Product Description: The malaise of today's Cultural Studies is perhaps best summarized by Picasso (paraphrased) success can lead to copying from oneself, and copying from oneself, and that is worse than copying from others. This book is both a response and an independent configuration of the dominant, current trend: that is cultural studies known as the Birmingham/U...read more

Product Description: Most communication research and most applications of that research acknowledge the process nature of communication. However, the materail following that acknowledgment conforms to traditional linear and static approaches treating communication as little more than printed text...read more

Product Description: This book honors the life and work of the late W. Barnett Pearce, a leading theorist in the communication field. The book is divided into four sections. The first section will lead with an essay by Barnett Pearce. This will be followed by sections on (1) practical theory, (2) dialogue, and (3) social transformation...read more

Product Description: It is widely accepted that the machinery of multicultural societies and liberal democratic systems is dependent upon various forms of dialogue - dialogue between political parties, between different social groups, between the ruling and the ruled...read more

Product Description: This book deals with matters of embodiment and meaning—in other words, the essential components of what Continental thought, since Heidegger, has come to consider as “communication.” A critical theme of this book concerns the basic tenet that consciousness of one’s Self and one’s body is only possible through human relationship...read more

This text presents 34 communication theories, from classic to new work, based on one chapter per theory. Extended examples are used to explain each theory, which should help students understand theories by applying their explanations and predictions to real-life situations. Ethics are covered in a special chapter and throughout the text, helping students to focus on the ethical implications of communication theories. Each chapter concludes with a critique of the theory, summarizing its strengths and weaknesses and raising critical questions to encourage analysis and give students an appreciation of the on-going process of communication research. Cartoons are also included to illustrate important concepts. Chapter One provides criteria for determining what makes a communication theory good, encouraging critical thinking from the start. This edition features a new chapter on the history of the communication discipline and a chapter that explains and illustrates two different approaches to communication research and theory: social scientific and humanistic. Totally new sections on intercultural communication and gender communication are also included. Ten new theories are presented, including William Gudykunst's anxiety/uncertainty management theory, Stella Ting-Toomey's face-negotiation theory and Deborah Tannen's genderlect styles.

One of the world’s most influential and prolific media scholars, George Gerbner played a major role in the development of communication theory and research. His critical approach to mass communication changed the way we think about media industries, the messages and images they produce, and their social and cultural impacts. Gerbner is most widely known for his decades of work on television violence, but his research and writing focused on many other vital aspects of the symbolic cultural environment. This book provides a broad-based introduction to Gerbner’s theories of mass communication, his long-term research on media content and effects, and the critical and policy contributions of his work. Although hundreds of studies have been conducted based on Gerbner’s ideas, this is the first volume to provide a concise and comprehensive overview of his many contributions to the field.

Product Description: Originally published as a special issue of Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10:2 (2009), this is the first book to map out historical sociopragmatics, a multidisciplinary field located within historical pragmatics, but overlapping with socially-oriented fields, such as sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis...read more

Product Description: This book is an invitation to consider the consequences of thinking about communication as (im)material with respect to pressing political, cultural, and technological problems. Arguing against those who separate the social world into the material and the symbolic, communication scholars increasingly assert that communication matters in social life precisely because it is the central nexus of constitution: The point at which objects, sites, and bodies intertwine with - and become inseparable from - norms, ideologies, and values in the production of social phenomena...read more

Product Description: Is it possible to incite a turn towards Media Philosophy, a field that accounts for the autonomy of media, for machine agency and for the new modalities of thought and subjectivity that these enable, rather than dwelling on representations, audiences and extensions of the self?In the wake of the field-defining work done by Friedrich Kittler, this important collection of essays takes a philosophical approach to the end of the media era in the traditional sense and outlines the implications of a turn that sees media become concepts of the middle, of connection, and of multitude—across diverse disciplines and theoretical perspectives...read more

Product Description: This study is the first comprehensive presentation of Kierkegaard s method of an indirect communication from a philosophical perspective. The indirect communication is described as Kierkegaard s method of thinking. Indirect communication not only represents a form of broken communication but also a theory on the limits of language and concept and a counterconcept to the systematically hermetic form...read more

Product Description: This handbook offers an overview of the diversity of perspectives on communication: including perspectives from biology, sociality, economics, norms & human development. The scope of the contributions is global, and the volume is relevant to both the empirical and philosophical traditions in human sciences...read more

Product Description: Walter Lippmann has been widely misrepresented in media and communication scholarship. Classified as a utilitarian and characterized as an antidemocratic adversary of philosopher John Dewey in a legendary debate in the 1920s about the role of the public in modern democracies, Lippmann has been portrayed as the bête noir of the post-1980s revival of pragmatism and humanistic studies within the field...read more