Knowledge management, innovation and big data: Implications for sustainability, policy making and competitiveness

This Special Issue of Sustainability devoted to the topic of “Knowledge Management, Innovation and Big Data: Implications for Sustainability, Policy Making and Competitiveness” attracted exponential attention of scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers from all over the world. Locating themselves at the expanding cross-section of the uses of sophisticated information and communication technology (ICT) and insights from social science and engineering, all papers included in this Special Issue contribute to the opening of new avenues of research in the field of innovation, knowledge management, and big data. By triggering a lively debate on diverse challenges that companies are exposed to today, this Special Issue offers an in-depth, informative, well-structured, comparative insight into the most salient developments shaping the corresponding fields of research and policymaking

The Tie between Action and Language Is in Our Imagination

In this thesis, the embodied cognition proposal that action words are directly and automatically mapped into the perceiver\u2019s sensorimotor system, and understood via motor simulation, has been put under the lenses of neuropsychology, psychophysics, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) investigation. The objective was to establish whether the tie between language understanding and motor simulation is necessary for the former to be effective, to the extent that a virtual identity can be recognized between action and language systems..

Framing university small group talk : knowledge construction through lexical concepts

PhD ThesisKnowledge construction in educational discourse continues to interest practitioners and researchers due to the conceptually “natural” connection between knowledge and learning for professional development. Frames have conceptual and practical advantages over other units of inquiry concerning meaning negotiation for knowledge construction. They are relatively stable data-structures representing prototypical situations retrieved from real world experiences, cover larger units of meaning beyond the immediate sequential mechanism at interaction, and have been inherently placed at the semantic-pragmatic interface for empirical observation. Framing in a particular context – university small group talk has been an under-researched field, while the relationship between talk and knowledge through collaborative work has been identified below/at the Higher Educational level. Involving higher level cognitive activities and distinct interactional patterns, university small group talk is worth close examination and systematic investigation. This study applies Corpus Linguistics and Interactional Linguistics approaches to examine a subset of a one-million-word corpus of university small group talk at a UK university. Specifically, it provides a detailed examination of the participants’ framing behaviours for knowledge construction through their talk of disciplinary lexical concepts. Analysis reveals how the participants draw upon schematized knowledge structures evoked by particular lexical choices and how they invoke expanded scenarios via pragmatic mappings in the ongoing interaction. Additionally, it is demonstrated how the framing moves are related to the structural uniqueness of university small group talk, the contextualized speaker roles and the institutional procedures and routines. This study deepens the understanding of the relationship between linguistically constructed knowledge and the way interlocutors conceptualize the world through institutionalized collaboration, building upon the existing research on human reliance upon structures to interpret reality at both the conceptual and the action levels. The study also addresses interaction research in Higher Educational settings, by discussing how the cognitive-communicative duality of framing is sensitive to various contextual resources, distinct discourse structures and task procedures through the group dynamics