New Perspectives on Games and Interaction

This volume is a collection of papers presented at the 2007 colloquium on new perspectives on games and interaction at the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences in Amsterdam. The purpose of the colloquium was to clarify the uses of the concepts of game theory, and to identify promising new directions. This important collection testifies to the growing importance of game theory as a tool to capture the concepts of strategy, interaction, argumentation, communication, cooperation and competition. Also, it provides evidence for the richness of game theory and for its impressive and growing application

Transformation Paradox: A Framework for the Analysis of Politics in Enterprise Transformations

The purpose of this research is to develop a theoretical framework for the analysis of politics in enterprise transformations using a dialectical analysis approach (Hegel, 1989; Heraclitus, 1979; Pinkard, 1988; Skinner, 1978a, 1978b) and conduct an evaluation of the framework validity. The framework is constructed using a dialectical analysis of concepts stemming from the work of Alford and Friedland (1992) and considers four theoretical perspectives: autocratic, bureaucratic, pluralistic, and cognitive. The framework is then validated by means of qualitative metrics and adherence to critical ideology. This research addresses the problem that there is no holistic theoretical framework for the analysis of politics across the systemic, situational, and structural contexts found in enterprise transformations. Politics occurs at multiple levels in the enterprise making it difficult to identify the salient issues that need to be addressed in support of transformation. Transformations can be paradoxical as enterprises revert to the dominant paradigm that affirms present realities rather than developing a critical posture to break the constraining paradigm. The dialectical approach used embraces the power of multiple theoretical perspectives in the transformation process, asserting that theories have power over actions, behaviors, and language. The theoretical framework allows for the simultaneous existence of shifting states of cooperation, frustration, and paradigmatic hegemony over systemic, situational, and structural contexts that embody politics in enterprise transformations. Rough set theory is used to demonstrate the ability of the framework to be adaptive and to evolve based on the inclusion of new data. I conclude that the deployment of an evolving framework of this magnitude may have a significant impact on the management of transformation efforts and suggest new areas of research to further the work

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism)