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Many believe that organization is to be depersonalized far as possible. But can it be entirely rid of personal dimension? And should one consider the personal a mere impediment or it may claim also a wholesome part? The author sheds light on the personal “engines” of organizational management and reveals the mechanisms of its influence on the decisions and behavior of both rank and files and higher-ups by scrutinizing the relevant managerial practice and research findings. Are revealed in corpore and presented in a systematic form the factors limiting depersonalization and the intimate features of personality – emotional, volitional, and subliminal – to be brought into play. It is argued that they are not merely requisites for effective management but also fundamental conditions of success in uncertain, diverse, erratic, tangled, and quickly changing environment. Depersonalization not so much raises the level of management as technicalizes it, ousting “pieces” with no need for personal involvement from the system of human relations. They cease to be organizational proper and turn into a technological appendage subject to technical control rather than management. The paper opens a new line of research aimed at discovering the intrapersonal drives as a run-the-organization resource. The findings and conclusions the author has come to is of use to practicioners who can employ them for increasing the effectiveness of their activity as well as to teachers wanting to give a more precise and comprehensive picture of human behavior within the courses of management and organization theory.

This review assesses the therapeutic potential of placebo and nocebo effects in the treatment of narcological disorders. The background of this issue is discussed and the neurobiological and psychological mechanisms of the placebo effect are addressed. Use of the placebo effect in psychotherapy is discussed. Particular attention is paid to the therapeutic and ethical aspects of the practical application of the placebo effect, including as part of treatment methods such as placebo therapy, object-oriented psychotherapy, motivational and cognitive behavioral psychotherapy, Antabuse treatment, and psychopharmacotherapy with opioid receptor antagonists. The authors conclude that placebo effects can be used in the treatment of narcological disorders with the aim of increasing efficacy, subject to compliance with the main principles of medical ethics.

An attempt is undertaken to reveal the conceptual grounds of the opposition and resistance to innovations. The origins and evolution of the views on the reception of new ideas, during the last half a century, have been traced, and the conclusion drawn that the social and personal dimensions are usually overemphasized while the mental ones kept in the shadow. Meanwhile, just the latter play the key role in the relation to the new by the community as a whole. Human mind passes anything through the prism of the concepts in which experience is accumulated and consolidated. And new ideas spring out of the same concepts combined otherwise. The conceptual background of the epoch presets the framework and tendencies of the common knowledge that, in its turn, being learned by people, determines the horizon of their mental outlook. Just that horizon turns, ultimately, into a frontier between accessible and inaccessible ideas. The closer an idea approaches to the frontier, the farther it moves from the scope of the contemporaries’ understanding. As to the insights having broken through the horizon, they become “invisible” and “inappreciable” to the overwhelming majority of the contemporaries. These persons are incapable of getting out from the gripe of the common knowledge as the force field of the epoch’s mentality. The revolutionary innovations are doomed to denial and nonacceptance. Their inner charge is incompatible with the conceptual background of the epoch. Nevertheless, albeit rejected, they exert not evident—indirect and marginal—but tectonic influence on knowledge and mentality and render, therethrough, great benefits even to those communities that turn them down.