This two-day workshop aims at bringing together researchers from Business Administration, Linguistics and Computer Science, as well as potential industrial partners and users, who are interested in the theory of Communicative Action and the modeling of Business Processes.
The Language/Action perspective (based on Searle's Speech Act
theory) introduced in the field of information systems by Flores and
Ludlow in the early 1980's has proven to be a new basic paradigm
for Information Systems Design. In contrast to traditional views
of "data flow", the language/action perspective emphasizes
what people DO while communicating; how they
create a common reality by means of language and how communication
brings about a coordination of their activities.
The initial impetus of Flores
and Ludlow has resulted in a first wave of applications within
the language/action perspective. The most important results of
this first application wave are laid down in the Coordinator,
a communication supporting tool developed by Winograd
and Flores, and the office communication analysis method SAMPO as proposed
by Lyytinen
and his colleagues.
The increasing importance of communication and CSCW systems,
pushed strongly by the technological breakthroughs in local and
global networking, is responsible for the second
wave of applications within the realm of the language/action
perspective. Examples of methods in this second wave are Action
Workflow by Medina-Mora
et al., and DEMO by Dietz
et al..
Now that the language/action perspective has been established
as a fruitful direction of research with supporters and opponents,
it is time to rethink its foundations critically so that it can
continue to grow sound and become mature. On the philosophical
side, we can think of the Habermas/Searle
debate on communicative action, of which the implications
for the field of information systems are not yet completely clear.
There is also not much convergence yet on the formal and logical
underpinnings of communication models. In practice, some applications
work while others do not, and it is not always clear why. More
real-life experience is needed.
(A full list of relevant references can be found on the LAP literature page)
(Please follow the links for the abstracts of the papers and additional links to postscript files of the papers (as they appear in the working papers))
Monday, July 1
Tuesday, July 2
Hans Weigand, Egon
Verharen (Tilburg Univ.)
Frank Dignum (Eindhoven
Univ. of Technology)
Ms. Alice Kloosterhuis
Infolab, Tilburg University P.O.Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The
Netherlands
E-mail: A.M.Kloosterhuis@kub.nl
Phone: +31 13 4663020
Fax: +31 13 4663069
For any further information or questions you might have please contact the conference secretariat or Hans Weigand (h.weigand@kub.nl ; phone +3113 4662806, fax +3113 4663069)
Egon Verharen, egon@kub.nl