“Put a meeting in my calendar!” The literacy practice of the digital calendar in workplaces

Abstract

Modern work life includes many digital tools, of which the shared digital calendar has attracted little attention in applied linguistics. The framework for this study is mediated discourse analysis applied to ethnographic data from one workplace and eight contextual interviews from eight other workplaces. The data were analyzed 1) qualitatively, using Wertsch's (1998) concepts for agency, and 2) quantitatively, through an SFG (Systemic Functional Grammar) analysis of the interviews. The quantitative analysis reveals a high degree of agency. The qualitative analysis shows that discourses of managerialism, globalization, democratization and "flat organizations" can be mapped to the digital calendar. The calendar is also related to other text media such as whiteboards and time report systems, where squares with colors and writing constitute the discursive shapes that are common to the digital calendar. The ability to search and book meetings in the calendars of others is an affordance, although regulated through digital or verbal access. In this and other ways, the individual is strongly connected to the digital tool. The boundary between private and public has been challenged by digital tools.

”I don’t know if I can share this.”

“…that people carry with them. A person's historical body can be transformed, for instance, by getting an account in a specific digital sharing system of the workplace (Blåsjö et al, 2019). The digital system in itself, and other artefacts, can be conceptualized as discourses in place (Scollon & Scollon, 2004), i.e., material and linguistic entities used or made relevant in certain situations.…”

“…Compliance or non-compliance is always performed in relation to norms; in a workplace, this may concern issues such as who is supposed to invite whom to meetings (Blåsjö et al, 2019) or whether it is acceptable to write instant messages to a colleague who is marked as unavailable at the moment (Darics, 2014). The relation between management and staff, and hence the scope of agency, is influenced by texts that employees are obliged to use (Nikolaidou & Karlsson, 2012;Ledin & Machin, 2016) and by digital tools making it more or less possible for employees to make their voices heard at management level (Cardon et al, 2019).…”

“…Resistance (Wertsch, 1998;Corely & Gioia 2004) to these circumstances, as well as the breaching of challenging norms, is enacted by the participants in actions such as taking shots, joking about, for instance, "hacking the net," airing problems of not begin able to access digital areas and perhaps regretting others to see one's own file system (a contested border between private and public, cf. Blåsjö et al, 2019).…”

Translanguaging and multimodality in workplace texts and writing

“…The format of the calendars, as well as language choice, serve to mark the difference between private and workplace related posts, such as the use of paper calendars and Swedish for more private posts. Where the digital calendar is searchable by other co-workers, and offers structure and order, the paper calendar offers a space for the private and the personal (see also Blåsjö et al, 2019).…”

“…Swedish thus became a secret language for keeping the discussions local and exclusive. While English represents possibilities for outreach and inclusion, Swedish affords the oppositepossibilities of withdrawal, exclusion and of discussing matters in a private, in-house form of communication (see also Blåsjö et al, 2019).…”