Making Social Worlds A Communication Perspective

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ISBN: 9781405162593 | 1405162597
Cover: Hardcover
Copyright: 11/5/2007

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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

Preface	p. ix
An Invitation...	p. ix
Extended to...	p. xii
Everyone	p. xii
Students	p. xii
Professionals	p. xv
With Appreciation for...	p. xv
Critical Moments that Shape Our Social Worlds	p. 1
Preview	p. 1
A Critical Moment in a 911 Emergency Telephone Call	p. 1
Why Acting Wisely in Critical Moments is Important: We're in a Race that We Need to Win	p. 6
9/11: A Missed Opportunity to Act Wisely in a Critical Moment	p. 12
What happened?	p. 12
How was the story told?	p. 13
How did President Bush respond?	p. 16
Could President Bush have responded in another way?	p. 17
Examples of acting wisely in critical moments	p. 18
Could President Bush have acted more wisely in the critical moment of 9/11?	p. 21
Taking a Communication Perspective on Social Worlds	p. 29
Preview	p. 29
Everybody Has a Theory of Communication, Although Most People Don't Know It	p. 30
If Communication is so Important, How Should We Understand It?	p. 30
My Discovery of Social Worlds	p. 38
Social worlds	p. 40
The worldliness of social worlds	p. 41
There are many social worlds	p. 42
Social worlds are made	p. 48
Each of us is an agent in the process of making social worlds	p. 52
Questions Asked by Those who Take a Communication Perspective on Social Worlds	p. 53
Paradigms and the "Physics" of Social Worlds	p. 57
Preview	p. 57
What was That?	p. 58
Paradigms	p. 58
Questions and Questioning	p. 61
Playfulness	p. 65
Systemic	p. 67
Process	p. 68
Emergent Characteristics	p. 70
Communication: Coordinating Actions and Making/Managing Meanings	p. 78
Preview	p. 78
Theory as a Way of Seeing Things	p. 78
Coordinating Actions	p. 80
Choosing "coordination" as a sensitizing concept for understanding communication	p. 83
Understanding how patterns of communication develop and discerning critical moments	p. 88
Acting wisely in critical moments	p. 93
Making/Managing Meaning	p. 95
Coherence: the gift of meaning and purpose	p. 96
Subjugation: the cost of fitting into prefigured molds	p. 98
Mystery: the gift of wonder and openings for exploration	p. 98
Communication as the Site where Social Worlds are Made	p. 100
Doing Things in Communication: Speech Acts	p. 105
Preview	p. 105
Speech Acts and the Quality of Our Lives	p. 105
Our Social Worlds are Made of Speech Acts	p. 106
Why call them "speech acts"?	p. 108
How many speech acts are there?	p. 109
Where do speech acts come from?	p. 110
Speech Acts are Made in Coordinated Actions	p. 112
Performing Speech Acts	p. 115
What is being done by what is said? Conversational implicature	p. 116
To what is that a response? The conversational triplet	p. 117
What can/must/should I do? Logical force	p. 119
What is the wisest course of action? Ante-narrative	p. 121
Making Better Social Worlds	p. 122
Change the situation so that there will be a different ratio of speech acts	p. 123
Resist or prevent the performance of undesired speech acts	p. 124
Facilitating or enabling the performance of desired speech acts	p. 126
Episodes and Patterns of Communication	p. 131
Preview	p. 131
Social Life is Episodic	p. 132
Our Social Worlds are Made of Episodes	p. 133
Making Episodes	p. 134
Making/managing meaning: perceiving the flow of experience as episodes	p. 135
Realizing episodes in coordinated action	p. 148
Patterns of Communication	p. 157
Making Better Social Worlds	p. 162
Freeing us up so that we can make wiser choices	p. 162
Calling better patterns of communication into being	p. 165
Selves and Forms of Consciousness	p. 171
Preview	p. 171
Here I Am!	p. 171
Selves are Made in Processes of Communication	p. 173
Forms of Consciousness Emerge in Processes of Communication	p. 181
The Role of Selves in Making Social Worlds	p. 189
Making Better Social Worlds	p. 191
Is there an innate impulse toward evolution of consciousness?	p. 192
Is there a special kind of transformative learning?	p. 192
How can we support each other in our zones of proximal development?	p. 193
How can we structure our institutions so that they support the evolution of consciousness?	p. 194
Can we take proactive steps to structure better forms of communication?	p. 195
Relationships and Relational Minds	p. 199
Preview	p. 199
The Difference between Being Related and Being in Relationship	p. 199
Relationships and Minds as Objects in Our Social Worlds	p. 200
Relationships as Contexts for the Way We Communicate	p. 204
Making Relationships in Communication	p. 210
The Evolution of Relational Minds	p. 213
Making Better Social Worlds	p. 216
Afterword: Something of a Guide for Using CMM	p. 224
Warning!	p. 224
Ways of "Using" CMM	p. 225
How Do You Know if You've Used CMM Well?	p. 226
A Typical Four-phase Sequence in Using CMM	p. 227
Description	p. 227
Interpretation	p. 228
Critique	p. 229
Putting it into practice	p. 230
Entry Points for CMM Practice	p. 231
An Example of Consulting Using Systemic Questioning	p. 232
This is a Test...	p. 239
Index	p. 241
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Making Social Worlds A Communication Perspective

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