The widespread incorporation of online communicative practices in the repertoires of language users has profoundly affected the structure of communicative ecologies around the world, thus compelling us to adjust some of our core vocabulary accordingly. This chapter therefore critically reexamines one of the key notions in discourse studies: context. Treating context as inextricably connected with meaning-making has historically set discourse studies apart from more formal branches in the study of language. This, however, has not necessarily led to overly sophisticated notions of context, and the mainstream modes of usage of context in much discourse analysis can be characterized as vague and imprecise, grounded in and biased by a default image of spoken, dyadic offline (“local”) discourse events as the most natural and fundamental ones. Such views of context have been imported in studies of online communication, leading to highly questionable but influential insights such as those on “context collapse.” In this chapter, I review some of the conceptual problems related to context in online–offline communicative ecologies. I argue that, in order to avoid the bias described earlier (spoken, dyadic and offline discourse as the “zero point” of language use), we might wish to shift to taking communicative action as our unit of analysis, and address this unit in its fullest ethnographic sense as characterized by normatively circumscribed sets of resources and participants brought into specific time-space constellations enabling and constraining the deployment and uptake of specific lines of activity, leading to effects that are effects both of meaning and of moral and identity valuations. Actions are here defined as chronotopically organized and ordered, with on- and offline chronotopes having particular characteristics and interactions between such chronotopically described “contexts” involving complex shifts in resource valuation, participation frameworks and normative codes of conduct, previously described as shifts in footing. Taking this approach, I argue, enables us to avoid the spoken-dyadic-offline bias inscribed in mainstream notions of context, forcing the analyst not just to approach new online forms of interaction as “abnormal” or “exceptional” interactions, even if they are characterized by the deployment of written/designed resources and directed at “networked publics” rather than at the individual interlocutor of dyadic interaction, and even if they appear not to respect clear boundaries between the online and the offline world. The chronotopic character of contexts for communicative action enables, I suggest, a new imagination of “society” as the necessary backdrop for any consideration of discourse, its means and effects, and in that sense invites a broad range of alternative theoretical and descriptive revisions.

Introduction

In a celebrated article, Aaron Cicourel emphasized that “it is important to locate the analysis of language and social interaction in a wide variety of social activities that are implicitly and explicitly known to the participants and the investigator” (1992: 296). The case built in that article revolved around the challenge, notably in conversation analysis and other branches of discourse analysis, to do justice to the tremendous complexity characterizing real social environments – a medical environment in Cicourel's concrete study – and the need, consequently, to employ “several types of ethnographic and textual materials in order to underscore … unavoidable aspects of organizational and local constraints and processes that are integral to rethinking ‘context’” (p. 309). If we accept, like Cicourel, that any form of human communication is set in a real social environment and draws on real and actual bodies of knowledge and experience of participants operating as “context” in social encounters, then tracing the sources of knowledge and experience of participants becomes a key issue, because “[a]s long as we continue to reify terms like ‘social structure’, ‘culture’ and ‘language’, we shall miss the contextual and cognitive significance of everyday social organization” (Cicourel 1973: 9) and we shall continue to impute our own, researchers’, assumptions and biases to the people we study.

Such reifications, of course, are a legacy of structuralism and found their way into the standard methodologies of a good deal of contemporary social and human sciences. In sociolinguistics, Glyn Williams's (1992) critique of work as widely diverse as Labovian variationism, Fishmanian sociology of language, and Schegloffian conversation analysis demonstrated the lasting and pervasive influence of structural-functionalist consensus models handed down from Talcott Parsons (drawing in turn heavily on Durkheim). Such models, Williams explained, would imagine any social environment as an integrated ‘complete’ system displaying an elementary form of equilibrium, in which every individual member would know what was expected from him or her, and in which such knowledge would be accessible to all members.

I argued in the preceding chapters that a sociolinguistics of globalization needs to be a sociolinguistics of mobile resources, not one of immobile languages. Our focus of analysis should be the actual linguistic, communicative, semiotic resources that people have, not abstracted and idealized (or ideologized) representations of such resources. Our focus should, therefore, be on repertoires, on the complexes of resources people actually possess and deploy. I already mentioned the ‘truncated’ nature of multilingual repertoires in super-diverse contexts such as those of a contemporary ‘global’ city. Multilingualism, I argued, should not be seen as a collection of ‘languages’ that a speaker controls, but rather as a complex of specific semiotic resources, some of which belong to a conventionally defined ‘language’, while others belong to another ‘language’. The resources are concrete accents, language varieties, registers, genres, modalities such as writing – ways of using language in particular communicative settings and spheres of life, including the ideas people have about such ways of using, their language ideologies. What matters in the way of language for real languages users are these concrete forms of language, or, to go by Hymes' words:

The world has become a complex place – that was the main line of argument in the previous chapter. In order to understand that place, we need to inquire into the way in which that place is imagined, represented and enacted by its inhabitants. This chapter will explore the conceptual complex that is central in globalization studies and hinges on notions such as centre and periphery, locality, flows, scales, networks, global economy and so forth. All of these notions refer to space and movements in/through space, and in particular the notion of ‘flow’ has already been productively adopted in sociolinguistics, as we saw earlier (Pennycook 2007). Theoretically, as we have seen, the main challenge for disciplines such as anthropology, sociology or sociolinguistics consists in loosening the connection between culture and a particular territory. Whereas more traditional approaches appeared to tacitly assume that societies and their features ‘belonged’ to one particular geographical area (think of our discussion of the linguistic rights paradigm in the previous chapter), and thus attributed an absolute spatiality to culture, the emphasis on situatedness emphasizes flows, trajectories, movements and thus the relative spatiality of culture. Hannerz (1991: 116–117) summarizes this as follows:

Globalization, the state and inequality

According to ideologues of this era such as Francis Fukuyama (1992), the post-Cold War processes of capitalist globalization produce more wealth for more people than any other era in history. It is also an era in which the modern nation state is on its way out, and its power (supposedly concentrated hitherto, which is highly questionable) is now dissipated and distributed over a wide variety of actors and networks (Castells 1996). Power is now held, and effectively enforced, by transnational capitalist ventures, international organizations, media empires and invisible, hardly visible (and otherwise free from democratic control) consortia of decision makers meeting each year in the Swiss ski-resort Davos and other places. There is truth in both propositions – Fukuyama's claim that the end of history would also mark an increase in global wealth, and Castells' and others' claim about the nation state now sharing its power with other actors. But both propositions also invite substantial qualification. I already quoted Hobsbawm in chapter 1, who affirmed that globalization ‘has brought about a dramatic growth in economic and social inequalities both within states and internationally’ (2007: 3), and the least we can gather from his work and that of many others is that globalization generates immense wealth for some and also immense misery for others. Hobsbawm (2007) also emphasizes the importance of traditional state structures in globalization.

I see this book as the third one of a trilogy in which I try to formulate some of the consequences of globalization for the study of language in society. The first book of the series, Discourse: A Critical Introduction (2005) attempted to sketch these consequences for our understanding of discourse, as well as for our ethos of analysing it. The same approach was applied to literacy in Grassroots Literacy (2008), and I am here bringing the same exercise to the field of sociolinguistics. Each of the books is an attempt, an essai in the classical and original sense of the term, in which I try my best to describe the problem and offer some conceptual and analytical tools for addressing it. And I make this effort because I believe that globalization forces us – whether we like it or not – to an aggiornamento of our theoretical and methodological toolkit. Much as modernism defined most of the current widespread tools of our trade, the transition towards a different kind of social system forces us to redefine them. Such an exercise, however iconoclastic it may seem at first, cannot be avoided or postponed.

The tone of this book, like the previous two, is consequently critical and paradigmatic. I deliberately try to push myself to explore the limits of the present sociolinguistic instrumentarium in an attempt to demonstrate its shortcomings and the need to revise its ingredients.

Sociolinguistics is the study of language as a complex of resources, of their value, distribution, rights of ownership and effects. It is not the study of an abstract language, but the study of concrete language resources in which people make different investments and to which they attribute different values and degrees of usefulness. In the context of globalization, where language forms are perhaps more mobile than before, such patterns of value and use become less predictable and presupposable. Economic metaphors such as those developed by Bourdieu (1991) are particularly useful for a sociolinguistics of globalization. Recall that Bourdieu saw language as a market of symbolic capital and power, with people juggling for profit and with some people structurally having less capital than others. Bourdieu and his contemporaries Bernstein (1971) and Hymes (1980, 1996) all drew our attention to the same phenomenon: that the world of language is not just one of difference but one of inequality; that some of that inequality is temporal and contingent on situations while another part of it is structural and enduring; and that such patterns of inequality affect, and articulate around, actual, concrete, language forms such as accents, dialects, registers and particular stylistic (e.g. narrative) skills.

The symbolic marketplace described by Bourdieu and others was a local and relatively closed one. Its patterns of value attribution and the logic of the economic game were clear to most of the people involved in the transactions – the speaker from la province knew quite well that their speech was ‘inferior’ to that of the Parisian, and this awareness accounted for their tendency towards hypercorrection.

Historical concepts

Understanding globalization is understanding a historical process, something that has considerable depth in time, and something in which we can discern different stages and moments of development. I underscored the importance of this point earlier in this book and now return to it. The difficulty we face was exemplified in Fairclough (2006): we can only observe globalization synchronically, while we can only understand it historically. Consequently, we must develop conceptual tools that are at least historically sensitive, that suggest and open a space of historical analysis and interpretation.

History, of course, is not the same as diachrony. It is not sufficient to specify a time-line along which sociolinguistic features develop and on which certain ‘dots’ mark important moments (a problem in some work on language policy and language planning). History means that time is filled with human activity, with actors who stand in various kinds of relationships to one another and whose actions influence those of others. Power, hierarchy, authority, normativity are central in understanding historical processes: history is filled with power and conflict (cf. Blommaert 1999a). Some works can be used as examples of historical sociolinguistic analysis. Bonfiglio (2002) reviews the genesis of ‘standard American’ accents and sets it against a panorama of race and ethnic relations, twentieth-century xenophobia and the emergence of new elites in the USA. We hear the voices of the ambitious in his study, and we see language ideology being articulated by identifiable actors to other identifiable actors.

Sketch of a road map

In the previous chapters I have developed some conceptual tools for a sociolinguistics of globalization. I argued that such a sociolinguistics ought to be a sociolinguistics of mobile resources and not of immobile languages. I showed how mobility affects the phenomenology of language, and how we need to think about it in terms of scales, orders of indexicality and polycentricity. I then tried to develop a perspective on locality, arguing that the sociolinguistic world needs to be seen in terms of relatively autonomous complexes, obviously influenced by global factors but still firmly local. I argued that through all of this, we need to think of truncated repertoires rather than of ‘complete’ languages in the traditional sense of the term, and that we need to see communication in globalization as often ‘unfinished’, as a deployment of incomplete communicative forms. And I offered inequality as a perspective on all of this, arguing that, paradoxically perhaps in a so-called post-modern age, the modern state is very often the engine behind much inequality. Together, these arguments and concepts form a kind of cosmology for the sociolinguistics I have in mind; they should offer us a sketch of a road map for the poorly charted waters in which we now find ourselves.