Marta Szeluga-Romańska

Friendship, a mutual and profound relationship, permeates history of human culture and occurs in all social situations, including professional and informal human activities. In organizations, it devel­ops through processes of communication and generates a communication culture of kindness and support. Organizational friendship enhances work engagement and satisfaction, as well as helps to promote individual ends. This article investigates the more vital significance of friendship in alter­native organizations. Such organizations, operating at the margins of the currently dominant profit-oriented business model, offer a plethora of insights of possible structures and practices. Our ethno­graphic qualitative research shows the implications of workplace friendship as organizing principle. It helps to make organizations more humane, and redressed the moral imbalance, so prevalent in contemporary organizing and management. This has important implications for any kind of com­munication, creating social awareness around important themes related to management and organ­izations. Patterns of friendship are meaningful for organizing and organizations and their most vi­tal significance concerns the area of social communication.

JEL: Z130

A Library in a New World or a New World in a Library?

Due to the profound changes in the modern world, the role of a contemporary library is also not what it used to be. The paper presents new various roles fulfilled by libraries in the 21st century, showing that, in the current reality, measuring the effectiveness of a library only quantitatively oversimplifies the issue and does not do justice to the socially complex function of this cultural institution. Based on the quantitative and qualitative research, the author attempts to specify certain elements of the future role of a library, indicate how the library performance evaluation systems should be improved, and suggest his own original method of measuring the library total value and performance.

Professionalization of the Journalist Profession in the Context of Media Convergence

The aim of this article is to broaden the current knowledge about changes in the profession of a journalist caused by the digitization and convergence of the media. The authors carried out surveys among journalists, exploring issues related to their opinion on professionalization, the process of changes in the media as well as opportunities and threats indicated by new media.