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Rethinking Relationships

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In this book, Steve Duck, a founder of and prolific crossdisciplinary contributor to the field of relationships research, challenges students to re-examine their assumptions about relationships. Duck shows that in order to understand relationships properly, students must understand the roles that society, language, our taken-for-granted assumptions, and other people who share those assumptions play in the conduct of relationships.

232 pages, Paperback

First published August 31, 2010

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About the author

Steve Duck

42 books3 followers
Steve Duck (Steven W. Duck) a British social psychologist turned communication scholar, is the Daniel & Amy Starch Distinguished Research Professor and Chair, Department of Rhetoric, at the University of Iowa.

He has made contributions to the scientific field of social and personal relationships.

He attended Bristol Grammar School and Pembroke College, Oxford before gaining a Ph.D. from Sheffield University in 1971. He studied social and personal relationships and published several books and articles on the subject. He taught at the University of Glasgow in Scotland and the University of Lancaster in England, being one of four founding members of the Department of Psychology there in 1973. In 1986 he moved to the University of Iowa as the Daniel and Amy Starch Distinguished Research Professor, the first fully endowed professorship in the College of Liberal Arts (later the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences – CLAS). He served as Chair Department Executive Officer for the Department of Communication Studies, University of Iowa 1994–1998 and subsequently as Chair of the Department of Rhetoric, University of Iowa (2010–present).

Duck conducted research into social relationships at Lancaster University. He founded the International Conference on Personal Relationships, the first four of which he organized with Robin Gilmour from Lancaster University, but situating the conference in Madison, Wisconsin in 1982 and 1984. These international conferences have since occurred every two years. Between these first two conferences he founded an interdisciplinary Journal of Social and Personal Relationships and was its first Editor for the fifteen volumes from 1984-1998. He also founded the International Network on Personal Relationships, and, then at the University of Iowa, founded and ran several conferences there both for general scholarly groups and also specifically for graduate students.

He served as President of INPR (International Network on Personal Relationships) which was subsequently merged into IARR (International Association for Relationship Research).

He has published several books and monographs on the general themes of relationships, becoming most closely associated with models of Interpersonal communication relationship dissolution and in particular with Duck's topographical model of relationship dissolution and a more formalized stages of dissolution model. This latter was later modified by Rollie & Duck (2006).

He has presented over 200 conference papers, written over 100 articles and chapters and written or edited 60 books, the most recent being Duck & McMahan (2017) Communication in Everyday Life: The Basic Course Edition With Public Speaking, and Duck & McMahan (2017) Communication in Everyday Life: A Survey of Communication, Third Edition, . In 1982 he became the founding Editor of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, and held the position of Editor in Chief until 1998.

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6 reviews
November 10, 2022
Disclaimer: I only read the first 6 and a half Chapters, because the book just drags on without any substential matter after that.

The book is rather dry but it has some nice perspectives on social and intimate relationships.

My takeaway is:
- A lot of interaction of relationships depends on the context of a situation and the context of the people involved
- You have a personal view on the world and the society also has a view on the world and these views are linked and influenced by each other
- You have a certain way to express your emotions in your society
- There is a "generalised other" this is something like the "common opinion" you will get from the outside world
- The way you conduct a relationship depends on your way how you think you should conduct a relationship (based on your upbringing and your current society)
Displaying 1 of 1 review