Moving between linguistic, professional and national boundaries is part of the daily reality of modern workplaces, where the concept of a job for life is now outdated. Employees move between jobs, countries and even professions during their working lives, but the multilayered process of redefining personal, social and professional identities is not reflected in current workplace research. This volume brings together a range of scholars from different disciplinary areas in the field, examining the challenges of transition into a (new) workplace, team or community, as well as transitions within different professional communities. By analyzing the strategies individuals adopt to navigate the boundaries they face (in languages, workplaces or countries), this book demonstrates that transitions are not linear but are negotiated and constructed in the situated'here and now'of workplace interaction, at the same time as they are positioned in the wider socioeconomic order.

Moving between linguistic, professional and national boundaries is part of the daily reality of modern workplaces, where the concept of a 'job for life' is now outdated. Employees move between jobs, countries and even professions during their working lives, but the multilayered process of redefining personal, social and professional identities is not reflected in current workplace research. This volume brings together a range of scholars from different disciplinary areas in the field, examining the challenges of transition into a (new) workplace, team or community, as well as transitions within different professional communities. By analyzing the strategies individuals adopt to navigate the boundaries they face (in languages, workplaces or countries), this book demonstrates that transitions are not linear but are negotiated and constructed in the situated 'here and now' of workplace interaction, at the same time as they are positioned in the wider socioeconomic order.

This is the first book in the field of workplace discourse to examine the relationships among leadership, ethnicity, and language use. Taking a social constructionist approach to the ways in which leadership is enacted through discourse, Leadership, Discourse, and Ethnicity problematizes the concept of ethnicity and demonstrates the importance of context-particularly the community of practice-in determining what counts as relevant in the analysis of ethnicity. The authors analyse everyday workplace interactions supplemented by interview data to examine the ways in which workplace leaders use language to achieve their transactional and relational goals in contrasting "ethnicized" contexts, two of which are Maori and two European/Pakeha. Their analysis pays special attention to the roles of ethnic values, beliefs and orientations in talk.

The chapters in this book illustrate a range of cutting edge research in language and gender studies, with contributions from a number of internationally recognised experts. The three themes, femininity, feminism and gendered discourse are central to research in language and gender, and the book thus makes a valuable contribution to a number of current debates.Femininity comprises a central aspect of gender performance and the process of "gendering" individuals is on-going and unavoidable. For many people, the word "femininity" has associations with "frilly pink party dresses," with demureness, deference, and lack of power and influence. The first section of this book demonstrates some alternative conceptions of femininity, and a range of ways in which femininity is performed in different contexts and cultures. The analyses illustrate that we are all continually performing aspects of femininity (and masculinity) in flexible, dynamic, ambiguous, predictable and unpredictable ways.Language and gender research has a long tradition of engagement with the political, and specifically with feminism and feminist goals. The chapters in the second section of this book demonstrate the value of identifying gendered patterns in order to challenge their potentially repressive effects in social interaction in a range of spheres. The researchers analyse contemporary international evidence of sexism in language use, including material from Japanese spam emails expressing sexual desire, and from media reporting on male and female candidates in the 2007 French elections.The final section of this book focuses on the different ways in which we negotiate our gender through discourse. Gender is just one of many facets of our intrinsically hybridized social identities. Nevertheless, it is a very significant facet, a salient dimension in everyday life, with a pervasive social influence on everything we do and say. Interaction is typically viewed through "gendered" spectacles much of the time. The chapters in the third section focus in detail on diverse ways in which gender is constructed through discourse, examining the interaction between individual agency and the larger constraining social structures, including socio-cultural norms, within which that agency is enacted.Finally, the different contributions in this book represent research from a multiplicity of geographic and cultural backgrounds, supporting efforts to internationalise language and gender research, and to raise awareness of empirical studies undertaken in a wide range of linguistic and cultural contexts.