A critical narrative approach to openness: The impact of open development on structural transformation

Openness has become an important, all-encompassing term denoting activities facilitated by sharing, using, producing, and redistributing information and communication resources within digital information systems. We compare theoretical advancements that emphasize processes and characteristics of openness with the limitations of extant approaches that have largely focused on improvements to productivity and efficiency. Based on Foucault and Bruner's ideas, this paper contributes a new critical narrative approach to understanding openness explicitly focused on structural transformation and power. The analysis focuses on the case of open development, examining 20 key studies based primarily on developing countries. The critical narrative approach unpacked the production of power/knowledge across actors, intentions, and outcomes of openness research and practice. We find that discursive formations are reliant on technocentric and normative ideals of researchers, leading to narratives of hypothetical outcomes that exclude marginalized perspectives. We propose hermeneutic composability and contesting normative narratives of openness as analytical techniques for an integrated, mutually constitutive conception of interactions between individuals, open artefacts, and open social praxis

The Fox and the Grapes—How Physical Constraints Affect Value Based Decision Making

<div><p>One fundamental question in decision making research is how humans compute the values that guide their decisions. Recent studies showed that people assign higher value to goods that are closer to them, even when physical proximity should be irrelevant for the decision from a normative perspective. This phenomenon, however, seems reasonable from an evolutionary perspective. Most foraging decisions of animals involve the trade-off between the value that can be obtained and the associated effort of obtaining. Anticipated effort for physically obtaining a good could therefore affect the subjective value of this good. In this experiment, we test this hypothesis by letting participants state their subjective value for snack food while the effort that would be incurred when reaching for it was manipulated. Even though reaching was not required in the experiment, we find that willingness to pay was significantly lower when subjects wore heavy wristbands on their arms. Thus, when reaching was more difficult, items were perceived as less valuable. Importantly, this was only the case when items were physically in front of the participants but not when items were presented as text on a computer screen. Our results suggest automatic interactions of motor and valuation processes which are unexplored to this date and may account for irrational decisions that occur when reward is particularly easy to reach.</p></div