This research thesis analyzes the characteristics of communication work in a call centre, by examining the communication work at a Swedish call centre which is outsourced to Latvia. The thesis studies the ways in which communication with the customers is organized, carried out and assigned meaning. Theoretically, the thesis draws on both critical and management-oriented perspectives of work. The empirical investigation combines participant observations at the call centre with individual interviews, mainly conducted with operators and management staff. The communication work is analyzed both as labour and as communicative activity. The concept of labour focuses upon the relation between employer and employee. Therefore, the analysis is placed within the framework of a capitalistic production system, through a survey of the economic and the organisational working conditions. The communicative activity deals with how the telephone conversations with the customers are enacted. In that part of the analyses, the working routines and the meaning making practices are illuminated. As examined in the current research, the communication work is indeed constructed in an alienated manner, through high levels of standardization, immobility, and estrangement from both customers and the customers’ culture. Nonetheless, merely being employed has meant significant economic security for the operators of the Latvian call centre. The operators are incumbents of a society affected by deep economic crises with high unemployment rates. In relation to their broader society, the employees have found meaning within their immediate social situation. This may explain why they endure the monotonous work with few opportunities for development.

Institutions of higher education in the United States have long been attractors for international students from all over the world. The number of international students had been constantly growing until the past couple of years. This is a concerning issue because international students play several important roles in higher education institutions. International students bring different points of view that enhance other students’ learning and institutions gain financial benefits from the presence of international students. Thus, it is important to understand how to improve the experience of international students. For the present study I used a phenomenological approach to explore the experiences of international students and their spouses. Participants in this study included 16.5 dyads from 12 different countries. The sample included both graduate international students and their spouses for various reasons. When studying acculturation, studies have traditionally focused on undergraduate students. The needs and experiences of undergraduate students are different from graduate students because they are usually in a different stage of life. It is also true that graduate students often relocate with their dependents, unlike undergraduate students, and therefore they have different challenges and responsibilities. It is important to include spouses because they are often an invisible population. Dependents have critical limitations such as the prohibition to work or study. This study was conducted through the lens of biographical disruption and participants’ accounts were analyzed to better understand the added communication work that they must manage. The findings showed that there was a relationship between acculturation categories and the amount and type of acculturation work. Finally, the study shows how international students and their dependents reconstruct their biographies by molding their identities. This study should be used to create new policies and services for international students and their dependents.

This thesis is focused on improving the state of corporate culture in Nutrend D.S., a.s. On the basis of analysis of results obtained in questionnaire inquiry, there were some drawbacks detected in managers getting familiar with the vision and long-term business objectives, in the financial evaluation and incentive system, and also in the working environment. Further there was an existing rivalry identified between different departments and low willingness of employees to attend corporate events. Subsequently, the proposals and recommendations have been processed leading to the elimination of these drawbacks and to improvement of the present state.

My study explores the characteristics of remote performance feedback that professional examiners working in the Oxford, Cambridge & RSA (OCR) awarding body communicate to each other. Drawing on sociocultural theories, I argue that this interaction possesses learning potential because between-professional communication supports the development of participants’ reasoning through the alignment of culturally appropriate collective thinking. My data consists of 991 feedback messages that were captured during two examination sessions (between May and July 2014, and between May and July 2015). These remote interactions (either email or telephone) involved three senior examiners and 27 examiners. These feedback interactions have an important quality assurance function as they help to ensure that the examiners carry out marking practices to an agreed standard. My research explores two interlinked research questions: ‘What are the characteristics of examiner feedback?’ and ‘What are the characteristics of effective examiner feedback?’ For the first research question I develop a methodology that extends the Sociocultural Discourse Analysis (SCDA) approach developed by Neil Mercer; I call this approach Augmented Sociocultural Discourse Analysis (ASCDA). My methodology allows me to investigate the features of interaction at both a particular and a general level, and clusters my analysis into four specific feedback discourse themes: feedback content, the development of discourse over time, evidence of joint intellectual action within feedback, and the impact of feedback. In order to address the second question I hypothesise that effectiveness relates to how feedback features support or undermine examiners’ common ground building. I synthesise the findings from these analyses to consider the lessons for examiner practice in particular, and for other professional feedback practices more generally. Taken together, these analyses suggest that feedback-giving is an intellectually challenging process. My analyses also suggest that this complexity involves the participants establishing and maintaining an Intermental Development Zone through their feedback communication, and that this entails them manipulating discourse features whilst simultaneously attending to a variety of contextual features of the professional environment.

This diploma thesis examines mutual communication of older school-age pupils during group work within Czech language lessons. In theoretical part, we define fundamental terms and introduce related theoretical work aimed to communication, group education, and adolescent period. The latter part consists of transcripted recordings analyses. Recordings were acquired during group work within Czech language lessons. Last part of the thesis compares the recording analyses. Key words communication, pupil, group work, group, education, older school-age, Czech