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This paper discusses an exploratory case study of the design of games that facilitate spontaneous social interaction and group behaviours among distributed individuals, based largely on symbolic presence ‘state’ changes. We present the principles guiding the design of our game environment: presence as a symbolic phenomenon, the importance of good visualization and the potential for spontaneous self‐organization among groups of people. Our game environment, comprising a family of multiplayer ‘bumper‐car’ style games, is described, followed by a discussion of lessons learned from observing users of the environment. Finally, we reconsider and extend our design principles in light of our observations.

It is generally recognised that companies spend approximately 50% of their marketing budget on promotional activities. Advertising belongs to the most visible areas of a company’s activity. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the average recipient associates marketing with advertising, competitions and leaflets about new promotions delivered to houses or offices. Advertising, especially Internet advertising, is one of the most effective forms of marketing and one of the fastest developing areas of business. New channels of communication are emerging all the time – the Internet, digital television, mobile telephony; accompanied by new forms, such as the so-called ambient media. Advertising benefits from the achievements of many fields of science, that is, psychology, sociology, statistics, medicine and economics. At the same time, it combines science and the arts – it requires both knowledge and intuition. Contemporary advertising has different forms and areas of activity; yet it is always closely linked with the operations of a company – it is a form of marketing communication.

The indices of marketing communication presented in this chapter are generally known and used not only by advertising agencies but also by the marketing departments of many organisations. Brand awareness, advertising scope and frequency, the penetration index or the response rate belong to the most widely used indices; others, like the conversion rate or the affinity index, will get increasingly more significant along with the process of professionalisation of the environment of marketing specialists in Poland and with increased pressure on measuring marketing activities. Marketing indices are used for not only planning activities, but also their evaluation; some of them, such as telemarketing, mailing and coupons, provide an extensive array of possibilities of performance evaluation.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest Homans’ social exchange theory (SET), a management theory, as an explanation for some of the findings of some of the Hawthorne experiments (1924-1933), which demonstrated how social situations play an important role in task performance and productivity and how social exchanges can facilitate it. The authors also use SET to investigate Elton Mayo’s inquiry as to what caused spontaneous cooperation in Hawthorne.

The authors used a combination of published work by Homans, Roethlisberger and Dickson, Mayo and others, as well as oral histories conducted by Greenwood and Bolton in 1982-1984, to argue that some of the Hawthorne studies illustrate the principles of SET. Homans’ SET brought together concepts from multiple disciplines and offered a framework to explain social behaviors.

The relay assembly room and the bank wiring tests of Hawthorne studies can illustrate SET as developed by Homans. With the development of SET, Homans not only provided explanations for the creation of strong feelings of affiliation and trust through interactions and mutual dependence between group members but also provided evidence to Mayo’s concept of spontaneous collaboration.

The limitations of the paper are that the studies themselves can lend themselves to multiple perspectives due to design flaws. Therefore, our argument is only one interpretation – even if it is something that the researchers would have supported.

The paper augments the ongoing discussion about the Hawthorne studies in the literature and in the development of management theories such as SET. The authors provide support that it is through the attempts to explain the Hawthorne studies and the post-Second World War controversies over the studies that Homans developed social exchange. Building on previous work, the methods show perspectives beyond the motivations and sentiments of Homans by demonstrating observable behaviors from the Hawthorne studies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how spontaneous volunteers make sense of their actions at the scene of accident. More specifically, this paper focusses on the moral aspects of this sense-making process in terms of how spontaneous volunteers justify their own and others actions at the scene of accident through moral positioning.

This is done through a narrative analysis of volunteers’ retrospective stories from the scene of accident. The empirical material consists of interviews with 12 witnesses to traffic accidents.

The narrative analysis identifies two central storylines: the interviewees frame their own and others’ actions through norms of how one should act, and the interviewees frame their own actions by presenting themselves as a person of a certain type, sometimes positioned against an real or imaginative “other”.

Disaster sociologists have long argued that emergent behaviours and norms are one of the phenomena distinguishing disasters from everyday emergencies. However, as this paper shows, emergent behaviours and norms are also present at everyday emergencies such as traffic accidents where spontaneous volunteers can play an important role by filling the void before the arrival of emergency services.

This study explores feedback-induced and spontaneous postdecision restructuring in a complex decision environment. We examine the impact of experience, decision norms, and the actual decision on postdecision restructuring tendencies. Experienced and novice auditors performed an aspect rating task as part of a going concern judgment. After a break, all participants were asked to recreate their decision stage aspect ratings, but only the experiment group received outcome feedback. We find that the restructuring tendencies are impacted primarily by experience and the original audit report choice. The post-decision restructuring more often than not is a result of adjustments made by participants lacking outcome feedback. This spontaneous defense is particularly vigorous when the report choice violates perceived experience-group norms and base-rates

Over the past decade or two, the Hayek Studies industry has been in a period of significant growth. A whole variety of books about Hayek, both his life and his thought, have appeared, with each trying to differentiate its product sufficiently to make a mark on both scholarship and sales. Into this fairly crowded marketplace comes a volume edited by two political scientists, neither of whom is known for contributions to the Hayek literature. The volume grew out of a lecture series at Utah State University, and the group of scholars that they assembled is notable as well for not being a cast of the “usual Hayekian suspects,” nor exclusively economists. In fact, there is only one economist contributing to the volume, with a couple of philosophers and one historian, and the rest being political scientists. In addition, all the essays address the concept of “spontaneous order,” which is central to Hayek's intellectual framework. More specifically, each essay approaches that topic in light of its relationship to “liberalism” and “conservatism.” The result is a largely excellent set of papers that offer critical and constructive explorations of the idea of spontaneous order and its place in Hayek's thought and in understanding the social world.

Certain elements of Hayek’s work are prominent precursors to the modern field of complex adaptive systems, including his ideas on spontaneous order, his focus on market processes, his contrast between designing and gardening, and his own framing of complex systems. Conceptually, he was well ahead of his time, prescient in his formulation of novel ways to think about economies and societies. Technically, the fact that he did not mathematically formalize most of the notions he developed makes his insights hard to incorporate unambiguously into models. However, because so much of his work is divorced from the simplistic models proffered by early mathematical economics, it stands as fertile ground for complex systems researchers today. I suggest that Austrian economists can create a progressive research program by building models of these Hayekian ideas, and thereby gain traction within the economics profession. Instead of mathematical models the suite of techniques and tools known as agent-based computing seems particularly well-suited to addressing traditional Austrian topics like money, business cycles, coordination, market processes, and so on, while staying faithful to the methodological individualism and bottom-up perspective that underpin the entire school of thought.

The paper's aim is twofold: to display how the application of social network analysis techniques to observational data provides researchers with a unique set of data to make sense of the dynamics of organizational settings; to contribute to knowledge on group design, self‐managing teams, and processes of technology diffusion.

The paper focuses on the findings of qualitative research, recently published, that were conducted in a major Italian clothing company producing garments for the top‐end market. Observation, ethnographic interviews and analysis of documents for data collection were employed. Coding procedures and social network analysis techniques were used to analyse data.

The long presence in the field allowed for the building of two grounded theories. One deals with the process of Computer Aided Design technology diffusion into a small group and it connects a number of variables usually studied separately in the literature. The second accounts for the enactment of spontaneous self‐managing practices in a group formally designed as a manager‐led team.

The grounded theories are formulated for specific social settings and future research could benefit from replications in different contexts to capture other phenomena leading to different categories to be integrated into the theories or to corroborate them.

The paper derived enacted network data from the direct and prolonged observation of actors as opposed to self‐reported network data. This allowed clarification of the actual content and the quality of the interactions among actors, and to move beyond their quantification, thus enhancing the comprehension of the impact of network relationships upon organizational behaviour.

I argue that while research on collective emotions is gaining in popularity, there has not been sufficient attention paid to understanding the mechanisms that explain how and why group emotions influence group outcomes. The goal of this chapter is to fill this gap by introducing group-member interactions as a group-level mechanism. I explore how positive and negative collective emotions in workgroups link to different types of member interactions, which in turn, influence group outcomes. Finally, I discuss the theoretical contributions of the research and the implications for future research on workgroup emotions and member interactions.