Policy, policing and the ecology of social norms: ethnographic monitoring revisited

• Autores: Jan Blommaert
• Localización: International journal of the sociology of language, ISSN 0165-2516, Nº. 219, 2013 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Ethnography of Language Policy: Theory, Method and Practice), págs. 123-140
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The book under review here represents an attempt towards paradigmatic change in the study of language policy. The attempt – characterized by the editor in terms of Hymes' “ethnographic monitoring” – consists of a series of shifts in objects, assumptions and methodologies. Policy research consists of work on a variety of distributed objects, organized along different scales and operating on a variety of levels and in a variety of modes. This review article organizes these shifts along three axes: (a) understanding language policies as ideological complexes; (b) incorporating history and globalization as crucial “contexts”, enabling a different kind of generalization about dynamic systems; and (c) the introduction of vertical processes of stratification and layering alongside horizontal processes of distribution and presence. Taken together, these shifts offer a new program for ethnographic monitoring.