all along history, the art and society always have interplayed. literary works especially novel are rooted in contemporary society and tell us about social, political, cultural and historical issues of a society. a realistic novel may reflect realities of its time like a mirror. the sociology of literature is aimed to explain the links between society and literature and clarifying the quality o...

Relationships mediated by ICTs are present in many aspects of everyday life. As they are established at a distance, one can see the projection of the other through the communication channels that are opened by the new ICTs. The objective of this paper is to discuss how the means of communication affect social presence in virtual environments. Based on the theory of investigative communities and...

Cancer is the number one cause of disease-related deaths among children. According to the American Childhood Cancer Organization (2010), physicians diagnose approximately 12,400 children up to the age of 19 years with cancer each year. The overall survival rate for children living 5 years after diagnosis of cancer is 80% (National Cancer Institute, 2009). The once taken-for-granted world no lon...

The article investigates the value of Wolfgang Iser’s concept of repertoire for reading the apocryphal story of Susanna. The viewpoint is that fictional literature such as the Susanna narrative and reality are not opposites of each other, but that fictional texts tell us something about reality. The investigation will also include Peter L. Berger’s theory on how religion contributes to construc...

People who work, learn, or play in online social worlds must sometimes leave those social worlds. Such departures may happen for many reasons. Often they are anticipated departures because the social world was meant from the start to be temporary. Most people do not yet have much practice at leaving an online social world, nor do we have a good model of the process. Activities that people under...

In systems based on organisational specifications a reoccurring problem remains to be solved in the disparity between the level of abstractness of the organisational concepts and the concepts used in the implementation. Organisational specifications (deliberately) abstract from general practice, which creates a need to relate the abstract concepts used in the specification to concrete ones used...

I wish to defend two claims in this paper. My first claim has two parts. First, I argue that there is a physical and social world out there which exists in a way that is independent of how we, as observers, represent it. In this sense, there is an objective reality. Following John Searle, I call this the claim of external realism. Note that this is an ontological claim. It says nothing about wh...

We argue that all primates primarily perceive the actions of conspecifics as meaningful expressions of agency. Social understanding is a perceptual capacity that does not require human reason or imagination. Conversely, only humans have an additional, sophisticated ability to decontextualize and objectify actions into abstract movements. We thereby turn the traditional consensus on its head: wh...

Theoretical developments in the analysis of organizations have recently turned to an “organizational becoming” perspective, which sees the social world as enacted in the micro-context of communicative interactions among individuals through which meaning is negotiated. According to this view, organizational change is endemic, natural and ongoing; it occurs in every-day interactions as actors eng...