“A new worker, for a new order, in a new era”: English, power and shifting ideologies of reflexivity in a Chinese global workplace

Abstract

Abstract This paper offers a historiographic and ethnographic analysis of how reflexivity, as a communicative practice and valued personality trait, has been understood, regulated, legitimised and used to control Chinese workers from the planned-economy era to the present. Using a Shanghai-based multinational company as a case study, I document how and under what conditions English-mediated reflexivity, with its stress on self-entrepreneurship, came to replace former Mandarin-mediated reflexivity supporting a notion of collective workerhood. Special attention is paid to reflexivity’s changing roles in shaping, managing and evaluating workers and facilitating understandings of labour, power and agency. The paper argues that the emerging English-dominated reflexivity represents a required linguistic shift for the creation of a new worker type in the current globalised economy as it normalises managerial technologies of discipline, stratification and exclusion.