Transnational work, translingual practices, and interactional sociolinguistics

This introductory article explains the need for interactional analyses of workplace communication, which is increasingly multilingual and multimodal in expansive spatiotemporal contexts and layered frames. It provides an overview of how neoliberal economic conditions have impacted workplace communication, generating new task structures and communicative practices. Arguing that there is a need to situate localized workplace interactions in changing frames and task structures, the article demonstrates how interactional sociolinguistics might serve this purpose. It goes on to review theoretical developments on the materiality of language to revisit traditional concerns about social structure and communicative interactions, develop a more expansive orientation to repertoires, and demonstrate how interactional analysis might adopt suitable units and categories of analysis. It then describes how this framework explains the different outcomes for language diversity in the contributing articles—ranging from inequality to solidarity, marginalization to inclusivity, and misunderstandings to intelligibility—in workplace interactions.