Linguistic Diversity as a Bureaucratic Challenge

Welcome to the new Books Network. Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the new Books Network. My name is Ingrid Pillar and I'm Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. My guest today is Dr. Clara Holtzinger. Clara is a postdoctoral researcher in sociology at the University of Vienna in Austria. Her research focus is on migration and social inequality and today we are going to chat about Clara's PhD thesis from 2023, which examined how Austrian employment officers deal with their clients linguistic diversity. Welcome to the show Clara. Thank you for the invitation. I'm very excited to be here. Fantastic. I'm Clara. Can you start us off by telling us about linguistic diversity in Austria? I mean, our listeners will know that Vienna is the capital of German-speaking Austria, but might not necessarily know what other languages are used there and where migrants to Austria come from. Yeah, sure. Yeah, so Austria is officially a monolingual country, I say officially. In some regions where it's actually officially multi-lingual. So I mean, Austria is bordered by nine countries in total and in those nine countries, different languages are spoken. So in the border regions with Hungary, with Slovenia, we have also in some areas, Hungarian and Slovenian as official languages. In Bergenland, which is province on the east of Austria, also Croatia is in some villages and official language. And in all Austria, also of course, the sign language is official minority language. However, overall in public institutions, et cetera, Germany is their predominant language, but the population is very multi-lingual. So we have, I mean, in Australia, it's, I think, even a higher percentage of people who are born in other countries that live now in this country, but in Austria, also. Almost half the population is born overseas or has parents, at least one pair of born overseas here. Yeah. In Austria, the percentage is not that high, but still we have a high percentage of people either having another citizenship or who are born outside of Austria and they speak many different languages. So traditionally, we had a lot of migration from Turkey and Yugoslavia, but also from the neighboring country and in the last 20 years, it became even more diverse, the migrant population or actually the Austrian population, I would rather say because, yeah, I would say people who live here and who are born, they do not have the citizenship and will consider them as Austrians, but, yeah, that's not the question. If they're considered by others as, yeah, so that's always a big question, right? Who is it? Yeah. Exactly, exactly. And I think it's, yeah, sometimes difficult to talk about the numbers, like who is now, we haven't German this term migrant background, and of you really use it in English in the literature, I never find it like this, and I think it's a problematic term because it kind of implies that you never can get rid of this foreigner status, so to say, and in the end, I think it doesn't mean anything because you're discriminated maybe as a migrant from certain countries, but not from others. So having a migrant background, per se, doesn't say much even about your own experiences in the country, but it doesn't also help really policy makers. Yeah, correct. And I think I mean, at least in Germany, I know that the statistics are really confusing because on the one hand, you have like this term, people with a migrant background, but that could be someone who's like a first generation migrant or someone whose parents migrated or even someone who's grandparents migrated, and so in the end, I think particularly with regard to language, it doesn't really tell you anything much, right? Yeah, I think so the same. And for a long time, we had the biggest new migrant group in Austria was from Germany, so I mean, this didn't tell you anything at all about the language differences or language diversity. So also for my research, it was always very hard to like really get actual numbers of when I looked at how the Austrian public employment service deals with multilingualism, it wasn't that easy to know how many people actually were concerned by this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and would Germans be typically considered as someone with a migrant background? No. No, right. I mean, statistically, yes, but when you talk with people, normally nobody would really say that, yeah, there are people with a migrant background in, how do you say like an inverted commas? But that doesn't mean that there is no hostility towards Germans, there also isn't, it's another topic, but it's not a typical, I say typical again, and what do you say, inverted commas? In quotation marks. Equate quotation marks, exactly, that's where it was looking for. Yeah, so Austria is a defector multilingual country, but it doesn't perceive itself at least officially as a multilingual country, and what are you? Right. And it creates problems. Yeah, and so your research looked at those problems specifically in the employment office, and so maybe just as a bit more background, could you tell us about how the Austrian welfare state is organized and why and how migrants might come in contact with employment officers? Yes, sure. So in the welfare state literature, Austria is characterized as a conservative welfare state typically. We have security-based welfare service in some areas, as in, for example, the unemployment case, so this means when you work in Austria, you pay compulsory a part of your salary to the employment insurance or unemployment insurance, and when you're an unemployed, you receive unemployment benefits for a certain amount of time. And so many people who work in Austria, they not necessarily speak German on a very high level, but it doesn't mean that they cannot work. The labour market actually is multilingual, but when they then are unemployed and go to the employment service to ask for the benefits, they might encounter problems. And they observed this in a research project that I was involved in as a pre-drug researcher many years ago, actually. We looked at you, migrants, and how they access their social rights, they're eventually even trans-nationally portable social rights, but also social rights that they had acquired the right to receive in a specific country. And what we found, it was an international study, it was, there were researches located in Germany, in the UK, in Sweden, and in Austria, and we looked in all those four countries at how migrants from so-called new member states, namely Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary, and Poland could access their social rights there. And in Austria it was particularly obvious that language barriers played a big role, namely at the Austrian unemployment service. We also looked at different institutions, we looked at the pension system, the healthcare system, and child benefits or family benefits, but especially in the sector of unemployment, we found that there were many language-related barriers. And this was what interested me and this is how I started looking more into this specific institution. So essentially you're telling us that migrants have all kinds of legal entitlement to unemployment benefits or employment services, but that language barriers may in reality kind of prevent them from accessing those exactly those legal entitlements. And so, May, can you tell us how these language barriers to migrants, legal entitlements, how they actually play out in the bureaucracy? Yes, sure. So I only looked at migrants who are legally entitled to work in Austria, and as soon as you work in Austria, then you're also insured social, like you received. socially insurance benefits if you need them. So I only looked at this specific group. I did not look at people who had no entitlement to work for example. And this is why also we looked mainly at EU migrants because legally they shouldn't be a problem for them to access their social rights. But as I said Austria is a multilingual country that perceives itself rather as a multilingual country and especially in the employment service we found again and again in the interviews that we conducted with advisors in these institutions but also with migrants who tried to access their benefits we found again this yeah perception as a multilingual institutions. They were told us several times well if you need something from us you need to speak German. Many of the advises that we interviewed they found this also problematic they said they wouldn't like actually to be able to help more people who do not speak a German at a very high level but they did not have the resources to do so. So I in like in my analysis I differentiated on the one hand between I called the manifest barriers and symbolic barriers. So on the one hand if nobody speaks we do in any other language in German I would argue that simply manifest barrier because you cannot necessarily understand what the person tells you if you do not speak German at a high level also then we call it like the internal multilingualism comes in because we have many dialects in Austria and people might speak with a strong dialect and if you learn to German in a German course in Vienna for example you might not understand somebody from the more Western provinces but so yeah manifest barriers would be instances where people simply could not either understand what they were told or could not make themselves understood as well they were not able to communicate or get the messages across. On the other hand there are also symbolic barriers that means what we found was that very often people could maybe even speak another language with a person but would refuse to do so because they considered German language skills as a prerequisite to access social benefits. This is not legally a prerequisite. The legal prerequisite would be that you paid your insurance contributions and are willing to work etc then you should receive these benefits. So what we found very problematic in regard to the manifest barriers were a lack of written information in general in German or in any other languages. If German written information was available online or in handouts it would very often be in a very sophisticated language so a very legal language that was hard to understand also for us as native German speakers. It's really like when you receive a letter from the employment service what exactly do you want from it. Many of our interview partners, migrants who want to explain that they showed us different letters or written documents that they had received and it was really hard to understand them for us. On the symbolic level what we found also was that very often people did not feel that they had the right to speak in the places in the offices because they felt like no if I cannot speak German then I should rather be quiet. And this is also a very hindering and problematic aspect of these symbolic barriers. It's something that French sociologist Pierre Baudier described. He talked mostly about dialects or social acts and less about different named languages but he also described this way how by speaking you negotiate power structures, societal power structures. And that somebody who feels he does not speak their legitimate language feels somehow that he's not entitled to speak and rather is quiet then just stand up for his rights. Yeah I mean I think that comes out so well in your research but the interplay between those manifests and those symbolic language barriers and you've just explained this from the perspective of migrants themselves but the other thing that I really appreciated in your work was actually that you a key focus is actually on the officers themselves and on the bureaucrats and one thing that really struck me actually was how how stressful they found linguistic diversity and how that was really a source of frustration and kind of created an extra burden on their work and so I was wondering whether you could talk as through how linguistic diversity really becomes this extra workload for employment officers. Yeah so what I think is important to make clear here is that it's not that the migrants that we interviewed did not receive necessarily benefits they could receive eventually benefits and partly this is also due to the officers really often try also their best I mean people are different people are different everywhere and in every institution in every country but the people that we spoke with they were the majority was very motivated to help people with different linguistic repertoires they were in front of them but if you as an individual try to solve a structure problem that's not always easy and as you said yeah it creates a lot of stress for the individuals and I think this is the overall conclusion that we also came to in our research I always say we because this was embedded in a bigger research project so me and my colleagues what we found was that the organizational structures are problematic because the organization totally ignores the facts that it acts within a multilingual population this has to do I think with Austria not understanding itself as a migration country it actually officially rejecting these statues and saying no no we are yeah we are homogenous monolingual country and so if you work as we call them street level progress the individuals that interact order the intersection of the state and the public so if you are a street level regret in a monolingual conceptualized organization this means that you have in the concrete situation when you're in front of somebody who does not necessarily speak German or not speak German that well in order to be able to understand the legal documents that you give him and you have to do something you have to kind of communicate and we found all kinds of different strategies that they employed one strategy that we saw was but institution there was actually there was actually the official way that they should communicate with people who would not speak German was to give them a piece of paper and this is a piece of paper that we also collected in our research from several offers as they gave it to us it's a piece of paper and in over 15 languages is written the statement you do not speak German well enough please come again with somebody who can interpret for you but we cannot cover the costs this is my way of paraphrasing this but it's the basic message that comes across but most advice is told as well I have this piece of paper I could hand that out to somebody but normally I don't do it normally I try to communicate with this person but this is not always that easy so what did it was either to try to speak in a very simple German never comprehensible German some emphasize that they would try to to create an atmosphere where the person felt safe in order to speak German also if they did not necessarily speak that well German and this is something that I personally can relate to very well because I worked as a language teacher for a very long time and I know that to create this atmosphere where it's a safe space and you feel like you can make mistakes and that's not that but you learned from a sticks etc. That's something very important. So I think this strategy was very wise from many advisors to do so. Some also used other languages that they would know. So maybe they had even first language other than German that they could use in the situations or they could use English or another rich language, a lingua franca like English or French in some cases. Or they would use drawings that they made in the consulting situation. They would use their hands, they would use their feet basically, whatever they had at their disposal to try to communicate with the migrants. And sometimes they would also rely on lay interpreters asking colleagues to help them. Or in one case, and I think, I mean, this is not in regard to data protection, et cetera, not the best strategy, but you could see that the person really wanted to help. Somehow they would rely on other clients who were in the waiting room, like opening the door of the office. Say like, does somebody speak Romanian here and if somebody like held up their hand, they wouldn't just ask, come and help me here. But I mean, what this also shows you is that it is really stressful as an individual to act in an organizational structure where multilingualism is largely ignored. I would say largely because for some groups, it would, there were some help provided, there were some help provided. As with, for example, Refugees in the first year that they were Refugees that Austin Unemployment Service, they could go to a specific office where they had advisors who were multilingual, and especially recruited, according to the language proficiency in, for example, Arabic or not Ukrainian at the time, I think, was Russian at the time also, et cetera. So, in some cases, there were attempts from the organization to cater to a multilingual population. But overall, the tendency was towards organizational monolingualism. You already spoke about, like, different specific linguistic strategies. And one of them, you mentioned, was that some of the officers or those street-level bureaucrats actually have another language background themselves. But I think in your writings and your work, you also show that these officers actually face an extra burden, if you will, or an extra challenge. And maybe you could tell us a bit about what their specific challenges were in their specific decisions about speaking German or speaking the heritage language, speaking the other languages or not. Yes, yeah, that's a very important point. So, some of our interviews, they were multilingual due to their family history, so they would speak, for example, Serbian, because their parents had migrated from Serbia to Austria, they grew up in Austria, but they could still speak Serbian. And they found themselves in a prevalent position. On the one hand, they could help some clients better, because they could rely on the first language. On the other hand, they faced this constant mistrust from the organization, especially. But there are also differences. We researched different officers, and we found regional officers. We found that in these different regional offices, this question was dealt with differently. But sometimes they faced mistrust from their supervisors, their superiors, or their colleagues, that if they would speak in a language added in German, they would so to say illegally help their clients, in the sense that they would tell them maybe tricks or some ways to trick the system somehow, so that they would. How can you say that? They they would. Yeah, there's always a spellfish, right? That there's always this suspicion that if you speak another language, then the dominant language, it's like, yeah, you might be plotting against. Exactly, you might be plotting, and that your cultural, national loyalty prevails in that situation. So that you rather help your, again, in quotation marks, your co-national, than actually doing what you should do as a good state officer, so to say. And there's always this suspicion against just the other, right? So as someone speaks another language, they become the other, and they are no longer loyal to their professional ethos or whatever. Yeah, and that's, I think, a really, a really, really important element of this whole issue. It's suspicion. And this is something very particularly, I think, in this context, though, if you look at state institutions because somehow their loyalty towards the state is expected from you, especially if you work there, but also if you come there as somebody asking for benefits that you're entitled to. But still, it's, yeah, it's a very ambivalent situation that we felt that many of our interviews are found themselves in this case. Yeah, and you also explain that overall, there is a bit of an ambivalence in the service because on the one hand, the employment service is there to support people who are unemployed and, you know, who have fallen on hardship, can't work or whatever. And on the other hand, the system is also designed to control those people and to ensure that, you know, that it's an element of control. So the tension between support and control also creates communication barriers. Exactly. Creates communication barriers and, yeah, linguistic diversity there comes in as an additional factor that knowledge is not really seen in the literature. I have to impression. So there is a lot of literature on this ambiguous role of welfare state agents or street-level bureaucrats. But there is hardly any literature that looks at role of linguistic diversity. And we found that it influenced, yeah, both in a way that it created more barriers, but it also shifted somehow sometimes power imbalances. So it also allowed recipients of benefits or people who applied for benefits. It gave them sometimes also more power because they could use their language proficiency strategically. And the same for the street-level bureaucrats. They could create maybe even more trust, which is also important in this specific relation between street-level bureaucrats and clients by speaking other languages or by showing that they were, they did try at least to speak another language. So language comes in in so many different, on so many different levels and in so many different ways that, yeah, I think we need a lot more research on that. Yeah, absolutely. One other aspect that I found really fascinating in your work relates to the choice of English, because of course everyone thinks English is the world's lingua franca, everyone speaks English now. So that's a good way to overcome language barriers. But you show quite nicely that it's not that simple and maybe you can tell us a bit more how English was used or not used and how it sometimes shifted power imbalances as you've just said. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's, for example, one way that sometimes clients would speak better English than the advisors. And they could use this advantage somehow in the situation or use, I mean, use that sounds so bad as if you would try to trick this system. That's not all I'm saying here, but in a way that it is always a power imbalance if a state official is in front of somebody who applies for benefits or who is in an advising situation here. And this power balance can be a bit equalized to a certain extent by an imbalance in the language proficiency. And again, here I think what you have so very well to understand this situation because then if English is accepted as the lingua franca in this situation, then it's so to say the legitimate language. And then a speaker who does not feel he's so proficient in that language as some advises where they might, so to say, lose a bit of power in that situation. And this is also why some of the advises they said it directly to us explicitly. They said like, no, I don't speak English because I don't feel I speak English well enough. And I feel stupid if I speak English, for example. And I feel stupid if then the client speaks better English than me. But some, I mean most of them would speak English in a situation. I think it was also an H. each aspect here. So the old advice is the less security would feel in English. But I think it was really fascinating to see that because that would maybe be the first conclusion for many who said, "Well, let's just speak English in this situation, but it's not that easy." In some cases, also the clients would not speak well English, of course. Yeah, absolutely. It's not a solution for everything, and it has new elements to it. So in a sense, you paint a picture of lots of individual efforts. I mean, there are lots of people, as you've said, who really try their best to overcome those barriers, but at the same time, on the institutional level, there really is this lack of policy and lack of vision. So I guess my big question would be, really, what do you see as a way forward for the institution or generally to overcome language barriers and to kind of ensure greater levels of linguistic inclusion? Yeah, I think on a one level, it's important to look more at this street level. So more the direct interactions that take place in the organization. And as many organizations, the Austrian Public Employment Service is hierarchical, organized. And the interviews we did more, so to say, on the top of the organizations, there was just less awareness of the problems that exist in the concrete communication situations, so to say. So to listen more to the street level progress, I think would be one very important aspect, one very important possibility also to solve problems. But at the same time, I think it's also important to create more awareness for linguistic discrimination and what linguistic discrimination can be, and there I think it's important to look at both the manifest barriers, but also the symbolic barriers, because if the street level progress would be trained more in this regard, they could also make their part in leveling the barriers, so to say, in tearing down the barriers that are there. Yeah, so I think most important to ask the street level progress, how do you perceive the clients, how do you perceive the situation, and then take this into account when you organize the whole organizational policy of dealing with multilingualism, and that's then maybe not a part also, to have a coherent policy in this regard, because what we found was so stressful for many individuals was that they had heard on the one hand in the courses that they had made in order to become advisers that they should speak only German, but then they had heard from their direct super superior nor they could also speak in other languages, so they were very often confused because they had different instructions, and sometimes they had no instructions at all and had to like deal with the situation just themselves. So I think a more coherent institutional policy is also something that can help. Yeah, absolutely, and it also seems like there is a fair number of like, you know, diversity policies or equity and inclusion policies except they don't pay attention to language in any meaningful way, right? Yeah, there was always so hard to, yeah, also for me to find literature on organizations and linguistic diversity, and I mean, your research is very important in this regard, but there's not so much especially in sociology and in migration studies in China, but also in organization studies. Yeah, and that's why I think your work is so important because you really take this kind of ethnographic street level approach, and as you say, we need to listen to the people who actually, you know, deal with linguistic diversity day in day out. Yeah, and I think many of the strategies that we've found, they could be multiplied, so to say, they could be made public and then also, yeah, taught to others. Yeah, but I think there were a lot of good practices in various cultural pockets, right? Exactly. At the same time, I'm very cautious not to say like, well, they can just feel by themselves, and we just tell them the best practice examples. I think what needs to be realized by the part of the organization, but not only by the part of the organizations, I mean, they get the budget also from the state in hand. So now, I love that linguistic diversity is an important factor, and that you need also to put resources there, financial resources. You need to account for problems that may arise in a situation, and you cannot always ask individuals to solve it, but you need to give them also the means and the resources in order to deal with this challenges that do not have to be, I mean, language barriers are constructed. They are not there. They're not out there. They do not simply exist there, because in the concrete situations, individuals do not have the means to communicate with each other. Yeah. So I think, I mean, I think that's a great takeaway message. So maybe before we go, can I just ask you what's next with your research, what are you working on now? Yeah. So I'm actually now working, I mean, I did not start yet, but I'm planning a research project where I look at institutions that try to cater to a multilingual population, so that really try to not create language barriers in their interaction in order to, yeah, to also show in a way that it's possible organizations to communicate with in a multilingual context, so to say in a linguistically diverse context, where there's not just one or two or three languages involved, but more languages. Yeah. So in this case, I will look at non-government organizations, mainly that, yeah. Well, that's fantastic. Yeah. We need those positive examples and positive case studies. Yeah. Thanks again, Clara, and feeling down for it. Thanks for listening, everyone. 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