Previous critical work on language ideologies surrounding English in postcolonial spaces has shown how perduring colonial logics are repurposed into contemporary discourses of value and class (Reyes 2017; Tupas 2019). This article builds on this work by examining a language-policing incident in an urban Pakistani café in which the owners link modernity, wealth, and professionalism to Western English competency. I further interrogate this interaction using a lens informed by organizational studies and decolonial work on structural whiteness to show how linguistic hegemonies working at the intersections of race, class, and organizational hierarchy in so-called postcolonial spaces can still embody and promote Anglocentric ideologies. Finally, in understanding how language policing works as a scalar act, this article ends with a discussion of how actors in positions of power can appeal to conflicting notions of scale to mask their larger ideologies as part of standard organizational practices, divorced from any larger context.
{"title":"“Say a Sentence”: Drawing an Interactional Link between Organizations, Language Ideologies, and Coloniality","authors":"Jacob Henry","doi":"10.1086/722838","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722838","url":null,"abstract":"Previous critical work on language ideologies surrounding English in postcolonial spaces has shown how perduring colonial logics are repurposed into contemporary discourses of value and class (Reyes 2017; Tupas 2019). This article builds on this work by examining a language-policing incident in an urban Pakistani café in which the owners link modernity, wealth, and professionalism to Western English competency. I further interrogate this interaction using a lens informed by organizational studies and decolonial work on structural whiteness to show how linguistic hegemonies working at the intersections of race, class, and organizational hierarchy in so-called postcolonial spaces can still embody and promote Anglocentric ideologies. Finally, in understanding how language policing works as a scalar act, this article ends with a discussion of how actors in positions of power can appeal to conflicting notions of scale to mask their larger ideologies as part of standard organizational practices, divorced from any larger context.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42895742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Singapore’s postcolonial multiracialism is held together by state policies that categorize its citizens into four major race groups ordered according to their size: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others. This postcolonial framework—with its colonial logics of statal race management and categorization—governs social life in Singapore. Recent race talk has birthed a contentious term—Chinese privilege—that has found its way into common parlance and is now deployed as an explanation for overt and covert racism. “Chinese privilege,” continuous from White privilege, may be understood as the belief that sociopolitical advantages are accorded to those racialized as Chinese. We take cues from Ahmed’s (2004b) notion of “stickiness” to consider how (1) Western ideas of racialized power rooted in Whiteness are reconfigured in postcolonial Singapore and (2) the processes of racialization and racial categorization are uncritically reproduced in invocations of Chinese privilege as censure and confessional. We interpret the notion of sticky raciolinguistics as the inextricability of race-language conaturalization from antecedent centers of White-settler colonial thought.
{"title":"Sticky Raciolinguistics","authors":"V. Pak, M. Hiramoto","doi":"10.1086/722622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722622","url":null,"abstract":"Singapore’s postcolonial multiracialism is held together by state policies that categorize its citizens into four major race groups ordered according to their size: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others. This postcolonial framework—with its colonial logics of statal race management and categorization—governs social life in Singapore. Recent race talk has birthed a contentious term—Chinese privilege—that has found its way into common parlance and is now deployed as an explanation for overt and covert racism. “Chinese privilege,” continuous from White privilege, may be understood as the belief that sociopolitical advantages are accorded to those racialized as Chinese. We take cues from Ahmed’s (2004b) notion of “stickiness” to consider how (1) Western ideas of racialized power rooted in Whiteness are reconfigured in postcolonial Singapore and (2) the processes of racialization and racial categorization are uncritically reproduced in invocations of Chinese privilege as censure and confessional. We interpret the notion of sticky raciolinguistics as the inextricability of race-language conaturalization from antecedent centers of White-settler colonial thought.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60728390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Advancing a raciosemiotics (Smalls 2020) of appropriation, this article examines what happens when raciolinguistically charged signs circulate and are taken up in a context different to their production. Based on face-to-face and digital ethnography of K-pop fans in Mexico, this study presents a multimodal semiotic analysis of fans’ metapragmatic discourses and social media practices. I show how fans orient to the female K-pop idol, a mediatized figure of personhood (Agha 2005; Hiramoto and Kang 2017) indexical of hegemonic cosmopolitan femininity but simultaneously an exotic racialized Other in many non-Korean contexts. My examination of fan discourses and performance on social media treats the characterological figure of the female K-pop idol as a desirable, aspirational racial other for Mexican fans, while attending to the sociohistorical specificities of Asian racialization in the context of Mexico. The characterological figure is shaped by, and must interact with, local racial ideologies. My analysis suggests that such performances allow fans to differentiate themselves from other Mexican youth by demonstrating their knowledge of intra-Asian differences. Moreover, they are able to fashion neoliberal and queer subjectivities, albeit conditionally, through their indexical approximation of K-pop idols.
{"title":"A Raciosemiotics of Appropriation: Transnational Performance of Raciogender among Mexican K-Pop Fans","authors":"Joyhanna Yoo","doi":"10.1086/722810","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722810","url":null,"abstract":"Advancing a raciosemiotics (Smalls 2020) of appropriation, this article examines what happens when raciolinguistically charged signs circulate and are taken up in a context different to their production. Based on face-to-face and digital ethnography of K-pop fans in Mexico, this study presents a multimodal semiotic analysis of fans’ metapragmatic discourses and social media practices. I show how fans orient to the female K-pop idol, a mediatized figure of personhood (Agha 2005; Hiramoto and Kang 2017) indexical of hegemonic cosmopolitan femininity but simultaneously an exotic racialized Other in many non-Korean contexts. My examination of fan discourses and performance on social media treats the characterological figure of the female K-pop idol as a desirable, aspirational racial other for Mexican fans, while attending to the sociohistorical specificities of Asian racialization in the context of Mexico. The characterological figure is shaped by, and must interact with, local racial ideologies. My analysis suggests that such performances allow fans to differentiate themselves from other Mexican youth by demonstrating their knowledge of intra-Asian differences. Moreover, they are able to fashion neoliberal and queer subjectivities, albeit conditionally, through their indexical approximation of K-pop idols.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46336840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
English in Singapore occupies an ambivalent status as both global bridge and threat to local “cultural values” (Tan 2017). English is also constructed as threatened by Singlish, or Singaporean Colloquial English (Wee 2018). This article first elaborates the historical-institutional production of a covert raciolinguistic community—“Caucasian” English speakers—whose speech ideologically contrasts with Singaporeans’ “non-native” English. It then analyzes a crowdsourced self-help column, “English as It Is Broken,” and participant observation at a Singlish awareness class. I argue that the figure of the native-English-speaking foreigner (by default white and, increasingly, American) continues to anchor what counts as “Good English” and rescales intersectional self- and other evaluations of Singaporeans’ linguistic deficiency. Good English thus invites aspirational investments in whiteness-as-position (a superordinate position in global, racializing hierarchies) but remains a target that Singaporeans are cast as forever failing to meet due to their nonwhite identities (not “being” white).
新加坡的英语作为全球桥梁和对当地“文化价值观”的威胁，占据着矛盾的地位（Tan 2017）。英语也被构造为受到新加坡式英语或新加坡口语的威胁（Wee 2018）。本文首先阐述了一个隐蔽的种族主义群体——“高加索人”英语使用者——的历史制度生产，其言论在意识形态上与新加坡人的“非母语”英语形成对比。然后，它分析了一个众包的自助专栏“English as It Is Broken”，以及新加坡式英语意识课上的参与者观察。我认为，以英语为母语的外国人（默认为白人，越来越多的是美国人）的形象继续锚定着所谓的“好英语”，并重新调整了对新加坡人语言缺陷的交叉自我和其他评价。因此，好英语吸引了人们对白人作为职位（全球种族化等级制度中的上级职位）的渴望投资，但由于他们的非白人身份（而不是“白人”），新加坡人仍然被视为永远无法实现的目标。
{"title":"(De)coupling Positional Whiteness and White Identities through “Good English” in Singapore","authors":"Joshua Babcock","doi":"10.1086/722624","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722624","url":null,"abstract":"English in Singapore occupies an ambivalent status as both global bridge and threat to local “cultural values” (Tan 2017). English is also constructed as threatened by Singlish, or Singaporean Colloquial English (Wee 2018). This article first elaborates the historical-institutional production of a covert raciolinguistic community—“Caucasian” English speakers—whose speech ideologically contrasts with Singaporeans’ “non-native” English. It then analyzes a crowdsourced self-help column, “English as It Is Broken,” and participant observation at a Singlish awareness class. I argue that the figure of the native-English-speaking foreigner (by default white and, increasingly, American) continues to anchor what counts as “Good English” and rescales intersectional self- and other evaluations of Singaporeans’ linguistic deficiency. Good English thus invites aspirational investments in whiteness-as-position (a superordinate position in global, racializing hierarchies) but remains a target that Singaporeans are cast as forever failing to meet due to their nonwhite identities (not “being” white).","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41826849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In proposing a “both-and” semiotics of intersectionality, this special issue responds to recent timely studies of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, settler supremacy, and other oppressive systems undertaken by linguistic anthropologists and other critical scholars of language. Contributors to this issue turn our attention toward two pressing concerns that are at stake in the continued theorization of raciolinguistics: First, we insist that the conaturalization of language and race is flexible and expansive, not reductive, narrow, or epiphenomenal. Second, we situate our projects at what has until now been a point of breakdown in raciolinguistic discussions by examining and theorizing raciolinguistic ordering in situations that are reflexively positioned as lying beyond the white settler colonial.
{"title":"Toward a “Both-And” Semiotics of Intersectionality: Raciolinguistics beyond White Settler-Colonial Situations","authors":"Joshua Babcock, Jay Ke‐Schutte","doi":"10.1086/722775","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/722775","url":null,"abstract":"In proposing a “both-and” semiotics of intersectionality, this special issue responds to recent timely studies of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, settler supremacy, and other oppressive systems undertaken by linguistic anthropologists and other critical scholars of language. Contributors to this issue turn our attention toward two pressing concerns that are at stake in the continued theorization of raciolinguistics: First, we insist that the conaturalization of language and race is flexible and expansive, not reductive, narrow, or epiphenomenal. Second, we situate our projects at what has until now been a point of breakdown in raciolinguistic discussions by examining and theorizing raciolinguistic ordering in situations that are reflexively positioned as lying beyond the white settler colonial.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41727792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We examine the metalinguistic, psychosocial, and identity-related indexical indications of (speaking about) the other, as provided by 36 Santa Marta inhabitants (Blestel 2022). Santa Marta is a city on Colombia’s septentrional coast, populated primarily by individuals of multiracial heritage, descended from Indigenous peoples, African slaves, and Spaniards. We show that the established main axis of differentiation (Gal and Irvine 2019) and associated judgments are adjacent, sometimes very explicitly, to racializing ideologies that more broadly traverse Colombian society as a whole. We maintain that these metapragmatic discourses, far from being anecdotal, indicate semiotic discrimination processes at work in sustaining or even renewing a system of values passed down from the colonial era.
{"title":"Discriminating an Accent, Enacting a Race (and Vice Versa): Perception and Representation of Phonic Variability on the Caribbean Coast of Colombia","authors":"Élodie Blestel","doi":"10.1086/721739","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721739","url":null,"abstract":"We examine the metalinguistic, psychosocial, and identity-related indexical indications of (speaking about) the other, as provided by 36 Santa Marta inhabitants (Blestel 2022). Santa Marta is a city on Colombia’s septentrional coast, populated primarily by individuals of multiracial heritage, descended from Indigenous peoples, African slaves, and Spaniards. We show that the established main axis of differentiation (Gal and Irvine 2019) and associated judgments are adjacent, sometimes very explicitly, to racializing ideologies that more broadly traverse Colombian society as a whole. We maintain that these metapragmatic discourses, far from being anecdotal, indicate semiotic discrimination processes at work in sustaining or even renewing a system of values passed down from the colonial era.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42054942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Throughout the colonial and postcolonial history of Bougainville (North Solomons Province from 1975 to 2005, Autonomous Region of Bougainville thereafter) people have asserted their sovereignty against the Papua New Guinea (PNG) state in many different ways, from demands for land rights to unilateral declarations of independence. In the 1970s and 1980s, Arawa Bulletin, a community-owned nonprofit magazine, bore accidental witness to many of these struggles for recognition, including a clan’s dispute over public use of its land in 1987 and the outbreak of a secessionist war in 1989. News narratives from this period apply a strategy for attribution of people’s political claims in which provincial government officials are delegated a role as co-narrators of events. In the provincial officials’ narratives, popular sovereignty has two faces—primordial and civil—which only local government can harmonize. The elite model promotes institutional reform but erases alternative modes of political consciousness.
{"title":"Independent Declarations: Attributions of Peoplehood in News Narratives","authors":"Ryan Schram","doi":"10.1086/721738","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721738","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout the colonial and postcolonial history of Bougainville (North Solomons Province from 1975 to 2005, Autonomous Region of Bougainville thereafter) people have asserted their sovereignty against the Papua New Guinea (PNG) state in many different ways, from demands for land rights to unilateral declarations of independence. In the 1970s and 1980s, Arawa Bulletin, a community-owned nonprofit magazine, bore accidental witness to many of these struggles for recognition, including a clan’s dispute over public use of its land in 1987 and the outbreak of a secessionist war in 1989. News narratives from this period apply a strategy for attribution of people’s political claims in which provincial government officials are delegated a role as co-narrators of events. In the provincial officials’ narratives, popular sovereignty has two faces—primordial and civil—which only local government can harmonize. The elite model promotes institutional reform but erases alternative modes of political consciousness.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43419896","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In Peru, Andean indigeneity is often discursively gendered as female. Such a connection between indigeneity and femaleness is invoked in a range of discourses that marginalize the status of Indigenous individuals, and different forms of Indigenous heritage in the country. Yet does this imply that all variations of Indigenous femininity are evaluated and ideologized the same way? This article complicates the semiotic logics and frameworks by which Indigenous female figures have been evaluated and analyzed across different historical moments and ethnographic contexts in Peru. I use the concept of “scale” (Blommaert 2007; Gal and Irvine 2019) to highlight the conflicting and competing ideologized stances and modes of evaluation that compare Indigenous identities, female bodies, and linguistic practices in relation to each other. Through this analysis, I will show that the evaluation of Indigenous female identities is enmeshed in a matrix of competing ideologized scalar regimes, highlighting the need to think about the construction and evaluation of racial and gendered types as shifting across multiple semiotic fields and different ideologized paradigms of evaluation.
{"title":"“Ni paisana, ni Jacinta”: Language and the Scaling of Indigenous Femininity in Peru","authors":"S. Narayanan","doi":"10.1086/721736","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721736","url":null,"abstract":"In Peru, Andean indigeneity is often discursively gendered as female. Such a connection between indigeneity and femaleness is invoked in a range of discourses that marginalize the status of Indigenous individuals, and different forms of Indigenous heritage in the country. Yet does this imply that all variations of Indigenous femininity are evaluated and ideologized the same way? This article complicates the semiotic logics and frameworks by which Indigenous female figures have been evaluated and analyzed across different historical moments and ethnographic contexts in Peru. I use the concept of “scale” (Blommaert 2007; Gal and Irvine 2019) to highlight the conflicting and competing ideologized stances and modes of evaluation that compare Indigenous identities, female bodies, and linguistic practices in relation to each other. Through this analysis, I will show that the evaluation of Indigenous female identities is enmeshed in a matrix of competing ideologized scalar regimes, highlighting the need to think about the construction and evaluation of racial and gendered types as shifting across multiple semiotic fields and different ideologized paradigms of evaluation.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48223482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the effects of commercial digital language technologies on the regimentation of language. Language technologies based on the exploitation of large data sets—from machine translation and automatic text generation to digital voice assistants—are a particular form of human-made sign practice in which traditional language norms interact with the affordances of digital devices and the capitalist interests of those who design them. Such sociotechnological practices construct language hierarchies within the realm of commercially based language technology and can shape both dominant discourses about language in society and epistemologies of language in linguistics. The article focuses on interrelationships between digital language technology and metasemiotic interpretations of language that pertain to multilingualism, language variation, and language prestige. It examines languages as discursive constructs and reviews the role of media technology in shaping language ideology, showing that writing and print have had a crucial impact on modern language concepts. It draws on expert discourse and qualitative interviews with programmers and users and examines ideological effects of digital language technology and the potential epistemological reconfigurations of concepts of language that may emerge as a result.
{"title":"Multilingualism and AI: The Regimentation of Language in the Age of Digital Capitalism","authors":"B. Schneider","doi":"10.1086/721757","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721757","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the effects of commercial digital language technologies on the regimentation of language. Language technologies based on the exploitation of large data sets—from machine translation and automatic text generation to digital voice assistants—are a particular form of human-made sign practice in which traditional language norms interact with the affordances of digital devices and the capitalist interests of those who design them. Such sociotechnological practices construct language hierarchies within the realm of commercially based language technology and can shape both dominant discourses about language in society and epistemologies of language in linguistics. The article focuses on interrelationships between digital language technology and metasemiotic interpretations of language that pertain to multilingualism, language variation, and language prestige. It examines languages as discursive constructs and reviews the role of media technology in shaping language ideology, showing that writing and print have had a crucial impact on modern language concepts. It draws on expert discourse and qualitative interviews with programmers and users and examines ideological effects of digital language technology and the potential epistemological reconfigurations of concepts of language that may emerge as a result.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48769951","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Communication is necessary work and imagined want in corporations. Using firsthand data from a midsize corporation, this essay discusses the professional practices of corporate communication as a metadiscursive project of proleptically shaping the circulation of representations of the corporation. In corporate work, activities spoken of as “communication” are segmented and ritualized with respect to who the corporation seeks to engage in discursive and semiotic frameworks of participation and which communicative media it employs. The ways in which various communicative scenarios are imagined and framed in the design and use of corporate media are examined, as is the manner in which the boundary of the corporation’s communicative activity is drawn and (re)defined through metapragmatic regimentations of future participatory encounters. The expertise of corporate communication practitioners involves the ability to formulate the corporation as the mediatized center of the groups with which it communicates and to devise messages that target diverse groups as addressees.
{"title":"Regimenting Circulation: A Case Study of Mediatization in Corporate Communication","authors":"Kyung-Nan Koh","doi":"10.1086/721776","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/721776","url":null,"abstract":"Communication is necessary work and imagined want in corporations. Using firsthand data from a midsize corporation, this essay discusses the professional practices of corporate communication as a metadiscursive project of proleptically shaping the circulation of representations of the corporation. In corporate work, activities spoken of as “communication” are segmented and ritualized with respect to who the corporation seeks to engage in discursive and semiotic frameworks of participation and which communicative media it employs. The ways in which various communicative scenarios are imagined and framed in the design and use of corporate media are examined, as is the manner in which the boundary of the corporation’s communicative activity is drawn and (re)defined through metapragmatic regimentations of future participatory encounters. The expertise of corporate communication practitioners involves the ability to formulate the corporation as the mediatized center of the groups with which it communicates and to devise messages that target diverse groups as addressees.","PeriodicalId":51908,"journal":{"name":"Signs and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45999567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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