The Rhetoric Of Innovation

Through critical examination of more than 1,000 occurrences of terms depicting legal innovation, this study maps the contours of legal change reported during the rabbinic period. The Rhetoric of Innovation examines temporal clusters of statements and actions attributed to authority figures in the Tannaitic and Amoraic periods, also reviewing the geographic distribution of these words and their divergent usages in documents edited in Roman Palestine and Babylonia.

Explores how rhetorical techniques helped to produce innovations in art of the Hellenistic courts at Pergamon and Alexandria.

Stephen Doheny-Farina shows that the technical and commercial processes of turning technologies into products are, in significant ways, communication processes. Improving the way that technology is transferred from laboratory to marketplace is central to improving American productivity and competitiveness in a global economy. In this provocative analysis, Stephen Doheny-Farina shows that the technical and commercial processes of turning technologies into products are, in significant ways, communication processes. He explores the key role that technical communicators must play in the movement of technology from expert designers and developers to users. Several lengthy case studies illustrate the rhetorical issues involved in technology transfers as well as the rhetorical barriers to their success. Doheny-Farina argues that processes typically called information transfer and technology transfer are not transfers at all but instead are series of personal constructions and reconstructions of knowledge, expertise, and technologies by the participants attempting to adapt technological innovations for social uses.Underscoring the rhetorical nature of any technology transfer, the case studies describe the powerful effect that a startup company's business plan can have on its future (including the many factors that surround the writing of a business plan), the rhetorical barriers to the transfer of an experimental artificial heart from a university research hospital to a biomedical products manufacturer, and two compelling situations that call for the inclusion of technical writers in new product development from its inception. A final chapter focuses on the important elements in the education of technical communicators and an appendix discusses classroom applications and includes a fictional case incorporating issues of intraorganizational barriers to collaboration in the new product development process.

Rhetorical critics have long had a troubled relationship with method, viewing it as at times opening up provocative avenues of inquiry, and at other times as closing off paths toward meaningful engagement with texts. Text + Field shifts scholarly attention from this conflicted history, looking instead to the growing number of scholars who are supplementing text-based scholarship by venturing out into the field, where rhetoric is produced, enacted, and consumed. These field-based practices involve observation, ethnographic interviews, and performance. They are not intended to displace text-based approaches; rather, they expand the idea of method by helping rhetorical scholars arrive at new and complementary answers to long-standing disciplinary questions about text, context, audience, judgment, and ethics. The first volume in rhetoric and communication to directly address the relevance, processes, and implications of using field methods to augment traditional scholarship, Text + Field provides a framework for adapting these new tools to traditional rhetorical inquiry. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Roberta Chevrette, Kathleen M. de Onís, Danielle Endres, Joshua P. Ewalt, Alina Haliliuc, Aaron Hess, Jamie Landau, Michael Middleton, Tiara R. Na’puti, Jessy J. Ohl, Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Damien Smith Pfister, Samantha Senda-Cook, Lisa Silvestri, and Valerie Thatcher.

This book provides a critical insight into the ongoing debates and controversies that surround employee empowerment and workplace innovation. It highlights competing interests and conflicting values, and illuminates some basic tensions between confident rhetoric and everyday realities. Martin Beirnes contribution marks a contrast with established academic investigations in this area. It combines sober analysis with advocacy to claim space for a research-based activism among coalitions of critical researchers and like-minded practitioners that can anticipate and promote genuinely enriching and empowering ways of managing and organizing work. Advanced students of management and organization will discover an invaluable, thought-provoking resource. It offers fresh insights, stimulating arguments and applied knowledge that will also appeal to managers with responsibility for work and employee relations, and to educators and researchers in the areas of critical management studies, work and employment.

This is the first book to systematically explore contemporary continental philosopher Paul Ricoeur's contribution to modem rhetorical theory. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi analyzes provocative test cases and investigates four topics central to the core vocabulary of the field-opinion, practical reasoning, commemoration, and solidarity. Her findings provide clarification on important problems and shed new light on troubling social and political issues. Placing Ricoeur's views in a larger intellectual context, Ritivoi identifies both the philosophical influences that have shaped them over the years and the correspondences with various relevant rhetorical theories. In doing so, she proves that a rhetorical enterprise refashioned with Ricoeur's help enables us to address questions that are crucially relevant to our time yet also grounded in the historical basis of the discipline.

This book puts forward a new paradigm to understand and implement Sustainable Innovation (SI). Innovation without sustainability leaves out large swathes of the population or generates maladaptive or misappropriate behaviors. Innovative solutions will be sustainable if they can retain individual and group differences while offering greater benefits for the common good. When working together, designers, life, human and social behavioral scientists can add value, which promotes behavioral changes to the advantage of sustainable models in all fields. This volume presents a guide on how to set up sustainable innovation programs, as well as ideas on how to integrate multidisciplinary teams into innovation projects. Moreover, this book offers students a synthesis of non-academic thinking on the relationship between design and behavioral science.