ABSTRACT
This chapter describes students acquiring practices constituting their jobs in workplace worlds. Students perceived their purposes for languaging actions involved establishing positive relations with customers. Students associated these practices with use of certain languaging actions with customers as consistent with norms and discourses based on corporate branding agendas defining the need to please customers. Students perceived some of their workplace experiences as useful for acquiring practices constituting their present and future identities. At the same time, they critiqued certain discourses related to race, class, and gender as shaping practices in workplaces. Students also identified use of certain genres constituting interactions with customers and co-workers. They can also respond to portrayals of workplace practices in media and literature for inferring connections to their own workplace practices.
