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Early Polish press advertising (between the 1850s and 1939) was characterized by a unique and today extinct combination of elements of persuasion and exceptional courtesy towards potential customers. The aim of this paper is to show the place of customer psychology in the earliest Polish advertising textbooks in the context of the actions of Polish press advertisers at the time, convinced of the susceptibility of their recipients to courtesy, appreciation and flattery.
Historical method based on archival research in Polish digital libraries was used with the aim of identifying and analyzing primary sources, enriched by examples of advertisements from pre-1939 newspapers and historical periodicals illustrating the phenomenon in question, and by the findings of more recent Polish-language research papers.
Although the level and quality of Polish advertising in the period under review were criticized by most of the coeval authors of advertising textbooks, empirical research from 1936 has been preserved which proves that just such combination of persuasion and courtesy in advertising was perceived as most effective by its target groups.
This study introduces hitherto unknown Polish marketing thought and practice, drawing on the earliest, mostly forgotten Polish marketing textbooks and other primary sources from the years 1896-1939. It thus contributes to the body of research on the history of advertising.
This empirical dissertation delves into the study of peer mediation within refugee shelters, focusing on understanding the participants' perspectives on what constitutes peer mediation. Drawing upon the grounded theory methodology by Strauss and Corbin, the study examines the experiences and perceptions of refugees engaged in peer mediation activities in refugee shelters in Germany.
The findings of the dissertation reveal that peer mediation plays a significant role in strengthening the self-efficacy of participants. Furthermore, the study highlights that engaging in peer mediation imbues refugees with a sense of meaning, as they assist their peers in resolving conflicts. Additionally, participants who undergo training as peer mediators report an increase in self-confidence regarding their mediation skills and conflict resolution competence as a direct result of increased self-efficacy.
The findings can guide the development of peer mediation programs that meet the specific needs of refugees in shelters. This research helps us see how peer mediation has the potential to promote self-efficacy, facilitating integration into new environments. Peers assisting one another not only aid others but also experience personal growth. By mitigating conflicts within refugee shelters, peer mediation reduces the need for security interventions. Implementing measures that incentivize refugees to reclaim their sense of self-efficacy is crucial.
The 2003 UNESCO Convention definition of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) covers religious practices and rites, as can be seen from normative descriptions and dozens of actual examples, many of which are Catholic religious traditions. The Traditional Latin Mass (TLM), practiced in one form or another for over 1500 years by an ever-increasing number of peoples and nations and in possession of a common stable set of rules, meets the UNESCO criteria for listing as ICH; in fact, it is arguably the best possible example. It is also a complicated one. After the Catholic Church’s liturgical reform in the 1960s and 1970s, new rites were introduced and the old rites were officially abandoned; nevertheless, a minority of clergy and laity continued to celebrate the TLM, and, over time, the legitimacy of their attachment to it was recognised by several popes, who also spoke regularly of the great value of the Church’s cultural and artistic patrimony and recommended that it remained joined with its religious origins. In contrast, the current pope, Francis, has recently become opposed to the continuation of the old rites. Be this as it may, it is quite possible that such a threatened but deeply appreciated international ICH as the TLM could be proposed for listing by several states that (unlike the Holy See) have signed the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, to give it a recognition appropriate to its immense historical and present-day cultural value.
The Energy Transition requires social innovation to mobilise the necessary financing, increase acceptance towards technologies and trigger behavioural change. This thesis investigates consumer (co-)ownership in renewable energy as one possible solution to these challenges. It is argued that as such this instrument can contribute to expand renewable energy and bring the Energy Transition forward, both in countries that have been pioneering renewables, such as Germany, as well as in countries like Poland that have lagged behind.
With the Clean Energy for All Europeans Package the EU for the first time lay the ground for “citizen energy” embracing both the role of citizens as active consumers on the energy markets and as co-investors. The transposition of new EU rules into national laws is pending and expected to take years.
Therefore, it is crucial to determine the indispensable elements (1) of the most competitive consumer model and (2) of the facilitating framework that allows for the participation of heterogeneous actors without discriminating individual households. For that, this study examines conventional models for consumer (co-)ownership and investigates an innovative financing technique – the Consumer Stock Ownership Plan (CSOP) – to modernise established schemes while meeting prerequisites for the governance of energy communities introduced by the relevant European directives.
Based on a detailed analysis of the energy policies, support systems, existing models for collective projects and the feasibility of the CSOP in Germany and Poland, this study presents a range of recommendations for national frameworks.
Territorial Stigmatisation: Urban Renewal and Displacement in a Central Istanbul Neighbourhood
(2023)
In Tarlabasi, an Istanbul neighbourhood facing massive redevelopment and displacement, marginalised residents speak about belonging, stigma, and what their community means to them. Based on a long-term ethnographic study that includes interviews, photographs, and archival research, Constanze Letsch examines how territorial stigmatisation is weaponised by the state and how differently stigmatised groups try to fight against the vilification of their neighbourhood. The contested plans of urban renewal threaten not only their homes and workplaces but a rapidly vanishing Istanbul: socio-demographic interdependencies and networks that have developed over decades.
This open access book presents an actor-centered study on Europeanization, based on the assumption that EU-driven reforms are highly dependent on the behavior and interests of the key domestic actors. Whether or not a state pursues a European and democratic agenda depends on domestic lawmakers. Further, political elites are pre-eminent in deciding on the nature, form and content of any law, and on the extent to which the rule of law is actually enforced. Elites can overcome structural or institutional barriers that stand in the way of achieving their goals. The empirical study on Romania presented here lends this observation a more profound meaning: it shows how, in contexts where high level corruption is the norm rather than the exception, self-serving political elites cannot be expected to genuinely commit to adopting sound anti-corruption reform. The book is an inquiry into the motivations that drive legislators to make particular decisions, but also into the structural characteristics and dynamics of the elite that invite a selfish rather than responsible and responsive behaviour.
This publication was supported by funds from the Publication Fund for Open Access Monographs of the Federal State of Brandenburg, Germany.
In the past three decades, radical right parties had the opportunity to directly influence political developments from the highest public office in many post-communist Central and Eastern European countries. Oliver Kossack provides the first comprehensive study on government formation with radical right parties in these countries. Even after the turn of the millennium, some distinct features of the post-communist context persist, such as coalitions between radical right and centre-left parties. In addition to original empirical insights, the time-sensitive approach of this study also advances the discussion about concepts and methodological approaches within the discipline.
In 2011, Sebastian Thrun, a Solingen-born professor at Stanford University, made his course "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence", including the final exam, fully accessible on his YouTube channel. Within a few weeks, thousands of people signed up for the course, while three months later, 160,000 people from 190 countries had attended the course, with 23,000 of them taking the online final exam. Just as ripples spreading out when a single pebble is dropped into water, MOOCs, which began in the USA and then spread around the world, had caught the attention of media outlets both inside and outside the U.S. This widespread attention to MOOCs, an online educational alternative, in the daily press has sparked the interest of media scientists from various countries. This study builds on the achievements of their researches, but extends the previous researches with question. Question 1 – What are the similarities and differences in the content of MOOC coverage in the American and Chinese media? Question 2 – If the analysed MOOC coverage in the USA and in the PRC satisfy the criteria of media hype identified?
The first question is addressed with a content analysis of all MOOC-related articles in the New York Times (USA) and Guangming Daily (China) for the period 2011 to 2020. The analysis reveals major differences in the content of MOOC coverage between the USA and the PRC, which can be primarily attributed to the varying challenges faced by the respective education systems of the two countries. To answer the second question, the paper employed the criteria defined by Dutch media scholar Peter Vastermann to identify media hype. The comparison of the two news outlets shows that the New York Times’ MOOC coverage meets all the criteria for media hype, while the coverage of the Guangming Daily is characterized by a growing interest in the topic of MOOC, but does not satisfy any of the Vastermann criteria.
From 18 to 25 July 2022, a summer school was held in the Romanian village of Trappold with students of heritage conservation and architecture from Germany and Romania. The summer school was a study project by Sebastian Bethge and Magdalena Roepke as part of their Master's programme "Strategies For European Cultural Heritage" at the European University Viadrina. The project was funded by the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the CasApold Association and the Fortified Churches Foundation. The summer school was dedicated to the fortified church in Trappold, which is part of the impressive cultural heritage of the Transylvanian Saxons. Under the guidance of lecturers Olaf Huth and Gerhard Gresik from Coburg University of Applied Sciences, the students were able to digitally measure and draw the fortified church. Daniel Tellmann (Faculty of Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Timisoara) worked with the students on various possibilities for using the fortified church in a meaningful way in the future. Furthermore, there was the opportunity to take part in two practical workshops in the areas of stone restoration and restoration of historical plaster and wall paintings. Bringing together young academics from different fields to encourage an interdisciplinary exchange was particularly important to us, along with the opportunity to apply theoretical knowledge. The students were also able to intensively explore the cultural heritage of the Transylvanian Saxons for a period of two weeks, which was reinforced by a specialised symposium and a field trip. This publication presents a summary of the results of the summer school and can serve as an example of how important practical experience and interdisciplinary exchange are for sustainable heritage conservation.
The European Union’s Role in the Cultural Integration of European Muslims and Combating Islamophobia
(2022)
The European agenda on multiculturalism has undermined Muslim communities through cultural repulsion. Muslims have been labelled as primitive and dangerous people. They experience discrimination at university, workplace or in the public sphere on a daily basis. Hence, the problem of Muslim cultural integration and the manifestation of Islamophobia in Europe pose a threatening challenge to European stability. The stigmatisation of Muslims and their exclusion undermine the image of the EU as the protagonist of liberal values and mar its motto of ‘unity in diversity’. So, it is prudent to assume that a great power such as the EU should step forward to tackle Islamophobia and support a multicultural way of living by promoting Muslim cultural integration into European societies. Keeping this in view, the proposed research aimed to analyse the EU’s legal framework and the mechanism of its ‘soft policy’ towards the cultural integration of European Muslims and combating Islamophobia from an anthropological perspective.
By means of qualitative research methods, the descriptive analysis of the EU policy and its anthropological impact on the Muslim cultural integration and combating Islamophobia led to the following results: The EU’s policy in this field is more likely to be assessed as insufficient and ineffective. Nevertheless, it tends to support the cultural hybridisation of European Muslims. Such a policy choice results in moderate Islamophobia and protecting Muslims only against certain forms of discrimination.
This dissertation critically examines how the monocultural ethnocentric structures of the Mexican education system – that are reproduced in the course of change processes in macro-level institutions, in their educational policies and their diversity-sensitive educational approaches – affect the educational quality of Native Mexican peoples, and, in particular, of the internal migrants among them. Theoretical approaches, such as Critical Race Theory, Structuration Theory, Diversity Education Theory and Change Theory are combined with results of a critical mixed-method analysis of empirical data from the Mexican research context to first uncover the origins and mechanisms of the reproduction of monocultural ethnocentric structures in today’s Mexican society. Then, the different internal migration patterns and related demographic profiles of Native Mexicans are explored. Afterwards the structures of the Mexican education system as well as the scope of influence of its institutions at the macro level are analyzed. Finally, the availability, accessibility, acceptability and adaptability of education for Native peoples in Mexico is examined. The abductive, interdisciplinary, longitudinal and iterative analysis showed that the educational quality of the Native Mexicans, and, in particular of the internal migrants among them, is lower compared to non-Native Mexicans, because institutions at the macro level of the education system that opt at dismantling the existing monocultural ethnocentric system structures in order to improve the educational quality for minoritized groups such as Native Mexicans, are unable to implement their diversity-sensitive educational approaches and related policies due to their limited resources and their corresponding low scope of influence.
COLLECTIVE REVIEW
Beate Neuss, and Antje Nötzold (Eds.). (2013). Polen als Motor des europäischen Integrationsprozesses: Bilanz der polnischen Ratspräsidentschaft and Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski, Thomas Mehlhausen, and Monika Sus (Eds.). (2014). Poland's EU-Council Presidency under Evaluation: Navigating Europe through Stormy Waters.
Erica Lehrer's "Jewish Poland Revisited. Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places" is an ethnographical study of contemporary Poland. Or, to put things more accurately, it is a study of contemporary Kazimierz, Cracow's prewar Jewish district. Unlike other Jewish places across Poland (for example Muranów, the Jewish part of Warsaw, destroyed during the war), buildings in Kazimierz survived the war almost intact. However, the majority of its Jewish population perished in the nearby Auschwitz death camp, leaving the district devoid of its rich pre-war Jewish culture. Lehrer's interest in Kazimierz began in the 1990s, when the area was slowly transforming from the city's slum (as it had been perceived throughout the communist era) into a trendier and more Jewish place. The post-1989 years saw a rising number of Jewish tourists flocking into the area, as well as the growing interest in Jewish history and culture among non-Jewish Poles. Lehrer's attempt to analyse both Jewish and Polish sides of the problem can be divided into two parts. The first half (chapters two and three) is concerned with the outsiders' view of Kazimierz and Poland while the second half (chapters four, five and six) discusses aspects of Polish involvement in the local heritage and tourism.
The history of music-making in postwar East-Central Europe has lent itself all too readily to clichés. The music, the stereotypes go, was worthless propaganda; the composers were cowed, and the whole region marched in lockstep to the beat of Moscow's drum. Scholars working in the fields of musicology and cultural history have started to add much-needed nuance to this oversimplified picture. David Tompkins is one of them. The product of extensive, painstaking archival research, Composing the Party Line traces the encounter of music and politics in Poland and East Germany during the early Cold War, a period Tompkins defines as lasting from 1945 until approximately 1957. Along the way, Tompkins challenges outmoded ways of thinking about the intersection of cultural production and political power in the formerly socialist societies of East-Central Europe.
David Tompkins' Composing the Party Line is a unique work in that he undertakes a transnational comparative analysis of specific cultural aspects of the Stalinist period, namely the production, performance and reception of music, primarily classical and modern music, but also popular music like mass songs and entertainment combining music and spoken word. Unless the reader is already familiar with the history of Stalinism in Poland and the GDR, it is best to read this work with other books on the cultural history of the period.
A game-theoretic setting is used to illuminate the conflict between vaccination proponents and vaccination opponents. A central result is that vaccination proponents could in principle persuade vaccination opponents to vaccinate by means of subsidization. Such a subsidy could increase benefits for both groups. Deeper analysis provides numerous further insights regarding the stability of these results.
The era of the New Economic Policy (NEP) was the golden age of Soviet affirmative national policies. This volume of documents offers insights into Polish and German minority institutions and political practices in early Soviet Ukraine. It provides a picture of how people in rural areas received the affirmative initiatives from above and adapted them for their own purposes. Even though these policies failed to achieve the goals the Bolsheviks expected, they granted a large degree of autonomy on a local scale that was unmatched in previous and later times. The Polish village of Hreczany near Proskuriv (today Khmel’nyts’kyi) in western Ukraine, and the German Karl-Liebknecht Raion in southern Ukraine serve as prime examples in this document collection.
This paper examines the attitude of consumers living in Germany towards higher prices charged to female consumers by surveying them randomly in two scenarios, one showing the same price and the other showing a higher price for the female version of the product. The interaction of Pink-tax and price fairness, and how gender mediates this perception was tested through a within-subject factorial design experiment, with two variables, price as the independent variable and gender as the mediator Afterwards, respondents were asked several questions about their perception of Price-Fairness. The results show that women have a marginally stronger negative perception when shown the higher price.
In times of growing complexity project management and the continuing ‘projectification’ of organisations (Midler, 1995) have arrived at a paradigmatic stalemate (Kuhn, 1970). The current theoretical and methodical foundations of project management may have reached the limits of their functionality in complex environments (Atkinson, 1999; Flyvberg, 2006; Flyvberg et al., 2005; Winch, 1996). This paper asks whether project management should continue to expand its tools to cope with complexity and whether current normative foundations must be challenged for new paradigmatic approaches (Whitty & Maylor, 2009, Geraldi & Adlbrecht, 2007; Whitty, 2005). This study argues for a review of conventional and agile project management paradigms. To overcome the paradigmatic crisis of project management it is proposed to create a unity of distinctions between conventional and agile project management in a systemically integrated project management practice.
This study applies a discourse practice analytical perspective to project management (Boje, 2014; Van Leeuwen, 2008). It is based on a systems theoretical assumption that projects and project management are social constructions of organisation (Luhmann, 1995). If projects are the result of recurring and organised conversations, project management can be considered the convention to govern these conversations (Bredillet, 2012 & 2006). The study employs a systems-theoretical second-order observation to how discourse practitioners in project management observe and self-describe their own practice and their management of complexity (Kiehne & Klein, 2006). It uses the concept of memes to identify recurring common attractors in the language patterns which inform project practice and management narratives (Boje, 2007; Whitty, 2005). The concept of the generic distinction is applied to identify points of attention in the decision logic of project managers (Spencer-Brown, 2010).
The results in this paper support the assumption that discourses in conventional and agile project management predominantly aim to differentiate themselves from each other. Yet, they both revolve around the same dominant narratives on how to manage projects. It turns out, that the reproduction of these narratives does not necessarily follow the logic of functionality in specific project contexts, but the logic of legitimacy of applying one or the other project management approach (Whitty, 2005). It is argued, that project management is a convention adequate to talk about projects. In times of complexity this paradigmatic foundation reaches its limits. In order for project management to overcome its ontological tendency, projects need to be rediscovered projects as conversations and project management as the means to facilitate these conversations meaningfully. The paper argues to overcome artificially constructed distinctions of different project management approaches for a systemically integrated project management practice. This paradigmatic shift may reposition project management in the social dimension of projects (Klein, 2012 & 2013) and as a means to facilitate the self-observation and self-description of project practitioners to conduct a successful project.
Review essay of Kapitał społeczny. Przypadek Polski and Oblicza kapitału społecznego uniwersytetu. Diagnoza- interpretacje-konteksty.
Problems of the development of social capital are crucial to analysing the potential of modern organisations. Social capital is usually defined terms of bonds, engagement, or trust.
Both books present a perspective of the research on social capital, but they treat the same conceptual category in different ways. Gajowiak's book aims to show the importance of the state in the process of social-capital building. Dudzikowa's research group, meanwhile, concentrates on analysing the role of the university within the science and technology development infrastructure in the same process of fostering social capital.
This volume is a paperback edition of a 2007 publication to which new elements have been added. Its subject is the experiences of a Jewish family from Kraków following German occupation in 1939, with well over half of the text devoted to letters sent by various members to Joseph (Józia) Hollander, the one person to escape the Nazis and find a new home in the United States. As a primary source, these letters are clearly a valuable research tool for anyone working in the area of Holocaust Studies, whilst having a much wider relevance, not least in an era marked by persecution and flight caused by war. The remainder of the book puts the family's experiences into wider contexts.
The growing interest in the Jewish past that has been visible in Poland in the last two decades gave rise to a wide range of cultural and commemorative initiatives across the whole country. The collection of essays "Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland" is an academic response to these developments. Edited by Erica Lehrer (author of "Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places" [link]) and Michael Meng (author of "Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland" [link]), the volume explores the question of how today's Poland responds to its Jewish (and not only Jewish) past. As editors Lehrer and Meng note in their introduction, 'space as a common analytical category' (p. 3) is the unifying element of the whole volume. As a result, most authors look at different sites of Jewish past (from centres such as Cracow and Warsaw, to less known Szczecin and Lodz, to entirely local examples of Chmielnik and Brzostek), with only a few of them (Tyszka, Cohn and to some extent Kapralski) trying to look at the issue of space from a wider perspective. Since the authors of the thirteen articles collected in this work represent various academic disciplines (from history to anthropology), "Jewish Space" is a truly interdisciplinary study. This diversity, however, is both a strength and weakness of the book.
Until late 2014, Poland was guided by a national security strategy that had not been revised for nearly a decade. In our turbulent times, advances in societal and technological development, just as the flux of rapid (mis)developments in world politics, an outdated vision of the state's international role and security is as much fraught with nasty consequences as it is in case of more tangible challenges, such as an economic crisis or illegal migration.
Shortly before the Polish national security strategy was updated in November 2014, this edited volume on the Polish state's foreign policy dilemmas was published. The volume does not cover, however, the events that occurred after late 2013, when the conference on which it draws took place. The main mission of the conference, and respectively – the book, has been to 'diagnose the most significant new developments and trends in the international environment of Poland and to determine their impact for continuity or change in the existing interests and goals of Polish foreign policy, just as to reveal respective dilemmas they posit for the country' (p. 11).
A decade after 1989, Poland began experiencing a "memory boom." This explosion in cultural productions dealing with the past inspired scholarly research on collective memory in fields as diverse as Anthropology, Archeology, Art History, Communications, Cultural Studies, History, Film, Languages and Linguistics, Literature, Journalism, Media Studies, Museum Studies, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology. While this intellectual surge drew inspiration from classical works produced earlier in Western Europe and the United States, it also produced a plethora of new concepts, theories, and perspectives rooted in the Central European experience and drew on classical Polish authors. This incredibly rich field of inquiry presents an intellectual labyrinth that can be difficult to navigate. Novices may have trouble finding their bearings, while seasoned scholars may talk past each other, each using terms native to their disciplines for lack of a common language.
Evoking Polish Memory explores the contemporary memoryscape of a mid-sized Polish city through the eyes of victims of repression and former security officers involved in political violence from 1944-1989. A theoretically sophisticated and methodologically rigorous ethnography, the book goes beyond recounting oral histories and uncovers how real people (re)construct memories of the past in the present through their interactions with social networks, state-sponsored memory projects, the court system, political discourses, and religious practices. Rich and compelling, Evoking Polish Memory is a rare success story in interdisciplinary research, taking an anthropological approach to questions of interest to political scientists, legal scholars, sociologists, and historians. Some minor revisions would strengthen the book even further and ensure that it garners the wider readership it deserves.
The editors of this volume have written on Central-Eastern European history before (i.e. Jewish Prague, antifascism in the GDR) and the contributors vary from PhD candidates to scholars teaching in the United States and Europe. They include David Tompkins, who published on the subject of music making and reception in Poland and the GDR in the Stalinist era and Mary Neuburger, co-editor of a volume about consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe.[1] The essays contained in this compilation reflect the diversity of their authors' interests and expertise and address a wide array of historical practices in countries of the Soviet bloc that enabled their citizens to create spaces of relative freedom within the confines of the regimes in which they lived. Interestingly enough, many of the authors point out how the regimes themselves, knowingly or inadvertently, provided these opportunities and tried to encourage or control them, depending on the local circumstances and the time period.
The volume edited by Kerstin Jacobsson and Steven Saxonberg contains a collection of studies about the specifics of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and selected social movements in post-communist countries in Europe.
The main aim of the book is to re-examine the notion of NGO-ization, which describes non-profit organizations and civic charities as structured, professional, and dependent on grants. The NGO-ization theory reveals the mechanism of the negative influence of donors on the development of NGOs. After regular financial support the sponsored NGOs usually change their modus operandi, and eventually focus much more on the mining of funds than on social work. On the other hand, they work only when they have the financial resources. This means that NGOs actually become quite addicted to the system of grants, which changes their focus from helping people to fundraising. The idea of NGO-ization is commented on in almost every chapter of the book from various perspectives.
It is no new insight that history is more than the dealings of presidents, kings and prime ministers. Nevertheless, the history of the East-West conflict is still very often a story of high level negotiations and government considerations. Although the interest in the impact that the division of Europe and the enforcement of communism in Eastern Europe has had on society in East and West has gained ground, this kind of research seldom encompasses a view of both sides of the conflict. The importance of the articles in the book Entangled Protest lies in doing exactly this – telling the story of the contact between East and West 'from below'.
The main aim of this collection of essays is to challenge the general Western historical approach to the results of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919. The peace treaty (or, to be more accurate, a number of peace treaties) was signed between Allied and Central Powers and it established a new political order that was to govern European politics for the next twenty years. Essays published in this volume attempt to present a more complex picture of the post-World War I politics. As the authors argue, European peace after the Great War was governed not only by the Treaty of Versailles, but also by the Treaty of Riga signed in March 1921. In other words, Riga played as important a role in the East as Versailles did in the West. The book is not the first attempt to put the Treaty in a wider context. It is rather surprising that the editor of the volume does not mention Traktat ryski roku 1921 po 75 latach (1998), which is an earlier collection of essays edited by Mieczysław Wojciechowski.
B|Orders in Motion in the Video Game Industry: An analysis based on Animal Crossing: New Horizon
(2021)
In 2020, the video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons was listed among the top ten in terms of revenue. We analyze the game by relying on an interdisciplinary framework of border studies. Borders can be interpreted not only in a geographical sense but also in terms of a temporal as well as a cultural dimension. We highlight how the game blurs the borders between the real and virtual world.
Collective review of Rune Ervik; Tord Skogedal Lindén (2013): Making Of Ageing Policy. Theory and Practice in Europe and Sarah Harper, Kate Hamblin (eds.) (2014): International Handbook on Ageing and Public Policy.
In 2013-2014, Edward Elgar published two interrelated books in the fields of social gerontology and public policy. Both books include domestic and cross-national case studies on selected topics that are important for ageing policy. The International Handbook on Ageing and Public Policy edited by Sarah Harper and Kate Hamblin focuses on a global approach towards demographic change. Meanwhile, The Making of Ageing Policy edited by Ervik Rune and Tord S. Lindén brings a closer look at issues, programs, and activities relevant to the ageing policy and its entities, especially in the countries of the European Union (EU) that are still seen as those that have been first to construct positive responses to the ageing population. Although, population ageing has slowed in Europe in recent years, globally it will have a substantial impact in the near future, mainly in Asian countries. Thus, it is necessary to create various programs that will allow societies and economies to adapt to new demographic conditions, among others, in the fields of the labour market, long-term care, social participation of older adults, provision of sustainable pensions for all, and health services.
Tomasz Kamusella's name is definitely known to those interested in language politics and the relation of language to nationalist movements in Central Europe. His 1140-page monograph on that topic, published in 2009, gained positive resonance. [1] Since then he has been actively involved in research on language policy issues in that region with special attention to minority language independence movements, such as the Silesian variety in Poland. [2] Moreover, Kamusella's publications show his deep interest in how state-official languages are shaped and recognized. [3] Therefore, I was not surprised to find his monograph Creating languages in Central Europe during the last millenium which provides an overview of the rise of the multiplicity of languages in a region that might seem insignificant and small on the world scale, but which is a place of a highly convoluted history of population movements, border and power shifts, ethnic mixes and spreads of different religions; a place where dozens of language varieties from several language families meet. [4] Therefore, this 100-page monograph is by necessity only an introduction to the topic, an invitation to learn more about the linguistic history of the region.
The German historian Markus Krzoska, who is an expert on Central European history, presents his postdoctoral thesis with the publication "Ein Land unterwegs: Kulturgeschichte Polens seit 1945" ("A Country on its Way: Cultural History of Poland since 1945"). The book changes the typical focus from confirmed knowledge (p. 13f) in the field of political and economic history towards Polish everyday life, in order to describe therein the "Normal" and the "European" (p. 21). Although research into contemporary history does link the micro and macro perspectives more often, this everyday-life approach has hardly been used in the case of Poland before. The author rightly maintains, that the functioning of a political system can only be understood by also taking into account everyday phenomena (p. 27). For this reason, he directs his attention to transnational-political frames and to small-scale and regional structures. He does so by analyzing "big events", like the accession of Poland to the European Union, but also through questions of lifestyle within village communities. With this broad research approach, Krzoska does not only support the idea of a paradigm shift within the historiography of Central and Eastern Europe, but he himself successfully places another type of "Cultural and Social History" (orig. "andere Kultur- und Gesellschaftsgeschichte", p. 25) in the forefront of his research.
Beth Holmgren's book is a monograph of Helena Modrzejewska/Modjeska (1840-1909), the famous Polish-American stage star. The author's purpose was "to introduce a little-remembered actress to a new American audience" (p. 15). This plan was successfully completed. "Starring Madame Modjeska" is not just a popularized biography but a result of meticulous research and intellectual elaboration. It can be extremely useful for Polish readers (scholars) as it makes use of American resources and a large bibliography inaccessible in Poland. It also presents an analytical rather than simply apologetic attitude, showing a spectrum of roles Modjeska played on- and offstage.
Relying on Maslow's needs-based theory of motivation, we analyze the role of the video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH) in satisfying needs. We use an interdisciplinary framework involving both psychology and gaming. While ACNH creates a virtual world, we highlight its role in satisfying the needs of the real person. In doing so, we reflect on the interdependence between the real world and the virtual one.
The Polish historian Maciej Górny has set his sights on describing the involvement of Central-Eastern European and Balkan intellectuals in the First World War. His book, entitled Wielka Wojna profesorów (The Great War of the Professors), is devoted to this issue. As it turns out, historians have already given much attention to this so-called "war of spirit" („Krieg der Geister"); however, they have so far concentrated on the involvement of Western European scientists. Górny claims that there is a significant gap in this scope and the possibility to compare successfully intellectuals from the Balkans, Central Europe, and Eastern Europe makes this gap even greater. The scientific as well as social status of such intellectuals, related mainly to public respect, allows for such a comparative analysis.
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning is dense. You will probably put it down a couple of times yet pick it up again and again, trying to refocus on the entirety of a colossal tapestry rather than lose yourself in the infinite fine threads that make up the fabric. The interpretative patterns woven are no less complex: multi-layered across local and international settings, with many shades of grey, not white or black. All the same, Snyder's book on the Holocaust remains very readable: it is written with clarity, style, and an inquisitive readership in mind.
The book, based on Marciniak's dissertation in American Studies at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, wants to 'explore the story of how a subculture emerged and evolved over time through the communication of ideas across space' (p. xiii). Her 'two main research questions' (p. xviii) are the depth of US-American influence in Poland, their local 'adjustments' (ibid.), and the 'cultural diffusion' (p. xix) involved. As the title of her work suggests, the perspective is transnational; the author focuses on the exchange of people, concepts, and ideas from the late 1970s to the early 2010s, mainly (but not exclusively) between Poland and the United States. The main part of the book concentrates on developments after 1989; earlier developments are bundled up in shorter introductions of the respective chapters.
In times of 'big choices' to be made (again) in European politics, framed by the manifold challenges– from financial and migration to 'Brexit' and security crises, the policymaker and expert community's attention is drawn 'back to Europe and the EU's neighbourhood'. Tulmets' (2014) richly sourced and thoroughly researched comparative account of East Central European foreign policy identity may well facilitate understanding of CEE countries' past and future choices, particularly with regard to the EU's turbulent neighbourhoods.
Of the myriad ways in which the Soviet Union attempted to exert control over its new vassal states in Eastern Europe after the Second World War, the use of 'soft power' – which US political scientist Joseph Nye described as 'the power of attraction'[1] – is undoubtedly the least studied. It is this topic that Texas-based historian Patryk Babiracki turns his attention to in his first book-length study, which forms part of 'The New Cold War History' series published by the University of North Carolina Press.
Anna Laudau-Czajka's "Polska to nie oni. Polska i Polacy w polskojęzycznej prasie żydowskiej II Rzeczypospolitej" presents a very interesting approach to Jewish-Polish relations in interwar Poland. The book looks at the issues of Polish antisemitism, Jewish patriotism and assimilation by analysing Jewish newspapers published in Polish, making the issue of language the most important element of the study. Landau-Czajka is fully aware of the nuances of Jewish interwar press, understanding the difficulties of her own work and presenting a collection of different case studies that should be treated more as a catalogue of questions than as a list of clear answers (p. 11). She is also aware of the tricky issue of public opinion and the fact that Jewish press published in Polish, though read mostly by acculturated (not assimilated) Jews, cannot be considered as an expression of any universal Jewish perceptions of Poles and Poland (pp. 42-3). It cannot even be considered as an expression of acculturated Jews' opinions, partly because different newspapers presented different opinions, partly because these opinions changed over time.