Theorising transitions

This edited collection focuses on transition talk and boundary-crossing discourse in the modern workplace context. Transitions form a normal part of life and the term typically denotes mobility and change. This includes movement across physical/ spatiotemporal borders, life stages, intellectual or social boundaries. Transitions are particularly visible in the modern globalised workplace; the concept of a ‘job for life’ is outdated, and employees move between jobs, countries and even professions or industries during their working lives. Workforce mobility is particularly intense within and between national and international urban workplaces (Eriksson and Lindgren 2009) and career journeys involve increasingly complex paths, for both white and blue collar workers. The changing employment market also means frequent boundary crossing into new linguistic environments and new ways of doing work. This affects the ways in which professional identities are constructed, in a fast-paced, fluid and dynamic context. A range of disciplinary areas, theoretical stances, and methodological traditions have addressed the dynamic nature of transitions. Transitions involving crossing and operating at the interface of one or more geographical borders have been studied by management studies and organisational behaviour scholars, most notably the implications of boundary-crossing activities for role performance and team dynamics. International business studies have also analysed the significance of the use of multiple languages in the workplace (e.g. Piekkari and Westney 2017) while work in sociology and education has probed the complexity of the phenomenon (e.g. Duchscher 2009; Pickles and Smith 2005; Avelino and Rotmans 2009). Despite this, transitions remain an under-researched area in sociolinguistics in general and workplace discourse in particular. This publication addresses this gap.

In sociolinguistics, transitions have long been conceptualised as linear and sequential or as moving between a place/language X to a place/language Y. This, however, does not capture the dynamics of mobility in modern society. Vertovec (2007) writing on the ‘diversification of diversity’ or ‘superdiversity’, a term that has become widely cited and popular, foregrounds the pace of mobility, the fluidity of transitions, and the multiple spatiotemporal journeys that more accurately represent population flows quantitatively and qualitatively.