Received: 7 June 2005 Revised: 9 December 2005 Accepted: 3 January 2006 Abstract In many types of activities, communicative and material activities are so intertwined that the one cannot be understood without taking the other into account. This is true of maritime and hospital work that are used as examples in the paper. The spatial context of the activity is also important: what you can do dep...

Purpose – To provide a social-theoretic framework which explains how e-commerce affects social conditions, such as availability of information and equality of access to information, influences actors’ behavior, shapes e-commerce business models, and in turn impacts industry structure. Design/methodology/approach – Empirical investigation based on one-hour interviews with owners/managers of nine...

In this thesis, we propose a unified framework for the pragmatics and the semantics of agent communication. Pragmatics deals with the way agents use communicative acts when conversing. It is related to the dynamics of agent interactions and to the way of connecting individual acts while building complete conversations. Semantics is interested in the meaning of these acts. It lays down the found...

The article features a brief overview of theoretical and empirical studies in communication psychology and sociability of men and women, boys and girls. Russian and foreign studies are summarized to point out that girls and women place greater emphasis on communication and interpersonal relations than do boys and men. Moreover, female communication is more emotional. The article presents the re...

It is believed that the communicative language teaching approach (abbreviated as CLTA) is one of the most effective methods to keep away from the weaknesses of the traditional English teaching method in developing students’ communicative ability. Using games, which is communicative in essence, are often considered effective in developing students’ communicative ability. In order to help English...

In this paper, we introduce M-Trans system, which has an ability of recording the specification of the design process for the communicative process, which is designed in a discussion and is be specified incompletely, of creating the communicative process according to the specification, and of supporting dynamic process specifications utilizing the record of executed communicative process. The s...

In the present study we assessed the forms and functions of prelinguistic communicative behaviors for 120 children and adults with Rett syndrome using the Inventory of Potential Communicative Acts (IPCA) (Sigafoos et al. Communication Disorders Quarterly 21:77-86, 2000a). Informants completed the IPCA and the results were analysed to provide a systematic inventory and objective description of t...

In the philosophical theory of communicative action, rationality refers to interpersonal communication rather than to a knowing subject. Thus, a social view of rationality is suggested. The theory differentiates between two kinds of rationality, the emancipative communicative and the strategic or instrumental reasoning. Using experimental designs in an fMRI setting, recent studies explored simi...

BACKGROUND Constructivist approaches to learning focus on learning environments in which students have the opportunity to construct knowledge themselves, and negotiate this knowledge with others. Discovery learning and collaborative learning are examples of learning contexts that cater for knowledge construction processes. We introduce a computer-based learning environment in which the two form...

This study explores the moral ethos of contemporary psychotherapy as represented in the psychoanalytic and systemic therapeutic traditions. It examines current moral/ethical debate in the field and presents a detailed critique of the individualistic normative orientation of this debate; its peripheral status within the discourse of psychotherapy; its restrictive focus on professional micro ethi...