Esta tese apresenta uma reflexão filosófica sobre a retomada epistemológica representada pela Produção Partilhada do Conhecimento. Ao contrário do saber universitário, marcado pelo uso da razão metódica originada no Iluminismo no século XVII, que distingue sujeito de objeto, a Produção Partilhada do Conhecimento busca a interatividade entre estatutos epistemológicos distintos, onde sujeitos tornam-se ao mesmo tempo objetos. A partir da análise do encontro entre os saberes da oralidade em culturas tradicionais, e o saber racional metódico da ciência universitária, a passagem da oralidade à escrita no processo de colonização das Américas e o uso da hipermídia no século XXI, o trabalho apresenta contribuições de Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas e Paul Ricoeur quanto à necessidade de uma hermenêutica que estabeleça o entendimento entre culturas distintas, e enfim demonstra como a hipermídia representa um intermeio adequado pelo qual esta hermenêutica se expressa, ilustrando com exemplos de casos como o do pesquisador Caio Lazaneo junto a comunidades indígenas, e o trabalho dos pesquisadores do Instituto Socioambiental junto às comunidades quilombolas do Vale do Ribeira. / This thesis presents a philosophical reflection on the epistemological recovery represented by the Shared Production of Knowledge. Contrary to university knowledge, marked by the use of methodical reason originated in the Enlightenment in the seventeenth century, which distinguishes subject from object, the Shared Production of Knowledge seeks the interactivity between distinct epistemological statutes, where subjects become objects at the same time. Based on the analysis of the meeting between oral knowledge in traditional cultures and the methodical rational knowledge of university science, the transition from orality to writing in the colonization process of the Americas and the use of hypermedia in the 21st century, the work presents contributions of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas and Paul Ricoeur on the need for a hermeneutic that establishes the understanding between distinct cultures, and finally demonstrates how hypermedia represents one intermedia by which this hermeneutic is expressed, illustrating with examples of cases like the researcher Caio Lazaneo with indigenous communities, and the work of researchers from the Socioambiental Institute with the quilombolas (descendants of enslaved Africans) communities of the Vale do Ribeira.

The marketing academy arguably holds an influential position within society, yet culturally speaking, very little is known about it; its people, processes or knowledge. Regardless of its privileged situation, we remain reflexively impoverished in terms of disciplinary self-understanding. This study, in some small way, hopes to change that. Indeed espousing and pursuing import around its scholarly intervention, this research instigates questions of a reflective nature, around marketing academia. More specifically, taking an anti-foundational perspective, it seeks to explore processes of knowledge production within the discipline. Having reviewed current approaches to the evaluation of knowledge production from within marketing and beyond, this study comes to suggest a disciplinary lacking with regard to reflexive understandings, through marketing’s; (1) lack of consideration around knowledge as practice and (2) unsatisfactory consideration of the academic ‘subject’ therein. With this in mind, it located a more precise interest around ‘the marketing academic’ and specifically, subjectivity formation, within a doctoral process of a major UK University. It was believed that this focus would provide a potentially revelatory means for generating new and responsible understandings into the conditions and effects of our disciplinary (re)production. To this end, having theorised and analysed subjectivity formation through a Foucauldian lens (‘subjectification’, 1983) this study came to produce five main conclusions. These included suggestions that (1) ‘the self’ was constituted, not inherent (despite dominant evaluatory positions to the contrary), (2) subjective reproduction within the site included ‘independence’ and ‘knowledgability’ (3) the rhetoric of independence served to obscure power relations and everyday interactions within the doctoral process (4) problematic power relations, in part, defined the supervisory relationship, and that (5) effects of training were both positively and negatively experienced by informants.

Re-evaluating classic work in the sociology of the visual arts, this Ph.D. thesis explores the tacit and practical bases of artistic mediation with reference to curatorial exhibition making in contemporary art. Data presented here derive from a visual microethnographic study of the exhibition-making process in two elite European centres for contemporary art (London’s Institute of Contemporary Art and ARC/Musée D’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris), combined with an additional thirty-five interviews with other curatorial professionals. By focusing on the visual dimensions of curatorial work, this thesis uses a case study in the sociology of art to think more broadly about aesthetic materials as active mediators of action, or actants in the sense of actor-network theory. Drawing on work in the sociology of education, communication studies, and the sociologies of science and technology, this research explores how the material, embodied, and situated interactions between curators, objects, and environments are constructed and understood in reflexive relation to more explicitly cognitive and verbal representations, interpretations, and accounts. In planning and installing an exhibition of contemporary art, curators frame artworks and build meaning based on the material and conceptual resources at hand. The plans made by curators when preparing an exhibition and composing textual documentation are altered and elaborated during the installation of contemporary art in the physical presence of the artworks and gallery space. The disjuncture between curatorial plans and these situated actions has consequences for the public presentation and comprehension of the final exhibition. In documenting these processes as they take shape in real time and in relation to material objects, the body, and the built environment, this work aims to contribute to the on-going developments and debates that centre on the creation of a ‘strong’ cultural sociology and to extend core sociological thinking on the social structures and bases of action.

Social and political life on small subtropical islands is frequently shaped by the economic imperative of sustainable tourism development. In Okinawa, “ecotourism” promises to provide employment for a dwindling population of rural youth while preserving the natural environment and bolstering regional pride. In this dissertation, I consider how new subjectivities are produced when host communities come to see themselves through the lens of the visiting tourist. I further explore how Okinawans’ sense of place and identity are transformed as their language, landscapes, and wildlife are reconstituted as “cherishable,” yet vulnerable resources. I present a case study of how local ecological knowledge moves inter-generationally (between Okinawan elders and youth) and cross-culturally (between Okinawan nature guides and international and mainland Japanese tourists, who are often also considered “foreign”). By tracing the formal and informal social networks through which specific attitudes, beliefs, and sensibilities about the environment are circulated and reproduced, I demonstrate how nature-based therapies marketed to tourists for stress relief and lifestyle rehabilitation (e.g., forest therapy, dolphin therapy, and coral “gardening”) also influence Okinawan attitudes toward health and wellness. These kinds of activities reconfigure human relationships with non-human animal species; creatures previously “good to eat” (Harris 1985) are now even better to heal. “Sustainability” in Okinawa always begins with the question of military bases. The ecotourism concept poses a compelling, if problematic, economic alternative to the expansion of US bases into northern Okinawa, the hub of environmentally oriented conservationist, educational, and tourist programs on the main island. My analysis of the ecological and cultural effects of sustaining the tourism industry in Okinawa speaks to small islands facing similar economic and environmental challenges in East Asia, the Caribbean, Oceania, and beyond. / Anthropology

Science studies contends that scientific knowledge is produced through social and geographical processes. This dissertation applies this insight to the production of economic knowledge, specifically addressing how the Anti-Corn Law League, an organization that campaigned against the protectionist Corn Laws in Britain in the 1830s and 40s, made economic truth. The argument is organized in five chapters. The Introduction discusses the key theoretical ideas from science studies – controversy, consensus, and credibility – that later chapters use in interpreting the Anti-Corn Law campaign. Chapter II supplies the social and intellectual context of the Anti-Corn Law movement, showing how its origins in Manchester shaped its meaning, and how uncertainty about the benefits of free trade compelled Leaguers to present a persuasive case for it. Chapter III explores how the League’s public meetings were conducted, arguing that economic knowledge was produced through the processes of presenting and authenticating testimony, in which mass assent, expressed through various imaginaries of the nation, functioned as a rhetorical voucher of truth. Chapter IV examines a case in which assent was not attained, and the means through which the League sought to maintain credibility. It is argued that the League depicted itself as trustworthy according to assumptions society shared about what counted as knowledge and honesty, assumptions that constituted what can be called a cultural map of credibility. The Conclusion summarizes the main arguments of the thesis. It explicitly relates the study to the literature on the geographies of science, and elaborates on how geographical imaginations are inscribed in the process of knowledge production.

By permitting the integration of multiple forms of knowledge through joint fact-finding, it is suggested that collaborative governance approaches can produce more holistic and place-based understandings of environmental problems and help to alleviate conflict among stakeholders over the knowledge that is used to make decisions. Despite the central role of knowledge in collaborative processes, research in the collaborative environmental governance field to-date has provided limited practical insight into what they can and cannot achieve or how processes should be structured and run to produce successful outcomes related to knowledge production and use. This study seeks to address this gap in the literature through three specific research objectives: (1) to develop a theoretical framework for analyzing knowledge production and use in collaborative environmental governance; (2) to use the framework to analyze knowledge production and use in a real-world collaborative environmental governance process; and (3) to offer recommendations for designing or adapting collaborative environmental governance processes to better achieve the goals of collaboration related to knowledge production and use. A multiple case study approach was used to analyze knowledge production and use in a collaborative water allocation planning process in South Australia. The findings affirm that a number of theorized process and outcome criteria associated with successful knowledge production and use are achievable in practice. Despite limited evidence that local actors were involved directly in producing knowledge within the processes that were examined, the findings showed that participants in at least one of the cases were able to achieve a high level of understanding and acceptance of the knowledge used to base policy decisions, as well as to build social capital among scientists and local participants. This paradox draws attention to limits of current theories in the collaborative environmental governance literature for designing and implementing successful collaboration and offers important insights for evaluating collaborative processes. The study also provides a preliminary set of recommendations for structuring and executing collaborative processes to achieve successful outcomes related to knowledge production and use. While the findings of this study relate most directly to the water allocation planning system in South Australia, they are also transferable to other collaborative institutions, particularly those that are nested within a more traditional top-down system of governance.

This thesis investigates, at the country level, the relationship between innovation output or generation of new technology and input factors such as stock of knowledge, research effort and institutional factors such as competition and intellectual property rights. It is shown that variations in generation of new technology reflect differences in knowledge stock, research effort, product market competition and other institutional factors of OECD countries. The available stock of knowledge and the research effort was shown to have a linear and positive effect on technology generation. It was also shown that the degree of product market competition has a nonlinear effect on technology growth, thereby confirming on a country-level an inverted-U relationship between competition and innovation. Generation of new knowledge was examined using a knowledge production function with annual and accumulated knowledge measured with a patent indicator based on a worldwide count of patent priority filings. A cross-sectional linear regression model was used with secondary data. Independent variables included were the main variables accumulated stock of patent priority filings, the number of FTE researchers in R&D and the Product Market Regulation Index. Institutional bias was accounted for by including the independent variables Index of Patent Rights, administrative patenting fees and a Global Competitiveness Index. The Global Competitiveness index was found to have positive effect on patent productivity and the administrative patenting fees relationship was found to be negative. The results are consistent with theories and empirical findings. The results also highlight the importance of innovation policies that keep costs of patenting low and of adjusting the competition policy of a country to the type of economy in question.

The aim of this study was to investigate the production of knowledge that can emerge in the use of Practice Research by Mirror method. This by finding out what it is in the practical work that leads to the production of knowledge and how knowledge production takes form. The empirical data that form the basis for this study is recorded group within the Mirror method discussions and a focus group interview with social workers who participated in the discussions. Those who have participated are social workers with experience from working with financial aid support and only real cases have been used in the discussions. The results have been analyzed according to Lipsky's theory of street-level bureaucracy and their discretion and Fook and Gardner´s theory of critical reflection. The results of the study show that evaluation and review of a difficult work using critical reflection as a tool and a reflexive approach leads to the development of the practical work.

The paper sheds some light on the issue of geographically mediated knowledge spillovers from university research activities to regional knowledge production in high tech industries in Austria. Knowledge spillovers occur because knowledge created by university is typically not contained within that institution, and thereby creates value for others. The conceptual framework for analysing geographic spillovers of university research on regional knowledge production is derived from Griliches (1979). It is assumed that knowledge production in the high tech sectors essentially depends on two major sources of knowledge: the university research that represents the potential pool of knowledge spillovers and R&D performed by the high tech sectors themselves. Knowledge is measured in terms of patents, university research and R&D in terms of expenditures. We refine the standard knowledge production function by modelling research spillovers as a spatially discounted external stock of knowledge. This enables us to capture regional and interregional spillovers. Using district-level data and employing spatial econometric tools evidence is found of university research spillovers that transcend the geographic scale of the political district in Austria. It is shown that geographic boundedness of the spillovers is linked to a decay effect. (authors' abstract) / Series: Discussion Papers of the Institute for Economic Geography and GIScience

This study focuses on a component of computer-mediated communicated which is labeled computer mediated technologies (CMTs) and is composed of the latest group of internet technology and digital media including social networking, Web2.0, Smartphone and Videoconferencing. The computer mediated technologies (CMTs) have the potential to facilitate scientific collaboration between scientists from north and south. This dissertation is a quantitative study that investigates the relationship between CMT use and collaboration, CMT use and research productivity, scientific collaboration and research productivity in Kuwait and the digital divide between developing and developed countries. This study answers the following questions: (1) To what degree has the scientific community in Kuwait adopted CMTs? (2) Are there any differences in the use of CMTs between faculty members (at KU) and researchers (in KISR) for scientific collaboration? (3) To what extent is CMT use associated with scientific collaboration in Kuwait? (4) To what extent is CMT use associated with research productivity in Kuwait? (5) What is the relationship between scientific collaboration and research productivity in Kuwait? The results show that the scientific community in Kuwait is very connected to the internet and has adopted using CMT channels in their daily work. However, there is a difference between academia and research scientists in their educational and collaboration activities. The difference is more notable when Kuwaiti scientists collaborated with scientists in the U.S. and Canada and there is a relationship with the use of CMTs for collaboration. The findings further suggest that scientists who graduated from developed countries collaborate more than scientists who graduated from developing areas. Also there is a correlation between gaining a PhD from developed countries and increased publication in foreign journals. The results support the assumption that collaboration leads to research productivity. But there is a real problem facing the Kuwaiti scientists because they spend little time on their research activities.