Until recently, the social-technical process of invention has fallen between sociological investigation of the genesis of a new idea (an ideational phenomenon) and the production of a new technology (a material phenomenon). The advent of post-modernism and post-structuralism offered new avenues for theorising invention, accounting for, on the one hand, its material nature, and, on the other, it...

This commentary explores the nature of creating safety in the here-and-now. Creating safety encompasses two dimensions: revisiting specific behaviours by focusing on substandard performance (reflection), and a more broad-ranging attention to everyday behaviours that are taken as given (reflexivity). The piece pays particular attention to this second dimension of creating safety. Two techniques ...

An excellent example of a phenomenon bridging a lexicon and a grammar is provided by grammaticalized alternations (e.g., passivization, reflexivity, and reciprocity): these alternations represent productive grammatical processes which are, however, lexically determined. While grammaticalized alternations keep lexical meaning of verbs unchanged, they are usually characterized by various changes ...

Diffusion processes in a social system are governed by external triggers and internal excitations via interactions between individuals over social networks. Underlying mechanisms are crucial to understand emergent phenomena in the real world and accordingly establish effective strategies. However, it is challenging to reveal the dynamics of a target diffusion process due to invisible causality ...