Language at work

The conference aims to foster discussion among social scientists about the relations between language and work, including occupations, labor processes and employment conditions.

(source: https://cled-ilt-dgestempr.urv.cat/web/events/language-at-work-conference)

Conference 7-8 June 2018
Where

Facultat de Ciències Jurídiques de la Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV)

(Tarragona, Catalonia, Spain)

The conference aims to foster discussion among social scientists about the relations between language and work, including occupations, labor processes and employment conditions. Within this broad field, the conference will focus on the central role language plays in labor processes. We start from the centrality of language in the information society, since information is linguistically coded and, for a wide range of products and services, language becomes raw material. Language is thus a key component of productivity, employability, wages, and control. First and additional languages, computer languages, numerical systems, scripts or protocols can be approached as today’s working tools that must be mastered by professionals on an everyday basis. Beyond the classical “language industries” whose outputs are books or translations, today’s conversations and texts are produced in a wide range of workplaces where they can be understood as the final product of the labor process.

Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, the conference will bring together scholars engaged in research on workplace language skills and their implications for broader social and economic concerns, including social and economic inclusion, job security, long-life learning, unionization, gender inequalities, and wage differentials.

Topics:

 Defining and measuring language skills related to job performance

 Language standardization/agency and production processes

 “Linguistic-jobs” and “non-linguistic” jobs

 Non-natural languages in the labor market. Technical and numerical languages.

 Professions and sectorial language. Jargons, company speak.

 Language skills, wages, employment, and employability

 Language as raw material, tool, and product

 Language, hiring, and promotion

 Social and economic implications of language work

 

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: 

 

  • Florian Coulmas
  • Senior Professor for Japanese Society and Sociolinguistics
  • Institute of East Asian Studies (IN-EAST) and Faculty of Social Sciences, Duisburg Essen University (Germany)
Florian Coulmas
  • Jo Angouri
  • Center for Applied Linguistics, Univesity of Warwick (United Kingdom)
Jo Angouri 
  • Krishna S. Dhir
  • Professor of Management Science
  • Former Dean of Business
  • College of Business and Economics, University of Hawaii at Hilo (USA)
Krishna Dhir 
  • Orhan Agirdag
  • Education and Society professor
  • Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven (Belgium)
Orhan Agirdag 
  • Sheila M. Puffer
  • Professor of International Business
  • University Distinguished Professor
  • Northweaster University, (USA)
Sheila M. Puffer 
  • Claudine Gaibrois
  • Research Institute for Organizational Psychology, University of St. Gallen and Zurich University of Applied Sciences, (Switzerland)
Claudine Gaibrois 
  • Antonio Di Paolo
  • Department of Econometrics, Statistics and Applied Economics 
  • Researcher at AQR-IREA Research Group (UB)
  • Researcher at Language & Occupations Research Project (URV)
  • University of Barcelona (Spain)
Antonio Di Paolo