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Transnationalism as interdiscursivity: Korean managers of multinational corporations talking about mobility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2017

Joseph Sung-Yul Park
Joseph Sung-Yul Park*
Affiliation:
National University of Singapore
*
Address for correspondence: Joseph Sung-Yul Park, English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, AS5, 7 Arts Link, Singapore117570, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article explores how transnationalism can be understood as an interdiscursive process. By making connections with chronotopes of past places along a transmigrant's trajectory, interdiscursivity allows for the emergence of complex indexical meaning associated with different speakers and different ways of speaking, imbuing the transmigrant's mobility with specific social significance. This article demonstrates this point through an analysis of how South Korean mid-level managers of multinational corporations in Singapore imagined their positioning in the global workplace. By tracing the ways the managers employed metapragmatic discourse associated with multiple chronotopes to make sense of their reasonably successful but limited careers, it offers an account of how interdiscursivity shaped their understanding of their own positionality as Koreans working beyond the time-space of Korea. (Interdiscursivity, transnationalism, chronotope, Korea, English, intercultural communication)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 46 , Special Issue 1: Metapragmatics of Mobility , February 2017 , pp. 23 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

* I express my deepest gratitude to all participants in this study, without whom it would not have been possible. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2013 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago. I thank the audience for critical comments, and Adrienne Lo, Angela Reyes, and an anonymous reviewer for Language in Society for their constructive feedback. This work was supported by an Academy of Korean Studies Grant (AKS-2012-R-24).

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