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Connectivism has been proposed to explain the impact of new technologies on learning. According to this approach, learning may occur even outside the individual within an organization or a system. Learning objectives are not defined in advance and learning requires the ability to form connections and use networks to find the required knowledge. The connections by which individuals can learn are more important than what they currently know. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if a measure, rating the importance of concepts, can be derived from a network representation of the learning domain and if highly connected concepts – with high importance value – can describe whether information is explored in such ways as assumed by connectivism.

The authors empirically examined if the proposed measure can provide insight on the role of connections in learning and explain the reasons behind passing certain parts of a test using a linear regression model.

The results are twofold. First, an implementation of the information exploration principle of connectivism has been introduced, applying semantic technologies and the importance measure. Second, although no significant effects could be isolated, trends in performance improvement concerning highly important concepts were identified.

However, connectivism has been known since 2005, it is still lacking for successful implementations. The presented approach of a concept importance measure is a promising starting point by providing means of connected learning, enabling individuals to effectively improve their personal abilities to better fit job demand.

The success of web services involved the adoption of this technology by different service providers through the web, which increased the number of web services, as a result making their discovery a tedious task. The UDDI standard has been proposed for web service publication and discovery. However, it lacks sufficient semantic description in the content of web services, which makes it difficult to find and compose suitable web services during the analysis, search, and matching processes. In addition, few works on semantic web services discovery take into account the user’s profile. The purpose of this paper is to optimize the web services discovery by reducing the search space and increasing the number of relevant services.

The authors propose a new approach for the semantic web services discovery based on the mobile agent, user profile and metadata catalog. In the approach, each user can be described by a profile which is represented in two dimensions: personal dimension and preferences dimension. The description of web service is based on two levels: metadata catalog and WSDL.

First, the semantic web services discovery reduces the number of relevant services through the application of matching algorithm “semantic match”. The result of this first matching restricts the search space at the level of UDDI registry, which allows the users to have good results for the “functional match”. Second, the use of mobile agents as a communication entity reduces the traffic on the network and the quantity of exchanged information. Finally, the integration of user profile in the service discovery process facilitates the expression of the user needs and makes intelligible the selected service.

To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first attempt at implementing the mobile agent technology with the semantic web service technology.

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the nature and range of solutions that can empower and (re-)engage vulnerable and marginalized populations so that they can fully participate in the social, economic, cultural, and political life. These innovative social solutions may be viewed as interactive, generative, and contextualized phenomena that are driven by individuals, organizations and institutional actors at micro, meso, and macro levels.

The use of Middle Range Theory (MRT) as an integrative approach provides an understanding of the processes and mechanisms that govern social phenomena including social innovations. Middle range theorizing focuses on empirical phenomenon and creates general statements that can be verified by data. As such MRT provides an appropriate framework to investigate social innovation trajectory and dynamics.

MRT has been used within the context of SIMPACT, a research project funded under the European Commission’s 7th Framework Program and is the acronym for “Boosting the Impact of Social Innovation in Europe through Economic Underpinnings.” The application of MRT to selected case studies has permitted to identify the micro (individual actions) and macro (structures) links in a variety of social and economic contexts across Europe.

This chapter provides new insights as how different themes studied in the SIMPACT project (i.e., migration, unemployment, education, gender, etc.) in different economic and geographic zones (i.e., Anglo-Saxon, Continental, East-European, and Scandinavia) have been treated by social innovators in response to problems of welfare, economic exclusion, and vulnerability. The research findings are susceptible to be of use in other countries with different economic, political, and social structures.

The significance of vulnerability is well-recognized by social innovators, intermediaries, and impact investors including governments and policy-makers. This requires greater policy and practical interventions, guidelines, and support. However the capacity to intervene is conditioned by financial and human resources. Further investigation about alternative social innovation business models will shed light on the resources and policies that would be needed to foster social innovation.

The analysis of social innovations' economic factors by case studies represents a pioneering effort to highlight social innovation path dependency and building as an effort to overcome the problems of vulnerability and exclusion.

The side effects of disguised bribes are hidden by their apparent good consequences (as pseudo-gifts). The aim of the chapter is to unveil to what extent pseudo-gifts (as disguised bribes) could distort the cultural, social, and communicational functions of gift-giving practices. We will firstly describe how disguised bribes could be analyzed from a Sartrean perspective, given that Sartre’s notion of bad faith could help to better understand the three basic kinds of substantive loss which follow from disguised bribes: (a) the loss of commonalities (the cultural function of gift-giving as distorted by disguised bribes: Malinowski’s notion of culture): we will analyze the phenomenon of guanxi; (b) the loss of social bonds (the social function of gift-giving as distorted by disguised bribes: Durkheim’s notion of culture); (c) the loss of communicability, and the arising of an empty truth (the communicational function of gift-giving as distorted by disguised bribes: Jaspers’ notion of truth claims). Gift-giving practices are culturally rooted. This is the first level of analysis (surface). Seizing the social and moral function of gift-giving practices unveils the second level of analysis (beneath-the-surface). Describing the communicational function of gift-giving practices opens the door to the third level of analysis (exchanges of truth claims). Bribery is the distortion of those basic functions of gift-giving practices. We are then facing an empty truth (the communicational function of culture is distorted).

Any concept of disguised bribes must be empirically tested. The way the cultural, social and communication functions of gift-giving practices are distorted could vary from one culture to another. Future research could check how such distortions arise in given societal cultures. It could then distinguish the side effects of disguised bribes, either from a cultural viewpoint, or from social perspective, or even from a communicational pattern of reference. Unveiling the multiple ways of distorting gift-giving practices could help decision-makers to better understand the frontiers between bribery and gift-giving. Emphasizing the various functions of gift-giving practices, from a philosophical and sociological perspective, could allow business decision-makers to raise their ethical awareness.

Since 1969, the Moroccan government has worked to convert irrigated collective land in the Gharb region into individual freehold tenure through cadastral, registration, and titling processes. The first titles were issued in 2017, the same year that a new compact between the Government of Morocco and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a US foreign aid agency, entered into force to develop a streamlined privatization process for collective lands. In this chapter, I adopt the analytic of assemblage to investigate the historical construction of administrative frameworks, material landscapes, and systems of practice governing access to collective land. I assert that the shifting arrangements of sociomaterial relations related to collective land access in the Gharb have continuously assembled new practices of land access legible to state and market actors at a wider scale. This legibility was produced by administrative reforms and the deployment of new forms of knowledge production in the form of cadastral maps and titles deeds, which have worked to formalize and individualize access to collective land in the Gharb. The logic of legibility smooths the contradictions between the diverse objectives of state actors, including rural development to improve economic livelihoods, pursuit of a neoliberal development strategy focused on commodification and marketization of land, and the evolution of a patronage system that exchanges economic gain for political support.

While the main emotional labor strategies are well-documented, the manner in which professionals navigate emotional rules within the workplace and effectively perform emotional labor is less understood. With this contribution, I aim to unveil “the good, the bad and the ugly” of emotional labor as a dynamic theatrical performance.

Focusing on three geriatric long-term care units within a French public hospital, this qualitative study relies on two sets of data (observation and interviews). Deeply rooted within the field of study, the chosen methodological approach substantializes the subtle hues of the emotional experience at work and targets resonance rather than generalization.

Using the theatrical metaphor, this research underlines the role of space in the practice of emotional labor in a unique way. It identifies the main emotionalized zones or emotional regions (front, back, transitional, mixed) and details their characteristics, before unearthing the nonlinearity and polyphonic quality of emotional labor performance and the versatility needed to that effect. Indeed, this research shows how health-care professionals juggle with the specificities of each region, as well as how space generates both constraints and resources. By combining static and dynamic prisms, diverse instantiations of hybridity and spatial in-betweens, anchored in liminality and trajectories, are revealed.

This research adds to the current body of literature on the concept of emotional labor by shedding light on its highly dynamic and interactional nature, revealing different levels of porosity between emotional regions and how the characteristics of each type of area can taint others and increase/decrease the occupational health costs of emotional labor. The study also raises questions about the interplay of emotional labor performance with the level of humanization/dehumanization of elderly people. Given the global demographics about an aging population, this gives food for thought at a social level.

For the Frankfurt School, what most decisively distinguished critical from traditional theory was that critical theorists refused to celebrate the working class uncritically. The early critical theorists accepted the premise that the working class is the most likely agent of social transformation, but unlike orthodox Marxists (and even such mavericks as their forerunner Georg Lukács) they did not assume that workers are progressive by nature. In other words, they disputed the metaphysic of the charismatic proletariat, a class “destined” for transcendence and glory. This essay sketches the emergence of this perspective in the early writings of Herbert Marcuse. Initially a partisan of the Lukáscian view, which he spiced with Heideggerian accents, Marcuse broke with transcendentalism when he repudiated existentialism and political theology. He concluded that relying on any kind of charismatic savior, whether a class or a leader, is an abdication of sociological realism and political responsibility. Reaching this conclusion placed Marcuse in agreement with Max Horkheimer, and enabled him to assist Horkheimer in the elaboration of the founding principles of critical theory. The ultimate results of this collaboration included the formulation of a new critical research agenda, which placed inquiry into the roots of authority on a new foundation. By means of critical inquiry into personal “authoritarianism,” the Frankfurt theorists were able to shed new light on political authority. This remains a seminal contribution and continues to animate a major contemporary research tradition.