Affect control theory (ACT) is a sociological theory of meaning processing in social interactions. Meaning, according to ACT, derives from cultural institutions and situational affordances, having denotative (declarative) as well as connotative (affective) properties. Mathematical formalizations...

Mit der demographischen Entwicklung gehen enorme Herausforderungen für die Gesellschaft einher. Eine dieser Herausforderungen liegt im wirtschaftlichen Bereich. Viele Unternehmen befinden sich im globalen Wettbewerb und, um dort bestehen zu können, sind sie gezwungen, ihre Produkte oder...

The starting point of this work is the deficit in brand research in social perspective implied by buying brand acquisitions. Models of consumer choice should be extended to include the interpersonal influence. Based on the question to what extent the acquisition of collective knowledge about...

Fearing that our overreliance on an individual, heroic model of leadership will only continue to dampen the energy and creativity of people in our organizations and communities, this essay proposes a practice perspective of leadership based on a collaborative agency mobilized through engaged...

SISTER, a Symbolic Interactionist Simulation of Trade and Emergent Roles, captures a fundamental social process by which macro level roles emerge from micro level symbolic interaction. The knowledge in a SISTER society is held culturally, suspended in the mutual expectations agents have of each...

In open systems of artificial agents, the meaning of communication in part emerges from ongoing interaction processes. In this paper, we present the empirical semantics approach to inductive derivation of communication semantics that can be used to derive this emergent semantics of communication...

In modern academia, history is occasionally classified as a social science. My aim is to demonstrate why history has not become a ‘real’ social science, although historians who represent the most advanced trends within the discipline aspired to this. Two-faced status of history is...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether organic foods are used to signal and build status. Bourdieu’s (1979; 1994) approach and symbolic interactionism (Goffman, 1951; Solomon, 1983) are used to frame the causes and consequences of status value and to highlight the marketing...