Search results

The authors discuss the lifeworld as a research concept for the field of information behaviour, which serves to problematise the concept of unit of analysis. In so doing, the authors demonstrate how the lifeworld can be adopted as a unit of analysis in information behaviour research, that is, how research can be based in the lifeworld rather than merely looking at the lifeworld. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors first situate our discussion in the current of information behaviour scholarship. The authors then introduce the concepts of lifeworld and unit of analysis and consider how they intersect. Next, to show the importance of the lifeworld, the authors present two recent studies in which the lifeworld emerged. Finally, the authors discuss how lifeworld-based research can be conducted more conscientiously.

Though many research approaches deal with lived experience in one way or another, they tend not to fully grasp these experiences. As opposed to units of analysis such as individual, social group, person-in-situation, etc., using lifeworld as a unit of analysis allows phenomena to be researched holistically and without reductionism.

The authors limit the discussion to the concept of the lifeworld as developed by Husserl, the concept’s originator. The lifeworld has been discussed and extended by other authors since, but this work is not considered here. The viewpoint is offered as a supplementary perspective, meant to be enriching to our field of study, rather than divisive.

This is the first time the concept of the lifeworld has been fully explicated in information science. As the authors discuss, two recent information behaviour studies that “discovered” the lifeworld through their analysis. Future studies that attend to the lifeworld from the start have the capacity to build on this work and extend the horizons of information science.

The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on the issue of preference heterogeneity in cooperatives.

Drawing on the ideas of Habermas and Luhmann, this paper interprets preference heterogeneity of cooperative members in terms of the precarious relationship between the categories of “system” and “lifeworld.” The argument is buttressed with a case study of an agricultural cooperative recently founded in Central Greece.

The sensitivity of cooperatives to the lifeworld contexts of their members exacts the price in the form of the member preference heterogeneity problem. If this sensitivity is taken to be the constitutive characteristic of cooperatives, then the proposed argument hammers home their fundamental ambivalence, as they are necessarily fraught with the potential for internal conflict.

The paper urges for a radical rethinking of Georg Draheim’s thesis of the “double nature” of cooperatives. “Double nature” is shown to aggravate the member preference heterogeneity problem.

The results of this study inform the cooperative leaders’ quest to strike a balance between the interests of their members and the demands of the external socio-economic environment.

This research contributes significantly to the literature on collective decision-making costs incurred by cooperatives. The failure of cooperatives to balance the sensitivity to members’ interests and to the external environment is exposed as the root cause of the divergence and heterogeneity of member preferences. This heterogeneity is shown to boost collective decision-making costs.

This article reflects on the adaption of Sarah Pink's video re-enactment methodology for exploring children's out-of-school lifeworlds.

Video re-enactments originate in the work of Sarah Pink who developed the methodology to study everyday routines, including activities associated with people's energy consumption at home. This article discusses the adaption of this methodology for exploring 9–10-year-old children's out-of-school lifeworlds in their homes in the global cities of Hong Kong, Melbourne and Singapore.

The article reflects on the practical ways in which the video re-enactment methodology was adapted to explore children's out-of-school activities in the three different locations. In terms of activities, the findings highlight that children's out-of-school lifeworlds included regular routines across a week that contribute to and constitute their everyday activities, with varying time spent on leisure, homework and scheduled activities.

The authors discuss and reflect on the implications of adapting a methodology in order to make it relevant and innovative in a new research context. The use of video re-enactments with children to explore their out-of-school activities gives greater insights into their lifeworlds and their engagement in various activities and the opportunity for children to reflect on their everyday lives.

Among the master social processes occurring in the modern world have been increased individualization, on the one hand, and the growth of largescale organizations, on the other. Unlike most scholars, who emphasize either one or the other, we focus attention upon certain strategic interrelationships between these master processes. We are thus addressing a fundamental sociological issue while at the same time taking development theorizing in a somewhat new direction.

Catholic social thought presents itself as a reflection by the Church on socio‐economic issues. The Church in its teachings has always had, and continues to have, an ambivalent attitude towards the capitalist economic system. This ambivalence has not always expressed itself in the most effective and appropriate ways. Attempts to argue that social analysis from a critical theory perspective is both able to capture effectively the ambivalence which Catholic social thought feels towards capitalism, and to put into a broader theoretical context many of the critiques levelled against the Church′s teachings. This in turn allows for a more cogent presentation of the Church′s normative project.

The porpose of this study is to critically consider the use of global reporting initiative (GRI) guidelines in universities’ sustainability reports.. In light of the recent literature and Habermas’s thinking, the study advances the research field by considering the process of internal colonisation from steering institutions and makes suggestions regarding the future role of GRI in the higher education (HE) context.

This study presents a systematic literature review and content analysis for enhancing the critical reading of GRI applications in HE studies. The results are analysed in light of Habermas’s thinking, considering the GRI as a steering institution and its guidelines as steering mechanisms.

This study updates the literature review on sustainability reporting (SR) at universities and underlines the general trend in the employment of the GRI in this context. The results highlight the need to adapt the GRI to enhance its applicability in the HE context by considering additional dimensions such as research, teaching and operations. In doing so, the framework loses effectiveness and weakens the role of the GRI as a steering institution.

The results suggest that the GRI guidelines should be reframed to enhance comparability among reports and increase its wider employment at universities.

Universities need to be guided in their accountability process towards SR by dedicated frameworks. This study suggests the potentially pivotal role that the GRI could play in providing dedicated tools for HE to steer and enhance the development of SRs at universities.

This study presents an updated review of studies on SR at universities and suggests possible paths for the future of the GRI framework applicability to universities’ SR.

The paper seeks to understand the formation of mutual knowledge in the online world using the phenomenological framework that Alfred Schutz and his associates constructed for the examination of the lifeworld.

This study consists of three parts: reviewing Schutz's theory of the constitution of intersubjectivity in the lifeworld; extending Schutz's analysis to the acquisition of mutual knowledge in the online world; and applying the extended version of Schutz's theory to the booming blogosphere on the internet.

Schutz divided the contemporaneous lifeworld into two realms – consociates and mere contemporaries. Schutz maintained that people came to know one another based on shared life experiences through “growing older together” in the realm of consociates and based on objectified schemes of interpretation through “ideal typification” in the realm of mere contemporaries. This article extends Schutz's analysis to human interaction on the internet, showing that in the emergent online world people become mutually familiar based on the biographic narratives they recount to one another through self‐disclosure. Mutual knowledge obtained online also contributes to the total stock of knowledge people come to accumulate in an increasingly distanciated lifeworld.

This article argues that the spread of the internet has changed the structure of the lifeworld Schutz depicted, and such changes have produced ways of getting to know others that were previously impossible. In light of those changes, this article seeks to update Schutz's theory of mutual knowledge.

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the research methodology literature that arose out of the (new) sociology of childhood and the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (1989) with regard to conducting ethical research with children rather than on children. In particular, this article reflects on the development of a method (learning dialogues).

Learning dialogues were designed to enable children to share their responses to prompts about specific aspects of their lifeworlds. This was one method used to produce the data corpus which also included a large-scale survey, classroom ethnographies and (video) re-enactments of children's lives after school.

The piloting of the learning dialogues took place in several iterations and a particular form was used for the main study. The original idea and development of the learning dialogues highlights they were both a rich source of data that complemented the other data sources in the study and an activity that children indicated that they enjoyed. The authors discuss the practicalities involved with adapting a qualitative method to different settings and to projects with large numbers of children.

The conceptualisation of the learning dialogues as sources of personal documentation about aspects of children's lifeworlds was unique to this research. In thinking about the learning dialogues as one source of data within a broader project, the research aimed to be more inclusive of all participants in contributing to the findings produced in the project.

This paper seeks to understand the role of financial accounting regulations in a less developed country in transition, Egypt. It explores the social, political as well as economic contexts that underlie the processes of setting the Egyptian Financial Accounting Regulations (EFAR) in a harmony with International Accounting Standards (IASs).

The paper is based on in‐depth interviews and an analysis of documents. It relies on Habermas' notions of society's lifeworld, institutional steering mechanisms and systems in order to link the changes in EFAR to the changes in the wider social, political and economic contexts wherein organizations operate. The paper also explores the role of EFAR, as “regulative” or “constitutive” steering mechanisms, throughout two longitudinal episodes; starting with the beginning of socialism and extending to liberalism.

The paper finds that the EFAR have had a constitutive tendency during the Egyptian transformation towards a market‐based economy. Although there are remarkable changes in political philosophy in Egypt, the regulators' motivations and the processes of the accountancy profession that mobilized the formulation of EFAR in harmony with IASs, those regulations were acted upon to constitute organizational members' values, norms and knowledge in order to overcome the persistence of the socialist accounting practices. The regulations were also aimed at enhancing professional conduct and, at same time, increasing organizational members' adherence to the processes of privatization as a part of a wider movement towards transparency, democracy, full disclosure and liberalisation.

The paper emphasises the interface between a macro social transformation and micro organizational responses in order to understand the role of EFAR. However, it does not stress how the actual implementation of those regulations is implicated at a micro organizational change level. Furthermore, the paper covers a timeframe – 1952 to 2000 – that extends from the start of socialism extending to liberalism. Although the IASs are now known as International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), the paper covers a period in which such IFRS were not applicable in Egypt.

The paper contributes to the understanding of the social, political as well as economic role(s) of financial accounting regulations in a transitional country during that country's transformation towards the market economy.

This paper explores the resistance strategies of organisations to unwanted changes. It is concerned with the way satellite organisations are created to provide a counter force to environmental disturbances such as changes introduced in the context of what has come to be called New Public Management. Its particular focus is with the attempt to develop and institutionalize external, “public” forms of resistance rather than undertake more internal, “private” forms. The specific empirical focus is general medical practice in the UK, where commissioning groups were formed as an alternative to GP fundholding. To help analyse this empirical detail we draw insights from Habermas’s model of society, organisational change theory and institutional theory. In the process the paper not only amplifies the empirical reactions of GP practices in the UK but also uses this empirical detail to develop the nature of this theoretical base by adding new dimensions concerning organisational resistance.