LinkedIn recently went public. Its success makes it, with Twitter and Facebook, one of the three most popular social networking platforms. A particular strand of Social Identity Theory, and particularly the work performed on this subject by thinkers such as Marcel Mauss and Max Weber seem to provide an interesting way to analyse the emergence [...]
In recent years, ‘software developers’ have traveled quite a distance in public imagination, from spotty-faced sociopathic nerds to geek chic alpha males. Some may want my head on a spike for such an appalling short cut, but one could argue that this change in the way software engineers are represented in cultural discourse may be [...]
By introducing the idea of a fragmented, constantly ‘failing’ subject, Lacan directly challenged the essentialist concept of a ‘stable identity’, or ‘constant ego’ as commonly accepted since Descartes’ Cogito. Indeed, according to Lacan, biological sexual differences between individuals could be viewed as the ‘paradigmatic difference’ at the origin of the formation of the subject ‘from [...]
What has been, in occidental culture, consensually defined as ‘the subject’, or ‘the self’, and seen as a natural, self-evident and indivisible part of the identity of human beings could be approached and understood as a historically constituted phenomenon, whose apparition and development could be investigated through an exploration of the various techniques and practices [...]
Overview of the Proposed Research Topic During the relatively short history of software development, several development methods have been introduced, from the rather standard waterfall model derived from development methods that can be found in more ‘traditional’ industries (Royce, 1970), to solutions more adapted to the particular issues involved in software development such as user-centered [...]