In response to the rapid rise of emerging markets, shorter product lifecycles, increasing global exchange and worldwide competition, companies are implementing `sustainable development' as a mechanism by which to maintain competitive global advantage. Sustainable product development approaches used in industry focus mainly on environmental issues, and to a certain extent on social and economic aspects. Unfortunately, companies have often ignored or are unsure of how to deal with the cultural dimensions of sustainable product development. Multi-nationals expanding their business across international boundaries are agents of cultural change and should be cognizant of the impact their products have on local markets. Companies need to develop a deeper understanding of local cultures in order to design and deliver products that are not only economically viable but also culturally appropriate. To demonstrate applicability of cultural appropriate design, this research undertakes a case study of food systems in India specifically focusing on the exchange of fresh fruits and vegetables (FFV). This study focuses on understanding the entire supply chain of FFV exchange, which includes consumer experiences, distribution practices and production processes. This study also compares different distribution channels and exchange practices and analyzes the pattern of authority between different players within the distribution network. The ethnographic methods for data collection included a photo-journal assignment, shop-along visits, semi-structured interviews, a participatory design activity and focus group studies. The study revealed that traditional retail formats like pushcart vendors, street retailers and city retail markets are generally preferred over modern retail stores. For consumers, shopping is a non-choreographed activity often resulting in exercising, socializing and accidental purchases. Informal communication, personal relationships and openness to bargaining were important aspects of the consumer-retailer relationship. This study presents cultural insights into interactions, artifacts and contexts relevant to FFV systems in India. It also presents key implications for the field of design, design research, cultural studies, consumer research and sustainability. The insights gained from this study will act as guidelines for designers, researchers and corporations interested in designing products and services that are culturally appropriate to contexts of production, distribution and consumption.

This dissertation explores South Asian American (SAA) emerging adult daughters' roles as their parents' reluctant confidants and mediators of conflict. Using Petronio's (2002) communication privacy management theory (CPM) as a framework, this dissertation investigates daughters' communicative strategies when engaged in familial roles. Findings from 15 respondent interviews with SAA women between the ages of 18 and 29 reveal daughters' intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for role-playing within their families, such as inherent satisfaction and parental expectations, respectively. Additionally, findings highlight daughters' use of coping and thwarting strategies after they become the recipients of their parents' unsolicited private information. Namely, daughters engaged in coping strategies (e.g., giving advice) to help their parents manage private information. Likewise, they enacted thwarting strategies (e.g., erecting territorial markers) to restore boundaries after their parents (the disclosers) violated them. Consequently, serving as parental confidants and mediators contributed to parent-child boundary dissolution and adversely affected daughters' well-being as well as their progression toward adulthood. This study provides theoretical contributions by extending CPM theory regarding reluctant confidants within the contexts of emerging adult child-parent relationships and ethnic minority groups in America. Practically, this study offers emerging adult children insight into how they might renegotiate boundaries when their parents change the relationship by disclosing personal information. Information gleaned from this study provides SAA emerging adult daughters with an understanding of the ramifications of prioritizing their familial roles and being a reluctant confidant, in addition to potential avenues for remediation.

This dissertation examines the organizational discourse of business meetings in a Kuwaiti financial organization (Innovative Kuwait Co., pseudonym) and an American non-profit trade organization (Global Phoenix, pseudonym). Specifically, I explore the discourse and social identities, agency, and power used in staff members' task-oriented business meetings (Bargiela-Chiappini & Harris, 1997). The study is based on ethnographic business meetings data collected during eight months of fieldwork in 2010, 2011 and 2012. I used three major qualitative methodologies: observation, audio recording, and feedback focus group. In this study, I propose three research questions: 1) How does agency of staff members reflect membership in the corporate culture of an organization as a whole? 2) How is power used in relation to agency in business meetings? And 3) How are discourse and social identities of staff members enacted in business meetings? The analyses of ethnographic and fieldwork data demonstrate similar and different business linguistic behaviors in the two companies. In Innovative Kuwait Co., male managers are responsible for opening and closing the meetings. They also perform power by using language directives and suggestions directed to staff members. In contrast, female staff members in the Kuwaiti company participated insignificantly in meetings and produce more nonverbal cues. However, in one meeting, a female manager organized the discussion by controlling topics and giving directions. In Global Phoenix, female managers outnumber their male counterparts; therefore, agency, power, discourse, and social identities are performed differently. Female managers are responsible for opening and closing the meetings and for organizing the overall discussions. Additionally, female and male staff members participate equally and they interrupted their colleagues less frequently compared to staff members in Kuwait. Interestingly, American staff members laugh and joke more together than staff members in Kuwait. The findings of this dissertation will contribute to existing linguistic literature on business discourse and the examination of social meanings and structures in organizations, explaining how language shapes the actions and relationships of business staff members. This dissertation will also encourage business people to become mindful of the role of language and language training in developing and maintaining the corporate culture of their organizations.

The People's Republic of China's inexorable ascendancy has become an epochal event in international landscape, accentuated by its triple national ceremonies of global significance: 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, 2009 Beijing Military Parade, and 2010 Shanghai World Expo. At a momentous juncture when the PRC endeavored to project a new national identity to the outside world, these ceremonial occasions constitute a high-stake communicative opportunity for the Chinese government and a fruitful set of discursive artifacts for symbolic deconstruction and rhetorical interpretation. To unravel these ceremonial spectacles, a public memory approach, with its versatile potencies indexical of a nation's interpretive system of social meaning, its normative framework of ideological model, and its past-present-future interrelationships, is contextually, conceptually, and analytically diagnostic of a rising China's sociopolitical constellations. Thus employing public memory as a conceptual-methodological matrix, my dissertation focuses on the prominent texts in these ceremonies, excavates their historico-memorial invocation and sociocultural persuasion, and plumbs their discursive agenda, rhetorical operation, and sociopolitical implication. I argue that the Chinese government deliberately and forcefully strove for three interrelated communicative objectives at these three ceremonies--re-imaging, re-asserting, and re-anchoring its national identity as an ancient, emergent superpower. Yet in contemporary Chinese context, its discursive (con)quest to recast its leadership as a historically continuous, culturally orthodox, and ideologically legitimate regime has always been compromised by its mythologized historical representation and hegemonic rhetorical reconfiguration, countervailed by its political and ideological fragility, and contested by domestic and global publics. Besides its contributions to the current conversation on the PRC's ceremonial phenomena, discursive formations, and communicative dynamics, this dissertation further offers its diagnosis and prognostication of this projected leading country in the 21st century.