In the communications of modern organizations, text sharing and knowledge management are mainly digital. The digital systems that frame many types of communication consist of, e.g., intranets and document sharing software that are occasionally exchanged for new systems. Employees have to adjust to modified routines and learn new systems, and management has to make decisions about digital systems and how these are to be integrated with work processes and knowledge management. In this article, we contribute to research on work-life literacies by highlighting the increasingly frequent issue of digital text sharing in modern workplaces through the study of commercial companies, mainly through ethnographic observations and interviews. The theoretical framework comes from New Literacy Studies where literacy practices, i.e., common patterns of using reading and writing, form a key concept. Moreover, the sociolinguistic concept of metadiscourse is applied in order to uncover the reflexive orientation of participating professionals towards digital text sharing. The results show that these professionals relate the combination of digital text sharing and technological and organizational change to problems, obstacles and potential risks; ambitions of enhancing digital text sharing may exclude certain groups, and changes in digital text sharing systems per se may cause professionals to lose control. These risks are often associated with access to information: a person who cannot access information in their organization has a lower degree of agency or power over their situation. The results are discussed in light of theories concerning modern work life from New Literacy Studies.

Recently, changes in working life have become a prominent topic in academic researchas well as professional literature and public discussions. It has been recognized thatthe contexts and conditions of work have become more transient and unpredictabledue to global changes and megatrends related to, for example, migration, techno-logical developments, and transforming values and lifestyles as the world becomesincreasingly interconnected through the flows of information, workforces, materialsand ideas (see e.g. Blommaert 2013; Gratton 2011; Sarangi 2011). In light of thistransformation, changing working life can be seen as a cluster of change processes thatinfluence the labour market and workplace organizations in various ways.

Det här är en vägledning om språkinlärning – med konkreta tips om hur du som har svenska som förstaspråk kan planera möten, sköta rekrytering och hantera det dagliga arbetet på en arbetsplats där det talas många språk.

Du får också veta mer om hur du kan öka den ömsesidiga förståelsen i kommunikationen med människor som håller på att lära sig svenska som andraspråk.

In modern business organizations, digital practices are enacted daily, often when sharing texts, which is crucial for knowledge management. How professionals experience digital text sharing is an issue that is often overlooked. In this paper, we focus on a relatively new aspect of business digital literacy: the literacy practice of digital text sharing in workplaces. Our analysis was conducted on ethnographic data from business organizations. The results show that sociomaterial aspects are enacted by professionals by discussing 1) the protection of borders of their own and other organizations, and 2) the status and digital location of texts. The analysis highlights two means of expressing agency that indicate conflicting norms: joking and showing strong emotions. The study places the hitherto backgrounded literacy practice of digital text sharing in workplaces in the foreground, proposes methods for studying this phenomenon, and highlights issues concerning digital text sharing that should be addressed by organizations.

Professionals working in international companies in Sweden are expected to speak, read, and write in Swedish and English in their daily work. This article discusses professional writing in different languages. Through the use of methods from linguistic ethnography, we aim to enrich the understanding of workplace literacy by studying writing and texts in multilingual business contexts. Our results show that professionals are expected to navigate between a translanguaging mode and a more monolingual mode in everyday communication. Also, when they opt for producing monolingual texts, literacy practices that surround those texts are often multilingual. Moreover, they imagine a future, secondary audience for their texts, often resulting in the choice of English for reaching out, or in the choice of Swedish as a way of keeping matters local. Knowing when to choose a translanguaging mode or a more monolingual mode is a necessary skill or competence in this type of workplace. Our results also show that the use of multimodal resources includes the material placement of texts, and that old materialities such as pen and paper are still essential. Different linguistic and semiotic resources are used, including resources from academic, business and personal discourse.

Modern work life includes many digital tools, of which the shared digital calendar has attracted little attention in applied linguistics. The framework for this study is mediated discourse analysis applied to ethnographic data from one workplace and eight contextual interviews from eight other workplaces. The data were analyzed 1) qualitatively, using Wertsch’s (1998) concepts for agency, and 2) quantitatively, through an SFG (Systemic Functional Grammar) analysis of the interviews. The quantitative analysis reveals a high degree of agency. The qualitative analysis shows that discourses of managerialism, globalization, democratization and “flat organizations” can be mapped to the digital calendar. The calendar is also related to other text media such as whiteboards and time report systems, where squares with colors and writing constitute the discursive shapes that are common to the digital calendar. The ability to search and book meetings in the calendars of others is an affordance, although regulated through digital or verbal access. In this and other ways, the individual is strongly connected to the digital tool. The boundary between private and public has been challenged by digital tools. Social actors can resist, e.g., by non-compliance in using the digital calendar, thus increasing their sense of agency. Additional features include the ability to combine different media and develop practices that are not directly offered by the design of the tool. The digital tool both widens the agency of the actors, e.g., in keeping a great deal of information connected to one meeting, and delimits it, e.g., in sometimes rendering individuals helpless to what they see in their own calendars.

In a bilingual school, the linguistic and semiotic resources of students who speak one, two or several languages can be used in classroom discourse in order to embrace and strengthen the multiplicity of voices and languages in teaching and learning. In this article, four English language lessons ? where the medium of instruction mainly oscillates between Swedish and English, and where Spanish is also used ? are analysed with the aim of generating knowledge about how translanguaging is or could be used as a pedagogical resource in the classroom. The data were collected through ethnographic fieldwork in a 5th grade class at a bilingual school in the Stockholm area and consist of recordings of classroom observations, photos and field notes.

I den här antologin beskrivs människor, redskap och situationer som många känner igen från dagens komplexa och rörliga arbetsliv:

• En mellanchef vars arbetsdagar i hög grad styrs av de många möten som andra lagt in i hennes kalender.
• En whiteboardtavla som kopplar samman olika delar av en verksamhet, och även kopplar möten till andra aktiviteter.
• Flera samverkande organisationer som gör det svårt att skilja internkommunikation från annan kommunikation, och som både ökar behovet av kommunikation och försvårar den.

Dessa skildras i tre uppsatser av Angie Gravett, Emma Legaard och Sofia Johansson. I en forskningsöversikt sammanfattar forskarna Mona Blåsjö och Carla Jonsson sociolingvistisk forskning om arbetslivskommunikation, med fokus på skrivbordsyrken. Översikten visar ur ett individperspektiv hur enskilda anställda förhåller sig till språk i sin vardag på arbetsplatsen, och ur ett organisatoriskt perspektiv diskuteras hur flera språk kan användas på en och samma arbetsplats. De studier som presenteras bygger på olika metoder (kvalitativa, kvantitativa, etnografiska osv.) och ger därigenom en bild av hur man kan gå tillväga för att analysera arbetslivskommunikation. Översikten fokuserar på tre teman: mångfald, dvs. olika aspekter av flerspråkighet på arbetsplatser, möten och annan muntlig kommunikation samt mejl eller snarare mejlande: textprocesser och digitala redskap i arbetslivet.

Antologin är lämplig för studenter på grundnivå och forskarnivå, men kan även läsas av alla som är intresserade av hur moderna organisationer arbetar med sin kommunikation.