The crucial nature of developmental theory is the question of relationship between cultural and personal facets of human development. Dialogue is a useful concept to specify this relationship from a process-oriented perspective. In its broadest sense, the notion of dialogue entails the interaction between at least two entities (persons, meanings, perspectives) out of which novelty can (but need not) emerge. Thus, dialogic models are open for developmental questions. These issues are examined in this, the first volume in which the increasingly popular metaphor of dialogue is systematically applied to developmental issues. Dialogue is a multilevel concept and can be understood (1) as a real exchange between two interacting persons, (2) as the interaction between culture at large (e.g. stories and narratives) and the interacting, developing person, and (3) as a metaphor for developmental processes in general. In the first part of this international volume, the concept of dialogue is elaborated by researchers from different disciplines. The focus of the second section is on dialogic models in the area of self development. The third deals with the dialogical co-development of person and culture.

The crucial nature of developmental theory is the question of relationship between cultural and personal facets of human development. Dialogue is a useful concept to specify this relationship from a process-oriented perspective. In its broadest sense, the notion of dialogue entails the interaction between at least two entities (persons, meanings, perspectives) out of which novelty can (but need not) emerge. Thus, dialogic models are open for developmental questions. These issues are examined in this, the first volume in which the increasingly popular metaphor of dialogue is systematically applied to developmental issues. Dialogue is a multilevel concept and can be understood (1) as a real exchange between two interacting persons, (2) as the interaction between culture at large (e.g. stories and narratives) and the interacting, developing person, and (3) as a metaphor for developmental processes in general. In the first part of this international volume, the concept of dialogue is elaborated by researchers from different disciplines. The focus of the second section is on dialogic models in the area of self development. The third deals with the dialogical co-development of person and culture.

Marková offers a dialogical perspective to problems in daily life and professional practices involving communication, care, and therapy.

The book pursues the goal of exploring and strengthening a dialogical approach of communication and cognition. It brings together contributions from world-leading researchers related to the dialogical approach in education and psychology. It presents, among others, the place of language and materiality in the development of communication and thinking, as well as the role of the methods in the relationship between researchers and participants. This leads to an innovative definition of the dialogicality and how a dialogical approach can provide heuristic (conceptual and methodological) tools to better understand how people think, communicate and learn in a complex world. The authors hereby develop an epistemological framework inspired by scholars such as Michaïl Bakhtin, Lev Vygotsky and Herbert Mead under the assumption that dialogue, or dialogicality - and therefore the presence of the other – is fundamentally entangled into the human thinking and development. This book contributes to the understanding of human communication, cognition and mind, and participates in a scientific dialogue which helps to advance future research. It includes theoretical and empirical chapters and presents innovative methods of inquiry, which makes it a useful tool for both teaching and research.

Develops a theory of social knowledge based on dialogicality and social representation.

The phenomenon which dialogism addresses is human interaction. It enables us to conceptualise human interaction as intersubjective, symbolic, cultural, transformative and conflictual, in short, as complex. The complexity of human interaction is evident in all domains of human life, for example, in therapy, education, health intervention, communication, and co-ordination at all levels. A dialogical approach starts by acknowledging that the social world is perspectival, that people and groups inhabit different social realities. This book stands apart from the proliferation of recent books on dialogism, because rather than applying dialogism to this or that domain, the present volume focuses on dialogicality itself to interrogate the concepts and methods which are taken for granted in the burgeoning literature.

In a boundary-crossing and globalizing world, the personal and social positions in self and identity become increasingly dense, heterogeneous and even conflicting. In this handbook scholars of different disciplines, nations and cultures (East and West) bring together their views and applications of dialogical self theory in such a way that deeper commonalities are brought to the surface. As a 'bridging theory', dialogical self theory reveals unexpected links between a broad variety of phenomena, such as self and identity problems in education and psychotherapy, multicultural identities, child-rearing practices, adult development, consumer behaviour, the use of the internet and the value of silence. Researchers and practitioners present different methods of investigation, both qualitative and quantitative, and also highlight applications of dialogical self theory.

This volume breaks open traditional disciplinary confines and approaches the full complexity of communicative interaction from an impressive range of exciting state-of-the-art perspectives in social psychology, conversation analysis, hermeneutics, constructivist psychology, communication theory, computational neuroscience, sociology of communication, second language pragmatics, ergonomic interaction theory and computer-mediated interaction studies. In so doing, it sets out to establish a new research agenda in which communication science is understood as a human-social science par excellence. This collection of fifteen essays by seventeen scholars from Canada, the United States, Brazil, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany and the UK will be of interest to scholars and students in all of the above fields. The editor, Colin B. Grant, is Reader in Modern Languages in the School of Management and Languages, Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh, where he runs the interdisciplinary social communication science research group. He is author of Literary Communication from Consensus to Rupture (1995), Functions and Fictions of Communication (2000) and chief editor of Language-Meaning-Social Construction (2001).

This volume understands itself as an invitation to follow a fundamental shift in perspective, away from the self-contained ‘I’ of Western conventions, and towards a relational self, where development and change are contingent on otherness. In the framework of ‘Dialogical Self Theory’ (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010; Hermans & Gieser, 2012), it is precisely the forms of interaction and exchange with others and with the world that determine the course of the self’s development. The volume hence addresses dialogical processes in human interaction from a psychological perspective, bringing together previously separate theoretical traditions about the ‘self’ and about ‘dialogue’ within the innovative framework of Dialogical Self Theory. The book is devoted to developmental questions, and so broaches one of the more difficult and challenging topics for models of a pluralist self: the question of how the dynamics of multiplicity emerge and change over time. This question is explored by addressing ontogenetic questions, directed at the emergence of the dialogical self in early infancy, as well as microgenetic questions, addressed to later developmental dynamics in adulthood. Additionally, development and change in a range of culture-specific settings and practices is also examined, including the practices of mothering, of migration and cross-cultural assimilation, and of ‘doing psychotherapy’.

Per Linell took his degree in linguistics and is currently professor of language and culture, with a specialisation on communication and spoken interaction, at the University of Linköping, Sweden. He has been instrumental in building up an internationally renowned interdisciplinary graduate school in communication studies in Linköping. He has worked for many years on developing a dialogical alternative to mainstream theories in linguistics, psychology and social sciences. His production comprises more than 100 articles on dialogue, talk-in-interaction and institutional discourse. His more recent books include Approaching Dialogue (1998), The Written Language Bias in Linguistics (2005) and Dialogue in Focus Groups (2007, with I. Marková, M. Grossen and A. Salazar Orvig).