Physical Work, Customer Service, or Teamwork?

Strömmer, Maiju

doi:10.4324/9780429298622-10

Cited by 5 publications

References 19 publications

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Labour mobility across the Baltic Sea: Language brokering at a blue-collar workplace in Sweden

Söderlundh

Keevallik

2022

Lang. Soc.

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In this case study we investigate the role of transnational networks and language brokering in labour migration within the European Union. By describing the working days of Estonians hired by a city maintenance company in Sweden, we demonstrate how language skills and network ties of a manager enable work migration in the local context. Most of the recruited workers belong to the manager's circle of family and friends. The manager is thus both capitalising on his social relationships and reinforcing a social support network in the receiving country for the individuals involved. The article promotes our understanding of the interface between migration, multilingualism, and language brokering in the understudied blue-collar workplaces and dissects the social and economic values of linguistic resources in work migration across the Baltic Sea. The data consist of ethnographic observations of daily work routines, video recordings of interaction, and interviews. (Labour migration, multilingualism, manual work, language broker)*

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Labour mobility across the Baltic Sea: Language brokering at a blue-collar workplace in Sweden

Söderlundh

Keevallik

2022

Lang. Soc.

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Language as a resource: public sector discourse on the role of regional minority and community languages in integration and employment

Easlick

2021

Current Issues in Language Planning

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Language for work and work for language: linguistic aspirations in the marketing of domestic work

Rydell

Hanell

2022

International Journal of the Sociology of Language

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Language inevitably plays a key part in the infrastructure of transnational domestic work. Many who work and have worked in the domestic sector in Sweden have Swedish as their second language. The object of this study is to investigate the ways in which this fact is reflected in the marketing of domestic work historically as well as currently. Drawing on two datasets – personal advertisements by job seekers published in a Swedish daily during the twentieth century, and corporate marketing by contemporary cleaning agencies – the study discusses how references not only to language competence, but also to prospective language learning are used in the marketing of domestic work. While the phenomenon of domestic work, especially when performed by migrants, has been a resilient space of upset in the Swedish society for the last hundred years, the article argues that references to language are used to navigate tensions.

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Physical Work, Customer Service, or Teamwork?

Cited by 5 publications

References 19 publications

Labour mobility across the Baltic Sea: Language brokering at a blue-collar workplace in Sweden

Labour mobility across the Baltic Sea: Language brokering at a blue-collar workplace in Sweden

Language as a resource: public sector discourse on the role of regional minority and community languages in integration and employment

Language for work and work for language: linguistic aspirations in the marketing of domestic work

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