The figure of the stranger is in serious need of revision, as is our understanding of the society against which the stranger is projected. Under conditions of globalization, inside/outside markers have been eroded and conventional indicators of "we-ness" are no longer reliable. We now live in a generalized state of strangeness, one consequence of globalization: we no longer know where our community ends and another one begins. In such circumstances it is often the case that neighbors are the nearest strangers. Strangeness occurs when global consciousness outstrips global connectivity and this means that we need to rethink some core elements of globalization theory.
Under conditions of strangeness the stranger is a "here today, gone tomorrow" figure. This book identifies the cosmopolitan stranger as the most significant contemporary figure of the stranger, one adept at negotiating the 'confined spaces' of globalization in order to promote new forms of social solidarity and connect with distant others.

Confronting the issue of the unacceptable as a social category, this collection of international essays provides distinctive perspectives on the theme of what is deemed socially acceptable. The book reveals the ways category of the unacceptable reflects sexual, racial and political fault-lines of a society.

Expressive Order introduces affect control theory to lay readers of sociology, and additionally guides sociology specialists into the theory's deep structure. Briefly, affect control theory proposes that individuals shape their social interactions so that emerging impressions reinforce sentiments about salient identities, behaviors, and settings. Emotions signal how the process of confirming sentiments is going for each individual. The theory explains behaviors, emotions, social labeling, and personality attributions in a wide variety of social contexts including intimate relations, work-world interactions, courtrooms, and international relations. Part 1 of the book provides a plain-language exposition of the theory, along with numerous interpretive analysis of everyday situations. This is engaging and provocative reading for anyone interested in social relations,

International scholars and researchers present cutting edge contributions on the significance of vocabulary in current thinking on first and second language acquisition in the school and at home. By pursuing common themes across first and second language and bilingual contexts, the editors offer a collection that tackles the most important issues.

Thus far, the communications revolution has been largely limited to the merely technological feat of converging telecommunications with personal computing. But does it hold a truly higher promise--to transform communication as a human act of sharing meaning about values, attitudes, and experiences? Or will it simply allow capitalism to pursue ever-greater economic efficiencies among the wealthy nations of the world, while ignoring the persistent and growing gap between rich and poor? The contributors to this volume consider these central questions, among others, from a wide variety of perspectives. The contributors argue that to create sustainable futures, ways must be found to make communication inclusive, participatory, and mindful of future generations. It must also emerge authentically from humanity's diverse cultures, be more concerned with the quality of information shared than with the sheer volume of email in the world, and be transformed from its technocratic bias in order to move toward a truly global "conversation of civilization." This book will be of interest to scholars in a variety of fields concerned with issues of communications, culture, and globalization.

Government agencies have tended to attempt to project favorable public images of themselves as a method of building the public support they need to survive, all the more so in times of increasingly sophisticated communications and decreasingly available financial resources. This study analyzes NASA's efforts to build political support through its public image. Throughout its tumultuous history, the space agency has carefully tailored its use of basic images: nationalism (during the Mercury era), romanticism (during the Apollo era), and pragmatism (during the Shuttle era)--to fit its prevailing political circumstances. This in-depth study will be of keen interest to scholars in political science and political communication.

This monograph offers a unique analysis of social protest in popular music. It presents theoretical descriptions, methodological tools, and an approach that encompasses various fields of musicology, cultural studies, semiotics, discourse analysis, media studies, and political and social sciences. The author argues that protest songs should be taken as a musical genre on their own. He points out that the general approach, when discussing these songs, has been so far that of either analyzing the lyrics or the social context. For some reason, the music itself has been often overlooked. This book attempts to fill this gap. Its central thesis is that a complete overview of these repertoires demands a thorough interaction among contextual, lyrical, and musical elements together. To accomplish this, the author develops a novel model that systemizes and investigates musical repertoires. The model is then applied to four case studies, those, too, chosen among topics that are little (or not at all) frequented by scholars.

What makes human communication problematic? Why can a face-to-face encounter be simple, automatic, and even mindless in one situation and still become complicated, difficult, and even vexing in the next? These are the central questions in this probing analysis of the potential and limits of communication in human relations. Working through the seemingly intractable complexities and complications that emerge from such conflicts as multiple viewpoints and divergent vantage points, this study advances the prospects of working toward optimum conditions for human interaction.

This book offers something quite new - an advanced textbook that considers professional writing as a negotiated process between writer and reader. Arguing that ethics, imagination and rhetoric are integral to professional writing praxis, the book encourages students to look critically at various writing practices in a range of contexts. A textbook for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates in Linguistics, Communication, Journalism and Media Studies.

Lengel takes the reader on a journey from India and Romania, where women preserve cultural rituals through mourning songs, to South Africa, where the body is a site of struggle for meaning and power in contemporary dance. This volume examines the interrelationship of cultural and national identity, ethnicity, gender, performance, and lived experience. It offers an understanding of how music and dance function within the lives of its performers and audiences, and how they embody meaning, carry social value, and act as a vehicle for intercultural communication. This book analyzes the communicative impact of women's cultural products and creative practice and creates links across disciplines such as communication, cultural studies, and performance studies. Contributors have lived, researched, and performed in the United States, Australia, Belize, Barbados, Canada, China, England, India, the Pacific, Romania, and Yemen. Their chapters address women's creative performance as a means of political and ideological expression.

The rapid improvements brought about by modern telecommunications are made possible by unfettered transmission of information, which relies on the ability to send, receive and properly utilize communication. Advanced Communication Protocol Technologies: Solutions, Methods, and Applications explores the complications and solutions created by communication required between ever-expanding technologies. The research in this book encompasses the fundamentals of protocol functions and protocol operations, the controlling protocols of ISDN and mobile networks, the evolution of IP-based protocols, and advanced solutions for routing, mobility and multimedia transmission. Finally, this book addresses the various special applications in this ever important field.

Entries in this dictionary focus on the people, organizations, events, and ideas that have been significant in the slightly more than two centuries of political communication in this country. The intent is to highlight those events and ideas that still have significance today--thus from the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the threshold of the 21st century.

The history of political communication and how that history has repeated itself is examined in this volume. Entries arranged from A to Z, deal with freedom of the press and the major threats to freedom of the press; successful and unsuccessful political campaigns, and the changes that have occurred in political communication as well as the tradition that has emerged in the slightly more than two centuries we have been engaged in it. By offering the reader insight into the evolution of political communication as an academic field, this reference will be useful to students and scholars in the disciplines of political science, political communication, mass communication, U.S. history, and related fields, as well as academic and selected public libraries.

The Handbook of Organizational Politics offers a broad perspective on the intriguing phenomena of power, influence and politics in the modern workplace; their meaning for individuals, groups and other organizational stakeholders; and their effect on organizational outcomes and performances. Comprising entirely of new chapters and insights, this second edition revisits the theory on organizational politics (OP) and examines its progress and changes in emphasis in recent years. This timely and informative book provides a comprehensive set of state-of-the-art studies on workplace politics based on experiences from around the world. The contributors highlight topics such as political skills, political will, politics and leadership, compensations, politics and performance, and politics and the learning climate. Students and scholars will benefit from the up-to-date collection of studies in the field of OP. This Handbook will also be of interest to practitioners and managers from public and private sectors looking for better explanations of internal processes in business. Contributors: S.L. Albrecht, G. Blickle, S.L. Bohle, D.A. Buchanan, M.R. Buckley, A. Capezio, A.M. Carnes, A. Drory, A.J. DuBrin, L. Eldor, B.P. Ellen III, G.R. Ferris, R. Frieder, J.N. Harris, S.E. Hill, J.D. Jacobs, I. Kapoutsis, E.M. Landells, L.P. Maher, G. Meisler, J.P. Meriac, M. Mizrahi, T.P. Munyon, K. Oerder, G.B. Schmidt, N. Schutte, H. Sibunruang, A.L.E. Thomas, D.R. Vashdi, E. Vigoda-Gadot, A. Wihler, D. Windsor

In what is becoming a series of annual volumes, researchers contribute to the study of cinema and mass communication by considering three nontraditional aspects of the industry. Among the 12 articles are discussions of the effect of horror movies on violence against women, the production of culture

This volume examines the role of political culture, or hegemonic ideology, in defining journalistic accounts of the world. Rachlin contends that a press, free from legal constraints imposed by an oppressive government, can still undermine the possibility of pluralism and the requirements of democracy if it is constrained by its own narrow vision of the world. It is this narrow vision that continues existing social relationships, instead of questioning or changing them, by inhibiting alternative realities. This volume examines the American press to see if it is so constrained and therefore a force that undermines rather than promotes democracy.

"Bridging the Digital Divide" investigates problems of unequal access to information technology. The author redefines this problem, examines its severity, and lays out what the future implications might be if the digital divide continues to exist. This is also the first book to assess empirically the policies in the United States designed to address the social problems arising from the digital divide. It analyzes policies at both federal and local level, as well as looking at the success of community-based initiatives. The analysis is supported by empirical data resulting from extensive fieldwork in several US cities. The book concludes with the author's recommendations for future public policy on the digital divide.

According to politics and the media, immigration and individualization are driving citizens apart but in neighbourhoods social life is often thriving, depending on the talents of particular citizens or the inventiveness of local institutions. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative research among hundreds of active and less active citizens, and an analysis of a vast array of newspaper articles, this book explores the crafting of citizenship, examining new forms of active citizenship and the actual conditions that hinder social cohesion.

"Lexicon of the Mouth" surveys the oral cavity as the central channel by which self and surrounding are brought into relation. Questions of embodiment and agency, attachment and loss, incorporation and hunger, locution and the non-sensical are critically examined. In doing so, LaBelle emphasizes the mouth as a vital conduit for negotiating "the foundational narrative of proper speech." "Lexicon of the Mouth" aims for a viscous, poetic and resonant discourse of subjectivity, detailed through the "micro-oralities" of laughing and whispering, stuttering and reciting, eating and kissing, among others. The oral cavity is posed as an impressionable arena, susceptible to all types of material input, contamination and intervention, while also enabling powerful forms of resistance, attachment and conversation, as well as radical imagination."Lexicon of the Mouth" argues for the revolutionary promise of the laugh, the spirited mythologies of the whisper, the schizophonics of self-talk, and the primal noise of gibberish, suggesting that the significance of voicing is fundamentally bound to the exertions of the mouth. Subsequently, assumptions around voice and vocality are unsettled in favor of an epistemology of the oral, highlighting the acts of the tongue, the lips and the throat as primary mediations between interior and exterior, social structures and embodied expressions. LaBelle makes a significant contribution to currents in sound and voice studies by reminding that to hear the voice, and to consider a politics of speech, is first and foremost to assume the mouth.

This unique study is the first to focus specifically on political communication ethics. Denton has brought together a group of works that address ethical concerns related to political communication, including political culture, campaigns, media, advertising, ghostwriting, discourse, politicians, and new technologies. All of the contributors raise a number of salient questions and discuss various methods, criteria, and issues for exploring and addressing ethical concerns. These ten chapters cover a range of topics that include the ethics of popular culture, political advocacy, ethics and morality in American presidential campaigns, virtue and character, the role of television in modern politics, the ethical implications of ghostwriting, polls and computer technology, and narrative form in political news. The central theme that emerges from these varied contributions is that we cannot depend on politicians, their handlers, or the media to correct real or perceived problems of ethics in American politics and that the greatest threat to democracy is neglect of the public forum. In analyzing the weak ethical links in the American political process, the authors call for a return to civic culture based on communication and persuasion, active citizen participation, and a high level of information. This work will be an important new resource for courses in political and mass communication, political ethics, and political science, as well as for students of sociology and American studies.