This book introduces graduate students to the social science side of the communication studies discipline, as an entry point for Masters or other programs. While there are many introductory titles which survey the topics, concepts, theories, and findings in major Communication subject areas, they tend to conceal the underlying fundamentals of Human Communication that bind many subject areas and research topics together within a single discipline. These fundamentals are what make our doing of communication, and what our communicating brings about, distinctively human.   The Work and Workings of Human Communication focuses on those fundamentals of human communication; it details what they are, how they relate to each other and other disciplines, and their upshot for theory and for research. This foundation provides a rationale for the great variety and proliferation of the topics and questions that the field addresses, and for including them all under the umbrella of a single discipline. Then, building upon the fundamentals, the book projects new topics and questions, for future research and theory, to refine the discipline among the social sciences.