Trust and Discourse: Organizational perspectives offers a timely collection of new articles on the relationship between discursive practices in organizational or institutional contexts and the psychological/moral category of trust. As globalization, the drive for efficiency and accountability, and increased time pressure lead groups and individuals to rethink the way they communicate, it is becoming more and more important to investigate how these streamlined and impersonal forms of communication affect issues of responsibility, authenticity and – ultimately – trust. The book deals with a variety of organizational settings ranging from in-hospital bedside teaching encounters and government communication following a nuclear accident to job interviews and foreign news reporting. This comprehensive study of an emerging new field will provide essential reading for linguists, discourse analysts, communication scholars, and other social scientists interested in a range of perspectives on oral, written and digital language use in society, including interactional sociolinguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, ethnography, multimodality and organizational studies.

The first book to bring together researchers and practitioners from a range of professions and institutions in exploring how people develop and may lose Trust through the ways in which they speak, write and act. Includes practical examples of how to conduct Trust-related research using tools from applied linguistics and discourse analysis.

"Don't talk to strangers" is the advice long given to children by parents of all classes and races. Today it has blossomed into a fundamental precept of civic education, reflecting interracial distrust, personal and political alienation, and a profound suspicion of others. In this powerful and eloquent essay, Danielle Allen, a 2002 MacArthur Fellow, takes this maxim back to Little Rock, rooting out the seeds of distrust to replace them with "a citizenship of political friendship." Returning to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 and to the famous photograph of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, being cursed by fellow "citizen" Hazel Bryan, Allen argues that we have yet to complete the transition to political friendship that this moment offered. By combining brief readings of philosophers and political theorists with personal reflections on race politics in Chicago, Allen proposes strikingly practical techniques of citizenship. These tools of political friendship, Allen contends, can help us become more trustworthy to others and overcome the fossilized distrust among us. Sacrifice is the key concept that bridges citizenship and trust, according to Allen. She uncovers the ordinary, daily sacrifices citizens make to keep democracy working—and offers methods for recognizing and reciprocating those sacrifices. Trenchant, incisive, and ultimately hopeful, Talking to Strangers is nothing less than a manifesto for a revitalized democratic citizenry.

Trust and trustworthiness are core social phenomena, at the heart of most everyday interactions. Yet they are also puzzling: while it matters to us that we place trust well, trusting people who will not let us down, both also seem to involve morally driven attitudes and behaviours. Confronted by whether I should trust another, this tension creates very practical dilemmas. In Trust, Thomas Simpson addresses the foundational question, why should I trust? Philosophical treatments of trust have tended to focus on trying to identify what the attitude of trust consists in. Simpson argues that this approach is misguided, giving rise to merely linguistic debates about how the term 'trust' is used. Instead, he focuses attention on the ways that trust is valuable. The answer defended comprises two claims, which at first seem to be in tension. One is a form of evidentialism about trust: normally, your trust should be based on the evidence you have for someone's trustworthiness. But, second, someone's word is normally enough to settle for you whether you should trust them. Social norms of trustworthiness explain why both are normal. Methodologically innovative, Trust also applies the account , addressing how cultures of trust can be sustained, and the implications of trust in God. While it is a philosophical essay, the book is written in a way that presumes no prior knowledge of philosophy, to be accessible to the scholars from the many disciplines also attracted and puzzled by trust.

Explores the implications for democracy of declining trust in government and between individuals.

John Sinclair is one of the major figures in applied linguistics and his work is essential study for students. This accessible book collects in one volume Sinclair's key papers on written discourse structure, lexis patterns, phraseology, corpus analysis, lexicography and linguistic theory from the 1990s. All the papers have been edited and updated for this book. The clear and accessible introduction helps students to navigate his key themes and arguments, making the volume an ideal companion for those coming to Sinclair's more recent writings for the first time.

Trust occupies a unique place in contemporary discourse. Seen as both necessary and good, it is variously depicted as enhancing the social fabric, lowering crime rates, increasing happiness, and generating prosperity. It allows for complex political systems, permits human communication, underpins financial instruments and economic institutions, and holds society itself together. There is scant space within this vision for a nuanced discussion of mistrust. With few exceptions, it is treated as little more than a corrosive absence. This monograph, instead, proposes an ethnographic and conceptual exploration of mistrust as a legitimate epistemological stance in its own right. It examines the impact of mistrust on practices of conversation and communication, friendship and society, as well as politics and cooperation, and suggests that suspicion, doubt, and uncertainty can also ground ways of organizing human society and cooperating with others.