Building on recent advancements in workplace discourse research, Japanese at work presents a series of studies that engage critically with different aspects of persona construction and performance in Japanese workplaces. With few exceptions, Japanese workplace discourse has not yet been adequately investigated using naturally occurring data, an issue that Cook & Shibamoto-Smith attribute to the status of the workplace as a kind of ‘restricted research site’ (2). The included studies, however, do much to rectify this gap in the literature by presenting data from a variety of different white-collar workplaces, ranging from foreign-invested corporations and dialect-area businesses to the smaller secondary school setting.

At their core, each of the studies centers on the idea of enacting the ‘right’ workplace persona in a given interactional moment, beginning with three papers that deal with the explicit and implicit socialization processes that go into the construction of these personae. The first two papers by Cynthia Dickel Dunn and Haruko Minegishi Cook analyze the explicit side of this process, engaging with the socialization that occurs in independent ‘business manner’ courses and in-house new employee orientations respectively. Prior to this volume, little linguistic work has centered on the explicit socialization that new employees undergo when they move from the university to the workplace, a transition from childhood to adulthood that is relatively formalized in Japan. In the third study, Shibamoto-Smith examines the implicit socialization that is enabled through the consumption of mediatized representations of the workplace in popular media. Analyzing the way that stereotypically gendered linguistic features are utilized in a metadiscursive context sheds light on the role that these media genres fulfill with regard to modeling and perpetuating normative gender and hierarchical relations.

The remaining chapters each take applied approaches to workplace personae. Ranging from Junko Saito's study on the navigation of masculinity practices by sarariiman ‘salarymen’ in a business meeting, to Kazuyo Murata's work on the manifestation of laughter across office contexts, each contributes to different research conversations concerning workplace discourse practices. Of particular note is Andrew Barke's study on the use of Kansai dialect in an Osaka-based corporation, which analyzes how dialect resources are either utilized or avoided depending on a situation's formality. Stepping outside the business context, Naomi Geyer explores the use of directives in the secondary school environment among the teaching staff. Finally, Stephen J. Moody's study on intercultural accommodation takes a fresh look at the way that address terms can serve as resources for doing identity work in an intercultural workplace setting.

As a volume, 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. Given that the scarcity of research on discourse in the Japanese workplace is based on naturally occurring data, this volume addresses a significant gap in the literature and suggests areas that need further work. Moreover, through the application of the construct persona as an increasingly utilized and revealing frame of reference in sociocultural linguistics, Japanese at work makes a timely, needed contribution to the field.