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Set in a multilingual cleaning company that serves Anglophone customers in the upper-(middle) class suburbs of New York City, this book presents an ethnographic study into power, language policy and communication from the perspectives of the Brazilian–American employer as well as the company’s Hispanophone and Lusophone employees. Power asymmetries in internal communication demonstrate the employer’s legitimated domination over her employees and her L1 Portuguese as a form of linguistic capital. Employees’ resourcefulness and multicompetence – rather than quantifiable levels of English-language proficiency – determine the extent to which they rely on language brokering to facilitate communication with their customers, directly impacting their agency. The book contributes to current debates on extra-linguistic modes of communication in multilingual settings and thematic analyses of care work, migration, communication and the role of English.
With their innovative application of embodied sociolinguistics and the post-humanist paradigm, Kellie Gonçalves and Anne Schluter provide a welcome and necessary addition to multilingual studies of language and the workplace. Their ethical and engaged research approach comes through on each page, and the focus on emotional intelligence offers a fresh and very different way of approaching female leadership, particularly for sociolinguistics.
Kellie Gonçalves is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, University of Bern, Switzerland. She is the author of Labour Policies, Language Use and the ‘New’ Economy: The Case of Adventure Tourism (2020, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of Language, Global Mobilities, Blue-Collar Workers and Blue-Collar Workplaces (2021, Routledge with H. Kelly-Holmes).
Anne Ambler Schluter is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Communication, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research focuses on the sociolinguistics of migration, discourse analysis, affective attachment/emotional labor, healthcare communication, and minority language and belonging.
Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Advancing Methodology: Using a Mixed Methodological Approach within a Multilingual Cleaning Company
Chapter 3. Magda: The Personal and Professional Trajectory of Shine’s Owner
Chapter 4. The Interplay between Identity, Ideology and Capital that Strengthens Cultural Attachments: The Pull of Portuguese and the Portuguese-Centric Ironbound Community for Shine's Hispanophone Employees
Chapter 5. Multicompetence as Essential and English-Language Proficiency as Secondary: Examining the Shape of Customer–Employee Interactions between Speakers who do not Share a Common Language
Chapter 6. Conclusion
References
Index