Klaipėdos universitetas

Spirituality is a basic human drive with diverse forms of expression that make for unique patterns of thinking consonant with an advanced level of cognition and integration of information. The paper features the Humanistic Spirituality Model, which captures the essential dimensions of humanistic spirituality through three components: self-actualisation, transcendence and ultimate meaning in life. The Humanistic Spirituality Inventory (HSI), a measure of spirituality developed on the basis of the Humanistic Spirituality Model, contains three scales corresponding to the three model components. According to the results of the HSI validation study (N = 331), the instrument has good psychometric properties, i.e. adequate content and construct validity as well as satisfactory internal consistency and test-retest reliabilities, which makes it a proper spirituality research measure.

The brand and customer – based brand equity, which can increase consumer benevolence and encourage them to stay loyal to the brand or service provider, can be an important instrument for corporate competition. The aim of this article is to evaluate practical application of the theoretical model of the interfaces between customer – based brand equity and customer loyalty while carrying out the survey of telecommunication consumers. Lithuanian telecommunication market is currently divided by the three main competitors – Telia Lietuva AB, Tele2 JSC and Bitė Lietuva JSC. The brand Telia has been selected for the analysis. The first phase of the survey was carried out in April–May of 2017, and the second phase – in February–March of 2018. The data obtained allows us to test hypotheses about model’s ability to evaluate the competing brands and to compare consumer positions with respect to them at different periods.

History of professional Caritative Social work content reaches back to the beginning of Christian era. The content and basis of Caritative social work reveals the understanding of social dimension and general conceiving of human beings from the Christian perspective. Solidarity and cooperation, caritative attitude, the value of personality, fraternity made Christianity as principally a social religion. The mediating concepts such as subsidiarity, liberty, solidarity, fraternity and equality can be viewed of unity of human kind in Christ. Article deals with Christian heritage of Europe contributing to commonly shared worldview and reveals the role of Caritative social ministry as ethos of Eastern Orthodox Christianity against the Western subjective individualism. The spirit of egalitarianism is deeply embedded in the body and soul of Eastern Christianity. There is no place for race / social discrimination in Eastern Christianity despite of its highly hierarchical structure. Christians still should stay with their civil tasks and obligations through Caritative Social work since their vision of “the self” is social.

The intention is to present original author’s programmes addressed to school-age persons and guardians who wish to improve their parenting skills. The recipients are children and youth from families with alcohol problems as well as their guardians. The problem of alcohol is a deep scratch in the whole family functioning. Unpleasant effects of alcoholism affect all links of the family system. Institutions supporting this type of families respond with an interesting offer of activities the aim of which is gradual overcoming of challenges resulting from the family situation as well as support in full self-expression and improvement of relations with other people through building a strong life base, based on strengths of an individual.

The present paper states that social work constitute at same time a political economy and a critical science. The presentation offers some alternative approaches to social work. Current social work faces resource inequality, vital inequality and existential inequality. These inequalities stem from structural and qualitative societal changes due to an aging population, long-term unemployment, globalization, technology developments, production advances, political conflicts as well as to individualization issues in the society. Consequently, social work’s old research approaches and practical strategies are now ineffective. Social work faces a crisis and must endure a “paradigm shift” to return to its standard science practice. By means of a new paradigm, it is possible to arrive at a novel type of ontopraxeology, at a different ontological and practical understanding of social work, which per se is poor in emphasizing personal service along with its ethical and moral aspects. Problems may be simplified and targeted at individuals and families, at the same time when social and individual lives become more complex. Hereafter, social work must perceive itself as an economic factor as well as a societal resource with political characteristics. By solving conflicts and increasing trust, social work increases social capital and furthers equality.

In this article the efforts of social workers to promote inclusive practices in children day care centres is analysed. Changes in education based on life-long learning culture require active and conscious participation of parents in child’s education process. However, this participation becomes overburden if family is socially excluded because of the deviant lifestyle or poverty. Indeed, practical observations together with results of the studies reveal that the collaboration between social professions, which aim to implement child welfare and parents is insufficient. In order to help these families children day care centres were established. The aim of the article is to reveal how social workers construct professional help with parents on the purpose to help overcoming child’s issues at school. The study is based on hermeneutical methodology. During Soviet period development of child’s skills belonged to the educational institutions outside the family. Research participants still struggles for the ownership of these developments, pushing neglectful parents aside. The research revealed that within transformation process social workers adapts the forms of professional posture, however, the content of their performance is inherited from the past experiences and historical development.

This study discusses discursive representations of the inclusion of people with disabilities. Analysing discourses was conducted in the third phase of the author’s mixed-methods study. The study participants lived in a municipality in Northern Finland and were receiving personal assistance services for persons with disabilities. In the analysis results, the participants did not discuss inclusion in their everyday life using formal inclusion-related concepts. Neither did social workers when writing about the participants in their service plans. The findings illustrate how the everyday discourses usually present the inclusion of people with disabilities through and after first representing their exclusion. Representing inclusion of people with disabilities is vague, however dynamic, as representing could eventually lead to the inclusion in the use of language.

Studies based upon surveys in different countries demonstrate that work-life balance (WLB) is one of important factors of job satisfaction (JS). The present article tries to reveal WLB as a factor of JS in social care services in Lithuania. This sector is interesting due to the fact that personal social services as a separate area of welfare, as well as the profession of social work, was established in Lithuania only after 1990 and, therefore, is little researched. The research findings showed that, if to build upon the overall evaluation approach, WLB is an important factor of JS in social care services in Lithuania. In other words, employees satisfied with WLB in their organisation are more likely to be satisfied with job in general. On the other hand, if to use the components approach, whereby WLB consists of multiple aspects that define the balance and give specific meaning to it, not all WLB factors identified in the research have been found significant for both overall assessment of WLB and JS. Therefore, the overall assessment of WLB does not provide basis to formulate recommendations for improving social policy. This requires creating a framework of WLB that is as detailed and systematic as possible, while restricted list of factors may produce incomplete WLB “picture” within the organisation.

In the article there is analysed the significant historical period in Chile, when after overthrowing of the democratically elected socialist president S. Allende, and taking power by military Pinochet regime, for the first time in the world history there were created the enabling conditions for the reforms based on neoliberal ideas. The reforms in Chile are significant, because they became the political laboratory for the further modernization reforms in Latin America and the whole world. Together with Chicago university (by M. Friedman) educated Chilean economists there were begun to implement the programmes of privatisation, depolitization, deregulation and decentralization, there was devaluated national currency and significantly reformed the spheres of education, health and social policy. In the last part of the article the authors evaluate the present situation in Chile and the perspectives of its development.

The paper develops the insights laid out in the chapter The Trauma of Nation’s De-localisation in the book Dramaturgy of National Identity (2005). In the contemporary world, delocalisation of nations is unavoidable and, in that sense, it represents a natural process of civilisation which reproduces national identity in a transnational form both in the country of emigration and of origin. However, for the nations with an incomplete story of territorial consolidation, the opening up to supra-nationalisation, emigration, and globalisation in general was unexpected and seemed infinite and destructive for the nation. The Lithuanian nation was affected by delocalisation, among other things, primarily by especially large-scale emigration. The nation is losing the feeling of integrity. Just 25 years ago, the ideal of the localisation of the nation – its concentration on a sovereign territory – prevailed. Global life economization, European supra-nationalization, and the failure to successfully complete the post-communist transformation dealt a blow to the national ideal that actualised “one’s own state”. The “breaking up” of the nation was so unexpected that even nationalism did not actualise ethnocentrism. It was expected to be just temporary costs of post-communist transformation. However, presently, we have increasingly more arguments to prove that the post-communist transitional period has expired, therefore, the current trends have long-term prospects. The de-localization of the Lithuanian nation takes place not really as a natural process of civilisation, but rather as a response to the mainly unsuccessful end of post-communism in Lithuania. The situation is to be characterised by the metaphor of trauma. Trauma is experienced at unexpected “discovery” of one’s own ethno-social disability (the term by R. Grigas) when one clings onto the traditional ethnocentric ideal of the nation and is unable to evaluate and project the delocalisation of the nation as a natural process of civilisation. The trauma implies the threat of a break in the building of national identity and the decline of the nation. For the Lithuaniannism to survive, it is necessary to “incorporate” a perspective of the network of its agents, open to transnationalism and stretching all over the world, into the content of the nation.