The Financial Sustainability of Cultural Heritage Reuse Projects: An Integrated Approach for the Historical Rural Landscape

In the last decades, the growing concern about land consumption, together with the awareness about cultural heritage’s key role for sustainable development, has led to greater attention to cultural property reuse as a conscious process of new values production. However, decisions about heritage bring a high degree of complexity, related to the need to preserve properties’ values and fulfill protection legislation, thus bringing high cost, which discourages public and private investments for reuse interventions. In this context, it becomes urgent to support reuse decisions through proper evaluation methodologies that, dealing with the complexity of interests at stake, allow individuals to assess the financial sustainability of conscious cultural heritage reuse projects. For these reasons, the paper proposes a methodological framework that, grounded on the recognition of cultural properties’ values and their possible integration in the local economic system, assesses reuse projects’ financial sustainability. This methodology’s application is discussed through a case study, represented by a project for a historical rural landscape in Pantelleria island. The application to the case study allows us to discuss the role of the proposed evaluation framework in supporting and promoting cultural heritage reuse and its possible room for improvement.

Finding the Drastic: Exploring Forms of Attention in Piano Performance

<p>While Carolyn Abbate’s essay “Music – Drastic or Gnostic” sets provocative parameters for considering performance, she also makes a bold stand on the mutual exclusivity of the knowing or gnostic mind and active or drastic body in performance. Abbate suggests that when one is involved in the real-time experience of music (i.e. performance) there is no room for thought because conceptual awareness interrupts the real-time experience. Thus, drastic precludes gnostic. Yet many performers speak about the need to negotiate a balance between mind and body in performance. This implies that an imbalance can occur in either direction, that over-thinking the execution is not conducive to flow but that the ultimate experience of the music ‘playing itself’ may also incur an undesirable sense of not being in conscious control. This paper aims to explore the limits of a gnostic approach and the parameters for a drastic performance. My own experience has demonstrated the ways in which too much conscious control - or rather, too much conscious attention on certain tactile aspects of playing - can end up hampering the physical execution. Indeed, Science Daily has summarised recent research in the Journal of Neuroscience that confirms scientifically that over-thinking can be detrimental to performance. Implicit memory (unconscious and expressed by means other than words) and explicit memory (which is conscious and can be described in words) each operate from different parts of the brain; and the implication is that physical performance in most cases requires the deployment of implicit as well as explicit memory. For a pianist, in other words, on the one hand the ‘action’ must become instinctive at some point because one’s attention cannot focus simultaneously on the fingers prior to every sound and on the sound itself. On the other hand, it is also not desirable simply to deliver the action to some level of drastic, or pure ‘doing’ (as the ancient meaning of the word suggests), even to a meta-drastic point where the music ‘plays itself’. Thus it would seem that Abate’s stipulation gnostic or drastic requires further reflection. Through my critical analysis of this discussion, I would like finally to be able to redress the balance between a gnostic and drastic approach in my own performance. Resituating the mind-body balance itself requires a shift in consciousness: a shift that effectively distracts me from overt tactile awareness and places my foreground attention to sound. This shift, ironically, requires an immense conscious effort: in other words, my shift towards the drastic is launched by the gnostic. Through documenting the process of my own journey from gnostic/explicit performance to drastic/implicit performance, I will propose that a specific balanced blend is ideal: that is, I need to move from a cognitive or conscious process that focuses on physical aspects of performance, in order to bring an unfettered consciousness of sound to the foreground attention. If I can suppress my conscious attention to the kinetics of playing the piano and this very suppression permits a focus on sound itself, will that be a shutting down of one kind of excessive cognitive effort and signal a release of the drastic, or simply resituate the gnostic? For myself, finding my way to trusting a drastic approach and yet balance it with a gnostic input is imperative if I am to find music making a pleasure.</p>

Finding the Drastic: Exploring Forms of Attention in Piano Performance

<p>While Carolyn Abbate’s essay “Music – Drastic or Gnostic” sets provocative parameters for considering performance, she also makes a bold stand on the mutual exclusivity of the knowing or gnostic mind and active or drastic body in performance. Abbate suggests that when one is involved in the real-time experience of music (i.e. performance) there is no room for thought because conceptual awareness interrupts the real-time experience. Thus, drastic precludes gnostic. Yet many performers speak about the need to negotiate a balance between mind and body in performance. This implies that an imbalance can occur in either direction, that over-thinking the execution is not conducive to flow but that the ultimate experience of the music ‘playing itself’ may also incur an undesirable sense of not being in conscious control. This paper aims to explore the limits of a gnostic approach and the parameters for a drastic performance. My own experience has demonstrated the ways in which too much conscious control - or rather, too much conscious attention on certain tactile aspects of playing - can end up hampering the physical execution. Indeed, Science Daily has summarised recent research in the Journal of Neuroscience that confirms scientifically that over-thinking can be detrimental to performance. Implicit memory (unconscious and expressed by means other than words) and explicit memory (which is conscious and can be described in words) each operate from different parts of the brain; and the implication is that physical performance in most cases requires the deployment of implicit as well as explicit memory. For a pianist, in other words, on the one hand the ‘action’ must become instinctive at some point because one’s attention cannot focus simultaneously on the fingers prior to every sound and on the sound itself. On the other hand, it is also not desirable simply to deliver the action to some level of drastic, or pure ‘doing’ (as the ancient meaning of the word suggests), even to a meta-drastic point where the music ‘plays itself’. Thus it would seem that Abate’s stipulation gnostic or drastic requires further reflection. Through my critical analysis of this discussion, I would like finally to be able to redress the balance between a gnostic and drastic approach in my own performance. Resituating the mind-body balance itself requires a shift in consciousness: a shift that effectively distracts me from overt tactile awareness and places my foreground attention to sound. This shift, ironically, requires an immense conscious effort: in other words, my shift towards the drastic is launched by the gnostic. Through documenting the process of my own journey from gnostic/explicit performance to drastic/implicit performance, I will propose that a specific balanced blend is ideal: that is, I need to move from a cognitive or conscious process that focuses on physical aspects of performance, in order to bring an unfettered consciousness of sound to the foreground attention. If I can suppress my conscious attention to the kinetics of playing the piano and this very suppression permits a focus on sound itself, will that be a shutting down of one kind of excessive cognitive effort and signal a release of the drastic, or simply resituate the gnostic? For myself, finding my way to trusting a drastic approach and yet balance it with a gnostic input is imperative if I am to find music making a pleasure.</p>

Social Awareness and Responsibility in Context of Polish Service Companies

Companies operating on the market have to cope with a variety of crisis situations which may adversely affect their development and jeopardise the achievement of their objectives. A crisis situation may, on the one hand, have a negative impact on the development of the company, but, on the other hand, it may provide a stimulus and have a constructive effect on its functioning. One of the factors influencing the ability to function of a business, including crisis situations, is its organisational culture. Therefore, a company responding to the situation should assess the conditions both in its environment and inside it and verify the artefacts, the system of values and the main principles that are the basis for building an organisational culture. Many companies that are dealing with a crisis situation decide to undertake a conscious process of cultural transformation. However, it requires the management to take appropriate actions and the time of a crisis situation is a test for many companies – whether in such a difficult moment something can still be done with the organisational culture, or whether the entrepreneurs can only wait for its inevitable impact on the functioning of the company. The subject of this article is the impact of a crisis situation on changes occurring within the organisational culture. The study attempts to evaluate the role of organizational culture in crisis situations based on the current state of knowledge and crisis events related to COVID-19.

History of the In-Between: World Literature and the Contemporary African Novel

The African novel has had an uneasy relationship with world literature, but a way to locate the historical novel in world literature lies in the emphatic turn of African fiction to the historical novel. Positing a temporality of a decolonization not yet achieved, the contemporary African novel returns to the particulars of national histories to explain change that has remained unacknowledged or misrepresented for political reasons. It grapples with the writing of history as a conscious process of what Edward W. Said describes as “textualization”: a narration that stresses voice and style in order to convey the particularity of historical circumstance, not as reportage but as lived experience. The world making of world literature comes into play as historical becoming revealed in the retrospective account conscious of the conditions of its own telling.

Incremental approach to regional strategising: Theory, methodology, practices

The relevance of the study stems from the growing importance of the strategic approach in governance, insufficient involvement of various groups of stakeholders in regional development strategising, and the lack of uniform methodologies to the formulation of a region’s strategy for socioeconomic development. The paper researches into the incremental approach to regional strategising. The methodological basis rests on the theoretical concepts of strategic management, regional economics, and political science. The key feature of the incremental approach is the formulation and implementation of a strategy for socioeconomic development of a territory as a gradual, step-by-step, conscious process that ensures continuous improvement of the existing mechanisms and their timely revision, as well as allows adjusting strategic actions and making necessary manoeuvres. The research relies on a comprehensive analysis of the strategies for socioeconomic development of the subjects of the Russian Federation by stages of the strategic management cycle with use of dialectical, causal, and expert evaluation methods. The theoretical significance of the study lies in providing the rationale behind adopting the incremental approach in regional strategising that is due to its ability to increase the likelihood of reaching a consensus between stakeholders, as well as to reduce the risk of making subjective suboptimal managerial and strategic decisions. The practical significance of the paper arises from evaluation of regional strategies and methods of strategising, breaking them down into their basic components (environmental analysis, goals, priorities, mechanisms of implementation and control), and identifying their distinctive features that are typical of the incremental approach.

Automaticity in Political Decision Making

Rather than being a slow, deliberative, and fully conscious process, political thinking is steeped in automaticity: that is, it is fast, relatively effortless, and often unconscious. Political and social psychologists have made great strides in measuring different components of this automaticity while pinpointing its influence on different types of citizens under a variety of social and political circumstances. There are manifold ways through which automaticity seeps into political cognition by focusing on various important domains of political decision-making, including intergroup relations, identity and information processing, and candidate evaluation. Multiple research frontiers in political science exist where automaticity can help break new conceptual and theoretical ground as it relates to people’s thinking, judgment, and evaluation of politics.

Having a Say

Under the chaotic and insufferable conditions of war, the Okinawans fled their homes and struggled for survival without food, water, or shelter. In their desperate travels, the Okinawans had numerous encounters with the Japanese military, sometimes seeking out the troops for protection. Most encounters, however, ended in violence and brutality. Shaken by the dissonance between the rhetoric of indoctrination and the acts of cruelty that demonstrated an abandonment of the preached ideals of shared nationhood, the Okinawans processed the duplicity of the Japanese by practically pursuing methods to ensure survival and by re-evaluating their own identity. The population began to question their commitment to Japan and their identity as Japanese subjects. The Okinawans actively reconstructed an identity to improve their situation. Through conscious process and interaction with both the Japanese and Americans, they came to a collective identity as Okinawan.

Experiences and Strategies Influencing Older Adults to Continue Playing Walking Football

Adults aged 55+ years are most likely to be inactive, despite research suggesting that older adults experience multiple benefits when participating in physical activity and sport. Limited research focuses on long-term continuation of sport participation in this population, especially in “adapted sports” like walking football. This study explored the experiences of walking football maintenance in 55- to 75-year-old players. Semistructured interviews were conducted, with 17 older adults maintaining walking football play over 6 months. The inductive analysis revealed five higher-order themes representing maintenance influences and two higher-order themes relating to maintenance mechanisms (i.e., the conscious process by which players maintain). Influences when maintaining walking football included individual- and culture-level influences (e.g., perceived benefits of maintenance and ability acceptance). Maintenance mechanisms included cognitions and behaviors (e.g., scheduling sessions and redefining physical activity expectations). Findings highlight novel implications for policy and practice, which are important to consider when delivering walking football to older adults.