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This chapter elaborates a phenomenological framework for the concept of “communication” by drawing mainly on the notion “lifeworld,” created by Husserl and developed by Habermas. The concept of “lifeworld” is approached as a communication-grounded idea.

The chapter is a theoretical essay, grounded mainly on bibliographical research. Main sources are the two volumes of Habermas’ The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas, 1987), seconded by other works by the German philosopher and some commentators as Stein (2004) e Pizzi (2006). The chapter endeavors to show that the phenomenological notion of “lifeworld” might be key to a critical understanding of main constructivist approaches in communication theory. It could be particularly illuminating where the focus is on a “reality,” which results from intersubjective interactions in everyday life. Most communication theories are media-centered, which means that they regard the “media,” both in its technical and institutional aspects as the main focus of the communication process. This chapter argues that the “lifeworld” is a far broader way to understand communication as a form of social interaction, whether mediated by media technologies or not. The chapter discusses the concept of “lifeworld,” framing its relational and communicative aspects as fundamental to the notion of “reality” as an interactive social creation. It also proposes the understanding of “communication” grounded on this phenomenological notion. Finally, it discusses some problems and limits of this approach, offering an alternative approach to conventional communication theory.

This essay addresses the topic of research lifeworlds and personal lifeworlds and what we gain and lose as researchers, and as people, from their overlaps and collisions. The essay analyses six narrative accounts of the authors lived experience of a unique collision between research and personal lifeworlds when the researcher-mother presented with her sick daughter to the hospital emergency department that served as the field site for her own research. This analysis revealed the following themes through which a researcher’s personhood animates the research process: feeling exposed but empowered; gaining conceptual clarity while opening up ethical ambiguity; and becoming liminal because of identity shifts and coping through self-reflexivity. The essay contributes to our collective understanding and shared learning of the ways a researcher’s personhood shapes, and is shaped by, the research process and (re)production of knowledge.

This chapter addresses emerging social media cultures and socio-technical practices through the theoretical lens of Theory of Communicative Action. This conceptual scene is used to explain the interplay between social media and tourism. It analyzes the paradoxical role of interactive technologies as forces for the reproduction and transformation of this industry. The chapter discusses processes of colonization of personal relations and life-spaces. The analysis shows the ambivalent potential of tourism social media as communicative technologies for emancipation but also as tools for hierarchization, control, and exploitation. Finally, further theoretical examination of technological development and tourism practices is sought.

Anger responding to government-imposed COVID-19 pandemic mandates is examined in relation to 2021 international reports of street protests in cities, with a focus on Perth, Western Australia. Angry protestors displayed a variety of signs and symbols, united under banners demanding freedom. A multi-disciplinary analysis attends to distrust in public health mandates in the global context of an insecure biosphere. Mandates can signify symbolic death, and anger an ‘immune’ response to lifeworld constraints. Anger among nurses and vaccine-hesitant protestors signifies ethical rejection of super-imposed mandates, and fear of alleged vaccine harms. Official pandemic communications are held to be ill-timed, lacking information meaningful to diverse citizens' needs, and offset by poorly contextualised data and unreliable pre-packaged interpretations communicated via digital technologies. A novel hypothesis proposes semiotic misrecognition of the global nature of communications from intersecting ecosocial crises may underlie protestors' anger. Modelling of a management system to validate broad contextual knowledges may restore meaningful balance and public solidarity, to creatively respond to future human crises.

People subjectively engage in the production and reproduction of what constitutes “feeling normal.” Objective standards of normalcy for the able-bodied are created and maintained by institutions (e.g., medicine, the state, business, the mass media, and family), and these standards are learned by individuals who socialize the next generation in a continuous cycle. Having a disability does not exempt a person from standards and values of “able-bodied normalcy,” nor does it prevent her/him from reproducing these standards for future generations. Thus, it is possible, if not probable, that persons with disabilities live in and reproduce the able-bodied lifeworld, sustaining, what is for the person with a physical disability, an unattainable standard of normalcy. Approximating and ultimately achieving “normalcy” in this situation or at least the presentation of “normalcy” (Goffman, 1959, 1963) may occupy a sizeable portion of everyday life. More importantly here, “feeling normal” emerges when the social constructions of reality allows the person with a physical disability to be part of a generation and everyday life. There is, in other words, a “frame” for defining normality, and physical disability is a key to changing this frame (Goffman, 1974).

The purpose of this paper is to advance knowledge and obtain an understanding of the phenomenon of public sector external auditing (PSEA) in Tanzania.

The paper used a grounded theory method informed by a critical approach. It used data from multiple sources including interviews, observations and documents, to provide a theoretical and practical understanding of PSEA in Tanzania. The theoretical aspects were developed ‘in vivo’ and were also informed by the Habermasian concept of colonisation.

The principal research findings from the data concern the central phenomenon of managing colonising tendencies in PSEA which appeared to be the core strategy for both the government and external auditors. While the government appeared to manage the National Audit Office of Tanzania (NAOT) appearance and exploited the legitimising features of PSEA, external auditors manoeuvred within colonising tendencies and attempted to maintain the ‘audit supremacy’ image. PSEA in Tanzania encountered colonising tendencies because of weak working relationship between the NAOT and other accountability agencies, inconsistencies in governance and politics, the culture of corruption and secrecy, dependence on foreign financing and mimicking of foreign models. To coexist within this colonising environment, external auditors managed their relationship with auditees and the complexities of PSEA roles. Managing colonising tendencies resulted into obscured subordination of PSEA, contributing to cosmetic accountability and growing public interest in PSEA.

It is hoped that future research in other countries, in and beyond Africa, will be undertaken to broaden and deepen our understanding of the external auditing of public sector entities.

The paper combines grounded theory with a critical approach to understand PSEA in a developing country.

This chapter details the theory of information worlds and its relation to studies of information behaviour, providing a framework for examining information behaviour in a variety of settings. Since information and its related technologies impact every aspect of life in advanced societies, it is of great importance to create a stronger theoretical understanding of information beahviours across social contexts. Information behaviour is simultaneously shaped by immediate influences, such as friends, family and other trusted small world sources, and by larger social influences, including public sphere institutions, media, technology and politics. Information behaviours of all sorts are situated and contextualized, given meaning by the multi-tiered contexts within which they occur. Drawing on the works of Jürgen Habermas, who studied information flow across the largest social structures, and Elfreda Chatman, who focused on the smallest social units, the theory explores information behaviour across all of the levels –– the small worlds of everyday life, mediating social institutions and technologies, the concerns of an entire society and broad political and economic forces. After detailing antecedents and exploring the theory's core concepts, the chapter investigates the theory's relevance for research on information behaviour and discusses the theory in light of other approaches to studying information behaviour, arguing that it provides a strong foundation for understanding and analysing the complex interwoven contexts within which we interact with information.

Standardisation in education is an ambiguous process. Standards of time, measurement, technology and other aspects have evolved historically as basic preconditions for social life and communication, in education as well as in society at large. But excessive standardisation, especially in domains of culture and knowledge, often works as cultural and symbolic violence, undermining the qualities of education and learning situations. This chapter investigates these ambiguities, presenting concepts of standards and standardisation and developing their implications for education through selected theoretical contributions and empirical cases. The theoretical contributions include Berger and Luckmann's constructivist sociology of knowledge, Bourdieu's theory of symbolic capital and Habermas' theory of communicative action. The empirical cases include the processes of centralisation and standardisation of education in the United States and the process of standardisation in European higher education.

Through the use of digital methods, representation of peoples’ self-perception of experiences becomes possible. Digital imagery presents opportunities to expand the way it is possible to convey the diverse information gathered in the field. To enable some of the communication of various unseen experiences of the chronic illnesses Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia, I created, what I have called, hypertextual self-scape digital photographs through collaboration with participants which use a layering of information gathered in the field, including both seen and unseen experiences to create sensory embodied dialogue about the lifeworld. I will expand on this in greater detail as we continue, but briefly this means the use of art forms being used as a way to gather information and then using digital techniques to communicate the self-talk of lived experience. Images have the potential to expand our access to peoples’ lifeworld and I will take this further in the chapter to look at how altering an image increases the information that can be communicated. Just as the bodies of my participants do not reveal the truth about their experiences, the objects chosen do not tell the whole story about what they really represent. As a part of this discourse I will show how digital technologies have the potential to expand representations of experience. Imagery is another way to “write up” information gathered during the research and by embracing images and symbols through our method and our writing up of the research expands on the information which can be gathered and later communicated about participants’ lifeworld. The images I am using here act “not as observational and objectifying tools, but as routes to multisensorial knowing” (Pink, 2010, p. 99) and expand on the existing representations of chronic illness in the literature. We also view and interpret images in a different way to text, as I believe images offer a potential to engage in dialogue with the body in sensory discourse. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to advocate the use of digital technologies alongside research methodologies when looking at hidden experience and interiorities (Hogan & Pink, 2010; Irving, 2013).

For Weberian Marxists, the social theories of Max Weber and Karl Marx are complementary contributions to the analysis of modern capitalist society. Combining Weber's theory of rationalization with Marx's critique of commodity fetishism to develop his own critique of reification, Georg Lukács contended that the combination of Marx's and Weber's social theories is essential to envisioning socially transformative modes of praxis in advanced capitalist society. By comparing Lukács's theory of reification with Habermas's theory of communicative action as two theories in the tradition of Weberian Marxism, I show how the prevailing mode of “doing theory” has shifted from Marx's critique of economic determinism to Weber's idea of the inner logic of social value spheres. Today, Weberian Marxism can make an important contribution to theoretical sociology by reconstituting itself as a framework for critically examining prevailing societal definitions of the rationalization imperatives specific to purposive-rational social value spheres (the economy, the administrative state, etc.). In a second step, Weberian Marxists would explore how these value spheres relate to each other and to value spheres that are open to the type of communicative rationalization characteristic of the lifeworld level of social organization.