When Legitimacy Rhymes with Productivity
The aim of this article is to highlight the articulation of the legitimisation processes of languages and their speakers around the logic of economic productivity. Drawing on an ethnographic study in a call centre, an emblematic site of the neoliberal economy, located in a working-class town in Switzerland, we show how the language competences of workers are the object of a celebration in economic terms (for the industrial repositioning of the town and for the productivity of the call centres). In fact, in a specific sector of economic activity (industry of communication), where language has become the primary work resource and where the national market is targeted, the multilingual competences of the workers (in our case in French, German, and Italian) are considered a central instrument of productivity. Yet, this multilingual ideal does not correspond to the pool of workers really available, which turn out to be less multilingual than expected, thus forcing the companies to reconfigure their language demands towards a German monolingualism and a French-Italian bilingualism. This situation introduces then a hierarchy within the working class between monolinguals and bilinguals, and between German-speaking monolinguals and French- and Italian-speaking monolinguals. The economic instrumentalization of multilinguals is then strongly related to issues of social class and social stratification from which institutions of power mainly profit. In turn, the tying of multilingualism to market logic and to industrial transformations leads to a reproduction of power relations between languages and their speakers, all the while keeping the economically most instable workers in precarious social positions.