This article argues that when attempting to extend the concept of affordances encompass action possibilities characteristic our sociocultural environments, a transactionally informed relational perspective—along lines formulated by classical pragmatist thinkers (especially Dewey and Bentley but also Peirce Mead)—proves useful. A transactional perspective helps reveal intimate conceptual connect...

Project DoCTA focuses on understanding interaction in a set of collaborative telelearning scenarios aimed at teacher training. Rooted in a sociocultural perspective, two scenarios were studied from thirteen views including ethnographic flavoured studies focused on understanding work organisation, usability studies of groupware systems, evaluations of computer logs, and questionnaire studies. Th...

As an important economic activity, entrepreneurship greatly contributes to economic development. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between Chinese culture and entrepreneurship. From a psychocultural perspective, Chinese culture is considered from the following five aspects – self-construal, self-evaluation, communication style, public attitude toward business failure, and the lega...

The integration of computer mediated and face to face communication has been recently implemented in numerous educational and professional contexts to create blended learning communities (Bonk & Graham, 2006; Ligorio, Cacciamani & Cesareni, 2006; Ligorio & Sansone, 2009) that improve learning processes through participation, sustaining a sense of belonging and the subsequent identity constructi...

Clinicians and patients frequently have a different understanding and interpretation of the nature of an illness. While many reasons for these discrepancies can be postulated, differences in sociocultural background often play an important role—especially in the field of psychiatry. At our tertiary psychiatric hospital in South Africa, where standard Western teachings are followed, clinicians a...

Street gangs function as ongoing, open social systems in relation to their surrounding sociocultural context. Fundamentally, gangs are comparable to some family systems. In fact, most gangs do consider themselves to be “families.” The same concepts used to describe family systems may also be applied to street gangs. Street gangs usually exhibit a highly complex organization, structure, process,...

Received wisdom in Primary science classroom teaching advocates the use of open questions for elicitation. The sociocultural perspective on discourse, however, leads one to question the usual classification of questioning by its grammatical formality and leads instead to an analysis of the discourse in the socio-cultural context which includes the background of the children. In this paper we de...

Among all the newly industrializing countries, South Korea’s development strategies, as implemented during the period of export-driven industrialization (1962-80), stand out as a model case in which rapid industrialization has been achieved by means of articulate trade and industrial policies. This paper, taking the historical perspective, critically examines the country’s industrial policies a...

Functionalism offers an account of the relations that hold between behavioural functions, information and neural processing, and conscious experience from which one can draw two inferences: (1) for any discriminable difference between qualia there must be an equivalent discriminable difference in function; and (2) for any discriminable functional difference within a behavioural domain associate...