Journal articles on the topic 'Recognition of the decisions of the general meeting invalid'

In this article, in addition to clarifying the legal nature of the decision of the general meeting, the judicial practice related to the recognition of the decisions of the general meeting as invalid, the processes based on the right and procedure for appealing by the participants to the court, for the consideration of disputes of this category in court and the execution of a judicial document are analyzed. Also, emphasizing that the decision of the general meeting is a separate legal fact that arises based on the will of the shareholders, various approaches to this matter, including opinions denying the view of the decision of the general meeting as a “deal” or “regulatory document” were expressed. Furthermore, by dividing the decisions of the general meeting into the void and controversial decisions, their similarities and differences, the conditions of claims in this regard, and the existing problems and solutions in protecting the rights of shareholders by the courts are studied, based on comparative legal analysis and substantive procedural law, proposals are made on the improvement of norms and amendments to the decisions of the Plenum of the Supreme сourt. Another important aspect of the article is that the cases considered by the courts in this category have been summarized and the practical experiences of the Supreme Court have been shared with regard to the shortcomings identified in the process of summarization.

The article considers the grounds for invalidating the decisions of the general meeting of participants of the limited liability company. It is determined that the normative regulation of the concept, grounds for invalidity and legal consequences of invalidity of the decision of the general meeting of participants of the LLC is absent. Based on the analysis of case law, it is established that the decision of the general meeting of participants of the LLC is an act of non-normative nature (act of individual action) aimed at the occurrence of legal consequences for participants in corporate relations, therefore, such decisions are neither unilateral transactions nor agreements.The general and unconditional grounds for recognizing the decisions of the general meeting of participants of the LLC as invalid are considered. It is established that in order to satisfy the claim of the participant of the LLC to declare the decision of the general meeting invalid, it is necessary to establish the fact of violation of corporate rights and interests of the participant and clarify compliance with the procedure for convening and holding general meetings.Based on the analysis of the norms of the Law of Ukraine «On Limited and Additional Liability Companies» it is determined that the unconditional grounds for recognizing the decisions of the general meeting of participants of the LLC as invalid are: 1) making decisions of the general meeting in the absence of an adequate number of votes of the company’s participants who have the right to vote on relevant issues (Part 2 of Article 34); 2) making decisions of the general meeting of participants of the company by polling on those issues on which the law or the statute prohibits to make decisions in this way (Article 36); 3) decision-making by the general meeting on issues not included in the agenda, for consideration of which the consent of all participants of the company was not obtained, who should have unanimously agreed to consider such issues (Part 5 of Article 33); 4) the absence of the minutes of the general meeting of participants of the LLC, signed by the chairman of the meeting or another person authorized by the meeting (Part 4 of Article 33). However, there are no court generalizations on the above grounds for recognizing the decisions of the general meeting of participants of the LLC as invalid.

The article refers to the institution of contract invalidation as a way of protecting civil rights and interests. In general, the article clarifies the types of invalid contracts based on the content of the dispute, the main features of invalid and disputed transactions, the term for appealing invalid transactions and the grounds that caused the contract to be declared invalid. The problems of the ratio of recognition of the contract as null and void as an independent means of protection of civil rights are considered.
 The rapid development of market relations requires the stability of contractual structures, which are ensured by their validity. However, due to various reasons, the transaction may be declared invalid. The fact of the existence of shortcomings provided for by the Civil Code of Ukraine is the basis for applying to the court with the demand to cancel the legal decision that arose as a result of the conclusion of the agreement.
 Within the scope of this article, judicial practice was studied, where from the given examples of court decisions, in some cases, the lack of a unified approach to resolving cases of invalidity of transactions and the application of the consequences of their invalidity is clearly observed, in others, they serve to reinforce the authors' position regarding the application of civil law norms legislation. I. Therefore, in modern conditions, there are many not only theoretical, but also practical problems associated with the unequal application by courts of the same norms of material law when making decisions regarding the invalidity of contracts.
 Based on the conducted research, the authors come to the conclusion that despite the attention to this issue in the literature, as well as the presence of certain conclusions of higher judicial bodies, for the doctrine of civil law there is no unity in the ratio of non-conclusion and invalidity of contracts.

The Board of Directors has the authority to manage the company. In carrying out management, the Board of Directors has the authority based on the Deed through the General Meeting of Shareholders whose term of office is determined in the Articles of Association of PT. The problem is that the Board of Directors whose term of office has ended but still carries out their duties and functions. The research method used in this writing is the normative juridical method. From the results of this research, it is concluded that the company's decision in the event that the Board of Directors makes a decision whose term of office has expired, then the decision is invalid unless all actions and decisions of the Board of Directors since the expiration of the term of office have been recognized and considered as the responsibility of the company by the decision of the shareholders in the GMS forum. Directors who carry out management outside their term of office are invalid but can be said to be valid if there is ratification of decisions made by Directors whose term of office has ended. The legal consequence of decision-making by unauthorized directors is that the directors are not responsible for their personal assets.

The RUPS is the highest forum for making company decisions for the benefit of various parties, where shareholders have the opportunity to express opinions, vote, and make decisions regarding company policies. In the GMS, a notary plays a role in making the minutes of the GMS, which records and formulates the entire course of the GMS containing all decisions taken during the meeting, including the results of voting and discussion. The minutes must be signed by the notary and the chairperson of the meeting for legal certainty. In addition, the notary is responsible for ensuring that the GMS is conducted in accordance with applicable regulations, both in terms of form and substance. The notary must verify the validity of the meeting invitation, quorum, and voting rights of the shareholders. However, notaries are often negligent in performing their duties and authorities, which can be categorized as unlawful acts. This research is intended to analyze unlawful acts committed by notaries and the legal consequences arising therein for companies through Supreme Court Decision Number 2826 K/Pdt/2021, using normative juridical methods. The results showed that the unlawful act committed by the notary through the decision was negligence in verifying the results of the GMS due to the absence of the notary in the quorum. This resulted in the actions of a person who served as Director and President Director whose appointment was invalid. This made the notary involved as a defendant in the case and subject to civil sanctions.

The paper examines the content of the prohibition on overcoming a court decision on recognition of a normative legal act as invalid by the repeated adoption of the same act as one of the legal effects of such court decisions. Based on examination of legal standings of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, the author explaines the constitutional and legal purpose of the prohibition under consideration. The study of the judicial practice of considering cases challenging regulatory legal acts indicates fairly frequent violations of this prohibition. Taking into account legal standings, courts should avaluate negatively situations when courts overcome recognition of a normative legal act as invalid by the repeated adoption of the same act also from the point of view of showing disrespect for the judiciary and its decisions. In order to exclude such situations, consistent implementation of the principle of constitutional integrity and reasonableness of actions of public authorities, formed in the legal positions of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, is required in the field of rule-making. The issue of developing mechanisms of constitutional and legal responsibility of public authorities in case of violation of this prohibition also requires attention. At the same time, it is necessary to adjust the Code of Administrative Procedure of the Russian Federation (CAP of RF) in terms of establishing exceptions to the possibility of overcoming this prohibition. Taking into account the significant impact of judicial examination of compliance with regulatory acts, it is no less important to ensure uniformity and generalization of judicial practice on issues of challenging normative legal acts, especially as a result of creation of appeal and cassation courts of general jurisdiction. This issue can be resolved through introduction of a mandatory generalization of the practice of judicial rule control in relation to regulatory legal acts of constituent entities of the Russian Federation and municipalities.

The General Meeting of Shareholders (GMS) serves as a decision-making mechanism within a Limited Liability Company (LLC) and plays a crucial role; however, it is often utilized as a tool for personal or specific group interests, leading to abuses in the conduct of GMS procedures. This research aims to analyze the legal mechanisms that determine the validity of changes within the company through the organization of the GMS, as well as the legal accountability in cases of abuse of the General Meeting of Shareholders (GMS) by Commissioners and the legal consequences for the minutes of meeting decisions made by a Notary, as explained in Case Decision Number 214/Pdt.G/2021/PN Jkt.Utr.This study employs a normative juridical method with a descriptive-analytical research typology. In this context, the abuse of GMS execution by Commissioners or related parties that harms other shareholders or third parties will be analyzed within the framework of unlawful acts. The results of this study indicate that the validity of changes within the company through the execution of the GMS heavily relies on clear meeting call procedures, qualified quorum, shareholder approval, and endorsement by the Ministry of Law and Human Rights, as stipulated in the company's Articles of Association and relevant laws concerning Limited Liability Companies. Legal accountability and legal implications for the minutes of meeting decisions made by a Notary become invalid and non-binding due to changes in the company's structure—whether in terms of amendments to the Articles of Association, share transfers, or changes in management composition—because they are not based on compliance with the Company Law (UUPT) and the company's Articles of Association. This provides an opportunity for aggrieved parties to file civil lawsuits or criminal charges.

In bankruptcy proceedings, the debtor’s property is sold at auction, which allows the alienation of such property at the highest value. This not only helps to achieve the goal of repaying creditors’ claims in the maximum amount, but also influences changes in the approach of banking institutions to lending to businesses, in general, protects the interests of business participants and improve Ukraine’s investment attractiveness. In addition, the analysis of the practice of selling the debtor’s property in the bankruptcy procedure shows that the issue of invalidating the results of auctions is often raised. At the same time, the analysis of case law shows that the most ambiguous and problematic is the question of the grounds for invalidating the results of the sale of the debtor’s property in bankruptcy proceedings. Provisions on invalidation of transactions related to the sale of bankrupt property are contained in the Bankruptcy Code of Ukraine (Article 73), but they are not specific and raise a number of issues in their application in practice. Therefore, in conditions of legislative uncertainty and ambiguous case law, it is necessary to consider the main issues concerning the invalidation of the results of the sale of the debtor’s property in bankruptcy proceedings, identify common approaches to the grounds for invalidation of decisions and make proposals to improve the legal definition of these grounds. A study of the legal aspects of the sale of bankrupt property in terms of invalidation of the auction for the sale of property, identified a number of legislative gaps that do not specify the grounds for invalidation of the sale of property and need to be addressed at the legislative level. Proposals have been made to specify the grounds for invalidating the results of the sale of the debtor’s property in the bankruptcy procedure.

Problem setting. Corporate governance of a company presupposes the existence of a higher, as a rule, self-governing body - the general meeting. The organization of this body is mainly determined by the statute and other internal acts of the company, but not always the status of the general meeting, the legal significance of their decisions, as well as other important aspects of their existence are fully disclosed by local rules. Because of this, the importance of this work is that as of 2020, a large percentage of corporate disputes considered by commercial courts relate to certain problematic issues of the general meeting of companies. Therefore, it is important to determine the activity of solving these problems by analyzing the existing case law. Target research. The purpose of the work is, firstly, to analyze the case law that has developed to date and relates to various important aspects of the organization and activities of the general meeting of companies, including their management decisions; secondly, to identify the main problems underlying court decisions and conclusions on this issue; thirdly, to suggest different options for their solution. Analysis of recent research and publication. Сorporate governance of a company is often a topic that is actively raised by well-known authors and scholars. Thus, the works of Zhornokuy V.G., Maksymchuk K.S., Lutsya V.V., Voloshchenko T.M., Gulyk A.G., Dobrovolsky V.I., Slivinska A.V., Shcherbina O.V., Slipenchuk N.A., Lukach I.V. etc. are devoted to certain issues related to the organization and activities of higher bodies of companies, including the general meeting. Article’s main body. The article is devoted to the disclosure of the main issues of corporate governance in companies. The main purpose of the general meeting and the nature of their decisions based on the rules of economic legislation are determined. Problematic issues related to the decisions of the general meeting and their appeal in commercial courts, based on existing case law, are researched. Conclusions and prospect of development. As a result, we can conclude that the activities of the general meeting is important in determining the activities of the company and in resolving its current issues. Therefore, the acts adopted by the meeting require clear legislative regulation. Due to the large number of corporate disputes in commercial courts, today there are certain problematic aspects in the decision-making procedure of the general meeting. As a result, a number of established legal positions on these issues have been established at the Supreme Court level. But it is not enough for the courts to explain this issue alone. Therefore, one option to solve this problem is to establish a list of grounds and other procedural elements for recognizing the decisions of the general meeting invalid in the model statutes of companies. Another option may be to enshrine in law the provisions of the case law.

Problem setting. Corporate governance of a company presupposes the existence of a higher, as a rule, self-governing body - the general meeting. The organization of this body is mainly determined by the statute and other internal acts of the company, but not always the status of the general meeting, the legal significance of their decisions, as well as other important aspects of their existence are fully disclosed by local rules. Because of this, the importance of this work is that as of 2020, a large percentage of corporate disputes considered by commercial courts relate to certain problematic issues of the general meeting of companies. Therefore, it is important to determine the activity of solving these problems by analyzing the existing case law. Target research. The purpose of the work is, firstly, to analyze the case law that has developed to date and relates to various important aspects of the organization and activities of the general meeting of companies, including their management decisions; secondly, to identify the main problems underlying court decisions and conclusions on this issue; thirdly, to suggest different options for their solution. Analysis of recent research and publication. Сorporate governance of a company is often a topic that is actively raised by well-known authors and scholars. Thus, the works of Zhornokuy V.G., Maksymchuk K.S., Lutsya V.V., Voloshchenko T.M., Gulyk A.G., Dobrovolsky V.I., Slivinska A.V., Shcherbina O.V., Slipenchuk N.A., Lukach I.V. etc. are devoted to certain issues related to the organization and activities of higher bodies of companies, including the general meeting. Article’s main body. The article is devoted to the disclosure of the main issues of corporate governance in companies. The main purpose of the general meeting and the nature of their decisions based on the rules of economic legislation are determined. Problematic issues related to the decisions of the general meeting and their appeal in commercial courts, based on existing case law, are researched. Conclusions and prospect of development. As a result, we can conclude that the activities of the general meeting is important in determining the activities of the company and in resolving its current issues. Therefore, the acts adopted by the meeting require clear legislative regulation. Due to the large number of corporate disputes in commercial courts, today there are certain problematic aspects in the decision-making procedure of the general meeting. As a result, a number of established legal positions on these issues have been established at the Supreme Court level. But it is not enough for the courts to explain this issue alone. Therefore, one option to solve this problem is to establish a list of grounds and other procedural elements for recognizing the decisions of the general meeting invalid in the model statutes of companies. Another option may be to enshrine in law the provisions of the case law.

The opening of bankruptcy proceedings against a debtor significantly changes both the legal regime of such debtor’s property and the procedure for resolving disputes to which the debtor is a party. In accordance with the principle of concentration of all property disputes in a bankruptcy case, the economic court, which hears such a case, resolves all disputes with the participation of the debtor. An important place among these disputes is occupied by cases of invalidation of the debtor’s transactions.
 The article is devoted to the study of the procedural form of consideration of cases on the recognition of the debtor’s transactions invalid in the bankruptcy case. The author analyzes the concept of economic procedural form and its relationship with the bankruptcy proceedings, examines the characteristics of bankruptcy proceedings and identifies their effect in separate proceedings, which resolve disputes over the invalidation of the debtor's transactions.
 The purpose of the article is to study the procedural form of consideration of cases on recognition of the debtor's transactions as invalid in the bankruptcy case and to highlight the features of consideration of cases on the recognition of the debtor's transactions as invalid within the bankruptcy case.
 Bankruptcy cases are a form of economic process. Therefore, their consideration is carried out not only on the basis of a special act – the Code of Ukraine on Bankruptcy Procedures, but also on the basis of the general provisions of the Economic Procedural Code of Ukraine.
 Based on the results of the study, the author concludes that claims for invalidation of the debtor's transactions in bankruptcy cases are considered in separate proceedings within the bankruptcy case. The decision to consider the claim for invalidation of the debtor's transaction shall be noted by the commercial court in the decision to initiate proceedings in the case.
 It is important to distinguish between participants in bankruptcy proceedings in general and participants in such “mini-proceedings” to challenge the debtor’s transactions – primarily to correctly determine the range of participants in the case and entities entitled to appeal court decisions.

Abstract: Meeting transcripts produced by tools like Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, are useful for recording discussions and decisions made during meetings. However, reading through long transcripts can be time-consuming and may not always be the most efficient way to understand the key points and conclusions of a meeting. Meeting summarization is a subfield of natural language processing that can extract important information from meeting transcripts and generate a concise summary. This summary can be used to quickly understand the key points and conclusions of the meeting, and can be especially useful for stakeholders who were not able to attend the meeting in person. Several natural language processing techniques can be used to create summaries of meeting transcripts, such as the term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) method, PageRank algorithm, Named Entity Recognition, Topic Modeling and specific summarization algorithms. Each technique has its own advantages and limitations, and the appropriate technique can be chosen based on the specific needs and requirements of the organization, such as accuracy, efficiency, and customization.

This paper investigates the relationship between control rights, cash flow rights, and firm performance across a sample of 276 China’s private listed companies (CPC) from 2003 to 2008. This paper finds that the performance of firms with pyramid ownership structures (POS) is lower than that of firms with direct controlling ownership structures (DOS). The separation of control rights and cash flow rights, which is the main characteristic of POS, is negatively related to the firm performance. Furthermore, in order to reduce the negative influence of control rights, this paper proposes the following countermeasures: cash flow rights should be increased because it has a positive effect on the firm performance; the supervisory powers of shareholders meeting (SM) should be strengthened because it helps improve firm performance and overrule invalid decisions taken by independent directors in China. This is proved by the findings that show a positive correlation between the attendance rate at shareholders’ meetings and firm performance; moreover, there is no positive relationship between independent directors and firm performance.

For over forty years the United Nations’ General Assembly has been meeting annually to examine a broad range of international issues. At the conclusion of its debates, it adopts resolutions and decisions on each of its agenda items. While some resolutions are procedural, many can be considered important, even historic, because of the events they spawned or because they marked a turning point in international relations. These include, among others, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, the Partition of Palestine, and the recognition of the People's Republic of China as the only legitimate representative of China in the UN.

The article is devoted to a comprehensive study of the conditions of validity of significant transactions of limited and additional liability companies. The author argues that a significant transaction of LLC or TDV shall comply with not only the general requirements regarding the validity of the deed (Article 203 of the Civil Code of Ukraine), but also the requirements that apply to deed of a specific type depending on its subject. In addition, to enter into a significant transaction, the consent of the authorized body of the company shall be given (or it shall be approved) under Article 44 of the Law of Ukraine “On Limited and Additional Liability Companies”. The author highlights the criteria for assigning the company’s transactions to the category of significant, analyzes the practice of applying such criteria based on the materials of court practice. The author stresses that significant transactions of the LLC (TDV), entered into without the consent (approval) of the authorized body of the company, are contested transactions. The author also argues that the consent of the general meeting of the company to the conclusion of the deed (or its subsequent approval) is not a classic and unconditional condition for its validity. At the same time, the lack of such consent combined with other circumstances, may be suggested as grounds for declaring the deed invalid. In particular, it is highlighted that in cases of recognition of a significant deed as invalid, other important factual circumstances are to be proved: the absence of active actions by the company or its participants, which would testify that such a contract (deed) does not correspond to the will of the company; the possibility (impossibility) of determining by the counterparty (creditor) whether the transaction is really significant for the company; prosecution of a person who committed such an act in excess of authority, etc

Reform theory and other concepts have accumulated a rich experience in studying the institutional environment of the R&D sector, including the identification of specific parameters of performance or non-performance of individual managerial decisions or entire areas of reforms. At the same time, assessments of institutional performance are usually based on expert analysis and detection of institutional traps, and do not deal with other facets of this performance, including the achievement of those goals or benchmark indicators. Measuring the institutional efficiency of achieving the "digital" goals laid down in the reform of Russian science has revealed significant problems at the design stage of the reform. The study of the indicators whose thresholds formed the vectors of transformation of Russian science led to the following conclusions. Most of the key indicators, even taking into account the failure to meet the deadlines, remained unachieved. And in the case of meeting the "digital" targets, there are signs of either managerial opportunism or other special circumstances of an accidental nature or negative externalities. Two conclusions can be drawn from this very depressing picture. Either the reforms have failed, and institutional efficiency according to the "digital" criterion has been unsatisfactory. Or the chosen set of indicators is invalid.

The article deals with theoretical and practical problems associated with identifying the signs of a normative legal act in decisions on the establishment of zones with special conditions for the use of territories, as well as those related to the moment and procedure for the entry into force of such decisions. An analysis of the special decision-making procedure on the example of sanitary protection zones, the special content of restrictions and special territorial coverage in such regulation made it possible to identify arguments in favor and against recognizing decisions on establishing zones as normative legal acts. A non-normative legal act is an imperious decision of an authority, for which the procedural legislation gives three months to challenge. Recognition as invalid of a normative legal act is possible during the entire period of validity of this act. To be convinced of the need to recognize the decision to establish a zone as a normative legal act, the study of the procedure for the entry into force of such a decision on the example of sanitary protection zones allows. The decision to establish the zone comes into force from the moment the information about the zone is entered into the Unified State Register of Real Estate. The only guaranteed way to obtain information about the content of such a decision and the date of its entry into the register is an extract from the Unified State Register of Real Estate. This extract is provided by Rosreestr for a fee. Such a mechanism goes against the notion of public accessibility and universality of information about regulatory legal acts. The results of the study can be used to improve legislation in the field of legal regulation of zones with special conditions for the use of territories.

The introduction of Individual Companies, which can be established by a single individual, aims to streamline company management and legal recognition while enhancing Indonesia's investment climate. This study seeks to address two critical questions: How is the concept of an individual legal entity regulated under the Job Creation Law? And what is the legal position of the General Meeting of Shareholders (GMS) in a sole proprietorship that constitutes an individual legal entity? Employing a normative or doctrinal legal research approach with a regulatory focus, this study revealed that the concept of an Individual Company aligned with institutional theory. Both agreement and institutional theories were applied in managing such companies. The study further highlighted that GMS decisions in an Individual Company were executed as shareholder resolutions, which carried the same legal weight as GMS decisions in traditional companies, while the role of commissioners was effectively eliminated.

The article studies the institution of conscientious acquisition, the conditions for recognizing the person in the conscientious acquirer, enshrined in civil law and the positions of the highest courts. Analyzing the concept of a bona fide acquirer, the authors highlighted signs of good faith, established the main conditions necessary to effectively protect violated law. The authors analyzed the peculiarities of consideration by the courts of affairs on the recognition of a person with a conscientious acquirer and circumstances affecting the adoption by the courts of decisions about meeting the claims of applicants or refusal to satisfy them. Based on the analysis of the current civil legislation and judicial practice, a number of conditions are formulated under which the acquirer will be recognized as conscientious, which will prevent the emergence of such violations, as well as expand the possibilities of restoring violated rights.

The article is devoted to the analysis of judicial practice on the recognition by the State Tax Service bodies of Ukraine (hereinafter - the State Tax Service of Ukraine) of the competence of the value added taxpayers to the risk criteria of taxpayers. This article analyzes the grounds for making decisions on compliance of value added taxpayers with the taxpayer’s risk criterion, analyzes such taxpayer risk criteria, provides analysis of decisions of the Supreme Court of Ukraine and lower courts concerning disputes on recognition of taxpayers’ compliance with risk criteria, the validity and legality of the legal position of the State Tax Service of Ukraine and the legality of such actions by regulatory authorities in terms of electronic document management and compliance with their defined procedure. The problematic issues that have arisen in the tax sphere in electronic document management are identified and solutions are proposed. It is determined that one of the problematic areas of value added tax administration is the adoption of decisions by regulatory authorities on compliance of taxpayers with risk criteria. The terminology is analyzed and it is determined that the value added tax (hereinafter - VAT) is an indirect tax, which is determined and levied in accordance with the provisions of the current Tax Code of Ukraine (hereinafter - the Tax Code of Ukraine). Therefore, VAT is a national indirect, ie one that is a component of prices for goods, works and services supplied and provided, and includes tax liabilities for goods and services supplied, tax credit for such goods (services) and obligations the payment of tax to the state budget. It is analyzed that the taxpayer is obliged to draw up a tax invoice and register in the Unified Register of Tax Invoices, have the necessary economic and industrial capabilities, staff, etc., to carry out business operations for the supply of goods, works or services declared activity. In addition, the laws of Ukraine establish clear grounds for suspending the registration of tax invoices, including compliance of the taxpayer with the risk criterion. Thus, the legislator has defined a clear list of conditions under which at least one of which, namely but not limited to registration on invalid documents, lack of open bank accounts, failure to report VAT and the availability of regulatory authorities information about the risk of business transactions. Such inclusion of the payer in the list of risk puts the company in a critical position and virtually terminates the activities of the payer and its counterparties in the tax chain, as all tax credit received from such a company is blocked, which creates additional tax burden on business.

Nowadays consumers are faced with so many choices in meeting their needs and desires. E-commerce seems to be a fast way to fulfill consumer shopping desires. Shopee is one of the E-commerce sites that offers a wide variety of products to consumers. This study aims to determine the online consumer buying process at Shopee. This type of research is qualitative using the interview method. The subjects of this study consisted of four informants with different backgrounds. The analysis was carried out by dividing two types of data, namely primary data from direct interviews and secondary data from relevant articles. The results showed that in the consumer purchasing decision-making process there are five stages, namely the first stage of need recognition, the second stage of seeking information, the third stage of evaluation, the fourth stage of purchase, and the fifth stage of post-purchase behavior. The process of making consumer purchasing decisions is carried out in different ways based on each one.

INTRODUCTION:During future interplanetary space missions, a number of health conditions may arise, owing to the hostile environment of space and the myriad of stressors experienced by the crew. When managing these conditions, crews will be required to make accurate, timely clinical decisions at a high level of autonomy, as telecommunication delays and increasing distances restrict real-time support from the ground. On Earth, artificial intelligence (AI) has proven successful in healthcare, augmenting expert clinical decision-making or enhancing medical knowledge where it is lacking. Similarly, deploying AI tools in the context of a space mission could improve crew self-reliance and healthcare delivery.METHODS: We conducted a narrative review to discuss existing AI applications that could improve the prevention, recognition, evaluation, and management of the most mission-critical conditions, including psychological and mental health, acute radiation sickness, surgical emergencies, spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome, infections, and cardiovascular deconditioning.RESULTS: Some examples of the applications we identified include AI chatbots designed to prevent and mitigate psychological and mental health conditions, automated medical imaging analysis, and closed-loop systems for hemodynamic optimization. We also discuss at length gaps in current technologies, as well as the key challenges and limitations of developing and deploying AI for space medicine to inform future research and innovation. Indeed, shifts in patient cohorts, space-induced physiological changes, limited size and breadth of space biomedical datasets, and changes in disease characteristics may render the models invalid when transferred from ground settings into space.Cheung HC, De Louche C, Komorowski M. Artificial intelligence applications in space medicine. Aerosp Med Hum Perform. 2023; 94(8):610–622.

Playback experiments have proved to be a useful tool to investigate the extent to which wild animals understand numerical concepts and the factors that play into their decisions to respond to different numbers of vocalizing conspecifics. In particular, playback experiments have broadened our understanding of the cognitive abilities of historically understudied species that are challenging to test in the traditional laboratory, such as members of the Order Carnivora. Additionally, playback experiments allow us to assess the importance of numerical information versus other ecologically important variables when animals are making adaptive decisions in their natural habitats. Here, we begin by reviewing what we know about quantity discrimination in carnivores from studies conducted in captivity. We then review a series of playback experiments conducted with wild social carnivores, including African lions, spotted hyenas and wolves, which demonstrate that these animals can assess the number of conspecifics calling and respond based on numerical advantage. We discuss how the wild studies complement those conducted in captivity and allow us to gain insights into why wild animals may not always respond based solely on differences in quantity. We then consider the key roles that individual discrimination and cross-modal recognition play in the ability of animals to assess the number of conspecifics vocalizing nearby. Finally, we explore new directions for future research in this area, highlighting in particular the need for further work on the cognitive basis of numerical assessment skills and experimental paradigms that can be effective in both captive and wild settings. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The origins of numerical abilities’.

Adoption of new vaccines in developing countries is critical to reducing child mortality and meeting Millennium Development Goal 4. However, such introduction has historically suffered from significant delays that can be attributed to various factors including (i) lack of recognition of the value of a vaccine, (ii) factors related to weak health systems, and (iii) policy considerations. Recently, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) supported efforts to accelerate the introduction of Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) vaccines in developing countries, which resulted in a significant surge in vaccine adoption by these countries. The experience with Hib vaccines, as well as similar efforts by GAVI to support the introduction of new pneumococcal and rotavirus vaccines, provides a strategy for new vaccine adoption that is reviewed in this paper, providing a useful model to help accelerate the uptake of other life-saving vaccines. This strategy addresses barriers for vaccine adoption by focusing on three major areas: (i) communications to increase awareness about the various factors needed for evidence-based decisions that meet a country's health goals; (ii) research activities to answer key questions that support vaccine introduction and long-term programme sustainability; and (iii) coordination with the various stakeholders at global, regional and country levels to ensure successful programme implementation.

“It is precisely this path of synodality which God expects of the Church of the third millennium.” (Address of His Holiness Pope Francis Ceremony Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Institution of the Synod of Bishops, October 17, 2015) (https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/it/speeches/2015/october/documents/papa-francesco_20151017_50-anniversario-sinodo.html)(September 26, 2022)
 This declaration was made by Pope Francis in his address to com-memorate the 50th anniversary of the institution of the Synod of Bishops in 2015. These words seem to point out the way the church should walk on its earthly pilgrimage. Synodalitas is the way of life and activity of the Church, which expresses the Church as the mystery of communion.
 The time and meeting of the Synod held at the diocesan level is mean-ingful in listening to and discerning the daily problems that people face and illuminating the way the church should take.
 At the canonical level, the spirit of ‘communion, participation, and mis-sion’ is concretely expressed through such organizations as diocesan synods, presbyteral councils, pastoral councils and financial councils, and financial councils, and parish pastoral councils and financial councils in the process of decision-making and implementation of certain issues. The canon law guaran-tees this spirit of synodalitas in the form of consultation and consent based on shared responsibility.
 First of all, consent binds the superior for whom consent is to be obtained by law. Insofar as it is obligatory to obtain consent, any juristic act is invalid if it is not followed. On the other hand, since counsel is not legally binding, the superior may not follow the counsel if necessary. However, if counsel is required, it must be sought for the validity of the act. Without seeking counsel, which is obligatory, the juridic act of a superior is invalid. The diocesan bishop does not respect the right of counsel and consent of qualified persons merely at the level of prudence. Rather, he must listen to the voice of ‘sense of the faith’ (sensus fidei) among the baptized faithful through counsel and consent according to the spirit of the synodalitas, which is the way of life and activity of the Church. In other words, the diocesan bishop must fulfill his responsibilities before the invisible God, who speaks in the form of counsel and consent to be obtained by the canonical bodies. Even though such counsels and consents sound like voice of people phenom-enally, they can be considered a form of patrimony which the Church has accumulated and inherited throughout the world. It is in this respect that the participation, expression and acceptance of all on the basis of common re-sponsibility never exempts the diocesan Bishop from the individual responsi-bility of the divine authority he has received from Christ the Lord. On the other hand, it is precisely for this reason that the faithful must accept and follow, in the spirit of obedience, the decisions of the diocesan Bishop on the proposals expressed in accordance with the spirit of synodalitas.

Keywords: trademark, civil litigation, judicial examination, judicial expert, court order, legal proceedings, piracy, counterfeiting
 The article analyses the system of judicial protection of trademark rights on the example of Italy. The main focus is on the judicial procedures provided for by the Italian civil procedural law in the event of an appeal to the court for the protection of the rights of interested persons. Jurisdiction for consideration of cases related to the protection of trademark rights, as well as cases related to unfair competition, is defined. The examination is also carried out by specialized chambers of intellectual property in general courts that consider civil and criminal cases (first and second instance). The legislation distinguishes between two types of legal grounds for lawsuits: violation of the rights of the plaintiff (owner of the trademark certificate)and recognition of the trademark certificate as invalid. The types of decisions that can be made by the court are analysed. First, the court can decide on «descrizione», according to which the plaintiff, with the participation of a bailiff and an expert, can examine and draw up a detailed description of the goods and/or production methods that infringe his rights. The purpose of this procedure is to officially record the violation of the plaintiff's rights. Secondly, the court can may decide to impose a sequestration on the defendant's property. Sequestration is carried out by a bailiff. In some cases, the plaintiff may participate in order to correctly identify the goods subject to seizure. The court may decide on the application of sequestration in the presence of a real threat and the possibility of causing irreversible damage to the plaintiff.Thirdly, the court may issue a decision imposing a ban on the infringer's activities related to the production, distribution, marketing, promotion and sale of counterfeit goods. When deciding on the above-mentioned grounds, the court can provide for the collection of a certain monetary fine from the defendant.The conclusion is formulated that the system of judicial protection of the rights of trademark owners in Italy is characterized by a balance of interests between the owners of trademark certificates, state and public interests. The court that examines this category of cases takes a fairly balanced approach to the application of certain sanctions, considering all the specifics of intellectual property rights, the interests of business entities and the damage caused by violations.

The Geological Curators’ Group, established in 1974, undertook a survey in 1981 investigating the “State and Status of Geology in United Kingdom Museums”. This survey, the first of its kind, set out to provide a snap-shot impression of how the nation’s geological collections were cared for, regarded, used and housed. It allowed the Geological Curators’ Group to focus its members’ efforts, influencing, where possible, policy decisions regarding the future of many “at risk” collections and assisting museums in need to specialist curatorial advice. In 2001 it was felt that more than enough time had elapsed since the original survey, and that there was a need to repeat the process, explore other areas of museum management, care and use of collections and compare, where able, the results from the two surveys 20 years apart. With access to new funding opportunities, museums have expanded and in some cases changed beyond all recognition. More funding appears to be available to all, but with 45% of respondees listing lack of staff time or expertise as their biggest “threat”, will the “new” curators or collection managers be able to dedicate the resources to chasing these elusive funding streams and proving that they are meeting targets and performance indicators whilst maintaining often historically and scientifically important collections? The United Kingdom has a unique history in the field of geological curation and collections, with many museums holding collections and specimens of un-recognised scientific and historical value. Should the heritage and culture community feel confidence in their continued care? What problems do we, the curators, perceive with the current “State and Status” of the collections we hold in trust? The “State and Status of Geological Collections in United Kingdom Museums: 2001” report provides another “snap-shot” of the UK’s collections and explores how the position of these collections has changed in 20 years.

The last three or four decades in the EU countries have been marked by a noticeable increase in the role of agricultural cooperatives in solving many economic and social problems. However, in their development, cooperatives face new challenges, which are caused by the growth of global threats and risks, the tightening of competition, the more frequent manifestations of unfair partnership in business. These circumstances force cooperatives to quickly adapt to the rapidly changing external environment, to restructure their organizational form in the direction of increasing its flexibility in order to increase market stability. There is an increasing trend towards further concentration of production, as a result of which large cooperatives of national and regional scale are formed. In the conditions of increasing competition (and, often, conducting competition by unfair methods), as well as the constant statements of the European Commission about the need to exempt cooperative activities from state support, more and more cooperatives are going to revise the "classical" principles of cooperation. The evidence of this is: the rejection of the principle of "one member of the cooperative – one vote" in favor of proportional voting; participation in the management and control bodies of the cooperative, as well as in its economic activities of persons who are not its members; attraction of external investors as co-owners; use of shares, individualization of available funds, participation in operations on the stock exchange. Such cooperatives are more focused on entrepreneurial activity and, often, they are more effective. However, at the same time, their role in serving social goals decreases. According to the author, the introduction of a significant part of the mentioned innovations into the practice of domestic agricultural cooperatives at the present time may compromise this form, which has not yet found sufficient recognition among the majority of the rural population. When making decisions at the general meeting, the principle of equality of votes of all members should remain unshakable, while the management bodies of the cooperative (the management board, the chairman, the supervisory board) should be elected only from its members. Otherwise, the equality of the members is violated, and the cooperative will not be able to fully serve their interests. In any case, in modern Russian conditions, when deciding on the inclusion in regulatory legal acts of provisions on new elements of the organization of cooperative activities, it is necessary to proceed from the degree of their compliance with traditional cooperative values.

в статье проанализировано российское уголовно-процессуальное законодательство в части определения разумности сроков. Определено, что осуществление уголовного производства основывается на определенных действующим уголовно-процессуальным законодательством принципах. Одним из таких принципов является разумность сроков, закрепленная в ст. 6.1 УПК РФ. Такой принцип необходим для выполнения задач уголовного производства, в частности для обеспечения прав и свобод человека во время его осуществления. То, что определенные принципы закреплены непосредственно в законе, означает их общеобязательность и нормативный характер, несоблюдение принципов права при принятии решений влечет признание их недействительными. Автором отмечено, что правило о разумном сроке применяется на протяжении всего уголовного судопроизводства и не рассматривается отдельно для каждой стадии. При этом следует учитывать, что в целом производство в суде первой инстанции временными рамками не ограничивается, ведь каждое производство имеет свои особенности, которые касаются как доказательств, так и участников уголовного производства. Главный вопрос, который при этом возникает – какой срок следует считать разумным, как его определить. Автор считает, что этот срок охватывает собой все производство по уголовному делу. В уголовном судопроизводстве этот срок начинается тогда, когда лицо впервые было задержано по подозрению в преступлении или ему предъявлено обвинение. Автором аргументировано, что необходимо определить сроки судебного рассмотрения уголовного производства не как разумные, а как процессуальные с четко определенными границами и основаниями их продолжения. the article analyzes the Russian criminal procedure legislation in terms of determining the reasonableness of deadlines. It is determined that the implementation of criminal proceedings is based on the principles defined by the current criminal procedure legislation. One of these principles is the reasonableness of deadlines, fixed in Article 6.1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation. Such a principle is necessary to fulfill the tasks of criminal proceedings, in particular to ensure human rights and freedoms during its implementation. The fact that certain principles are enshrined directly in the law means that they are generally binding and normative in nature, non-compliance with the principles of law when making decisions entails their recognition as invalid. The author notes that the rule of reasonable time is applied throughout the entire criminal proceedings and is not considered separately for each stage. At the same time, it should be borne in mind that, in general, the proceedings in the court of first instance are not limited to a time frame, because each proceeding has its own characteristics that relate to both evidence and participants in criminal proceedings. The main question that arises in this case is what period should be considered reasonable, how to determine it. The author believes that this period covers the entire criminal proceedings. In criminal proceedings, this period begins when a person was first detained on suspicion of a crime or charged with it. The author argues that it is necessary to determine the terms of judicial review of criminal proceedings not as reasonable, but as procedural with clearly defined boundaries and grounds for their continuation.

Abstract Background UK IBD Standards 2019 (ibduk.org) for the first time embed and describe Specialist Pharmacy Services (SPS) as an integral part of the IBD multidisciplinary team (MDT) and enable recognition and commissioning of Expert Pharmacists in IBD (EPharmIBD). The Benchmarking Tool, comprised of the IBD Patient Survey and Service Self-Assessment 2019/2020 provides a benchmark of expert pharmacy practice. Methods The Benchmarking Tool developed by IBD UK to drive quality defines A-D descriptors for all IBD standards (A=’excellent, proactive’ to D=’minimal, inadequate’ care). Descriptors for 4 (7%) standards describing SPS were developed through an e-Delphi process by IBD UK with EPharmIBD representation. Royal Pharmaceutical Society standards and SPS feedback were used to define descriptors for leadership, medicines expert role and MDT working. All UK IBD services were asked to complete the self-assessment between Oct 2019 and Jan 2020. Results 10,222 IBD patients complete the IBD Patient Survey 166 (72%) paediatric and adult IBD services took part across the UK. MDT Standard 46% (n=81/166) of all IBD Services have pharmacist input to the IBD MDT, but only 13% of all adult services (n = 18/134) met or exceeded the standard for 0.6 WTE EPharmIBD /250,000 population. Leadership role 76% (n=98/129) of services with IBD leadership team work with a pharmacist of which 48% (n=47/98) work with an EPharmIBD on the annual formulary review. Of these teams 66% (n=31/47) work with an EPharmIBD on annual protocol/policy review, with actions and outcomes, actively develop pharmacy services within IBD. Medicines expert role Ward pharmacists in 95% (n=157/166) of IBD Services have access to an advanced generalist pharmacist for advice. Of these services 54% (n=84/157) are supported by an EPharmIBD but in only 41% (n=34/84) of these patients and ward pharmacists have access to an EPharmIBD on admission and during their stay for medication review, optimisation and personalised consultation. Conclusion Benchmarking shows a low level of pharmacy IBD expertise in the UK with a minority of services, ward pharmacists and patients having access to an EPharmIBD. Few IBD leadership teams work with an EPharmIBD and a small number of services have adequate EPharmIBDs commissioned. In contrast where services report meeting the IBD Standards criteria for the number of EPharmIBDs, patients responding to the Patient Survey were more likely to be given appropriate information about potential treatments to help them make informed decisions. This highlights the high need for advanced competencies and prioritisation of service commissioning in IBD.The pharmacy profession needs to respond urgently to this challenge to ensure high quality pharmaceutical care for IBD patients.

In Arun the Constitutional Court held that section 28 of the Land Use Planning Ordinance (LUPO) vests all land indicated as public roads on a development plan in the local authority upon approval of such a plan. This includes land that is in excess of the normal need of the development. The appellant must hence be compensated for the "expropriation" of such excess land if the provision is to comply with section 25(2) of the Constitution. This ruling is problematic for both expropriation law and administrative law.In terms of section 25(2) four objections may be raised against the Arun decision. Firstly, it disregards the function of the public interest requirement for expropriation, as understood in view of the law-of-general-application requirement (which, in turn, is informed by the legality principle). The state cannot expropriate property for purposes that are ultra vires (or ulterior to) the authorising legislation. Yet the Arun court seems to allow just this by permitting the local authority to acquire land unrelated to the normal need of the development against payment of compensation instead of setting the attempted expropriation aside. The judgment, secondly, ignores the role of compensation under section 25(2). Merely paying compensation to an affected party cannot turn an invalid expropriation into a valid one, since compensation is merely the result of a valid expropriation and not a justification for it. Thirdly, it makes the distinction between deprivation and expropriation pivot on the effect of the property limitation, which is unable to properly distinguish between these two forms of limitation in all instances. Finally, Moseneke DCJ's ruling seems to afford an election to litigants who are affected by materially defective expropriations to choose whether to accept the expropriation and claim compensation or to have it reviewed and set aside under PAJA. This election, if it indeed exists, subverts the principles of expropriation law and may have negative repercussions for both expropriation law and administrative law, especially in view of the single-system-of-law principle.From an administrative law perspective the authors identify four considerations that could assist courts in determining whether administrative law should be considered, if not applied, in a given case. The first is the internal coherency of the law in view of the subsidiarity principles. The subsidiarity principles provide guidelines for courts to decide cases where two fundamental rights might be applicable. A principled approach is necessary in this context to ensure that the law operates as a single system and displays the positive characteristics of such a system. The fact that Moseneke DCJ preferred to award compensation to Arun instead of reviewing the expropriation under PAJA runs contrary to these principles and seems to result in an outcome which endorses – instead of prevents – administrative injustice. Secondly, the Constitutional Court's refusal to follow PAJA by reason of its being onerous on the appellant contradicts earlier case law where the Court held that time-periods under the Act cannot be circumvented by reason of their being burdensome. The rationale behind these time-periods is integral to securing administrative justice, since time-periods are not merely formalistic technicalities. Thirdly, the authors argue that a green-light approach to internal remedies could have resulted in the broadening of the interpretative context and recognition of the legitimate role of the public administration in the state. Finally, deference as understood by Dyzenhaus also exemplifies why administrative law should not be ignored in cases which concern the exercise of public power. According to Dyzenhaus, deference requires courts to actively participate in the justification of administrative decisions by asking whether the administration's "reasoning did in fact and also could in principle justify the conclusion reached".

The proportion of foreigners in Korea’s total resident population has been steadily increasing, and accordingly, the number of foreigners acquiring Korean nationality has also continued to rise. This trend is expected to persist in the future. Under the Nationality Act, foreigners may acquire Korean nationality through naturalization if they meet certain requirements. According to the general legal principles governing the revocation of defective administrative acts, the competent administrative authority may revoke a naturalization approval if a defect is found. Article 21, Paragraph 1 of the Nationality Act stipulates that even after naturalization is granted, the competent administrative authority may revoke it if it is determined that the approval was obtained through fraud or other improper means. This provision serves to ensure the predictability of legal consequences for individuals and to balance the competent administrative authority’s discretion when revoking naturalization for reasons not explicitly stated in the law. Since the revocation of naturalization results in the retroactive loss of nationality, individuals may face significant disadvantages, yet administrative authorities retain broad discretion in such decisions. Citizenship is one of the essential components of a state. Nationality defines an individual's qualification and status as a citizen, making its acquisition and alteration matters of constitutional significance. Individuals exercise fundamental rights and conduct their lives based on the recognition of their nationality in accordance with the Constitution and the law. Therefore, the acquisition and loss of nationality should be safeguarded at the level of fundamental rights. However, even if this necessity is acknowledged, questions may arise as to whether the naturalization of foreigners should also be guaranteed as a fundamental right. Even if there is a defect in the approval of naturalization, once it has been granted based on the appearance of meeting the legal requirements under the Nationality Act, an individual who has held nationality for a certain period and has built their life and rights upon it should have their status protected at the level of fundamental rights. There is no doubt that the principles of legal reservation, clarity, due process, and proportionality apply to the revocation of naturalization. The competent administrative authority must exercise its discretion in accordance with these constitutional limitations. However, Article 21 of the Nationality Act fails to encompass various cases of naturalization revocation, does not provide sufficient predictability for individuals, and inadequately restricts the discretionary power of the competent administrative authority. Therefore, improvements are necessary. Additionally, the possibility of introducing a time limit for revoking naturalization should be considered. Furthermore, the Nationality Act could specify detailed grounds for revocation and clarify circumstances under which administrative discretion should be limited. In most practical cases, naturalization revocation involves individuals who have clearly submitted false documents or engaged in fraudulent activities during the naturalization process. There is general consensus on the need for strict measures in such cases. It is also important to heed calls for stricter immigration administration to maintain public order and national security. However, even if an individual has engaged in certain unlawful acts during the naturalization process, revocation of naturalization imposes severe disadvantages and retroactive effects that undermine legal stability. Therefore, if a person has already sufficiently assimilated into the domestic community, their nationality should not be revoked retroactively solely due to past misconduct, although they may still be subject to appropriate legal penalties.

Topicality. Each year, the issue of environmental responsibility of the business is becoming more and more relevant both in Ukraine and abroad, which is connected with globalization, increasing the threat of technogenic and environmental disasters, updating healthy lifestyles, socializing labor relations, etc. In today's economic environment, environmental liability is only a component of social responsibility. However, it should not be forgotten that during the period when the concept of social responsibility emerged, it was the environmental focus that was prioritized. In the holy of this, and ecological marketing of nature, as a kind of human activity aimed at meeting needs through exchange, should be environmentally responsible towards the consumer and producer of human goods. Underestimation of natural resources and environmental damage leads to distortion of indicators of economic development and progress, accompanied by the choice of inefficient socio-economic direction. In general terms, the concept of environmentally responsible business refers to the activity of each individual citizen, business structures that benefits the environment (or reduces the negative impact on the environment). In addition, this activity is not limited to certain laws and mandatory measures. The higher the economic value of natural objects, the greater the likelihood that the economic decisions made in various projects and programs will be ecologically balanced, take into account the priorities of environmental protection and the conservation of natural resources.Aim and tasks. The purpose of the article is to identify the conceptual foundations and methodological principles of environmentally responsible marketing in environmental management. To do this, the concept and essence of the concept of environmental responsibility, the tools for practical implementation of environmental responsibility of business and the methodology for assessing environmental liability should be defined. At the same time, despite the growing widespread adoption of the principles of corporate social responsibility and the recognition of the benefits that they give to both entrepreneurs and society, the limits of social responsibility remain rather blurred. Assessment of the level of implementation of environmental liability in the practice of enterprise management is proposed on the basis of an analysis of the impact of its activities on the environment.Research results. The conceptual bases and methodical principles of conducting ecologically responsible marketing in environmental management are considered. The concept of social responsibility is used in many spheres of activity, but only in the business context, pointing to specific areas of development, it becomes clear wording. This allows researchers and professionals to split CSR into specific types. The economic component is the most controversial and complex. Its sustainability and effectiveness depends on the role that the organization assumes, as well as the methodology for defining and measuring end-points. The ecological aspect of social responsibility exists in the block of economic responsibility of the enterprise, in legal liability, in the block of ethical responsibility, and also the aspect of sustainable development in the philanthropic block was allocated, and all three main components: economic, ecological and social are in close interconnection and interdependence . Social responsibility of entrepreneurship in the field of ecology, that is, environmental responsibility, becomes a vital factor of competition, since it is the level of environmental responsibility of business in the near future will determine the position of a company in the international market and in the eyes of consumers of its products. The advantages of implementing ecological activity within the framework of socially responsible work of the enterprise are considered. The tools of practical implementation of ecological responsibility of business are offered. Environmentally responsible marketing should use the following tools to address sustainable development issues: environmental impact assessment when developing strategies and plans for economic development; environmental audit; environmental insurance; certification for compliance with environmental standards; social and environmental reporting.Conclusions. There is no single approach to assessing the level of environmental responsibility of an enterprise, no normative document contains a single methodology for its definition. In our opinion, the overall level of environmental responsibility of an enterprise should be determined taking into account the impact of various economic, environmental and organizational factors through the integrated indicator of the overall level of economic responsibility of the enterprise, based on three partial integral ratios, namely: the integral coefficient of environmental damage; integral coefficient of influence of economic factors; the integral factor of the impact of environmental and economic factors.

Introduction. A revision of syntaxa was carried out within the framework of the classification of the Brown-Blanquet school identified in the Russian Arctic. A geodatabase (GDB) and GIS, which include several interconnected main modules (see: Matveyeva et al., 2019a, b), with information on species composition, structure, ecology, and geography of syntaxa of all levels, integrated in these databases, became the basis of the presented checklist. This is the first result of compiling information on the vegetation classification, performed with the prospect to produce Prodromus of syntaxa, identified in this territory, with detailed information (character/differential/diagnostic species, ecology, zonal position, geography, bibliography), available in the GDB. It will be in time included in the Prodromus and later will become the basis for a volume in multivolume series on the vegetation of the Russian Federation (see: Plugatar et al., 2020). Territory. The checklist contains information on syntaxa established in the Russian Arctic within the boundaries of the Circumpolar Arctic Vegetation Map (hereafter CAVM) (CAVM Team, et al., 2003; Walker et al., 2005; Raynolds et al., 2019), as well as on the Barents Sea coast of the Kola Peninsula, which is referred to the tundra zone in accordance with the zonation of the Russian Arctic flat territory (see: Matveyeva, 1998). The list includes syntaxa found north of the treeline — in the tundra zone (subzones of the southern, typical, and arctic tundra) and polar deserts.1 Hence, it follows that there are no syntaxa from the forest-tundra as well as those above the treeline in the mountains adjacent to the tundra zone (Putorana and Anabarskoe plateaus). The syntaxa from the territory of the «Russian Arctic» (Barentsburg, Pyramida) on the West Spitsbergen Island (Spitsbergen archipelago) are also not taken into account (their positioning is logical in Spitzbergern syntaxonomy). History. The study of the Russian Arctic plant cover began in the second third of the XIXth century in the north-east of the European Russia (Schrenk, 1855) and in Siberia on the Taymyr Peninsula (Middendorf, 1860–1867). After a significant break, it continued in the USSR in the pre-war time and intensified after the end of the Great Patriotic War. The most intense (both in the size of the studied areas and the numbers and duration of the field works) was the period from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s. Researchers working both in other zones and in the Arctic processed the obtained data in accordance with the approaches of the dominant classification, and the relevés were either not published or presented in a small (4–5) number for association. Despite the obvious limitations of this approach, there were published (both in the form of text with listing of few dominants and with relevé tables) both general (Gorodkov, 1935) and regional (Andreev, 1932; Bogdanovskaya-Giyenef, 1938; Smirnova, 1938; Dedov, 2006 [1940]; Aleksandrova, 1956, 1983; Gorodkov, 1956, 1958 a, b; Katenin, 1972) classifications, and checklists — a draft classification of vegetation of the whole Arctic (Aleksandrova, 1979) and classification of Taymyr vegetation (Matveyeva, 1985). In the late 1980s, Russian phytosociologists turned to the Brown-Blanquet floristic (= floristic-sociological (Theurillat et al., 2021), or ecological-floristic (Mirkin, Naumova, 2014)), classification system as the most conceptually substantiated, with generally accepted rules for describing communities in the field and the technique of relevé tabular processing, and also with clear rules for the formation of syntaxon names. In this system, the obligatory publication of the original data and the requirements for its validity when describing the basic syntaxon are strictly postulated, which provides an objective comparison and classification of any plant community types, in whatever system these data are not submitted. Just as it is impossible to imagine the development of taxonomy without the existence of herbarium collections, so it should be an axiom for phytosociologists that since the relevé is the only documentary reflection of a natural phenomenon named «plant community» (Matveyeva, 2008), it should be available for analysis to all syntaxonomists. Since the second decade of the XXth century, the followers of the Braun-Blanquet system have published thousands of relevés from different regions of the globe, which made it possible to produce a unified classification of vegetation from the Arctic to the tropics and its constant replenishment. Currently, the process of creating electronic databases (archives) of relevés, including the Arctic Vegetation Archive, which accumulates information on circumpolar vegetation is accumulated, is actively underway (Walker et al., 2018). The starting point when Russian tundra experts began to work consistently, following the principles of this classification, is the first International Meeting on the Classification and Mapping of Arctic Vegetation, which took place in 1992 in Boulder, CO (USA). For the publication of its data, a special issue of the Journal of Vegetation Science (1994, Vol. 5, N 6) named «Circumpolar arctic vegetation» (where 4 papers by Russian syntaxonomists were published) was provided. After 1992, when the intensity of field works decreased sharply, the number of publications with complete characteristics of the communities of the Russian Arctic increased rapidly.The proposed checklist of syntaxa is the result of this almost 30-year acti­vity. The checklist structure. The arrangement of syntaxa of class rank is mainly the same as in the EuroVegChecklist — hereafter EVC (Mucina et al., 2016): zonal and intrazonal communities of the polar desert zone (one class); zonal (one class) and landscape-forming intrazonal (five classes) communities of the tundra zone; intrazonal communities (13 classes), united into groups according to the gradients of moisture, snow depth and soil mechanical composition. A syntaxon is represented as follows: — higher units of the rank Class/Order/Allian­ce (Suballiance): number (for Class), abbreviated rank in English (Cl., Ord., All. (Suball.)), in square brackets — code (if any) from EVC (Mucina et al., 2016); full name, author(s) and year; below is a brief description in two languages: English — in general as in the cited paper with some corrections due to the specificity in syntaxon geography and ecology in the Asian part; Russian — partly in accordance with the English version and/or to Prodromus of higher vegetation units of Russia (Ermakov, 2012), sometimes with minor corrections or clarifications. For new orders and alliances within the zonal tundra class differential taxon combinations are listed; — syntaxa of the rank Association, Community Type, Community, established on the territory of the Russian Arctic: abbreviated rank in English (Ass., Com. Type, Com.), name, author(s) and year (besides association, the cited papers are included in the Refe­rences). If syntaxon was previously described by European/American authors outside the Russian Fede­ration, the link to the publication, where it was found in the Russian Arctic, is placed in brackets. The ­arrangement of associations is alphabetical; — syntaxa of units of a lower (within association) rank (subassociation and vicariant, variant, subvariant, facies): abbreviated rank in English (subass. and vicar., var., subvar., fac.), name, in brackets author, year (besides subassociation, the cited papers are included in the References). The arrangement of the syntaxa is as follows: typicum(-cal, -ca), inops, then alphabetically. For subass. typicum authors are not listed (Theurillat et al., 2021), but if it was described by another author and/or in another paper, then the link to it is given in brackets and the paper is included in the References. All names of syntaxa are given in the author’s edition (as it was published), including the endings of a typical syntaxon within an association (subassociation, vicariant, variant, facia) — typicum, typical, typica. In different papers, there are two English spellings of Russian surnames: Aleksandrova/Alexandrova, Andreev/Andreyev, Bogdanovskaya-Giyenef/Bogdanovskaya-Gienef, Pristyazhnyuk/Prystyazhnyuk, Savich/Savič. A uniform (the first one) spelling of the surname is used here. If there was something that caused a disagreement with the author’s decision (including the assignment of an association to a syntaxon of a higher rank), there is a superscript number before the syntaxon name, or before the author’s surname (when it is in brackets), referring to critical comments. Critical comments. 1 – The name is invalid or needs change because: 1a – no reference to the nomenclature type; 1b – published ineffectively (names published as ‘manuscript’ or ‘unpublished’); 1c – not accompanied by a sufficient diagnosis, no tables with original relevés; 1d – suggested by the author as preliminary; 1e – not obvious from what species syntaxon epithet is formed and it cannot be extracted from the diagnosis and/or tables); 1f – syntaxon with the same name was described earlier (including the case of inversion); 1g – the form of the syntaxon name does not correspond to Art. 10 of «International Code of Phytosociological Nomenclature» — hereafter ICPN (Theurillat et al., 2021); 1h – the given nomenclature type belongs to a different syntaxon, validation does not correspond to ICPN; 1i – the relevé chosen as an association or subassociation nomenclature type does not contain the name-giving taxon of this syntaxon; 1j – there is a subspecies in the original diagnosis and in the tables, while in the syntaxon name the species name is used; 1k – the nomenclature type is given for 2 variants of the vicariant, among which there is no tyicum one; 1l – published or validated in 2002 or later with no indication of novelty (like, Ass. nov.). 2 – the author(s) did not place the syntaxon among the higher units. 3 – the author(s) placed the syntaxon in other higher units than suggested in this list. 4 – the syntaxon was renamed due to a change in its rank; in this checklist it is also given under a new name. 5 – the syntaxon is described by the author(s) in the Community rank but is assigned within the known association as a unit of it internal division. 6 – the author(s) assigned the syntaxon to this class with a question. 7 – the author(s) unreasonably (noted in literature) placed the communities in given syntaxon that needs revision. 8 – in the EVC there is only one author, while in the original source there are two. 9 – it is written that the title proposed by the first author was valid, but according to Principle II of the ICPN it is not. 10 – the author(s) of the syntaxon is(are) incorrect: the syntaxonomic units originally described in the framework of the ecological-physiognomic classification are invalid in accordance with Principle II (Art. 3d ICPN), and have been validated by subsequent authors. 11 – the author(s) assigned the syntaxon to this class/order, but did not refer to an alliance or placed in the alliance other than that proposed in this checklist. 12 – the author(s) attributed the syntaxon to this alliance, but as part of a different class/order, or not attributed to the class/order. 13 – the author(s) changed the rank of the syntaxon in comparison with the original description. 14 – the spelling of the syntaxon name does not correspond to the rules of the ICPN; the correct name [recte[ is given in square brackets. 15 – in the EVC the alliance is placed in another order. 16 – the author(s) of the syntaxon are incorrect, the first author (in brackets) did not give such a name, or incorrect year. 17 – the author(s) of the syntaxon incorrectly cited, priority belongs to other author(s) who published the name earlier and/or effectively. 18 – in the EVC the alliance is placed in synonyms for another alliance, which name was changed but not yet approved (nom. mut. propos). THE CHECKLIST — see the main text. Brief analysis of the composition. The checklist is based upon analysis of more than 70 papers, professionally reviewed and published, which contain more than 6,000 geobotanical relevés, that make available information on the composition and structure of 734 syntaxa ranging from association/community type/community to facies. At the mid-2021, the checklist includes 241 associations (152 subassociations and 25 vicariants, 190 variants and 61 subvariants, 13 facies), 35 types of communities and 17 communities from 62 alliances (6 suballiances), 33 orders and 20 classes. Most of the higher rank units — Class/Order/Alliance — are taken from the classification of vegetation in Europe (Mucina et al., 2016) Class. Of the 20 classes, 19 are in EVC (Mucina et al., 2016), to which we have assigned 207 associations, although we do not consider this decision final. A new class for zonal tundra vegetation Carici arctisibiricae–Hylocomietea alaskani class. prov.2 so far is left in the provisional status. Conventionally is used the class Betulo carpaticae–Alnetea viridis which contains willow scrubs in the valleys and on the interfluves. Order. Of the 33 orders 29 are in EVC. Among the known ones there is formally described Salicetalia glauco-lanatae so far located in Betulo carpaticae–Alnetea viridis. Three orders (Arctophiletalia fulvae; Chamerio–Betuletalia nanae; Schulzio crini­tae–Aquilegietalia glandulosae) were described by Russian authors. Three new orders (Salici polaris–Hylocomietalia alaskani ord. nov. prov., Caricetalia arctisibiricae-lugentis ord. nov. prov., Eriophoretalia vaginati ord. nov. prov.) are suggested here in the provisional status, for establishing within the tund­ra zonal class Carici arctisibiricae–Hylocomietea alaskani class. prov. Nameless order is proposed for communities dominated by mesophytic arctic and/or arcto­alpine herbs often with dwarf shrubs (Salix arctica/polaris/reticulata, Dryas octopetala/punctata) and few mosses on the southern slopes of hills and high river banks in the tundra zone of Eurasia; conventionally it is placed in the Mulgedio–Aconitetea. According to both species composition and habitat the order Arabidetalia caeruleae is moved from Thlaspietea rotundifolii (as in EVC) into Salicetea herbaceae. Alliance. Of the 62 alliances 36 are in EVC, 5 of which (Arctophilion fulvae; Caricion stantis, Chamerio angustifolii–Matricarion hookeri; Dryado octopetalae–Caricion arctisibiricae, Polemonio acutiflorum–Veratrion lobeliani) are described by Russian authors. Alliance Oxytropidion nigrescentis, validated in 1998 (Matveyeva 1998, p. 81), is given as valid. The following 8 alliances are valid: Aulacomnio palustris–Caricion rariflorae, Polemonio acutiflorum–Salicion glaucae and Rubo chamaemori–Dicranion elongati on the European North, Carici concoloris–Aulacomnion turgidi, Oxytropido sordidae–Tanacetion bipinnati in Siberia, Androsaco arctisibiricae–Aconogonion laxmannii, Aulacomnio turgidi–Salicion glaucae, Salici pulchrae–Caricion lugentis on Chukotka. Another 7 alliances have invalid names (suggested as preliminary, no nomenclature type was chosen, etc.). For 6 of these validation is necessary and quite simple. An exeption is the alliance Luzulo–Festucion rubrae (Ektova, Ermokhina, 2012), with all invalid associations (no both relevés and diagnoses); after the later are validated they logically could be placed in Loiseleurio-Arctostaphylion. Within the tundra zonal class the alliance Salici polaris–Hylocomion alaskani all. nov. is formally described and the alliances Cassiopo tetragonae–Eriophorion vaginati all. nov. prov. and Poo arcticae–Calamagrostion holmii all. nov. prov. are proposed provisionally. It is recommended to establish 6 alliances (in the checklist with no name) in classes Drabo corymbosae–Papaveretea dahliani (3), Betulo carpaticae–Alnetea viridis (1), Thlaspietea rotundifolii (1) and Mulgedio-Aconitetea (1). Syntaxonomic decisions, other than those derived from the EVC, are made on the positions of 4 alliances within the higher-rank units: Caricion stantis was moved from Sphagno warnstorfii–Tomentypnetalia to Caricetalia fuscae; Dryado octopetalae–Caricion arctisibiricae — from Carici rupestris–Kobresietea bellardii to Carici arctisibiricae–Hylocomietea alaskani class. prov. (see: Lavrinenko, Lavrinenko, 2018a); Potentillo–Polygonion vivipari is recognized (Koroleva et al., 2019) as different from Kobresio-Dryadion, synonym with which it is given in the EVC; the Honckenyo–Leymion arenarii is used compare to the EVC where it is the synonym of Agropyro–Honckenyion peploidis nom. mut. propos. Compared to the author’s decision, the alliance Carici concoloris–Aulacomnion turgidi from Loiseleurio procumbentis–Vaccinietea is moved to Carici arctisibiricae–Hylocomietea alaskani class. prov. Suballiance. Of the 6 suballiances 4 (Androsaco arctisibiricae–Aconogonenion laxmannii; Astragalo pseudadsurgentis–Calamagrostienion purpurascentis; Caricenion rariflorae; Oxytropido vassilczenkoi–Dryadenion punctatae) are valid, and two (Anemono parviflorae–Salicenion and Pediculari lapponicae–Salicenion) require validation. The suballiance Caricenion rariflorae placed in the checklist in Scheuchzerion palustris was originally established within the Sphagnion baltici, which in the EVC is synonymous with the first name. Association. Of 241 associations only 34 are known outside the Russian Arctic, and the remaining 207 are new. The known ones are mainly on coastal bio­topes — marshes (15) and dunes (3) — and extremely wet habitats (9). There are 4 associations described earlier in Europe within the large landscape-forming classes (Dryadetum octopetalae, Empetro–Betuletum nanae, Loiseleurio-Diapensietum, Phyllodoco–Vaccinietum myrtilli) which distribution ranges are extended to the European North of Russia, and 3 within small intrazonal classes (Geranietum sylvatici, Potentillo crantzii–Polygonetum vivipari, and Rumici–Salicetum lapponi) found on Kola Peninsula. Only 2 associations, described by European (Dryado–Cassiopetum tetragonae) and American syntaxonomists (Sphagno–Eriophoretum vaginati), occur in the Asian part of the Russian Arctic (with new subunits within both). The most association-rich are 8 main classes. The two zonal classes include Drabo corymbosae–Papaveretea dahliani (20 associations) in the polar desert zone and Carici arctisibiricae–Hylocomietea alaskani class. prov. (34 associations) in the tundra zone — 54 in total. 129 associations are identified in the 6 main classes of intrazonal vegetation: Be­tulo carpaticae–Alnetea viridis (29 associations) Loiseleurio procumbentis–Vaccinietea 1960 (22 associations), Carici rupestris–Kobresietea (21 associations), Salicetea herbaceae (16), Scheuchzerio palustris–Caricetea fuscae (25 associations); Juncetea maritimi (16 associations) — 187 in total. The vegetation of other 12 classes is described locally geographically and selectively syntaxonomically. 37 associations were not assigned to any of the known classes. This, in particular, was the case with the vegetation of the polar desert zone (Matveyeva, 2006) before Drabo corymbosae–Papaveretea dahliani class was described in 2016. But it also happened when deciding to assign an association to some well-known class, authors stressed that they did this forcibly in the absence of an adequate unit. For example, before the proposal, albeit provisionally, of the class Carici arctisibiricae–Hylocomietea alaskanii class. prov., even zonal communities from the Arctic tundra subzone were placed in the Loiseleurio procumbentis–Vaccinietea class accentuating that they do not contain a single characteristic species of this class (Kholod, 2007). Community type is distinguished when author does not establish new association due to the small number (less than 10) relevés in one location, leaving this for the future There are 35 such units, most of which (9) are in the Drabo corymbosae–Papaveretea dahliani in the polar desert zone. It is worth noting two points: 1) almost never Community types reach the association status; 2) not all authors are stopped by a small number of relevés, when naming syntaxa, and many associations are based upon on less than not 10, but even 5 relevés. As a result, units of different status often contain equally little information about their composition. Community. This rank exists when there is only one relevé, due to both the type rarity and the lack of time. There are 17 such units, with 7 in the polar desert zone. Two main subordinate levels are used within the association: the first — subassociation and vicariant (not protected by the ICPN), the second — variant. Both reflect small but obvious differences in composition, abundance, constancy of species from the type of association (typicum), conditioned edaphically, locally-climatically, chorologically (Ellenberg, 1956; Braun-Blanquet, 1964) or indicate different stages of succession (Westhoff, van der Maarel, 1978). Differences in the listed characteristics from the type group (typicum) due to ecology are an undoubted reason for identifying several subassociations even in a landscape. To reflect similar differences due to the object location in several areas on latitudinal (in different tundra subzones) or longitudinal (in different sectors of the same zone/subzone) gradients in similar habitats (on the same landscape elements, with the same soil type), subassociation (a unit protected by the ICPN) is used as well. However, the desire to distinguish the reasons that caused such differences is also understandable. Hence, understandable is the interest to the concept of geographic vicariant, perceived by some Russian syntaxonomists working in the Arctic, which is reflected in the checklist (since the unit is not protected by ICPN, after the name in brackets there is a link to References). Leading European phytosociologists E. van der Maarel and W. Westhoff, who in 1993 reviewed an article by N. Matveyeva on the vegetation of Taymyr (Matveyeva, 1994), recalling the concept of geographical races (Becking, 1957), or vicariants (Barkman, 1958), recommended to use the status of a geographic vicariant to reflect changes in the composition of communities of one association related with a geographic location, leaving ecologically determined differences for subassociations.The need for such a division is reflected in the famous paper of F. Daniëls (1982) on Greenland, where the author distinguishes ecologically (habitat-differential) and geographically (area-differential) determined syntaxa, although uses only the name of subassociations. It is a great pity that the concept of a geographical vicariant, which was formed in the minds of the classics of phytosociology almost 60 years ago, did not find formal support: this unit was not included nor in the 3rd edition of the ICPN (Weber et al., 2000), neither in the 4th (Theurillat et al., 2021). The question of whether such a unit should be covered by the ICPN regulations «... can be resolved with the accumulation of experience in its application» (Weber et al., 2000, p. 6); the results of such experience are reflected in this checklist. Subassociation. There are 152 subassociations within 71 associations: most of all in the Carici arctisibiricae–Hylocomietea alaskani (24), slightly less in Loiseleurio procumbentis–Vaccinietea (21) and Betulo carpaticae–Alnetea viridis (23), more than 11 in Carici rupestris–Kobresietea bellardii (16), Scheuchzerio palustris–Caricetea fuscae (17), Juncetea maritimi (12) and Thlaspietea rotundifolii (12). Usually there are 2–3 subassociations in one association. Vicariant. There are 25 vicarians in the 14 associations. 19 of these are latitudinal in associations of zonal, mire, snowbed (Matveyeva, 1994, 1998, 2006) and herb meadow (Zanokha, 1993, 1995a, b) communities within 3 tundra subzones and syntaxa, replacing them in the polar deserts on Severnaya Zemlya (Zanokha, 2001; Matveyeva, 2006. The appeal to the concept of vicariant on Taymyr, where in the only place on the Earth on the mainland at about 900 km a full latitudinal gradient from the tree line to the polar deserts is expressed (Matveyeva, 1998), is quite understandable and logical. The other 6 vicariants are longitudinal: 1 in the European North of Russia (Matveyeva, Lavrinenko, 2011) and 5 on Wrangel Isl. (Kholod, 2007). Variant. There are 190 variants within 66 associations. There are no clearly formulated rules regarding their fundamental difference from subassociations. It is also not obvious whether the level of variant is the next after subassociation in association subdivision, or these are units of the same rank: in 31 associations, variants are allocated within subassociations or vicariants, in 34 — directly in the association. There is no clear logic behind why even one and the same author follows the first way in some cases, and the second in others. Subvariant. This unit was used for the division of variants of technogenically disturbed vegetation (Sumina, 2012, 2018), where 54 subvariants (2–5 in each) were identified in 20 variants of 6 associations, as well as of the baydzharakh vegetation in the arctic tundra subzone in Siberia (7 subvariants). Facies. The unit without differentiaal taxa, recognized by the predominance (with a high abundance) of a species of the «normal» floristic complex of the association, due to particular or sometimes ­extreme abiotic factors, or under anthropogenic impact (Westhoff, van der Maarel, 1978). There are 14 facies in 2 associations of 2 classes on Wrangel Isl. (Kholod, 2007) and in 3 syntaxa of 3 classes in the Bolshezemelskaya tundra (Neshataev, Lavrinenko, 2020). Conclusion. One of the purposes of publishing this checklist is to draw the attention of northern phytosociologists to assessing the validity of syntaxa and the legality of their position in the Braun-Blanquet system. Our task was to bring together all available information, which is done in this article. Even a simple list of syntaxa makes it possible to assess the completeness of the geographical and syntaxonomic knowledge of vegetation. Geographically, sytaxonomic information is available for 12 of the 13 Russian floristic provinces (according to CAVM), in which about 130 districts have been investigated. The most studied provinces (from west to east) are Kanino-Pechora, Yamalo-Gydan, Taymyr, East Chukotka, Wrangel Island (the number of published relevés in each more than 600. There are no published data for the Kharaulakh province. It is not possible to say for sure to what extent the number of associations reflects the presence and distribution communities of 20 classes in different regions of the Russian Arctic. The completeness of the vegetation study depended on the tasks and on the possibility of their implementation. High attention to zonal vegetation is natural, since it is used for subdivision of the territory, for zonal division, and for maps of various scales. Both snowless (Carici rupestris–Kobresietea bellardii) and snowbed (Salicetea herbaceae) communities, as specific for the Arctic, are also always in the sphere of interests. Polygonal mires and bog-hollow vegetation (Scheuchzerio palustris–Caricetea) certainly require much more research, due to their vast areas in the eastern regions of the Siberian Arctic, where these types are not described. For the relatively well-studied shrub communities in the Asian part (conditionally assigned to the Betulo carpaticae–Alnetea viridis), validation of many syntaxa are required; the gap in the description of this object in the northern European regions has just begun to be filled. For 12 associations of grass-forbs communities on the well heated slopes conditionally positioned in the Mulgedio-Aconitetea, new orders and allian­ces, and, potentially, the class are necessary to be established. Unreasonably little data are available for raised bogs (Oxycocco-Sphagnetea), if even these are ­rather common of the southern regions of the tundra zone. Very scattered geographically and sparse syntaxonomic data are on the vegetation of naturally eroded mobile substrates (sand screes, gravel debris, landslides). In the Arctic, as in other regions of the globe, communities are placed in this class not by their species composition, but by habitat (unstable substrate), and the fact of the sparse cover. Only recently the zonal vegetation of polar deserts on horizontal surfaces with quite stable loamy substrates has been classified as a distinct class (Daniëls et al., 2016). In the list of habitat types with associated described Brown-Blanquet syntaxa from Arctic regions of Europe, Greenland, western North America, and Alaska, there are 5 classes (Walker et al., 2018) which are absent in our checklist: Juncetea trifidi Hadač in Klika et Hadač 1994, Saxifrago cernuae–Cochlearietea groenlandica Micuna et Daniëls in Mucina et al. 2016, Vaccinio-Piceetea Br.-Bl. in Br.-Bl. et al. 1939, Asplenietea trichomanis (Br.-Bl. in Meier et Br.-Bl. 1934) Oberd. 1977, Salicetea purpureae Moor 1958. Communities of these classes either exist in the Russian Arctic, but were not described (e. g. forest «islets» in tundra landscapes — Vaccinio-Piceetea, and the vegetation of rocks and rubble talus — Asplenietea trichomanis), or they exist, but are positioned in the other classes. An open question remains with Junce­tea trifidi on acidic substrates. Final conclusions on these classes will become possible after the thorough analysis of syntaxa throughout the entire circumpolar space. Even a very brief analysis of the available data revealed numerous cases of invalid names of syntaxa (no indication of the nomenclature type) or inconsistency names with ICPN rules (correct [recte] names are given for 43 ones); leaving the association outside of higher-level units or assigning one basic unit to ­several higher ones, etc. There are more such cases than we have noted now, especially taking into ­account the new edition of the ICPN (for example, the obligatory Latin or English terminology for denoting ranks and new units (ICPN 4th, Art. 3d, 3i, 3o, 5), mutation ­cases (Lat. mutatum, ICPN. 4th, Art. 45), inversions (Lat. inversum, ICPN. 4th, Art. 42) of names and autonym (Lat. autonym, ICPN 4th, Art. 13b, 4d). Now it becomes possible for each author to take measures to eliminate errors of various kinds to validate their syntaxa. Consolidated participation in joint publication is also possible. This is a necessary step for the next action — preparing the Prodromus of the vegetation syntaxa of the Russian Arctic with the expanded characteristics for all levels.

The work is devoted to the research of problematic issues of recognition of decisions of the general meeting of a company as invalid as a special way of protecting the corporate rights of participants of the respective company. In addition, the decision of the general meeting, in turn, is also a way of influencing the participants in the direct activities of the company, by exercising their right to management provided for in corporate law. The issues regarding the terms of appeal against the decisions of the company meeting are analyzed, namely: 1) the companies with limited liability and additional liability have not been set exact terms, so we should be guided by the provisions of the Civil Code of Ukraine; 2) no law contains information about the possibility of renewal of the statute of limitations, so again it is necessary to refer to the provisions of the CCU; 3) is not fixed at the legislative level and the validity of the reason for missing the general meeting. Holding a general meeting is an important process in any business community, as it is now the only way for participants to influence the affairs of the company. As is well known, any phenomenon has ways of managing the negative consequences, including the protection of corporate rights of members of companies. Therefore, one of the important ways of protecting such rights is to declare the decisions of the general meeting invalid, which in turn is one of the special ways of protecting the rights and interests of the founders or participants (shareholders) of companies. To appeal against the decisions of such a collegial body of a company as a general meeting (hereinafter referred to as a meeting), vested solely with the members of the respective industry who had such status at the time of the contested decision. That is, a party / shareholder who has not acquired the ownership of a share or shares in the share capital of a company has no right to appeal to the commercial court, since it is logical that its corporate rights could not be violated before their existence. The following is a comprehensive list of legislative gaps that adversely affect the invalidation of decisions of the General Meeting, namely: - the uncertainty of the timeframe (boundaries) regarding the appeal of such decisions, as well as the lack of provision for the possibility of renewal of such term (should be addressed to the CCU); - absence in the legislation of at least indicative list of criterion of validity of omission of limitation periods; - the list of grounds for declaring the decisions of the general meeting invalid is uncertain.

The article analyzes judicial practice on the recognition of a notarial alimony agreement as invalid. The author highlights the grounds for recognizing such a transaction as imaginary, draws attention to the inconsistency of judicial decisions and the need for a combination of all criteria. There are no sufficient formal grounds for a notary to refuse to certify it already at the stage of concluding an agreement, but he can minimize possible risks.

This essay analyzes legal nature and grounds of nullity of transactions according to the civil legislation of Ukraine and modern civil law achievements. Correlation between invalid, void and illegal transactions is set. It establishes the specifics of invalid transactions, that demarks them from other similar legal categories. The essay discloses gaps and contradictions in the legislation of Ukraine, while pointing out different approaches of the application of law by the courts when it comes to the nullity of transactions, as well as offers solutions as to its improvement. The legal nature of articles of incorporation (articles of association, except for the articles of association ofa partnership) is analyzed. And issue of possibility to use provisions as to invalidity of transactions to invalidating the incorporation documents of a legal person and/or decisions of the general meeting of the partnerships is set.

AbstractPeople spontaneously infer other people’s psychology from faces, encompassing inferences of their affective states, cognitive states, and stable traits such as personality. These judgments are known to be often invalid, but nonetheless bias many social decisions. Their importance and ubiquity have made them popular targets for automated prediction using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). Here, we investigated the applicability of this approach: how well does it generalize, and what biases does it introduce? We compared three distinct sets of features (from a face identification DCNN, an object recognition DCNN, and using facial geometry), and tested their prediction across multiple out-of-sample datasets. Across judgments and datasets, features from both pre-trained DCNNs provided better predictions than did facial geometry. However, predictions using object recognition DCNN features were not robust to superficial cues (e.g., color and hair style). Importantly, predictions using face identification DCNN features were not specific: models trained to predict one social judgment (e.g., trustworthiness) also significantly predicted other social judgments (e.g., femininity and criminal), and at an even higher accuracy in some cases than predicting the judgment of interest (e.g., trustworthiness). Models trained to predict affective states (e.g., happy) also significantly predicted judgments of stable traits (e.g., sociable), and vice versa. Our analysis pipeline not only provides a flexible and efficient framework for predicting affective and social judgments from faces but also highlights the dangers of such automated predictions: correlated but unintended judgments can drive the predictions of the intended judgments.

Forensic economic expertise in the field of taxation is an integral part of the legal process, especially in cases related to tax audits and disputes. The article considers the definition of the very concept of "forensic economic expertise". Summarizing the achievements of scientists, the author of the article proposes to consider forensic economic expertise as a study of objects, phenomena and processes, which is conducted by a person who has special knowledge in the field of economics in order to provide a conclusion on issues raised by bodies of inquiry, pre-trial investigation or court. An important point is that the forensic economic examination is appointed exclusively to establish the circumstances of the case, which relate to the subject of evidence in the case and when the expert's opinion cannot replace other means of proof. The conducted research on the state of cases that are (were) pending in courts of various instances on tax disputes was based on the use of various general and specialized scientific methods, in particular: analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction, abstraction, generalization, economic-mathematical and statistical methods, etc. According to the results of the research, it was established that the largest specific weight is made up of cases of tax payers' lawsuits to the DPS authorities regarding the recognition of tax notices-decisions as invalid/invalid. The objects of research of forensic economic expertise on taxation are primary documents that confirm the implementation of an economic transaction and contain basic information about it, accounting registers that contain in a systematized form information about certain accounting objects, data on the formation of objects object of taxation and determination of the amount of taxes and fees payable to the budget, financial statements including descriptions of applied accounting policies, tax statements, other documents containing reliable information related to the subject of the study. Actual problems of appointing and conducting forensic economic examinations were identified and ways to overcome them were proposed.

The main information characteristics of the data on the company’s fixed assets, which are formed in the accounting and financial reporting system, are revealed. Each group of interested persons can use information about the fixed assets of enterprises, taking into account the aspects of its use during the formalization, selection, implementation and evaluation of the results of the implementation of economic decisions. It was determined, that information about the company’s fixed assets and financial and economic operations with them refers to such stages of their existence as: creation or acquisition, commissioning, use in activities of all kinds for the purpose of obtaining profit, also disposal from the company. The corresponding stages are reflected in the accounting system based on the application of methodical approaches to the recognition of fixed assets, their evaluation, accounting classification and disclosure. Recognition of objects of fixed assets for accounting purposes means that there are grounds for a professional accountant to reasonably consider their existence to be real in the context of the presence of a material form, a set of certain technical and functional characteristics, geographical or operational localization, as well as the existence of rights in the enterprise ownership of such objects. Fixed assets can be evaluated as a result of the transfer of part of the capitalized costs to the costs of the period, or static, as of the reporting date of the recalculation of the estimated value of the value, which has signs of fair, market or other. The role of the accounting classification of objects of fixed assets is to group information about their accounting characteristics in a format that allows users to define a certain set of parameters by which both individual objects and their groups differ. The methodical basis of disclosure of information about fixed assets is also a set of procedures based on the requirements of the applied conceptual framework and the use of the judgments of a professional accountant. The specified aspects are designed to ensure the implementation of the information needs of interested parties who use accounting and financial reporting data in order to achieve their own economic, social and other types of interests.

This article presents an alternative proposal to the traditional model, based in a “knowledge dialogue”. More than a pedagogical proposal, “knowledge dialogue” is a position based on respectful and democratic relations and practices, which recognizes the pupil as a subject, responsible of its own destiny, and human beings as not finished beings that construct themselves interacting with others and the world. “Knowledge dialogue” is a communicative process in which there is an interaction between two rationalities, scientific and daily knowledge, trying to understand each other. It implies the recognition of the “other” as someone different, with diverse knowledge and positions. It doesn’t deny that health education has an intention, directed to promote autonomy and liberty, so that each person can take the most appropriate decisions according to its own context and situation. It is a scene where different knowledge, truths, feelings and rationalities play, in the construction of consensus, but respecting disagreement. It is a meeting among human beings – pupil and teacher – where both construct and strengthen themselves. It is a dialogue in which both of them are transformed.

Abstract Background During the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, national governments took restrictive measures, such as a visitors ban, prohibition of group activities and quarantine, to protect nursing home residents against infections. As ‘safety’ prevailed, residents and close relatives had no choice but to accept the restrictions. Their perspectives are relevant because the policies had a major impact on them, but they were excluded from the policy decisions. In this study we looked into the moral attitudes of residents, close relatives and volunteers regarding the restrictions in retrospect, and what moral lessons they considered important. Methods We conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with residents and close relatives and one focus group meeting with volunteers working in nursing homes. Data were transcribed verbatim and analyzed inductively. Subsequently, three Socratic dialogue meetings with residents, close relatives and volunteers were organized in which first analysis outcomes were discussed and dialogues were fostered into moral lessons for future pandemics. Outcomes were combined with moral theory following an empirical bioethics design. Results Critical perspectives regarding the COVID-19 restrictions grew in time. Various moral values were compromised and steered moral lessons for our future. The participants recognized three moral lessons as most important. First, constructing tailored (well-balanced) solutions in practice is desirable. Second, proper recognition is needed for the caring role that close relatives fulfill in practice. Third, a responsive power distribution should be in place that includes all stakeholder perspectives who are affected by the restrictions. Discussion Comparing the results with moral theory strengthens the plea for inclusion of all stakeholder groups in decision-making processes. To further concretize the moral lessons, tailored solutions can be realized with the use of moral case deliberations. Proper recognition includes actions addressing moral repair and including counter-stories in the debate. Responsive power distribution starts with providing clear and trustworthy information and including all perspectives.

Shareholders and board of directors in an annual general meeting (AGM) are the two organs of a company. Shareholders are legally empowered to participate in the AGM to meet directors and know about the performance of the company. Despite various philosophies (theories) and legal provisions on shareholder participation in AGMs, shareholders are still facing some challenges. Moreover, available literature in this area is limited in Nigeria. Therefore, this study seeks to examine various philosophies (theories), the law, cases and opinions of experts on shareholder participation, practices and the role of shareholder associations in protecting the rights of shareholders. The study adopted two methods of data collection. The first method was doctrinal legal research (library based) which mainly concerned statutory provisions under the Companies and Allied Matters Act 1990 (CAMA) and decisions of the court. The second method of data collection consisted of qualitative interviews with seventeen respondents regarding the theories, practices and role of shareholder associations in protecting the rights of shareholder participation in AGMs. The findings showed that shareholder participation can be supported by various theories including corporate personality theory; agency theory; contract theory; shareholder primacy; and corporate governance. The finding equally indicated that shareholders in Nigeria received notices of AGMs late, due to postal inefficiency and lack of recognition of ICT under the CAMA. Similarly, both regulators and shareholder associations have not done enough to protect shareholders and to improve their participation in AGMs. In view of this, there is a need for proactive measures to improve the participation of shareholders in AGMs. This is by amending the CAMA to incorporate provisions that will facilitate the effective service of notices of AGMs. Similarly, shareholder associations and regulators must take the responsibility of enlightening shareholders on their right of participation as well as how to enforce their rights in AGMs.

Abstract Background Stress has a bad impact on mental, physical, psychological health of teacher and it can interfere with job performance and job satisfaction. This study will not only measure the frequency of work related stress among teachers but it also will correlate the work related stress, anxiety and depression with the different risk factors in school environment and their effect on the health status of the teacher. Objective To measure the frequency of work related stress,anxiety and depression among school teachers in governmental schools in kobri el koba district, to measure the frequency and extent to which school teachers are exposed to possible riskfactors of stress in school environment as well as to study the possible effects of work related stress, anxiety, depression on school teachers. participants and Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted on 400 teachers from governmental school in kobri elkoba district and their ages range from 20 to 59years old and the percentage of males (35.8%) is almost half the percentage of the females (64.3%). Results There were significant positive correlations between stresss score, anxiety& depression scores. In Logistic regression for factors favouring having anxiety (E. Sev) among the studied teachers: question number 63 in the sources of administrative stress which is (the lack of the support from the administration) was significant factors that increased the anxiety, while single status was a significant factor that decreased the anxiety. In Logistic regression for factors favouring having depression (Sev/E. Sev) among the studied teachers: School grades (preparatory and secondary) were significant factors that decreased the depresssion, while question number 66 in the sources of administrative stress which is (No participation in the adoption of administrative decisions) also question number 71which is (the school administration interferes with all my responsibilities) were significant factors that increased the depresssion. Conclusion Drawn from this study is that the degree of work related stress, anxiety and depression among teachers in governmental schools in kobri el koba district is considerably high. This indicates that we are in need to do Further studies on teachers for better assessment of the epidemiology of work related stress, anxiety and depression and the risk factors also Intervention studies are highly recommended as the prevelance of stress, anxiety and depression in the present study is almost 100% which is considered extremely high and in need to urgent intervention,Authorities should be informed about the results and should be encouraged to reduce work related stress, anxiety and depression, Asking the competent authorities to increase salaries to be suitable with the requirements of the life, Establishment of committee to assess stress, anxiety and depression among teachers and to suggest the coping strategies,Informal group meeting should be periodically held between managers and the teachers to allow expression of feelings, to promote lines of communication where constructive critical feedback from supervisors and subordinates can be exchanged, and to provide a sense of success through rewards, appreciation and recognition of task completion.

Quality of life needs to be considered in every patient clinical encounter and should be a vital component of wholistic care. Its measurement will give a context and assess the impact of physical illness on patients’ daily life. This evaluation provides a preview of what it is like to be ill based on the individual’s unique personal experience that changes through time and disease course.1 World Health Organization (WHO) has defined Quality of Life (QOL) as a “person’s perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns.”1 Health-related QOL, on the other hand, is a multidimensional consideration of how patients are affected by their illness diagnosis and management.2 There are tools available to determine QOL and can implicitly provide the impact of diseases on an individuals’ daily activities. Questionnaires currently available to measure quality of life can be divided into two categories: generic surveys intended for the general population and tools that are for disease-specific populations. Short form survey (SF-36) is the most widely known and used generic tool for QOL.3 Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy-Palliative (FACIT-PAL-14) Instrument for Filipino cancer patients in the article by Manalo and Nicolas-Casem is an example of a tool designed for a specific population.4 Palliative care patients are a vulnerable population with a wide range of difficulties, disabilities, and physical-mental fatigue. QOL is both an essential component of medical care and a significant outcome in cancer research. There is a need to measure QOL as it would assist health care providers to understand how the diagnosis of cancer, treatment or palliative care has affected daily life. This can lead to the recognition of the latest physical-emotional status, formulation of informed decisions, and evaluation of medical interventions. Tools that measure constructs such as quality of life need language translation and validation in the local setting, particularly if created using another language in a different culture. However, validation of instruments to ensure that it will measure what it needs to evaluate is both a challenging and resource-intensive task. Challenges in health-related quality of life questionnaires include varying psychometric properties, different levels of validations, and patient compliance.3 The importance of suitable validation techniques should be underscored as research not suitably conducted according to standards yields invalid results. There are several ways that will help establish validity and reliability of a tool to measure QOL. The initial translation of an instrument into the local language should be substantiated with back-translation, engagement of several professional translators or addition of a committee tasked to compare the original to translated version.5 Construct validity can be established by comparing the new form to other tools that determine the same concepts and is typically evaluated by degree of agreement between the two measures.6 The last step in the process would include measurement of psychometric properties and pilot testing. Psychometric index such as Cronbach’s alpha is often reported as a validation measure to demonstrate internal reliability among questionnaire items.5 In the article by Manalo and Nicolas-Casem,4 they determined the psychometric property of a Tagalog version of FACITPAL-14. It was a cross-sectional study involving 500 cancer patients in an outpatient oncology clinic in the Ilocos Province. The tool had shown acceptable reliability and poor correlation with two instruments that measure performance status. There was, however, inadequate information on a local dialect version, sampling procedures, and on descriptions of the language translation status of the comparison tools. Measuring Quality of Life through validated tools is a vital part in the assessment of well-being, status, and perception of disability. However, these instruments need to show validity and reliability. Tagalog-translated, validated, shortened questionnaires are needed for patients, not just for quality of life or palliative care, but also for individuals with chronic diseases, and conceivably in the assessment of family support, relationships, or function. Tool validation is not an easy undertaking, but it needs to be done, preferably with more culturally sensitive and accurately done validation studies.

Women in Universities Women have been fighting for the right to participate in universities since 1873, when Sophia Jex Blake went to court with her fight to enrol at Edinburgh University. In rejecting her application, one of the judges stated: It is a belief, widely entertained, that there is a great difference in the mental constitution of the two sexes, just as there is in their physical conformation. The powers and susceptibilities of women are as noble as those of men; but they are thought to be different, and, in particular, it is considered that they have not the same power of intense labour as men .... (Scutt 224) In Australia, from the 1850s to the 1880s, both the University of Sydney and The University of Melbourne refused to admit women as students. In 1879, the Chancellor of the University of Sydney suggested that: The best course to be taken by advocates of advanced education for women, would be to found some sort of affiliated college for them in the vicinity of the University ... if there really be a widespread wish on the part of young women for a higher education ..." (Scutt 228). Having finally won the right to study at university in 1881, and to enter the academic workforce, women are still finding many of the old prejudices remain. Numerous studies have demonstrated that women's experiences in academe are qualitatively different from men's and that women are systematically paid lower salaries than men of equivalent academic achievement, age and length of service (Bagilhole 431-47; Loder 713-4; McElrath 269-81;). Studies have shown that differences in the experiences of male and female faculty are largely explained by gender (Booth & Burton 312-33; Everett 159-75; Over & Lancaster 309-18; Ready 7) and sex discrimination is highlighted as an ongoing contributor to the inequity (Allport 5-8; Hall & Swadener 1; Tuohy 8). A recent UNESCO-Commonwealth (http://www.unesco.org/) report states that: ... in spite of advances which women have made in many areas of public life in the past two decades, in the area of higher education management they are still a long way from participating on the same footing as men. With hardly an exception, the global picture is one of men outnumbering women at about five to one at middle management level and at about twenty to one at senior management level (Singh 4). The introduction in Australia of Sex Discrimination legislation (http://www.hreoc.gov.au/sex_discrimination/) in 1984 and more recently, Affirmative Action policies ( http://www.austlii.edu.au/) in employment and promotion rounds in some universities has not improved women's situation to the extent expected. In 1978, women held 16% of full time academic posts while gaining 25% of all higher degrees and 30% of undergraduate degrees (Commonwealth Government statistics cited by Over and McKenzie 61-71). In 1999, 54% of students were women yet women's participation in academe had only increased to 35% (DETYA) (http://www.deet.gov.au/). Women are mainly employed at the lowest academic levels. In 1999, 72% of women were employed at Levels A and B (Associate Lecturer/Lecturer) compared to 46% of men, with only 8% of women reaching Levels D and E (Associate Professor/Professor) compared to 26% of men. Women continue to be clustered in the traditionally female areas of Health, Education and Arts while few seem to have successfully broken through the barriers in the traditionally male areas of Engineering, Architecture or Agriculture (DETYA) (http://www.deet.gov.au/). Business has traditionally been viewed as a male preserve but enrolments have increased to the point where women almost equal men. However, the staff ratio of men to women remains very low at 70/30 (DETYA) (http://www.deet.gov.au/). The slow growth rate for women in academe belies the fact that more women than men are now completing university degrees. The purpose of this study was to determine how well the experiences of academic women in the male-dominated faculties of business and commerce, reflect the literature on women in universities, in general. Previous empirical studies have found inequitable treatment of women without necessarily exploring the processes of discrimination. The Study This study involved interviews with academic women who had been employed in faculties of business and commerce for at least five years. The research used the 'snowballing' technique: participants initially comprised women known to me but as these women told female colleagues of my study I was given the names of other women who were willing to participate. Participants comprised twenty-one women from three universities in Western Australia, two universities in New South Wales and one Victorian university. One woman had recently left academe and started her own business because of discriminatory practices she had encountered and another was contemplating leaving. In each university, women comprised a minority of the faculty and felt disadvantaged in some way. A semi-structured interview was used to explore with the women the issues that had been identified from previous studies of sex discrimination in the academic profession. Open-ended questions were used and the interviews conducted face to face, or, in the case of those interstate, via telephone or email. The women spoke frankly about their experiences. Findings and Discussion Promotion Each of the women in this study said that their university had established an internal promotion policy based on merit. However, they felt the greatest problem they had encountered in gaining promotion was in determining the criteria upon which they would be judged each year, and in meeting those criteria. "I have been chasing promotion for over five years. At first I was told that I would not be promoted until I got my masters degree so I worked really hard to complete it but then a male colleague was promoted without a masters. Once I got the masters I was told I needed to publish to be promoted but in the next year someone else was promoted without any publications. You go all out to meet the criteria each year but in the next year the promotions committee changes and so do the criteria for that year"(Lecturer applying for Senior Lecturer position). The promotion procedure at one university was explained by a Senior Lecturer who had served on promotion committees on two occasions. "There are about ten criteria upon which promotion can be based. When the applications are received we all get together to determine which are the criteria to be applied. In the last promotion round only four of the ten criteria were used so only people satisfying those criteria were selected." When asked whether the criteria were the same as the previous year she replied: "Last year there was more emphasis on qualifications and publications. This year community involvement and involvement in university affairs were judged as more important ... it varies from year to year". On questioning about the promotion procedures at their universities, women stated they were largely dissatisfied with the process, that they were presumed to be satisfied with their lot while the men were actively encouraged to apply. "I was told not to bother to apply (for a senior lecturer position) as I would not get it ... that there was a queue of people to be promoted before me - (named males) - and until they were promoted, I would not be considered" (Lecturer). "The position was advertised with a specific male applicant in mind and specifically excluded me by stating that the appointee must have supervisory experience. Women in my department are not given the opportunity to supervise students so I didn't even bother applying."(Lecturer aspiring to a Senior Lecturer position). One woman, upon inquiring why she was not promoted, was told that she should be grateful to have tenure and asked why she wanted to be promoted, anyway. "They would never have said that to a male, they would have expected a male to be working towards promotion" (Associate Lecturer). All women interviewed stated that they had problems keeping up with the 'goal posts' which moved from year to year. The 'moving of the goal posts' is one means by which universities are able to maintain the position of women at lower levels. Unsurprisingly, some women said they felt that promotion at their university was based on politics rather than merit. However, defining merit in universities is problematic. According to Burton (430), definitions of what is meritorious depend upon the power of particular groups to define it and, as a result, can change. The narrow view of merit is 'the best person for the job' which Burton (113) describes as an "overwhelming tendency to select in your own image". Burton (430) and Allport (5) claim universities define merit along male cultural lines with current selection, remuneration and career progression practices strongly influenced by an underlying gender bias. Burton (430) argues that there is still a tendency for work to be ranked as 'men's' or women's work with lower status attributed to the latter and an assumption that different skills and abilities are needed for each. Over and McKenzie (61-71) claim that women are disadvantaged by the fact that invalid merit criteria are applied to them which men as a group are more likely to satisfy. They state that the academic careers of most women do not fit the stereotypic male experience and it is mainly men who decide whether women should be promoted. At one university in the study, the merit criteria for senior lecturer include the requirement that aspirants have a number of overseas conference presentations. "Some of us are single working mothers and overseas conference attendance is out of the question because who's going to mind our children while we are away? The senior males were astonished when I mentioned that this was a problem for me. It had never occurred to them" (Associate Lecturer on why women at her university do not apply for promotion). Family Responsibilities The women commented on the numerous difficulties they had encountered in combining an academic career with responsibility for children. They felt that certain male faculty members perceived married women with children as lacking in career commitment, whereas married men with families were viewed as being more stable and committed to their careers. One married woman claimed that when she needed to go home to tend a sick child, her male Head of Department told her she should "get her priorities right". In 1992, Family Responsibility provisions were added to the Sex Discrimination Act (http://scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/pasteact/0/171/top.htm). However, it would appear that individual practice doesn't always follow as a result of changes in policy. Equal Pay On the subject of equal pay for equal work, the women said that they were often paid lower wages than their male colleagues despite having higher qualifications and equivalent teaching and research experience. Some women felt that the barriers between academic levels were used to artificially maintain the wage gap between men and women, regardless of qualifications and ability. This was felt to be particularly the case between the levels of Associate Lecturer (Level A) and Lecturer (Level B). "They find excuses to keep you at Associate Lecturer so that they can pay you less to do the same work that you would be doing as a lecturer ... lecturing, coordinating units and so on"(Associate Lecturer). "There are no men below Lecturer in my Department, either lecturing or with Masters degrees. As soon as they get their Masters they are promoted to Lecturer.... I'm coordinating units as an Associate Lecturer while some male lecturers have less responsibility' (Associate Lecturer with Masters degree and publications) Two women said that they had been performing higher level duties (Level B) for up to five years while working on their Masters but their university refused to pay them at the higher level until they had completed their degree. Even when they satisfied all the requirements for the Masters degree and had a letter from their supervisor saying they had satisfied all the requirements, the university refused to pay them until they had actually graduated, which was some time later. Shortly afterwards their university took on two men to perform the same duties, paying these at the higher level even though they had not completed a masters degree. One former lecturer claimed that she was employed at a time when there was a large turnover of staff in her department. A number of new staff were appointed of whom she was the only female. Although she and the other new staff were all employed at Lecturer Level B, it wasn't until later on that she discovered that the men were appointed at the top of the Lecturer salary scale while she was appointed at the bottom, with a salary differential of about10 000pa. This was despite the fact that both she and the men had similar qualifications and work experience at commencement. Teaching Loads Another complaint by women concerned inequitable teaching loads. An analysis in one Business School showed that women had higher teaching loads while men were given more time off for research. The women complained that the supervision of post-graduate students was divided up between the men, and women were excluded. Since research publication and student supervision are usually the most highly ranked criteria in academic promotion rounds, women who are not given the opportunity to participate in these areas are disadvantaged when applying for promotion. This problem is compounded since women are overwhelmingly employed at the lower levels where responsibility for the majority of teaching takes place. This leaves them with little time left to devote to research even if given the opportunity. The women also said they were often pressured into taking on higher duties than those prescribed in the Position Classification Standards for their level. They tended to acquiesce because of their need to prove they were better than men to gain promotion. One woman said that the extra administrative duties she had been given meant that she had less time for research which actually reduced her prospects for tenure and promotion. She said she didn't dare complain as the men in her department would use it as an excuse to question her commitment to her job. Conclusion An examination of women's perceptions and experiences in the workplace can help us understand the informal processes that work against women. The experiences of the women discussed in this paper provide an insight into the subtle processes that continue to operate in some higher education institutions to prevent women from reaching their full potential. Although equal opportunity legislation (http://www.hreoc.gov.au/about_the_commission/legislation/index.html) has been enacted to prevent discrimination and disadvantage to women, the implementation of policy does not always filter through to the operational levels. It is still possible to circumvent legislation in subtle ways, perhaps without even being aware that these practices are discriminative. The women in this study spoke frankly about their experiences and the difficulties they had encountered in gaining equal recognition to men, with very few satisfied that they were receiving equitable treatment. The women felt that their work was not valued as highly as that of the men they worked with and they were given less opportunities for advancement. Overall, the interviews with the women revealed interesting insights into their experiences in pursuing academic careers and in trying to gain recognition for their achievements. The collective experiences of the women provide an insight into the subtle ways in which disadvantage can be engendered. The findings of this study have serious implications for university administrators, particularly deans and heads of schools. There are many well-qualified women academics and universities cannot afford to overlook the valuable contribution these women can make to teaching, research and university governance. References Allport, Caroline. "Improving Gender Equity: Using Industrial Bargaining". NTEU Frontline4.1 (1996): 5-8. Bacchi, Carol. "The Brick Wall: Why So Few Women Become Senior Academics". Australian Universities Review36.1 (1993): 36-41. Bagilhole, Barbara. "Survivors in a Male Preserve: A Study of British Women Academics' Experiences and Perceptions of Discrimination in a UK University". Higher Education26 (1993): 431-47. Booth, Alison, and Jonathon Burton. "The Position of Women in UK Academic Economics". The Economic Journal110.464 (2000): 312-33. Burton, Clare. "Merit and Gender: Organisations and the Mobilisation of Masculine Bias." Australian Journal of Social Issues22 (1987): 424-35. Burton, Clare. An Equity Review of Staffing Policies and Associated Decision-making at Edith Cowan University. Report commissioned by ECU. 1994. DETYA. Selected Higher Education Statistics. 1999. Everett, James. "Sex, Rank and Qualifications at Australian Universities". Australian Journal of Management19.2 (1994): 159-75. Hall, Elaine, and Beth Blue Swadener. "Chilly Climate: A Study of Subtle Sex Discrimination at a State University". Initiatives (Online)59.3 (2000): 1. Loder, Natasha. "US Science Shocked by Revelations of Sexual Discrimination". Nature405.6787 (2000): 713-4. McElrath, Karen. "Gender, Career Disruption and Academic Rewards". Journal of Higher Education63.3 (1992): 269-81. Over, Ray, and Sandra Lancaster. "The Early Career Patterns of Men and Women in Australian Universities". The Australian Journal of Education28.3 (1984): 309-18. Over, Ray, and Beryl Mckenzie. "Career Prospects for Women in Australian Universities". Journal of Tertiary Educational Administration7.1 (1985): 61-71. Ready, Tinker. "West Coast US Recognizes Academic Gender Bias". Nature Medicine 7.1 (2000): 1. Scutt, Jocelyn. The Sexual Gerrymander.The Law Printer, 1994. Singh, Jasbir. "Women and Management in Higher Education: A Commonwealth Project." A.C.U. Bulletin of Current Documentation. 133 (1998): 2-8. Tuohy, John. "Sex Discrimination Infects Med Schools: Women Say Bias Blocks Chances for Advancement". USA Today2000. 8. Links http://www.unesco.org/ http://www.deet.gov.au/ http://www.hreoc.gov.au/sex_discrimination/ http://www.hreoc.gov.au/about_the_commission/legislation/index.html http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgibin/disp.pl/au/legis/cth/consol%5fact/aaeofwa 1986634/?query=title+%28+%22affirmative+action%22+%29 http://scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/pasteact/0/171/top.htm Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ellis-Newman, Jennifer. "Women and Work" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4.5 (2001). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Ellis-Newman.xml >. Chicago Style Ellis-Newman, Jennifer, "Women and Work" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4, no. 5 (2001), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Ellis-Newman.xml > ([your date of access]). APA Style Ellis-Newman, Jennifer. (2001) Women and Work. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 4(5). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0111/Ellis-Newman.xml > ([your date of access]).

Setting the Mood Weirdly, everything feels the same. There’s absolutely no distinction for me between news, work, walking, gaming, Netflix, rock collecting, scrolling, messaging. I don’t know how this happened, but everything has simply blurred together. There’s a dreadful and yet soothing sameness to it, scrolling through images on Instagram, scrolling Netflix, walking the dog, scrolling the news, time scrolling by as I watch face after face appear or disappear on my screen, all saying something, yet saying nothing. Is this the rhythm of crisis in a slow apocalypse? Really, would it be possible for humans to just bore themselves into oblivion? Because in the middle of a pandemic, boredom feels in my body the same as doom ... just another swell that passes, like my chest as it rises and falls with my breath. This opening anecdote comes from combining narratives in two studies we conducted online during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020: a global study, Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking: Autoethnographic Accounts of Lived Experience in Times of Global Trauma; and an Australian project, The Shut-In Worker: Working from Home and Digitally-Enabled Labour Practices. The Shut-In Worker project aimed to investigate the thoughts, beliefs, and experiences of Australian knowledge workers working from home during lockdown. From June to October 2020, we recruited twelve households across two Australian states. While the sample included households with diverse incomes and living arrangements—from metropolitan single person apartment dwellers to regional families in free standing households—the majority were relatively privileged. The households included in this study were predominantly Anglo-Australian and highly educated. Critically, unlike many during COVID-19, these householders had maintained their salaried work. Participating households took part in an initial interview via Zoom or Microsoft Teams during which they took us on workplace tours, showing us where and how the domestic had been requisitioned for salaried labour. Householders subsequently kept digital diaries of their working days ahead of follow up interviews in which we got them to reflect on their past few weeks working from home with reference to the textual and photographic diaries they had shared with us. In contrast to the tight geographic focus of The Shut-In Worker project and its fairly conventional methodology, the Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking project was envisaged as a global project and driven by an experimental participant-led approach. Involving more than 150 people from 26 countries during 2020, the project was grounded in autoethnography practice and critical pedagogy. Over 21 days, we offered self-guided prompts for ourselves and the other participants—a wide range of creative practitioners, scholar activists, and researchers—to explore their own lived experience. Participants with varying degrees of experience with qualitative methods and/or autoethnography started working with the research questions we had posed in our call; some independently, some in collaboration. The autoethnographic lens used in our study encouraged contributors to document their experience from and through their bodies, their situated daily routines, and their relations with embedded, embodied, and ubiquitous digital technologies. The lens enabled deep exploration and evocation of many of the complexities, profound paradoxes, fears, and hopes that characterise the human and machinic entanglements that bring us together and separate the planetary “us” in this moment (Markham et al. 2020). In this essay we draw on anecdotes and narratives from both studies that speak to the “Zoom experience” during COVID-19. That is, we use Zoom as a socio-technical pivot point to think about how the experience of liminality—of being on/off screen and ambiently in between—is operating to shift both our micro practices and macro structures as we experience and struggle within the rupture, “event”, and conjuncture that marks the global pandemic. What we will see is that many of those narratives depict disjointed, blurry, or confusing experiences, atmospheres, and affects. These liminal experiences are entangled in complex ways with the distinctive forms of commercial infrastructure and software that scaffold video conferencing platforms such as Zoom. Part of what is both enabling and troubling about the key proprietary platforms that increasingly host “public” participation and conversation online (and that came to play a dominant role during COVID19) in the context of what Tarleton Gillespie calls “the internet of platforms” is a sense of the hidden logics behind such platforms. The constant sense of potential dis/connection—with home computers becoming ambient portals to external others—also saw a wider experience of boundarylessness evoked by participants. Across our studies there was a sense of a complete breakdown between many pre-existing boundaries (or at least dotted lines) around work, school, play, leisure and fitness, public and media engagement, and home life. At the same time, the vocabulary of confinement and lockdown emerged from the imposition of physical boundaries or distancing between the self and others, between home and the outside world. During the “connected confinement” of COVID-19, study participants commonly expressed an affective sensation of dysphoria, with this new state of in betweenness or disorientation on and off screen, in and out of Zoom meetings, that characterises the COVID-19 experience seen by many as a temporary, unpleasant disruption to sociality as usual. Our contention is that, as disturbing as many of our experiences are and have been during lockdown, there is an important, ethically and politically generative dimension to our global experiences of liminality, and we should hold on to this state of de-normalisation. Much ink has been spilled on the generalised, global experience of videoconferencing during the COVID-19 pandemic. A line of argument within this commentary speaks to the mental challenge and exhaustion—or zoom fatigue as it is now popularly termed—that many have been experiencing in attempting to work, learn, and live collectively via interactive screen technologies. We suggest zoom fatigue stands in for a much larger set of global social challenges—a complex conjuncture of microscopic ruptures, decisions within many critical junctures or turning points, and slow shifts in how we see and make sense of the world around us. If culture is habit writ large, what should we make of the new habits we are building, or the revelations that our prior ways of being in the world might not suit our present planetary needs, and maybe never did? Thus, we counter the current dominant narrative that people, regions, and countries should move on, pivot, or do whatever else it takes to transition to a “new normal”. Instead, drawing on the work of Haraway and others interested in more than human, post-anthropocenic thinking about the future, this essay contends that—on a dying planet facing major global challenges—we need to be embracing liminality and “staying with the trouble” if we are to hope to work together to imagine and create better worlds. This is not necessarily an easy step but we explore liminality and the affective components of Zoom fatigue here to challenge the assumption that stability and certainty is what we now need as a global community. If the comfort experienced by a chosen few in pre-COVID-19 times was bought at the cost of many “others” (human and more than human), how can we use the discomfort of liminality to imagine global futures that have radically transformative possibilities? On Liminality Because liminality is deeply affective and experienced both individually and collectively, it is a difficult feeling or state to put into words, much less generalised terms. It marks the uncanny or unstable experience of existing between. Being in a liminal state is marked by a profound disruption of one’s sense of self, one’s phenomenological being in the world, and in relation to others. Zoom, in and of itself, provokes a liminal experience. As this participant says: Zoom is so disorienting. I mean this literally; in that I cannot find a solid orientation toward other people. What’s worse is that I realize everyone has a different view, so we can’t even be sure of what other people might be seeing on their screen. In a real room this would not be an issue at all. The concept of liminality originally came out of attempts to capture the sense of flux and transition, rather than stasis, that shapes culture and community, exemplified during rites of passage. First developed in the early twentieth century by ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep, it was later taken up and expanded upon by British anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner, best known for his work on cultural rituals and rites of passage, describes liminality as the sense of “in betweenness” experienced as one moves from one status (say that of a child) to another (formal recognition of adulthood). For Turner, community life and the formation of societies more broadly involves periods of transition, threshold moments in which both structures and anti-structures become apparent. Bringing liminality into the contemporary digital moment, Zizi Papacharissi discusses the concept in collective terms as pertaining to the affective states of networked publics, particularly visible in the development of new social and political formations through wide scale social media responses to the Arab Spring. Liminality in this context describes the “not yet”, a state of “pre-emergence” or “emergence” of unformed potentiality. In this usage, Papacharissi builds on Turner’s description of liminality as “a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” (97). The pandemic has sparked another moment of liminality. Here, we conceptualise liminality as a continuous dialectical process of being pushed and pulled in various directions, which does not necessarily resolve into a stable state or position. Shifting one’s entire lifeworld into and onto computer screens and the micro screens of Zoom, as experienced by many around the world, collapses the usual functioning norms that maintain some degree of distinction between the social, intimate, political, and work spheres of everyday life. But this shift also creates new boundaries and new rules of engagement. As a result, people in our studies often talked about experiencing competing realities about “where” they are, and/or a feeling of being tugged by contradictory or competing forces that, because they cannot be easily resolved, keep us in an unsettled, uncomfortable state of being in the world. Here the dysphoric experiences associated not just with digital liminality but with the broader COVID-19 epidemiological-socio-political conjuncture are illustrated by Sianne Ngai’s work on the politics of affect and “ugly feelings” in the context of capitalism’s relentlessly affirmative culture. Rather than dismissing the vague feelings of unease that, for many of us, go hand in hand with late modern life, Ngai suggests that such generalised and dispersed affective states are important markers of and guides to the big social and cultural problems of our time—the injustices, inequalities, and alienating effects of late capitalism. While critical attention tends to be paid to more powerful emotions such as anger and fear, Ngai argues that softer and more nebulous forms of negative affect—from envy and anxiety to paranoia—can tell us much about the structures, institutions, and practices that frame social action. These enabling and constraining processes occur at different and intersecting levels. At the micro level of the screen interface, jarring experiences can set us to wondering about where we are (on or off screen, in place and space), how we appear to others, and whether or not we should showcase and highlight our “presence”. We have been struck by how people in our studies expressed the sense of being handled or managed by the interfaces of Zoom or Microsoft Teams, which frame people in grid layouts, yet can shift and alter these frames in unanticipated ways. I hate Zoom. Everything about it. Sometimes I see a giant person, shoved to the front of the meeting in “speaker view” to appear larger than anyone else on the screen. People constantly appear and disappear, popping in and out. Sometimes, Zoom just rearranges people seemingly randomly. People commonly experience themselves or others being resized, frozen, or “glitched”, muted, accidentally unmuted, suddenly disconnected, or relegated to the second or third “page” of attendees. Those of us who attend many meetings as a part of work or education may enjoy the anonymity of appearing at a meeting without our faces or bodies, only appearing to others as a nearly blank square or circle, perhaps with a notation of our name and whether or not we are muted. Being on the third page of participants means we are out of sight, for better or worse. For some, being less visible is a choice, even a tactic. For others, it is not a choice, but based on lack of access to a fast or stable Internet connection. The experience and impact of these micro elements of presence within the digital moment differs, depending on where you appear to others in the interface, how much power you have over the shape or flow of the interaction or interface settings, or what your role is. Moving beyond the experience of the interface and turning to the middle range between micro and macro worlds, participants speak of attempting to manage blurred or completely collapsed boundaries between “here” and “there”. Being neither completely at work or school nor completely at home means finding new ways of negotiating the intimate and the formal, the domestic and the public. This delineation is for many not a matter of carving out specific times or spaces for each, but rather a process of shifting back and forth between makeshift boundaries that may be temporal or spatial, depending on various aspects of one’s situation. Many of us most likely could see the traces of this continuous shifting back and forth via what Susan Leigh Star called “boundary objects”. While she may not have intended this concept in such concrete terms, we could see these literally, in the often humorous but significantly disruptive introduction of various domestic actants during school or work, such as pets, children, partners, laundry baskets, beds, distinctive home decor, ambient noise, etc. Other trends highlight the difficulty of maintaining zones of work and school when these overlap with the rest of the physical household. One might place Post-it Notes on the kitchen wall saying “I’m in a Zoom meeting so don’t come into the living room” or blur one’s screen background to obscure one’s domestic location. These are all strategies of maintaining ontological security in an otherwise chaotic process of being both here and there, and neither here nor there. Yet even with these strategies, there is a constant dialectical liminality at play. In none of these examples do participants feel like they are either at home or at work; instead, they are constantly shifting in between, trying to balance, or straddling physical and virtual, public and private, in terms of social “roles” and “locations”. These negotiations highlight the “ongoingness” of and the labour involved in maintaining some semblance of balance within what is inherently an unbalanced dialectical process. Participants talked about and showed in their diaries and pictures developed for the research projects the ways they act through, work with, or sometimes just try to ignore these opposing states. The rise of home-based videoconferencing and associated boundary management practices have also highlighted what has been marginalised or forgotten and conversely, prioritised or valorised in prior sociotechnical assemblages that were simply taken for granted. Take for example the everyday practices of being in a work versus domestic lifeworld; deciding how to handle the labor of cleaning cups and dishes used by the “employees” and “students” in the family throughout the day, the tasks of enforcing school attendance by children attending classes in the family home etc. This increased consciousness—at both a household and more public level—of a previously often invisible and feminised care economy speaks to larger questions raised by the lockdown experience. At the same time as people in our studies were negotiating the glitches of screen presence and the weird boundarylessness of home-leisure-domestic-school-work life, many expressed an awareness of a troubling bigger picture. First, we had just the COVID lockdowns, you know, that time where many of us were seemingly “all together” in this, at home watching Tiger King, putting neighborly messages in our windows, or sharing sourdough recipes on social media. Then Black Lives Matters movements happened. Suddenly attention is shifted to the fact that we’re not all in this together. In Melbourne, people in social housing towers got abruptly locked down without even the chance to go to the store for food first, and yet somehow the wealthy or celebrity types are not under this heavy surveillance; they can just skip the mandatory quarantine. ... We can’t just go on with things as usual ... there are so many considerations now. Narratives like these suggest that while 2020 might have begun with the pandemic, the year raised multiple other issues. As many things have been destabilised, the nature or practice of everyday life is shifting under our feet. Around the world, people are learning how to remain more distanced from each other, and the rhythms of temporal and geographic movement are adapting to an era of the pandemic. Simultaneously, many people talk about an endlessly arriving (but never quite here) moment when things will be back to normal, implying not only that this feeling of uncertainty will fade, but also that the zone of comfort is in what was known and experienced previously, rather than in a state of something radically different. This sentiment is strong despite the general agreement that “we will never [be able to] go back to how it was, but [must] proceed to some ‘new normal’”. Still, as the participant above suggests, the pandemic has also offered a much broader challenge to wider, taken-for-granted social, political, and economic structures that underpin late capitalist nations in particular. The question then becomes: How do we imagine “moving on” from the pandemic, while learning from the disruptive yet critical moment it has offered us as a global community? Learning from Liminality I don’t want us to go back to “normal”, if that means we are just all commuting in our carbon spitting cars to work and back or traveling endlessly and without a care for the planet. COVID has made my life better. Not having to drive an hour each way to work every day—that’s a massive benefit. While it’s been a struggle, the tradeoff is spending more time with loved ones—it’s a better quality of life, we have to rethink the place of work. I can’t believe how much more I’ve been involved in huge discussions about politics and society and the planet. None of this would have been on my radar pre-COVID. What would it mean then to live with as well as learn from the reflexive sense of being and experience associated with the dis-comforts of living on and off screen, a Zoom liminality, if you will? These statements from participants speak precisely to the budding consciousness of new potential ways of being in a post-COVID-19 world. They come from a place of discomfort and represent dialectic tensions that perhaps should not be shrugged off or too easily resolved. Indeed, how might we consider this as the preferred state, rather than being simply a “rite of passage” that implies some pathway toward more stable identities and structured ways of being? The varied concepts of “becoming”, “not quite yet”, “boundary work”, or “staying with the trouble”, elaborated by Karen Barad, Andrew Pickering, Susan Leigh Star, and Donna Haraway respectively, all point to ways of being, acting, and thinking through and with liminality. All these thinkers are linked by their championing of murky and mangled conceptions of experience and more than human relations. Challenging notions of the bounded individual of rational humanism, these post-human scholars offer an often-uncomfortable picture of being in and through multiplicity, of modes of agency born out of a slippage between the one and the many. While, as we noted above, this experience of in betweenness and entanglement is often linked to emotions we perceive as negative, “ugly feelings”, for Barad et al., such liminal moments offer fundamentally productive and experimental modalities that enable possibilities for new configurations of being and doing the social in the anthropocene. Further, liminality as a concept potentially becomes radically progressive when it is seen as both critically appraising the constructed and conventional nature of prior patterns of living and offering a range of reflexive alternatives. People in our studies spoke of the pandemic moment as offering tantalizing glimpses of what kinder, more caring, and egalitarian futures might look like. At the same time, many were also surprised by (and skeptical of) the banality and randomness of the rise of commercial platforms like Zoom as a “choice” for being with others in this current lifeworld, emerging as it did as an ad hoc, quick solution that met the demands of the moment. Zoom fatigue then also suggests a discomfort about somehow being expected to fully incorporate proprietary platforms like Zoom and their algorithmic logics as a core way of living and being in the post-COVID-19 world. In this sense the fact that a specific platform has become a branded eponym for the experience of online public communicative fatigue is telling indeed. The unease around the centrality of video conferencing to everyday life during COVID-19 can in part be seen as a marker of anxieties about the growing role of decentralized, private platforms in “replacing or merging with public infrastructure, [thereby] creating new social effects” (Lee). Further, jokes and off-hand comments by study participants about their messy domestic interiors being publicized via social media or their boss monitoring when they are on and offline speak to larger concerns around surveillance and privacy in online spaces, particularly communicative environments where unregulated private platforms rather than public infrastructures are becoming the default norm. But just as people are both accepting of and troubled by a growing sense of inevitability about Zoom, we also saw them experimenting with a range of other ways of being with others, from online cocktail parties to experimenting with more playful and creative apps and platforms. What these participants have shown us is the need to “stay with the trouble” or remain in this liminal space as long as possible. While we do not have the space to discuss this possibility in this short provocation, Haraway sees this experimental mode of being as involving multiple actants, human and nonhuman, and as constituting important work in terms of speculating and figuring with various “what if” scenarios to generate new possible futures. As Haraway puts it, this process of speculative figuring is one of giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads, and so mostly failing but sometimes finding something that works, something consequential and maybe even beautiful, that wasn’t there before, of relaying connections that matter, of telling stories in hand upon hand, digit upon digit, attachment site upon attachment site, to craft conditions for flourishing in terran worlding. This struggle of course takes us far beyond decisions about Zoom, specifically. This deliberately troubling liminality is a process of recognizing old habits, building new ones, doing the hard work of reconsidering broader social formations in a future that promises more trouble. Governments, institutions, corporate entities, and even social movements like Transition Towns or #BuildBackBetter all seem to be calling for getting out of this liminal zone, whether this is to “bounce back” by returning to hyper-consumerist, wasteful, profit-driven modes of life or the opposite, to “bounce forward” to radically rethink globalization and build intensely localized personal and social formations. Perhaps a third alternative is to embrace this very transitional experience itself and consider whether life on a troubled, perhaps dying planet might require our discomfort, unease, and in-betweenness, including acknowledging and sometimes embracing “glitches” and failures (Nunes). Transitionality, or more broadly liminality, has the potential to enhance our understanding of who and what “we” are, or perhaps more crucially who “we” might become, by encompassing a kind of dialectic in relation to the experiences of others, both intimate and distant. As many critical commentators before us have suggested, this necessarily involves working in conjunction with a rich ecology of planetary agents from First People’s actors and knowledge systems--a range of social agents who already know what it is to be liminal to landscapes and other species--through and with the enabling affordances of digital technologies. This is an important, and exhausting, process of change. And perhaps this trouble is something to hang on to as long as possible, as it preoccupies us with wondering about what is happening in the lines between our faces, the lines of the technologies underpinning our interactions, the taken for granted structures on and off screen that have been visibilized. We are fatigued, not by the time we spend online, although there is that, too, but by the recognition that the world is changing. References Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2006. Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. Yale UP 2018. Haraway, Donna J. “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far.” Ada New Media 3 (2013). <http://adanewmedia.org/2013/11/issue3-haraway>. Lee, Ashlin. “In the Shadow of Platforms: Challenges and Opportunities for the Shadow of Hierarchy in the Age of Platforms and Datafication.” M/C Journal 24.2 (2021). <http://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2750>. Markham, Annette N., et al. “Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking during COVID-19 Times.” Qualitative Inquiry Oct. 2020. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420962477>. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard UP, 2005. Nunes, Mark. 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