With the emergence and popularity of online social networking technologies (Web 2.0) students are exploring new concepts of self, identity and community both in real and virtual spaces. New theories are necessary to develop social policy responses, including those of educational systems and institutions, to the consequences of these new conceptualisations. We present an original theoretical mod...

The rapid growth of network access and the development of Web 2.0 have resulted in the popularity of virtual communities (VCs), such as Wikipedia, Facebook, professional forums and social network communities. The impact of VCs increasingly spreads over a broad range of fields, from social and educational to business. The content (i.e., knowledge) that VC members provide is the factor that deter...

OBJECTIVES This longitudinal study focused on the role of self-esteem and social support in adjustment to loneliness experienced by bereaved elderly persons. This study also examined the contributions of a general and a specific coping theory toward explaining loneliness. A distinction has been made between emotional loneliness and social loneliness/perceived support. The theory of mental incon...

the purpose of current article is to study the effect of sense of place on creating the urban identity in new cities. in order to fulfill the mentioned purpose, the key concepts of research and the theories related to the issue were studied. according to it, in order to collect the data, library method and note taking tool were used. the studies indicated the presence of human in the environmen...

This paper aims at making the dream of peace real in the Middle East, concerning the constant conflict over “the holy land,” thus building up a conceptual apparatus of checks and balances. For this hope to be fulfilled, a second thought regarding the internal legal-social problems of the state of Israel ought to be considered. Hypocrisy has led us to believe that political and social problems a...

With the advent of Web 2.0, the business world is fast changing its way of communicating and collaborating. In this study, we regarded the use of instant messaging in team collaboration as a social behavior and examined the changing roles of social influence processes in the formation of usage we-intention (i.e. social intention). Building on the belief-desire-intention model and the social inf...

international competition for having a greater contribution in the world is ever increasing, thus human resource management plays an important role. in a knowledge-based economy, an all-out participation of women in different social arenas promises optimal utilization of all human resource potentials. in this respect, iran has experienced an extensive presence of women in its higher education. ...

Online communities are increasingly important to organizations and the general public, but there is little theoretically based research on what makes some online communities more successful than others. In this article, we apply theory from the field of social psychology to understand how online communities develop member attachment, an important dimension of community success. We implemented a...

Inspired by social-cognitive and dialogical theory of identity the research was focused on identity dynamics. It was assumed that there are two basic factors which influence identity organization: first, basic motives underlying identity formations which are: self-esteem, efficacy, continuity, distinctiveness, belonging and meaning (Vignoles et al, 2006); second, dialogical activity as an intri...