PSU Center for Japanese Studies Presents
Haruko Minegishi Cook, University of Hawaii
Going from Student to Company Worker: New-Employee Orientations of Japanese Companies
How are students socialized to be company workers in Japanese society? From a language socialization perspective, Dr. Cook will discuss the ways in which new employees are socialized through new employee orientation sessions in Japanese companies into acquiring their new identity of “shakai-jin”: in other words, how to become “mature,” “contributing adults” in “society.” Language socialization investigates how novices learn to become competent members in a social group by participating in routines of culturally organized activities. It is the workplace where adult novices are socialized into cultural values and practices of the business and professional community. Unlike in the West, in Japan, in terms of employment getting a full-time job after completing formal education is a major transition in life. To prepare for this, companies offer in-house orientations or send their new employees to courses offered by a business manner training company, where they place more emphasis on polite behavior including polite language than technical aspects of the new job. Dr. Cook will discuss these interactions between trainers and new employees in these orientations and she will show how new employees in Japan leave their student identities behind to become shakaijin in the workplace.
Dr. Haruko Minegishi Cook is Professor of Japanese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Her research interests include Japanese linguistics, language socialization, discourse analysis and politeness research. One of her major research topics is Japanese speech style shift, studying how Japanese speakers shift speech style between honorifics and plain form in different social contexts. For her current project, she examines how Japanese students are socialized to be company workers when they get a full-time job. Major publications include Socializing Identities through Speech Styles: Learners of Japanese as a Foreign Language (Multilingual Matters, 2008), Japanese at Work: Politeness, Power and Personae in Japanese Workplace Discourse (co-edited; Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and Handbook of Language Socialization in Japanese (co-edited; Hitsuzi Shobo, 2023). Her articles appear in a number of major journals, such as Journal of Pragmatics.