Japanese at Work

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.

• 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.

“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)