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The main purpose of this essay is to reflect on the nature of justification. To this end, the analysis draws on Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s De la justification. Les économies de la grandeur ¹ [On Justification: Economies of Worth ² ]. More specifically, the article aims to examine the extent to which Boltanski and Thévenot’s conceptual framework, widely known as ‘the sociology of critical capacity’, ³ permits us to demonstrate that processes of justification ⁴ are vital to the symbolically mediated construction – that is, to both the conceptual and the empirical organization ⁵ – of social life. In order to prove the validity of this contention, the inquiry explores the meaning of ‘justification’ in relation to the following dimensions: (1) existence, (2) ethics, (3) justice, (4) perspective, (5) presuppositions, (6) agreement, (7) common worlds, (8) critique, (9) practice and (10) justification itself. By way of conclusion, the article maintains that processes of justification constitute an essential ingredient of human reality.

This article is a contribution to the development of a comprehensive interdisciplinary theory of LIS in the hope of giving a more precise evaluation of its current problems. The article describes an interdisciplinary framework for lis, especially information retrieval (IR), in a way that goes beyond the cognitivist ‘information processing paradigm’. The main problem of this paradigm is that its concept of information and language does not deal in a systematic way with how social and cultural dynamics set the contexts that determine the meaning of those signs and words that are the basic tools for the organisation and retrieving of documents in LIS. The paradigm does not distinguish clearly enough between how the computer manipulates signs and how librarians work with meaning in practice when they design and run document mediating systems. The ‘cognitive viewpoint’ of Ingwersen and Belkin makes clear that information is not objective, but rather only potential, until it is interpreted by an individual mind with its own internal mental world view and purposes. It facilitates further study of the social pragmatic conditions for the interpretation of concepts. This approach is not yet fully developed. The domain analytic paradigm of Hjørland and Albrechtsen is a conceptual realisation of an important aspect of this area. In the present paper we make a further development of a non‐reductionistic and interdisciplinary view of information and human social communication by texts in the light of second‐order cybernetics, where information is seen as ‘a difference which makes a difference’ for a living autopoietic (self‐organised, self‐creating) system. Other key ideas are from the semiotics of Peirce and also Warner. This is the understanding of signs as a triadic relation between an object, a representation and an interpretant. Information is the interpretation of signs by living, feeling, self‐organising, biological, psychological and social systems. Signification is created and con‐trolled in a cybernetic way within social systems and is communicated through what Luhmann calls generalised media, such as science and art. The modern socio‐linguistic concept ‘discourse communities’ and Wittgenstein's ‘language game’ concept give a further pragmatic description of the self‐organising system's dynamic that determines the meaning of words in a social context. As Blair and Liebenau and Backhouse point out in their work it is these semantic fields of signification that are the true pragmatic tools of knowledge organ‐isation and document retrieval. Methodologically they are the first systems to be analysed when designing document mediating systems as they set the context for the meaning of concepts. Several practical and analytical methods from linguistics and the sociology of knowledge can be used in combination with standard methodology to reveal the significant language games behind document mediation.

This study aims to increase language learning (L2) output by incorporating a digital storytelling chatbot system (known as a “storybot”) that focused interactions on a narrative. This study also sought to investigate student perceptions of these storybot interactions and improve on poor perception rates from previous studies.

This one-sample exploratory study was of student-storybot participation rates and student perceptions towards a storybot activity designed to increase L2 output. A combination of storybot participation analytics and survey analysis of student perception was carried out.

The use of storybots in the L2 class resulted in mixed participation rates. Students read nine times more than they wrote, indicating a high degree of reading comprehension necessary for storybot interaction. Survey results revealed that students believed storybots helped them meet their L2 goals, were relevant to their L2 and were easy to navigate.

Interactions were through text messaging so no impact on speech or pronunciation could be observed. Further, the context was within a single university class in South Korea, restricting the generalization of findings to outside regions or with younger learners. Finally, while storybots proved to be valuable reading comprehension activities, the next step in this line of chatbot research should incorporate more writing prompts.

Storybots revealed explicit benefits to reading comprehension, as measured by cohesion between storybot delivered comprehension questions and student responses. Moreover, storybots can be used as examples for students in their own story creation, classroom forms to collect relevant student information regarding learning objectives and platforms for class quizzes.

Storybots scaffold students through conversations, which abide by socio-pragmatic norms, providing models for L2 learners to incorporate in real-world text-based communication. Additionally, a wide range of idiomatic expressions is contextualized in comprehensible interactions that students can learn from the storybot then practice with friends.

This study contributes to the growing research on the use of chatbots for second L2 and offers specific insight into the use of narrative storybots as a means to increase L2 output and potentially benefit L2 reading comprehension.

This volume presents state-of-the-art research and thinking on the analysis of justification, evaluation and critique in organizations, as inspired by the foundational ideas of French Pragmatist Sociology’s economies of worth (EW) framework. In this introduction, we begin by underlining the EW framework’s importance in sociology and social theory more generally and discuss its relative neglect within organizational theory, at least until now. We then present an overview of the framework’s intellectual roots, and for those who are new to this particular theoretical domain, offer a brief introduction to the theory’s main concepts and core assumptions. This we follow with an overview of the contributions included in this volume. We conclude by highlighting the EW framework’s important yet largely untapped potential for advancing our understanding of organizations more broadly. Collectively, the contributions in this volume help demonstrate the potential of the EW framework to (1) advance current understanding of organizational processes by unpacking justification dynamics at the individual level of analysis, (2) refresh critical perspectives in organization theory by providing them with pragmatic foundations, (3) expand and develop the study of valuation and evaluation in organizations by reconsidering the notion of worth, and finally (4) push the boundaries of the framework itself by questioning and fine tuning some of its core assumptions. Taken as a whole, this volume not only carves a path for a deeper embedding of the EW approach into contemporary thinking about organizations, it also invites readers to refine and expand it by confronting it with a wider range of diverse empirical contexts of interest to organizational scholars.

Most research on language acquisition using technology generally investigates collegiate language learners. However, it is unclear as to how well these findings apply to refugee learners, who sometimes have experienced interrupted schooling and had little exposure to technologies found in the resettlement context. Little research concentrates on the use of technology to aid language acquisition among this population. By better understanding the digital literacies refugees already possess, the author are better able to bridge this digital divide (Thorne & Reinhardt, 2008; Warschauer, 2002) and move toward researching how to capitalize on the technological skills refugees already possess in order to facilitate language learning. Therefore, this chapter reviews available literature on how refugees worldwide use multiple forms of technology, their levels of access to such technology, and considerations for pre- and post-resettlement technological options. It identifies best practices for employing technology to facilitate language acquisition in light of the multifaceted constraints refugees face. It concludes by outlining the suitability of different technologies as a means of facilitating language development within a myriad of contexts and gives recommendations for future research on using technology to facilitate language learning at all proficiency levels.

Whilst English remains the language of global commerce, the role and outcomes of English language provision in English-medium higher education institutions in the Arab Gulf countries remains central to any discussion on graduate profile and the employability of graduates in the global marketplace. This paper describes the findings of research into English workplace communication skills amongst a sample of Bahrain employers and students at Bahrain Polytechnic. Using a mixed methods approach, data was gathered through telephone interviews, student workplace simulations and employer focus groups. Findings show that generic employability skills, channelled through English as a second or additional language, are highly valued by Bahrain’s employers. In particular, students need to market themselves as confident, knowledgeable individuals during the recruitment process and after recruitment, continuing to operate successfully in the sociolinguistic culture of their company. Consequently, it is concluded that English language training in higher education programmes needs to move from purely linguistic and degree-related content areas to a broader remit of English for communication purposes that covers both specialised discourse fields and broader generic employability skills and competencies.

The purpose of this paper is to look into the latest advances in ontology-based text summarization systems, with emphasis on the methodologies of a socio-cognitive approach, the structural discourse models and the ontology-based text summarization systems.

The paper analyzes the main literature in this field and presents the structure and features of Texminer, a software that facilitates summarization of texts on Port and Coastal Engineering. Texminer entails a combination of several techniques, including: socio-cognitive user models, Natural Language Processing, disambiguation and ontologies. After processing a corpus, the system was evaluated using as a reference various clustering evaluation experiments conducted by Arco (2008) and Hennig et al. (2008). The results were checked with a support vector machine, Rouge metrics, the F-measure and calculation of precision and recall.

The experiment illustrates the superiority of abstracts obtained through the assistance of ontology-based techniques.

The authors were able to corroborate that the summaries obtained using Texminer are more efficient than those derived through other systems whose summarization models do not use ontologies to summarize texts. Thanks to ontologies, main sentences can be selected with a broad rhetorical structure, especially for a specific knowledge domain.