In this domain we wish to get some insight into interaction as it pertains to labour, production, and economic activity. Here we consider both domestic and public modes of economic activity. We will exclude economic activities that primarily concern trade, or overlap with labour. These activities can be addressed in the relevant domains of this questionnaire.
For some societies, the domains of local community and labour will overlap significantly. If local community and domain of labour are one and the same, please answer for both domains.
Labour: Work. Activities that pertain to production and consumption, which transform the natural world into the cultural domain.
Economic activity is defined broadly to mean human labour and production by which people transform nature into a cultural domain (Seremetakis 2007: 101). Labour is “the activity linking human social groups to the material world around them”, meaning human labour is always social labour in some way, and therefore relational (Schultz & Lavenda 1990:406, Seremetakis 2007). Production, specifically the notion of the modes of production, is “a specific, historically occurring set of social relations through which labor is deployed to wrest energy from nature by means of tools, skills, organization, and knowledge” (Wolf 1982: 75). In other words, in this domain we will target what is typically understood as “work” in the Western world.
Since we are working with a global sample, we will consider that there are two major types of economies which form a continuum. On the one hand there are economies that predominantly revolve around domestic mode of production. In this mode, work activity, production, and consumption all occur in the domestic sphere (Seremetakis 2007:102). On the other hand there are public modes of production, where there is a split between the public and private domains, and the individual goes out to the public domain to sell his/her labor (Seremetakis 2007: 102). These modes roughly, though not always, overlap with certain kinds of socio-political organisations: domestic modes with hunter-gatherers and horticultural societies, public modes with complex societies. Complex societies can be characterised as having at least three levels of hierarchically arranged administration (e.g. Wenke 1980: 431), and this tends to result in some form of social stratification such as class or caste (Berdan 1989: 79).
Language use in modern workplaces are relatively well-researched, though there are a wide array of workplace types, as well as societal contexts, to be covered. The (post-)industrialised workplace has been of interest since these are spaces “where everyone at some stage is new to the environment and has to be socialised into its particular linguistic and cultural environment” (Roberts 2010: 214; Roberts & Sarangi, 1999). There is socialisation into the institutionalised forms of speaking and learning the metalanguage of the workplace, but also a space of personal and social discourses (Holmes & Stubbe, 2003). Work places in migration contexts are often multilingual (Gunnarsson 2013), and use of languages in such a space are greatly affected by greater language (and/or ethnic/cultural/national) attitudes and ideologies (Roberts 2010). For example, second language socialization “often occurs in a relatively hostile environment” (Roberts 2010: 217), for example in countries such as Canada where migrant workers are involved in "unskilled labour" (Li, 2000; Katz, 2000). On the other hand professionals in cosmopolitan transnational corporate environments tend to have more egalitarian relationships across different strata of staff (e.g. “bilingual professionals” in Day & Wagner, 2007) .
For the purposes of this domains questionnaire, the interactional patterns of the private mode of production will be assumed to mirror those of the Local Community closely. Private modes of production blur the line between domains of labour and household as understood in industrialised contexts, and so we assume that modes and norms of interaction are similar enough to assume analogy. Of course one would expect there are modes of labour that straddle the line between private and public (e.g. collective group works for the benefit of a large group).
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