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Research on creativity highlights feedback as an important driver of creative ideas. However, it advances a rather mechanistic understanding of communication, which obscures the specific practices in feedback interactions as well as their constitutive role in shaping creative ideas. In this paper, we advance conceptual arguments on how actors interact in communicative feedback processes on creative ideas. By drawing on the theory of communicative action by Jürgen Habermas and Hans Joas’ theory of creative action, we develop a more complex and nuanced understanding of creativity as a phenomenon that is constituted in communication. These authors’ work draws conceptual attention to the practices through which actors negotiate the novelty and usefulness of creative ideas in communicative interactions, the important role of feedback givers as creative actors, and “spaces for play” as a communicative sphere that allows creativity to emerge. We extend the literature on creativity by introducing a theory of communicative and creative action that offers to unpack communicative interactions through which creativity does or does not come into being.

This paper seeks to explore the effects of communicative interaction on integration and coordination of a commercial aerospace supply chain.

A perspective of supply chains as complex activity networks is used for data analysis based on in‐depth interviews in a global setting. Themes for interviews were identified through literature research.

The paper finds that integration through risk‐sharing partnerships is chosen for co‐developing expertise and innovative capacity. Practices of integration and coordination through communicative interaction are emerging while they are producing innovative solutions and competitive advantage. The multi‐voiced interaction between partners in the supply chain is assisting in moving the product beyond what the airframe manufacturer could have created alone.

The paper provides evidence of changing interactive practices in commercial aerospace supply chains. By applying concepts of supply chains as he interaction of multiple work activities this assists in comprehending the forces of change. Communicative interaction within the supply chain is used for co‐construction of meaning to enhance change and development.

In order to understand how specific communities might develop over time, it is important to take into account how the broader phenomenon of online consumer communities is itself situated in a bigger social context. As a whole, online communities can be seen as micro-social groups (Maffesoli, 1996) that exist at the “forgotten” level in consumer research (Bagozzi, 2000). This micro-social level, between individual and macro/cultural levels, is the level at which interactions and communications between people take place (Cova & Cova, 2002).

Habermas’ concept of communicative rationality, in which reason is construed in terms of the noncoercive intersubjectivity of mutual understanding and reciprocal recognition, provides a valid foundation on which the theory and practice of selves‐directed learning can be developed. In an increasingly individualized world a focus on learning networks allows a perspective transformation from the purely individualistic instrumental rationality of self‐directed‐learning towards communicative interaction via learning encounters and the possibility of satisfying the emancipatory conditions of communicative rationality within communities of selves‐directed‐learners in life and work. The orientation of communicative action to criticizable validity claims which are open to empirical investigation is the central core that makes this learning process both theoretically and practically possible.

This chapter develops theoretical aspects of an investigation conducted in Mendoza, Argentina, at the national University of Cuyo (UNCuyo), concerning the learning and development of social abilities on challenged students attending special education schools. First, the concepts of social abilities/social competence are analyzed; the next step is to approach the complexity of the overall evaluation, and, more specifically the evaluation of social abilities in educational contexts. An instrument of qualitative evaluation is presented. Finally, we present an analysis of social abilities in the communicative interaction on students with communicational difficulties and recommend guidelines for school activities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how peer-to-peer word-of-mouth (PPWOM) conversations evolve over time because of the dynamic social nature of the community in which they take place.

This study analyzed PPWOM conversations in an online community website for new and expectant mothers. Two data collection phases were undertaken during a four-year period. In phase I, messages were collected for a one-month period from five different bulletin boards (i.e. cross-sectional data) and at two points in time (i.e. semi-longitudinal). In phase II, a full longitudinal study was conducted, and the complete text of all messages of a newly formed bulletin board was captured for a nine-month period. The corpus of messages was examined in line with the basic tools of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis.

This research developed a typology of PPWOM genres and showed that these genres change over the community lifespan. The findings confirmed that the levels of social cohesiveness and the interaction communicative motives are the main factors that distinguish different PPWOM genres.

This research has offered a new perspective into the study of PPWOM, and hopefully it will serve as a starting point for a broader dialogue regarding the social context in which PPWOM is exchanged.

In contrast to traditional word-of-mouth research, this study demonstrated that PPWOM conversations go much beyond the exchange of functional information, and instead serve numerous social and emotional goals.

The paper investigates knowledge sharing and co‐creation in an organisation‐wide discussion supported by Computer‐Mediated Communication (CMC). The paper draws on the empirical evidence from a field study of a consultative process as part of a University strategic decision‐making. Informed by Habermas’s theory of communicative action, the investigation focuses on communicative practices in the CMC discussion and the ways participants interact, share knowledge and co‐create meanings in a particular situation. Communicative analysis of organisational discourse via CMC reveals hidden structures and mechanisms that impede knowledge sharing and inhibit cooperative meaning making. The issue here is whether CMC enables or disables some of these structures and mechanisms. By interpreting the CMC discussion as an argumentation process the paper aims to provide deeper insights into this issue. Among the lessons learned are requirements for new technologies to support knowledge sharing and meaning co‐creation.

Online collaboration in today's world is a topic of genuine interest to Internet researchers. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of group knowledge heterogeneity (GKH) in open collaboration performance using the mediating mechanisms of group cognition (GC) and interaction to understand the determinants of the success of online open collaboration platforms.

Study findings are based on partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), the formal mediation test and moderating effect analysis from Wikipedia's 160 online open collaborative groups.

For online knowledge heterogeneous groups, open collaboration performance is mediated by both GC and collaborative interaction (COL). The mediating role of GC is weak, while the mediating role of COL is strengthened when knowledge complexity (KC) is higher. By dividing group interaction into COL and communicative interaction (COM), the authors also observed that COL is effective for online open collaboration, whereas COM is limited.

These findings suggest that for more heterogeneous large groups, group interaction would explain more variance in performance than GC, offering an in-depth understanding of the relationship between group heterogeneity and open collaboration performance, answering what determines the success of online open collaboration platforms as well as explaining the inconsistency in prior findings. In addition, this study expands the application of Interactive Team Cognition (ITC) theory to the online open collaboration context.