Corporate Culture and Its Connection with External and Internal Public Relations

The main aim of this article is to present the influence of corporate culture on company's stakeholders. This paper signalises the tendency in corporate communication with its internal and external publics. It is focused on two issues: corporate social responsibility and employer branding. Those two categories are consequences of corporate culture model.Głównym celem artykułu jest zaprezentowanie wpływu jaki wywiera charakter kultury korporacyjnej na związanych z przedsiębiorstwem interesariuszy (stakeholders). W artykule zasygnalizowane zostały główne tendencje wyznaczające charakter komunikacji między organizacją a jej wewnętrznym i zewnętrznym otoczeniem. Tekst koncentruje się na dwóch kwestiach: społecznej odpowiedzialności przedsiębiorstwa (corporate social responsibilty) i budowanie wizerunku pracodawcy (employer branding), które zaprezentowane zostały jako efekty określonego modelu kultury organizacyjnej

The Persistence and Interaction of Multi-Ethnic Settlement Remnants in The Cultural Landscape

The paper deals with remnants of multi-ethnic settlement: their form, interaction and persistence. In the past, the Podlasie region, situated in northeastern Poland, was an area of multi-ethnic settlement. The interaction of cultures brought the emergence of a new, borderland culture. As the years have passed, the memory of the sources of regional and local traditions has disappeared. Elements of ethnic and religious traditions have spread and survived in the material structures of the rural landscape. The most significant traces of cultural interactions and at the same time the remnants of past landscape are high roadside wooden crosses with an additional small iron cross on their top, decorated with the crescent moon and sunbeams. The cross with half-moon has its beginnings in old Christian symbolism, regional history and tradition. The crescent was always accompanied by sunbeams and they meant sun and moon, day and night, Christ and Our Lady. Its material durability appears to be greater than the collective memory of the locals. The roadside wooden crosses embellished with iron crescent cross are an interesting part of regional heritage. The symbol of the crescent was common here for all Christian inhabitants and Tatars, unifying all Podlasie people. This uniting symbol is the most valuable remnant of the interaction of multi-ethnic settlement in the cultural landscape of the Podlasie. These days, the 300 years of tradition falls into oblivion, but regional cultural heritage can be saved through tourism-related product and marketing. In peripheral, economically neglected areas like the study case, the remnants may become an impetus to develop the local economy through recreation and tourism. Furthermore, making new tourism products based on natural and cultural values can be a good opportunity to restore precious elements of the historical landscape

Border ethnography and post-communist discourses of nationality in Poland

In this article I shall explore discursive constructions of ethnicity, and in particular notions of ‘Polishness’, among members of three-generation families living in the Polish town of Zgorzelec, on the border with Germany. The data come from a Europe-wide ethnographic project studying communities living on the borders between the EU and its ascendant nations, funded by the European Commission’s 5th Framework Programme (www.borderidentities.com). The most characteristic feature of the data concerning ethnicity is a clash between my informants’ declared identity (mainly constructed in terms of Polishness) and the constructions of Polishness. Even though the latter is usually described in negative terms, almost all interviewees choose to describe themselves in ethnic terms from the spectrum of labels they have been given. Drawing upon Billig et al.’s (1988) concept of ideological dilemma, I shall argue that the apparent contradiction in my informants’ discourse of identity is a result of two different ideological bases underpinning it: the lived ideology accomplished in their discourse clashes with the intellectual ideology explicitly adopted in their declarations of identity. Finally, I shall discuss this shift in terms of the particular place of residence of the members of Polish community right of the national border. I shall also explore the role of the interviewer in my informants’ discourses of ethnic identity. ‘Insiderness’ and ‘outsiderness’ of the researcher in relation to the community under investigation was perceived as a challenge to a coherence of the narratives and resulted in constant discursive negotiations of my interlocutors’ ‘stories of Polishness’. (Sage Publications