As technology continues to advance so does the need for understanding how this will affect us. We, as the users are subject to actions which bring into conflict the needs and characteristics of human actors, the demands of technology, and the wealth of research in End-User Interactions (EUC). Organizational and End-User Interactions: New Explorations provides a comprehensive look at studies that show a significant contribution in EUC by relating organizational and end user computing to organizational and end user performance and productivity, strategic and competitive advantage, and electronic commerce. This book touches on possible future directions of ECU, and why they are viewed as important for the future. The body of knowledge in this topic area continues to grow and with it comes a fertile ground for future exploration in the EUC domain.

The value of multi-disciplinary research lies in the exchange of ideas and methods across the traditional boundaries between areas of study. It could be argued that many of the advances in science and engineering take place because the ideas, methods and the tools of thought from one discipline become re-applied in another.
The topic of "the visual" has become increasingly important as advances in technology have led to multi-media and multi-modal representations, and extended the range and scope of visual representation and interpretation in our lives. Under this broad heading there are many different perspectives and approaches, from across the entire spectrum of human knolwedge and activity.
The editors and authors of this book aim to break down cross-disciplinary barriers, by bringing together people working in a wide variety of disciplines where visual representations and interpretations are exploited. Contributions come from researchers actively investigating visual representations and interpretations in a wide variety of areas, including art history, biology, clinical science, cognitive science, computer science, design, engineering, linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, physics, psychology, and sociology.
The book provides a forum for wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary contributions on visual representations and interpretations.
* Contributors include researchers actively investigating visual representations and interpretations
* Content spans a wide variety of areas including but not limited to biology, sociology, and computer science
* Discusses how new technology has affected "the visual" representation of information

Social norms are valuable because they help us to understand guidelines for appropriate and ethical behavior. However, as part of that process, cultures develop taboo behaviors and topics for group members to avoid. Failure to discuss important topics, such as sex, drug use, or interpersonal violence, can lead to unwanted or unintended negative outcomes. Improving communication about forbidden topics may lead to positive social and health outcomes, but we must first develop the communication and coping skills to handle these difficult conversations. The Handbook of Research on Communication Strategies for Taboo Topics seeks both quantitative and qualitative research to provide empirical evidence of the negative social and health outcomes of avoiding taboo conversations and provides communication and coping strategies for dealing with difficult topics. Covering a range of issues such as grief and forgiveness, this major reference work is ideal for academicians, practitioners, researchers, counselors, sociologists, professionals, instructors, and students.

A husband echoes back words that his wife said to him hours before as a way of teasing her. A parent always uses a particular word when instructing her child not to talk during naptime. A mother and family friend repeat each other's instructions as they supervise a child at a shopping mall. Our everyday conversations necessarily are made up of "old" elements of language-words, phrases, paralinguistic features, syntactic structures, speech acts, and stories-that have been used before, which we recontextualize and reshape in new and creative ways.
In Making Meanings, Creating Family, Cynthia Gordon integrates theories of intertextuality and framing in order to explore how and why family members repeat one another's words in everyday talk, as well as the interactive effects of those repetitions. Analyzing the discourse of three dual-income American families who recorded their own conversations over the course of one week, Gordon demonstrates how repetition serves as a crucial means of creating the complex, shared meanings that give each family its distinctive identity.
Making Meanings, Creating Family takes an interactional sociolinguistic approach, drawing on theories from linguistics, communication, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Its presentation and analysis of transcribed family encounters will be of interest to scholars and students of communication studies, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and psychology-especially those interested in family discourse. Its engagement with intertextuality as theory and methodology will appeal to researchers in media, literary, and cultural studies.

Organizations are rapidly shifting the way that individuals conceptualize, participate, and engage in work. A significant change is how organizations are coordinating, arranging, and organizing the activities of their employees for the accomplishments of organizational goals. Communication, Relationships and Practices in Virtual Work characterizes the nuanced communication, relational, and practical dynamics that characterize virtual working in contemporary organizations. This reference work addresses virtual teams, peer relationships in virtual work, mentoring, vertical mobility, diversity in the virtual workspace, productivity and the postmodern aesthetic, and the communication practices and processes of dispersed work configurations.

There is very little discussion of socially just approaches to speech-language pathology. Within other fields of clinically-oriented practice that social justice is a topic that has received a great deal of attention within the last few years. Pedagogy for addressing social justice has been developed in other disciplines. Within the field of communication disorders, it has failed to move forward and do the same. Discussion of social justice is important given the current sociopolitical climate and landscape that clients carry out in their day-to-day functioning. Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) have an opportunity to engage in practices that help address and alleviate some of the injustices that contribute to educational and health disparities experienced by communities of color. They may do this through the development and application of a socially just orientation of culturally competent practice that fosters changes beyond the individual level. Adapting such a framework makes it possible for SLPs to effectively advocate for and foster equity and inclusion for the individuals and broader communities impacted by SLP services. Critical Perspectives on Social Justice in Speech-Language Pathology addresses the socio-political contexts of how the field of speech-language pathology and service delivery can impact policy and debates related to social justice issues. It explores social position factors and the experiences of marginalized communities to explore how speech-language pathologists deliver services, train and prepare students, and carry out research in communities of color. It covers topic areas including disproportionality in special education, disability rights and ableism, achievement and opportunity gaps, health disparities, and LGBTQ+ rights with a focus on voice, communication, and gender-diverse populations. This book is essential for speech-language pathologists, administrators, practitioners, researchers, academicians, and students interested in how the SLP profession and discipline can contribute to or develop efforts to help address injustices faced by Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities.

At a time when sustainability is on everyone's lips, this volume is one of the first to offer an overview of sustainability and communication issues - including community mobilization, information technologies, gender and social norms, mass media, interpersonal communication and integrated communication approaches - from a development and social change perspective. Drawing on contemporary theories of communication as well as real-world examples from development projects around the world, the contributors in this collection showcase the increasing richness and versatility of communication research and practice. Together, they make a case for adopting a more comprehensive perspective on communication in the areas of development and social change.

The longevity of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, Texas, suggests that it is possible for a social change organization to simultaneously address racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, environmental justice, and peace-and to succeed. Activism, Alliance Building, and the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center uses ethnographic research to provide an instructive case study of the importance and challenges of confronting injustice in all of its manifestations. Through building and maintaining alliances, deploying language strategically, and using artistic expression as a central organizing mechanism, The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center demonstrates the power of multi-issue organizing and intersectional/coalitional consciousness. Interweaving artistic programming with its social justice agenda, in particular, offers Esperanza a unique forum for creative and political expression, institutional collaborations, and interpersonal relationships, which promote consciousness raising, mobilization, and social change. This study will appeal to scholars of communication, Chicana feminism, and ethnography.

Public venues are vital to information access across the globe, yet few formal studies exist of the complex ways people in developing countries use information technologies in public access places. Libraries, Telecentres, Cybercafes and Public Access to ICT: International Comparisons presents groundbreaking research on the new challenges and opportunities faced by public libraries, community telecentres, and cybercafes that offer public access to computers and other information and communication technologies. Written in plain language, the book presents an in-depth analysis of the spaces that serve underserved populations, bridge digital divides, and further social and economic development objectives, including employability. With examples and experiences from around the world, this book sheds light on a surprising and understudied facet of the digital revolution at a time when effective digital inclusion strategies are needed more than ever.

This inaugural edited collection for the Communicating Responsible Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion series presents new critical discourse alongside cutting-edge practical work at the crossroads of PR, CSR, and DEI. The collection explores the active promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion as a public relations responsibility and provides new avenues for critiquing the ways in which power operates through public relations work and theory building. Featuring contributions from leading scholars from across the PR, CSR, and DEI fields, Public Relations for Social Responsibility explores key issues including the legal and economic frameworks thwarting authentic social responsibility and DEI, the unique social responsibility style of women and people of color managing organizations, and expanding the social responsibility critique to include non-human stakeholders and the environment. Chapters illuminate international and industrial contexts at the intersection of PR, CSR and DEI, including historical perspective on DEI roadblocks in the U.S., PR in the time of COVID-19 crises, organizational bullying, DEI, AI and PR ethics, animals as stakeholders, inclusion as CSR component, CEO activism on the African continent, and PR's responsibility in transforming society. The collection will introduce new conceptual and practical approaches highly relevant to scholars of Communication, Management and Corporate Social Responsibility in a global context.

We live in a multilingual, transforming society in which language plays a dynamic and central role. We use it everyday for communication and it is not possible to imagine life without it - it is generally recognised as a mark of what makes us human. But how often do we think about exactly what language is and how we actually use it? Language, society and communication introduces established and new linguistic concepts and theories, and links these to contemporary issues in society and the media, including new social media, with a particular focus on southern Africa. Language, society and communication explores how language is intricately bound up with issues of power, status and identity. It explores the tension between the diverse nature of everyday language practices, on the one hand, and the societal pressures towards managing and containing this diversity, on the other. It also demonstrates the relevance of linguistic study (e.g. phonology and syntax) to real world problems (e.g. analysis of a child's acquisition of language), within a southern African context. Study questions and case studies, which relate the theoretical ideas discussed to current research, are provided at the end of each chapter. Language, society and communication is aimed at undergraduate students studying linguistics, language and communication, and related fields such as language education.

Brands and logos are all around us - from the clothes we wear and the objects we buy, to the advertisements which cover our cities and the celebrities created by the media. We regard the brand as a new phenomenon, something born with the consumer society, but branding was born with civilization, its earliest examples dating to the Roman Empire.Branding is now a growing industry, applied not only to commodities but to charities, cities, the worlds of sport and entertainment, even government initiatives. Such is the ubiquity and power of branding that it is increasingly taken as a sign of the commodification of everyday life and the rapacity of corporate power. Examining the brand in history, the growth of national and global brands, the changing approaches of the branding industry and the exploration of new spaces for advertising, The Rise of Brands analyses exactly how brands develop and operate in contemporary society.

This publication is a record of the sessions presented during the annual conference of the South Central Association for Language Learning Technology (SOCALLT) held at the University of Colorado in Boulder on April 13-14, 2002. All authors are current members of the organization. The articles of these proceedings focus on a variety of issues dealing with the integration of technology into the foreign language curriculum, the role of technology in the teaching and learning process, language media development, professional development, and language center management.

O'Shaughnessy, Henneberg, and their contributors examine how the theory and practice of marketing has been and can be applied to politics. Particular attention was paid to the theory of political marketing, with conceptual definitions developed to better facilitate communication between marketing professionals and political science researchers. Political marketing is about the making and unmaking of governments in a democracy. Despite its growing importance, the marketing academic profession has shown very little interest in the political ramificaitons of their discipline, while political scientists often come to political marketing with the view that it is cosmetic, if not trivial. O'Shaughnessy, Henneberg, and their contributors examine how the theory and practice of marketing has been and can be applied to politics. As they show, elections are a persuasion task writ large, most especially with the demise of inherited class loyalties. Following elections, governments can employ marketing techniques to build support for their actions, while opposition parties can press the government and its supporters through similar marketing approaches. Of particular interest to scholars, researchers, and policy makers involved with politics, political communication, and the making of public policy.

From a private nature walk to an engrossing novel, humans spend a vast amount of time engaged in solitary activities. However, despite the fact that individual activities are a prevalent part of everyday life, most scholarly research has been devoted to social interaction rather than solitary action. Ira Cohen's Solitary Action fills this intellectual void, identifying and discussing four basic forms of individual action: peripatetics, engrossments, regimens, and reflexives. Cohen explores the differences and similarities among the forms, specifically delving into the structural contrast between behaviors with rigid constraints, such as the game of solitaire, and behaviors which require creativity and spontaneity, such as a solo jazz improvisation. Lucid and relatable, Solitary Action links its arguments with examples from literature, personal narrative, and daily life, shedding light upon the understated significance of individual activities. The book concludes with a discussion of extensive retreats into solitude for religious, aesthetic, and self-restorative experiences, including examples from Thomas Merton and Henry David Thoreau. Ultimately, Cohen's findings promise to inspire new inquiries into the nature of social behavior by opening a new domain of everyday activities to the attention previously reserved for social interaction.

This collection of essays examines the variety of ways in which communication scholarship and research contribute to the political mobilization and empowerment of citizens to act on environmental issues - environmental discourse and action in the largest sense. As seen here, the task of environmental empowerment involves a curious mixture of national and local politics, abstract principles and concrete actions, ethical frameworks and political expediency. The contributors to this volume provide a fascinating array of perspectives on how to go about this task and how "earthtalk" continues to shape and frame human perceptions and actions on environmental issues. This unique work will be of interest to scholars, policymakers, and students of political communication, public policy, and the environment.

"Social networks are collections of individuals linked together by a set of relations. The linkage of social networks to people and business contexts as well as to critical government domains is important for the emerging information ecosystems of the knowledge society. Knowledge Networks: The Social Software Perspective concentrates on strategies that exploit emerging technologies for the knowledge effectiveness in social networks. This comprehensive book delivers an excellent mix of information for readers and is a must for those thirsty for knowledge on social networks and information systems."

This book explores the strengths and weaknesses of the English state in the sixteenth century. It examines the relationship between monarchy and people in Cornwall and Devon, and the complex interaction between local and national political culture. Popular resistance to the Reformation, and the rebellions of 1497 and 1548-9, are set against the strategies employed by the crown to cultivate the allegiance of its subjects. Royal propaganda, both literary and visual, is identified as a key factor in the development of patriotism and the nation state. This book offers a fresh understanding of government at the allegedly dangerous edges of Tudor England.