This paper aims to theoretically discuss the emergence of the ‘post-modern’ professionals out of the ‘modern’ professionalism in the second half of the twentieth century, and how their adoption and intense use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), particularly mobile and wireless technologies, potentially shapes and is shaped by the emerging professionals’ work practices. For th...

This paper examines the changing form of NGOs in Eastern Europe as they face challenges of democratic consolidation in an organizational environment increasingly permeated by universally available information technologies, unprecedented collaboration opportunities and complex technological change. We examine how NGOs’ potential for developing an innovative capacity is linked to their use of int...

We investigate the impact of actors’ positions within regional innovator networks on their innovative performance. The networks of four selected regions are based on information on patent applicants and inventors. Count data regressions show positive effects on innovation of both the total number of relations and of access to a larger knowledge base. However, when looking at innovators that are...

This paper surveys and analyzes the state of the art of agent-mediated electronic commerce (e-commerce), concentrating particularly on the business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) aspects. From the consumer buying behavior perspective, agents are being used in the following activities: need identification, product brokering, buyer coalition formation, merchant brokering, and ne...

New media museum exhibits often see designers representing the research of expert content providers. Despite perceptions that such exhibits provide museum visitors with a greater depth and range of experience, differences in knowledge and practice between designers and content providers can see content development become an unruly, competitive process in which audience experience, digital media...

Virtual clusters spanning over resources belonging to different administration domains have to face with the computational resources brokering problem in order to allow the direct interaction among them. Typically, it requires some component collecting, elaborating and providing resources information. Currently, every virtual cluster project provides its own solution with a low degree of portab...

Ethnographic research identifies brokering (a.k.a., “copping for others”) as an important and popular way people who use heroin acquire the drug by making purchases for their peers. Brokering is when a customer buys drugs for a fellow customer using the buyer’s money and is paid using drug the buyer purchases. This distributes heroin costs. Heroin dealers obviously manipulate price and/or drug ...

Death brokering refers to the activities of medical authorities to render individual deaths culturally meaningful. Social scientists and others agree that mortality provokes existential ambiguity in modern life requiring cultural coping mechanisms. In contemporary Western societies, medical professionals have sequestered the dying in institutions, and have classified the causes of death to expl...

The growth of commercial activities across networks has led to the network itself becoming a competitive marketplace with a multitude of vendors, operators and customers. In such an environment, users will ‘shop around’ for the best deals in terms of network financial costs and services. Intelligent, autonomous and mobile software agents introduce an alternative approach that facilitates expert...