As a representative of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse has repeatedly discussed relationship between technology and freedom. He attributes human alienation to fact that technological rationality become covered ideology in developed industrial society, thus making people lose negativity, transcendence criticism, then 'one-dimensional '. This paper takes Marcuse's "comfortable non-freedom" as start...

In this paper, we revisit Donald Schön’s scholarly work on “handling uncertainty”, suggesting that in order to cope reasonably well with uncertainty, practitioners should be encouraged to take a reflective existential stance, aimed to explore their own tacit personal style (i.e., theories-in-use). They should (i) recall and reflect on their theories-in-use to bear on the phenomenon, (ii) metaph...

Several studies of two-party negotiations have shown that negotiators more often than not reach inefficient compromises. We analyze the circumstances under which rational agents make inefficient compromises and refrain from improving them. We do this by describing and interpreting various negotiation situations and by developing formal constructs and theorems for determining the character of a ...

Computer support for design as cooperative work is the subject of our discussion in the context of our research program on Computer Support in Cooperative Design and Communication. We outline our theoretical perspective on design as cooperative work, and we exemplify our approach with reflections from a project on computer support for envisionment in design – the APLEX and its use. We see envis...

A research and practice gap is identified demonstrating tourism to be an insufficiently critical business. Initially the idea of critical tourism is addressed in two ways. First an array of meanings is exposed from which the idea of critical theory is developed. Next discussion turns to how critical approaches can contribute to good management and governance of tourism by providing understandin...

The term “bureaucracy” has never been so precisely defined than in the writings of Max Weber. Such precision results in a useful and enduring conceptualization of the term. This paper examines four essential characteristics of Weber’s ideal type bureaucracy; defining them and their technical advantages in the context of certain overarching sociological trends. These trends are impersonality, ef...