The cover of this issue features Santa Claus images from the travelling exhibition, ‘‘Merry X-Ray and A Happy New Lung: When Santa Sold Cigarettes’’, created by Alan Blum, Director of the University of Alabama Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society. Taken from popular magazines published in the US, these images feature Santa, one of the most ubiquitous symbols of the Christmas season, sugg...

It is rather difficult to get an accurate picture of the number of practising Buddhists in the United States. In 1975, Barrett estimated 190,000 persons, or approximately 0.1% of the population and one would expect this figure to be mainly composed of descendants of Chinese and Japanese immigrants affiliated to the Jodo shinshu inspired Buddhist Churches of America with some Nichiren shoshu of ...

The recent market success of in-car navigation systems creates the opportunity to investigate the appropriation of location-aware systems outside laboratory settings. Through ethnographical lenses, we study how this technology changed the practice of a massive community of its early adopters, the taxi drivers of Barcelona (Spain) and, specifically, their exploitation of pervasive geoinformation...

Is aimed at broadening Colombia's understanding of the social appropriation of science and technology, particularly the types of actors who promote initiatives in this sphere. Using a chain referral sampling methodology, a hundred such initiatives in Colombia were identified and documented, which were promoted by civil society, the State, business, the research community and mediators. The arti...

This paper contributes to the understanding of the importance of dynamic firm capabilities for corporate performance in isolating the effect of core competences on the performance of companies. It discusses and tests the assumed relation between core competences and economic performance, including the effect of the external appropriation of these competences through mergers and acquisitions as ...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between a tutor’s advice and a student’s questionings, and the way in which it develops a student’s self-regulation skill. Firstly we offer that a tutor’s advice is one component that trains a student’s self-regulation skill. Through analysis of interactive learning opportunities between academic departments, we discovered that a tutor’s ...

Studies in computer supported collaborative learning frequently under-expose the interaction between students and technology. To gain more insight in the way student groups interact with educational technology, we examine how students ‘appropriate’ this technology. The notion of technology appropriation implies a process of social construction in which the actions and thoughts of the user are s...