86 Results Found

The environment in healthcare facilities can influence health and recovery of service users and furthermore contribute to healthy workplaces for staff. The concept of therapeutic landscapes seems to be a promising approach in this context. The aim of...

Our goal in this paper is to connect workspace design to employee wellbeing and social sustainability. Toward this connection, we introduce and empirically test a new concept of “workspace integration”. This concept refers to the continuum of integra...

As the key to mitigating climate change, a sustainable lifestyle has become a focus of environment policy. Past studies have largely neglected the symbols of sustainable lifestyle guiding policies and failed to capture its effect on the experienced u...

The purpose of this paper was to interpret the usage of symbols in popular religion based on contemporary symbolic interactionism using the reference framework of the symbolic community. The strength of the chosen symbolic interactionist approach is...

In today’s competitive environment, it is important to understand that consumers’ evangelical behavior depends on symbolic brand attachment. This study, drawing on social identity theory (SIT), investigates the direct relationship between...

In Italy, the debate regarding the presence of crosses and crucifixes in public places is long-standing and involves their detractors, supporters and defenders. Over time, these conflicting positions have gained media resonance, becoming a sociopolit...

This ethnographic multiple-case study, grounded in the theory of investment, examines the prewriting practices of three Uzbekistani male undergraduates in an English essay writing class at a South Korean University. It aims to identify the symbolic r...

In this article I analyze the symbolic role of the hospital in its social context, from its creation in Rome in the 2nd century BCE to contemporary Montreal hospitals. I trace the change from its original role as a site to isolate the sick to limit t...

This study examined whether layering spatial partitions and symbolic identity cues can transform underdefined university lounges into supportive social environments. In a within-subjects experiment, 60 architecture students experienced three lounge c...

Culture has traditionally been considered as a set of knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, norms, and morals, acquired by a human being as a member of a group. Some anthropologists interpret this as a set of abstract representations, such as information o...

Over the past two decades, the expanding environmental and ecological crises highlight the need to broaden the concept of sustainability to encompass support for cultural sensitivity and social well-being. This study explores the role of architectura...

This paper presents the evolution of a robotic architecture intended for controlling autonomous social robots. The first instance of this architecture was originally designed according to behavior-based principles. The building blocks of this archite...

Various theories highlight the importance of using the actor/environment as the ideal unit for theoretical and experimental focus. Clothing, placed as it is as the intermediary between body and environment, is typically treated as a symbol rather tha...

This paper argues that the contemporary growth paradigm needs to be reconsidered on a micro level of consumption and product service-systems. This becomes necessary since a dynamic link between macro strategies and micro implementation of sustainable...

Since the 2000s, Japanese internet media as well as mass media, including magazines, television and newspapers, have promoted the concept of a “power spot” as part of the spirituality movement in the country. This emerging social environment for the...

This work highlights the importance of heritage education as a vehicle for citizen education. We present an analysis of concepts of heritage, citizenship, and territory held by third-year social science students. The results are obtained from statist...

Urban blue spaces are defined as all natural and manmade surface water in urban environments. This paper draws on how the concepts of experienced, symbolic, social, and activity space combine to position urban blue spaces as therapeutic landscapes. W...

Buddhism has long maintained a fine tradition of establishing and preserving a hyper-stable institutional order. Historically, the Vinaya served as the institutional literature for the monasteries, but it gradually evolved into a sacred symbol of the...

Sex work in all its forms is an occupation that belongs to the service industry, and like any other work, sexual labour is open to exploitation. However, the reason why sex work is seen to be different from other forms of labour is that it betrays th...

Warmth and competence are fundamental dimensions of social cognition. This also applies to the interpretation of ambiguous symbolic stimuli in terms of their relation to warmth or competence. The affective state of an individual may affect the way pe...

This explorative case study investigates health-promoting office design from an experience and meaning-making perspective in an activity-based flex-office (A-FO) in a headquarter building. This small case study (n = 11) builds using qualitative data...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) at the macro-level has been explored quite extensively, but how it affects employee-level outcomes was only recently researched. This paper draws on insights from the micro-foundation of CSR in explaining the eff...

Intelligence is a central topic in computing and philosophy, yet its origins and biological roots remain poorly understood. The framework proposed in this paper approaches intelligence as the complexification of agency across multiple levels of organ...

The African American rhetorical tradition could be described as a shelter in an alien environment or as a way station on a long journey. A focus on ethos suggests that such a narrow approach to African American literature cannot do justice to these l...

The “Metaverse Territorial Brand” integrates core and interconnected elements into a virtual, interactional, experiential, and immersive space known as the metaverse. This type of brand encompasses the connection with immersive territorie...

In recent years, many studies have examined “novel foods” from various perspectives; however, the theoretical framework of social representations has been underutilized in this research. This paper denotes an initial attempt to study the...

Departing from the understanding of food tourism in urban environments, this research analyses the brand engagement of bakeries during the COVID-19 lockdown period, and the first stages of the de-escalation process. A mixed-methods study is designed...

As with environment and sustainable development, there has been a rapid rise in the worldwide consumption of organic foods over the last years, as well as the quickly growing potential of organic markets in China, and their direct influence on consum...

According to the currently dominant view, cognitive science is a study of mind and intelligence focused on computational models of knowledge in humans. It is described in terms of symbol manipulation over formal language. This approach is connected w...

The anthropology of food is a sub-field of cultural anthropology interested in studying food and foodways. This article provides a concise overview of the anthropology of food, tracing its development from the early twentieth century to contemporary...

Names symbolize an individual’s identity, highlighting their unique attributes and representing their religious and cultural background. Names often serve as initial indicators of individuals’ cultural identities and beliefs. In the conte...

Landscapes are socially produced and reproduced spaces. This is easily recognizable for large-scale urban groups with built environments that dominate living places. But it also pertains to all types of societies and cultures, even small-scale hunter...

The article presents the results of a qualitative study aimed at uncovering the social imaginaries of virtual education among university faculty, with the purpose of understanding how symbolic representations shape the reality of educational phenomen...

What drives farmers’ decision-making? To inform effective, efficient, and legitimate governance of agricultural soils, it is important to understand the behaviour of those who manage the fields. This article contributes to the assessment and de...

The factors contributing to urbanization, such as population growth and the development of mega-cities, have increased environmental stressors on top of everyday stressors, resulting in information overload. This has led to the increasing incidence o...

This paper examines personal names derived from traditional religious beliefs and practices among the Erei people in Biase Local Government Area of Cross River State in South-South, Nigeria while utilising insights from the multidisciplinary inferenc...

Across the centuries, trees have been recognised as one of the oldest lifeforms on earth, witnessing and subject to the passage of time on a scale that far exceeds human life, telling us who we are in the world. This paper explores the intricate natu...

With the advancement of information technology, social media has become increasingly prevalent. The complex networks of social relationships among decision-makers (DMs) have given rise to the problem of social network group decision-making (SNGDM), w...

For several decades, tourism has been considered an important instrument for the sustainable development of rural areas. However, a great deal of scholarship has cast a doubt on the actual economic and ecological impacts of many of these initiatives....

Cartographic representations are subject to sensory perception and rely on the translation of sensory perceptions into cartographic symbols. In this respect, cartography is closely related to aesthetics, as it represents an academic discipline of sen...

This research conducted in Switzerland addresses the participatory capability of children regarding their organized leisure activities. Observations were made in 2016 in three French-speaking counties in Switzerland within 11 leisure facilities diffe...

(1) Background: The visual impact of artificial infrastructures on natural landscapes generates a common negative perception in public opinion. However, as in the case of electrical energy, the increasing demand for power supply and its need for capi...

This study addresses the impact of pandemics, economic limitations, and physical constraints on physical pilgrimage by proposing and evaluating a culturally sensitive, ritual-oriented virtual Boudhanath Stupa environment. Using user-centered design (...

Inclusive campus design is increasingly being recognised as a key component of sustainable and equitable higher education environments. However, limited research has been carried out on this topic, particularly examining university campuses in Austra...

Recent advances in technologies for capturing video data have opened a vast amount of new application areas in visual sensor networks. Among them, the incorporation of light wave cameras on Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environments provides more accura...

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and recent economic recession have been impacting many people’s mental health. The experience of social distancing created new hardships for people who already reported symptoms of depression or anxiety. In t...

This article draws on the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) model to understand the role of negative emotions in the anti-brand behaviors of online users who consume snow sports brands. To this end, both the online social influence and the...

This study looks at the sense of belonging among the youth who fled Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and currently reside in Weimar, Germany. Having fled the war in a time of transition to a more independent stage of life, refugee youth...

“Coexpressivity” is the property of utterances that marshal multiple linguistic elements and modalities simultaneously to perform the distinct linguistic functions of Jakobson’s classic analysis (1960). This study draws on a longitu...

The fashion industry, one of the largest industries in the world, is a complicated phenomenon, driven by aspirations of symbolic lifestyle and the creativity of architecture and design. It pushes the use of natural resources to its limits by mass pro...