The Spatial And Temporal Dimensions Of Interactions

“This book provides a significant contribution to the discursive analysis of service encounters. It demonstrates, in a very elegant way and based on a solid empirical investigation, how mediated discourse analysis may be enacted to describe and understand the social and cultural practices associated with space, time, ethnicity and identity construction. A must-read for researchers and practitioners interested in language use in professional contexts.” -- Laurent Filliettaz, University of Geneva, Switzerland “This book contains one of the most thorough and productive applications of the theoretical and analytical apparatus of mediated discourse analysis I have come across, demonstrating how the moment-by-moment ways that people appropriate discourse to perform mundane daily activities such as shopping contribute to the broader maintenance of social identities and communities. The analysis is meticulously undertaken and communicated in clear, elegant prose. This book will be of interest to anyone working in the field of discourse studies." -- Rodney Jones, University of Reading, UK This book investigates the social practices of service encounters in the context of a typical Persian shop in Sydney. Although by nature goal-oriented speech events, the book posits that service encounters are not simply limited to achieving business transactions, but that they incorporate a range of social and discursive practices. Analysing ethnographic data using the frameworks of Mediated and Multimodal Discourse Analysis, the author explores how people use everyday activities to enact social and cultural identities, construct linguistic authenticity, and maintain strong economic ties to the community. It will be of interest to scholars and students of the sociolinguistics of ethnic/ minority sites and urban spaces. Dariush Izadi holds a PhD in Sociolinguistics and teaches Language and Linguistics Research Methods, Sociolinguistics, Discourse Analysis and TESOL Units at Western Sydney University, Australia. In his work, he applies mediated discourse and nexus analysis to investigate practices and methods through which participants accomplish their actions in social settings.

This book explains how mobile computer usability is shaped by the increasing integration of personal circumstances in organization. It represents an attempt to conceptualize an alternative model of mobile computer usability. It is motivated by the author’s conviction that we do not yet have an adequate understanding of this concept because we have not taken seriously the transformation of human personality by the co-evolution of organization and ICTs. The author argues that the transformation has resulted in a human personality whose personal and organizational activities are characterized by strong continuities between them. This characterization reflects a new kind of personality of the worker, and is a critical determinant of mobile computer usability. The word ‘organizational’ is used to describe this kind of personality – hence an alternative organizational personality perspective on mobile computer usability. This perspective suggests that a mobile computer is more usable to a person than another one because of its satisfaction of both his personal and organizational motives, which are in turn shaped by the co-evolution of organization, technology and personality.

"This book provides concepts, methodologies, and applications used to design and develop multimodal systems"--Provided by publisher.

This collection brings together social semiotic, ethnographic, and conversation analytic approaches to multimodality in global studies of shopping, drawing on the rich diversity of the latest multimodal methods to critically reflect on shopping as a cornerstone of contemporary social life. The volume explores shopping as an area of study in its own right, with the buying and selling of goods and services a fundamental part of the social and cultural life of human communities for centuries. The book looks at both online and offline shopping, examining it as both everyday multi-sensorial practice and its translation into the interactive text and imagery that comprise the online shopping experience, from London street markets to Japanese grocery shops to Danish supermarkets to worldwide online shopping sites. Highlighting the diversity of modern multimodal approaches through contributions from established scholars, the book critically surveys both the challenges and opportunities in the embodied interactions between buyers and sellers and how these points of connection have been translated and will continue to transform in the age of algorithms and emergent technologies. This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in multimodality, multimodal conversation analysis, social semiotics, social interaction, and retail studies.

This three-volume set LNCS 13604-13606 constitutes revised selected papers presented at the Second CAAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in Beijing, China, in August 2022. CICAI is a summit forum in the field of artificial intelligence and the 2022 forum was hosted by Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAAI). The 164 papers were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 521 submissions. CICAI aims to establish a global platform for international academic exchange, promote advanced research in AI and its affiliated disciplines such as machine learning, computer vision, natural language, processing, and data mining, amongst others.

This book addresses the problem of World Regional Studies and its components: regional complexes, regional subsystems and global regions. With an increasingly complex international system and the emergence of new actors, it is clear that the conceptual framing within the classical disciplines of IR, Political Theory, International Political Economy or Comparative Politics can no longer fully explain a number of processes originating from a tighter and intricate nexus between local, regional and global dimensions. World Regional Studies explains the emergence of new phenomena in international relations and world politics on a regional and predominantly non-Western regional level. How do non-Western societies react to the transformations of the global order? Is a non-Western democracy possible? Should we discuss the possibilities for the appearance of a non-Western IR theory or a new framework for analyzing de-westernized global development? This study, based on decade-long research and teaching post in World Regional Studies at MGIMO-University and Russian University of Humanitarian Studies (RGGU), seeks to answers these questions.

This book analyses credit crisis issues in China from the aspect of individuals, enterprises, and government through investigations of six Chinese urban and rural areas. After China’s reform and opening up in the 1970s, a slew of new problems involving integrity, trust, and credit appeared with the establishment of a market economy and the creation of new business opportunities. To track these phenomena down to their very origins and to explore the theoretical principles underlying them through a truly holistic sociology, this book highlights a native Chinese perspective when dissecting and analysing the characteristics of their origins, mechanisms, and manifestations. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of economic sociology, Chinese studies, and those who are interested in the sociology of credibility in general.

This book presents recent estimates on the rate of change of major land classes. Aggregated globally, multiple impacts of local land changes are shown to significantly affect central aspects of Earth System functioning. The book offers innovative developments and applications in the fields of modeling and scenario construction. Conclusions are also drawn about the most pressing implications for the design of appropriate intervention policies.