Thriving, Not Just Surviving in Changing Times: How Sustainability, Agility and Digitalization Intertwine with Organizational Resilience

Nowadays, the buzzwords for organizations to be prepared for the competitive environment’s challenges are sustainability, digitalization, resilience and agility. However, despite the fact that these concepts have come into common use at the level of both scholars and practitioners, the nature of the relation between sustainability and resilience has not yet been sufficiently clarified. Above all, there is still no evidence of what factors determine greater resilience to change in an organization that also wants to be more sustainable, especially in times of crisis and discontinuity. This research aims to explore from a theoretical point of view, through the construction of a conceptual model, how these dimensions interact to help the business to become strategically resilient by leveraging digitization and agility as enablers. A new view of resilience arises from the study, which goes beyond the well-known ability to absorb or adapt to adversity, to also include a strategic attribute that could help companies capture change-related opportunities to design new ways of doing business under stress. A key set of strategically agile processes, enabled by digitalization, creates strategic resilience that also includes a proactive, opportunity-focused attitude in the face of change. Strategic resilience to lead to organizational sustainability must be understood as a multi-domain concept quite similar to the holistic view of sustainability: environment, economy and society. Finally, the research offers a set of propositions and a theoretical framework that can be empirically validated.

Metaphors in Business Applications

Commercial advertisements, social campaigns, and ubiquitous online reviews are a few non-literary domains where creative text is profusely embedded to capture a viewer's imagination. Recent AI business applications such as chatbots and interactive digital campaigns emphasise the need to process creative text for a seamless and fulfilling user experience. Figurative text in human communication conveys implicit perceptions and unspoken emotions. Metaphor is one such figure of speech that maps a latent idea in a target domain to an evocative concept from a source domain. This chapter explores the problem of computational metaphor interpretation through the glass of subjectivity. The world wide web is mined to learn about the source domain concept. Ekman emotion categories and pretrained word embeddings are used to model the subjectivity. The performance evaluation is performed to determine the reader's preference for emotive vs non emotive meanings. This chapter establishes the role of subjectivity and user inclination towards the meaning that fits in their existing cognitive schema.

Introduction of Synesthetic Metaphors in English-Ukrainian Translations of Fiction

Along with the cognitive operations of reconstruction, elimination and substitution of synesthetic metaphors, translational decisions are also based on the cognitive operation of introduction of synesthetic metaphor, which does not exist in the original. The aim of the article is to reveal and describe the cases of introduction of synesthetic metaphors, absent in the original, in the Ukrainian translations of the English text. Synesthetic metaphors are named so, because of the similarity with the phenomenon of synesthesia, which is studied in psychology as the deep interaction of sense organs, in which these organs are "working" together creating a new type of sensibility, named synesthesia. Special feature of such metaphors implies the fact that in contrast to the conceptual metaphors, in which basic domains are the background for the interpretation of the abstract domains, in synesthetic metaphors both source domain/concept and target domain/concept are basic ones, embedded directly into the bodily sensations. Understanding domain we follow R. Langacker, as a concept or conceptual complex of any degree complexity, containing background information, and helping to understand the meaning of the language unit, actualized in the discourse; in other words domains are the background knowledge (basis) for the distinguishing (profiling) of concepts. Domains are distinguished into basic and abstract. Conceptual metaphor we interpred following G. Lakoff, M. Johnsons and Z. Kovecses as the result of the cognitive operation of mapping or projecting, in which abstract conceptual structure (target domain/concept) is identified in terms of concrete (embedded in our bodily experience) mental structure (source domain/concept). Application of methodological tools of conceptual metaphor theory made it possible to reveal synesthetic metaphors, introduced in the translation, based on the following cognitive models: VISION is TOUCH (SENSATION of SHARP SURFACE), HEARING is TOUCH ( SENSATION of DRY/HOT/SOFT SURFACE). Application of operation of introduction of synesthetic metaphor model helps to reveal in translation communicative sense implied by the author of the original.

SQL Query Construction from Ontology Concept Descriptions

Based on the usage of previously proposed database concepts as mapping point to a database in a domain ontology, the present paper describes the process of constructing SQL queries from them. The proposed database concepts allow for the mapping of domain concept to the source of data from a database. The paper describes the process of traversing the class hierarchy in an ontology for gathering these database concepts and constructing the SQL query. The purpose of the constructed SQL query is to obtain data from a database to populate the ontology with instances related to a selected ontology concept. The described process begins with the selection of one ontology concept, obtaining all directly related concepts, filtering and collecting database concepts, and finally constructing the SQL query.

Lexical patterns in customary sayings

Customary sayings are the traditional words delivered in the form of poetry and practiced in various social activities in Negeri Sembilan in marriage, family, criminal law and administration. Sudeen (1995) recorded that studies on customary sayings have been conducted from the early 20th century in the history of custom, marriage system, political system and the dispensation of inheritance.This study examines the content words and function words in customary sayings that have been categorized based on the semantic domain concept by Gliozzo (2006). Based on the content words and function words, this study has identified the customary words in the corpus data. The results show that more function words were used in the customary sayings. However, content words dominated the list of customary sayings, such as Datuk and custom. The function words 'nan' and 'dek' were found in all domains of the study namely, political, social and economic domains. These findings indicate that function words are not only grammatically functional, but also used to give an aesthetic impact through the articulation style of the local dialect. On the other hand, the analysis of the content words shows that the use of customary words is influenced by the environment and culture of Adat Perpatih.

Language shift or maintenance

Pakistan is a multilingual country with six major and over 59 minor languages. However, the languages used by the domains of power, (government, corporate sector, media and education), are English and Urdu. Compared to the other regional languages in Pakistan, the Sindhi language has a more emancipated position in the state-run schools and some other domains. The present study seeks to explore the extent to which the use of Sindhi language has been shifted or maintained, and to survey the patterns of language use in certain domains through Fishman’s domain concept for the determination of language shift within the community concerned. A mixed method data collection including questionnaires and in-depth interviews was conducted to find out whether Sindhis in the Sind province of Pakistan maintain their heritage language in specific domains and to ascertain the impact of Pakistan’s language policy on Sindhi language. The results show that Sindhis in Sindh province fully maintain their language and behold sentimental affiliation with it as part of their cultural identity. The Sindhis have successfully uplifted and maintained their language in education and other vital domains. The Sindhi community enjoys a higher ethno-linguistic vitality than the other ethnic groups in Pakistan.