Japanese at Work Politeness, Power, and Personae in Japanese Workplace Discourse

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.

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.

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.