For example, the hegemonic discourses regarding the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism has been somewhat abandoned over the last decades and exchanged for a different narrative, which underscores creative industries, the ‘new’ knowledge economy, and ‘new’ capitalism along with it, within different schools of thought (i.e. While the pairing of language and work as a phenomenon to be studied isn’t really all that new (Boutet 2012 Hiss 2017), theories of economic and labor-market developments continue to transform. Indeed, different ways of thinking about and tackling research on language and work are approached through distinct epistemological lenses acquired through researchers’ own disciplinary training, beliefs systems and ideological biases together with the sociohistorical structures and context that shape each study’s setting. Recent trends and future directions within the field of language policy that are concerned with both ontological and epistemological elements (Pérez-Milans and Tollefson 2018: 728) such as the saliency of employing critical approaches, ethnography and addressing ethical issues in contemporary LPP through researchers’ reflexivity are addressed in this special issue. This line of argumentation has not gone unquestioned especially by scholars exploring the political economy of language through a Marxist or quasi-Marxist perspective (Holborow 2015, 2018 Block 2018). Much of this work has been influenced by the dominant neoliberal narrative of commodification which marketizes everything (Holborow 2018: 58) and has coopted just about everyone (Pennycook in press). Two of these processes pertain to individuals’ increased mobility for economic reasons and the massive shift of tertiary work being dispersed on the global level, where workers’ language skills and their ostensible commodification have been regarded as a central tool of the new global economy (Cameron 2000, 2005 Heller 2003, 2010 Duchêne 2009 Urciuoli and LaDousa 2013 Muth and Del Percio 2018 among others).

This means that we are faced with not necessarily new challenges, but varying degrees, speeds, and shifts of existing social processes connected to different political, economic, and cultural systems. The perspective taken in this issue is that while globalization and transnational interdependencies (Vertovec 2009) are not new, they have and continue to affect the rise of a new globalized economy and thus a ‘new’, international division of labor (Lutz 2011), which, among other corollaries, affects how socio-cultural practices, one of which is language, is being utilized, conceptualized, practiced and managed in innovative and different ways by both employers and employees in various workplace contexts globally.Īdopting a transformationalist perspective of globalization means acknowledging that we live in an already globalized world where national boundaries are becoming more permeable (Coupland 2013) based on particular interests of certain nation-states.

Historically oriented scholars may advocate that what we are experiencing today in terms of globalizing forces and transnational migration is nothing new (Kellner 2002). Within this context, language as a resource-whether symbolic, interactional, material or ideological-flows, changes and is used by specific and often very powerful social agents to manage individuals in their daily workplaces. Currently, we are residing in what Elliott and Urry have termed ‘the golden age of mobility’ where “massive social changes are implicated in the ever-increasing movement of people, things, capital, information and ideas around the globe” ( 2010: ix). Against the backdrop of global mobilities-the unprecedented circulation of people and socio-cultural practices-this special issue of Language Policy centers on the latest conditions of language policy, planning and practices taking place in diverse ‘blue-collar’ workplaces around the world as a result of postmodern economies that have witnessed an expansion of precarious working conditions (Standing 2011 Serwe in press).

Blue collar vs ivory tower