Workplace communication in flux: from discrete languages, text genres and conversations to complex communicative situations

Abstract

Changing working lifeRecently, changes in working life have become a prominent topic in academic research as well as professional literature and public discussions. It has been recognized that the contexts and conditions of work have become more transient and unpredictable due to global changes and megatrends related to, for example, migration, technological developments, and transforming values and lifestyles as the world becomes increasingly interconnected through the flows of information, workforces, materials and ideas (see e.g. Blommaert 2013; Gratton 2011; Sarangi 2011). In light of this transformation, changing working life can be seen as a cluster of change processes that influence the labour market and workplace organizations in various ways.Firstly, the changes have to do with the very content of work. In post-industrial societies, work is to a great extent connected with knowledge production and the transfer and provision of various kinds of expert services. Moreover, in the complex and super-diverse (see Vertovec 2007; also Arnault et al. 2015) world where social and technological innovations play a key role, value creation is not only seen to lie in the effective management and distribution of information, but in its

‘Somewhere Between Engineering and Humanities’: Discourses of Investment in Additional Language Learning Among Students of Higher Education in Finland

“…Part of this discourse is the understanding of language as a gateway to intercultural understanding; this discourse is specifically related to foreign language learning. In the context of working life, the conditions of which have largely shifted from production-based jobs to a globalised economy involving various types of knowledge work including immaterial, entrepreneurial, digital, collaborative, and knowledge-focused skills (Iedema & Scheeres, 2003;Nissi et al, 2023), language is seen as a symbolic resource (Duchêne & Heller, 2012;Heller, 2003). As a resource in globalised economy, language becomes a marketable commodity, the use of which determines one's productivity for example in the way and extent of phone calls taken, words translated, products and services sold, or successful interactions carried out with tourists (see Chun, 2016;Duchêne & Heller, 2012, p. 326;Heller et al, 2017).…”

Negotiating joint commitment in collaborative work project: Focus on text-based requests and news deliveries in atypical work

“…This is because the workers earning their income through service provision have to seek and maintain several concurrent work contacts and tailor their services to different customer groups. Consequently, they have to adapt to varying social situations and roles whose rights, responsibilities and mutual relations are under constant negotiation due to transient working arrangements and fuzzy boundaries between work and non-work (see Nissi et al, 2023). The complexity of these new contexts is further reinforced by the fact that professional communication is increasingly ‘polymedial’ (Androutsopoulos, 2021; Lexander, forthcoming; see also Darics, 2015) in nature, namely, it utilises several different channels and platforms, which requires knowledge of new types of digital and text-based interaction environments with their specific technological affordances.…”