The language division of labour across occupations: an introduction

Alarcón, Amado

Abstract:

This Special Issue contributes to the understanding of the role of lan-guage division of labour across occupations. Articles on this Issue contributes tosociological understanding and critical dialog with human capital perspective inthe context of Information Society, where language have a central role in pro-duction precesses. It is, since information as raw material and product islinguistically encoded, language occupies a central role in new forms of division oflabour. Main question in this introduction and following articles is to what extendsocial changes of information centrality at the production level involves reproduceor create new social inequalities observables through the lens of language divisionof labour within occupations. Although progress has been made in cross-cuttingknowledge about competencies in the information and digital environment, littleis known about specific linguistic needs across to occupational classifications.Given the widespread of alphabetization, literacy is today’s taken for granted incommon sense as a conditionsine qua nonfor entering labour markets, instead of astratifier across occupations and social structure. Nevertheless, in this SpecialIssue authors show that language of origin, second language knowledge, andother literacies, such as communicative skills become key stratifier factors. This isobservable both at the territorial level, types of literacies as well in specific andsophisticated language professions

Year:

2021

Type of Publication:

Article

Keywords:

human capital; language division of labour; literacies; occupations; social inequalities

Journal:

International Journal of Sociology of Language

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2021-0036