Transnationalism as interdiscursivity: Korean managers of multinational corporations talking about mobility

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores how transnationalism can be understood as an interdiscursive process. By making connections with chronotopes of past places along a transmigrant's trajectory, interdiscursivity allows for the emergence of complex indexical meaning associated with different speakers and different ways of speaking, imbuing the transmigrant's mobility with specific social significance. This article demonstrates this point through an analysis of how South Korean mid-level managers of multinational corporations in Singapore imagined their positioning in the global workplace. By tracing the ways the managers employed metapragmatic discourse associated with multiple chronotopes to make sense of their reasonably successful but limited careers, it offers an account of how interdiscursivity shaped their understanding of their own positionality as Koreans working beyond the time-space of Korea. (Interdiscursivity, transnationalism, chronotope, Korea, English, intercultural communication)*