Ways of Doing, Ways of Being: Language, Education and 'Working' Identities

Abstract

Workplace language education has assumed new prominence in restructuring workplaces where textual practice has become the 'new work practice' and learning 'the new form of labour'. This paper begins by exploring the ways in which working identities are discursively constructed in contemporary workplaces, arguing that the construction of new kinds of working identities is a primary function of the contemporary workplace, a function mandated by global discourses of 'Quality management' and mediated by workplace educators at local sites. However, while workers are largely unable to escape these new identities (if they should want to do so) they do not simply relinquish the old to 'take up' the new. When workplace textual practices shift in response to new workplace discourses, spaces are opened up in which workers may have limited opportunities to fashion new working identities. When workplace language educators engage with workers in these processes of identity formation they have an opportunity to extend the range of new working identities made available in the contested space of workplace language practice.