Institutions and linguistic penalties

This paper argues that job interviews are key site in the production of linguistic and social inequality. They present a linguistic penalty which is rendered invisible by the processes and rhetoric of institutional selection. Applicants from overseas, including migrants and international medical graduates, fare much less well than both white British and black and minority ethnic British. This linguistic penalty is produced by the competency-based framework of these interviews and the hybrid discourses entailed in them. Candidates from overseas struggle to 'read' and produce these hybrid discourses. While the examples below show that these candidates are fluent English speakers, the indirectness inscribed in the job interview penalises them, despite them being highly qualified, or indeed, over-qualified, for the posts on offer. When differences in ethnicity, religion or language come to be seen as markers of low social status and attract various downward prejudices, social divisions and discrimination may increase Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level (2010: 185) 1. Introduction This paper is about the role of language in contributing to inequality in institutional settings. It looks at an area of life that has been somewhat neglected by socio and applied linguistics: the workplace. I shall argue that there is a linguistic penalty in the labour market that particularly affects migrant and mobile workers and job-seekers. This penalty is at its harshest and most visible in the job interview and associated selection processes. While different countries in the western world, and in the global labour markets influenced by western ideologies, have somewhat differing selection processes, in the English speaking world, the job interview reigns supreme. Outside of the informal economy, 90% of organisations use telephone and face to face interviews to select acceptable people for the post(s) on offer. And while occupational psychologists and human resource managers invest considerable money and time in designing and carrying out these interviews, the fact that such encounters are made of talk is never routinely addressed. So language and its power to produce inequality remains hidden except when candidates are from linguistic minorities when language is used as an explanation for failure.