This edited collection presents a range of heretofore unpublished, unavailable methods for the systematic reconstruction of culture from interviews and other discourse. Authors set the design and evolution of their methods in the context of their own research projects, and draw general lessons about investigating culture through discourse. These methods have largely grown out of the work of the cultural models school, and represent the approaches of some of the very best methodologists in cultural anthropology today. An impetus for the volume has been inquiries from researchers, many of them graduate students, about how to conduct the kind of research that cultural models theorists do. This is not a linguistics book; unlike approaches to discourse analysis from linguistics, this volume focuses on culture, treating discourse as a medium especially rich in clues for cultural analysis, and hence a window into culture.

Talk of love surrounds us, and romance is a constant concern of popular culture. Ann Swidler's Talk of Love is an attempt to discover how people find and sustain real love in the midst of that talk, and how that culture of love shapes their expectations and behavior in the process. To this end, Swidler conducted extensive interviews with Middle Americans and wound up offering us something more than an insightful exploration of love: Talk of Love is also a compelling study of how much culture affects even the most personal of our everyday experiences.

This book traces the developmental, social, cultural, and historical origins of the autobiographical self - the self that is made of memories of the personal past and of the family and the community. It combines rigorous research, compelling theoretical insights, sensitive survey of real memories and memory conversations, and fascinating personal anecdotes to convey a message: the autobiographical self is conditioned by one's time and culture.

A new, fully revised edition. The culture of an organisation can mean the difference between success and failure. Leaders cast long shadows, and if you want to change the culture you have to walk the talk. This book shows you how. Walking the Talk covers everything from measuring corporate culture to changing people's behaviour (including your own) and describes in detail six archetypes of company culture: Achievement, Customer-Centric, One-Team, Innovative, People-First and Greater-Good. Packed with fascinating examples and case histories, and drawing extensively on Carolyn Taylor's twenty years' experience of building great cultures, it will give you the confidence to build a culture of success in your own organisation.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The author of The Talent Code unlocks the secrets of highly successful groups and provides tomorrow’s leaders with the tools to build a cohesive, motivated culture. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BLOOMBERG AND LIBRARY JOURNAL Where does great culture come from? How do you build and sustain it in your group, or strengthen a culture that needs fixing? In The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle goes inside some of the world’s most successful organizations—including the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six, IDEO, and the San Antonio Spurs—and reveals what makes them tick. He demystifies the culture-building process by identifying three key skills that generate cohesion and cooperation, and explains how diverse groups learn to function with a single mind. Drawing on examples that range from Internet retailer Zappos to the comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade to a daring gang of jewel thieves, Coyle offers specific strategies that trigger learning, spark collaboration, build trust, and drive positive change. Coyle unearths helpful stories of failure that illustrate what not to do, troubleshoots common pitfalls, and shares advice about reforming a toxic culture. Combining leading-edge science, on-the-ground insights from world-class leaders, and practical ideas for action, The Culture Code offers a roadmap for creating an environment where innovation flourishes, problems get solved, and expectations are exceeded. Culture is not something you are—it’s something you do. The Culture Code puts the power in your hands. No matter the size of your group or your goal, this book can teach you the principles of cultural chemistry that transform individuals into teams that can accomplish amazing things together. Praise for The Culture Code “I’ve been waiting years for someone to write this book—I’ve built it up in my mind into something extraordinary. But it is even better than I imagined. Daniel Coyle has produced a truly brilliant, mesmerizing read that demystifies the magic of great groups. It blows all other books on culture right out of the water.”—Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Option B, Originals, and Give and Take “If you want to understand how successful groups work—the signals they transmit, the language they speak, the cues that foster creativity—you won’t find a more essential guide than The Culture Code.”—Charles Duhigg, New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better

From the author of New York Times bestseller You're Wearing That? this bestselling classic work draws upon groundbreaking research by an acclaimed sociolinguist to show that women and men live in different worlds, made of different words. Women and men live in different worlds...made of different words. Spending nearly four years on the New York Times bestseller list, including eight months at number one, You Just Don't Understand is a true cultural and intellectual phenomenon. This is the book that brought gender differences in ways of speaking to the forefront of public awareness. With a rare combination of scientific insight and delightful, humorous writing, Tannen shows why women and men can walk away from the same conversation with completely different impressions of what was said. Studded with lively and entertaining examples of real conversations, this book gives you the tools to understand what went wrong -- and to find a common language in which to strengthen relationships at work and at home. A classic in the field of interpersonal relations, this book will change forever the way you approach conversations.

An international business expert helps you understand and navigate cultural differences in this insightful and practical guide, perfect for both your work and personal life. Americans precede anything negative with three nice comments; French, Dutch, Israelis, and Germans get straight to the point; Latin Americans and Asians are steeped in hierarchy; Scandinavians think the best boss is just one of the crowd. It's no surprise that when they try and talk to each other, chaos breaks out. In The Culture Map, INSEAD professor Erin Meyer is your guide through this subtle, sometimes treacherous terrain in which people from starkly different backgrounds are expected to work harmoniously together. She provides a field-tested model for decoding how cultural differences impact international business, and combines a smart analytical framework with practical, actionable advice.

A new examination of how and why American religious parents seek to pass on religion to their children The most important influence shaping the religious and spiritual lives of children, youth, and teenagers is their parents. A myriad of studies show that the parents of American youth play the leading role in shaping the character of their religious and spiritual lives, even well after they leave home and often for the rest of their lives. We know a lot about the importance of parents in faith transmission. However we know much less about the actual beliefs, feelings, and activities of the parents themselves, what Christian Smith and Amy Adamczyk call the "intergenerational transmission of religious faith and practice." To address that gap, this book reports the findings of a new national study of religious parents in the United States. The findings and conclusions in Handing Down the Faith are based on 215 in-depth, personal interviews with religious parents from many traditions and different parts of the country, and sophisticated analyses of two nationally representative surveys of American parents about their religious parenting. Handing Down the Faith explores the background beliefs informing how and why religious parents seek to pass on religion to their children; examines how parenting styles interact with parent religiousness to shape effective religious transmission; shows how parents have been influenced by their experiences as children influenced by their own parents; reveals how religious parents view their congregations and what they most seek out in a local church, synagogue, temple, or mosque; explores the experiences and outlooks of immigrant parents including Latino Catholics, East Asian Buddhists, South Asian Muslims, and Indian Hindus. Smith and Adamczyk step back to consider how American religion has transformed over the last 100 years and to explain why parents today shoulder such a huge responsibility in transmitting religious faith and practice to their children. The book is rich in empirical evidence and unique in many of the topics it explores and explains, providing a variety of sometimes counterintuitive findings that will interest scholars of religion, social scientists interested in the family, parenting, and socialization; clergy and religious educators and leaders; and religious parents themselves.

The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion offers a comprehensive exploration of the dynamics of religious conversion, which for centuries has profoundly shaped societies, cultures, and individuals throughout the world. Scholars from a wide array of religions and disciplines interpret both the varieties of conversion experiences and the processes that inform this personal and communal phenomenon. This volume examines the experiences of individuals and communities who change religions, those who experience an intensification of their religion of origin, and those who encounter new religions through colonial intrusion, missionary work, and charismatic and revitalization movements. The thirty-two innovative essays provide overviews of the history of particular religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Sikhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, indigenous religions, and new religious movements. The essays also offer a wide range of disciplinary perspectives-psychological, sociological, anthropological, legal, political, feminist, and geographical-on methods and theories deployed in understanding conversion, and insight into various forms of deconversion.

This volume on medical tourism includes contributions by anthropologists and historians on a variety of health-seeking modes of travel and leisure. It brings together analyses of recent trends of "medical tourism", such as underinsured middle-class Americans traveling to India for surgery, pious Middle Eastern couples seeking assisted reproduction outside their borders, or consumers of the exotic in search of alternative healing, with analyses of the centuries-old Euro-American tradition of traveling to spas. Rather than seeing these two forms of medical travel as being disparate, the book demonstrates that, as noted in the introduction ‘what makes patients itinerant in both the old and new kind of medical travel is either a perceived shortage or constraint at ‘home’, or the sense of having reached a particular kind of therapeutic impasse, with the two often so intertwined that it is difficult to tell them apart. The constraint may stem from things as diverse as religious injunctions, legal hurdles, social approbation, or seasonal affliction; and the shortage can range from a lack of privacy, of insurance, technology, competence, or enough therapeutic resources that can address issues and conditions that patients have. If these two intertwined strands are responsible for most medical tourism, then which locales seem to have therapeutic resources are those that are either ‘natural,’ in the form of water or climate; legal, in the form of a culture that does not stigmatise patients; or technological and professional, in the form of tests, equipment, or expertise, unavailable or affordable at home; or in the form of novel therapeutic possibilities that promise to resolve irresolvable issues’. This book was originally published as a special issue of Anthropology & Medicine.