Our Take: The East Bloc
Russia and China are fast becoming the UN’s main arbiters of human rights issues at Europe’s expense.
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Russia and China are fast becoming the UN’s main arbiters of human rights issues at Europe’s expense.
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“The love for the human being” has always been an attribute of God, the great philanthropist. As a practice in the Church it finds its origins in the earthly practice of Jesus Christ. His ministry was a continuous example of care, healings, and the natural outcome of the divine mercy toward our afflicted human nature. After resurrection, He gave His disciple the commandment of love to one another as the foundation of Christian identity. Love can go as far as putting someone’s live for the neighbor. It is the Church that was created out of His sacrificial love the one to continue practice in the world empathy for the disadvantaged, the needy and the abandoned, the elderly and the forgotten. In God’s love there is a place for everybody, this is what the Church has always taught. The present study is both a description of the preoccupation that the Orthodox Church has for the social work and a historical and sociological survey of what has been done and how much more is still to complete. It is therefore important to approach with kindness and responsibility every single member of the community, and provide care through compassion, charity, responsibility in a changing and globalizing world.
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Through this study, I did not intend to achieve introspection on the historic evolution of the monachism or of the notions of “monk”, “nun” etc., but on the complex issue inferred by the monastic life. It is a known fact that orthodox spirituality has a universal character, to which spirituality – i.e. the entirety of the spiritual, monastic life – belongs. I believe that a few clarifications regarding this life desired by some men are quite opportune, especially in the social, political and religious context we are living in.
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Russia’s Empress, Catherine II, also called “thre Great” (1762-1796), after she consolidates her rule at the domestic level, when she implicates her preference for some of the principles of the enlightened despotism, quite fashionable in Western Europe, resumes with new means and under new circumstances the path of the Russian expansion towards South. After the glorious military successes in the war with the Turks between 1769-1774, she will draw up a “Greek project”, aiming at releasing Constantinople from the Ottoman yoke, and installing here a Slav Emperor; the United Romanian Principalities were meant to form the “Kingdom” of Dacia. The plan, in which the Tsarina tries to attract Emperor Joseph II of Austria (together with whom she fights the Turks in 1787-1792) will fail, but at the time Catherine II dies, the Russian Empire’s frontiers were already extended up to the Dniester and the Black Sea. Under these circumstances, the situation of the Orthodox Church in the Romanian Principalities (under Ottoman rule, but enjoying a large autonomy) is an extremely difficult one. Thus, the military conflicts taking place on the Romanian territory often affect the church governing process, they raise internal organization problems and problems related to the fostering of natural relations with other ecclesiastic Orthodox structures (on the territory of the great rival powers other Orthodox Churches display their activities, with which the Church of the Romanian Principalities is in liturgical communion and canonic and disciplinary unity). One could also notice the weight of the cultural currents promoted by the Church: the one resorting to some of the principles of the enlightened despotism, the movement of spiritual renaissance initiated by Saint Paisius Velichkovsky (1722-1794), the hegumen of the monastery of Neamţ, as well as the one developed at the monastery of Putna, nourishing the attachment to the Orthodox values and the interest for the Romanian historical past (obliging the descendents to carry on the inheritance).
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The Hebrew Bible uses more words to express the feeling of love. Sometimes the words used have different meanings and they can cover a great semantic area: love, mercy, kindness, and compassion. The most used Hebrew words are ahab and hesed, and each of them refers to a different kind of love. Also, each is related with human and divine love.
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Starting from a comparison of three narratives of Acts 1-5 (The choice of Matthaias; The Pentecost narrative; Ananias and Saphira) with essenian parallels, the author goes on with archeological considerations that can corroborate Essenian influences upon the primitive Church of Jerusalem. He concludes that taking into account the Essenian movement and its writings is essential in order to get a better understanding of the early Christian movement, particularly of the primitive Church of Jerusalem.
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Among Luke’s theological themes developed in Gospel, wealth and stewardship are joined in two parables founded in Lk 16: unjust manager and poor man Lazarus. Both stories show the manner of conversion terrestrial wealth and stewardship into spirituals gifts prepared to heavenly life. The dishonored manager use the economic strategy of conversion the debts, so debtors and master appreciate his shrewd in the energetic planning with respect to one’s physical resources. Eschatological dimension implied in Lk 16: 14-18 is enchained with parable of Rich man and poor Lazarus. This second story that have two sequences - terrestrial and celestial – point that proud, stored up treasures on earth doesn’t inherit happiness and comfort in heaven world. In afterlife existence God positively reward the spiritual and social goodness and negatively reward the self-satisfaction suite with blind to divine revelation. Luke propose the pattern of stewardship with eschatological dimension and a shrewd conversion of terrestrial wealth in human lovely sentiment.
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An important element of the assessment of the quality of service of chronically ill patients is to identify their unmet needs, expectations and experiences with health care in chronic conditions. For this purpose qualitative studies have been applied. Qualitative study included focused group interview in the form of an open discussion with chronic patients. The main objective of this paper is to present the use of focus groups to identify the attributes of service quality of chronically ill patients.
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The article aims to show the application of the focus group interview method (FGI) in the research of the young-adults behaviors on the market for financial services. The author presents the advantages and disadvantages of the method illustrated with his own research conducted in October 2013 on two groups of respondents representing young-adults of the Silesian Voivodeship. With the use of this method it was possible to get much information about the nature of the phenomenon examined and to prepare the scope of quantity research.
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The ongoing changes in consumers’ behaviour rise the need to construct new business models on one hand, and on another market research needs to be performed in an innovative way in order to identify new trends in consumption. The position of the respondent of the research process is also changing: the respondent becomes a partner in creating offers. Research which the results can be basis for building new marketing models of business requires recognition of cultural codes and a holistic view of the research and often the use of different approaches and research methods. Ethnographic and semiotic research programs are among others applied in this area.
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The article presents the possibilities of using a case study to acquire knowledge about the changes in consumers’ purchasing behaviour. A case study methodology based on the triangulation of data and research methods is classified into the research strand of an interpretative approach, which is different from a normative approach. The article describes basic guidelines of the interpretative approach and its application in the study of purchasing behavior changes in consumers acculturation.
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In the article the author presents results of the primary research conducted among the group of over 1000 clients of shopping centers located in Lublin. The analyses which were carried out allowed to construct the path relation model of the process of building customer satisfaction and loyalty on the analyzed market. Obtained data show how clients evaluate value of the offer of separate shopping centers located in Lublin. What is more they additionally prove that every shopping center possesses different set of key success factors which are the main determinants of decision making process on the market.
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This article discusses some of theoretical and empirical evidence of value obtained from investing in product innovation process improvement and introduction of a product on the market using the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and SGMM (Smart Grid Maturity Model). Business drivers for process improvement and some challenges in organization change are described, along with data on the impact on the new product success of achieving the five maturity levels in the CMM. From an executive perspective, the crucial point is that the continual improvement depends on systematically addressing the problems facing the organization − regardless of the improvement framework selected in the product innovation process − irrespective of the chosen structure improvements..
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The objective of the article is to present the results of applied multiple correspondence analysis procedure (MCA) (known as the analysis of homogeneity − HOMALS) in the context of development of a synthetic scale, representing the latent variable that was based on the consumers’ personal hedonic values. This procedure was also applied in the analysis in order to find the optimal quantification of particular categories of the qualitative observed variables. All the results obtained have been interpreted in the context of empirical possibilities of scaling consumers’ personal values.
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A group interview (its classical form, i.e. interview in which there is a direct contact between respondents and moderator) is the main method employed in qualitative marketing research. Therefore it is not surprising that most cases of transferring the qualitative research methods to the virtual space precisely concern the method of group interview. The author of the article notices that as a result of these attempts this method, however, loses (to a much greater extent than the IDI method which is moved to the Internet) a lot of its key attributes which determine the specificity of the method and its belonging to the categories of group interviews and qualitative research methods (and in the case of its two types based on written communication, it seems they lose even crucial attibutes to call them an interview).
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The paper characterizes the consumers’ attitudes and analyzes functions and their measures. It shows a role of Fishbein model in the consumers’ attitudes analyses. The work presents problems of research of consumers’ attitudes on example the market of green products.
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Continuing growth in the number of interview surveys conducted online results in the decreasing survey response rates. Already huge and still growing non-response error is a serious concern for online researchers, as it affects population coverage and may lead to biased results. In this article a few factors that affect response rates in online surveys have been investigated, especially with regard to surveying companies. These include social proof and influence, authority (academic survey affiliation), and survey topic scope and salience. The obtained results of the two-phase experiment show that informational content of e-mail invitations may significantly increase and decrease the response rate in online surveys.
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The article presents the problem of triangulation of methodological approaches in the research field of marketing. There are presented the theoretical and methodical aspects considering the scope and components of the methodological approaches’ integration and proposals how to conduct an analysis of research projects’ triangulation. This article presents the results of the analysis of the scale and areas of triangulation in scientific marketing research published in the journal “Marketing i Rynek” in the years 2012-2013. The analysis indicated that the triangulation of methodology is used rarely as a research orientation, but it is applied. We can also find many examples of different types of triangulation in terms of NK Denzin.
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Social media are currently the field of marketing research in three main areas: site-centric, user-centric and quality-centric. These studies are an extremely important source of information especially about the behavior of consumers and their needs. In addition, the research in the area of site-centric and quality-centric allows to adjust service area managed by the company to meet the needs of Internet users in order to increase conversions and interactivity in communication. The paper presents selected methods of marketing survey on the Internet and in social media on the example of the social networking site Facebook.
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Social innovation is not a new phenomenon. It has existed and developed for a century. It changes with socio-economic development. Particularly large changes in its content and meaning are taking place today. Social innovation, like other types of innovation, is a pro-development factor. The awareness of this makes it more widely regarded as a factor of development of innovative economy and an innovative society. Its share in shaping this development has remarkably increased. This in turn contributes to the increase in demand for information and marketing research. The article shows the relationship between the development of social innovation and the use of marketing research.
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