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This book empirically explores how different linguistic resources are utilized to achieve appropriate workplace role inhabitance and to achieve work-oriented communicative ends in a variety of workplaces in Japan. Appropriate role inhabitance is seen to include considerations of gender and interpersonal familiarity, along with speaker orientation to normative structures for marking power and politeness. This uniquely researched edited collection will appeal to scholars of workplace discourse and Japanese sociolinguistics, as well as Japanese language instructors and adult learners of Japanese. It is sure to make a major contribution to the cross-linguistic/cultural study of workplace discourse in the globalized context of the twenty-first century.
List of contents
Chapter 1. Bowing Incorrectly: Aesthetic labor and expert knowledge in Japanese business etiquette training; Cynthia Dickel Dunn.- Chapter 2. Socialization to acting, feeling, and thinking as shakaijin: New employee orientations in a Japanese company; Haruko Minegishi Cook.- Chapter 3. Representing the Japanese workplace: Linguistic strategies for getting the work done; Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith.- Chapter 4. "Sarariiman" and the performance of masculinities at work: An analysis of interactions at business meetings at a multinational corporation in Japan; Junko Saito.- Chapter 5. Constructing identity in the Japanese workplace through dialectal and honorific shifts; Andrew Barke.- Chapter 6. Humor and laughter in Japanese business meetings; Kazuyo Murata.- Chapter 7. Directives in Japanese workplace discourse; Naomi Geyer.- Chapter 8. Terms of address and identity in American-Japanese workplace interaction; Stephen J. Moody.
About the author
Haruko Minegishi Cook is Professor of Japanese at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA. Her main research interests include language socialization, discourse analysis, and pragmatics. She has published widely on Japanese sentence-final particles and honorifics in edited volumes and major journals.
Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, USA. She is a specialist in Japanese language, society and culture, with an emphasis on the interaction between ideology and practice.
Summary
One of the first books to provide detailed empirical studies of aspects of the Japanese workplace based on naturally occurring data
Offers empirical findings on Japanese workplace practices in analytic frameworks that facilitate comparison with those of Western studies on workplace discourse
Significantly contributes to the cross-linguistic/cultural study of business discourse in the globalized context of the twenty-first century
Includes chapters on foreign-invested companies in Japan, and workplace socialization of recent graduates – both critical areas which have been understudied.
Additional text
“Japanese at work is a valuable collection of studies that engage with not only linguistic practice in the workplace, but the ways in which workers are socialized into those practices. … Japanese at work makes a timely, needed contribution to the field.” (Hannah E. Dahlberg-Dodd, Language in Society, Vol. 48 (1), February, 2019)
Report
"Japanese at work is a valuable collection of studies that engage with not only linguistic practice in the workplace, but the ways in which workers are socialized into those practices. ... Japanese at work makes a timely, needed contribution to the field." (Hannah E. Dahlberg-Dodd, Language in Society, Vol. 48 (1), February, 2019)
