ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the notion of boundary crossing and ‘fitting in’ in the modern workplace. The challenges in accessing the workplace and negotiating team membership have attracted interest over the years but not until relatively recently for workplace discourse analysts. We focus here on issues around recruitment, access and integration in multilingual and multinational workplaces. We draw on postmodern interactional approaches to identity and culture and discuss Goffman’s conceptions of performance, stigma and passing (Goffman 1959 and 1963) as well as Bourdieu’s habitus (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992).
To shed light on how fitting in is performed and assessed, we draw on our recently completed and ongoing work as well as illustrative studies from socio- and applied linguistics research with cases from the UK and Denmark. We argue that although ‘fitting in’ suggests flexibility and mutual adjustment, in L2 gatekeeping events and workplace settings, issues of power and hegemony are relevant to pressures on newcomers to adjust. In the expectation that those coming ‘in’ are the ones to fit in, employers put pressure on new employees to adapt or to already be familiar with local social, cultural and linguistic norms. This is particularly visible in events such as the job interview which we discuss in detail. We conclude the chapter with some terminological considerations and areas for future research.
