Exploring the characteristics of different types of workplace conversations, including decision-making, training, briefing or making arrangements, this enthralling account pays particular attention to interactions with a more social focus, such as small talk or office gossip.
Presenting a range of approaches to analyzing such workplace discourse, Almut Koester argues for a combination of quantitative corpus-based methods, to compare specific linguistic features in different genres and qualitative methods involving a close analysis of individual conversations, to explore such issues as politeness, power, conflict and consensus-building. A corpus of conversations recorded in a variety of office environments both in the UK and the USA is used throughout to demonstrate the interplay between speakers accomplishing tasks and maintaining relationships in the workplace.
This innovative study of naturally-occurring English conversations between Hong Kong Chinese and their native English friends and colleagues makes a worthwhile contribution to the research literature on intercultural conversation. Through analyzing dyadic intercultural conversations, the study investigates the ways in which culturally divergent conversationalists manage their organizational and interpersonal aspects of the unfolding conversations.
is written to introduce readers to the ethnographic study of intercultural and social interactions. This is done by analyzing several specific conversations in which different cultural orientations are operating, seeking to hear in them, cultures at work. The particular cases analyzed and commented on involve conversations that bring together practices from Britain, Finland, Russia, Blackfeet Country, and the United States, with each being in some sense distinctive in its communication codes, that is, in its use of symbolic meanings, forms, norms, and motivational themes.
Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most
Members of the Harvard Negotiation Project--which brought you the mega-bestseller Getting to YES--show you how to handle your most difficult conversations with confidence and skill.
Whether you're dealing with an underperforming employee, disagreeing with your spouse about money or child-rearing, negotiating with a difficult client, or simply saying "no," or "I'm sorry," or "I love you," we attempt or avoid difficult conversations every day. Based on fifteen years of research at the Harvard Negotiation Project, Difficult Conversations walks you through a step-by-step proven approach to having your toughest conversations with less stress and more success. You will learn:
how to start the conversation without defensiveness
why what is not said is as important as what is
ways of keeping and regaining your balance in the face of attacks and accusations
how to decipher the underlying structure of every difficult conversation
Filled with examples from everyday life, Difficult Conversations will help you on the job, at home, or out in the world. It is a book you will turn to again and again for advice, practical skills, and reassurance.
Difficult Conversations is a New York Times Business Bestseller.
Conversations in the Cognitive Neurosciences
Conversations in the Cognitive Neurosciences is a brief, informative
yet informal guide to recent developments in the cognitive
neurosciences by the scientists who are in the thick of things.
"Getting a fix on important questions and how to think about them from
an experimental point of view is what scientists talk about, sometimes
endlessly. It is those conversations that thrill and motivate,"
observes Michael Gazzaniga. Yet all too often these exciting
interactions are lost to students, researchers, and others who are
"doing" science. Conversations in the Cognitive Neurosciences brings
together a series of interviews with prominent individuals in
neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology that have
appeared over the past few years in the Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience.
The ten interviews are divided into five sections: basic neuroscience
approaches to cognition (Floyd Bloom and Mark Raichle), attentional and
perceptual processes (Michael I. Posner and William T. Newsome), neural
basis of memory (Randy Gallistel and Endel Tulving), language (Steven
Pinker and Alfonso Caramazza), and imagery and consciousness (Stephen
M. Kosslyn and Daniel C. Dennett)
