Communication Yearbook 33

* Communication Yearbook 33. Christina S. Beck, ed. New York, NY: Routledge Communication, 2009. 536 pp. $155 hbk. This yearbook, the fourth edited by Christina S. Beck, a professor of communication studies at Ohio University, represents a stellar achievement and an important resource for the international community of students and scholars of communication. As a yearbook, or an annual review, this collection has gone through a carefully managed and highly selective process of winnowing down a large number of proposals. This was followed by some finetuning of the author's contributions with the assistance of an impressive list of reviewers. The eleven chapters in this rather comprehensive review range from quite specialized concerns about specific communications effects, through some familiar as well as emerging perspectives on communications processes, to some assessments of media content, occupational discourses, and apologetic rhetoric. By including individualized tables of contents at the beginning of each chapter, Beck makes it easy for the reader to proceed with a good sense of what each contribution has to offer. And, there is quite a bit here to consider. Three chapters focus to some extent on aspects of persuasion. Sahara Byrne and Philip Hart offer two competing perspectives on the unintended consequences of messages that we recognize as "boomerang" effects. It may be, as many suggest, that some communication targets are able to resist the persuasive impact of a given message, but it may also be that, for one reason or another, the target simply "missed the point" of the message entirely. Jos Hornikx and Daniel O'Keefe's review focuses primarily on consumer advertising. They observe that attempts to adapt persuasive messages to what the source believed to be important cultural values for a particular set of targets are only slightly more effective than those that were not adapted. This suggests that marketers may also miss the point about which values really matter to which segments of the population. Seth Noar, Nancy Harrington, and Rosalie Aldrich focus more explicitly on the role of message-tailoring as it applies to the development of persuasive messages about health for individuals, rather than for members of population groups or segments. They do so, in part, because of a belief that new media technologies will make such targeting commonplace. This assumes, of course, that the accumulated evidence regarding the efficiency and effectiveness of targeting will be persuasive. Another set of reviews reflects the editor's abiding interest in intersections and interactions across social and institutional boundaries. Marni Heinz and Ronald Rice present an integrated model of knowledge-sharing in online systems. This comprehensive model identifies a number of factors that influence individual usage of "knowledge management systems" and the individual and collective outcomes that result. …