Communicating change in a transforming state: Globalization and the politics of office communication in urban Russia

This dissertation describes how business leaders and educators have attempted to transform Russian office communication skills after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Drawing upon multi-sited ethnographic research in offices and educational institutions in St. Petersburg, Russia, it argues that the ability to communicate at the office is not a neutral "skill" that can be objectively trained and assessed, but instead represents an arena of intense ideological work shaped as much by transnational processes as by historically and culturally situated practice. In particular, the analysis highlights the impact of transnationally circulating liberal ideologies of egalitarian communication that have been widely heralded as signs of the new neoliberal work order and examines how these were mobilized, contested, transformed, and invested with different types of significance in different historical and institutional contexts. Attention is also given to a contrasting discourse on "image" that promoted new types of market-based self-presentation that required astute attention to signs of inequality based upon status, gender, and positioning in the global economy.;The dissertation examines debates over communication in the St. Petersburg private sector as an entry point for considering questions of language and globalization. It shows how processes of neoliberal globalization are intertwined not only with the production of discrete individuals, but also involve shifts in understandings of the communicative relationships between people. At the same time, it also works to counter totalizing accounts of neoliberal globalization by examining how processes of global circulation can be mediated by overlapping and sometimes contradictory language ideologies. Finally, it provides an understanding of how debates over communication reflect people's senses of themselves as participants in a larger global market economy. In crafting new modes of communication appropriate for a market environment, St. Petersburg business people and educators were also commenting upon the ongoing transformations in Russian society and considering what it meant to be a post-Soviet office worker, and a Russian more generally, in a sometimes "wild" market economy embroiled in a larger capitalist system of global economic connections. They were engaged in a larger project of civilizing the market and making it morally safe for everyday business practice.