'A Critical Introduction (2005) attempted to sketch these consequences for our understanding of discourse, as well as for our ethos of analysing it. The same approach was applied to literacy in Grassroots Literacy (2008), and I am here bringing the same exercise to the field of sociolinguistics. Each of the books is an attempt, an essai in the classical and original sense of the term, in which I try my best to describe the problem and offer some conceptual and analytical tools for addressing it. And I make this effort because I believe that globalization forces us - whether we like it or not - to an aggiornamento of our theoretical and methodological toolkit'--Provided by publisher.