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This chapter recounts how Maine's once-great mills lost jobs as the 1990s and 2000s wore on, and demonstrates how frequent layoffs hollowed out once-great institutions and ways of life. It mentions the historic Westbrook Mill, which contracted from over two thousand jobs to only several hundred in the early 2000s and the Great Northern Paper Company's employment at three mills, which shrank by two-thirds over the same period. It also talks about historic mills that hung on after 2000 as private equity companies swooped in and bought the mills using highly leveraged sources of credit. The chapter cites the well-established influx of paper imports from advanced mills subsidized by governments and the shrinking markets for publication papers as the digital reading became widespread. It elaborates how the loss of the well-paid source of rural employment sparked a progressive depopulation of rural towns in Maine.

Pereira’s “The projective theory of consciousness” is an experimental statement, drawing on many diverse sources, exploring how consciousness might be produced by a projective mechanism that results both in private selves and an experienced world. Unfortunately, pulling together so many unrelated sources and methods means none gets full attention. Furthermore, it seems to me that the uncomfortable breadth of this paper unnecessarily complicates his project; in fact it may hide what it seeks to reveal. If this conglomeration of diverse sources and methods were compared to trees, the reader may feel like the explorer who cannot see the forest for the trees. Then again, it may be the author who is so preoccupied with foreground figures that the everpresent background is ultimately obscured. Resumo: A teoria da consciência projetiva de Pereira é uma proposta experimental, baseada em diversas fontes, explorando como a consciência pode ser produzida por um mecanismo projetivo que resulta tanto em individualidades privadas (“Eus”) quanto em um mundo da experiência. Infelizmente, reunir tantas fontes e métodos sem relações recíprocas significa que nenhum recebe atenção total. Além disso, parece-me que a amplitude desconfortável deste artigo complica desnecessariamente seu projeto; na verdade, pode ocultar o que procura revelar. Se esse conglomerado de diversas fontes e métodos fosse comparado a árvores, o leitor poderia se sentir como o explorador que não pode ver a floresta por causa das árvores. Então, novamente, pode ser que o autor esteja tão preocupado com as figuras de primeiro plano que o pano de fundo sempre presente fique finalmente obscurecido.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life . By Nancy Tatom Ammerman . New York : Oxford University Press , 2014. xvi + 37 6pp. $99.00 cloth; $29.95 paper.Book Reviews and NotesSociologist Nancy Ammerman is an accomplished scholar of American religion. Her previous research on "everyday religion" prompted her to interview ninety-five Americans about the spiritual aspects of their daily lives. These interviews provide candid glimpses into the many ways people identify experiences as sacred, negotiate tensions between religious and secular understandings of their lives, and selectively appropriate intellectual or ritual themes from religious institutions. Ammerman found that only a few of her research subjects were loyal, orthodox believers across all domains of their lives. Many were infrequent in their religious attendance. Some had no religious affiliation at all. But most told stories about everyday activities that signaled intense interest in viewing the world in ways that go beyond wholly secular understandings. Ammerman draws heavily on Charles Taylor's work as she identifies a "sacred consciousness" in the stories that Americans use to narrate their lives. This sacred consciousness consists of an overriding sense that life cannot be reduced to what Taylor terms the "immanent frame" of objective science. This book seeks to understand the everyday religion guiding these individuals' efforts to identify--and live up to--such distinctively religious conceptions of everyday realities.Ammerman designed these interviews to explore how "sacred consciousness" informs the meaning of a broad spectrum of human activities: everyday life at home, the workplace, neighborhoods and local communities, engagement with national and even international policies, and attempts to manage illness or death. Especially insightful were her interviewee's reflections about the nature and meaning of their jobs. Some jobs lend themselves both to a sense of vocation and to the possibility for everyday encounters with larger meanings and mysteries. More often, however, religion surfaces in people's efforts to cope with the frustrations and disappointments inherent in their work lives. Very few of her interviewees called on religious principles to critique the nature of the wider economic system. Ammerman found that a few engaged in (or were annoyed by) workplace prosletyizing and that two-thirds of workplace friendships are religiously homogenous. For the most part, however, everyday religion manifests itself in the workplace as yet another variation of what Ammerman calls "Golden Rule Christianity." It seems that at work--as with most other spheres in our lives--religion is not primarily about beliefs or institutional affiliation. Everyday religion thus often comes down to caring for others, being compassionate, and setting aside selfishness.Ammerman teases a number of interesting points from her interviewee's lengthy stories. …

Among the many emerging forms of digital scholarship, “Networked Participatory Scholarship” (NPS) is garnering increased attention for its potential to liberate scholarly communications from the slow, closed, and expensive methods of the pre-digital era. This paper will argue that different forms of NPS contribute to different forms of student consciousness, or how students conceive of the role of their scholarship, and the means of producing and communicating that scholarship in both the academic and public sphere.

This paper curates four experiential narratives and poetry by the five co-authors that illustrate epistemic and ontic shift from the Modern Western (ModWest) mindset to a holistic, embodied and animistic mindset. Coming from different cultural backgrounds, yet having been systemically influenced by the dominant ModWest views and values, each author has initiated an ongoing shift in consciousness, demonstrating how such transformations are possible. Affirming that a shift in consciousness is not simply a matter of cognitive change but is a thoroughly holistic process, the authors write in autobiographical narratives and poetry to capture and convey embodied and emplaced, experiential understanding and feelings, or 'felt sense.' Deep changes in the consciousness, such as these epistemic shifts, take the whole ensemble of "body + mind + heart + soul + spirit + the world" as the unit of change for learning. Through these writings, they sensuously and feelingly, existentially-and-spiritually and discursively explore possibilities of becoming one-bodied with the animate Earth. They call this the re-bonding project through which they address humanity's first-order bonding rupture between Humans and the Earth community.यह शोध अध्ययन पाँच सह-लेखकों के चार अनुभतवमक कहानियाँ एवं कविताओं के चुनिंदा संग्रहण को पेश करती है जो आधुनिक पाश्चात्य मानसिकता से हटकर एक पूर्णतवादी, सन्निहित, और आध्यात्मिक सोच अपनाती है। सभी लेखक विविध सांस्कृतिक पृष्ठभूमि से होते हुएँ भी प्रमुख पाश्चात्य विचारों से प्रभावित हैं। यह कहानियाँ हैं उनकी जारी उपक्रमों के जो दिखलाते हैं की वास्तविक परिवर्तन सम्भव हैं। लेखक दृढ़ता के साथ कहना चाहते हैं कि यह अंदरूनी चेतना में बदलाव केवल एक ज्ञान-सम्बंधी प्रक्रिया नहीं हैं बल्कि एक पूर्ण समग्र परिवर्तन हैं जिसे लेखकों ने आत्मकथात्मक, अनुभव-सम्बंधी कथाओं के प्रणाली से पेश किए हैं। गहरे जागरुकता के लिए एक सम्पूर्ण संयोजन की ज़रूरत हैं जिस विद्या में तन, मन, हृदय, आत्मा, भावना, और संसार का मिश्रण होता हैं। अपने लेख के माध्यम से यह लेखक अनुभूति-जनक, भावमय, आध्यात्मिक एवं अस्तित्ववान चर्चा करने का प्रयास करते हैं ताकी वह इस सजीव पृथ्वी के संग नितांत रूप से एक हो जाए। वह इस परियोजना को re-bonding अर्थात नवीकृत मिलन की पहचान देते हैं जिसके माध्यम से वे मानवता और धरती की सम्बंध-विच्छेद को सम्बोधित करना चाहेंगे।.

Though a concern with nature is one way of accessing the fictional world of all Hawthorne's Transcendentalist contemporaries, he has long been considered the least interested in nature. Despite the vast research done on Hawthorne’s rich and multi-layered novel, The Scarlet Letter (1849) has been overlooked ecocritically. Nature/ Culture dichotomy is being overlooked in Hawthorne's work. The goal of this paper is to advance an understanding of Hawthorne's attitude towards Culture/Nature dichotomy through rereading The Scarlet Letter and to derive ethical concepts out of nature. To convey his ecological vision, Hawthorne juxtaposes wild nature against the city of Boston and all that the urban culture stands for in 1750. Through the pastoral experience of Hawthorne's heroine, he rediscovers the natural landscape his ancestors once possessed and discarded as a secluded location of secret desires and moral absence. Exploring the interdisciplinary nature of Ecocriticism to the pastoral mode permits a reconsideration of nature/culture relationship. Hawthorne employs his pastoral heroine to resolve the root tensions between culture and nature by living in the borderline between them, gaining wisdom through her long years of solitude. Connecting the interdisciplinary nature of ecocristicsm together, the paper shows that the values expressed in the text are consistent with the ecological wisdom through psycho-analyzing Hawthorne’s main characters. Hawthorne, as a green writer, seeks to promote a reconsidering of one's beliefs and one's vision of Nature for a sound awareness and an essential unity of life

This paper takes the position of plurality and 'between-ness' in designing, to sharpen our perception for things that emerge in-between that cannot be grasped and thus, falls outside of consciousness. Attuning to this presence is important because designing is an exploration and articulation of concerns and understanding among people, and specifically in PD, involved in mediating socio-material relations. In order to articulate this 'between-ness', the paper borrows the notion of Ma in Japanese philosophy to attune into a way of sensing the relational, processual and atmospheric. This notion is shared with the design community as a way to situate that we are, more often than not, working and designing 'between-ness'.

The paper is aimed at describing the convergent effect of the interaction of several linguistic consciousness sense-forming channels, when their joint nonlinear impact significantly exceeds the total potential of individual elements of discursive activity. The texts of Russian Chernozem region writers are studied. The novelty of the research is that the role of the conjugate work of creative and receptive minds forming the two levels of autochthonous text-generating discourse (immanent and representative) is revealed and evaluated. It is proved that the efficient mechanism of autochthonous text generation is the synergy of the discursive-modus concept - the phenomenon of nonlinear discursive activity. The idea is substantiated that immersion in the synergistic architectonics of the discursive-modus concept opens the way to understanding the playful origin of the author's linguistic consciousness: his abilities through the system of content (aesthetic, modal, expressive, etc.) and formal linguistic means to embody the strategic vision in a unique, non-trivial and creative way. The paper proposes a compromise solution to distinguish between the synergy of averbal (naive, trivial, folk concepts that have not yet undergone the processes of linguocreative semiosis) and verbal (linguistic) concepts. This served as the platform for applying a linguo-epistemic approach to regional literary concept which allows to implement the convergent synergy of two types of concepts, thereby contributing to understanding the literary discourse as the cognitive basis of text generation process.

The paper is a study of the gender-based stigmatisation process of elite professionals in an international legal field. It uses commercial arbitration as an example of an international profession and adds to the prevalent understanding of gender inequality by developing a framework called ‘invisible stigmatisation’. The main theoretical framework is supported by twenty-two semi-structured interviews conducted across five international arbitration jurisdictions and two original datasets. These data have helped to contextualise the nuances of gender-based stigmatisation in prestigious arbitral appointments and at the echelons of international arbitration law firms. The paper establishes that the stigmatising experiences drive elite female professionals and their gender-equality consciousness. These experiences also lead to them devise innovative strategies to minimise the effects of gender inequality on their professional lives.

The paper highlights the key events of the private life of Larysa Kosach and Olha Kobylianska. It focuses on their communication and relations with men (acquaintance, friendship, and love), in particular Serhii Merzhynskyi and Osyp Makovei. The practice of behavior, the emotional and sensual experience of the Ukrainian women from the modern era have been revealed in a comparative aspect. This approach is determined by the special spiritual and sisterly connection between Larysa and Olha, as well as similar stages of experiencing the love feeling. The emphasis is made on the ‘history’ of L. Kosach, which is explained and even duplicated in the ‘history’ of Olha Kobylyanska. A general shaping of the writers’ personalities has been also considered comparatively. The cultural, psychological, and gender aspects in Ukraine of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had to be taken into account. The typology of both personalities has been traced from the time of their adolescence till their adulthood. The author of the paper pays special attention to the social norms as the oldest way to keep a woman within her nature as it was imagined. The traumatic experience of such social representation and the ways of addressing the issue within literary and autobiographical works are highlighted as well. The problem of expressing oneself is an important psychobiographical factor here. All private and public profiles related to human individuality, female nature, and creative consciousness are worth taking a deeper look at. The break up with the authorities, being a dominant feature for these women, is important for each of the mentioned manifestations of personalities and their integrity. The researcher concludes that biographical material, when properly structured, opens up new perspectives for those focused on the life and creative paths of the famous Ukrainian female writers.

This article presents a new stage of the research project on the frontal analysis of conditions and results of contextual actualization of lexemes representing the Russian concept MENTALITET/MENTAL’NOST’ (‘MENTALITY’). Here, the author studied the word mentalitet (‘mentality’) in non-usual subject-predicate combinations. The aim was to analyse semantic transformations of the lexeme mentalitet in the conceptual metaphorical models of reification and animation. L.O. Cherneiko’s method of cognitive interpretation of abstract words and the method of conceptual analysis elaborated by Nizhny Novgorod Conceptological School were applied in the paper. For material the author turned to the Russian National Corpus. The scientific value of the article consists in introducing a new aspect of conceptual analysis, i.e. conceptual metaphorical transformations of the word mentalitet in subject-predicate combinations. The key findings are as follows: 1) in the contexts of conceptual metaphorical reification, the lexeme mentalitet is interpreted as a sensually perceived object: a concrete thing, device, mechanism, material (substance); 2) in the contexts of conceptual metaphorical animation, mentalitet is perceived as a living, rationally and efficiently acting being endowed with consciousness, emotions and will. The author comes to the conclusion that this borrowed abstract concept has been to a large extent appropriated by the Russian linguistic worldview. The paper makes a sufficient contribution to contemporary cognitively oriented linguoculturological research strategies as well as to the theory and practice of conceptual analysis. The practical value of the article lies in the opportunity to use its main results in journalism and PR projects, as well as in compiling a new type of concept dictionaries and in linguistic examination of media texts. For citation: Zhukovskaya L.I. Semantic Transformations of the Lexeme mentalitet (‘Mentality’) in the Metaphorical Models of the Subject-Predicate Relationship. Vestnik Severnogo (Arkticheskogo) federal’nogo universiteta. Ser.: Gumanitarnye i sotsial’nye nauki, 2021, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 37–46. DOI: 10.37482/2687-1505-V101

Posthumanist approaches in archaeology have given plenty of focus to things in the last decade. This focus on things is a reaction to the over-anthropocentric view of social life advanced by postprocessual archaeologists. Whereas agency of more than 10 years ago was about how individuals expressed purpose and identity, agency today is about how both humans and non-human objects affect one another in a symmetrical manner. It seems without doubt that Posthumanism has contributed greatly to new understandings of social reality, but in the process it has also forced archaeologists to sacrifice many topics of interest, namely those involving consciousness and purpose. But is this sacrifice really necessary? This is one of the central problems of Posthumanism: it disallows a compromise of ideas from more conventional social theory (e.g. norms, purpose, practice) with those of posthumanist theory. This paper revisits John Searle's ‘Chinese Room’ and reiterates what this thought-experiment meant to understanding consciousness and purpose. The thought-experiment highlighted the differences between humans and machines and demonstrated that, even if a machine could replicate human purpose, it would still not be considered human because, unlike mechanical processes, human purpose is based on ethics. The thought-experiment was the first step in debunking the computational theory of mind. In light of this thought-experiment, the paper argues that, in a world where things interact with humans, we should think of agency in terms of ethics and keep the focus on humans.

In the marketplace of opinions concerning the metaphysics of mind and consciousness panqualityism (PQ) occupies an interesting position. It is a distinct variant of neutral monism, as well as of protophenomenalism, and as such it strives to carve out a conceptual niche midway between physicalism and mentalism. It is also a brand of Russellian monism, advocated by its supporters as a less costly and less extravagant alternative to panpsychism. Being clearly articulated and relatively well-developed it constitutes an intriguing view. Nonetheless, the present paper takes a decisively critical stance towards PQ. In particular, it challenges it on two principal grounds. First, I argue that PQ's analysis of experience, and of the qualities tasked with constituting the phenomenal character of experience, is fundamentally flawed. Second, I argue that PQ's attempt to explain phenomenal consciousness as a function of reflective awareness is equally misguided. Along the way, the paper also points the shortcomings of previously established critiques of PQ. All in all, the discussion identifies some difficulties that are likely to generalize beyond PQ's specific circumstances, raising concerns regarding the viability of a "middle of the road" solution to the mind–body problem.

This paper presents a preliminary sketch of what we have termed a Jungian socioanalysis - an emerging theory combining analytical psychology, complexity theories, sociological theories, socio- and psycho-analysis, group analysis and affect theories. Our assumption is that Jungian theory and practice need to attend to and focus more on social contexts, sociality and the influence of societal developments. But also, on the other hand, that analytical psychology, primarily Jung's theory of individuation and the transcendent function as well as the broad complexity perspective of his theory of psyche, can be extended to a 'socio' and not just a 'psycho' perspective. The paper presents five foundational assumptions for a Jungian socioanalysis, with the following headings: 1) A Jungian socioanalysis calls for a complex psychology; 2) (Un)consciousness is social and sociality has a dimension of (un)consciousness; 3) A Jungian socioanalysis explores social fields 'from within' by smaller groups; 4) A Jungian socioanalysis enables and is enabled by emerging metaphors and affect-imagery; 5) Socio-cultural fields have an impulse toward individuation. This is the first of two papers in the present edition of the journal - the second paper gives socio-clinical illustrations of our thesis in this paper.

Nigeria suffers conflicts whose causes are pinned on ethnic consciousness and factors other than culture. As such, culture is considered as an epiphenomenon. But at the base of Nigerian conflicts is culture which shapes and stirs ethnic consciousness, and remains a divisive factor in human societies. Thus, Nigeria is socio-politically polarized along cultural lines and conflicting cultural contents despite the present world of traversing cultural boundaries. This paper analytically exposes culture as the socio-political base of ethnic consciousness and conflicts in Nigeria, and reveals the philosophical foundation of cultural character as well as axiological panacea to conflicts in Nigeria. The paper finds that in every socio-political setting, ethnic consciousness does not happen in a vacuum, and nobody speaks and acts from nowhere but from a cultural orientation; for culture is the matrix of human existence and nothing happens outside it. As such, ethnic consciousness and human socio-political exercises; behaviours, dispositions and actions are shaped, posited, viewed and interpreted from cultural spaces. But to bridle the negative impact of culture and enhance national unity, consciousness and patriotism of the citizenry, the study concludes that there is need for a national culture that is replete with indigenous values and overlapping similarities to form the content of curriculum in Nigerian education system.

In his outline of Theory U, an awareness-based social change methodology, Scharmer (2018) depicts seven stages of presencing which he suggests can enable deeper modes of perception and knowing, to help us actualise our highest potential for social, economic, and cultural renewal. In this paper I attempt to shine a deeper light into the seven stages of presencing, by drawing from the fields of transpersonal psychology, quantum physics, and consciousness studies. In doing so, my objective is to operationalise in psychological terms key processes in presencing, such as “letting go”, letting come”, “connecting to source”, and “dialoguing with the universe”. I explore what such processes may involve and what they may demand of presencing practitioners. In the first half of the paper, I map Scharmer’s (2018) seven stages onto three core streams of consciousness which inform the human experience, reflecting on the features and qualities of each stream, and considering what psychosomatic dynamics may be at play as we enact the trajectory of the U. In depicting the three streams of consciousness, I highlight some of the challenges which presencing presents, suggesting that it is, in essence, a depth-psychological and spiritual approach. In the second half of the paper, I explore the practical and ethical implications of presencing, considering what capacities and attitudes may need to be nurtured in practitioners to support skilful facilitation and enactment of the U process. I also consider what frameworks could be deployed to facilitate safe and effective practice.

Literary theories are the lens in which reality is created and viewed. If an incorrect or limited lens in used, then they impact on vision hence the corrective lenses are used to correct impaired vision. The literary works of Ngugi wa Thiong’o have been comfortably viewed from Marxist, Nationalist and Post-colonialist lens. It is the argument of this paper that though these literary theories do shed clarity on the works of wa Thiong’o, they limit the span of what we see that is outside their frames. The paper privileges the Decolonial Critical Theory, a theory located in the Global South, as the most appropriate lens to visibilise the decolonial thoughts and philosophy of wa Thiong’o. The appropriateness of the Decolonial Critical Theory is that it provides a critical lens outside the Euro- North American “mainstream” canon foregrounded in coloniality. The argument expanded here is that essentialisms and fundamentalisms like Marxism, Nationalism and Post-colonialism are limited in the critique of wa Thiong’o as they do not take coloniality and decoloniality into account. Undoubtedly, wa Thiong’o has been many things politically and philosophically, but decoloniality as a philosophy is the organising idea and overarching line of his thought. Like decoloniality itself, wa Thiong’o has developed, journeyed and passed through different ideological and philosophical liaisons to arrive at his present decolonial consciousness and activism hence Decolonial Critical Theory is a betting lens in looking at this journey.

In recent years, global economic integration has a great impact on college students’ thinking. Many college students are lack of ideals and beliefs and their moral consciousness is very weak and ideological quality is not high. Therefore, ideological and political education should be carried out in college English teaching. We need to make scientific and reasonable teaching program. It will help to improve the overall quality of college English teaching and the ideological quality of college students. Based on this, the paper summarizes the practical value of curriculum ideology and politics in college English teaching. It also analyzes the advantages of curriculum ideology and politics in college English teaching. To provide some reference for college teaching, the paper even explores the practical path of curriculum ideology and politics in college English teaching.

People’s interactions with others are usually reflections of their value, at both individual level and cultural level. In international legal settings where there are designed and professional questions, this is reflected distinctly in the confrontations between two parties. Drawing on the second dimension of Hofstede’s value system, namely individualism and collectivism, and taking the first hearing in the CAS arbitration between WADA, Sun Yang and FINA which was held in Switzerland in November 2019 as an example, this paper aims at elaborating on the collectivism-orientated or individualism-orientated values that are reflected in intercultural legal settings. To be more specific, collectivism-orientated value such as “We” Consciousness, Confrontation Avoidance, Facts/Rules Neglecting, High-context Communication and individualism-orientated value like Facts/Rules Focusing were all revealed in the testimony of Chinese witnesses by Sun Yang’s party. These values may have led to either negative or positive influence on the efficiency of Chinese witnesses’ defence in varying degrees. Analysis in this paper is based on the transcript of the video file of CAS public hearing on Sun’s case. I hope that the finding of the research may provide a reference to researchers on cultural values and communications in professional contexts such as international companies, schools, governmental organizations and tribunals.

The paper considers one of the relevant issues of introducing and using digital technologies by a future music teacher. It is proven that the realm of aesthetic culture of a future music teacher requires the introduction of innovative forms of education and their active application. It is substantiated that digital technologies are a means of professional development of future music teachers in the process of professional training and become an integral part of society at all levels and centers, and digital competence is recognized as one of the priorities in educational activities. The paper emphasizes that modern education is the mastery of electronic, multimedia textbooks and guides, e-courses, interactive complexes, therefore learning with the use of digital technologies is not a novelty but a requirement of the time. The structural components of aesthetic culture such as aesthetic consciousness, aesthetic activity, aesthetic self-organization are analyzed and singled out, and the author believes that such components are designed to implement strategic ideas in the field of education and culture into public life, to develop values, to apply and use modern technologies in professional activities, and this requires active skills in using ICT, as well as information, music and technological competencies, critical thinking, behavioral strategies, response to changing needs and interests of society. In this paper, the author considers digital, music and computer technologies as a means of professional development of a future music teacher in the process of professional training, because the use of such technologies increases motivation for professional activity and develops positive beliefs in selected music disciplines and areas of music research. The paper studies the SAMR approach that allows assessing the level of digital technologies use in educational institutions for teaching and learning. A review of current trends in digital technologies organization and application has identified their most common forms in the training of future music teachers and proven the effectiveness of their use, which affects the development of pedagogical mastery of music teachers.

The paper discusses the interdisciplinary studies of the meaning. Being a difficult object to analyze, the meaning could be considered as an «intermediate» between the micro-level of individual consciousness and the macro-level of social institu­tions. The paper shows the possibilities of sociological and psychological para­digms in the analysis of the meaning as a unit of language consciousness. Thus represented, the meaning is a traditional subject of psycholinguistics. The mean­ings changeable in time are captured in the results of mass associative experi­ments. The paper studies the special properties of the meaning, such as «open­ness» at the same time to the individual minds and to social institutions; external conditionality of consistency; bimodality, or autopoiesis, which is the ability to si­multaneously be an element and a principle of system organization. Due to these properties of the meaning it is possible to combine psycholinguistic methods with approaches from other sciences, as well as to use an integrative methodology. The paper demonstrates the possibilities of interdisciplinary approach from the perspective of the sources of the meanings, including social actors, social in­stitutions or individuals.

The paper analyses selected philosophical aspects of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris. I argue that there is an interesting similarity between the history of “Solarist studies” –the fictional scientific discipline depicted by Lem and cognitive science. I show that both disciplines go through similar stages as they try to describe their main subject (the planet Solaris and human consciousness respectively). In the further part of the paper, I focus on two problems identified in cognitive science that can be directly related to the themes found in Solaris: the problem of the detection of intelligence and the problem of the notion of mental representations.I finish the paper by looking at the mysterious guests that stalk the main protagonists and show that they can be understood as heuristic models that are taken into account in the theories of mind uploading. Artykuł bada wybrane filozoficzne aspekty powieści Solaris Stanisława Lema. Twierdzę, że zachodzi interesujące podobieństwo pomiędzy historią „solarystyki” – fikcyjnej dyscypliny naukowej opisywanej przez Lema a historią kognitywistyki. Pokazuję, że obie dyscypliny przechodziły przez podobne etapy, starając się opisać swój przedmiot (odpowiednio, planetę Solaris oraz świadomość ludzką). W dalszej części artykułu skupiam się na dwóch problemach zidentyfikowanych w kognitywistyce, które można bezpośrednio odnieść do wątków obecnych w Solaris: problemie wykrywania istot myślących oraz problemie reprezentacji umysłowych.Kończę artykuł przyglądając się tajemniczym gościom, którzy prześladują bohaterów powieści i pokazuję, że mogą oni być zinterpretowani jako modele heurystyczne rozważane w teoriach uploadu.

This paper aimed to study the content of the concept of wife in Russian and English-speaking linguocultures. The research will broaden the understanding of linguistic consciousness of Russian and English native speakers as well as identify some peculiarities of their world image. It is important to study the national world image today, as it can help to improve mutual understanding between cultures and simplify the assimilation process for those who decide to immigrate for some reason or other. The author utilized the methods of linguocultural and comparative analysis, as well as of associative-verbal nets study suggested by Yu.N. Karaulov. They include comparing associative-verbal nets by respondents’ first two reactions, identifying the most frequent types of answers, and grouping the responses into semantic zones. Further, the article analyses the synonymic chains of the word wife and explains the significance of this concept in Russian and English-speaking linguocultures, as well as identifies common semantic groups for the concept (wedding, household) and determines a common response to the stimulus in the two linguocultures. In addition, the paper traces differences in the perception of the concept of wife and singles out various semantic zones and their key elements. The research found that for many Russian native speakers, this concept contains such features as faith and belonging to someone, while in English linguistic consciousness it includes gender and partnership.

Purpose: This paper aims to analyze the portrayal and presentation of memory, gender, and identity in selected psychological thrillers. Approach/Methodology/Design: The selected films are Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and James Mangold’s Identity. For the analysis of these films, the researcher employs both narrative and structural approaches; thematic analysis, psychoanalysis, and also feminist film theory. Findings: The results of the analysis show that apart from building suspense and mysteries with the identity issue, these thrillers question the stereotypes and inequality in society through the female characters for the consumerist audience. Hence, these films attempt to break the chains of legitimated stereotypes in the society which create binaries in the lives of people. Practical Implications: The portrayal of illness in psychological thrillers has attracted a lot more audience to seats. Dissociative elements such as memory and identity of the mind perhaps have permeated the film-going experience. The paper showcases these aspects in the selected films. Originality/value: The picturization of the fading identity and the double personality of the characters are central to the interior experience. The capturing of Amnesia and its related themes of memory, identity, and distributed consciousness are common materials in recent films because they can stretch to basic humanistic concerns and contemporary psycho-social issues.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between Husserl’s phenomenology and soft systems. An important idea arising from the action research programme at the University of Lancaster is the notion of soft systems. The concept of soft systems, that distinguished it from other systems (holistic) thinking of the time, was the conscious link between soft systems thinking and phenomenology. Phenomenology is that the realm of intentional consciousness that enables the phenomenologist to develop a radically unprejudiced justification of his (or her) basic views of the world and of himself and explore their rational interconnections. Similarly, in soft systems, it is acknowledged that reality is formed by sensation and fashioned by experience. It is not exclusively a process of thought (although this may shape how we process our experience), for us the world exists as the result of a subjective appreciation of it. In Part 1, the author explores how phenomenology informs soft systems theory and practice through the work of Husserl and some of those that influenced him and were influenced by him. In Part 2, the author explores a possible relationship between Husserl and Gadamer as a possible intellectual grounding for organisational inquiry. Design/methodology/approach The research was conducted by examining published material relating to the development of soft systems ideas and Husserl's phenomenology. Findings An analysis of the ideas within the material suggests that phenomenology can be considered as a underpinning the notion of soft systems Research limitations/implications There is difficulty tracking down important papers that recorded the development of soft systems (i.e. 1970–1990) as Lancaster University had disposed of all issues. However, the author tracked down a source and was able to use this material as part of the research. In addition to helping research the origins of the idea, it also provides a paper trail for other researchers interested in these ideas. Practical implications Tracing the published material relating to soft systems necessitated visits to several universities as many of the important papers where no longer held by the University of Lancaster library. Social implications It seems apposite that the ideas behind soft systems are resurrected as they offer an alternative way of thinking about complexity – which the modern world seems increasingly creating Originality/value There is a lack of research into soft systems as the publications describing the Lancaster research programme have centred around soft systems methodology (SSM). Checkland remarked a decade or so ago that said SSM should be taken as given and other ideas explored. There is little evidence that the soft ideas have been explored outside variations of SSM, this paper is intended to encourage more research into ‘soft’ systems.

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the pertinent issues, barriers and pitfalls of intergenerational communication in business families during their leadership succession period.Design/methodology/approachBuilding on relational leadership theory, the paper makes use of an action research approach using a qualitative single case study to investigate communication barriers and pitfalls in business transition.FindingsThrough action research, interventions were taken in the underlying case, which increased the consciousness, as well as the personal and social competencies of the business family. Thus, business families stuck in ambivalent entanglement understand their underlying motives and needs within the change process, get into closer contact with their emotional barriers and communication hindrances, which is a prerequisite for any change, and break the succession iceberg phenomenon.Research limitations/implicationsFuture research should undertake multiple case studies to validate and/or modify the qualitative methods used in this action research to increase the validity and generalizability of the findings.Practical implicationsGiven the large number of business families in transition, our study shows the beneficial effects action research might have on business families’ communication behavior along a change process. The findings might help other business families to understand the value of action research for such underlying challenges and decrease communication barriers.Originality/valueThis is one of the few studies to have addressed intergenerational communication of business families using an action research approach.