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Jürgen Habermas is one of the most important authors in contemporary philosophy. In this chapter, we analyse his contribution to the philosophical debate on universalism and relativism and consider its implications for organization studies and organizations operating in an intercultural environment. We briefly describe the critique of a universal concept of reason that has been forwarded by sceptical and postmodern philosophers. As a response to this critique, we outline the contribution of discourse ethics and analyse the theories of Jürgen Habermas and his colleague Karl-Otto Apel. We explore the justification of discourse ethics and point out some problems in its argumentative logic. In the light of this critique, we outline some characteristics of an intercultural ethics that is based on constructivist philosophy and point to some encouraging prospects on the consolidation of the debate between relativistic and universalistic philosophers.

Institutions are built upon language. Although we have a number of linguistic perspectives already in our arsenal, this chapter seeks to convince you of our need for just one more. The primary claim is that because the structure of arguments uniquely maps onto the latent structure of institutions, the use of arguments in institutional analysis may help us gain more traction on three important topics – the nature taken-for-grantedness, the macro-micro divide, and the political dynamics of institutions. This chapter thus offers a starting point for how to use an argumentation perspective when studying institutions.

This paper explores the use of argumentation by young children. Drawing on transcripts of children's play, as well as planned mathematical experiences for children aged five to seven years in a school setting, a social constructivist approach is employed to described and analyze ways in which argumentation is used by some young children to construct knowledge. Implications for early childhood education are derived from these examples and from the theoretical discussion of argumentation and social constructivism.

This chapter introduces a theoretically grounded pedagogical procedure of moral argumentation that aims to facilitate student teachers’ learning of moral competencies during teacher education. Despite the essentiality of the moral aspects of teaching, they often remain implicit in the curricula and pedagogical practices of teacher education. Thus, there is a clear need to bring these aspects to the foreground and create possibilities for student teachers to elaborate them thoroughly during teacher education. Authentic cases capturing classroom realities and moral dilemmas at school as well as their systematic analysis and reflection from various lenses form the core of the procedure. Based on the results of the use of the procedure in the practice of teacher education, it promisingly fulfills the aims to demonstrate the moral core of teaching and teacher’s central role in it for student teachers.

Purpose – The aim of the present chapter is to analyse episodes of dispute and conflict in co-located computer gaming. The main purpose is to extend prior research on dispute-interaction to a computer mediated setting.

Methodology – Naturally occurring multiplayer computer gaming was video recorded in Internet cafés (28 hours). A single case was selected that involved a series of escalating disputes over the course of 45 minutes of gaming. The social interaction involved – of two 16-year-old boys playing World of Warcraft – was analysed using conversation analytical procedures.

Findings – The sequential analyses show how the two players engaged in disputes at the points where one or both of the players’ avatars had been killed. The players held each other accountable for their in-game performance, and avatar death was a central event in which gaming competence was contested, often in outright confrontations. Such disputes, where each player attempted to present the other as inferior, were used for negotiating player identities in what Goffman (1967) has called character contests. In gaming, players thus risk losing the game as well as their social standings. Disputes were also linked to the variable stakes of the game: with more at stake, players were more likely to escalate conflicts to the point of even quitting the game altogether.

Originality – The chapter shows how disputes are central components in adolescents’ computer gaming, and how they both structure the players’ intersubjective understanding of the game, and how they play a role in local identity work.

Chapter 2 discusses the relevance and potential benefits of the text to the realities of learning system design and configuration. The chapter is presented as an argument in support of the relevance of the work and its perspective on learning. It presents a continuous flow (implicate order), which reflects the structure of the discipline (argumentation). The three-part model of collection, discrimination, and integration into practice is configured into a continuous flow in the argument. This chapter creates interest and expectations in the subsequent discussions, which are reexamined in Chapter 9 to connect expectations with outcomes for the work.

Political communication is not first and foremost about truth; it is a struggle for power and influence between different interests. In this struggle, it is critical for politicians to persuade voters, and not just by the power of their argument, but also, and increasingly, through creating trust by means of their personality. In this study we will focus on how politicians attend to these concerns in televised election campaign debates in the Nordic countries. Ideally, political debates provide politicians with equal opportunities for airing their positions. This linguistic ideal of fairness has more elaborate equivalents in established theories of discourse, such as the theory of the ideal speech situation proposed by Habermas (1975a, b), Paul Grice’s maxims for efficient and logical communication (Grice, 1975), and the face-saving traffic rules of social interaction analyzed by Goffman (1967). However, this rudimentary standard of fairness is rarely satisfied in practice (Gastil, 1992). Rather than granting all participants equality, debates often become events in which prior inequalities, such as gender, age, class and status, are re-enacted (Edelsky & Adams, 1990). The question we are pursuing in this article is whether and how such “brought along” features are made relevant, or “brought about” in actual debate situations.

A long period of capitalist crisis has amplified uneven and combined development in most aspects of political economy and political ecology in most parts of the world, with a resulting increase in the eco-social metabolism of profit-seeking firms and their state supporters. This is especially with the revival of extraction-oriented corporations, especially fossil fuel firms, which remain the world’s most profitable. What opportunities arise for as multi-faceted a critique of “extractivism” as the conditions demand? With ongoing paralysis of United Nations climate negotiators, to illustrate, the most critical question for several decades to come is whether citizen activism can forestall further fossil fuel combustion. In many settings, the extractive industries are critical targets of climate activists, for example, where divestment of stocks is one strategy, or refusing access to land for mining is another. Invoking climate justice principles requires investigating the broader socio-ecological and economic costs and benefits of capital accumulation associated with fossil fuel use, through forceful questioning both by immediate victims and by all those concerned about GreenHouse Gas emissions. Their solidarity with each other is vital to nurture and to that end, the most powerful anti-corporate tactic developed so far, indeed beginning in South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle, appears to be financial sanctions. The argumentation for invoking sanctions against the fossil fuel industry (and its enablers such as international shipping) is by itself insufficient. Also required is a solid activist tradition. There are, in 2014, two inter-related cases in which South African environmental justice activists have critiqued multi-billion dollar investments, and thus collided with the state, with two vast parastatal corporations and with their international financiers. Whether these collisions move beyond conflicting visions, and actually halt the fossil-intensive projects, is a matter that can only be worked out both through argumentation – for example, in the pages below – and through gaining the solidarity required to halt the financing of climate change.