Handbooks of Communication Science

This handbook combines the perspectives of communication studies, economics and management, and psychology in order to provide a comprehensive economic view on personal and mass communication.
It is divided into six parts that comprise:

1. an overarching introduction that defines the field and provides a brief overview of its history (1 chapter)
2. the most commonly used theoretic frameworks for the analysis of communication economics and management (4 chapters)
3. the peculiarities of the quantitative and qualitative methods and data used in the field (3 chapters)
4. key issues of the field such as the economics of language, labor in creative industries, media concentration, branding etc. (10 chapters)
5. descriptions of the development, trends and peculiarities of the field in different parts of the world, written by scholars from the respective region (10 chapters)
6. reflections on future directions for the field, both from a managerial and from an economics perspective (1 chapter).

The authors of the individual chapters represent different academic disciplines, research traditions, and geographic backgrounds. The reader will thus gain multifaceted insights into the management and economics of communication.

Sport is a universal feature of global popular culture. It shapes our identities, affects our relationships, and defines our communities. It also influences our consumption habits, represents our cultures, and dramatizes our politics. In other words, sport is among the most prominent vehicles for communication available in daily life. Nevertheless, only recently has it begun to receive robust attention in the discipline of communication studies. The handbook of Communication and Sport attends to the recent and rapid growth of scholarship in communication and media studies that features sport as a central site of inquiry. The book attempts to capture a full range of methods, theories, and topics that have come to define the subfield of "communication and sport" or "sports communication." It does so by emphasizing four primary features. First, it foregrounds "communication" as central to the study of sport. This emphasis helps to distinguish the book from collections in related disciplines such as sociology, and also points readers beyond media as the primary or only context for understanding the relationship between communication and sport. Thus, in addition to studies of media effects, mediatization, media framing, and more, readers will also engage with studies in interpersonal, intercultural, organizational, and rhetorical communication. Second, the handbook presents an array of methods, theories, and topics in the effort to chart a comprehensive landscape of communication and sport scholarship. Thus, readers will benefit from empirical, interpretive, and critical work, and they will also see studies drawing on varied texts and sites of inquiry. Third, the handbook of Communication and Sport includes a broad range of scholars from around the world. It is therefore neither European nor North American in its primary focus. In addition, the book includes contributors from commonly under-represented regions in Asia, Africa, and South America. Fourth, the handbook aims to account for both historical trajectories and contemporary areas of interest. In this way, it covers the central topics, debates, and perspectives from the past and also suggests continued and emerging pathways for the future. Collectively, the handbook of Communication and Sport aspires to provide scholars and students in communication and media studies with the most comprehensive assessment of the field available.

What is public relations? What do public relations professionals do? And what are the theoretical underpinnings that drive the discipline? This handbook provides an up-to-date overview of one of the most contested communication professions. The volume is structured to take readers on a journey to explore both the profession and the discipline of public relations. It introduces key concepts, models, and theories, as well as new theorizing efforts undertaken in recent years. Bringing together scholars from various parts of the world and from very different theoretical and disciplinary traditions, this handbook presents readers with a great diversity of perspectives in the field.

Ethics in communication and media has arguably reached a pivotal stage of maturity in the last decade, moving from disparate lines of inquiry to a theory-driven, interdisciplinary field presenting normative frameworks and philosophical explications for communicative practices. The intent of this volume is to present this maturation, to reflect the vibrant state of ethics theorizing and to illuminate promising pathways for future research.

Finn Frandsen and Winni Johansen have won the 2019 Danish communication prize (KOM-pris) for their world-class research in organisational crises, crisis management and crisis communication. This prize is awarded by The Danish Union of Journalists (Dansk Journalistforbund) and Kforum.

The aim of this handbook is to provide an up-to-date introduction to the discipline of crisis communication. Based on the most recent international research and through a series of levels (from the textual to the inter-societal level), this handbook introduces the reader to the most important concepts, models, theories and debates within the field of crisis communication. Crisis communication is a young and very vibrant field of research and practice. It is therefore crucial that researchers, students and practitioners have access to presentations and discussions of the most recent research. Like the other handbooks in the HOCS series, this handbook contains a general introduction, a chapter on the history of crisis communication research, a series of thematic chapters on crisis communication research at various levels, a chapter perspectives, a glossary of key terms, and lists of further reading for each chapter (with references to publications in English, German, and French).

Overview

Section I – Introducing the field
General introduction
A brief history of crisis management and crisis communication: From organizational practice to academic discipline
Reframing the field: Public crisis management, political crisis management, and corporate crisis management

Section II – Between text and context
Image repair theory
Situational crisis communication theory: Influences, provenance, evolution, and prospects
Contingency theory: Evolution from a public relations theory to a theory of strategic conflict management
Discourse of renewal: Understanding the theory’s implications for the field of crisis communication
Making sense of crisis sensemaking theory: Weick’s contributions to the study of crisis communication
Arenas and voices in organizational crisis communication: How far have we come?
Visual crisis communication

Section III – Organizational level
To minimize or mobilize? The trade-offs associated with the crisis communication process
Internal crisis communication: On current and future research
Whistleblowing in organizations
Employee reactions to negative media coverage
Crisis communication and organizational resilience

Section IV – Interorganizational level
Fixing the broken link: Communication strategies for supply chain crises
Reputational interdependence and spillover: Exploring the contextual challenges of spillover crisis response
Crisis management consulting: An emerging field of study

Section V – Societal level
Crisis and emergency risk communication: Past, present, and future
Crisis communication in public organizations
Communicating and managing crisis in the world of politics
Crisis communication and the political scandal
Crisis communication and social media: Short history of the evolution of social media in crisis communication
Mass media and their symbiotic relationship with crisis

Section VI – Intersocietal level
Should CEOs of multinationals be spokespersons during an overseas product harm crisis?
Intercultural and multicultural approaches to crisis communication

Section VII – Critical approaches
Ethics in crisis communication

Section VIII – The future
The future of organizational crises, crisis management and crisis communication

For a detailed table of contents, please see here.

Almost everything that matters to humans is derived from and through communication. Just because people communicate every day, however, does not mean that they are communicating competently. In fact, evidence indicates that there is a substantial need for better interpersonal skills among a significant proportion of the populace. Furthermore, "dark side" experiences in everyday life abound, and features of modern society pose new challenges that make the concept of communication competence increasingly complex.

The Handbook of Communication Competence brings together scholars from across the globe to examine these various facets of communication competence, including its history, its essential components, and its applications in interpersonal, group, institutional, and societal contexts. The book provides a state-of-the-art review for scholars and graduate students, as well as practitioners in counseling, developmental, health care, educational, intercultural, and human resource management contexts, illustrating that communication competence is vital to health, relationships, and all collective human endeavors.

This handbook on Mediatization of Communication uncovers the interrelation between media changes and changes in culture and society. This is essential to understand contemporary trends and transformations.

“Mediatization” characterizes changes in practices, cultures and institutions in media-saturated societies, thus denoting transformations of these societies themselves.

This volume offers 31 contributions by leading media and communication scholars from the humanities and social sciences, with different approaches to mediatization of communication. The chapters span from how mediatization meets climate change and contribute to globalization to questions on life and death in mediatized settings. The book deals with mass media as well as communication with networked, digital media.

The topic of this volume makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of contemporary processes of social, cultural and political changes. The handbook provides the reader with the most current state of mediatization research.

Although not considered a formal area of study, scholarship on the uses, content, and effects of entertaining media has been central to communication studies and related fields for more than a century. The serious study of entertainment seems paradoxical, as we presume entertainment to be the “lighter side” of our daily lives. Yet as revealed in this volume, entertainment media serve as cultural artifacts that shape our understandings of various peoples and publics in ways that invite deeper, immersive, and increasingly interactive engagement.

On this backdrop, Entertainment Media and Communication serves as a reference guide for canonical and foundational research into media entertainment and a collection of emerging and updated theories and models core to the study of media entertainment in the 21st century. Across more than forty chapters and with a diverse and inclusive list of authors, this volume provides a broad-yet-nuanced view into entertainment media and communication scholarship. The contributors explore its foundations, define and extend key concepts and theories through myriad lenses, discuss unique considerations of digital media, and divine future paths for scholarly inquiry.

Against the background of an enormous expansion and diversification of both political communication itself and scientific research into its structures, processes, and effects, this volume gives an overview of some of the key theories and findings accumulated by political communication research over the last decades. In order to do so, the volume provides readers with review articles by renowned international authors on various aspects of (I) the normative, regulatory and conceptual foundations of political communication, (II) different situations of political communication (e.g., elections, referendums, social movements, media hypes, crisis and war), (III) the activities of and part played by political actors, (IV) mass media and journalism, (V) characteristics and typical features of media messages, (VI) the role played by citizens as well as (VII) various kinds of effects on citizens. Each section includes several chapters that address specific issues and research problems in the form of comprehensive overviews articles.

The volume gives a multi-perspective overview of scholarly and science communication, exploring its diverse functions, modalities, interactional structures, and dynamics in a rapidly changing world. In addition, it provides a guide to current research approaches and traditions on communication in many disciplines, including the humanities, technology, social and natural sciences, and on forms of communication with a wide range of audiences.

In this volume, leading scholars from the fields of communication, educational psychology, and international education address what is known about the strategic role of interpersonal communication in the teaching/learning process. Instruction often involves spoken communication that carries information from teacher to learner, and in these instances the teacher's skillful and strategic use of language has a measurable impact on learning outcomes. Thus, the cumulative findings of instructional communication research are instrumental in maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of both teaching and learning. Major sections of this volume include:

• Historical and Theoretical Foundations
• Instructor Characteristics and Behaviors
• Student Characteristics and Outcomes
• Pedagogy and Classroom Management
• Teaching and Learning Communication Across the Life-span

This handbook serves researchers, professors, and graduate students by surveying the collective findings of research and experience concerning the intentional activity of teaching and learning.

Having, maintaining, and/or obtaining good health is one of the most frequently mentioned desires that people have. Although genetic and environmental factors play an important role in these lifestyles and diseases, it is also known that health-related information that people are exposed to through a variety of modalities and sources has a huge impact on people’s health, health behaviours, and their acceptance of health-related policies, as recently demonstrated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The handbook of Health, Media, and Communication presents a timely and up-to-date overview of the broad and substantial research efforts that have been invested in recent decades to understand how health communication affects health knowledge, perceptions, and discussion as well as health behaviours and, ultimately, health outcomes. The handbook is structured to reflect and address essential parts of the communication process: sender, content, medium, and recipient. In addition to providing a historical and contemporary overview, the handbook also acknowledges the novel challenges that emergent media present for health communication, such as infodemics and misinformation.

This handbook takes a multi-disciplinary approach to offer a current state-of-art survey of intercultural communication (IC) studies. The chapters aim for conceptual comprehension, theoretical clarity and empirical understanding with good practical implications. Attention is mostly on face to face communication and networked communication facilitated by digital technologies, much less on technically reproduced mass communication. Contributions cover both cross cultural communication (implicit or explicit comparative works on communication practices across cultures) and intercultural communication (works on communication involving parties of diverse cultural backgrounds). Topics include generally histories of IC research, theoretical perspectives, non-western theories, and cultural communication; specifically communication styles, emotions, interpersonal relationships, ethnocentrism, stereotypes, cultural learning, cross cultural adaptation, and cross border messages;and particular context of conflicts, social change, aging, business, health, and new media. Although the book is prepared for graduate students and academicians, intercultural communication practitioners will also find something useful here.

Media scholarship has responded to a rapidly evolving media environment that has challenged existing theories and methods while also giving rise to new theoretical and methodological approaches. This volume explores the state of contemporary media research. Focusing on Intellectual Foundations, Theoretical Perspectives, Methodological Approaches, Context, and Contemporary Issues, this volume is a valuable resource for media scholars and students.

Interpersonal communication has been studied in terms of both communication functions and specialized contexts. This handbook comprehensively covers the field including research on processes of social influence, the role of communication in the development, maintenance and decline of close personal relationships, nonverbal communication, cognitive approaches, communication and conflict, bargaining and negotiation, health communication, organizational socialization and supervisor-subordinate communication, social networks, and technologically-mediated interpersonal communication. Two chapters are dedicated to research methods in the field. The handbook includes chapters by widely recognized and respected scholars in the field.

The primary goal of the Communication and Technology volume (5th within the series "Handbooks of Communication Science") is to provide the reader with a comprehensive compilation of key scholarly literature, identifying theoretical issues, emerging concepts, current research, specialized methods, and directions for future investigations. The internet and web have become the backbone of many new communication technologies, often transforming older communication media, through digitization, to make them compatible with the net. Accordingly, this volume focuses on internet/web technologies. The essays cover various infrastructure technologies, ranging from different kinds of hard-wired elements to a range of wireless technologies such as WiFi, mobile telephony, and satellite technologies. Audio/visual communication is discussed with reference to large-format motion pictures, medium-sized television and video formats, and the small-screen mobile smartphone. There is also coverage of audio-only media, such as radio, music, and voice telephony; text media, in such venues as online newspapers, blogs, discussion forums and mobile texting; and multi-media technologies, such as games and virtual reality.

The primary goal of the volume on "Visual Communication" is to provide a collection of high quality, accessible papers that offer an overview of the different academic approaches to Visual Communication, the different theoretical perspectives on which they are based, the methods of analysis used and the different media and genre that have come under analysis. There is no such existing volume that draws together this range of closely related material generally found in much less related areas of research, including semiotics, art history, design, and new media theory. The volume has a total of 34 individual chapters that are organized into two sections: theories and methods, and areas of visual analysis. The chapters are all written by quality theorists and researchers, with a view that the research should be accessible to non-specialists in their own field while at the same time maintaining a high quality of work. The volume contains an introduction, which plots and locates the different approaches contained in it within broader developments and history of approaches to visual communication across different disciplines as each has attempted to define its terrain sometimes through unique concepts and methods sometimes through those borrowed and modified from others.

Common sense tells us that verbal communication should be a central concern both for the study of communication and for the study of language. Language is the most pervasive means of communication in human societies, especially if we consider the huge gamut of communication phenomena where spoken and written language combines with other modalities, such as gestures or pictures. Most communication researchers have to deal with issues of language use in their work. Classic methods in communication research - from content analysis to interviews and questionnaires, not to mention the obvious cases of rhetorical analysis and discourse analysis - presuppose the understanding of the meaning of spontaneous or elicited verbal productions. Despite its pervasiveness, verbal communication does not currently define one cohesive and distinct subfield within the communication discipline.
The Handbook of Verbal Communication seeks to address this gap. In doing so, it draws not only on the communication discipline, but also on the rich interdisciplinary research on language and communication that developed over the last fifty years as linguistics interacted with the social sciences and the cognitive sciences. The interaction of linguistic research with the social sciences has produced a plethora of approaches to the study of meanings in social context - from conversation analysis to critical discourse analysis, while cognitive research on verbal communication, carried out in cognitive pragmatics as well as in cognitive linguistics, has offered insights into the interaction between language, inference and persuasion and into cognitive processes such as framing or metaphorical mapping.
The Handbook of Verbal Communication volume takes into account these two traditions selecting those issues and themes that are most relevant for communication scholars. It addresses background matters such as the evolution of human verbal communication and the relationship between verbal and non-verbal means of communication and offers a an extensive discussion of the explicit and implicit meanings of verbal messages, with a focus on emotive and figurative meanings. Conversation and fundamental types of discourse, such as argument and narrative, are presented in-depth, as is the key notion of discourse genre. The nature of writing systems as well as the interaction of spoken or written language with non-verbal modalities are devoted ample attention.
Different contexts of language use are considered, from the mass media and the new media to the organizational contexts. Cultural and linguistic diversity is addressed, with a focus on phenomena such as multilingual communication and translation.
A key feature of the volume is the coverage of verbal communication quality. Quality is examined both from a cognitive and from a social perspective. It covers topics that range from to the cognitive processes underlying deceptive communication to the methods that can be used to assess the quality of texts in an organizational context.

The current volume, featuring 28 contributions from cutting-edge researchers, emphasizes uses, purposes, origins, and consequences of nonverbal communication in the lives of individuals, dyads, and groups - in other words, the behaviour of human beings. As such, the volume as a whole is not just about communication systems per se nor the impact on humans of the physical environment, whether built or natural. Instead, the volume focuses on humans engaging in nonverbal communication and the communicative and psychological aspects of this behaviour. Nonverbal behaviour is an inclusive category and includes all emitted nonverbal behaviour that may be subject to interpretation by others, whether the behaviour is intentionally produced or not.
This panoramic volume, edited by two of the world's leading authorities on nonverbal communication, contains 28 essays presenting the state of the art in the domain of nonverbal behaviour study.

Reginald B. Adams, Jr.
Tamara D. Afifi
Peter Andersen
Sarai Blincoe
Ross W. Buck
Peter Bull
Judee K. Burgoon
Vanessa L. Castro
Gaëtan Cousin
Amanda Denes
M. Robin DiMatteo
John P. Doody
John F. Dovidio
Marshall Duke
Hilary Anger Elfenbein
José-Miguel Fernández-Dols
Mark G. Frank
Jillian Gannon
Robert Gifford
Laura K. Guerrero
Sarah D. Gunnery
Amy G. Halberstadt
Judith A. Hall
Jinni A. Harrigan
Monica J. Harris
Hyisung C. Hwang
Jessica Kalchik
Arvid Kappas
Mark L. Knapp
Eva Krumhuber
Ravi S. Kudesia
Dennis Küster
Marianne LaFrance
Jessica L. Lakin
Leslie Martin
David Matsumoto
Joann M. Montepare
Anthony J. Nelson
Stephen Nowicki
Alison E. Parker
Sona Patel
Miles L. Patterson
Stacie R. Powers
Kevin Purring
Klaus Scherer
Marianne Schmid Mast
Michael A. Strom
Elena Svetieva
Joseph B. Walther
Benjamin Wiedmaier
Leslie A. Zebrowitz

This unique volume offers an overview of the diversity in research on communication, including perspectives from biology, sociality, economics, norms and human development. It includes general social science and humanities approaches to communication, from systems theory to cultural theory, as well as perspectives more specifically related to communication acts, such as linguistics and cognition. The volume also features chapters on the participants and various elements in communication processes, on possible effects and on wider consequences of mediation (with technical media). The scope of the contributions is global, and the volume is relevant to both the empirical and the philosophical traditions in human sciences. Designed as a stand-alone collection to engage undergraduates as well as postgraduates and academics, this is also the first book in, and an introduction to, the De Gruyter Mouton multi-volume Handbooks of Communication Science.