In the first chapter of this book, the editors discuss how discourse concerning language advocacy has shifted from concerns of rights and heritage (pride) to an emphasis on language as a means for economic development (profit) in a multilingual, globalized world. Individual authors then explore examples of such negotiation of the dynamics of pride and profit as “co-constitutive discursive tropes” (16).
The authors of Chs. 4, 5, and 6 consider how language advocacy groups negotiate the transition between discourses about language based on pride and ones based on profit. In Ch. 4, Jacqueline Urla reports how a language advocacy group effectively adapted total quality management for their language advocacy efforts. In Ch. 5, Joan Pujolar & Kathryn Jones consider less successful attempts by heritage advocacy groups to reproduce their discourse of national pride in the arena of economic profit. In Ch. 6, Adrian Blackedge & Angela Creese consider how closely related languages can be used indexically to make distinctions within an immigrant population.
The authors of Chs. 2, 7, and 9 explore governments negotiating this transition. In Ch. 2, Susan Gal explores the EU's modification of language discourse in the form of guidelines to shift from a primary language to a multilingual language policy for Europe. In Ch. 7, Michelle Daveluy presents the Canadian Navy's shift from English-only to bilingual, which aided recruiting but could not be fully implemented in the area of security. In Ch. 9, Beatriz P. Lorente describes the Philipine government's ongoing efforts at modifying language training to market their mobile labor force for export.
The authors of Chs. 3, 10, and 11 provide case studies of business making the transition. In Ch. 3, Alfonso Del Percio & Alexandre Duchêne describe how soccer fans in Basel battle to be authentic fans and not to have their distinctive language and culture used by the management for promotional purposes. In Ch. 10, Josiane Boutet explores how management seeks to govern call-center workers' language articulation as well as requiring that they take on aliases for different target customer groups. In Ch. 11, Bonnie McElhinny explores how social scientists worked together with industry in researching communities of practice.
In Ch. 8, Monica Heller & Lindsay Bell present the transition as navigated by a society. They investigate how the societal frame of “Frenchness” has linked an ethnolinguistic group with the market system, an arrangement that may fail in the globalized world market.
The book makes a significant contribution to understanding perspectives on language as we have moved from a primary language model with concerns for authenticity and language potential to a multilingual global society with ongoing concerns for authenticity and “potential” monetized into value-added considerations. The editors emphasize that the authors raise questions (15), but the two questions that particularly caught my attention were whether language research would be compromised by management (88) or would serve as its accomplice (242).
