Communication is a transaction in which man invents and assigns meanings to achieve its objectives. In this context, psychological theories of communication emphasize different components of human communication, including attitudes, intentions and conditions required for effective communication. In psychological models of communication, the source is influenced by its communicational abilities,...

Cultural theory has evolved over the past 20 years to become an important framework for understanding how groups in society interpret danger and build trust or distrust in institutions creating and regulating risk. This paper examines the theoretical roots of cultural theory, traces its passage in the risk literature, and explores its value in current risk management issues. It concludes that c...

Knowledge transfer (KT) is an evolutionary process that requires embedding into and assistance from organizational culture. Since the determinants and influence path of KT regarding cultural change are not clear, this study designs a path model from organizational culture to KT through organizational characteristics. The findings demonstrate that the sociability factors of organizational cultur...

This paper incorporates aspects of humans’ evolved cognition into a formal model of cultural evolution and scrutinizes their interactions with population-level processes. It is shown how the biased transmission of different kinds of behavior via cultural learning processes influences agents’ consumption behavior. Thereby, the model’s learning dynamics are capable of generating typical Veblenian...

Some contemporary theories about the origin and the nature of language resort to concepts with no bearing on Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis or evo-devo perspective which are both based on the reconstruction of species morphological structure transformation. These theories, which evoke qualitative leap, cultural evolution, structure/function coevolution as esplicative principles for human evo...

In this paper we question one of the paradigms in the behavioural sciences in the last century. We call it the "rationality" paradigm, according to which animal and human behaviour can be understood from the assumption that it is "rational" with respect to reaching a given goal. For instance, animals are assumed to take the best course of action for maximising their reproductive success, and ac...

J B. S. Haldane, the British geneticist, once mused, "my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose ,but queerer than we can suppose" (Haldane 1927:286). This comment can be paraphrased to summarize the fundamental problem presently facing hunter-gatherer studies: there is more variation among recent and especially past hunter-gatherer societies than we have supposed. Th...

1 College of Science, North China University of Technology, Beijing 100144, China 2 Center for Systems and Control, Department of Mechanics and Engineering Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China 3 School of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, East China Jiaotong University, Nanchang 330013, China 4College of Computer and Information Engineering, Beijing Technology and Business Un...

This paper explores the possible uses of Bourdieu‟s cultural capital theory in the making of French state cultural policy. It focuses on the following paradox: this theory had an important if not predominant impact on the intellectual background and expertise of cultural policy, but only limited effects on its actual orientations. To understand this paradox, I go back to the 1960s when both cul...

globalization is a powerful and progressive process that challenges the power of governments in all political, economic, technological, and cultural aspects and provides them with opportunities and threats in their policy making. globalization theoreticians believe that information revolution has made the cultural aspect of globalization as its most powerful and widespread aspect challenging cu...