Overview
- 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.
Part of the book series: Communicating in Professions and Organizations (PSPOD)
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About this book
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.
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Keywords
Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
Reviews
“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)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
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.
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Japanese at Work
Book Subtitle: Politeness, Power, and Personae in Japanese Workplace Discourse
Editors: Haruko Minegishi Cook, Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith
Series Title: Communicating in Professions and Organizations
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63549-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-63548-4Published: 17 April 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-09695-3Published: 19 December 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-63549-1Published: 06 April 2018
Series ISSN: 2947-812X
Series E-ISSN: 2947-8138
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 234
Number of Illustrations: 1 illustrations in colour
Topics: Sociolinguistics, Japanese, Pragmatics, Multilingualism, Discourse Analysis, Self and Identity