Language & Communication 51 (2016) 30–39

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Language & Communication

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langcom

The compromised pragmatics of diversity

Bonnie Urciuoli
Anthropology Department, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY 13323, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: When languages or ethnic/racial identities are imagined as neoliberal objects in corporate,
Available online 1 August 2016 government, and educational discourses, their worth is imagined in terms of ‘added value.’
Yet they emerge from social formations embedded in inequalities, reflecting the interplay
Keywords: of markedness and unmarkedness. People experience them chronotopically, meaningful
Language relative to specific times, places, and relationships. But once language and identity become
Diversity
quantifiable units of diversity, they become subject to rhetorical packaging that eliminates
Skills
any experiential specificity. Disconnected from context, language and social identity
Neoliberalism
Markedness
become available for use in institutional promotion and branding. Yet, though marketed in
Chronotope relation to neoliberalized personal properties like skills, the marketing potential of lin-
guistic or social diversity is always subject to compromise by the echo of lived experience.
Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction: how can language and social identity be parallel objectifications?

In contemporary Euro-American corporate discourses, language and race/ethnic identity are routinely objectified as
‘things’ that people ‘have.’ This is especially the case when those qualities are marked, i.e. when a language is considered a
‘minority’ language or when race/ethnic identity is cast as ‘diversity.’ In neoliberal labor regimes, workers are expected to
treat such indexes of their own markedness entrepreneurially. Yet language and identity are inherently neither parallel nor
objects, at least not if one thinks of ‘language’ as, in Silverstein’s (2003) terms, a compendium of glottonymically designated
phonological, grammatical, and lexical forms, or of identity as a socially-imposed classification signified by selected inherited
physical features or other presumably innate properties. That they can be objectified in such parallel ways, says much about
the capacity of neoliberalism to reframe and mask the nature of human experience, sociality, and inequality.
I use neoliberalism in the sense analyzed by Harvey (2005): the function of the state is to maximize the market’s oper-
ational potential, with social practices generally conceptualized as subject to market processes. In this imaginary, workers
optimally look upon themselves as an assemblage of commodifiable elements, a condition which Gershon (2011: 540)
characterizes as neoliberal agency: an actor’s capacity to engage other selves as “autonomous market actors.” Each consti-
tutive element of self is valued in terms of its productive deployability, as if one ran oneself like a business. Any capacity for
action that gives workers a market edge becomes a ‘skill’: ‘hard skills’ as forms of knowledge (including language) or ‘soft
skills’ as modes of sociality (including social identity). Thus imagined as skills, language and social identity are more readily
imagined as comparable objectifications of qualities possessed by workers.
That the discursive production of languages and identities are parallel and countable in part reflects the function of
markedness in a neoliberal labor regime. By ‘marked,’ I mean that which is taken as atypical or problematic and consequently
inferior, as opposed to an ‘unmarked’ norm. In neoliberal labor regimes, marked qualities are seen as potentially value-added

E-mail address: burciuol@hamilton.edu.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2016.07.005
0271-5309/Ó 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
 B. Urciuoli / Language & Communication 51 (2016) 30–39 31

based on their capacity to expand a company’s market reach, provide a wider range of services, and so on. This makes
speakers of marked languages and bearers of marked identities responsible for finding value for their own markedness, which
disguises but does not diminish the conditions of inequality through which people become marked in the first place. Social
actors are expected to recast their own marked qualities in rational, modernist terms that readily lend themselves to problem-
solving models. Thus, languages spoken by marked populations only take on full neoliberal value when cast as neatly
bounded, named, and definable entities not used in messy or problematic ways: no code-switching, no low-status varieties.
Languages should be identifiable with text-based standards demonstrating users’ continual focus on ‘best’ practices. Similarly,
‘diverse’ social identities only take on full neoliberal value when they are seen as exemplifications of good worker qualities,
implemented as means to productive outcomes. Thus, good language practices and good identity practices as manifestations
of good worker practices become comparable.
In this essay, drawing heavily on websites, I use corporate or corporatized discourses to show how knowledge of marked
languages is imagined in terms of productive ‘skills’ and how marked social identities (‘diversity’) are linked to problem-
solving and leadership. In this way I show how, in such discourses, language and identity can be construed as at least
partly parallel objects similarly invested with market value. The evidence for marked languages is drawn from studies of the
neoliberalizing of once historically marginalized languages in Europe and Canada, and from diversity marketing firm websites
in the U.S (firms that advise companies wanting to market goods and services to ethnically/racially and linguistically marked
populations). These provide comparable but slightly different perspectives on contemporary ways in which languages are
conceptualized and assigned value, particularly as disconnected from the messiness of language as social experience. I
compare these perspectives to the corporate imagining of ‘diversity’ as a value-added capacity possessed by workers and
students, using material from corporate diversity policy statements by major corporations and from the website of the Posse
Foundation, a U.S. non-profit organization that recruits students from ‘non-traditional’ and ‘diverse’ backgrounds and secures
college scholarships for them with the understanding that these students will undergo ‘leadership’ training to transform
them into ‘change agents’ on their respective campuses. In both corporate diversity statements and on Posse’s website, we see
identity disconnected from social experience and connected instead to a complex of institutional values. These comparisons
illustrate two assumptions about the neoliberalizing of difference embedded in corporate language: that it is incumbent on
people to use their social markedness in value-added ways; and that the inequalities of social experience giving rise to such
linguistic knowledge or marked identities matter less than their entrepreneurial value.
Marked linguistic experience and social identity take on meaning in webs of social relations anchored to and shaped by
particular times and places. Linguistic elements can index social dynamics in configurations that are not apparent or pre-
dictable from the named language alone. For example, Blommaert and Rampton examine a notice in an Antwerp shop
window, written in Chinese and advertising an apartment for rent, in which the complex of elements (and their origins)
making up this small sign “bears the traces of worldwide migration flows and their specific demographic, social and cultural
dynamics” (Blommaert and Rampton, 2011:2). Or to take another example, Welsh and Basque, now heavily neoliberalized
(Barakos, 2012; Urla, 2012), had long histories as local languages that became marginalized under regimes of internal
colonialism. Simply referring to these situations by the glottonyms “Chinese” or “Welsh” or “Basque” obscures those historical
shifts. That said, given the nature of language as “an ideological artifact with very considerable power” that “operates as a
major ingredient in the apparatus of modern governmentality” (Blommaert and Rampton, 2011:4), it is somewhat easier to
mask the structural dynamics that have made named languages marked than it is to mask the structural dynamics that have
made identities marked.
Yet the experiences and relationships in which people learn language are also those in which they take on social identity.
Silverstein (2005, after Bakhtin, 1981) characterizes these processes in terms of the chronotopic (time-space) structuring of
social relations which in turn organizes the framing semiotic principles by which routine acts of pragmatic interpretation are
mutually coordinated. Since chronotopicity is a function of the properties structuring people’s social worlds, people’s
experience of it can range from relatively stable to complex and fluid. The shared semiosis characterizing people’s experience
of chronotopicity emerges cumulatively from webs of linked interaction taking place in real time and in actual locations,
through which social actors build up a sense of discursive continuity, of sharing ‘the same’ kind of talk through links to other
discursive activity. This is the process of enregisterment, the continuous co-occurring emergence of linguistic forms and their
governing pragmatics as people engage in common social life. In that sense, people’s experience of language is the experience
of register, always in specific times, place, and relationships. Nor do registers ever stop forming while people use them.
Regional and social language varieties, contact varieties, code-switching, convergence, and other non-standard formations
emerge through enregisterment processes in socially marked circumstances, while those formations recognized as standard
develop (or are deliberately cultivated) in unmarked circumstances. As Agha (2007:145–149) argues, registers are cultural
models of action linking discursive production to images of person, interpersonal relations, and types of conduct. Thus,
register formation is deeply linked to formation of social personas and identities: patterns of co-occurring linguistic elements
are manifestations of social formations, group-relative processes that carry value for that group, and for other groups (not
necessarily the same values). Hence the link between ‘untidy’ registers (non-standards, code-switching, etc.) and images of
the people who use them.
Under conditions of neoliberal governmentality, the messiness of language and identity becomes reformulated. The
messiness of marked language becomes unacknowledged or explicitly criticized and the recognized language is a stan-
dardized form. The messiness of marked social identity is reformulated and tidied up as ‘diversity.’ In a general Foucauldian
sense, governmentality signifies the regimes through which subjects are imagined and imagine themselves, along with the
32 B. Urciuoli / Language & Communication 51 (2016) 30–39

technologies of power through which such regimes are instantiated, particularly the “technologies of self” through which
subjectivity becomes valued in ways that seem natural and logical within the systemic distribution of power, resources, and
authority (Foucault, 1988). Rose (1999) builds this into a notion of specifically neoliberal governmentality, in which tech-
nologies of power establish the conditions through which neoliberal subjectivity is generated. Leaving aside for the moment
the problem of empirically demonstrating how such governing regimes generate ethnographically specific outcomes (see e.g.
the critique by Kipnis, 2008), we can note that received neoliberal wisdom is framed by corporate discourses that make clear
how subjects are imagined from a top-down perspective, and how their activities are structured and valued. (How subjects
actually imagine themselves is less easily determined.) This takes place within a larger political economy in which a lami-
nation of nation, culture, and language becomes routine. That lamination routinely obscures the dynamic complexity of
linguistic experience. The culture and language aspects of the lamination are routinely framed as ‘skills’ that can also be
classified in terms of national connection. At that point, language identifiable with nation can be disconnected to some extent
from the marked social processes in which people have lived it, e.g. Spanish or Chinese as national languages rather than
languages of working class immigrant populations. By contrast, the idea of diversity is more directly linked to person, since
race/ethnicity diversity classifications are directly about markedness. So diversity remains more immediately linked to the
structural underpinnings connecting people to the particular lived time/space-bound envelopes that shape their social
experience, and those underpinnings never quite shake loose.

2. Language objectified as skill in a neoliberal political economy

In a neoliberal frame, language is readily objectified as a ‘skill set.’ As Cameron (2000) has argued, communication skills
valued in the corporate world acquire value as techniques designed by appropriately credentialed experts (as opposed to
ordinary emergent social practice). Such ‘skills’ are framed in terms of contemporary Taylorist problem-solving, i.e. the idea
that there is a ‘best way’ or as it would now be termed, ‘best practice.’ Linguistic practices not describable in textbook terms
are not likely to be considered tools for problem-solving, i.e. not ‘skills’ that can be put to such productive ends as spreading
product information or providing services to new market niches.
As noted earlier, language in the neoliberal imaginary is a function of how workers are imagined, that is, as bundles of
marketable skills, skills being interpretable as elements of job performance or behaviors that fit workers to the needs of the
work place, an imagining now routine in corporate discourses (Urciuoli, 2008). Where job skills in an older, Fordist era of
production and management largely meant what are now considered ‘hard skills’ (techniques or forms of knowledge) that
one performed as part of one’s job, the idea of skills in the post-Fordist ‘flexible’ workplace has expanded to include such ‘soft
skills’ as ‘teamwork,’ ‘leadership,’ ‘good communication,’ and ‘time management.’ Soft skills are elements of personhood and
social behaviors that contribute to worker adaptability (or to use the terminology of the neoliberal workplace, ‘buy-in’ and
‘empowerment’) and are valued for their capacity to better fit the worker to the conditions of a ‘just in time’ workplace
(Harvey, 1990). The ‘fast capitalism’ literature mapping out that ‘flexible worker’ is accepted wisdom in human relations
discourses (Gee et al., 1996).
Linguistic practices can be construed as hard skills if the focus is on grammatical/lexical knowledge of a named language,
or as soft skills if the focus is social dimensions of its use, i.e. ‘communication.’ The hard/soft distinction might seem fairly
straightforward but it is not, as Allan (2013:65–66) shows in her work with immigrants in Toronto: when language is
imagined as “a barrier,” the issue may be not simply technical control over code but the capacity to “communicate an
appropriate self.” In this way, race/ethnic markedness gets mapped onto the ‘language skills’ of immigrant workers. This also
explains why, as Allan notes in the same discussion, foreign languages only count as skills (presumably hard skills) when a
worker’s English is unmarked. Communication as a soft skill is central to notions of worker flexibility, understood as the
capacity for workers to immediately and unproblematically insert themselves into any desired task structure. A ‘language
barrier’ interferes with that capacity and is thus a soft skill failure.
Much of what are now treated as language skills have become so since the 1980s–90s; much of that linguistic knowledge
used to be heritage language knowledge, often not highly valued. Heller and Duchêne (2012) point out the tension between
the principles of (ethnic heritage) pride and (business) profit. Pride and profit constitute not an absolute polarity but con-
trasting perspectives through which language users can be seen: as ethnic citizens possessing heritage language or as workers
possessing skills that can enhance corporate profits. The latter is linked to the process of language commodification (Heller,
2010) which is closely linked to but not isomorphic with the conception of language as a skill set. Linguistic practices can be
commodified so far as the value of workers’ labor power depends on their knowledge of such practices, and insofar as they
have the capacity to sell that labor power. It is here that we see local or minority languages bounced back and forth between
‘pride’ and ‘profit’ as semiotic frames that account for value in contrasting ways. For example, Duchêne has shown that the
labor value of workers’ multilingual capacities depends on multiple factors: Swiss tourism call center operators are valued for
their capacity to handle standardized major languages while adding authenticity in nonstandardized local languages
(Duchêne, 2009); Swiss airport workers who staff the desks with direct customer contact are valued for their command of
major European languages while service workers such as baggage carriers are expected to provide unscripted and occasional
language fill-in work, as-needed, in more local, less valued languages (Duchêne, 2011). Heller (2003, 2011) and Roy (2003)
have shown how the use of French in Canadian call centers reinforces a shift in social meaning away from a user’s ethnic
identity and toward neoliberal subjectivity defined by possession of skills. Roy shows how call center labor has shifted the
meaning of (and value accorded) bilingualism from the ability to use English and French in their socially appropriate contexts
 B. Urciuoli / Language & Communication 51 (2016) 30–39 33

to the ability to use them separately in ways that satisfy customers. Heller traces the increasing economic (as opposed to
cultural) legitimation of language practices as communication tied to markets, with the state shifting from the role of pro-
tector of language rights to facilitator of the production of linguistic commodities. This can involve low-wage and scripted call
center work, in which French language interaction is often based on translations from English. That is a long way from French
as a performance of French Canadian pride, particularly as it privileges a standard French over an ethnically-identified variety.
Such deployment of language as a skill requires considerable disciplining of linguistic production: in the case of call centers it
is tightly scripted and the speaker is rarely the author of the script. The generic standard becomes the privileged form with the
use of the non-standard rationalized only by its capacity to reach otherwise unreachable markets. Throughout these (and
several other) ethnographic studies, the worker emerges not as a speaker with social agency but as a deployer of language
whose agency is structured by workplace function, making language use a skill, valued by virtue of its capacity to be counted
as an enhancement of human capital. What counts as human capital exists in a hierarchic relation to some larger end, shaped
by company or national policy or both.
Since the neoliberalized reframing of ethnic languages is not always a stark matter of skill sets, the intertwined nature of
profit and pride as perspectives on value is interesting to consider in relation to Silverstein’s (2003) notion of ethnolinguistic
recognition, wherein named languages emerge as glottonyms (ethnolinguistic labels) naturalized as distinctions among types
of people. Of particular relevance here is the fact that the work of legitimizing relatively marked glottonymic identities falls to
the people who are marked relative to those at the top of the glottonymic hierarchy whose social and linguistic identities are
the prestige norm. The process of establishing ethnolinguistic identity is conceptually organized around the notion of
localized ‘communities’ and performed in contrast to other hierarchized identities, in identity displays that cumulatively and
interdiscursively generate a sense of ‘us’ linked to each other and to place. Through such work, heritage language speakers
may gain recognition, legitimating the positions from which marked languages can be seen as worthy. ‘New’ communication
mediation can move this process into continuous globalized configurations, in which marked languages become “visible to
Euro-Western ethnonational institutions and consciousness in rather new sociological configurations” (2003: 547). In “elite
re-ethnicization,” culture-brokers located in institutionally elite positions “reschedule” what count as displays of ethno-
linguistic identity while maintaining a sense of “rhizomic” connection with what is imagined as the cultural source
(2003:546–548).
The sociological configurations resulting from neoliberalized re-ethnicization are often not only “rather new” but rather
startling, as can be seen in recent work on language revival of Celtic languages and Basque. For much of the twentieth century
these were seen as marginal, even dying, languages until they became sites of politicized heritage revival. Then came the shift
toward what Jaffe (2007:62–63) terms the ‘value added’ model of ethnic languages; as she describes in her study of Corsican,
the movement is away from learning an ethnic language for its own sake and toward learning it as part of a greater identity to
which the ethnic language makes a significant contribution. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, a further shift linking ‘valued
added’ explicitly to corporate values became evident in the venues of identity display favored by language revivalists in search
of ethnolinguistic recognition.
McEwan-Fujita (2005) shows how ideologies of neoliberal governmentality came to saturate Gaelic language planning in
Scotland, along lines dictated by funding principles and economic goals, excluding from consideration any minority-language
planning based on sociolinguistic or linguistic anthropological or any other relevant social science principles. Such language
planning and policy is done with an eye toward reimagining difference as a form of human capital – ironically, since the
functional differentiation of English and Gaelic registers makes it seem unlikely that business registers would develop in Scots
Gaelic to any great extant. Brennan and Costa (2013) demonstrate the staging of the link of language to Celtic identity, in line
with touristic expectations and demonstrating the complexity of the ‘pride’ end of the Duchêne-Heller pride/profit contrast.
Such staging depends on Celtic languages being recognized at the level of nation, rather than of minority speakers, with
Scotland and Ireland sold as products on an international market, and not just tourist markets. While cultural heritage may
carry elements of the 19th century archaeological museum, it is also celebratory. The celebratory element opens up the
market potential of heritage in that it distinguishes an ethnic self from a tourist ‘other’ loosely and porously enough to enable
tourists to identify across that boundary with the ethnic self being performed. This limits the use of heritage language
functions to non-referential performance elements such as song and poetry, thus making language an element of added value
maximizing profit and customer satisfaction.
Barakos (2012) describes shifting heritage language value in Wales, where Welsh speaking declined among northern and
western rural populations and rose instead among urban businessmen in Wales’ Anglicized south. Welsh language policy,
Barakos notes, is designed both to be promotional (advancing the status of Welsh, endorsing bilingual corporate identity,
showing symbolic cultural commitment) and to operate as a “grassroots tool for regulating modes of interaction” (2012: 174).
Barakos describes the shift from the 2003 Welsh national language policy focused on language choice and establishing the
equal status of Welsh and English in public agencies and administration to the 2012 national policy focused on “promotion
and persuasion” (2012:171). Thus neoliberally restructured, the value of Welsh becomes measurable in some sense of return
on investment. This includes its capacity to extend service provision and enhance the experience of customers. Welsh
speakers gain value to the extent that they can facilitate those ends. More broadly, the end is private sector efficiency or
expansion, the means (one of many) is the use of Welsh, and the vehicle by which that means is delivered is the speaker. In
other words, the value that accrues to speaking Welsh and identifying as Welsh is a function of return on investment.
The case of Basque illustrates another once-marginalized language moved by neoliberalized activists into a business-
friendly form of heritage status. Urla (2012:155ff) describes the process of “Total Quality Language Revival” through which
34 B. Urciuoli / Language & Communication 51 (2016) 30–39

Basque language revival has been managed, and in particular brought into the workplace, which is no easy feat in language
planning. A key element in this process was the alliance of Basque use with the principles of ‘excellence’ seen as the outcome
of TQM (total quality management) techniques coming not from government sources but from quasi-leftist language ad-
vocates. These advocates sought ways to shift contexts of Spanish use to Basque use, not as a political move but as a productive
way to run one’s business and to encourage readers and advertisers – that is, to gain customers – particularly important as the
older politicized modes of identifying as Basque were fading away. The key to the language revival was to expand the contexts
within which the language could operate and to convince potential speakers that Basque could be part of working life. Thus,
the identity display venues that promised the most valuable ethnolinguistic recognition simultaneously linked speakers
‘here’ and ‘now’ back through thousands of years in place (speaking of rhizomes!) and into a ‘place’ of ‘excellence’ in the
current capitalist order.
The neoliberal valuing of language takes a different turn in the United States, where instances of valued language are less
readily apparent than in countries which give formal recognition to more than one language. This reflects the intransigence of
what Silverstein (1987) has called the American ‘monoglot standard’ and the pervasive U.S. perspective that English is the
only language that should have a legitimate ‘official’ place in the national sphere. Nevertheless, one informative venue in
which languages other than English are recognized as having value is found on the websites of multicultural marketing firms.
These firms advise companies how best to reach non-white, non-English-speaking customer bases. On these sites, languages
are referred to as named national standards. Although potential customers are more likely to experience language as the sort
of complex, non-standard varieties noted above in the discussion of enregisterment, the corporate perspective that values
language skills for purposes of product reference, customer persuasion, and organizational (including customer service)
problem-solving favors standard varieties. Two such firms, located through Google search, are Ethnoconnect and Améredia.
Both bring together language skills and diverse identity in a characteristically American concatenation.
Ethnoconnect describes itself as a firm that “provides seminars, training, consulting and coaching on how to sell more
products and services to the multicultural market in America.”1 It casts workplace diversity in practical business terms of
creativity, productivity and problem-solving, which, the company asserts, is the link between language skills and diverse
workers:
Language skills are obviously needed in today’s increasingly global economy–and diverse workers often have this
proficiency. If a company needs specific knowledge or language skills, it may hire foreign nationals for help. In some
markets, international job seekers have the advantage. For example, companies breaking into European, Asian or Latin
American markets will need foreign expertise. High-tech firms in particular are expanding into countries abroad. In the
United States, we like to believe that English is “the language of the world.” While that may be true for business, our
native tongue ranks second in the world behind Chinese and just slightly ahead of Hindustani. To truly build re-
lationships with the other people of the world, we must speak their language. It is a tremendous advantage of
workplace diversity if we enable people from other cultures [who] can help us understand not just their words, but also
the meaning behind what they are saying.2
That foreign expertise may be particularly desirable suggests some tension in the notion of ‘diversity.’ If foreign nationals
are preferable to U.S. born Latinos as Spanish speakers, it might be that the latter are regarded as having insufficiently
standard ‘skills’ whereas the former have expertise through being educated in a standard language. This also suggests some
fluidity in the notion of ‘diverse’ as to whether or not the term denotes U.S. versus foreign born.
The same concern with standard nationally-oriented language skills appears in the website for Améredia Integrated
Multicultural Marketing, a firm which provides
.online and print content translation, transcreation and localization in over 30 different languages including Spanish,
Mandarin, Cantonese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Korean, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese,
Thai, Indonesian and various South Asian languages. We use only native and certified translators for each language to
ensure accuracy and cultural sensitivity. Our services include copywriting, translation, proofreading, editing, type-
setting, layout and designing.3
The concern with appropriately credentialed problem-solving is evident in the reference to “native and certified trans-
lators” and in the text-oriented services which the firm offers. Note how cultural sensitivity (paralleled with accuracy) is seen
as a consequence of standard-language text-oriented skills. The productive outcome of these language skills is laid out in the
following news article (formerly on Améredia’s website), which describes its work for Comcast’s Internet Essentials program
(through which Comcast offers a low-cost broadband and related internet service package to low-income families):
“In partnership with Améredia, Comcast was able to extend the reach of its Internet Essentials program to more diverse
audiences by providing materials in 12 languages. Internet Essentials continues to gain momentum, and make a dif-
ference in our communities”, said Peter Intermaggio, SVP Marketing Communications at Comcast.

1
http://www.ethnoconnect.com/about-multicultural-awareness-through-ethnoconnect accessed May 26, 2016.
2
http://www.ethnoconnect.com/articles/9-business-advantages-of-diversity-in-the-work-place. Accessed May 26, 2016. The “who” inserted in brackets
seems to have been omitted from the original text.
3
http://ameredia.com/services/translation-localization.html accessed May 26, 2016.
 B. Urciuoli / Language & Communication 51 (2016) 30–39 35

The San Francisco-based agency has produced culturally appealing marketing materials for the program – each made to
resonate with 12 diverse ethnic groups through in-language, family focused, and child focused messaging. Through this
work, Internet Essentials now connects with the Arabic, Chinese, Haitian, Hmong, Korean, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese,
Russian, Somali, Tibetan, and Vietnamese cultures.4
Ethnoconnect and Améredia both make reference to languages, countries, and ‘cultures,’ all viewed as mutually
isomorphic, and interchangeably referred to as diversity or multiculturalism. As to the notion of language knowledge as hard
skill bringing return on investment, the construction of language on these two websites is coherent with that of the literature
reviewed earlier, with one difference. In that literature, there is a sense of locally anchored language, especially for Welsh,
Gaelic, and Basque, that is missing from the presentation of language by U.S. companies, where language appears to be a
manifestation of a more general category of diversity. Otherwise, the European, Canadian and U.S. instances all demonstrate a
capacity for language to be disconnected from its chronotopic origins and neoliberally objectified as a ‘skill’ that enhances
productivity and reaches new markets.

3. How is ‘diversity’ neoliberally objectified?

Ethnoconnect and Amérida talk about diversity in ways that illustrate how it operates as a referring expression in U.S.
corporate registers. To further explore this enregisterment, I present a few examples of diversity policy language from four
major companies, Starbucks, Kellogg, Hewlett-Packard, and ATT, chosen through an internet search for “corporate diversity
policy” in which I picked four companies randomly from the first page. All four assert that diversity is good for business.
Starbucks and Kellogg explicitly equate diversity with categories of marked persons, juxtaposed with lofty metaphors.
Hewlett Packard and ATT do not specify categories of diverse persons though Hewlett Packard does cite the U.S. Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission Guidelines for non-discrimination policy elsewhere on its website.

A selection from Starbucks’ site:

At the heart of our business, we seek to inspire and nurture the human spirit – understanding that each person brings a
distinct life experience to the table. Our partners are diverse not only in gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation,
religion and age, but also in cultural backgrounds, life experiences, thoughts and ideas.
Embracing diversity only enhances our work culture, it also drives our business success. It is the inclusion of these
diverse experiences and perspectives that create a culture of empowerment, one that fosters innovation, economic
growth and new ideas.5

Kellogg:
Diversity and inclusion are vital to building a winning culture where all employees can contribute their best work.
Workforce diversity is a journey. Throughout our 100-year-plus history, we have made significant strides toward the
more equitable inclusion of women, people of color, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender individuals, people with
disabilities, veterans and other demographic groups. Our goal is to reflect the diversity of our consumers throughout our
company. We have done much to achieve this objective, and we are firmly committed to making continued progress.6

Hewlett-Packard:
We believe a well managed, diverse work force expands HP’s base of knowledge, skills and cross-cultural under-
standing, which in turn, enables us to understand, relate and respond to our diverse and changing customers
throughout the world, connecting them to the power of technology. Our overall commitment is reflected in our di-
versity and inclusion philosophy.7

AT&T:
We know that diverse, talented and dedicated individuals are critical to our success, so we look for people from various
backgrounds and give them opportunities to grow. We have long been a leader in providing an inclusive work

4
http://www.hispanictrending.net/2013/12/multicultural-marketing.html accessed May 26, 2016.
5
http://www.starbucks.com/responsibility/community/diversity-and-inclusion accessed May 27, 2016.
6
http://www.kelloggcompany.com/en_US/our-approach.html accessed May 27, 2016.
7
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/diversity/nondisc.html accessed May 27, 2016.
36 B. Urciuoli / Language & Communication 51 (2016) 30–39

environment, offering performance-based rewards and creating a culture of excellence. Our senior leaders are
accountable for leading diversity initiatives as part of this philosophy.. all managers are taught a simple philosophy:
we serve our customers better when we build diversity into all we do . and that positively impacts our customers and
shareowners.8
Lined up and viewed one after another, these sets of policy statements illustrate the following general principles. Diversity
is an element of human capital, whether imagined as experience (Starbucks) or as skills, knowledge, and understanding (HP);
however imagined, it provides a contribution to a company’s bottom line. In part this is due to the correlation of a diverse
workforce with a diverse customer base (Kellogg, HP, AT&T). It is important to maintain an inclusive workplace, treating
employees with ‘understanding and respect,’ so that each unit of human capital can perform to its maximum. A diverse
workforce drives success (Starbucks) and contributes to a workplace culture (Starbucks, AT&T) of excellence (AT&T). Most
noticeably, diversity never operates by itself but always in tandem with or leading to the development of other corporate
values: a well-managed workforce (HP), technologies (HP), innovation and growth (Starbucks), performance-based rewards
(AT&T). These thematic variations are no accident.
The folk-metasemiotic template for the assignment of diversity value to human capital dates to the 1990s, when a
conscious shift was made in the human relations management literature to recast diversity specifically in terms of individual
rather than group properties. The argument was that a focus on a group or a ‘culture’ reinforced stereotypes and an ‘us versus
them’ mentality, and served as ‘code’ for Affirmative Action policies. Perhaps the most influential advocate of this approach
was (and remains) diversity consultant Marilyn Loden (1996) whose work on “implementing diversity” has provided a go-to
blueprint cited on websites within and outside the U.S. Loden designed her model to be specifically apolitical. I cite it because
it has become widely disseminated and highly routinized in the human relations literature. Loden proposes a model of di-
versity made up of primary and secondary dimensions of each individual’s social constitution, the most recent version listing
nine primary and eleven secondary dimensions. The primary dimensions (age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, income, spiritual
beliefs, class, gender, physical abilities and characteristics) are those which Loden finds “. particularly important in shaping
an individual’s values, self-image and identity, opportunities and perceptions of others. We think of these primary di-
mensions as the core of an individual diverse identity.” The secondary dimensions (first language, family status, work
experience, communication style, cognitive style, political beliefs, education, geographic location, organizational role and
level, military experience, work style) represent “essential dimension of an individual’s social identity.”9 Each of these
identity dimensions constitutes an element contributing to a whole worker. Note the parallel between language and
ethnicity/race in this model, as two among many diversity dimensions possessed by the worker.
This corporate-friendly model of diversity has come to saturate U.S. higher education, not surprisingly given the
considerable influence of corporate interests in the academic world (see, e.g. Tuchman, 2009) and particularly as universities
and colleges strategically deploy notions of diversity to advance their presence in the academic market, and with it, their
brand. Higher educational registers have become strikingly interdiscursive (Silverstein, 2005) with corporate registers in the
formally and pragmatically comparable ways in which diversity is talked and written about. Higher education discourses of
diversity arise from and reinforce corporate interests, however unevenly that message may be internalized among faculty. It
has been more readily internalized by academic administrators who routinely deploy ‘diversity’ discourses in ways that align
their interests with corporate values particularly as these are mediated by university and college boards of trustees. Hence the
widespread co-enregisterment of ‘diversity’ with ‘leadership,’ ‘skills’ and so on, an alignment supported by the term’s
referential indeterminacy (Urciuoli, 2003, 2009). Particularly in response to the higher education ranking system developed
by U.S. News and World Report in the early 1980s,10 college and university officers (influenced and sometimes funded by
boards of trustees) have increasingly invested in marketing their institutions. The college branding industry expanded rapidly
from the 1990s into the 2000s11 and a critical element in that branding has been the presentation of diversity. In fact, U.S.
News and World Report worked a diversity index into their ranking system, in part to address the growing perception that
academically desirable students preferred more diverse schools.12 By the mid 1990s, it was hard to miss the message that
diversity was no longer a straightforward matter of leveling the playing field for all students, but rather had become an
important element of a school’s image.13
The corporatized model of student diversity is particularly well exemplified by the recruitment practices and policies of
the Posse Foundation, founded in 1989. Students apply to college through the Posse Foundation after being nominated early
in their last year of high school on the basis of leadership and academic potential. Posse ‘partners’ with colleges and uni-
versities which provide students with tuition scholarships. Once accepted to college, Posse students from the same city are
organized into cohorts of ten and receive several months of soft-skill ‘leadership’ and ‘team’ training before each cohort goes

8
http://www.att.com/gen/corporate-citizenship?pid¼17725 accessed May 27, 2016.
9
All quotations from http://www.loden.com/Web_Stuff/Dimensions.html accessed May 27, 2016.
10
http://www.usnews.com/news/national/articles/2008/05/16/the-birth-of-college-rankings accessed May 27, 2016.
11
See for example http://www.stamats.com/ (accessed May 27, 2016), a major player and self-described “thought leader” in the education branding
industry.
12
http://www.usnews.com/education/articles/2008/08/21/methodology-campus-ethnic-diversity accessed May 27, 2016.
13
Ahmed (2012) notes in her critique of diversity work in British and Australian higher education that such institutions are more likely to deploy the term
diversity discursively to make themselves look good than to actually do good. The same is certainly true of U.S.
 B. Urciuoli / Language & Communication 51 (2016) 30–39 37

to college together. These student recruits are from public high schools and are characterized as likely to be ‘overlooked’ in the
usual college application processes. Not all but most are students of color. The ‘posse’ name originates in the idea that such
students will be much more successful if they go through college in a cohort or ‘posse.’ Posse’s rationale is that in return for
free tuition, students will serve as ‘change agents’ on their respective campuses. Its website describes its mission as follows:
The Posse model works for both students and college campuses and is rooted in the belief that a small, diverse group of
talented students – a Posse – carefully selected and trained, can serve as a catalyst for increased individual and
community development. As the United States becomes an increasingly multicultural society, Posse believes that the
leaders of this new century should reflect the country’s rich demographic mix and that the key to a promising future for
our nation rests on the ability of strong leaders from diverse backgrounds to develop consensus solutions to complex
social problems. One of the primary aims of the Posse program is to train these leaders of tomorrow.14
Readers should note the relation of diverse to such business-oriented qualities as talented and carefully selected and trained
making it possible to recast people of color as problem-solving strong leaders of tomorrow. This construction of diversity is
clearly designated a form of cultural capital but it only becomes so in relation to other forms of cultural capital and dissociated
from much of what students growing up in working class non-white neighborhoods are likely to have experienced.
Diversity associated with talent, training, and leadership is further validated by its capacity to generate countable out-
comes. Posse’s web pages contain little thumbnails of information: their high graduation rate, the percentage of their alumni
pursuing graduate degrees or awarded Fulbright scholarships, with the same information repeated at various points
throughout the website. Their 2012 Alumni Report intersperses demographic information on race/ethnicity and class, success
stories from their first cohorts, and results of an alumni survey. The introduction to the section on the survey sheds useful
light on how Posse casts information:
Today, Posse has a rapidly growing network of over 1500 alumni who are building a reputation as leaders in the
workforce and in their communities. After 23 years of recruiting and graduating dynamic young leaders, the research
arm of The Posse Foundation – The Posse Institute – conducted its first comprehensive survey of all Posse alumni, a
cohort of 1557 individuals . This report describes the survey’s findings, detailing Posse alumni’s collective perspec-
tives and profiles and celebrating their tremendous accomplishments.15
The intertwined use of numbers and stories to demonstrate outcomes has become routine on college and university
websites, so the interdiscursivity between those websites and Posse’s is considerable. There are also a couple of elements
specific to Posse. First, consistent with its stance as supplier of change agents to higher education and the business world, the
numbers attributed to its alumni’s accomplishments are taken as indices of social change. Second, Posse positions itself as
both economically neoliberal and politically liberal, which gives its rhetoric the interesting function of providing what might
be seen as rather progressive views with a corporate-friendly frame, as can be seen in the 2013 Posse Plus Retreat report.16
Students who enter college through Posse are continually channeled toward highlighting aspects of self that their in-
stitutions will best value. This has increasingly become the situation in which students of color find themselves generally, that
is, tapped to contribute to their institutional brands. Posse seems to have been designed with this function in mind. Diversity
in higher education is a numbers game, and much of the value provided to institutions by its ‘diverse’ students lies in those
students’ capacities to provide content for given categories of distinctive difference. This is readily seen on any U.S. elite
college or university website, where it has become central to college marketing. Faces appear selected to represent insti-
tutional diversity as a sort of mosaic of (mostly) identifiable types of looks: so many that ‘look’ white and that ‘look’ black and
Asian and Latino, and depending on the institution, so many that ‘look’ other ethnic ‘types.’ Representation of undergraduate
populations tend heavily toward pictures of attractive youths engaged in wholesome and productive activities, so that each
differs only in race/ethnic ‘look’ and gender, each a variation on a theme of ‘good’ students demonstrating their productive
place in the institution. Diversity thus becomes visually represented as a mosaic. This use of ethnic/race representations as
mosaic tiles highlights the fungibility of the representative units: any diverse student can replace any other diverse student in
this representation. These mosaic tiles often figure into revolving slide shows of web site imagery. Like so much of the visual
imagery that colleges and universities use on their websites (shots of landscapes or classrooms or events), what is actually
represented on these mosaic tiles remains unidentified, unconnected to particular times and places or particular students.
With that specificity masked, these pictures become evocative rather than informational. Students are institutionally iden-
tified in narratives and visuals that highlight particular contributions: doing good works, giving an artistic performance,
presenting an academic accomplishment. In this framework, any such presentation of ‘diverse’ students highlights their
association with productive activities that illustrate campus participation and ‘leadership’ roles.
What gets left out of this picture is what being in college can actually feel like for ‘diverse’ students. It can be isolating and
exhausting; hence Posse’s origin story (“I would have made it through if I had only had my posse with me”). Student
‘multicultural’ organizations provide racially marked students with a place to find each other as well as to ‘educate the public’
(raising the question why the socially marked should have to enlighten the socially unmarked). The chronotopic experience of

14
http://www.possefoundation.org/about-posse/our-history-mission accessed May 27, 2016.
15
https://www.possefoundation.org/m/alum-report-web.pdf (p.2) accessed May 27, 2016.
16
https://www.possefoundation.org/i/articles/WhatsYourWorth.pdf accessed May 27, 2016.
38 B. Urciuoli / Language & Communication 51 (2016) 30–39

marked students can be quite distinct from that of unmarked students, not surprisingly given how much student networks
are shaped by common social backgrounds. Such experience of racial markedness is particularly bounded, as noted by Dick
and Wirtz (2011:E7): the more marked one’s history of experience, the more it is shared with others similarly marked and the
more distant and differentiated it is from that of the unmarked. So much of the social life of racially marked students is
oriented toward shared safe spaces, which often means the Black, Latino and Asian organizations. Taking on leadership roles
in those organizations readily follows from those networks. Once in those roles, the amount of effort that goes into the
organizational work can take a heavy toll on one’s time and energy, as I was told in roughly three dozen student interviews at
my own small liberal arts college. Nor is this specific to my college. Nguyen (in Childs et al., 2008) provides a detailed account
of the effort necessary to sustain a student multicultural club at a major university, effort that got little recognition from
student activities personnel.
Students often talk about what they bring together in those places of safety as ‘their culture.’ As a referring expression,
culture, like diversity (and for that matter language), is pragmatically variable depending on its enregisterment. As used by
race/ethnically marked students, it signifies a connection to home and family recreated within institutional spaces through
food, music, language, and other ‘possessable’ things and practices, and sustained by linked experience. It is thus chro-
notopically anchored. In educationally-linked institutional usage, it can signify an ethnicized (race, ethnicity and/or na-
tionality presented in positive terms of striving and contribution) classification imagined as a possessable entity and
grammaticalized as either a mass or count noun as can be seen in the following examples found by searching various college
websites, my own included, as well as Posse’s: black culture, Cuban culture, Afro-Caribbean culture, Indian culture, Russian
culture, Latino culture, Asian cultures, diverse cultures, different cultures, Japanese culture, ethnic cultures, foreign cultures.
(College websites often also feature non-ethnic references such as student culture(s), hip-hop culture, pop culture.) As
ethnicized classifications, uses of ‘culture’ partially overlap with student usage but lack the chronotopic dimension indicated
by student use of possessive pronouns (‘my’ culture). Such usage is coherent with the mosaic of publicly constructed dif-
ference (described above) and with the idea that cultural diversity is an institutional good (Urciuoli, 2009). On the other hand,
higher education references do not (unlike multicultural marketing firms) treat culture as a skill, nor could I find such
treatment on the Posse website. I did find an occasional example suggesting ‘culture’ imagined in somewhat utilitarian terms:
“Posse Scholars are knocking down stereotypes, knocking down flawed expectations, and exposing people to different ways
of thinking, experiences and cultures.”17 While this does not directly equate language and culture to ‘skill’ as do the multi-
cultural marketing agency websites, it does suggest a link to some notion of ‘added value.’
For the most part, on college and university websites, skill is not associated with diversity. It is routinely treated as discrete,
countable and possessable, and is routinely grammaticalized as a count noun. Most often, references to ‘skills’ are found on
college career center websites as something that can be assessed and put on a resume. Beyond the career center, there is
abundant reference to interpersonal or writing or quantitative or communication or leadership skills, usually in association
with a non-curriculum-specific program (such as the writing center) in which people improve or develop their skills. Such
usage is also routinely found in relation to non-curricular forms of academic participation such as internships or experiential
learning, in which students are urged to participate. While such reference is not quite completely the same as career center
talk, they share a lot of mutual enregisterment, and career center talk in turn is pretty closely interdiscursive with corporate
registers. The same skills enregisterment is found on Posse’s website, on which people develop or improve or bring or grow
their skills (though the last two are rarer on college websites than on Posse’s). In other words, based on this admittedly slim
evidence, Posse’s website is situated, in terms of register development, between higher education websites and corporate
websites. Like higher education discourses, Posse’s website language unambiguously treats culture and diversity as good for
institutions but it goes a little farther in terms of how explicit it is about how such good can be used. But it does not go quite as
far as corporate discourses go.

4. Conclusion

In corporate and corporatized discourses about language and social identity, framing them in terms of neoliberal agency is
what makes them recognizable as ‘value added’ forms of human capital which workers (or students as future workers) can
possess. In that sense, they become objectified in parallel ways. The parallel is not complete, as language appears more
amenable to being recast as a skill in and of itself, whereas in order for diversity to become recognizable as skill-like, it re-
quires affiliation with soft skills like leadership, teamwork, or problem-solving, or a hard skill like knowledge of a stan-
dardized language other than English. Either way, language or social identity must first be sufficiently disconnected from the
lived experience of markedness. Actually having grown up with, say, the inequalities of race has little value in itself, nor is that
experience coherent with the fixed, commensurable diversity and linguistic classifications found in educational and corporate
discourse. Unless that experience can be framed, as in website narratives, in some promotionally useful way, it does not ‘add
value.’ Then again, as Loden’s diversity model makes clear, the point of ‘implementing diversity’ is to disconnect it from
context and reframe it a constitutive element of individuals as human capital. If one pays attention to the dynamic de-
mographic complexity that actually exists, one knows that never-settled categories of difference are continuously produced. If
one imagines difference as categories of human capital to enhance corporate gain, one becomes invested in designing

17
https://www.possefoundation.org/news/detail/ropes-gray-partner-champions-power-of-opportunity accessed May 28, 2016.
 B. Urciuoli / Language & Communication 51 (2016) 30–39 39

categories that are clearly distinguished from and entirely comparable to one another, forming templates by which any one
employee or student can be compared to any other. Each of those constituting elements must have some identifiable utility
and also must be measurable or assessable in some way.
When language and identity provide means to corporate ends, markedness ceases to exist in ways that can be meaningful
to those so marked because the conditions producing markedness are ignored. The enduring reality is that marked social
identity or marked linguistic capacity cannot by itself constitute value. They can be valued among employees to the extent
that they can be linked to other productive business practices, such as matching employees to customer demographics. Posse
gives thousands of students a chance to graduate from college, but only by linking diversity to valued typifications of human
capital like leadership and changemaker. Once-devalued languages become revalued as the means to reach new markets.
Neither exactly counts as acceptance of markedness in and of itself.

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