Summary: General foundations of geography.

Public communication is secure if a hostile third-party cannot decode the messages exchanged by the communicating parties. In Nash equilibrium, communication by computationally unbounded players cannot be secure. We assume complexity averse players, and show that a simple, secure, and costless communication protocol becomes available as the marginal complexity cost tends to zero.

Truth matters for organization studies, but it has been neglected as a topic of research. Positivist scholars do not tend to question assumptions about the relationship between knowledge and the world, while critical theorists tend to view ‘truth’ as an outdated, metaphysical way to describe it. However, the pragmatic philosophical tradition of inquiry into truth has not yet received enough attention within organization studies. This essay presents a genealogical account of that tradition by conducting a close reading of texts by (...) C.S. Pierce, William James, Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty. Following this reading, we identify pragmatic truths that pertain to the qualitative v. quantitative, rigor v. relevance, and positivist v. critical tensions that currently animate our field. (shrink)

New production and work practices set new proficiency requirements for employees in operative organisations. Most of these requirements involve information and communication. We can train and educate people to meet with these challenges and design their physical and information environments to support and facilitate them in their work. New information tools play a central role in this development. But what kind of tools? How to apply these tools to enhance employees’ learning by reflection. In this article we will discuss the (...) emergency of shop-floor information environment from the sociotechnical point of view. In addition, the possibilities and limitations of electronic performance support as a solution are evaluated. Shop-floor information artifacts are tools used to produce, organise, store and distribute work related information in a shop-floor environment. They may be very simple like handwritten notes or user interfaces to extremely complex data management systems. (shrink)

Computer users copy computer software - this is well-known. However, less well-known are the reasons why some computer users choose to make unauthorized copies of computer software. Furthermore, the relationship linking the theory and the practice is unknown, i.e., how the attitudes of ordinary end-users correspond with the theoretical views of computer ethics scholars. In order to fill this gap in the literature, we investigated the moral attitudes of 249 Finnish computing students towards the unauthorized copying of computer software, and (...) we then asked how these results compared with the theoretical reasons offered by computer ethics scholars. The results shed a new light on students' moral attitudes with respect to the unauthorized copying of software. In particular, this new knowledge is useful for computer ethics teachers, and for organizations seeking to combat this practice. (shrink)