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Organization Studies and Posthumanism: Towards a More-than-Human World (Routledge Studies in Management, Organizations and Society)
This book aims at exploring the reception of critical posthumanist conversations in the context of Management and Organization Studies. It constitutes an invitation to de-center the human subject and thus an invitation to the ongoing deconstruction of humanism. The project is not to deny humans but to position them in relation to other nonhumans, more-than-humans, the non-living world, and all the “missing masses” from organizational inquiry. What is under critique is humanism’s anthropocentrism, essentialism, exceptionalism, and speciesism in the context of the Anthropocene and the contemporary crisis the world experiences. From climate change to the loss of sense at work, to the new geopolitical crisis, to the unknown effects of the diffusion of AI, all these powerful forces have implications for organizations and organizing. A re-imagination of concepts, theories, and methods is needed in organization studies to cope with the challenge of a more-than-human world.
Organizational Culture and Social Equity: An Experiential Guide
Social equity, or the lack of social equity, is practiced in all of our organizations. By focusing on advancing social equity in organizational culture, public and non-profit organizations can create more inclusive operations, correct historical injustices, and fulfill their mission to serve the community. Social equity is often explored as a grand theory, but it is critical for organizations to identify and practice strategies to apply theory into action. Organizational Culture and Social Equity: An Experiential Guide is the first book of its kind to provide the public service-minded reader with an opportunity to practice social equity. The chapters are designed to be both theoretical and practical, helping the reader develop knowledge to analyze social equity efforts in their own organization as well as the tools to act. The contributing chapter authors in this book explore social equity through various dimensions of organizational culture: physical characteristics and general environment; policies, procedures, and structures; socialization; leadership behavior; rewards and recognition; discourse; and learning and performance. Each contributor provides a thorough overview of their respective culture category along with important theories and concepts, definitions, and strategies for practice. The chapter authors then examine social equity in each area of organizational culture through a learning activity, discussion questions, and a call to action. Each chapter further reinforces concepts with a vignette featuring a public administrator who has faced a situation related to that chapter. Organizational Culture and Social Equity is a timely and essential read for all those who wish to study or practice public administration through an equity lens.
Organizational Ethnography
Ethnography is at the heart of what researchers in management and organization studies do. This crucial book offers a robust and original overview of ‘doing’ organizational ethnography, guiding readers through the essential qualitative methods for the study of organizations. Preparing students to enter the field with a confident outlook and a toolkit of skills, chapters present a series of action-learning projects to arm readers with practical exercises that will hone the abilities of the organizational ethnographer. Expert contributors offer crucial outlines into a variety of essential skills, including shadowing, autoethnography, interviews, media analysis and storytelling. The book concludes with a chapter by a doctoral student, providing unique insights into the development of the ethnographic understanding of organizational realities. Featuring useful exercises and an accessible style, this book is critical reading for PhD and Masters students in business administration and organizational theory, as well as social science students undertaking qualitative methodology programmes. It will also be useful for students on MBA courses in need of a humanistic approach to organizations.
Organizational Listening for Strategic Communication: Building Theory and Practice (Routledge Research in Public Relations)
Embracing listening as a useful tool for strengthening organization-publics and organization-employee relationships, this book offers theoretical and practical insights for listening across myriad strategic communication contexts. Chapters authored by a diverse global collective of communication scholars and professionals present original research and case examples of listening for strategic communication in corporate, government, and nonprofit environments. They explore topics such as utilizing artificial intelligence and social media; activism, social justice, and ethics; and fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion within and outside organizations. Each chapter concludes with recommendations for strategic communication practice. This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in public relations and strategic communication, organizational communication, and listening.
Organizational Routines: How They Are Created, Maintained, and Changed (Perspectives on Process Organization Studies)
Over the past 15 years, organizational routines have been increasingly investigated from a process perspective to challenge the idea that routines are stable entities that are mindlessly enacted. A process perspective explores how routines are performed by specific people in specific settings. It shows how action, improvisation, and novelty are part of routine performances. It also departs from a view of routines as "black boxes" that transform inputs into organizational outputs and places attention on the actual actions and patterns that comprise routines. Routines are both effortful accomplishments, in that it takes effort to perform, sustain, or change them, and emergent accomplishments, because sometimes the effort to perform routines leads to unforeseen change. While a process perspective has enabled scholars to open up the 'black box' of routines and explore their actions and patterns in fine-grained, dynamic ways, there is much more work to be done. Chapters in this volume make considerable progress, through the three main themes expressed across these chapters. These are: Zooming out to understand routines in larger contexts; Zooming in to reveal actor dispositions and skill; and Innovation, creativity and routines in ambiguous contexts.
Organizing Sustainable Development (Routledge Open Business and Economics)
The role and meaning of sustainable development have been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. However, there has recently been a dynamic increase in interest in the subject, which results in numerous, in-depth scientific research and publications with an interdisciplinary dimension. This edited volume is a compendium of theoretical knowledge on sustainable development. The context analysed in the publication includes a multi-level and multi-aspect analysis starting from the historical and legal conditions, through elements of the macro level and the micro level, inside the organization. Organizing Sustainable Development offers a systematic and comprehensive theoretical analysis of sustainable development supplemented with practical examples, which will allow obtaining comprehensive knowledge about the meaning and its multi-context application in practice. It shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to students at an advanced level, academics and reflective practitioners in the fields of sustainable development, management studies, organizational studies and corporate social responsibility.
Overcoming Bad Leadership in Organizations (The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Professional Practice Series)
Leadership is the most consequential force impacting the lives of billions of people around the world. In healthy organizations, leadership is a productive force that inspires cooperation and builds cultures that give people meaning and purpose in their lives. On the other hand, nearly everyone has experienced a bad boss and the detrimental effects of poor leadership. Overcoming Bad Leadership in Organizations brings together the foremost experts on the dark side of leadership to offer groundbreaking insights to leaders, talent management professionals, and psychologists. The goal is to confront reality head on, to shed the idea that leadership is always good, and in this space increase our understanding of the perils of dysfunctional leadership. With this knowledge, readers are well-positioned to improve their own leadership style, consult with organizations to ameliorate abusive and dysfunctional leadership, hold bad actors accountable, and unleash good leadership around the world.
Overcoming Orientalism: Essays in Honor of John L. Esposito
Orientalism is the term applied to scholarship that reduces Islam and Muslims to stereotypes of ignorance and violence in need of foreign control. It has been used to rationalize Europe's colonial domination of most of the Muslim world and continued American-led interventions in the post-colonial period. In the past 30 years it has been represented by claims that a monolithic Islam and equally monolithic West are distinct civilizations, sharing nothing in common and, indeed, involved in an inevitable "clash" from which only one can emerge the winner. Most recently, it has appeared in Alt Right rhetoric. Anti-Muslim sentiment, measured in public opinion polls, hate crime statistics, and legislation, is reaching record levels. Since John Esposito published his first book nearly 40 years ago, he has been guiding readers beyond such politically charged stereotypes. The essays in this volume highlight the contributions of scholars from a variety of disciplines who, like -- and often inspired by -- John Esposito, recognize the misleading and politically dangerous nature of Orientalist polarizations. They present Islam as a multi-faceted and dynamic tradition embraced by communities in globally interconnected but substantially diverse contexts over the centuries. The contributors follow Esposito's lead, stressing the profound commonalities among religions and replacing Orientalist discourse with holistic analyses of the complex historical phenomena that affect developments in all societies. In addition to chapters focusing on diversity among Muslims and interfaith relations, this collection includes chapters assessing the secular bias at the root of Orientalist scholarship, and contemporary iterations of Orientalism in the form of Islamophobia.
The Oxford Handbook of Acculturation and Health (Oxford Library of Psychology)
The Oxford Handbook of Acculturation and Health expertly brings together two very distinct, but complementary, streams of work and thought: theoretical and methodological work on acculturation, and the applied work linking acculturation to various health outcomes among international migrants and their families. In this important volume, the work of landmark acculturation theorists and methodologists come together to showcase applied epidemiologic and intervention work on the issues facing acculturation and public health today. Edited by Seth J. Schwartz and Jennifer B. Unger, this Handbook is divided into two important parts for readers. Part one features chapters that are dedicated to theoretical and methodological work on acculturation, including definitional issues, measurement issues, and procedures for studying acculturation across immigrant groups and national contexts. The second part focuses on the links between acculturation and various health outcomes, such as obesity, physical activity, drug and alcohol abuse, mental health, delinquency, and suicide. Notably, because a majority of the research on acculturation and health has been conducted on Hispanic immigration, this volume contextualizes that research and offers readers compelling insight for how to apply these principles to other immigrant groups in the United States and around the world.
The Oxford Handbook of Accurate Personality Judgment (Oxford Library of Psychology)
Each day, we make judgments about the personality characteristics of those around us, and we routinely rely on them to guide our behavior in interpersonal interactions and relationships. This handbook provides a review of theory and research on the accuracy of personality judgments. After a historical review, the first section presents the major theoretical models that guide research in this area and describes methodological approaches to evaluating accuracy. The second section reviews the research findings relevant to four moderators of accuracy, and the third section focuses on judgments people make of themselves. The fourth section examines various types of information used in making personality judgments, while the fifth section provides examples of some of the domains to which accuracy research can be applied, including romantic relationships and clinical practice. Learning about the process of accurate judgments can be used to help people understand when and how they are more likely to make accurate judgments, and this handbook offers a thorough, evidence-based, and up-to-date review of this research field.
The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies (Oxford Handbooks)
Intellectual struggles with the "animal question"-- how humans can rethink and reconfigure their relationships with other animals-- first began to take hold in the 1970s. Over the next forty years, scholars from a wide range of fields would make sweeping reevaluations of the relationship between humans and other animals. The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies brings these diverse evaluations together for the first time, paying special attention to the commodification of animals, the degradation of the natural world and a staggering loss of animal habitat and species extinction, and the increasing need for humans to coexist with other animals in urban, rural and natural contexts. Linda Kalof maps these themes into the five major categories that structure this volume: Animals in the Landscape of Law, Politics and Public Policy; Animal Intentionality, Agency and Reflexive Thinking; Animals as Objects in Science, Food, Spectacle and Sport; Animals in Cultural Representations; and Animals in Ecosystems. Written by international scholars with backgrounds in philosophy, law, history, English, art, sociology, geography, archaeology, environmental studies, cultural studies, and animal advocacy, the thirty chapters in this handbook investigate key issues and concepts central to understanding our current relationship with other animals and the potential for coexistence in an ecological community of living beings.
The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Network Research (Oxford Handbooks)
Network research has recently been adopted as one of the tools of the trade in archaeology, used to study a wide range of topics: interactions between island communities, movements through urban spaces, visibility in past landscapes, material culture similarity, exchange, and much more. This Handbook is the first authoritative reference work for archaeological network research, featuring current topical trends and covering the archaeological application of network methods and theories. This is elaborately demonstrated through substantive topics and case studies drawn from a breadth of periods and cultures in world archaeology. It highlights and further develops the unique contributions made by archaeological research to network science, especially concerning the development of spatial and material culture network methods and approaches to studying long-term network change. This is the go-to resource for students and scholars wishing to explore how network science can be applied in archaeology through an up-to-date overview of the field.
The Oxford Handbook of Christianity in Asia (Oxford Handbooks)
Named by the International Bulletin of Missionary Studies as an Outstanding Book of 2014 for Mission Studies Despite the ongoing global expansion of Christianity, there remains a lack of comprehensive scholarship on its development in Asia. This volume fills the gap by exploring the world of Asian Christianity and its manifold expressions, including worship, theology, spirituality, inter-religious relations, interventions in society, and mission. The contributors, from over twenty countries, deconstruct many of the widespread misconceptions and interpretations of Christianity in Asia. They analyze how the growth of Christian beliefs throughout the continent is linked with the socio-political and cultural processes of colonization, decolonization, modernization, democratization, identity construction of social groups, and various social movements. With a particular focus on inter-religious encounters and emerging theological and spiritual paradigms, the volume provides alternative frames for understanding the phenomenon of conversion and studies how the scriptures of other religious traditions are used in the practice of Christianity within Asia.
The Oxford Handbook of Coercive Relationship Dynamics (Oxford Library of Psychology)
Coercive interactions and conflict are commonplace in close relationships and families, friendships, and teacher-student relationships in schools. Coercion and conflict can be used to grow stronger relationships, or they can lead to the deterioration of relationships, undermine efforts to socialize and teach youth, and lead to the development of mental health problems in children and parents. Coercion theory helps shed light on how these daily interaction dynamics explain the development of aggression, marital conflict, depression, and severe mental health problems in families and how they undermine school safety and effectiveness. The Oxford Handbook of Coercive Relationship Dynamics features the most recent, innovative applications of coercion theory to understanding psychopathology, developmental theory, and intervention science. The volume provides a multidisciplinary perspective on coercive processes, origins, and social functions to anchor coercion theory from multiple perspectives and to lay a theoretical and empirical foundation for innovative expansion of the coercion model to new areas of research. The volume gives specific examples of how the basic coercive processes underlie the development of significant suffering in children and families, and chapters include clinically oriented discussions of research on the role of coercion in the causation and amplification of problem behavior and emotional distress. The internationally renowned authors of this volume highlight scientific advances in the study of coercive dynamics in families and close relationships, account for physiological and genetic correlates of coercive dynamics, and discuss the application of coercion theory to effective interventions that improve the quality and well-being of children, adolescents, and adults. This volume is an invaluable resource on behavioral science methodology, developmental theory, and intervention science.
The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology (Oxford Handbooks)
In recent years there has been a growing interest in cognition within sociology and other social sciences. Within sociology this interest cuts across various topical subfields, including culture, social psychology, religion, race, and identity. Scholars within the new subfield of cognitive sociology, also referred to as the sociology of culture and cognition, are contributing to a rapidly developing body of work on how mental and social phenomena are interrelated and often interdependent. In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, Wayne H. Brekhus and Gabe Igantow have gathered some of the most influential scholars working in cognitive sociology to present an accessible introduction to key research areas in a diverse field. While classical sociological and newer interdisciplinary approaches have been covered separately by scholars in the past, this volume alternatively presents a broad range of cognitive sociological perspectives. The contributors discuss a range of approaches for theorizing and analyzing the "social mind," including macro-cultural approaches, interactionist approaches, and research that draws on Pierre Bourdieu's major concepts. Each chapter further investigates a variety of cognitive processes within these three approaches, such as attention and inattention, perception, automatic and deliberate cognition, cognition and social action, stereotypes, categorization, classification, judgment, symbolic boundaries, meaning-making, metaphor, embodied cognition, morality and religion, identity construction, time sequencing, and memory. A comprehensive look at cognitive sociology's main contributions and the central debates within the field, the Handbook will serve as a primary resource for social researchers, faculty, and students interested in how cognitive sociology can contribute to research within their substantive areas of focus.
The Oxford Handbook of Consumption (Oxford Handbooks)
The Oxford Handbook of Consumption consolidates the most innovative recent work conducted by social scientists in the field of consumption studies and identifies some of the most fruitful lines of inquiry for future research. It begins by embedding marketing in its global history, enmeshed in various political, economic, and social sites. From this embedded perspective, the book branches out to examine the rise of consumer culture theory among consumer researchers and parallel innovative developments in sociology and anthropology, with scholarship analyzing the roles that identity, social networks, organizational dynamics, institutions, market devices, materiality, and cultural meanings play across a wide variety of applications, including, but not limited to, brands and branding, the sharing economy, tastes and preferences, credit and credit scoring, consumer surveillance, race and ethnicity, status, family life, well-being, environmental sustainability, social movements, and social inequality. The volume is unique in the attention it gives to consumer research on inequality and the focus it has on consumer credit scores and consumer behaviors that shape life chances. The volume includes essays by many of the key researchers in the field, some of whom have only recently, if at all, crossed the disciplinary lines that this volume has enabled. The contributors have tried to address several key questions: What motivates consumption and what does it mean to be a consumer? What social, technical, and cultural systems integrate and give character to contemporary consumption? What actors, institutions, and understandings organize and govern consumption? And what are the social uses and effects of consumption?
The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Approaches to Human Resource Management (Oxford Handbooks)
In recent years scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognized that human resource management (HRM) has paid insufficient attention to the impact of context. While research has been devoted to examining the impact of national context on HRM systems, this literature has been largely separate from that focused on other levels of context affecting organizational choices in HRM strategies, such as the impact of the organizational environment, industry sector, occupation or workforce characteristics. In addition, research has tended to consider elements of context in isolation rather than considering its impact at different levels. The goal of The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Approaches to Human Resource Management is to provide a more holistic approach to developing a contextual understanding of HRM. This Handbook offers a comprehensive understanding of the influence of contextual characteristics on the design and implementation of HRM systems. Rather than focusing on a single level or approach to examining context, the Handbook provides both conceptual and empirical analyses of different elements of context using a range of different lenses and measures. In order to explore the influence of contextual factors at multiple levels, the volume assembles a range of detailed accounts of how context affects the design, implementation and impact of HRM activities.
The Oxford Handbook of Cross-Cultural Organizational Behavior (OXFORD LIBRARY OF PSYCHOLOGY SERIES)
The process of globalization has brought into focus the central role of culture in understanding work behavior. In parallel to the accelerating process of globalization, there has been an explosion of empirical studies on culture and organizational behavior. The Oxford Handbook of Cross-Cultural Organizational Behavior integrates this research into one coherent framework with a rich collection of chapters that highlight the role of culture at the multi-levels of the organization, from the individual level to the meso-level of the social group, the macro-level of the organization, and up to the global work culture. Written by a diverse group of experts in the field, this handbook provides critical knowledge on how cultures vary, and how culture influences basic psychological processes, communication, trust, social networks, leadership, and negotiation. It also covers how to manage multicultural teams, culture and human resource management practices, joint ventures, organizational change, and more. In order to be effective in the emerging global economy, managers need to be able to interact effectively across cultures, and this handbook provides the most comprehensive treatment of the subject on the market.
The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology (Oxford Handbooks)
Since sociologists returned to the study of culture in the past several decades, a pursuit all but anathema for a generation, cultural sociology has emerged as a vibrant field. Edited by three leading cultural sociologists, The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology presents the full theoretical and methodological vitality of this critically significant new area.The Handbook gathers together works by authors confronting the crucial choices all cultural sociologists face today: about analytic priorities, methods, topics, epistemologies, ideologies, and even modes of writing. It is a vital collection of preeminent thinkers studying the ways in which culture, society, politics, and economy interact in the world. Organized by empirical areas of study rather than particular theories or competing intellectual strands, the Handbook addresses power, politics, and states; economics and organization; mass media; social movements; religion; aesthetics; knowledge; and health. Allowing the reader to observe tensions as well as convergences, the collection displays the value of cultural sociology not as a niche discipline but as a way to view and understand the many facets of contemporary society. The first of its kind, The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology offers comprehensive and immediate access to the real developments and disagreements taking place in the field, and deftly exemplifies how cultural sociology provides a new way of seeing and modeling social facts. "This groundbreaking, readable handbook [is] the first single volume to attempt to unify its diverse contemporary applications in a wide range of traditional genres of sociology...Valuable for college universities and libraries supporting undergraduate and graduate degree programs in sociology and history."-CHOICE
The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology (Oxford Library of Psychology)
The goal of cultural psychology is to explain the ways in which human cultural constructions -- for example, rituals, stereotypes, and meanings -- organize and direct human acting, feeling, and thinking in different social contexts. A rapidly growing, international field of scholarship, cultural psychology is ready for an interdisciplinary, primary resource. Linking psychology, anthropology, sociology, archaeology, and history, The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology is the quintessential volume that unites the variable perspectives from these disciplines. Comprised of over fifty contributed chapters, this book provides a necessary, comprehensive overview of contemporary cultural psychology. Bridging psychological, sociological, and anthropological perspectives, one will find in this handbook: - A concise history of psychology that includes valuable resources for innovation in psychology in general and cultural psychology in particular - Interdisciplinary chapters including insights into cultural anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, culture and conceptions of the self, and semiotics and cultural connections - Close, conceptual links with contemporary biological sciences, especially developmental biology, and with other social sciences - A section detailing potential methodological innovations for cultural psychology By comparing cultures and the (often differing) human psychological functions occuring within them, The Oxford Handbook of Culture and Psychology is the ideal resource for making sense of complex and varied human phenomena.
The Oxford Handbook of Cyberpsychology (Oxford Library of Psychology)
The internet is so central to everyday life, that it is impossible to contemplate life without it. From finding romance, to conducting business, receiving health advice, shopping, banking, and gaming, the internet opens up a world of possibilities to people across the globe. Yet for all its positive attributes, it is also an environment where we witness the very worst of human behaviour - cybercrime, election interference, fake news, and trolling being just a few examples. What is it about this unique environment that can make people behave in ways they wouldn't contemplate in real life. Understanding the psychological processes underlying and influencing the thinking, interpretation and behaviour associated with this online interconnectivity is the core premise of Cyberpsychology. The Oxford Handbook of Cyberpsychology explores a wide range of cyberpsychological processes and activities through the research and writings of some of the world's leading cyberpsychology experts. The book is divided into eight sections covering topics as varied as online research methods, self-presentation and impression management, technology across the lifespan, interaction and interactivity, online groups and communities, social media, health and technology, video gaming and cybercrime and cybersecurity. The Oxford Handbook of Cyberpsychology will be important reading for those who have only recently discovered the discipline as well as more seasoned cyberpsychology researchers and teachers.
The Oxford Handbook of Diversity in Organizations (Oxford Handbooks)
In the last decades diversity and its management has become a feature of modern and postmodern organizations. Different practices have spread around the globe focusing on the organizing and management of inclusion and exclusion of persons and identities based on different genders, sexual orientations, racial and ethnic backgrounds, ages, and (dis)abilities as well as religious beliefs. However, although increasingly recognized as important, the discourses of diversity are multifaceted and not without controversy. Furthermore, diversity management practices have the potential to reproduce both inclusion and exclusion. The book presents the foundations of organizing and managing diversities, offers multidisciplinary, intersectional and critical analyses on key issues, and opens up fresh perspectives in order to advance the diversity debate. It also inspires new debates on diversity by encouraging scholars to broaden their research agendas and assists students and scholars to increase their understanding of the field and its current discussions. The contributors are a team of leading diversity scholars from all over the world.
The Oxford Handbook of Economic Conflict Resolution (Oxford Handbooks)
Individuals, groups, and societies all experience conflict, and attempt to resolve it in numerous ways. This Handbook brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to offer perspectives on the current state and future challenges in negotiation and conflict resolution. It will serve as an aid to scholars in identifying new research topics, provide a guide to current debates, and identify complementarities between approaches taken by different disciplines and the insights which those approaches generate. Leading researchers of economics, psychology, organizational behavior, policy, and other fields have contributed chapters. The volume is organized to purposefully juxtapose contributions from different fields to enable cross-fertilization between the disciplines and to generate new and creative approaches to studying the topic. These chapters provide a lens into current scholarship, and a window into the future of the field of economic conflict resolution. The confluence of research perspectives represented will identify further synergies and advances in our understanding of this topic.
The Oxford Handbook of Education and Globalization
Globalization has become one of the most recurrent concepts in social and political sciences. More often than not, however, the concept is handled without much of a properly articulated theory capable of explaining its historical origin and expansion. For education researchers attempting to elucidate how global changes and processes affect their field of study, this situation is problematic. The Oxford Handbook on Education and Globalization brings together in a unique way leading authors in social theory and in political science and reflects on how these two distinct disciplinary approaches deal with the relation between globalization and education. Part I develops a firmer and tighter dialogue between social theory, long concerned with theories of globalization, and education research. It presents, discusses, and compares three major attempts to theorize the process of globalization and its relation to education: the neo-institutionalist theorization of world culture, the materialist and domination perspectives, and Luhmann's theory of world society. Part II analyses the political and institutional factors that shape the adoption of global reforms at the national and local level of governance, emphasizing the role of different contexts in shaping policy outcomes. It engages with the existing debates of globalization mainly in the field of public policy and comparative politics and explores the social, political, and economic implications of globalization for national systems of education, their organizations, and institutions.
The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages (Oxford Handbooks)
The endangered languages crisis is widely acknowledged among scholars who deal with languages and indigenous peoples as one of the most pressing problems facing humanity, posing moral, practical, and scientific issues of enormous proportions. Simply put, no area of the world is immune from language endangerment. The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages, in 39 chapters, provides a comprehensive overview of the efforts that are being undertaken to deal with this crisis. A comprehensive reference reflecting the breadth of the field, the Handbook presents in detail both the range of thinking about language endangerment and the variety of responses to it, and broadens understanding of language endangerment, language documentation, and language revitalization, encouraging further research. The Handbook is organized into five parts. Part 1, Endangered Languages, addresses the fundamental issues that are essential to understanding the nature of the endangered languages crisis. Part 2, Language Documentation, provides an overview of the issues and activities of concern to linguists and others in their efforts to record and document endangered languages. Part 3, Language Revitalization, includes approaches, practices, and strategies for revitalizing endangered and sleeping ("dormant") languages. Part 4, Endangered Languages and Biocultural Diversity, extends the discussion of language endangerment beyond its conventional boundaries to consider the interrelationship of language, culture, and environment, and the common forces that now threaten the sustainability of their diversity. Part 5, Looking to the Future, addresses a variety of topics that are certain to be of consequence in future efforts to document and revitalize endangered languages.