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.

Drawing upon theories from visual studies, critical visual culture studies, and cognitive psychology, and with a special focus on gender and ethnicity, this book gives students a theoretical foundation for future work as visual communicators. The book takes a closer look at the interwoven character of perception and reception that is present in everyday visual encounters. Chapters present a wide variety of visual examples from art history, digital media, and the images we encounter and use in our daily lives. With the tools to understand how images and text make meaning, students are thus prepared to better communicate through visual media. This book serves as a main or supplementary text for visual communication or visual culture courses.

This book is a commonsense guide to becoming a reflective practitioner, written by a practitioner for practitioners. Relying on actual practice situations, stories, and self-guided exercises, it responds to the questions: Why should professionals care about reflective practice? How do its principles and methods increase competence? What characteristics distinguish reflective practitioners? Every person in a conflict resolution process sees the world differently and acts in a distinctive manner. Yet, by following well-developed practice routines, practitioners often fail to consider the unpredictability of human interactions and overlook behaviors that are inconsistent with their expectations. To respond effectively to surprising and unpredictable events, this book encourages practitioners to adapt their thinking, so they can use their knowledge and skills when situations do not match their assumptions or are inconsistent with their practice routines.

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.

This book is the first in a three-volume set that celebrates the career and achievements of Cliff Goddard, a pioneer of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach in linguistics. In addition, it explores ethnopragmatics and conversational humour, with a further focus on semantic analysis more broadly. Often considered the most fully developed, comprehensive and practical approach to cross-linguistic and cross-cultural semantics, Natural Semantic Metalanguage is based on evidence that there is a small core of basic, universal meanings (semantic primes) that can be expressed in all languages. It has been used for linguistic and cultural analysis in such diverse fields as semantics, cross-cultural communication, language teaching, humour studies and applied linguistics, and has reached far beyond the boundaries of linguistics into ethnopsychology, anthropology, history, political science, the medical humanities and ethics.

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.

Specialised translation has received very little attention from academic researchers, but in fact accounts for the bulk of professional translation on a global scale and is taught in a growing number of university-level translation programmes. This book aims to provide three things. Firstly, it offers a description of what makes the approach to specialised translation distinctive from wider-ranging approaches to Translation Studies adopted by translation scholars and applied linguists. Secondly, unlike the traditional approach to specialised translation, this book explores a perspective on specialised translation that is much less focused on terminology and more on the function and reception of specialised (translated) texts. Finally, the author outlines a professionally-oriented hands-on approach to the teaching of specialised translation resulting from many years of teaching it to MA students. The book will be of interest to Translation Studies students and scholars, as well as professional translators who are interested in the theory on which their activity is based.

This book examines the concept of persuasion in written texts for specialist audiences in the English and Czech languages. By exploring a corpus of academic research articles, corporate reports, religious sermons and user manuals the authors aim to reveal similarities and differences in rhetorical strategies across cultures and genres. They draw on Biber and Conrad's (2009) model for contextualising interaction in specialised discourses, Bell's (1997) framework for the analysis of participants roles, Swales' (1990) genre analysis approach for considering genre constraints and Hyland's (2005) metadiscourse model for investigating writer-reader interaction. The result is a book which will appeal to researchers and students in Discourse Studies, especially those with an interest in genre and rhetorical strategies.

Surfing, Street Skateboarding, Performance, and Space: On Board Motility draws from critical cultural studies, political philosophy, postcolonial studies, urban sociology, and poststructuralist theory in the context of human communication and performance to construct an epistemology of riding boards. This book ponders why we move the way we do and examines the ways in which movements communicate, developing, as a result, a theoretical perspective or board motility that is gestural and fluid, moving in relation to shifting social and physical landscapes. By combining the discourses and practices of critical theory and physical movement, this text presents a sustained analysis of radical political philosophy. In the book the symbolic narratives associated with each physical practice are deconstructed as their theoretical counterparts are thoroughly established. Then, through performance, the author narrows the divide between these two forms of thinking, verbal and nonverbal, outlining and embodying an ontological and epistemological stoke in the process that emerges from riding boards, on both waves and streets.

This book is an indispensable "cutting edge" book for students and researchers of journalism studies seeking a text that illustrates and applies a range of linguistic and discourse-analytic approaches to the analysis of journalism. While the form, function and politics of the language of journalism have attracted scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines, too often this analysis has reduced the work of journalists to text-characteristics alone. In contrast, this collection is united by the principle that journalistic discourse is always socially situated and the result of a series of processes - produced by journalists in accordance with particular production techniques and in specific institutional settings - and as such, analysis requires more than the methods offered by linguists. The contributors to this book draw on a range of the most prominent theoretical and methodological approaches to media discourse - including Conversation Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, the APPRAISAL framework, Multi-modal Analysis and Rhetoric - in making sense of the language of newspapers (national, local and minority press), television and online journalism. Written in an engaging style by distinguished academic authorities, this book provides a state-of-the-art review of the subject. This book was published as a special issue of Journalism Studies.

This book seeks for an alternative perspective in analysing cultural phenomena to supplement the norm of Western dominant theorising and conceptualisation. It engages notions and concepts of culture developed by Chinese cultural theorists when addressing Chinese teachers' cross-cultural experiences in Australian school settings. This alternative approach acknowledges the fact that the generation and development of cultural theories is contextually based. Through the reciprocated theory-data examination, it enables the arguments: Chinese culture is rooted in its written language (hanzi) which makes culture inseparable from language teaching; the core of the culture is linked back to, streamlined with and continues from China's elongated history; this core has been consistently influential on these teachers' practices and the observable cultural shift in them could be non-genuine mimicry for survival. Document analysis witnesses the current political push for the culture's stability and continuity through the national education system across sectors. This book provides background information for teachers with cultural backgrounds different from their students', and draws on a bank of practice-based evidence to suggest ways to enhance teacher-student relationships in cross-cultural settings.

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.

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 book examines user perceptions of European Union institutions and compares them to perceptions communicators within these institutions have of their users. Analysing the images both sides have through their interaction on the EUROPA website (www.europa.eu) helps to to show where communicator intentions and user perceptions do or do not overlap. The timeliness of this issue could not be more striking than in the current internal and external debates surrounding the EU (e.g., the "No" votes on the common constitution). With this in mind, every possible way of interaction should be reconsidered, in order for citizens to get more involved and feel more connected. Next to mass media, the Internet plays an increasingly important role in people's lives. Even though the Internet may not currently be a dominant source of information about the RU relative to other mass media outlets, it continues to increase in importance as part of most people's everyday life, in particular for the younger generation who turn to it for information. The main focus of this book is on the integration of both the user and the communicator perspectives. By looking at user needs in comparison to the production processes that determine the information structure of a Web site, the usability of a Web site is defined. The user experience online in turn determines the users' perceptions of the institutions and their attitudes towards the European Union.