Papers by William Simpson
A World without Capitalism Is Common Sense
Rethinking Marxism, 2025
This essay responds to Christian Chun’s recent book A World without Capitalism? and its attempt t... more This essay responds to Christian Chun’s recent book A World without Capitalism? and its attempt to break through the impasse of being “stuck” in a world in which there is seemingly no alternative to capitalism. It responds to Chun’s framing of such an impasse in terms of resistance to capitalism rather than to neoliberalism and to his discussion of the interanimation of class and class interests. Building upon Chun’s contribution, the essay highlights the need for a disentangling of the notions of a capitalist class, elites, and/or the establishment for understanding the operation of and resistance to global capitalism. Furthermore, this essay asks how the emergence of a new cloudalist class, which operates within what some have termed tech-feudalism, affects the kinds of questions Chun raises in his book.
Routledge, 2023
Capital, Commodity, and English Language Teaching illustrates how the drive for profit in commerc... more Capital, Commodity, and English Language Teaching illustrates how the drive for profit in commercial ELT affects the manner in which language is taught. The book looks at education as a form of production, and asks how lessons are produced, and how the production of profit in addition to the production of the lesson affects the operation of educational institutions and their stakeholders.
Simpson delivers a theoretically rigorous conception of capital and builds from this an investigation into how the circulation of capital for profit interrelates with the teaching of language. Simpson discusses ELT at both a global level, in discussion of the ELT industry in the UK, the US, Ireland, Canada, Japan, Spain, and transnationally online, as well as at a more local level, where finer detailed descriptions of the work-lives of those within the Japanese eikaiwa ELT industry are given. Drawing on a synthesis of Marxist and Bourdieusian theory, the book outlines a dialectical approach to understanding capital, and to understanding how the drive for profit and language education interrelate with one another. Simpson concludes by showing how such an approach might open up areas for further research in a number of contexts across the globe, as well as in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Providing a model for addressing global issues of ELT, this book is of interest to advanced students, scholars and professionals within applied linguistics, TESOL, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology, language economics and related areas.
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2024
What kind of people are language teachers? In this article we address this question by examining ... more What kind of people are language teachers? In this article we address this question by examining commercial forms of language teaching in which personality functions in the evaluation of particular teachers as "good" or "suitable" for particular learners. We relate commercial forms of the online teaching of English to global political economic changes in which affective labour in service work, and the feminization of labour, have involved new gendered relations between the global North and South in recent decades. We focus on the emergence of particular forms of commercial online English teaching that bring Filipina teacher labour into relation with Japanese learners as customers. We relate the affective nature of the labour Filipina teachers are expected to perform, in terms of being teachers who are kind, cheerful, always smiling, and able to produce a feeling of ease or relaxation in their learner-customers, to the feminization of labour in service industries more broadly. We present the feminized affective labour of Filipina teachers of English, as an illustration of the partiality and situatedness of discourses of personality in online platforms and customer reviews. Here, personality becomes salient for teachers within particular gendered and racialised relations, where personality serves a substitutionary role in compensating for professional skill, knowledge or nativeness. As such, discourses of personality draw on patriarchal notions of women as "naturally caring" or "working out of love" which permeate low paid and precarious forms of language teaching. We conclude by discussing future directions and issues for work which examines the object of teachers' care or lovecaring or loving for who or what?
Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2020
In building upon sociolinguistic work which highlights the continuities and contradictions of cap... more In building upon sociolinguistic work which highlights the continuities and contradictions of capitalism, this article proposes an understanding of Taylorised and flexible forms of production as a dialectical and contradictory unity, which can push and pull those within production in contradictory directions. As a means to illustrate what a dialectical approach to contradiction might offer sociolinguistics, the article discusses empirical work from corporate eikaiwa English language teaching, a form of commercial language teaching within Japan, where both Taylorised and flexible forms of producing the English language lesson exist in considerable tension. The article proposes a dialectical approach as a means of shedding light not only on how such contradictory regimes of production interrelate and play out in language work such as language teaching but also on how forms of subjectivity are produced among language workers , such as teachers, who are tasked with managing contradictory demands made of them in the workplace.
Language and Intercultural Communication, 2018
The neoliberal era is often surmised as the extension of the free market,
increasing privatisatio... more The neoliberal era is often surmised as the extension of the free market,
increasing privatisation, and the commodification of everything. A large
body of work has shed much light on the way in which during the
neoliberal period, a discursive shift has taken place whereby language is
increasingly seen in instrumental terms of profit rather than in ethno/
national pride. Though such work engages with language as a
commodity within discourse, the view that language and languages
themselves are literally commodities remains problematic. It is argued in
this article that in the case of private commercial language schools
known as eikaiwa in Japan, what is produced and consequently on sale,
is not language itself, but rather the lesson. What this article offers, is an
example of how commodity fetishism plays out in relation to language
education, and how the commodity comes to be divorced from its
production and its producers, in the recontextualization of the lesson in
advertising. In contrast to previous work on eikaiwa advertising which
focusses on depictions of exotic and eroticised white native Englishspeaking
Others, the analysis here finds that representations of teachers,
is largely absent. The article argues that this erasure of labour (teachers), and the foregrounding of the student in advertising, illustrate a form of commodity fetishism particular to the neoliberal period, where the student as neoliberal homo-oeconomicus – producer of her own desire -comes to the fore.
Language Sciences, 2018
Over the past 10 years, an emerging body of research in applied linguistics and linguistic anthro... more Over the past 10 years, an emerging body of research in applied linguistics and linguistic anthropology has made the argument that recent global political-economic developments have led to the commodification of language. In focusing on how language is seen as a tradeable commodity, the process of commodification is portrayed as a principally discursive event, where value and commodity status are attributed to languages. However, the notion of both value and of commodities themselves as discursive matters stands in contrast to Marxist and classical political economy where commodities have value only insofar as they are congealed embodiments of human labour, expended in production processes where labour stands in relation to capital. In juxtaposing the 'language com-modity' with the commodity of Marxist political economy, and in drawing on Marx's notion of commodity fetishism, we argue that though language may appear to be a commodity , it is not one, as language itself is not a product of labour. We conclude by discussing what a closer engagement with the more material concerns of production offer political economy approaches to language in addressing an 'ideal' and 'material' episte-mological divide (Gal
Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2017
The English language is seen by the Chinese as a tool of significant pragmatic value, both by the... more The English language is seen by the Chinese as a tool of significant pragmatic value, both by the individual and the state. Discourse on English language education within China has, both historically and at present, pitted the pragmatic value of English against concerns of cultural and linguistic erosion and imposition. Concerns over the corrupting impact the English language may have on the Chinese language, and further on Chinese culture, uneasily coexist with an acceptance of the English language's role as the key to modernization and economic development. Voices of past and present, have at their core a desire for the protection of a reified cultural identity or essence. However, cultural and linguistic influence has not merely been imposed upon China from external forces, but has been actively drawn in by domestic forces. Such domestic forces range from foreign language education policies that meet the demands of a globalized market driven economy, to a market demand for English language media such as TV programs, movies and literature. Ultimately, the presence and significance of these domestic forces undermines a view of the English language as a vehicle of cultural imperialism in China.
It probably doesn’t need saying that the term ‘Native Speaker’ is one that anyone with any sort o... more It probably doesn’t need saying that the term ‘Native Speaker’ is one that anyone with any sort of investment in linguistics, applied or otherwise, will instantly recognise. However in the widespread use of the term, beyond that of the linguist, the term ‘native speaker’ can carry a plurality of possible interpretations. This study qualitatively investigates how 11 in-service ELT teaching staff perceive and ascribe ‘native speaker of English’ identities, the native/non-native speaker of English distinction in relation to English language teaching. The findings of this study suggest that there is a significant variety with which native speaker of English identities are perceived and ascribed, and that the native/non-native speaker of English teacher distinction was paradoxically seen as both meaningful and meaningless.
Books by William Simpson
A Political Economy of English in Japan: The Consumptionof English as Investment and Leisure
Education and Mobilities: Ideas, People and Technologies, Proceedings of the 6th BNU/UCL IOE International Conference in Education, 2020
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Papers by William Simpson
Simpson delivers a theoretically rigorous conception of capital and builds from this an investigation into how the circulation of capital for profit interrelates with the teaching of language. Simpson discusses ELT at both a global level, in discussion of the ELT industry in the UK, the US, Ireland, Canada, Japan, Spain, and transnationally online, as well as at a more local level, where finer detailed descriptions of the work-lives of those within the Japanese eikaiwa ELT industry are given. Drawing on a synthesis of Marxist and Bourdieusian theory, the book outlines a dialectical approach to understanding capital, and to understanding how the drive for profit and language education interrelate with one another. Simpson concludes by showing how such an approach might open up areas for further research in a number of contexts across the globe, as well as in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Providing a model for addressing global issues of ELT, this book is of interest to advanced students, scholars and professionals within applied linguistics, TESOL, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology, language economics and related areas.
increasing privatisation, and the commodification of everything. A large
body of work has shed much light on the way in which during the
neoliberal period, a discursive shift has taken place whereby language is
increasingly seen in instrumental terms of profit rather than in ethno/
national pride. Though such work engages with language as a
commodity within discourse, the view that language and languages
themselves are literally commodities remains problematic. It is argued in
this article that in the case of private commercial language schools
known as eikaiwa in Japan, what is produced and consequently on sale,
is not language itself, but rather the lesson. What this article offers, is an
example of how commodity fetishism plays out in relation to language
education, and how the commodity comes to be divorced from its
production and its producers, in the recontextualization of the lesson in
advertising. In contrast to previous work on eikaiwa advertising which
focusses on depictions of exotic and eroticised white native Englishspeaking
Others, the analysis here finds that representations of teachers,
is largely absent. The article argues that this erasure of labour (teachers), and the foregrounding of the student in advertising, illustrate a form of commodity fetishism particular to the neoliberal period, where the student as neoliberal homo-oeconomicus – producer of her own desire -comes to the fore.
Books by William Simpson