The purpose of the present thesis is to create an understanding of entrepreneurship interpreted as communicative action. This is done through reflections on an interactive study that was planned and conducted together with members of a civic network-organization called Societal Change in Practice (SIP). According to Habermas, civic organizations are ideally characterized by a communicative rationality that enables them to organize informal public spheres; that is, arenas in social life where individuals can come together to discuss and act upon societal problems or opportunities that they have experienced in their private life-spheres. I have actively participated in three ventures with members from SIP. The first venture revolves around my own and members from SIP’s respective practices as education coordinators. Based on our common interest in education and learning in relation to entrepreneurship, we planned and conducted a series of joint activities that also involved our respective student groups. The activities are interpreted based on my own personal experiences as a researcher participating in a project that requires commitment and responsibility. The second venture involves the creation of a local community magazine that highlights examples of civic initiatives in two municipalities. The production of the magazine is interpreted as an example of how SIP creates public opinion in the local community. The third event relates to the organization of a conference on the subject of youth and digital media. The main message of the conference is interpreted in terms of a manifestation of what the public sphere can accomplish, or as a reaction in defense of a well-functioning public sphere in society. The methodological contribution of the thesis is its definition of three interactive research roles based on my own interaction as a researcher in different kinds of ventures. Based on a theatrical metaphor, I argue that the researcher can participate as one of the directors of a venture, as a member of the ensemble that performs a venture, or as a member of the audience that observes an event. The theoretical contribution of the study is that it shows how Habermas’ theory of communicative action can be modified and made useful as a theoretical frame of reference for studying entrepreneurship in civil society. Entrepreneurship is understood as a way to vitalize the informal public sphere, thereby influencing society as a whole and not just its economy.

Orientador: Cristiano Amaral Garboggini Di Giorgi / Resumo: Esse trabalho destaca, nos contornos do novo panorama mundial, as reformas que as organizações internacionais propõem para a educação dos países do terceiro mundo. Elas foram decididas, exclusivamente, no plano de macropolíticas e destinam-se a fortalecer a produtividade, num contexto de economia mundializada. Grande parte da sociedade civil a tudo isso assiste sem participar minimamente das decisões, pois não tem projetos legitimamente consensuais para contrapor, não tem a prática da participação política e nem informações de que existem essas e outras possibilidades. Espaços institucionais para um determinado tipo de participação estão consignados nas normas e nos projetos da administração central e até nas propostas do Banco Mundial. Falta apenas aprender a participar e participar, tanto formalmente, apesar da burocratização dessa modalidade, quanto informalmente, que é a forma de participação que essa pesquisa prioriza pela sua potencialidade, capaz de melhorar o processo de interação das pessoas na sociedade. A teoria promissora para fundamentar a participação desejada é a teoria da ação comunicativa de Jurgen Habermas, e a escola, a instituição adequada para ensinar a participar politicamente. Através desse caminho é possível superar o entendimento e a dimensão restrita de participação dos organismos internacionais e fazê-la crescer quantitativa e qualitativamente para ampliar a voz da sociedade civil. / Abstract: This work emphasizes, in the configuration of the new worldwide scenery, the reforms that the International Organizations propose to the Education in the Third World Countries. They were decided exclusively in the plan of macropolitics and are destined to fortify the productivity in a worldwide economy context. A large part of the civil society watches everything not taking part of the decisions, because there are neither consensual projects legitimately to be interposed nor the politics participation practice and nor information about the existence of other possibilities. The Institutional Space to a determined kind of participation are consigned in the norms and in the projects of the central administration and even in the purposes of the World Bank. It needs to learn to participate and take part as much formally as informally despite the bureaucratism of this modality, that is the form of participation that is put in prominence by this survey through its able potentiality to improve the interaction process of the people in the society. The promising theory to establish the wish is the theory of communicative action. Through this way it is possible to get over the understanding and the restrict dimension of participation of the international institutions and do it to increase in quantity and in quality at the same time to enlarge the voice of the civil society. / Mestre

This is an exploratory study of the Situational Theory of Problem Solving applied to the context of climate change communication. Selective exposure to politically slanted media is explored as a referent criterion and framing effects are also tested. Relationships between consumption of media characterized as conservative or liberal with referent criterion, Situational Motivation in Problem Solving, problem recognition, involvement recognition, and constraint recognition are tested.

In the Chinese village Wukan, violence between the authorities and protesters took place when farmers resisted land transaction 2011. Wukan is one out of about ten thousand local protests annually in China, but unique in the modern Chinese history since it resulted in suspension of land transaction and the leaders of the protest where elected into the village committee, in an election which is considered by external observers as the most democratic in China. The aim of this paper is to understand destructive and constructive processes emerging out of interaction between protesters and the authorities. The focus is on how the actors (the authorities vs. protesting farmers) interpret their opportunities to: a) understand the intention of the other, b) be understood by the other, and c) influence the action of the other, in the different phases of the conflict. The conclusion is that when actors respond to disagreement with discursive closure, the destructivity increases, and vice versa.

Social media had an impactful role in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Facebook as a public sphere space was used as a powerful tool to enhance communicative action among Egyptians, dissidents, and global observers. Drawing on the philosophical and theoretical notions of individuality and the responsibilities of the state of John Locke (1689; 1690), Jean Jacques Rousseau (1762); the public sphere and communicative action of Jürgen Habermas (1981; 1989); and Manuel Castells network society and new public sphere (2004; 2006; 2008), this thesis empirically investigates the role of social media, specifically Facebook, during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Theories and concepts including the strength of weak ties, social movement theory, and Internet and organizational theory, a discussion of recent writings from both sides of the spectrum—those believing social media to hold power and those with the opposite view—inform the theoretical foundation of this thesis. The primary purpose of this thesis is to better understand what power lies in Facebook as used during the Egyptian Revolution. Using a qualitative approach, a methodological frame is employed to examine both the form and content of Facebook posts. This study concludes three major findings regarding the social power of Facebook during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution: the power of attention and momentum, the power of cooperation, and the creation of a repository of information and communication.

Social media had an impactful role in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Facebook as a public sphere space was used as a powerful tool to enhance communicative action among Egyptians, dissidents, and global observers. Drawing on the philosophical and theoretical notions of individuality and the responsibilities of the state of John Locke (1689; 1690), Jean Jacques Rousseau (1762); the public sphere and communicative action of Jürgen Habermas (1981; 1989); and Manuel Castells network society and new public sphere (2004; 2006; 2008), this thesis empirically investigates the role of social media, specifically Facebook, during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Theories and concepts including the strength of weak ties, social movement theory, and Internet and organizational theory, a discussion of recent writings from both sides of the spectrum—those believing social media to hold power and those with the opposite view—inform the theoretical foundation of this thesis. The primary purpose of this thesis is to better understand what power lies in Facebook as used during the Egyptian Revolution. Using a qualitative approach, a methodological frame is employed to examine both the form and content of Facebook posts. This study concludes three major findings regarding the social power of Facebook during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution: the power of attention and momentum, the power of cooperation, and the creation of a repository of information and communication.

O objetivo desse trabalho é rastrear a dimensão de influências específicas que moldaram Jürgen Habermas na construção da Teoria do Agir Comunicativo. Em sua obra maior, a pretensão habermasiana foi harmonizar um vasto leque de autores e teorias que uma vez trabalhados em suas especificidades convergissem para a existência de um projeto emancipador possibilitado por uma racionalidade de teor comunicativo. Com esse propósito, a atenção está voltada para o segundo volume dessa obra, em especial para o papel de Talcott Parsons e sua teoria de sistemas, a sociologia de Émile Durkheim que faculta a interação por meio da linguagem e seu entrelaçamento com Habermas por mais de uma via, as discussões metodológicas com Popper e a disputa com o positivismo, bem como a presença da teoria crítica e seus personagens diversos. / The aim of this work is to track the size of specific influences that shaped Jürgen Habermas in the construction of the Theory of Communicative Action. In his major work, the habermasion intention was to harmonize a wide range of authors and theories that treated in their particularity would be able to converge to an emancipatory project made possible by a rationality of communicative content. For this purpose, the attention is focused on the second volume of this work, especially on the role of Talcott Parsons and his systems theory, on the sociology of Émile Durkheim that provides interaction through language and its relationship with Habermas through several ways, on the methodological discussions with Popper and the dispute with positivism, and on the presence of critical theory and its many characters.

O objetivo desse trabalho é rastrear a dimensão de influências específicas que moldaram Jürgen Habermas na construção da Teoria do Agir Comunicativo. Em sua obra maior, a pretensão habermasiana foi harmonizar um vasto leque de autores e teorias que uma vez trabalhados em suas especificidades convergissem para a existência de um projeto emancipador possibilitado por uma racionalidade de teor comunicativo. Com esse propósito, a atenção está voltada para o segundo volume dessa obra, em especial para o papel de Talcott Parsons e sua teoria de sistemas, a sociologia de Émile Durkheim que faculta a interação por meio da linguagem e seu entrelaçamento com Habermas por mais de uma via, as discussões metodológicas com Popper e a disputa com o positivismo, bem como a presença da teoria crítica e seus personagens diversos. / The aim of this work is to track the size of specific influences that shaped Jürgen Habermas in the construction of the Theory of Communicative Action. In his major work, the habermasion intention was to harmonize a wide range of authors and theories that treated in their particularity would be able to converge to an emancipatory project made possible by a rationality of communicative content. For this purpose, the attention is focused on the second volume of this work, especially on the role of Talcott Parsons and his systems theory, on the sociology of Émile Durkheim that provides interaction through language and its relationship with Habermas through several ways, on the methodological discussions with Popper and the dispute with positivism, and on the presence of critical theory and its many characters.

The community-based public health coalition has proliferated in public health practice since the 1970‘s as a favored means of achieving community participation in public health promotion. There is concern, however, that many contemporary coalitions are not particularly inclusive, and that population health indicators fail to demonstrate significant improvement in health outcomes resultant from coalition practice. This dissertation research was designed to critically examine participation and dissemination of coalition-derived ideas through ethnographic study of five community-based participatory public health coalitions in the United States. The research answers calls from public health scholars to improve upon the coalition theory base and to contribute a useful theory of dissemination of public health interventions. At the same time, the research contributes to anthropological calls for better understanding of mechanisms that discourage the participation of all stakeholders. The research uses a theoretical model – Habermas‘ Theory of Communicative Action – that sees participation and dissemination as linked phenomena. The research was designed to contribute to an existing theory of coalition function, Butterfoss and Kegler‘s Community Coalition Action Theory. Qualitative evidence of communicative action was gathered through participant observation of coalition meetings and semistructured interviews with a purposive sample of members of each study coalition. Data were compared across coalitions and across respondent categories to determine variation in diversity of coalition participation and forms of coalition-derived communicative action; as well as indicators associated with motivation for coalition participation, barriers to participation, and dissemination of ideas both in coalition meetings and to broader discourse communities outside the coalition. The results of this applied research include the creation of a typology of diversity of coalition participation, improved understanding of differences in motivation for coalition participation between members in- and outside of the social services sector, the identification of collateral idea exchange as a key coalition outcome, and means of overcoming barriers to participation and dissemination. In addition to representing contributions to theory within anthropology and public health, these results have been shared with leaders of each of the study coalitions.

<p>This study concerns school-development and the political public sphere in a Swedish context. It draws on an earlier study in which school-leaders expressed political signals in relation to school-development as being ambiguous and contradictive. On one hand they saw a political support for openness and dialogue in school. On the other hand they perceived control and competition. Another point of departure for the study is what tentatively was suggested as a shift in focus for the state government of schools during the 1990:s, from decentralization as such to an increased emphasis on control of its consequences. The overriding aim of the study was to illuminate how this shift could be understood regarding the relation between school-development and the political public sphere.</p><p>The study was conducted within a larger, national project where almost 900 schools worked without the national time table. Policy texts behind the governments’ decision on starting the project were used in order to describe and analyse school policy. School-leaders´ accounts on school-work and school-development in the project was used for analysis and description of school practice.</p><p>Habermas’ theory of communicative action, particularly his notions on “the welfare-state crisis” as an opening for a revitalized political public sphere grounded upon communicative action, was used as a theoretical frame for the study.</p><p>The results support the assumption that school policy, as formulated in the studied documents, did shift over time from a focus on decentralization to an emphasis on control of its consequences. The school-leaders, however, gave voice to a school practice where the importance of a communicative direction was emphasized. The overall conclusion is that while a vital political public sphere in Habermas´ terms is supported in school practice, school policy seems to direct school development in the opposite direction, thereby closing the opportunity for school to support a revitalized public sphere.</p>