The Relevance of Relational Ontologies in Driving New Methodological Approaches in Virtual and Digital Contexts

Qualitative methods are traditionally roots in the anthropological person-centered field. In a virtual and digitalized society, the presence and the agency of technology and devices need to be considered as well. The purpose of this chapter is to contribute conceptually to the reflection of a different ontological perspective in qualitative research. After presenting some qualitative methods centered on humanist ontology and its limits in a virtual and digital society, the author explains the interest to adopt relational ontologies to adapt some qualitative methods in order to overcome the previous limits. This chapter deals with emerging qualitative methods linked to relational ontologies that move away from the individualistic vision of the consumer and also focus on the technological object.

Case-Based Reasoning with an Artificial Neural Network for Decision Support in Situations at Complex Technological Objects of Urban Infrastructure

The article considers the tasks of intellectual support for decision support in relation to a complex technological object. The relevance is determined by a high level of responsibility, together with a variety of possible situations at a complex technological facility. The authors consider case-based reasoning (CBR) as a method for decision support. For a complex technological object, the problem defined is the uniqueness of the situations, which is determined by a variety of elements and the possible environmental influence. This problem complicates the implementation of CBR, especially the stages of comparing situations and a further selection of the most similar situation from the database. As a solution to this problem, the authors consider the use of neural networks. The work examines two neural network architectures. The first part of the research presents a neural network model that builds upon the multilayer perceptron. The second part considers the “Comparator-Adder” architecture. Experiments have shown that the proposed neural network architecture “Comparator-Adder” showed higher accuracy than the multilayer perceptron for the considered tasks of comparing situations. The results have a high level of generalization and can be used for decision support in various subject areas and systems where complex technological objects arise.

RESEARCH OF THE CONTENT OF ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN, APPROACHES AND METHODS OF ITS IMPLEMENTATION IN THE ENTERPRISE

Organizational design is currently, to a certain extent, a new direction of research, the goal of combining modern achievements in the field of production organization, design analysis, project management, planning, control and management of organizational behavior to create new competitive organizations or improve (increase the efficiency) of those that are already carrying out business activities. The study of the content of "organizational design" gave grounds to generalize the opinion of scientists and determine that organizational design is an extremely complex process of creating an organization design in which all elements of the system should be optimally combined so that it allows to implement the strategy and achieve the goals of the business entity. This process has its own tasks, subject, object and principles of implementation. It was found that scientists distinguish two groups of approaches to determining the content of the organizational design process: object (information, target, system-target) and subjective (game). Attention is focused on the fact that now in the scientific literature it is most often recommended to use three approaches to organizational design, namely: normative-functional (experimental-statistical, function-oriented), functional-technological (process-technological), object-target (object-synergetic approach), the advantages and disadvantages of each of them are considered. It was found that the methods of organizational design are classified from the standpoint of production (method of analogies, typical design, program-target method, simulation modeling) and from the standpoint of management (method of analogies, expert-analytical, method of structuring goals, organizational design), the advantages of each method are determined. It is noted that domestic scientists agree with the expediency of using the considered methods of organizational design and give a similar description of their content, but divide them into two groups: methods of a qualitative nature (analogy method, method of standard structures, expert-analytical method, method of goal structuring); formalized methods (regression, models, optimization models, organizational modeling).

Inhibitory protection of bearing units of electric motors in animal husbandry

The electric motor is always part of the agricultural production system, in particular the animal production system. Its purpose is to equip a technological object with energy to ensure the functioning of the production process. The weak link of electric motors used in animal production is the bearing assemblies due to their wear in the corrosive environment of the premises used in this industry. The aim of the work was to assess the effect of inhibitory protection on the reliability of the bearing assemblies of electric motors for the conditions of their operation in animal husbandry. A theoretical resource distribution of bearing assemblies was chosen, approximated by the three-parameter Weibull distribution. For two groups of bearing assemblies, with and without inhibitory protection, bench tests were carried out to simulate the conditions of animal husbandry. The distributions of the initial wear rate of bearings and the difference between the limiting and initial wear rates were obtained. Using the theoretical distribution, the parameters of Weibull distribution were established. Their analysis showed that the use of the inhibitor “Prana” increases the durability of bearings by 15%, which indicates the advisability of using this protection in animal husbandry conditions.

Mallarmé’s Digital Demon

How do Mallarmé’s writings speak to the present? To answer this question, this article establishes a dialogue between one of Mallarmé’s early prose poems, ‘Le Démon de l'analogie’, and texts by the contemporary media theorists Mark Hansen, Steven Shaviro and Eugene Thacker. The article argues that Mallarmé’s poem explores how it feels to be a body modulated by code. The poem puts twentieth-century phenomenology with its focus on human perception under pressure, and instead presents a very contemporary view of individuation (subject-formation) as a process that is both thoroughly bound up with the environment, and difficult to comprehend and unify. In a final section, the article considers ‘Le Démon de l'analogie’ in relation to the poet's dream about le Livre, and suggests that Mallarmé’s work as a whole brings together the utopian and the dystopian tendencies that have marked media studies from their inception, and that continue to characterize our relations to the technological object.

AN EVENT MODEL OF THE OPERATION PROCESS OF UNMANNED AIRCRAFT VEHICLES USED IN THE POLISH ARMED FORCES

The article addresses the issue of unmanned aircraft vehicles used in the armed forces of the Republic of Poland as a technological object undergoing the exploitation process in accordance with an event-based exploitation model. The author discusses problems related to the semantics of drones, which, in conjunction with the study of technical documentation and participant observation, allowed to qualify the operating state and determine the exploitation process event model for these devices together with the permitted transitions matrix. The presented results are the basis for further research on the reliability of these systems.

Dialogical selves in action: Movements within and between frames in work meetings

In our article, we present an analysis of work meeting interactions based on Hubert Hermans’ dialogical self theory and Erving Goffman’s frame analysis. Goffman’s approach has similarities with positioning theory and discursive psychology, which have a theoretical link to the dialogical self theory. In our analysis of work meetings, we identified three different frames in which participants discussed the acquisition of a new online text messaging service for the firm for which they worked. These frames were financial, pragmatic–instrumental, and social, all of which constructed different perspectives of the technological object and its use in daily work. Finally, the theoretical and methodological differences of dialogical self theory and frame analysis are outlined. The contribution of this article is two-fold; it illustrates how dialogical self theory and frame analysis provides, first, complementary approaches to social interaction and, second, how they differ in their orientation to the study of social situations.