Whether politically, socially, economically, or psychologically, postmodern institutions attempt to influence their environments through the use of rhetoric in their public relations campaigns. As corporations increasingly dominate the public discourse we experience daily, it becomes increasingly important to understand how that discourse operates, and to become more informed creators and consumers of institutional rhetoric.

This volume examines the theoretical bases and practical effects of a variety of public relations campaigns. The contributors demonstrate that rhetorical inquiry is a viable and underrated approach to explaining the influence of public relations campaigns. Cases analyzed in the book range from those of national scope (e.g., Mobil Oil's Observations campaign of the 1970s and 1980s), to studies of targeted influence (e.g., corporate recruitment videos), to cases of internal relations (e.g., issues management during corporate mergers), to studies of local situations (e.g., the anatomy of a local ballot issue campaign). While the various contributors employ a broad range of rhetorical methods and analysis, the discussions remain approachable and understandable for students and professionals alike.

Pathways across Cultures: Intercultural Communication in South Africa is a uniquely South African communication textbook. Local examples of communication methods from a wide range of cultural groups are used to explain theories of communication and complex intercultural concepts. It covers some of the rich cultural histories of the rainbow nation, such as Khoisan cave drawings, highlighting the intercultural communication styles of the early peoples who lived in South Africa. The book also includes critical commentary on western theories and approaches to studying intercultural communication.

With a view to decolonising how intercultural communication is taught in South Africa, where possible the chapters in this book have been co-authored with emerging scholars. This approach provided mentoring opportunities for emerging scholars to develop case studies. As a result, this book has a wide-ranging perspective on intercultural communication that is representative of South Africa’s own cultural diversity.

Information is an important concept that is studied extensively across a range of disciplines, from the physical sciences to genetics to psychology to epistemology. Information continues to increase in importance, and the present age has been referred to as the "Information Age."

One may understand information in a variety of ways. For some, information is found in facts that were previously unknown. For others, a fact must have some economic value to be considered information. Other people emphasize the movement through a communication channel from one location to another when describing information. In all of these instances, information is the set of characteristics of the output of a process. Yet Information has seldom been studied in a consistent way across different disciplines.

"Information from Processes" provides a discipline-independent and precise presentation of both information and computing processes. Information concepts and phenomena are examined in an effort to understand them, given a hierarchy of information processes, where one process uses others. Research about processes and computing is applied to answer the question of what information can and cannot be produced, and to determine the nature of this information (theoretical information science). The book also presents some of the basic processes that are used in specific domains (applied information science), such as those that generate information in areas like reasoning, the evolution of informative systems, cryptography, knowledge, natural language, and the economic value of information.Written for researchers and graduate students in information science and related fields, "Information from Processes "details a unique information model independent from other concepts in computer or archival science, which is thus applicable to a wide range of domains. Combining theoretical and empirical methods as well as psychological, mathematical, philosophical, and economic techniques, Losee's book delivers a solid basis and starting point for future discussions and research about the creation and use of information."

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.

This book discusses the effect of communication strategies in the course of China's national image building from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. The research data are collected via researcher's in-depth observation as well as focus group analysis and case study of selected Chinese radio and TV networks. On the basis of the empirical study and drawing on theories of international communication and political communication, this book also introduces an analytical framework that can be used to evaluate the effect of communication strategies in practice. Especially, the framework is applied to systematically analyze the formation and application of Chinese Communist Party's communication strategy with an aim at improving the national image and increasing its global influence. This book is of interest to graduate students and researchers who are interested in the broadcast communication in China.

The advent of the Information Society is marked by the explosive penetration of information technologies in all aspects of life and by a related fundamental transofmation in every form of the organization. Researchers, business people and policy makers have recognized the importance of addressing technological, economic and social impacts in conjunction. For example, the rise and fall of the dot-com hype depended a lot on the strenght of the business model, on the technological capabilities avalable to firms and on the readiness of the socity and economy at large sustain a new breed of business activity. However, it is notoriously difficult to examine the cross-impacts of social, economic and technological aspects of the Information Socity. This kind of work requires multidisciplinary work and collaboration on a wide range of skills. Social and Economic Transformation in the Digital Era addresses this challenge by assembling the latest thinking of leading researchers and policy makers. The book covers all key subject areas of the Information Society an presents innovative business models, case studies, normative theories and social explanations.

Each of us is highly skilled at designing our turns at talk, and meshing them with those of the people around us. Conversation Analysis (CA) is the study of just how that is done, and how the choreography of conversation brings off the business we conduct with each other.
Conversation Analysis is beginning to have a strong record not only of understanding interaction, but also of seeing how it might be changed. This volume collects together some of the most exciting developments in CA as it is applied to intervention programs in medical communication, speech therapy, mediation, welfare interviewing, surveying, telephone helplines, and other insitutional encounters. The contributors explain the difficulties and the benefits of applying CA in the real world, and with working with external agencies like government institutions, charities, and the medical establishment.

Although the figure of irony has enjoyed extensive attention through important contributions to the diverse literatures addressing figurative thought and language, it still remains relatively in the background compared to other figures such as metaphor and metonymy. The present volume, together with a 2017 collection by Angeliki Athanasiadou and Herbert L. Colston, aims to the further exploration of verbal and situational irony, its gestural accompaniments, its comprehension and interpretation, its constructional diversity and its cooperation with other figures such as metaphor and hyperbole. The present volume is a highly interesting collection of chapters dealing with both theoretical investigations and descriptive applications of a central figure pervading human thought and language. Its aim is to draw more attention to irony's diversity and its concomitant connections to other aspects of figurativeness.

This first book-length critical analysis of Kennedy's public address defines how he aroused Americans to rise to the opportunities and challenges that he defined for them. This rigorously researched study offers an in-depth analysis of the development of President Kennedy as a public speaker and a balanced view of his civil rights, foreign policy, presidential, and other types of speeches. Eight speech texts accompany the analysis. This reference and teaching tool also offers a selected chronology of major speeches along with a bibliography of important primary and secondary sources. Designed for students, teachers, and professionals in the fields of rhetoric, political communication, presidential studies, and American history.

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 presents background information on the current literary theory known as reader response and examines ways in which response and the teaching of literature has been researched and the findings of that research. It effectively demonstrates the diverse manner in which theoretical principles can be examined using a number of different frameworks. It investigates new theoretical perspectives on reader-response theory as well as demonstrating how empirical, qualitative, and ethnographic research has investigated current theory. Each chapter on research response to literature integrates classroom vignettes and actual student responses, in order to offer the classroom teacher as well as the reading and literature research new information about the manner in which children and older students interact with the literature. This volume will be particularly informative to college personnel and graduate students interested in theories and research focusing on response to literature and the teaching of literature. This text is useful as both a reference for researchers and teachers and a supplemental text for graduate students.

During the past decade, blogging has not only grown, but it has also become a truly international phenomenon: about two thirds of all blogs are written in a language other than English. Blogging in the Global Society: Cultural, Political and Geographical Aspects provides a comprehensive view of blogging as a global practice. Bloggers have created a new virtual world a blogosphere populated with opinion leaders and information purveyors, political pundits and activists, human and animal rights defenders and abusers, corruption fighters and truth seekers, as well as professionals, marketers, advertisers, journalists, celebrities, artists, academics, and bored consumers of all sorts. This book provides a cross-disciplinary analysis of the social, cultural, and political factors affecting blogging practices, tracing the diffusion of blogging as a global communication innovation, uncovering particularities and patterns of adoption in different cultures and geographical regions, and shedding light on trends in the global blogosphere.

In this absorbing book, Bruce J. Evensen analyzes the role of the mass media, public opinion, and the Zionists in the evolution of America's Palestine policy during the Truman administration. Taking issue with recent revisionist historians who argue that Truman had little difficulty manipulating public opinion, Evensen claims that the press and an aroused public opinion successfully frustrated the President's course on Palestine and elicited his support of the United Nations' partition of Jewish and Arab states and Truman's early recognition of Israel. Evensen emphasizes the development of a conventional wisdom that placed the Middle East at the center of U.S. strategic planning and saw limiting Soviet penetration as a primary goal. Within this context, he shows a divided Truman administration, which was uncertain how to act on the Jewish state. Reluctantly, the administration initially supported the UN's vote to partition the region; then, as Palestine erupted into violence, it attempted to abandon this decision. Interpreting the President's action as a gutless appeasement of the Arabs and an indication of his fear of the Soviets, the media, reflecting the public's Cold War fears, confronted the administration's policy in the Middle East and frustrated the President's effort to abandon the partition scheme. The media's role in reflecting and shaping competing visions of reality, which became the conventional wisdom of policy making, is a key part of this study.

The dominant cultural script is that the Baby Boomers have 'had it all', thereby depriving younger generations of the opportunity to create a life for themselves. Bristow provides a critical account of this discourse by locating the problematisation of the Baby Boomers within a wider ambivalence about the legacy of the Sixties.

What signals are you sending when you share the gospel? The importance of signs for communicating truth has been recognized throughout the ages. Crystal L. Downing traces this awareness from biblical texts, through figures from church history like John Wycliffe and William Tyndale, to more recent writers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and C. S. Lewis. In the nineteenth century, this legacy of interest in the activity of signs brought about a new field of academic study. In this book, Downing puts the discipline of semiotics within reach for beginners through analysis of the movement's key theorists, Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce, Mikhail Bakhtin and others. She then draws out the implications for effective communication of the gospel of Jesus Christ within our shifting cultural landscape. Her fundamental thesis is that "Failure to understand how signs work--as effects of the cultures we seek to affect--inevitably undermines not just our political and moral agendas but, worse, the gospel of Jesus Christ." Writing with humor, clarity and flare, Downing lucidly explains the sophisticated thinking of leaders in semiotics for nonexperts. Of value to all those interested in communication in any context, this work will be of special interest to students majoring in communications or English or to students in evangelism and preaching courses at the undergraduate and graduate level.

Communication in its most basic form--the sending of signals and exchange of messages within and between organisms--is the heart of evolution. From the earliest life-forms to "Homo sapiens," the great chain of communication drives the evolutionary process and is the indispensable component of human culture.
That is the central message of this unique perspective on both the biological evolution of life and the human development of culture. The book explores the totality of communication processes that create and sustain biological equilibrium and social stability. The authors argue that this ubiquitous connectivity is the elemental unity of life.
Introducing a new subdiscipline--evolutionary communication--the authors analyze the core domains of life--sheer survival, sex, culture, morality, religion, and technological change--as communications phenomena. What emerges from their analysis is a brilliant interpretation of life interconnected through communication from the basic molecular level to the most sophisticated manifestations of culture.
Challenging the boundaries of conventional approaches to cultural analysis, this is an original and engaging view of evolution and an encouraging prognosis for our collective future.

Cultural heritage has tremendous importance in human development. The communication of culture is determinant for society, whereas that of heritage can be a driving force for individual development. If cultural heritage is communicated and incorporated into the educational development of children from the very beginning, it will contribute to the formation of their entire lives and sustainable social development. Combining Modern Communication Methods With Heritage Education provides relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings in the area. It shows that heritage related to information provision is to be started at a very early age and continued by schools and later educational forms. Covering topics such as cultural heritage, world heritage education, and indigenous archives, this premier reference work is an essential resource for educators and administrators of both K-12 and higher education, pre-service teachers, teacher educators, sociologists, anthropologists, business leaders and executives, marketers, librarians, researchers, and academicians.

The first and most thoroughly developed audience-oriented argumentation text has been updated to its 8th edition: Argumentation and Critical Decision Making presents argumentation as a cooperative, communicative process. This text examines the general principles of argument in a rigorous yet readable manner and then applies those principles to different spheres of life -- law, science, religion, business, government, and politics -- to explore how conventions of argument change when applied to these real-world arenas. Focusing on the dynamics of decision making and using real-life examples to illustrate principles, Argumentation and Critical Decision Making aims to help readers develop practical argumentation skills within the world of their daily lives.

This issue focuses on "radical interactionism," which recent emergence as an alternative perspective to conventional symbolic interactionism has sparked fierce debate in both North America and Europe. Lonnie Athens discusses the four fundamental differences between radical and conventional symbolic interactionism. The prominent scholars compare the relative insights offered not only between radical interactionism and symbolic interactionism, but between radical interactionism and feminism, dramaturgy, critical studies, and neo-pragmatism. Without exception, they found the radical interactionism revealed new and formidable insights that improved our general understanding of human group life and critical problems that arise during it. While some contributors believe that radical interactionism marks the development of a new and more vibrant form of interactionism which in due time will replace its much older and more conservative cousin, others believe that it only signals the need for traditional interactionists to finally start making some much-needed modifications in symbolic interactionism if they wish it to remain a viable sociological perspective in the 21st century.

This volume provides a novel and relational sociological approach to the study of EU civil society. It focuses on the interactions and interrelations between civil society actors and the forms of capital that structure the fields and sub-fields of EU civil society, through new and important empirical studies on organized EU civil society.

Jewish-American Identity and Critical Intercultural Communication: Never Forget, Tikkun Olam, and Kindness to Strangers explores what it means to be Jewish on a personal, sociocultural, and global-political level. This book employs 50+ interviews with diverse Jewish voices to provide a history of Jewish migration to the US and to privilege voices that are not necessarily White and Eastern European/Ashkenazic. Sobre argues for a more inclusive form of intercultural theorizing that favors intersectionality and allyship over oppression Olympics (stereotypes between members of different nondominant groups) and colorism (within nondominant group discrimination). Such siloing of differences, and further competing about whose differences are the most egregious, minimizes critical intercultural coalition opportunities allowing for such groups as those who gave power to Trump and Netanyahu to connect while inclusive progressives engage in in-fighting and separatism. The author calls for transversal dialogic politics, racially and historically accurate school curriculum, intersectionality and more inclusive intercultural communication scholarship and practice as various means of working together against white nationalism and white supremacy in the US and the world. Scholars of religious studies, cultural anthropology, and intercultural communication will find this book of particular interest.

Advances in Group Processes publishes theoretical analyses, reviews, and theory based empirical chapters on group phenomena. The series adopts a broad conception of "group processes." This includes work on groups ranging from the very small to the very large, and on classic and contemporary topics such as status, power, exchange, justice, influence, decision-making, intergroup relations and social networks. Previous contributors have included scholars from diverse fields including sociology, psychology, political science, philosophy, computer science, mathematics and organizational behaviour. This volume contains papers presented at the 25th anniversary of the Annual Group Processes Conference.

Today, individuals and societies of the digital age are no longer constrained by conventional contexts, narratives, settings, and status; they are surrounded and guided by digital tools and applications leading to a digital revolution. That digital revolution changed the individual along with living styles and cultural and social relations among people. Moreover, these revolutionary changes and the increasing capabilities of smart devices have brought today's people a new kind of public sphere with questionable freedoms but also restraints in its digital dimensions. Now, it is possible to talk about the digital dimension and equivalence of all the concepts that are both individually and socially constructed in a new digital world. The Handbook of Research on Digital Citizenship and Management During Crises covers many different components engaged with digital world responsibilities. The authors assess the position, status, and reactions of the new citizen against future catastrophes. Covering topics such as epistemic divide, internet addiction, and new media technologies, this text serves as a cutting-edge resource for researchers, scholars, lawmakers, trainers, instructional designers, university libraries, professors, students, and academicians.