Making Better Social Worlds

Download or read book Making Social Worlds written by W. Barnett Pearce and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making Social Worlds: A Communication Perspective offers the most accessible introduction to the tools and concepts of CMM – Coordinated Management of Meaning – one of the groundbreaking theories of speech communication. Draws upon advances in research for the most up-to-date concepts in speech communication Defines the 'critical moments' of communication for students and practitioners; encouraging us to view communication as a two-sided process of coordinating actions and making/managing meanings Questions how we can intervene in dangerous or undesirable patterns of communication that will result in better social worlds

Download or read book The Coordinated Management of Meaning written by Stephen W. Littlejohn and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. In the broadest sense, these are probably the three general themes found in the work of Pearce and his colleagues. In another sense, these categories also identify three important dimensions of Pearce’s major contribution, the theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning.

Download or read book A Call to Cosmopolitan Communication written by Arthur Jensen and published by . This book was released on 2020-12-13 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are witnessing the emergence of a new form of communication, one with the potential to overcome the political polarization dominating our social landscape in recent decades. Cosmopolitan communication is one way of naming this emerging form and the promise it holds. In A Call to Cosmopolitan Communication, Arthur Jensen explores the dimensions, skillsets, and transforming potential of this new form, contrasting it with the all-too-familiar patterns of communication we experience as ethnocentric and modernistic tendencies.Drawing on Pearce and Cronen's enduring practical theory, the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM), Jensen focuses on the concept of mystery and our ability to co-produce narratives of richness that embrace our differences instead of simply assimilating, tolerating, or dismissing them.A Call to Cosmopolitan Communication is not a call to arms. Rather, it is a call to human thriving, made possible by recognizing that our lives are shaped in social interaction with others and that the quality of our communication with each other matters enormously. This book, along with Penman and Jensen's previous work in Making Better Social Worlds, supports Cosmopolis2045.com, a companion project depicting one vision of a better social world that can emerge from a cosmopolitan mindset.

Download or read book Making Better Social Worlds written by Robyn Penman and published by CMMi Press. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do you despair about the divisiveness, the hatred, and the lack of compassion in our social world? Are you looking for a better way to manage the complexities and demands of 21st century social life? Well, this book offers just such a way. Following the adage of Einstein, that you cannot solve problems with the mindset that created it, you are introduced to a new way of thinking and acting that opens up possibilities for a more hopeful future than the one we currently face. The new mindset presumes that we create our social worlds in communication, that our relationships with people matter deeply to the quality of our lives and that living with difference enriches us. The authors draw on the Theory of the Co-ordinated Management of Meaning for inspiration, making dense concepts and technical language more accessible so that you can use the theory. You are introduced to such notions as relational beings, self-reflexivity and storied worlds, along with what it can mean to engage in joint action, dialogue and cosmopolitan communication. By drawing on these ideas and implementing them in our everyday interpersonal communication, the authors show how changing our communication practices can bring about social and cultural change.

Download or read book Making the Social World written by John Searle and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-12 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are few more important philosophers at work today than John Searle, a creative and contentious thinker who has shaped the way we think about mind and language. Now he offers a profound understanding of how we create a social reality--a reality of money, property, governments, marriages, stock markets and cocktail parties. The paradox he addresses in Making the Social World is that these facts only exist because we think they exist and yet they have an objective existence. Continuing a line of investigation begun in his earlier book The Construction of Social Reality, Searle identifies the precise role of language in the creation of all "institutional facts." His aim is to show how mind, language and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle explains how a single linguistic operation, repeated over and over, is used to create and maintain the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together. Searle then applies the account to show how it relates to human rationality, the freedom of the will, the nature of political power and the existence of universal human rights. In the course of his explication, he asks whether robots can have institutions, why the threat of force so often lies behind institutions, and he denies that there can be such a thing as a "state of nature" for language-using human beings.

Download or read book Decoding the Social World written by Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-12-22 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How data science and the analysis of networks help us solve the puzzle of unintended consequences. Social life is full of paradoxes. Our intentional actions often trigger outcomes that we did not intend or even envision. How do we explain those unintended effects and what can we do to regulate them? In Decoding the Social World, Sandra González-Bailón explains how data science and digital traces help us solve the puzzle of unintended consequences—offering the solution to a social paradox that has intrigued thinkers for centuries. Communication has always been the force that makes a collection of people more than the sum of individuals, but only now can we explain why: digital technologies have made it possible to parse the information we generate by being social in new, imaginative ways. And yet we must look at that data, González-Bailón argues, through the lens of theories that capture the nature of social life. The technologies we use, in the end, are also a manifestation of the social world we inhabit. González-Bailón discusses how the unpredictability of social life relates to communication networks, social influence, and the unintended effects that derive from individual decisions. She describes how communication generates social dynamics in aggregate (leading to episodes of “collective effervescence”) and discusses the mechanisms that underlie large-scale diffusion, when information and behavior spread “like wildfire.” She applies the theory of networks to illuminate why collective outcomes can differ drastically even when they arise from the same individual actions. By opening the black box of unintended effects, González-Bailón identifies strategies for social intervention and discusses the policy implications—and how data science and evidence-based research embolden critical thinking in a world that is constantly changing.

Download or read book Divergent Social Worlds written by Ruth D. Peterson and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2010-07-07 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than half a century after the first Jim Crow laws were dismantled, the majority of urban neighborhoods in the United States remain segregated by race. The degree of social and economic advantage or disadvantage that each community experiences—particularly its crime rate—is most often a reflection of which group is in the majority. As Ruth Peterson and Lauren Krivo note in Divergent Social Worlds, "Race, place, and crime are still inextricably linked in the minds of the public." This book broadens the scope of single-city, black/white studies by using national data to compare local crime patterns in five racially distinct types of neighborhoods. Peterson and Krivo meticulously demonstrate how residential segregation creates and maintains inequality in neighborhood crime rates. Based on the authors' groundbreaking National Neighborhood Crime Study (NNCS), Divergent Social Worlds provides a more complete picture of the social conditions underlying neighborhood crime patterns than has ever before been drawn. The study includes economic, social, and local investment data for nearly nine thousand neighborhoods in eighty-seven cities, and the findings reveal a pattern across neighborhoods of racialized separation among unequal groups. Residential segregation reproduces existing privilege or disadvantage in neighborhoods—such as adequate or inadequate schools, political representation, and local business—increasing the potential for crime and instability in impoverished non-white areas yet providing few opportunities for residents to improve conditions or leave. And the numbers bear this out. Among urban residents, more than two-thirds of all whites, half of all African Americans, and one-third of Latinos live in segregated local neighborhoods. More than 90 percent of white neighborhoods have low poverty, but this is only true for one quarter of black, Latino, and minority areas. Of the five types of neighborhoods studied, African American communities experience violent crime on average at a rate five times that of their white counterparts, with violence rates for Latino, minority, and integrated neighborhoods falling between the two extremes. Divergent Social Worlds lays to rest the popular misconception that persistently high crime rates in impoverished, non-white neighborhoods are merely the result of individual pathologies or, worse, inherent group criminality. Yet Peterson and Krivo also show that the reality of crime inequality in urban neighborhoods is no less alarming. Separate, the book emphasizes, is inherently unequal. Divergent Social Worlds lays the groundwork for closing the gap—and for next steps among organizers, policymakers, and future researchers. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology