Engineering commodifiable workers: language, migration and the governmentality of the self

Abstract

This article examines the strategies and forms of expertise on language and communication mobilized to engineer commodifiable migrant workers. Drawing on an ethnographic account of counselling practices in a state-run Italian job guidance centre for newly arrived migrants, I examine the calculations, tactics, and forms of expertise on language and communication mobilised by job counsellors. Here, I illustrate how these tactics regulate, or ''police'', migrants' communicational conduct and promote their socialisation into a desirable professional self that can be commodified on the Italian job market. In doing so, I demonstrate that the state's investment in the policing of migrants and the commodifiability of their labour is an investment in a larger project of societal consent for both the arriving migrants and for the forms of precarity they are believed to embody in Italy. At the same time, I argue this state agenda should not make us blind to the fact that the individuals and actors, including professional counsellors, working in these job guidance centres seem ready to invest a great deal into these spaces in the interest of pursuing another, more emancipated agenda. Indeed, in my paper I aim to demonstrate that job guidance centres are also spaces of hope where people work to support migrants who are preparing themselves for a viable future and attempting to create the practical framework for their life projects.

Language, medical tourism and the enterprising self

“…We have discussed, how individuals who ensure that this economy continues to grow at a spectacular pace make sense of their part in a neoliberal industry that is characterized by uncertainty, flexibility and a hierarchical work order but at the same time rewards selfrealization and self-improvement within the structures and constraints of the linguistic market. Similar to what has been demonstrated elsewhere in different contexts of language work within neoliberal economies (Cameron 2000;Del Percio 2018;Duchêne 2011;Park 2016;Rahman 2009), aspiring for a career in the medical tourism industry requires continuous investments and self-work, with language as the central work tool and product. As we have demonstrated along the trajectories of three aspiring healthcare entrepreneurs, language skills indeed became commodities and as such, central in attempts to access potentially lucrative foreign healthcare markets.…”

“…In line with neoliberal ideology (Harvey 2005;Gershon 2011), current and future healthcare markets must be read, anticipated and engaged with to profit from a rapidly growing yet largely unregulated service industry. Further, in order to stand out it is up to the individual speaker to strategically invest in one's own multilingualism, professional knowledge, and communicative conduct (Del Percio 2018;Urciuoli 2008;Park 2016), adhering to an imperative of constant self-improvement.…”

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

“…A critical sociolinguistics of governmentality has addressed how neoliberal governmentality operates through the processes of subjectification and self‐governance in particular (e.g. Allan, 2013; Barakos, 2016; Del Percio, 2018; Dlaske, 2016; Martín Rojo, 2019). This article illustrated how a nexus of different governmentality technologies and bodies of knowledge are employed in the mine’s governmentality apparatus that combines the neoliberal technology of responsibilization with the disciplinary strategies of surveillance, supervision, and regulations.…”

“…Neoliberal governmentality is constructed, strengthened, and disseminated via discourse by means of daily institutional practices (Martín Rojo & Del Percio, 2019: 2). Hence, previous sociolinguistic research adopting a governmentality framework has primarily focused on analyzing how language has been used as a medium for neoliberal governmentality in the management, guidance, and training of individuals, such as language learners (Flubacher & Del Percio, 2017; Martín Rojo, 2019), workers (Barakos, 2016; Dlaske, 2016), and unemployed immigrants (Allan, 2013; Del Percio, 2018). These studies have shown how individuals are governed through ‘technologies of the self’, by making them internalize neoliberal requirements such as responsibility, flexibility, and employability, and, seemingly voluntarily, regulate their behavior accordingly.…”

Linguistic Anthropology in 2018: Signifying Movement

“…The Language Policy special issue edited by Muth and Del Percio (), for instance, brings together studies that explore the specific institutional and discursive conditions that attribute economic value to different varieties of language in local context. These studies show that management of multilingualism for economic purposes is shaped not only by shifts in market conditions (Muth ) but also by multiple constraints, such as local circulation of state‐based ideologies of commodification (Brennan ), transnational identity construction of a community (Bolander ), older hierarchies of value attributed to language (Van Hoof ), as well as resistance toward this logic of commodification (Del Percio ). Similarly, Flubacher, Duchêne, and Coray's () ethnography of public employment service in Fribourg raises issues with how the bureaucracy's vague conceptualizations of language obscure the complexity of the correlation between language learning and employment, thereby leading to rationalizations of class, race, and gender‐based inequalities.…”