An examination of language use in the important area of social conflict.

Learn to assess the situation, manage your emotions, and move on. While some of us enjoy a lively debate with colleagues and others prefer to suppress our feelings over disagreements, we all struggle with conflict at work. Every day we navigate an office full of competing interests, clashing personalities, limited time and resources, and fragile egos. Sure, we share the same overarching goals as our colleagues, but we don't always agree on how to achieve them. We work differently. We rub each other the wrong way. We jockey for position. How can you deal with conflict at work in a way that is both professional and productive--where it improves both your work and your relationships? You start by understanding whether you generally seek or avoid conflict, identifying the most frequent reasons for disagreement, and knowing what approaches work for what scenarios. Then, if you decide to address a particular conflict, you use that information to plan and conduct a productive conversation. The HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict will give you the advice you need to: Understand the most common sources of conflict Explore your options for addressing a disagreement Recognize whether you--and your counterpart--typically seek or avoid conflict Prepare for and engage in a difficult conversation Manage your and your counterpart's emotions Develop a resolution together Know when to walk away Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

When we disagree about fundamental issues, especially issues such as politics or religion, it can be incredibly difficult to maintain close interpersonal relationships. These differences have ended friendships and caused rifts in families. We need a tool to help us build more resilient relationships despite real and present differences. In Brave Talk, communications expert Melody Stanford Martin offers just such a tool: impasse. By learning to treat every conflict as if it's an impasse and temporarily suspend our desire to resolve differences, we make space for deeper understanding and stronger ties. Brave Talk offers hands-on skill-building in critical thinking, power sharing, and rhetoric. Combining real-life storytelling, engaging illustrations, and rigorous academic sources, this book blends humor, creativity, and interactive learning to help everyday people develop better skills for navigating conflict in order to build stronger relationships and healthier communities.

Narrative analyses routinely investigate autobiographical and interview data. This book examines narratives-in-interaction co-constructed by participants in formal mediation sessions, by asking how many of the five cases in the videotaped data display the adversarial narrative pattern pervasive within the interpersonal conflict literature, and secondly what other narrative patterns may be present, and how do they work? Focusing simultaneously at the utterance level and the macro-levels present within the larger dispute context, this book reveals situated communicative practices by which interlocutors interactively construct, resist, reproduce, and intertextually transform adversarial narratives to produce outcomes consonant with their underlying interests. In contrast to the dramaturgical model traditionally used in narrative research, this book illuminates the emergent, microgenetic character of narrative development.

Describes the six-step conflict resolution process, called "Talk It Out," developed by educator Barbara Porro to teach students to solve their own real-life problems, such as teasing, cheating, hitting, and others, and includes lesson plans, scripts, and other resource tools.

This volume aims to fill two gaps in pragmatic research into English as a lingua franca (ELF): the investigation of conflict talk and the incorporation of a multimodal perspective into the analysis of ELF interactions. To this end, multimodal conversation analysis is used, combined with the perspective of politeness theory. The author shows how interactants use multimodal resources to manage competitive overlaps, disagreement, and third-party complaints in casual ELF conversations among friends. In doing so, the notion of cooperativeness is re-examined, and the appropriateness of an intercultural approach to analyzing multimodal resources in ELF interactions is demonstrated.

A transformational approach to conflict argues that conflicts must be viewed as embedded within broader relational patterns and social and discursive structures. Central to this book is the idea that the origins of transformation can be momentary, situational, and small-scale or large-scale and systemic. The momentary involves shifts and meaningful changes in communication and related patterns that are created in communication between people. Momentary transformative changes can radiate out into more systemic levels, and systemic transformative changes can radiate inward to more personal levels. This book engages this transformative framework by bringing together current scholarship that epitomizes and highlights the contribution of communication scholarship and communication-centered approaches to conflict transformation in personal, family, and working relationships and organizational contexts. The resulting volume presents an engaging mix of scholarly chapters, think pieces, and personal experiences from the field of practice and everyday life. The book embraces a wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, including narrative, critical, intersectional, rhetorical, and quantitative. It makes a valuable additive contribution to the ongoing dialogue across and between disciplines on how to transform conflicts creatively, sustainably, and ethically.