Using the same words but speaking different languages: Listening practices as social differentiation

Presentation by Janet Connor (Leiden University). She holds a PhD in Anthropology and Linguistics from the University of Chicago and will present her research into listening practices to the circle.

Abstract

In the past ten years, organizations supporting social entrepreneurship have proliferated across Oslo, Norway. These groups, which promote projects addressing social issues through business-based strategies, use a common entrepreneurial register, with words like “impact” and “incubator,” and frequent code-switching between Norwegian and English. While many people in Oslo hear all these organizations as the same, my interlocutors at one such organization, which I call Inspire, claimed there were important differences in this field, from organizations that were more profit-driven, to those that were more concerned with challenging traditional social hierarchies. While they agreed social entrepreneurs across the city were using the same words, they insisted, as one interlocutor succinctly put it “we’re not speaking the same language at all.”

This paper asks how Inspire staff listened to other organizations in a way that allowed them to hear differences that most people could not. I argue that adopting specific listening practices was key to how Inspire staff differentiated themselves from seemingly similar organizations. These practices included two components. First, they were looking out for and taking up signs beyond the denotational content that indexed the speaker’s relationship to their proposed social business. Second, their listening practices extended beyond the moment of aural reception as they listened for what I call listening chains, or who the speaker was listening to.