4.2 Scholarly Edited Books on Listening

Three edited books on listening to others represent some of the best listening research in the field of Communication. These three books are Michael Purdy and Deborah Borisoff’s, Listening in Everyday Life, Andrew Wolvin’s, Listening and Human Communication in the 21st Century, and Deborah Worthington and Graham Bodie’s The Handbook of Listening.^[1] I compare the topics of the first two books, noting similarities and differences, and suggest what topics could be added. Second, I describe how the Worthington and Bodie volume increases the scope of listening topics and provides multidisciplinary perspectives of listening to others.

Purdy and Borisoff’s foundational chapter on listening covers the need for listening, research on listening, and the ethics of listening. Missing are theories of listening. Wolvin’s foundational chapter improves on this by including theoretical perspectives of listening. Purdy and Borisoff’s volume does not contain chapters on listening methodology while Wolvin’s volume contains two chapters on methods, one for quantitative and one for qualitative listening research. Both edited volumes contain chapters on listening and intercultural, interpersonal-dialogic, education, and service-business communication. The Purdy and Borisoff book chapters on listening in health, helping professions, journalism, and digital presence do not have counterparts in Wolvin’s edited volume. Surprisingly, the Purdy and Borisoff chapters on listening in health care and listening in the digital world are not continued as major topics in the Wolvin edition. This gap is inconsistent with the dramatic increase in health care and digital communication publication trends between 1997 and 2010.^[2]

Finally, both books include unique topic chapters on listening to others. Specifically, the topics of listening and gender, eavesdropping, and lawyer-client relationships are unique to the Purdy and Borisoff volume, while chapter topics on listening and spirituality and religion, second languages, and cognitive psychology are unique to the Wolvin volume. Not represented in either edited volume are topics related to listening and racial equity, inclusion, and diversity.

While the Purdy and Borisoff chapter on digital presence could not anticipate the enormous increase in digital communication scholarship over the next decade, by the time of the publication of the Wolvin volume in 2010, Prensky’s idea of “digital natives and immigrants”^[3] is well known. Yet, scholarship in digital listening does not mirror this upward trend. Since Prensky’s landmark study of 2001, Prensky published a series of scholarly books on the changing landscape of the digital world in education.^[4] For all three edited volumes on listening to others, the body of research on digital listening merits more attention. There is only a single chapter on “mediated listening” in the Worthington and Bodie volume. I briefly return to the topic of digital listening toward the end of this chapter.

The Worthington and Bodie edited volume on listening to others overlaps and expands many of the listening topics covered in the Purdy and Borisoff and the Wolvin edited volumes. In particular, the Worthington and Bodie handbook covers four methodological approaches to listening (physiological, phenomenological, interpretive, and empirical), eleven disciplinary perspectives on listening (ranging from architecture and linguistics to musicology and philosophy), multiple chapters on teaching listening, a section on contexts and applications (including mindfully listening to others, health care, and healthy democracy), and finally a section on emerging perspectives (e.g., performance studies, augmented reality, peace, and listening to silence). While this volume represents a comprehensive view of the field of listening to others, it does not address any of the additional listening contexts in listening to the SONG of life, namely, listening to self, nature, and the Divine.^[5]

I expect future edited books on listening will continue the tradition of foundational chapters covering definitional and theoretical aspects of listening, especially from the perspective of multiple disciplines, as exemplified in the Worthington and Bodie volume. Future edited volumes on listening should also continue to include chapters on listening methodology for those interested in understanding and conducting listening research. A useful extension of the methodological approaches for listening to others, noted in the Worthington and Bodie handbook, is available in The Sourcebook of Listening Research ^[6]

I hope that future edited books on listening will incorporate, or at least acknowledge, the full range of possibilities in listening to the SONG of life. I imagine additional chapters in future edited volumes covering each aspect of the SONG of life, listening to self (an extension of Purdy’s intrapersonal listening), listening to others (represented in all three edited volumes), listening to nature (a new chapter not represented in the previous three volumes), and listening to Goddess-God-Divine (an extension of Schnapp’s^[7] chapter in the Wolvin volume). A future edited volume of listening would also include multiple chapters on digital/mediated listening (extending the chapter on mediated listening in the Worthington and Bodies volume), and address issues of listening diversity, inclusion, and equity.^[8] Finally, I would expect to see chapters on topics similar to the previous volumes on listening in education, law, music, politics, peacebuilding, health care, intercultural, training and development, mindfulness, and silence.^[9] In the next section, I move from reviewing print resources to digital resources on listening to others, namely TED Talks.