Digital Transformation of Consumer Engagement by Sustainable Communication Tools

The Sustainable Development Goals by United Nations is one of the leading challenges of our world today. The common goal is to achieve a globally collaborative sustainable movement for reducing the harmful effects of climate change and its social consequences. Technology, communication, and collaboration are the pivot components of these targets and the continuing discussion of sustainable communication. Within this scope, the chapter discusses the role of sustainable communication for creating communicative action in the aspect of marketing communications. The chapter explains the role of packaging in terms of building emotional bond between the brand and consumer and offers a new communication perspective building brand purpose by using new technology-based packaging systems by giving some examples. The chapter aims to contribute to studies on Marketing 5.0 and sustainable communication beside starting a discussion for professionals on focusing the role of eco-friendly and communicative packages.

REQUEST AS ONE OF THE SPEECH GENRES OF RELIGIOUS COMMUNICATION

The article is devoted to the study of such a speech genre as a request, which is actively used in interpersonal religious communication. The material for the study was the prayers, psalms of King David and the Book of Proverbs of Solomon, which are based on this form of communication. The study shows that the request belongs to the imperative speech genres, is an independent type of motivation, and has a set of specific properties. The specific situation of communication determines the choice of language forms of expression of the semantics of the request, and the addresser's intentions, which are implemented in it, make it possible to distinguish several types of requests. Statements have a spiritual component and are dialogical in nature. Their context directs the addressee to perform a post-communicative action, which is directly related to the addresser's desire to satisfy the necessary request. The paper uses a communicative-pragmatic approach, which allows us to explore the speech genre, taking into account all possible language means, special properties, aimed at implementing the semantics of the request in a communication situation. The results of the study are important for understanding the essence of religious communication.

La evaluación de lo público: prácticas y comunicación en las instituciones públicas costarricenses / Evaluation of public matters: practices and communication in Costa Rican public institutions

The evaluation was not until a little more than two decades ago a relevant matter for public activity, concentrated in execution and guided by intuition, public approval or some data to record success in government work. This story has changed due to an increasingly demanding national and international context requiering transparency of public actions, efficiency in activities that each government in turn prioritizes, and of course, the effectiveness of what is proposed. The practice of evaluation in the Costa Rican state system is governed by an exhaustive normative and procedural framework. However, this platform has not necessarily ruled the execution of communication in the institutions. According to a study performed out in Costa Rican institutions between 2019-2020, first with a mapping of the communication units carried out with a survey (43) examining their operation, projects they execute and some evaluation practices they carry out; lack of rigorous evaluation practices were identified. Furthermore, these units there has no obligation to carry out operational planning of their annual activities, to apply systematic evaluations, nor are they obliged to prepare reports on the work carried out. Subsequently, an inquiry was conducted through interviews (22) with planning heads of the institutions and governing bodies to learn about the evaluation regulations, the formats and platforms used, inter-institutional link for evaluation and the scope of the mandatory nature of this function. The results suggest that the praxis of the units is dominated by the macro-institutional planning exercise that uses matrices and quantitative formats that record compliance but do not evaluate effects, changes, or impact of their activities, which reduces visibility of the public value provided by state sector, and to which is also added the work accomplish by the communication units. The true evaluation in the State is limited to a few government projects registered within the National Development Plan and not to a daily action in the entire state system. Some of the planning offices even indicate that neither planning, and even less evaluation, constitute a resource that is considered as strategic, conversely, they are seen more as an operational, compliance and organization resource, and for the different areas the filling of matrices and formats to record the execution of their tasks is an additional burden. In fact, one of the difficulties raised by these offices is the planning of their annual programs with objectives that can be evaluated, a position that is also recognized by the Contraloria General de la Republica (Comptroller General of the Republic), which indicates the absence, in a relevant percentage, of objectives in public institution programs. For the communication units, this set of practices produces inertia in the communicative action, little or no influence of the communication units in the institutional decision-making process, and an operational focus on execution, which reduces their strategic role. It is also clear that there is a predominance in the use of techniques and tools for reporting results in communication that does not correspond to evaluation, measurement is used with greater emphasis, and even in some cases the use of reportings which not apply to neither of the two processes.

Public Councils as a Legal Form of Partnership between the State and Its Citizens

Today, the existence of every society and every state is marked with the presence of generally accepted phenomena that radically distinguish the legal status of an individual from his ancestors, who lived hundreds or even thousands of years ago. These phenomena are: democracy, legal society, human rights, good governance, participatory democracy, etc. The study of legal relations between an individual or a group of individuals and the state, represented by the system of government in one form or another, has been carried out by a large number of well-known legal scholars, sociologists, political scientists, and economists, all of whom offered numerous theoretical concepts, represented different scientific schools, and worked in various fields of research. The basic issue they have been trying to solve both in the past and at present is how an individual citizen or a group of individuals can influence the decision-making processes of public authorities that affect the interests of each of them. It turned out that the institutions we are aware of (like those of political parties, public organizations, unions) are not the only legal forms of association of the country citizens who seek to exercise public power and represent the interests of certain groups of their compatriots. The active changes that took place in the world after the Second World War, as well as the emergence of the third generation of human rights were a logical continuation of the growing influence of liberal ideas and views, which proved the existence of new scientific alternatives, ideas and concepts for developing the theory of deliberative democracy. The latter’s main objective was the idea of citizens’ active involvement in decision-making by the authorities and local governments, which consequently led to the phenomenon of public-private partnership. The article under discussion contains a legal analysis of the institution of public councils as one of the legal forms of such interaction through the theory of communicative action. At the same time, the paper will contain an attempt to analyze the current Ukrainian legislation that determines and regulates the legal status of public councils. This will enable to draw conclusions about the level of involvement of citizens in the decision-making process. In addition, the article will lay particular emphasis on a study of the already established and existing public councils in Ukraine, as well as will identify the positive and negative aspects of their activities, which will help to work out the problematic aspects of their legal status and offer practical ways to eliminate them.

Transformative Communication Radar: Practices, Action and Praxis Communication in Solidarity Economy Networks in Portugal and Catalonia

This article explores the transformational character of solidarity economy network communication in Portugal and Catalonia, focusing on the first two months of the crisis brought on by COVID-19. We assume that what these networks choose to convey (or remain silent on) in their public communications reflects their positions in the fields of action and values and their theoretical alignment, establishing an ethico-political orientation. Through the analysis of virtual content conveyed by solidarity economy organisations, we analyse the topics covered, the types of content and sources cited, and the level of demand in the discourse, as well as their individual, institutional and collective character. The results reveal very different communicative approaches in each of the cases analysed: from silence or total absence of communicative practices to what can be considered a transformational praxis communication, based on collective action challenging the structures of power and domination and pointing out ways to overcome them. The article proposes a transformative communication radar linking Habermas’s theory of communicative action and Fuchs’s Marxist-inspired praxis communication concept, as a way of distinguishing merely instrumental communicative approaches from those guided by communicative and cooperative rationality driving new agreements and societal transformations.

LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION AND PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

The author argues that understanding crisis phenomena in an education system, as well as conditions of upgrading this system, is connected with development of a philosophy of education focused on such categories as language and communication. The heuristic and productive nature of theory of communicative action and hermeneutics is shown while comprehending the specific nature of learning environment where a pedagogical interaction between a teacher and students is carried out. Taking into account the ideas of J. Habermas, H. G. Gadamer and L. Wittgenstein, it is shown that education is a process of human development if it is organised as a process of searching for and generating meanings by the students. This educational process model corresponding to essential human need for self-understanding and self-expression.

Semantic-pragmatic potential of reports of refusal of communication in the roman of E. Vodolazkin “Lavr”

The semantic and pragmatic potential of statements of refusal to communicate allows shedding light on the peculiarities of the phenomenon of silence, identifying its varieties, the specifics of manifestation in the Russian linguistic picture of the world and analyzing the functionality as part of a literary text. The concept of “refusal to communicate” is a broader phenomenon than the actual speech genre of refusal, since refusal as such implies a negative reaction only to initial motivational responses, while refusal of communication can become both a reaction to any statement or not be reactive at all, that is, to be the initial remark in the dialogue. The peculiarity of statements with the semantics of silence is manifested in the fact that their illocutionary goal is the impossibility or unwillingness to continue communication and is achieved using various linguistic means, first of all, lexemes denoting the speaking process, as well as modal modifiers expressing the reason for such speech behavior. The differences between speech genres, which are based on rejection, lie in the very object of rejection, in what the speaker rejects. In the Russian linguistic picture of the world, silence is characterized by the fact that it is a communicative action, it consists not in the absence of speech, but in the transmission of information in a non-verbal way. In this case, it is called communicatively meaningful silence. The analysis of the lexical structure of E. Vodolazkin’s novel “Laure” made it possible to identify important fragments of the text associated with silence, to obtain information about the author’s worldview and his attitude to the phenomenon of silence.

Keeping the personality in the information societies

The purpose of the paper is to define how the sociopolitical thought of J. Habermas – his theory of communicative action and the concept of deliberative democracy – guarantees the protection and keeping of an independent human personality in modern information societies. In order to solve this problem, the author seeks to determine what is meant by a “personality”. Analyzing this issue, the author distinguishes two different understandings of a personality among J. Habermas’s works: philosophical-personalistic and public-sociological. When integrating these understandings, the author gives an original socio-philosophical definition of a personality, in which the personality retains both individualistic and social traits. It is especially emphasized that for the affirmation of the personality and his/her development, an equal, subject-subject dialogue with Others is necessary. The paper reveals that the development of personality, first of all, is interrelated with the maintenance of a cultural, normative and valuable “life-world”, which is violated by the mechanisms of systematic technocratic regulation in modern times, in a society. The principles of this regulation are justified in a system-functional approach. The advantages of J. Habermas’s approach, capable of ensuring the development of a genuine normative essence of personality, are determined

‘Decolonising’ the clinical encounter via multi-criteria decision support (Preprint)

UNSTRUCTURED According to researchers drawing on the ideas of Jürgen Habermas, Canadian patients and Danish General Practitioners are experiencing ‘colonisation’ of their ‘lifeworlds’ by ‘the system’, Their suggested remedy is to ensure that the clinical encounter, freed of strategic rationality, re-prioritises Habermasian ‘communicative action’ aimed at mutual understanding. However, Blau shows that such communicative action is, and should be, inextricably interwoven into means-end rationality, when Habermas’ caricature of the latter is rejected. We argue that the decision support framework provided by Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis can help produce the ‘communicative means-end rationality’ essential in a public health service based on role-respecting sincerity and autonomy. No ‘positivistic reduction’ is involved in the technique.