Intersubjective Representations Research Articles

Interfirm problem representation: Developing shared understanding within inter-organizational networks

Actors in business networks often struggle to integrate their resources and bridge knowledge boundaries, which makes shared understanding difficult to establish and sustain. We develop the concept of interfirm problem representation (IFPR) to illustrate how networks of multidisciplinary teams create shared understanding and establish collective decisions in their day-to-day negotiations and joint problem-solving. IFPR is defined as an arrangement of localized artefacts or boundary objects that are jointly created by team members, and continuously adapted to facilitate mutual agreement and shared understanding in their daily conversations. We draw evidence from the UK construction industry to illustrate how team members from different organizations and knowledge domains manage their resource dependencies by creating IFPR as a common frame of reference to guide the implementation of their shared goals. Our data collection activities involve the observation of 3 different construction project teams over a period of 11 months. During the period, a total of 43 project team meetings were attended and 32 face-to-face interviews conducted across the 3 project teams. Findings from this study advance the discussion on subjective cognition and inter-subjective representations in networks by illustrating how diverse cognitive views and knowledge boundaries of network actors are synergized through an objectified system of representation. This enables us to offer important theoretical implications related to prior research on knowledge sharing and shared cognition. Our discussion highlights how actors, engaging in a shared activity that is extended over a period of time, collectively navigate different social contingencies while utilizing IFPR as a socio-historical artefact. IFPR enables network actors to critically review past mistakes to achieve improved collaborative outcomes.

What Are Friends for in Russia Versus Canada?: An Approach for Documenting Cross-Cultural Differences

Most research on friendship has been grounded in Western cultural worlds, a bias that needs to be addressed. To that end, we propose a methodological roadmap to translate linguistic/anthropological work into quantitative psychological cross-cultural investigations of friendship, and showcase its implementation in Russia and Canada. Adopting an intersubjective perspective on culture, we assessed cultural models of friendship in three inter-related ways: by (1) deriving people’s mental maps of close interpersonal relationships; (2) examining the factor structure of friendship; and (3) predicting cultural group membership from a given person’s friendship model. Two studies of Russians (Study 1, n = 89; Study 2a, n = 195; Study 2b, n = 232) and Canadians (Study 1, n = 89; Study 2a, n = 164; Study 2b, n = 199) implemented this approach. The notions of trust and help in adversity emerged as defining features of friendship in Russia but were less clearly present in Canada. Different friendship models seem to be prevalent in these two cultural worlds. The roadmap described in the current research documents these varying intersubjective representations, showcasing an approach that is portable across contexts (rather than limited to a specific cross-cultural contrast) and relies on well-established methods (i.e., easily accessible in many research contexts).

Culture and Group Processes

Table of Contents Foreword: Series Editors Chapter 1. Culture and Group Processes: Defining the Intersection Marilynn B. Brewer and Masaki Yuki Part I. Culture and Basic Group Processes Chapter 2. Essentialism and Entitativity Across Cultures Nick Haslam, Elise Holland, and Minoru Karasawa Chapter 3. Intergroup Comparison and Intragroup Relationships: Group processes in the cultures of individualism and collectivism Masaki Yuki and Kosuke Takamura Chapter 4. A Knowledge-based Account of Cultural Identification: The Role of Intersubjective Representations Ching Wan and Jia Yu Chapter 5. Culture, Group Processes and Trust Letty Y-Y. Kwan and Ying-yi Hong Part II. Culture and Intragroup Processes Chapter 6. Outlier Nation: The Cultural Psychology of American Workways Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks and Eric Luis Uhlmann Chapter 7. Culture, Group Processes, and Creativity Chenchen Li, Letty Kwan, Shyhnan Liou, and Chi-Yue Chiu Chapter 8. How Does Culture Matter? A Contextual View of Intercultural Interaction in Groups Mary E. Zellner-Bruhn and Cristina B. Gibson Chapter 9. Unpacking Four Forms of Third Culture in Multicultural Teams Wendi Adair and Omar Ganai Part III. Culture and Intergroup Processes Chapter 10. Culture and Intergroup Communication Kimberly A. Noels Chapter 11. Culture, Group Entitativity and Contagion of Conflict Tiane Lee, Michele Gelfand, and Garriy Shteynberg

‘Posing for all the characters in the book’: the multimodal processes of production in Alison Bechdel’s relational autobiography Are You My Mother?

During the production process of her graphic novels, Alison Bechdel poses for all the characters (including her own former self), then makes a photo via a self-timer, and finally reproduces this photography via her hand drawing. As a consequence, her comics not only combine words and (drawn) pictures, but they also materialise various modes of experience: first, Bechdel performs a scene from the past with her own body, then she takes a photograph of that performance, then she reproduces the photograph in the mode of a handmade drawing, then that drawing is put into print via technical reproduction. Especially in the context of graphic auto/biography, this production process triggers certain questions concerning authenticity and self-staging. However, Bechdel not only performs her former self, but also re-embodies other people’s past experiences, which becomes particularly clear when she starts to learn her late father’s handwriting to be able to reproduce his letters to her mother. Against this background, the current article argues that Bechdel uses her own body as a medium of experience and interconnection that allows her to transgress the limited focalisation that the autobiographer is usually bound to, thereby working towards an intersubjective representation of the past.

Enriching Cultural Psychology With Research Insights on Norms and Intersubjective Representations

Enriching Cultural Psychology With Research Insights on Norms and Intersubjective Representations

Understanding Cultural Identification Through Intersubjective Cultural Representation

Intersubjective cultural representation refers to a collective’s common representation of a culture. Such representation provides a meaningful basis for individuals to develop identification with the culture. Specifically, the more an individual’s personal values are aligned with values intersubjectively represented to be important to a culture, the more strongly the individual would identify with the culture. Consideration of the role of intersubjective representation in cultural identification has implications for future research on the development of cultural identity, especially in multicultural contexts.

The Relational Genesis of Community: Self–Other Dialogue

ABSTRACTOf late, there is increasing interest in the dialogical foundations of the self and community. Indeed, dialogical theory points to the embeddedness of community in self–other relations. This article proposes a dialogical approach to community that draws upon four key themes of discourse: the sociality of the self, the realm of interindividual relations, the constructive role of social representations, and the emergent properties of collective action. The ‘between’ constitutes a valuable concept for theorizing fundamental processes of relational existence and responsive meaning‐making, including the co‐constitution of community. In the process of coming into dialogic relation with one another, individuals construct meanings, experiences, and actions that profoundly shape both selfhood and community. Thus conceived, community is founded on dialogic interaction and intersubjective representation, thereby becoming the conscious object of reflection and action. The intention here is to theorize the relational genesis and continued transformation of community through self–other dialogue. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Instalacija "K 19" Zlatka Kopljara - upis etičkog koncepta u prostor

Recentno oblikovana, prostorna instalacija „K 19“ likovnog umjetnika Zlatka Kopljara postavljena u urbanoj jezgri Zagreba, smislom je i sadržajem upućena na spomen žrtvama holokausta. Instalacija se sastoji od pet skulptura izrađenih od cigala, prvotno korištenih za gradnju zidova logora u Jasenovcu, a potom za gradnju stambenih objekata nakon rata. Iste su cigle danas, korištene kao materijal za oblikovanje skulptura, postavljenih na standardiziranim postamentima građevinskih Euro-paleta. Slagane u horizontalnim nizovima, tvore vertikalne blokove neujednačenih gornjih bridova, organizirajući pri tom fragmente fiktivne cjeline u polukružni prostorni prsten spomeničkog karaktera. Polazeći od zapažanja da opisani rad određenu povijesnu situaciju dokumentira neprikazivim narativom, nastoji se pokazati kako time nije iznevjerena narav medija u kojem se djelo pokazuje. Teorijska se argumentacija izvodi iz različitih interpretativnih strategija koje se bave sidrenjem kulturnih reprezentacija u djelu, kao da su upis etičkog koncepta u prostor. Ukazuje se na postupke kognitivnog mapiranja u zadanim okvirima moralnih geografija, na spregu kontingencije i konceptualizacije baštinjenja, te na mnemopoetički perspektivizam i intersubjektivni karakter srodnih reprezentacija. Podražavanjem susreta „viđenog i pročitanog“, kao „vidljivog i iskazanog“, nastoji se ukazati na efekte fikcionalizacije i teatralizacije u djelu, koji ne urušavaju aspekte svjedočenja (minule) stvarnosti, već joj pomažu pri-kazati se u komunikaciji sa svijetom. Premda se nedovršene ili urušene zidove skulptura instalacije „K 19“ može interpretirati u kontekstu čitavog niza „promjenjivih atmosfera svjetova umjetnosti“, u zaključku se ukazuje da je sam autor, pripisujući svojstva formi, uspješno strukturirao sadržaj svoga djela, učinivši neprikazivo vidljivim.

Shared Knowledge Matters: Culture as Intersubjective Representations

AbstractThe intersubjective representation approach to culture focuses on cultural members’ shared knowledge representations about the culture that they are in. Members of the same culture tend to share certain knowledge representations of the central characteristics of the culture. These shared cultural representations are established and perpetuated through dynamic communicative processes. Recent empirical research has provided support for the incremental value of intersubjective cultural representations in research on cultural identity, social cognition, and behaviors. The intersubjective representation approach complements extant research on culture as self and external artifacts. In doing so, it allows for a more comprehensive understanding of culture’s role in social and personality psychological processes.

The skin as a social organ

In general, social neuroscience research tends to focus on visual and auditory channels as routes for social information. However, because the skin is the site of events and processes crucial to the way we think about, feel about, and interact with one another, touch can mediate social perceptions in various ways. This review situates cutaneous perception within a social neuroscience framework by discussing evidence for considering touch (and to some extent pain) as a channel for social information. Social information conveys features of individuals or their interactions that have potential bearing on future interactions, and attendant mental and emotional states. Here, we discuss evidence for an affective dimension of touch and explore its wider implications for the exchange of social information. We consider three important roles for this affective dimension of the cutaneous senses in the transmission and processing of social information: first, through affiliative behavior and communication; second, via affective processing in skin-brain pathways; and third, as a basis for intersubjective representation.

The Compassionate Brain: Humans Detect Intensity of Pain from Another's Face

Understanding another person's experience draws on "mirroring systems," brain circuitries shared by the subject's own actions/feelings and by similar states observed in others. Lately, also the experience of pain has been shown to activate partly the same brain areas in the subjects' own and in the observer's brain. Recent studies show remarkable overlap between brain areas activated when a subject undergoes painful sensory stimulation and when he/she observes others suffering from pain. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we show that not only the presence of pain but also the intensity of the observed pain is encoded in the observer's brain-as occurs during the observer's own pain experience. When subjects observed pain from the faces of chronic pain patients, activations in bilateral anterior insula (AI), left anterior cingulate cortex, and left inferior parietal lobe in the observer's brain correlated with their estimates of the intensity of observed pain. Furthermore, the strengths of activation in the left AI and left inferior frontal gyrus during observation of intensified pain correlated with subjects' self-rated empathy. These findings imply that the intersubjective representation of pain in the human brain is more detailed than has been previously thought.