A First Look at Communication Theory (6th edition)

Other texts by Tannen
• Framing and Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Gender and
Conversational Interaction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
• You may wish to check out her work, The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of
Words (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999). Although probably misnamed—Tannen is
not really against argument when it is conducted rationally, fairly, and productively—it
takes on the discourse of contentiousness that may be too prevalent in our society.
Two-cultures hypothesis in groups
• Renee A. Myers, et al. provide empirical support for the dual cultures approach to malefemale
communication in “Sex Differences and Group Argument: A Theoretical
Framework and Empirical Investigation,” Communication Studies 48 (Spring 1997): 19-
41.
• Katherine Hawkins and Christopher B. Power explore the presence of genderlects in
small groups in “Gender Differences in Questions Asked During Small Decision-Making
Group Discussions,” Small Group Research 30 (April 1999): 235-56.
Critiques of Tannen
• In The Mismeasure of Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), Carol Tavris
offers an interesting critique of Tannen’s genderlects theory (297-301). For example,
she argues, “What Tannen’s approach overlooks is that people’s ways of speaking . . .
often depend more on the gender of the person they are speaking with than on their
own intrinsic ‘conversation style’” (298-99).
• Other critiques of the two-cultures approach to gender and communication can be
found in Mary Crawford’s Talking Difference: On Gender and Language (London: Sage,
1995); and Elizabeth Aries’s Men and Women in Interaction: Reconsidering the
Differences (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
• An attack on Tannen’s evidence for You Just Don’t Understand is launched by Daena J.
Goldsmith and Patricia A. Fulfs in “‘You Just Don’t Have the Evidence’: An Analysis of
Claims and Evidence in Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand,” Communication
Yearbook 22 (1999): 1-49.
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