Transnationalism as interdiscursivity: Korean managers of multinational corporations talking about mobility

Abstract

This article explores how transnationalism can be understood as an interdiscursive process. By making connections with chronotopes of past places along a transmigrant's trajectory, interdiscursivity allows for the emergence of complex indexical meaning associated with different speakers and different ways of speaking, imbuing the transmigrant's mobility with specific social significance. This article demonstrates this point through an analysis of how South Korean mid-level managers of multinational corporations in Singapore imagined their positioning in the global workplace. By tracing the ways the managers employed metapragmatic discourse associated with multiple chronotopes to make sense of their reasonably successful but limited careers, it offers an account of how interdiscursivity shaped their understanding of their own positionality as Koreans working beyond the time-space of Korea. (Interdiscursivity, transnationalism, chronotope, Korea, English, intercultural communication)*

The Pragmatics of English as a Lingua Franca: Research and Pedagogy in the Era of Globalization

“…Hence, what the lecturer considered an appropriate speech act in this situation was perceived as otherwise by Ranjit. Park (2017) also found the impact of L1 sociopragmatic norms on a speech act. Park interviewed Korean businessmen in multicultural corporations in Singapore and found that, due to the Korean value of modesty, participants avoided bolstering their achievements in front of their supervisors, even though they were aware of the need to do so.…”

The (im)possibility of sociolinguistic hybridity: Power and scaling in post‐soviet, transnational life

“…Many different types of semiotic practices are involved in the construction of spatiotemporal social reality (c.f. Irvine & Gal, 2000): everyday communication, the positioning of oneself and construction of one's identity through language (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005), the sharing of narratives (Wortham, 2001), stance‐taking (Du Bois, 2007), as well as commentary on language, identity, and social behavior (Park, 2017). Additionally, the semiotic practices of institutions – the ways in which they use language to label, categorize, and evaluate others, and to construct their own identities – also contribute to the construction of social reality (Carr, 2010).…”

Mobile (Dis)connection: New Technology and Rechronotopized Images of the Homeland

“…Agha ). The chronotope has been used to show how migrants and non‐migrants orient to and/or construct images of different centers and sociolinguistic contexts through their discursive practices (e.g., Dick ; Karimzad ; Koven ; Park ; Catedral 2017). For example, Eisenlohr () demonstrates how those in diaspora use narratives to construct a time and place, or an “imagined homeland,” from which they have been removed, and which function to legitimize their belonging in the new nation‐state that they occupy.…”

“…These non‐migrants then evaluate this imaginative sociology through “cultural chronotopes” related to spatiotemporal understandings of modernity and financial success as opposed to morality. Park () and Karimzad (), on the other hand, demonstrate how Korean and Iranian mobile populations use discourses informed by their individual histories to construct chronotopes of an uncertain or ideal future—highlighting the instability of their own subjective positionings within transnationalism. Bolonyai () shows how particular images of the nation‐state populated by certain social types are used to read migrants as “not belonging” through an association of their “foreign accents” with non‐nativeness.…”