Engineering a Hotel Family: Language Ideology, Discourse, and Workplace Culture

Abstract

Drawing on a larger ethnographic study by Katz of workplace language and literacy programs serving immigrant workers in California, the following analysis focuses on the discourse practices of one California workplace, where notions of home, family, and work were coopted by the company to encourage workers to cooperate with the “reengineering” agenda, which included language training, or what Fairlough has described as the “technologization of discourse.” By building continuity between personal and professional, and private and public realms, the Carleton Hotels hoped to inspire workers to invest themselves in the company's mission. Drawing on De Certeau's notion of resistance through everyday practice, the following analysis of workplace discourse and language ideology illustrates how despite potentially oppressive and coercive practices at Carleton, hotel employees maneuvered through a constraining sociolinguistic space. By playing on the discursive fault lines—those places where discourses of family, home, and work collided and converged—workers appropriated English language practices in ways that allowed them to subtly reshape their experiences of work, and reimagine who they were able to be within and outside it.