this paper. MISQ Review articles survey, conceptualize, and synthesize prior MIS research and set directions for future research. For more details see http://www.misq.org/misreview/announce.html The associated web site for this paper is located at http://misq.org/misreview/teeni.shtml communication to a view that assesses the balance between medium and message form. There is also a need to look more closely at the process of communication in order to identify more precisely any potential areas of computer support

Are Americans more individualistic and less collectivistic than members of other groups? The authors summarize plausible psychological implications of individualism–collectivism (IND-COL), metaanalyze cross-national and within-United States IND-COL differences, and review evidence for effects of IND-COL on self-concept, well-being, cognition, and relationality. European Americans were found to be both more individualistic—valuing personal independence more—and less collectivistic—feeling duty to in-groups less—than others. However, European Americans were not more individualistic than African Americans, or Latinos, and not less collectivistic than Japanese or Koreans. Among Asians, only Chinese showed large effects, being both less individualistic and more collectivistic. Moderate IND-COL effects were found on self-concept and relationality, and large effects were found on attribution and cognitive style. To contemporary Americans, being an individualist is not only a good thing; it is a quintessentially American thing. However, the term individualism itself appears to have its roots outside of the North American continent, namely in the French Revolution. It appears that individualism was first used to describe the negative

include knowledge management, IT enabled organizational forms such as virtual teams and communities,

Allport (1954) recognized that attachment to one’s ingroups does not necessarily require hostility toward outgroups. Yet the prevailing approach to the study of ethnocentrism, ingroup bias, and prejudice presumes that ingroup love and outgroup hate are reciprocally related. Findings from both cross-cultural research and laboratory experiments support the alternative view that ingroup identification is independent of negative attitudes toward outgoups and that much ingroup bias and intergroup discrimination is motivated by preferential treatment of ingroup members rather than direct hostility toward outgroup members. Thus to understand the roots of prejudice and discrimination requires first of all a better understanding of the functions that ingroup formation and identification serve for human beings. This article reviews research and theory on the motivations for maintenance of ingroup boundaries and the implications of ingroup boundary protection for intergroup relations, conflict, and conflict prevention. Although we could not perceive our own in-groups excepting as they contrast to out-groups, still the in-groups are psychologically primary.... Hostility toward out-groups helps strengthen our sense of belonging, but it is not required....Thefamiliar is preferred. What is alien is regarded as somehow inferior, less “good, ” but there is not necessarily hostility against it....Thus, while a certain amount of predilection is inevitable in

conditioning, etc.). Piaget spelled out a list of "formal operations," such as modus ponens, the probability schema, etc., which he regarded as the fundamental deductive and inductive rule schemas necessary to understand the world. The cognitive revolution, from its earliest incarnation in the work of such theorists as George Miller and Herbert Simon, until nearly the end of the 20 century, essentially embraced Piaget's position of extreme formalism and content independence of inferential rules. Cognitive scientists' endorsement of the formalist, universalistic position was undoubtedly encouraged by the analogy between the human mind and the computer: brain = hardware, cognitive procedures = operating principles and factory-installed software (Block, 1995). This analogy both encouraged the universality assumption and discouraged any assumption that cognitive procedures might be alterable. The heuristics and biases movement of Kahneman and Tversky (1974) and their colleagues in social

and Creative Modeling Modeling is not simply a process of response mimicry as commonly believed. Modeled judgments and actions may differ in specific content but embody the same rule. For example, a model may deal with moral dilemmas that differ widely in the nature of the activity but apply the same moral standard to them. Modeled activities thus convey rules for generative and innovative behavior. This higher level learning is achieved through abstract modeling. Once observers extract the rules underlying the modeled activities they can generate new behaviors that go beyond what they have seen or heard. Creativeness rarely springs entirely from individual inventiveness. A lot of modeling goes on in creativity. By refining preexisting innovations, synthesizing them into new ways and adding novel elements to them something new is created. When exposed to models of differing styles of thinking and behaving, observers vary in what they adopt from the different sources and thereby create ...

La théorie socio-cognitive adopte une perspective d’action pour ce qui est du développement, de l’adaptation et du changement humains. Cette théorie distingue trois types d’action: l’action personnelle exercée individuellement, l’action par procuration où l’on s’assure de bénéfices désirés en incitant autrui a intervenir en sa faveur, et l’action collective où les gens agissent ensemble pour construire leur avenir. Des dichotomies conflictuelles parsèment notre domaine, opposant l’autonomie et l’interdépendance, l’individualisme et le collectivisme. Les déterminants et les doses d’action individuelle, par procuration et collective varient culturellement. Mais tous les modes d’action sont nécessaires pour parvenir á ses fins quel que soit le contexte culturel. Les cultures sont diverses et dynamiques, ce ne sont pas des monolithes statiques. La diversité intraculturelle et les écarts dans les orientations psychosociales mettent en évidence la dynamique aux multiples facettes des cultures. La globalisation croissante, la pluralité des sociétés et l’immersion dans un monde virtuel qui se joue du temps, des distances, des lieux et des frontières incitent

Abstract. This paper describes a cross-cultural research project on the relation between how people conceptualize nature (their mental models) and how they act in it. Mental models of nature differ dramatically among and within populations living in the same area and engaged in more or less the same activities. This has novel implications for environmental decision making and management, including dealing with commons problems. Our research also offers a distinct perspective on models of culture, and a unified approach to the study of culture and cognition. We argue that cultural transmission and formation does not consist primarily in shared rules or norms, but in complex distributions of causally-connected representations across minds in interaction with the environment. The cultural stability and diversity of these representations often derives from rich, biologically-prepared mental mechanisms that limit variation to readily transmissible psychological forms. This framework addresses a series of methodological issues, such as the limitations of conceiving culture to be a well-defined system or bounded entity, an independent variable, or an internalized component of minds. 2 I. Introduction.

To increase their revenue from electronic commerce, more and more Internet businesses are soliciting personal information from consumers so as to target products and services at the right consumers. But when deciding whether to disclose their personal information to Internet businesses, consumers may weigh the concerns of giving up information privacy against the benefits of information disclosure. This paper examines how Internet businesses can motivate consumers to disclose their personal information. Based on a synthesis of the literature, it identifies seven types of extrinsic or intrinsic benefits that Internet businesses can provide when soliciting personal information from consumers. Through comprehensive conceptual and empirical validation processes, it develops an instrument that allows Internet businesses to gauge the preference of consumers for the various types of benefits. By testing a set of nomological networks, it offers some ideas to Internet businesses about what types of benefits may be more effective given the personality traits of consumer populations. Besides providing a foundation for efforts at developing theories on information privacy and information disclosure, the results of this research provide useful suggestions to Internet businesses on how best to solicit personal information from consumers. Implications for research and practice are discussed. Key words: privacy, Internet business, information disclosure, extrinsic benefit, intrinsic benefit, personality, confirmatory factor analysis. We gratefully thank all participants in the 2002 NUS summer research workshop and the 2002 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). We also thank Ee-Cheah Tam for her contributions to a previous version of this manuscript, and Juan-Juan Han for her research

Buckley (2002) argues that the international business (IB) research agenda may be running out of steam, because no big research question has currently been identified. Buckley also asks whether the field needs a big question, and if so challenges IB scholars to discover it. Buckley and Ghauri (2004) elaborate on the third question of globalization discussed in Buckley (2002) as a possible candidate for the big question. In response, this article is written to take up Buckley’s challenge and also to comment on Buckley and Ghauri’s more recent work. I agree that IB needs a big question, the pursuit of which can serve to unite and energize scholars, make scientific progress, and enhance the status and prestige of the field. Toward that end, I argue that ‘What determines the international success and failure of firms?’ has always served as a fundamental research question, which has permeated IB research in the past and present and is likely to propel its progress in the future. Therefore, I am of the opinion that the IB research agenda is not likely to run out of steam, because focusing on this question will leverage IB’s comparative advantage and keep the field engaged in generating exciting and disciplined theories and findings in the 21st century.