Blue-collar workplace communicative practices: a case study in construction sites in Qatar

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the role of language in multilingual blue-collar workplaces by investigating how communication is realized in construction sites in Qatar. The State of Qatar offers a unique and, hence, very interesting setting for the linguistic investigation of migration-related issues, such as multilingualism (Pietikäinen et al. in Sociolinguistics from the periphery: small languages in new circumstances, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016), due to the fact that over 90% of its population consists of non-citizens (Ahmad, in: Kamrava, Babar (eds) Migrant labor in the Persian Gulf, Hurst & Company, London, pp 21–40, 2015). In addition, after its successful bid to host the World Cup 2022, the country is currently witnessing a rapid transformation of its landscape evident through its massive number of construction sites, where people of different national, ethnic and social class backgrounds from all over the world are hired to work together in developing the infrastructure that is part of the ambitious Qatar Vision 2030. Against this backdrop, the focus is on the sociolinguistic resources (Blommaert in The sociolinguistics of globalization, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010) mobilized in a construction site at a university in Qatar. The multilingual community of practice (Lave and Wenger in Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1991) investigated consists of blue-collar workers from India and their communication practices with their supervisors, who are project site engineers from all over the world. In such transnational fields, where effective communication is a sine qua non not only for the successful completion of the project or infrastructure itself but also, and perhaps most importantly, for the safety of everybody involved in the construction, multilingualism is the norm. It is argued that communication is realized through spatial repertoires (Canagarajah, in: Canagarajah (ed) The Routledge handbook of migration and language, Routledge, New York, pp 1–28, 2017), that are constructed and used as ingroup markers to facilitate communication among people from different nationalities, ethnicities and social classes. The ethnographic data, collected for almost 13 months, comprise voice-recorded interactions, field notes from on-site participant observation as well as ethnographic interviews with select blue-collar workers and their supervisors. The linguistic and exolinguistic analysis is contextualized in the broader socio-political and economic forces of Qatar (Fromherz in Qatar. A modern history, Georgetown University Press, Washington, 2012; Kamrava in Qatar: small state, big politics, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2015; chapters in Kamrava and Babar in Migrant labor in the Persian Gulf, Hurst & Company, London, 2015).

Workplace Learning through Human‐Machine Interaction in a Transient Multilingual Blue‐Collar Work Environment

“…Despite such difficulties, the study found that interactions became more effective once workers had spent more time with each other (Sunaoshi 2005, 192-193). Similar observations have been made on construction sites in the United Kingdom (Tutt et al 2013) and Qatar (Theodoropoulou 2019), where workers with diverse language backgrounds developed a shared repertoire over time. These findings suggest that language diversity can become less of a challenge when workers spend some time together and, thus, develop particular ways of interacting.…”

“…“Transience” and “language diversity” characterize many contemporary blue‐collar work environments. Lønsmann and Kraft (2017, 138) define blue‐collar workers as laborers in the primary sector (e.g., agriculture) and the secondary sector (e.g., manufacturing), whose jobs are “often, but not always, temporary, and low‐status.” Furthermore, many studies of blue‐collar workplaces highlight language diversity as a prominent theme (e.g., Goldstein 1997; Handford and Matous 2015; Kleifgen 2013; Kraft 2017; Piller and Lising 2014; Sunaoshi 2005; Theodoropoulou 2019; Tutt et al 2013), although there are well‐known exceptions to this tendency (e.g., Daly et al 2004; Holmes and Marra 2002; Holmes and Woodhams 2013).…”

Language policy and linguistic landscaping in a contemporary blue-collar workplace in the Dutch–German borderland

“…In addition, blue-collar work is typically regarded as physically demanding. With regard to language practices, many authors have observed that people in blue-collar workplaces often use other languages than the official or majority language of the nation-state in which they are working (Goldstein 1997;Gonçalves and Schluter 2017;Holm et al 2019;Hiss 2017;Hovens 2020;Kraft 2019;Piller and Lising 2014;Theodoropoulou 2019). Besides this, the ability to use English as a lingua franca cannot be taken for granted here (see, e.g., Lønsmann 2014).…”

In the name of security: Governmentality apparatus in a multilingual mine in Arctic Finland

“…Hence, unsuccessful communication is regarded as a major reason for occupational accidents in high‐risk industries (Albert et al, 2014; Keffane, 2015). However, critical sociolinguistic research has questioned the notion of straightforward causality between language problems and safety (see Daveluy, 2012; Kraft, 2019, 2020; Theodoropoulou, 2019). The higher accident rates among migrant employees can also be explained by aspects other than language, such as the employee leasing system and constantly changing personnel (Kraft, 2019, 2020).…”

“…Workplace safety and communication has to some extent been studied ethnographically in language disciplines (e.g. Daveluy, 2012; Handford & Matous, 2015; Kraft, 2019; Theodoropoulou, 2019) 1 . This study contributes to this research strand in the mining context.…”