Developed for students in telecommunications management, media management, and the business of media, this text helps future media professionals understand the relationship and convergence patterns between the broadcast, cable television, telephony, and Internet communication industries.

The second edition includes updated research throughout , including material on major business and technology changes and the importance of digital lifestyle reflected in E-commerce and personalized media selection, such as Netflix and iTunes, and the growing importance of Facebook and social networking from a business perspective. Also included with this edition is a new and robust companion website that includes discussion questions, exercises, further readings, all of the book’s tables and figures, video links and an RSS feed.

Find out more.

Order a complimentary exam copy.

The contents include summaries of communication research programs that represent the most current innovative work separated into the following sections:

Part I: Rethinking Organizational Membership and Career Formation in a Global Information Society
Part II: Rethinking Communication Frameworks, Models, Methods, and Paradigms
Part III: Reassessments of Message Design and Persuasion Scholarship
Part IV: Reviewing Trends: Scholarship Evaluating Media Engagement and Exposure Effects.

Offering a blend of chapters emphasizing timely disciplinary concerns and enduring theoretical questions, this volume will be valuable to scholars throughout communication studies.

Recommend to your librarian today!

The editors put together this collection working under the assumption that journalists’ backgrounds, working conditions and ideas are related to what is reported (and how it is covered) in the various news media round the world, in spite of societal and organizational constraints, and that this news coverage matters in terms of world public opinion and policies. Outstanding features include:

•Coverage of 33 nations located around the globe, based on recent surveys conducted among representative samples of local journalists
•Comprehensive analyses by well-known media scholars from each country
•A section on comparative studies of journalists
•An appendix with a collection of survey questions used in various nations to question journalists

As the most comprehensive and reliable source on journalists around the world, The Global Journalist will serve as the primary source for evaluating the state of journalism. As such, it promises to become a standard reference among journalism, media, and communication students and researchers around the world.

Take a look inside the book!

Read more!

By introducing readers to actual human subjects speaking about how their identities have been shaped and transformed through time, the author explores how discourses reproduce ideology and social power relations. Readers are challenged to consider complex influences between human subjects and institutionalized discourses through critical-interpretive analyses of transcribed speech.

The Life of Voices has an interdisciplinary flair grounded in careful research. Scholars in communication, sociology, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, gender studies and identity politics will find valuable insights, methods and examples in this work. It is essential reading for anyone who is interested in discourse studies and the body’s relationship to speech or human identity formation.
 

Cosmopolitanism as a theoretical repertoire provides nuanced descriptions of what it means to be and communicate as a global citizen, how to critically study interconnectedness within and across cultures, and how to embrace differences without glossing over them. Moving intercultural communication studies towards the global in complex and nuanced ways, this book highlights crucial links between globalization, transnationalism, postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, social injustice and intercultural communication, and will help in the creation of classroom spaces devoted to exploring these links. It also engages the links between theory and praxis in order to move towards intercultural communication pedagogy and research that simultaneously celebrates and interrogates issues of cultural difference with the aim of creating continuity rather than chasms. In sum, this book orients intercultural communication scholarship firmly towards the critical and postcolonial, while still allowing the incorporation of traditional intercultural communication concepts, thereby preparing students, scholars, educators and interculturalists to communicate ethically in a world that is simultaneously global and local.

Recommend to your librarian, or order a copy!

Key features include:

•Advice on how to write and place effective press releases, plan and budget for campaigns, and anticipate responses from different sectors and the wider public
•Coverage of different types of communication and consultancy, including the controversial areas of lobbying and access to influential policy makers
•Case studies on the way in which experienced journalists and public relations practitioners gain coverage for their work, with plentiful examples drawn from both recent media scares and long-running issues
•A survey of the way challenging public relations issues have been perceived in the past, analysing the attitudes of both legislators and the public
•A user-friendly format designed to reinforce learning, including handy tips, definition boxes explaining key words and concepts, and exercises and reflection points to stimulate group discussion and reflection on specific examples of science and medical PR practice.
Wide-ranging and highly accessible, this book will be an essential resource for undergraduates, postgraduates and professionals learning to specialise in health public relations.

Order your copy today!

Named as one of Routledge's Books of the Month, as an example of an innovative revision of a popular text.

Read more...

This innovative and popular text provides a clear pathway to developing public relations campaigns and other types of strategic communication.

Implementing the pragmatic, in-depth approach of the previous editions, author Ronald D. Smith presents a step-by-step unfolding of the strategic campaign process used in public relations practice. Drawing from his experience in professional practice and in the classroom, Smith walks readers through the critical steps for the formative research, strategic and tactical planning, and plan evaluation phases of the process.

Order your complimentary exam copy if you teach a relevant course.

See all titles listed as books of the month...

Read more about the topics explored in The Routledge Companion to Digital Consumption in this fascinating interview with the editors.
 

Overall, what picture do these interesting, yet varied essays, point of digital consumption? Is there an overarching message, and if not, are there particular divergences that are important to note?

In a few short decades digital consumption has colonized more and more of our lives from entertainment to communication to shopping to learning about the world. We have had many technological revolutions before, dating back to the Stone Age. But this one is profound. As consumers of digital technologies, we have already experienced seismic shifts in how we spend our day. Industries have rapidly emerged and others have rapidly declined in the face of these shifts in consumption. This book is a compendium of answers to what this means for consumers, marketers, theory, research, and human well-being.

Which of the essays in this collection would you say was the most radical in terms of its view of digital consumption, and why?

Norah Campbell’s chapter on the posthuman consumer presents a radical view of consumers becoming digital machines and digital machines becoming human. Each of the chapters in the section on researching the digital consumer introduces radically new methods needed to understand digital consumption. And the chapters by Pridmore and Zwick and Singh and Lyon alert us to the social and ethical issues arising from digital surveillance and the radical changes in notions of privacy that such surveillance is creating.

What prompted you to bring this collection together and are there any essays that you particularly agree with or feel are very important in terms of getting a particular message about digital consumption out there?

Digital consumption was the elephant in the room that everyone could see but very few were addressing in terms of what it means for consumer theory and practice. The papers in the introductory section on “What’s Digital?” help set the stage for the volume by tracing many of the changes taking place and raising an agenda of issues. The next five sections help understand a variety of digital consumption phenomenon that together comprise a good view of the emerging field. But the final section on issues for society and culture is the most profound in taking a hard critical look at the consequences, both positive and negative, that have thus far arisen in the area of digital consumption.

Please could you say a few words about the potential dangers that arise from taking digital consumption for granted? How would these play themselves out?

Past technological revolutions like those involving electricity, the telegraph, radio, television, and the automobile have taught us that while they were inevitably accompanied by simultaneous frenzies of technophilia and technophobia, it is once they became normalized that they had their greatest impacts, even though they were less appreciated at the time. The same is true of digital consumption. We have already seen how changes in the consumption of books, music, and film initially caused celebrations of free information and at the same time fierce resistance from those industries wed too strongly to older technologies. But issues of what digital consumption do to our notions of self, trust, friendship, and consumer activism have been less appreciated until recently, even though they likely have a more profound on our well being.

What do you think is the biggest assumption about digital consumption that needs to be addressed?

The initial assumption was that the so-called digital divide would separate ages, genders, and nations, empowering the young, men, and wealthy nations and disempowering the others. This gave way to an almost opposite assumption that digital technologies level the playing field, with digital phones leapfrogging landlines and anyone being able to buy, sell, and compete online. Neither of these assumptions was wholly warranted, but we need to find just which groups are benefitting from digital consumption and what the impediments are for those who are not. We also need to critically examine the assumption that everyone must have high speed internet access in order to be a fully functioning human being able to compete in the global marketplace.

How much does digital consumption reflect itself in society? Do you have any anecdotes that you would like to share which reflect this or sum it up?

We already have numerous concepts that have changed our lexicon, from “Google it” to “lol” to “in the cloud.” There’s an anecdote contained in the initial chapter about how one of us was teaching a class first thing in the morning on the first day of the term and students were straggling in late due to a major snow storm. When they were asked how many had nevertheless been on Facebook already that morning, three-fourths raised their hands. When they were asked how many had been on Facebook before they got out of bed, nearly a third raised their hands. Just don’t expect your hundreds of Facebook friends to all show up at your wedding or funeral.

How fast do you think digital consumption is evolving and to what extent can you see it taking over our lives? In other words, will there always be a place for the cashier?

There is already something of a backlash with banks and other institutions advertising that when you call you can talk to a real human being. So perhaps “taking over our lives” is a bit too extreme. With the advent of digital music, the record has made a comeback. And there is still a reasonable market for books and magazines made of paper. Together with printing out digital copies, our consumption of paper has actually gone up. But these exceptions do not negate the wave of digital consumption sweeping over us. Yes, there will always be a place for the cashier as well as the butcher, the waiter, and the air host or hostess, just as there is still a place for the blacksmith, the sweeper, and the actor or actress. But it is a safe bet that there are ever more human applications that will be replaced or aided by some form of digital encounter. Even robotic partners for life have been proposed by some utopic or dystopic visionaries.
 

Some of us may believe that interpersonal communication is a matter of common sense or that skillful communication is an innate ability that you either have or you don’t. In this text, Denise Solomon and Jennifer Theiss demonstrate that interpersonal communication skills are not just common sense; nor are they mysterious qualities that defy learning. Interpersonal Communication: Putting Theory into Practice draws on theory and research in the interpersonal communication discipline to help you identify strategies to improve your communication skills. Denise and Jen introduce interpersonal communication as a subject of scientific research that has enormous relevance to your daily lives. You will learn to use what researchers have discovered about interpersonal communication to improve your own ability to communicate well. You will also read about contemporary research in interpersonal communication, a foundation for establishing skill-building tips.

Read More | Companion Website | View Inside | Complimentary Exam Copy

Routledge are offering all delegates a 20% discount on our communication and media books.

All delegates can use discount code ICCMSD13 to recive 20% off our communication and media books, including:

Visual Communication on the Web
The Media Studies Reader
A Handbook of Media and Communication Research
Persuasion in Society
Case Studies in Crisis Communication
Sourcebook for Political Communication Research
The Handbook of Comparative Communication Research
The Social Media Industries
The Media Economy

Find out more about the conference.

Historians of rhetoric have long worked to recover women's education in reading and writing, but have only recently begun to explore women's speaking practices, from the parlor to the platform to the varied types of institutions where women learned elocutionary and oratorical skills in preparation for professional and public life. This book fills an important gap in the history of rhetoric and suggests new paths for the way histories may be told in the future, tracing the shifting arc of women's oratorical training as it develops from forms of eighteenth-century rhetoric into institutional and extrainstitutional settings at the end of the nineteenth century and diverges into several distinct streams of community-embodied theory and practice in the twentieth.

Treating key rhetors, genres, settings, and movements from the early republic to the present, these essays collectively challenge and complicate many previous claims made about the stability and development of gendered public and private spheres, the decline of oratorical culture and the limits of women's oratorical forms such as elocution and parlor rhetorics, and women's responses to rhetorical constraints on their public speaking.

Recommend to your librarian.

Find out more about the Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication Series.

New and forthcoming titles from this series are listed below.

.
 

With essays by emerging voices in identity communication, volume contributors discuss the ways that racial, cultural, and gender identities are perceived and relayed within those communities and the media. The text’s essays are structured into four parts, each highlighting different themes of identity communication, from general approaches to racial perceptions to female and adolescent identities.

Order your copy today.

More forthcoming titles in this series can be found below.

.

To honor the Grunig’s scholarship, this volume continues to expand their body of work with essays from renowned colleagues, former students, and research associates. The chapters discuss current trends in the field as well as emerging issues that drive the field forward. Sample topics include theories and future aspects of the behavioral, strategic management approach to managing public relations, and its linkages and implications to related subfields and key field issues. Contributions stimulate academic discussion and demonstrate the relevance of applied theories for the practice of public relations and communication management with up-to-date concepts, theories, and thoughts.

Order your copy today.

What prompted you to write this book?

Two personal perspectives. With over twenty years of experience in the industry as a public relations practitioner, Margalit identified a significant gap in the way public relations was practiced and perceived in Israel compared to the developed countries she visited as a member of the international PR community. While studying and working in the US she became intrigued by those differences. Israel for example, had no academic program in public relations till 2011 while in the US it was a recognised discipline within many universities. She decided to respond to scholars such as Sriramesh and Vercic who in the late 1990s called for the discipline of public relations to research the profession within the context of specific cultural and political environments rather than follow the assumption that all public relations experiences follow the US model.
As a Scottish republican, David has been questioning national identity almost since birth and has been researching PR since 1997. Only recently, however, did he appreciate the formative role of public relations in personal and national narratives and the impact of national identities on the evolution of PR as a profession. Our joint trips to Israel helped us both to identify the interplay of nation building and PR as a distinctive way to understand both the uniqueness of the Israeli system and its possible relevance to other unique national experiences.

What makes Israel stand out from other countries, in terms of the use of PR to inform/build national identity?

Israel, at 65, is relatively a new state that was established by immigrants from around the world with about 70 different cultural identities and languages. The Zionist movement that established the state made a phenomenal effort to unite them into one society and to create a new Israeli identity. The first public relations practitioners were employed by Zionist institutions. They used PR to enlist the new immigrants to the challenging tasks involved in building a nation and a state. They also provided the enlisting narratives, symbols, and emotional messages that inspired the sacrifice of personal individual goals, and sometimes, lives, for the sake of building a state.

Does the definition of PR change when used in the context of nation building?

Current definitions of public relations emphasise the role of the practitioners as facilitators of dialogue between organisations and their constituents, and as builders of networks of relationships. We argue that in situations of nation building, the pressure to use propaganda-style communication is intense. The whole society, including the media, tends to cooperate and support the agendas set by the national leadership. Typically, there is no tolerance for dissident voices as happens during wars. Enlisted societies rarely offer the democratic environment that allows PR to flourish in line with contemporary definitions.
 

Do other techniques form national identities in Israel?

There is a special term in Hebrew called Hasbara which, literally, means “explanation.” It is used to describe the effort of government, or other organisations, to influence public opinion within Israel and abroad. A paternalistic approach to persuasive communication, Hasbara is based on the assumption that the receivers of the message are ignorant or lack the background knowledge to understand correctly without guidance. Hasbara, or the lack of it, is often blamed for the poor image of Israel abroad and the international criticism on its behaviour, especially in the context of its conflict with Palestinians. Hasbara is often used to describe public relations campaigns though it is closer to propaganda and does not recognise the need for interactive dialogue.

What is the difference between political propaganda and public relations, or is it that political propaganda is a tool of public relations?

Any type of propaganda, not just political propaganda, is one sided and involves half-truth or lies while ignoring or shutting down the voices of opponents. Public relations aims to be more dialogical and to present activists and other critical voices to the decision makers of their organisations. The profession aspires to ethical communication and to the building of relations of trust with stakeholders, the public, and the media. In reality, however, it can operate akin to many features of propaganda and only pay lip service to the attitudes and demands of internal and external publics.

Why do you think PR has not been examined before in terms of nation building and national identity?

There have been a few scholars who did examine this interaction and, more recently, there’s been increased research in the area. Nonetheless, most of the literature on public relations has been produced since the 1920s in the US. That literature assumed American leadership of the profession and the academic research. With the rise of globalisation, and less US-centric approaches, scholars have studied different professional experiences in different parts of the world. Jacquie L’Etang’s (2004) pioneering book on the history of public relations in Britain was a first of its kind. In a sense our book follows her steps by providing a different story from another political, economic, and socio-cultural environment.

What is the overall message of the book?

That unity should not ride roughshod over democracy and that dissenting voices need to be heard. We see an urgent need to make the future activities of public relations contribute positively and transparently to the growth of “fully functioning societies.” In a climate of nation building and nationalism, PR can be too easily pressed into the service of government propaganda. It needs to build a history of resistances to these pressures. By remembering that it functions best in a democratic environment, it can help to speak truth to power to preserve that environment. Israel’s success in providing narratives that enlist society to unite and to sacrifice for the state offers lessons that unity sometimes comes at the cost of democracy.

If you were pressed to name one lesson to be taken away from this research, what would it be?

We hope our narrative will encourage public relations practitioners and scholars from all over the world to make their histories visible, to learn from both their positive and negative aspects and to share both as widely as possible. Our deeper aspiration is that PR practitioners, activists, and media workers can jointly contribute to more democratic societies.

Who did you write this book for?

We have ongoing discussion with Margalit’s family and friends in Israel and Israelis, Jews and non-Jews outside of the country. While writing the book we were trying to clarify our position to them and work out how our experiences in our nations had shaped us. Our colleagues and friends from all over the world who research and study the role of public relations in society were a significant audience in our mind. We also tried to create a book that would help Israelis understand PR and the Israeli PR industry to acknowledge its professional roots and be inspired by the socially responsible aspirations of contemporary public relations practitioners across the world.
 

The need for this Sourcebook stems from recent innovations in political communication involving the use of advanced statistical techniques, innovative conceptual frameworks, the rise of digital media as both a means by which to disseminate and study political communication, and methods recently adapted from other disciplines, particularly psychology, sociology, and neuroscience. Chapters will have a social-scientific orientation and will explain new methodologies and measures applicable to questions regarding media, politics, and civic life. The Sourcebook covers the major analytical techniques used in political communication research, including surveys (both original data collections and secondary analyses), experiments, content analysis, discourse analysis (focus groups and textual analysis), network and deliberation analysis, comparative study designs, statistical analysis, and measurement issues. Order a copy or view inside this book to find out more.