Argues that anyone—anthropologist, psychologist, or policeman—who uses what people say to find out what people think had better know how speech itself is organized.

Packed with research-based insights from leading workplaces, Let's Talk Culture is the how-to guide for people leaders who want to shape a world-class team culture by design. Successful leaders and organizations know that culture is the unseen advantage of world-class teams. But can it be influenced? And what role do managers play in building and shaping it? Author and expert in leader communication, Shane Michael Hatton, says the research suggests it can be influenced and that the people leader plays a crucial role – but it all starts with effective communication. Based on extensive research with people leaders on the ground, Let's Talk Culture reveals the five practical conversations people leaders need to have to design a world-class team culture within their organzation. An easy-to-understand guide for future culture champions, this book will give you the tools to build a team that attracts and retains your top talent, confidently address cultural inconsistencies in the workplace and meaningfully reward the behaviors that strengthen your team culture.

This edited collection presents a range of heretofore unpublished, unavailable methods for the systematic reconstruction of culture from interviews and other discourse. Authors set the design and evolution of their methods in the context of their own research projects, and draw general lessons about investigating culture through discourse. These methods have largely grown out of the work of the cultural models school, and represent the approaches of some of the very best methodologists in cultural anthropology today. An impetus for the volume has been inquiries from researchers, many of them graduate students, about how to conduct the kind of research that cultural models theorists do. This is not a linguistics book; unlike approaches to discourse analysis from linguistics, this volume focuses on culture, treating discourse as a medium especially rich in clues for cultural analysis, and hence a window into culture.

In Communication as...: Perspectives on Theory, editors Gregory J. Shepherd, Jeffrey St. John, and Ted Striphas bring together a collection of 27 essays that explores the wide range of theorizing about communication, cutting across all lines of traditional division in the field. The essays in this text are written by leading scholars in the field of communication theory, with each scholar employing a particular stance or perspective on what communication theory is and how it functions. In essays that are brief, argumentative, and forceful, the scholars propose their perspective as a primary or essential way of viewing communication with decided benefits over other views.

Speaking Culturally presents case studies of two cultures, focusing on how speaking is thematized and enacted in each. The Teamsterville culture is drawn from the author’s studies of the spoken life of an urban, working-class neighborhood in Chicago, while the Nacirema culture draws upon studies of communication among middle-class Americans, primarily on the West Coast. Using fieldwork conducted over a period of twenty years, Philipsen shows how listening to a people’s spoken life can reveal expressions of underlying codes—or social rhetorics—of what it means to be a person, how persons can and should be linked together in social relations, and how communication can and should be used in interpersonal conduct. From these studies of speaking in two cultures emerges an understanding of communication as an activity in which people not only draw from and express but also shape and fashion their understandings of self, society, and strategic action.

With fourteen articles written by well-known anthropologists, this book addresses the theme of representation in anthropology and explores the directions in which anthropology is moving following the debates of the 1980s.

The Histories of Anthropology Annual series presents diverse perspectives on the discipline’s history within a global context, with a goal of increasing awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and doing anthropology. Critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfields of anthropology are included. This ninth volume of the series, Corridor Talk to Culture History showcases geographic diversity by exploring how anthropologists have presented their methods and theories to the public and in general to a variety of audiences. Contributors examine interpretive and methodological diversity within anthropological traditions often viewed from the standpoint of professional consensus, the ways anthropological relations cross disciplinary boundaries, and the contrast between academic authority and public culture, which is traced to the professionalization of anthropology and other social sciences in the nineteenth century. Essays showcase the research and personalities of Alexander Goldenweiser, Robert Lowie, Harlan I. Smith, Fustel de Coulanges, Edmund Leach, Carl Withers, and Margaret Mead, among others.