К.соц.н. Иванова Д. Н.

Южный федеральный университет, Россия

преп. высшей квал. категории Глазунова Л. С.

ГБПОУ « Константиновский педагогический колледж», Россия

LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL REALITY

It has always been supposed that language connects people to each other in social relations. In doing so it constructs social reality. Insofar as any social and cultural phenomenon is embodied in a verbal form, it is perceivable by people and mediated by them though linguistic means. Since every cultural phenomenon has a social domain at any moment of its history, it may be reflected through language, which is susceptible to dialectical variations. When a new cultural construct has a recognizable reality only for a sub-group within a society, processes of communicative transmission can readily bring the construct to the attention of other members of society. They make this cultural construct more widely known and thus presupposable in use by larger segments of the population.

All cultural and social phenomena are subject to transmission through language means. This paper explores the important role of language in shaping a very important domain of social and cultural life of people called work. Language users commonly perceived the organization of language as comprised largely of words, often “conceived as elementary building blocks or atoms of meaning” [1, p. 107].

The main point at issue here is that any socio-cultural phenomenon can be identified and examined on the basis of a linguistically informed approach to the sociological character of emerging phenomena and processes. The linguistic data we provide in this paper have been primarily collected through periodicals and research literature as well as direct observation of communication practices of native speakers. Taking this approach seriously means that the assumption that new words represent some larger scale social and cultural phenomena becomes plausible. So, an attempt has been made in the paper to discuss emerging phenomena at work with the help of analysis of new words.

The essential point is to attend to the social effects these new words produce. In taking the step from actual words to the social and cultural effects it produces, we move beyond the domain of lexicon to the domain of social reality. Whether we are dealing with stereotypic or emerging social effects, we should describe such effects “through decontextualizing these words in speech events. All such effects are highly palpable and consequential while a speech event is under way”[2]. It is true that social effects of this kind do have a principled organization.

It is important to see, moreover, that formation of new words in our day-to-day communication is better explained from pragmatic perspective. And when we want to describe something we need to fill the gaps in our vocabulary. These gaps occur when we face with new concepts which imply coining new words. As a matter of fact the process of new word formation continues restlessly, reflecting emerging social and cultural phenomena.

Our goal here is to make clearer attributes of language that shape various parts of our social reality by causing emerging cultural trends to become obvious and distinctive. These attributes are of focal interest for us. In general they make language so exquisite an instrument for doing research into new social and cultural phenomena. In many ways, the phenomena or products language reflects are far more accessible to our everyday awareness. But there is no denying that it is language that makes or unmakes these social and cultural phenomena.

We do agree that “things that last for seconds can have effects that last for years. Even physical tokens of discourse that have a fleeting durational existence (such as spoken utterances) can order and construct social reality of a much more perduring kind, one that persists far longer than the initial speech token itself ” [3]. If individuals are makers of social reality, they do it most readily through speech utterances. People do it countless times a day and think nothing of it. But those products of human activity that we call new words shape our reality sometimes in a complex way, and often with far greater consequences. It is therefore all the more important to see how these new words make models of social reality.

We know that social relations might be expressed by all kinds of things but work has always been regarded as one of the most significant domains of enactable roles and relationships. Let us take this specific area of human activity as our point of departure and explore it through new words and social effects they produce.

Work is a doubly important aspect of life, in that it is of overriding significance to us as individuals and to society in general. Work is – perhaps unfortunately – the single activity that most of us spend most of our lives doing.

So all the dramatic changes this domain undergoes are clearly seen by ordinary people as well.

One of the most obvious trends of our society in the domain of work is the loss of craft skills. Braverman indentifies this process as deskilling [4]. Deskilling removes the4 skills, knowledge and science of the labour process and transfers these to management. The most recent product of this phenomenon is the fast-food company McDonald as it can be seen as the result of dissemination of deskilling. Moreover, there is a term “McDonalization” denoting “the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world” [5].

There is one more new word associated with fast-food restaurants. A person working in this place is called burgerista.

Clare told her boyfriend that her dream job is to be a burgerista at KFC so that one day she could become a Starbucks barista.

McDonald and other fast-food restaurants are particularly reliant on new technologies of surveillance that transform places of work into a Panopticon. Originally proposed by Bentham J., the Panopticon was a design of prison created to allow permanent observation of the inmates at all times. The inmates of a Panopticon (whether it be a prison, factory, McDonalds outlet, bank or other place of work) are potentially under constant surveillance. Sewell and Wilkinson argue that “new technologies decisively favour management in the struggle for control at work” [6]. These technologies include those tracking individuals (CCTV, face-recognition software, swipe cards, computer logins, and passwords); tracking things, including inventory and stock (barcodes, integrated alarms); recording activity (sales, monitoring of phone calls); as well as the redesign of entire organizations to eliminate the need of inventories and warehouses full of stock (these are typically called Just-In-Time systems).

In the face of these developments the recalcitrant worker (who is also in the focus of our study) is in more and more ways constrained in the forms of resistance available to them. Because they do not know when they are free from surveillance there is an obvious tendency for self-discipline.

But given the new technologies of control and the decline of collective bargaining the forms of resistance of the recalcitrant worker are becoming invisible. These new forms of resistance include a failure to act, acting ritualistically, leaking information, rumour-mongering, whistle-blowing. These are “sins” of omission. “Sins” of commission remain and centre on the pilfering of non-material resources (e.g. computer time, ideas, protocols) and the dissemination of anti-corporatist ideologies. Paul De Guy has extended the notion of the labour process as game with particular emphasis on counter-ideologies. He uses the concept of la perruque – the work of appearing to work.

La perruque is the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer. It pilfers from pilfering in thata nothing of material value is stolen. It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job. La perruque may be as simple a matter as secretary’s love letter on “computer time” [7].

Using the Internet to pretend to work is called cyberslacking/cyberloafing. Hidden in cyberspace it looks as if people are busily typing as they shop, e-mail friends, read the news, check the scores, or book a holiday.

Let us now list the issues that the above examples brings to the foreground. Drawing on speech events these examples show that language is the effective means by which human beings construct various social domains and models of conduct. These new models of social behavior are made and remade by linguistic means. The fact that these models vary across societies in limitless ways and can be reflected in language forms differently is no cause for distress. Rather, the recognition of the assumption made above helps us understand better the sense in which social and cultural reality is an open project, the ways in which forms of cultural and social organization are modifiable through human language.

References:

1. Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations, Cambridge University Press, p. 107.

2. Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, vol.3. ed. by David Levingston and Melvin Ember. NewYork, p. 210.

3. Austin, J. L. 1962. How To Do Things With Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 63.

4. Braverman, H. 1974. Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, New York: Vintage Books.

5. Ritzer, G. 1996. The McDonaldization of Society. An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life. CA: Pine Forge, p.69.

6. Sewell, B. and Wilkinson B. 1992. “Someone to watch over me”: Surveillance, Discipline and the J-I-T Labour Process. Sociology 26(2), P. 615

7. Gay, P. D. 1996. Consumption and Identity at Work. London: Sage, p.103.