Accent modification and workplace accentism: the institutionalization of linguistic profiling and its career implications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This paper argues that accent modification acts as a mechanism that (re)produces workplace accentism, which is a set of ideologies and practices positioning some English accents as inherently superior/inferior to others in the context of work and careers. Design/methodology/approach This conceptual paper draws on existing literature mainly from critical sociolinguistic and labor studies to support its central argument. Findings Through acting as a skill, a technology and a commodified service, accent modification naturalizes linguistic hierarchies, which are racist, classist and colonial constructions, and reinforces the structural status quo in different contexts. Practical implications In order to move away from accent modification as a means to enhance oral communication at work, organizational attempts at fostering mutual intelligibility and undoing the role of accent in workplace communication are necessary. Originality/value Contrary to research that presents accentism as a purely interpersonal issue, the paper explores how accentism is institutionalized and is connected to linguistic profiling.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".