Communication plays a crucial role in influencing various aspects of our social life. However, communication has more often than not been distorted by unequal opportunities to initiate and sustain it. Such a condition has been criticized by Habermas who argues for an ideal speech situation. It...

Besides being a distribution medium for up-to-date information, the Internet provides professional communities of users with an infrastructure for collaborative work. An important problem, however, is that groups working over the Internet often fail to accomplish their goals. In this paper our...

This paper will focus on integrated conservation of cultural built heritage starting from the analysis of related European policies in an economic perspective. Integrated conservation of cultural built heritage allows either a city or country to undertake socio­economic and cultural promotion...

This paper is positioned at the crossroads of three scientific disciplines: economics, planning and cultural heritage preservation. It aims to present a general framework for local identity analysis and historic environment preservation within the context of a more comprehensive urban ecological...

The point of departure is that the activities associated with the Internet are organizational and societal activities taking place within a given historical context. As such they can profit from sociological theories such as postmodernism. Postmodernism can be seen as a reaction to some signal...

This paper agrees that a suitably generalized Darwinism may help understand socioeconomic change, but finds the most publicized generalization by Hodgson and Knudsen unsuitable. To do better, it generalizes the extension of Neo-Darwinism into evolutionary developmental biology ("evo-devo"),...

The paper investigates the interplay between the institutions of law and property and innate propensities towards possession. The questions to be answered are: How do property relations emerge in historical-anthropological terms in contrast to the well-known constitutional perspective and what...

This study analyses public attitudes towards the degree of government involvement in ensuring the livelihood and care of the elderly in Japan. Using four waves of individual-level annual data from the Japanese General Social Survey collected over the period 2000-2005, we estimate ordered logit...