Product Description: This is the first course guide that has been developed for students of policing. It identifies the core themes and additional source material, providing an essential overview for students and a reference point for use throughout their studies.
"The best way to understand the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life," writes Malcolm Gladwell, "is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do." Although anyone familiar with the theory of memetics will recognize this concept, Gladwell's The Tipping Point has quite a few interesting twists on the subject.
The book quickly makes it clear that there is no such thing as European politeness. In fact, although the book is organized by regions (Western Europe, Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe), the editors themselves point out that this grouping was chosen more for convenience than for identification, and that a number of other classifications might have been possible. Indeed, it is impossible to generalize about Scandinavian politeness or Western European politeness or Southern European politeness. A Dane, it turns out, will prefer to get to the point, whereas a Finn will favor evasion at all costs. As far as politeness is concerned, an Estonian has more in common with a Finn than with a Pole, despite having a closer physical proximity.
Special dedication to all Contributors and shoutbox regulars: dealing constantly with various multi-cultural problems with understanding and politeness! Thank you all!
From The author's summary: I set out in this book to explore how the notion of point of view is relevant to the stylistic analysis of dramatic texts. My reasons for doing this stemmed from the fact that, although viewpoint has largely been disregarded in the criticism of drama, some dramatic texts exhibit discourse architectures that are at least as complex as prose fiction narratives. This in itself suggests that point of view is relevant to the analysis of dramatic texts too, though, as I have shown, even in those dramatic texts exhibiting more prototypical discourse structures point of view effects can arise.
Items in this Dictionary have been researched by anthropologists, archaeologists, biologists, linguists, psychiatrists, psychologists, semioticians, and others who have studied human communication from a scientific point of view.
