Japanese at Work

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Haruko Minegishi Cook, Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith

   Pages 1-14

3. Bowing Incorrectly: Aesthetic Labor and Expert Knowledge in Japanese Business Etiquette Training

   • Cynthia Dickel Dunn

   Pages 15-36

4. Socialization to Acting, Feeling, and Thinking as Shakaijin: New Employee Orientations in a Japanese Company

   • Haruko Minegishi Cook

   Pages 37-64

5. Representing the Japanese Workplace: Linguistic Strategies for Getting the Work Done

   • Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith

   Pages 65-96

6. “Sarariiman” and the Performance of Masculinities at Work: An Analysis of Interactions at Business Meetings at a Multinational Corporation in Japan

   • Junko Saito

   Pages 97-121

7. Constructing Identity in the Japanese Workplace Through Dialectal and Honorific Shifts

   • Andrew Barke

   Pages 123-149

8. Humor and Laughter in Japanese Business Meetings

   • Kazuyo Murata

   Pages 151-175

9. Directives in Japanese Workplace Discourse

   • Naomi Geyer

   Pages 177-203

10. Terms of Address and Identity in American-Japanese Workplace Interaction

    • Stephen J. Moody

    Pages 205-234

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.

• identity creation
• shakaijin
• gender identity
• politeness
• power
• japanese language
• business meetings
• sociolinguistics
• japanese
• discourse analysis

“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) “This engaging collection of papers includes chapters from leading Japanese researchers in the area of sociopragmatics. The analyses provide valuable insights on a range of aspects of power, politeness and personae in Japanese intracultural and intercultural workplace interaction. Discourse analysts and pragmatics scholars, as well as those teaching courses in these areas, will find rich resources here to extend and deepen their understanding of how Japanese interlocutors negotiate these important dimensions of face-to-face interaction at work.” (Janet Holmes, Emeritus Professor in Linguistics and Associate Director, Language in the Workplace Project, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)

“Japanese at Work is a timely and very welcome response to growing calls for workplace discourse research to expand beyond the Western, English-speaking world. The chapters offer exciting new treatments of topics with importance for the Japanese context and beyond (the interactional impact of bowing and other business etiquette, honorifics, identities and relational work), opening our eyes to novel ways of thinking about the influence of power, politeness and personae on everyday talk at work.” (Meredith Marra, Director of the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)

• University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

  Haruko Minegishi Cook

• University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA

  Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith

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. 

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