Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of South Carolina, 1998. / Appendix 3 in Japanese. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 147-171).

The construction industry's environment is continually changing. Employees are now more geographically widespread and diverse, both culturally and educationally, than ever before. A great deal of research has been carried out on knowledge acquisition and storage, but there is still a distinct lack of research into knowledge presentation and communication. Information and knowledge presentation play a significant role in daily decision-making processes, when inappropriate decisions may result from inaccurate or poorly communicated information. The simplified, filtered coherent presentation of explicit knowledge can be instrumental to a successful, profitable and safety conscious business. Wates Construction is a major construction company and employs around 1300 people directly, as well as various subcontractors on different projects. Their current turn over is around £1billion, they are based in the UK and have branches in Ireland and Abu Dhabi. Wates realised their existing information system was inefficiently conveying information to its employees and the need to provide a simplified system, to assist staff's decision-making processes. Earlier IT professionals' attempts to make the system more usable had made no significant difference to its performance.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-16T15:23:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 716065 bytes, checksum: 342b4c52399d17dc4e893c037fb312db (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-03-01 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / In the configuration of contemporary society, information emerges as a phenomenon essential to the construction of knowledge, interactive communication and mutual understanding between individuals, peoples, cultures and nations. From this perspective, Information Science resize your needs pragmatic approaches, especially the technical assumptions for transfer socializing information. It is in this perspective, therefore, this research seeks to understand, the Theory of Communicative Action (TAC) as teachers of Graduate Programs in Information Science from Northeast conceive the concept and dynamics of information in the process of teaching and learning. Of descriptive and qualitative nature, uses mixed questionnaire, developed in Google Docs and sent by e-mail, as an instrument for data collection and categorization technique, in this content analysis to analyze these. Thus, it is understood that the concepts of correlation and dynamic information of the orientation of instrumental rationality, conceived the idea of the Information Transfer, predominates over communicative rationality, organizer of Socialization Information. From this perspective, the research concluded that the practices of teaching and learning of Graduate Programs in Information Science, information transfer (instrumental rationality) has been losing ground to the assumptions of socialization of information (communicative rationality), establishing, albeit incipient strike a balance. / Na configuração da sociedade contemporânea, a informação emerge como fenômeno imprescindível à construção do conhecimento, à comunicação interativa e ao entendimento mútuo entre sujeitos, povos, culturas e nações. Nessa perspectiva, a Ciência da Informação necessita redimensionar suas abordagens pragmáticas, sobretudo os pressupostos técnicos de transferência para Socialização da Informação. É nessa perspectiva, portanto, que esta pesquisa busca compreender, a luz da Teoria da Ação Comunicativa (TAC), como os docentes dos Programas de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Informação da região Nordeste concebem o conceito e a dinâmica da informação no processo de ensino-aprendizagem. De tipo descritiva e natureza qualitativa, utiliza o questionário misto, elaborado no Google Docs e enviado por e-mail, como instrumento de coleta de dados e a técnica de categorização, presente na Análise de Conteúdo, para a análise destes. Partindo-se do pressuposto de que na correlação dos conceitos e dinâmicas da informação a orientação da racionalidade instrumental, concebida pela ideia de Transferência da Informação, predomina sobre a racionalidade comunicativa, articuladora da Socialização da Informação, o desenvolvimento da pesquisa possibilitou concluir que nas práticas de ensino-aprendizagem dos Programas de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Informação, a Transferência da Informação (racionalidade instrumental) vem perdendo espaço para os pressupostos de Socialização da Informação (racionalidade comunicativa), estabelecendo, ainda que de forma incipiente uma relação de equilíbrio.