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Civic and community engagement is often crucial for the successful development of rural areas and a catalyst of personal transformation. This article examines changes in civic and community engagement among women in rural Bihar, India. Using an exploratory factor analysis of survey data from n = 815 respondents who participated in Heifer’s Values-Based Holistic Community Development [VBHCD] training, the study identifies three factors that constitute civic and community engagement. Next, the study assesses the efficacy of VBHCD’s impact on participants’ civic and community engagement relative to participants’ duration in the program and type of self-help group. The results indicate that pass-on groups are more civically active in their community than original groups. However, civic and community engagement wanes over the course of participation in Heifer’s intervention.

Nonprofit humanitarian organizations work to alleviate poverty and are evaluated in part on their effectiveness in doing so. One such organization is Heifer International, a global humanitarian nonprofit whose mission is to "end hunger and poverty while caring for the Earth." In this study, we assessed the impact of Heifer International's Values-Based Holistic Community Development approach on beneficiaries' interpersonal communication competency and positive communication behaviors. The article offers a cross-sectional study of 815 women in Bihar India across four-time periods: baseline, 6 months, 12 months, and 24 months. Compared to baseline, participants reported higher levels of positive communication behaviors and interpersonal communication competence across 6, 12, and 24 months. Implications of these findings for future research are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is a qualitative analysis of e-mail communication between burn survivors. Grounded in 200+ e-mail messages between participants of an online support group, the study shows how burn survivors manage multiple, albeit contradictory, discourses of recovery. Using a narrative approach, we first highlight how burn survivors manage a tension between acceptance of their situation and resentment toward their circumstances. Then, we reveal how they cope with multiple meanings of beauty. Our study shows that online support groups can also privilege or enforce particular ways of thinking about recovery, such as valuing acceptance over resentment. In the conclusion, we suggest that surviving is a communicative accomplishment and propose that practitioners should engage in supportive communication without being patronizing. DOI: 10.1080/10417940903377151

This article proposes that culture is not the most important influence in a person's life. A person, I argue, emerges through moment-to-moment lived experiences and the communicative moments that we co-create with others. To support this argument, I examine a short autobiography and my journal. In the process, I reveal five claims that speak to the process of becoming a person: (a) the individual emerges through lived experience, (b) it is not culture that matters most, but the people we meet, (c) communicative moments are crucial experiences, (d) cultures are predictable, not a person's life, and (e) culture does not provide answers, the individual must choose. The conclusion is an encouragement to communicate ethically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, I investigated naturally occurring medical interaction in commercial medicine. Drawing on 30+ hours of videotaped data and 9 months of fieldwork in a cosmetic surgery clinic, this analysis focuses on how plastic surgeons interact with patients who seek to alter their bodily appearance. The ethnographically informed discourse analysis reveals how plastic surgeons manage multiple and competing interactive demands. Specifically, I describe plastic surgeons' key strategies for meeting both health-related and institutional goals. In the conclusion, I reflect on the communication challenges that medical professionals and patients face when consumerism and medicine meet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When plastic surgeons meet with new cosmetic surgery clients, they routinely try to get patients to `sign up' for elective surgery without forcing or pressuring them to do it. On rare occasions, they face a prospective client who, in the course of interaction, signals possible legal or medical risks, thereby calling on the surgeon to screen the client more vigilantly to determine whether embarking on cosmetic surgery will be reasonable. Grounded against nine-month field work at a cosmetic surgery center, combined with 30+ hours of videotaped data of initial consultations, this article investigates a unique situation in which a 74-year-old woman seeking rhinoplasty and rhytidectomy is perceived as a difficult customer. Why this moment was interpreted and emerged as difficult is the analytic focus of the article. Using action-implicative discourse analysis (e.g. Tracy, 2001, 2005), the analysis describes five communication challenges the plastic surgeon faced in the course of the 60-minute encounter. In the article's conclusion, I reflect on what seems to be a central issue for plastic surgeons: to act as gatekeepers of a fully elective and pricy surgery in a service-oriented business. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we analyze the premeeting talk that occurred in 6 meetings of a nutrition company's weekly staff meetings. We begin by describing the business organization, the specific meeting, and the study's discourse and ethnographic materials. Then we introduce small talk, the theoretical frame that initially shaped our interest in premeeting talk, showing that premeeting talk is not merely a site for small talk. Premeeting talk includes work talk, meeting preparatory talk, and shop talk. For each, we illustrate what the talk type looks like and highlight the organizational function it served. In the article's next section, we examine premeeting talk through a second lens-talk as institutional identity work, focusing on the group-level identity of Nutrition Corporation as a mainstream American business committed to health and fitness. We show how the company's premeeting talk reflected and constructed this partially contradictory identity. In the conclusion of the article, we consider implications of the case study for organizational scholars' studies of culture, for distinguishing institutional and ordinary kinds of talk, and for language and social interaction research that attends to the visible behaviors and material surround. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]