Introduction Community Based Forestry (CBF) implies commitment to the long term ecological, economic and social well being of forest dependent communities. CBF, or community scale sustainable forestry, constitutes a departure from industrial forestry due to this commitment to the preservation of the ecological integrity of the forest ecosystem in perpetuity and to the maintenance or improvement...

The coordination in open multi-agent systems is difficult to achieve, mainly because agents are autonomous. Social commitments have been proposed as a new coordination paradigm, suitable to describe agent communications or interactions. As some authors have pointed out, commitment enforcement is necessary, i.e., autonomous agents that violate commitments must be punished. In related work this i...

We consider the social relationships between autonomous principals, assuming that each principal is represented in a computational multiagent system via a unique agent. Work on commitment protocols [1, 7] has shown that the meaning of interactions may be expressed in terms of (social) commitments [3]: C(x, y, p, q) represents an expectation of y (creditor) that x (the debtor) will bring about q...

The authors developed and meta-analytically examined hypotheses designed to test and extend work design theory by integrating motivational, social, and work context characteristics. Results from a summary of 259 studies and 219,625 participants showed that 14 work characteristics explained, on average, 43% of the variance in the 19 worker attitudes and behaviors examined. For example, motivatio...

In this chapter, we examine the self and identity by considering the different conditions under which these are affected by the groups to which people belong. From a social identity perspective we argue that group commitment, on the one hand, and features of the social context, on the other hand, are crucial determinants of central identity concerns. We develop a taxonomy of situations to refle...

Monitoring the temporal evolution of obligations and prohibitions is a crucial aspect in the design of open interaction systems. In this paper we regard such obligations and prohibitions as cases of social commitment with starting points and deadlines, and propose to model them in OWL, the logical language recommended by the W3C for Semantic Web applications. In particular we propose an applica...

Over 1,000 U.S. Army officers responded to two surveys over a two-year period. Results indicated that mentoring was positively related to affective commitment and continuance commitment and negatively related to “turnover behavior.” The relationship with affective commitment was moderated by the conditions of mentorship (supervisory versus nonsupervisory) but not by the type of mentoring suppor...

in the field of critical literature, siavash kasraie and ahmad matar's poems can be comparatively analyzed in terms of their social background, poetic content and linguistic strategies. applying a.van dijk’s socio–cognitive model of discourses studies, this paper uses critical discourse analysis to identify discourses formed in the works of the poets and analyzes the ideologies and discourse-or...

Real world players often increase their payo¤s by voluntarily committing to play a …xed strategy, prior to the start of a strategic game. In fact, the players may further bene…t from commitments that are conditional on the commitments of others. This paper proposes a model of conditional commitments that uni…es earlier models while avoiding circularities that often arise in such models. A commi...

A positive relationship between employee engagement and affective commitment is already documented in the literature. However, we do not adequately know how engagement is associated with continuance and normative commitment. Using survey methodology we find that while engagement has a non-significant positive association with continuance commitment; it has a positive association with normative ...