Books on the topic 'Value hierarchy'

As the long sixteenth century came to a close, new positive ideas of gusto/taste opened a rich counter vision of food and taste where material practice, sensory perceptions and imagination contended with traditional social values, morality, and dietetic/medical discourse. Exploring the complex and evocative ways the early modern Italian culture of food was imagined in the literature of the time, Food Culture and the Literary Imagination in Early Modern Italy reveals that while a moral and disciplinary vision tried to control the discourse on food and eating in medical and dietetic treatises of the sixteenth century and prescriptive literature, a wide range of literary works contributed to a revolution in eating and taste. In the process long held visions of food and eating, as related to social order and hierarchy, medicine, sexuality and gender, religion and morality, pleasure and the senses, were questioned, tested and overturned, and eating and its pleasures would never be the same.

The concept of the literary canon is one of the most debated and controversial in the western intellectual tradition. This book offers ten contributions by Italian scholars of Anglo-American culture addressing the way in which the concept of the literary canon holds out against areas traditionally considered as external or extraneous to it. The essays range over different topics: the etymological analysis of the term "canon"; the relations between canon and performativity; paraliterature – a universe populated by non-hierarchic genres; the relations between post-colonial literature and the canon; postmodern biofiction; studies on translation and finally gay and lesbian literature. The book ends with a meditation on the innovations wrought on the Anglo-American canon by the virtual world of Internet and with a reading proposal originating from a different area of literary studies. Taken as a whole, the intention of the book is to pave the way to democratisation and pluralism in literary studies, going beyond the limitations set by the traditional scale of values of the "western canon". It proposes a frequentation of the geographical and cultural borderlines and hence of the areas of resistance that such borderlines pose to the dominant conceptual hierarchies within and around us, enabling us to glimpse an original future for literature and for western culture in a broader sense.

Like Suryaniness, authority in Hayy al-Suryan is performed. The two are constantly contested and (re)articulated such that their components are legitimated, and, ultimately, agreed upon and valued. In putting some emphasis on gender in relation to notions of authority, particularly on women’s agency in the strict ecclesiastical and social hierarchy of Hayy al-Suryan, this chapter suggests the concept of authority as more appropriate than power. Borrowing Ricoeur’s tradition of authority, the chapter presents chant as the arbiter of Suryani modes of value in the worldly, relational sphere of Urfalli sociality. It underlines the affective liminality social complexity bestows on the female voice while gendering women’s bodies. The chapter zooms in on three individuals, portraying them dynamically in integrated instances of intimate ethnography, to shed light on the atemporal interlockings of value and perception in the musical story of a living, ancient musicality.

According to this chapter, approaches to truth and to the liar paradox appear to face a dilemma, as they must, it seems, appeal to some sort of hierarchy or contend that a putatively coherent concept is actually incoherent, either of which results in expressive limitations. The chapter proposes a new approach to the liar paradox that avoids such expressive limitations. This approach countenances classical semantic values while advocating a revision to how we think about compositional rules. The idea is that there are exceptions to the compositional rules associated with a language. To this end, the chapter adverts to theories that respect the “Chrysippus intuition,” which captures the idea that different tokens of the same type can have divergent semantic statuses. Such theories yield models of languages whose semantic values are classical but where the compositional rules associated with these languages have exceptions.

This chapter problematizes the notions and language of tolerance and accommodation in relation to religious diversity, and traces their genealogy both as legal solutions and as discursive frameworks within which religious diversity is increasingly understood in the public sphere. The problem they pose is that they create a hierarchy of privilege that preserves hegemonic power relations by religious majorities over religious minorities. Tolerance in this context might be imagined as the broadly stated value that we must deal with diversity and those who are different from us by tolerating them. Accommodation might be seen as the implementation of this value—that in order to demonstrate our commitment to tolerance we must accommodate the ‘demands’ of minority groups and those individuals who position themselves or align themselves with minorities.

The nosology developed by Kraepelin at the end of the nineteenth century was the first comprehensive paradigm for psychiatric research. He conjectured that clinical features, experiment, and anatomy will validate psychiatric diagnoses, that these validators converge on natural disease units, and that there is a hierarchy of validators, with course and outcome being the most important. Current psychiatric research is still shaped by Kraepelin’s paradigm, and we continue to design experiments and studies based on the dogma of the natural disease unit. To make progress, we need a new strategy for psychiatric research. We need to determine the strength of evidence for each validator, rank the strength of evidence for each diagnosis, and build consensus for the value for validators. The current debate about the scientific status of psychiatric nosology is the result of conflicting value judgments regarding validators of psychiatric diagnoses.

Engagement is defined and a classification of engagement-related activity presented, underlining the centrality of individual and team relationships in delivering health and social care to individuals. Case studies provide practical illustration of differing approaches in the hierarchy of engaging individuals in treatment, from mutually constructive strategies to more restrictive tactics for people who avoid services. Throughout, the patient and service perspective is compared, for example, when does conscientious follow-up become perceived as harassment? Critique and evidence from research and patient testimony is provided. The value of engagement measures are discussed, including patient reported attachment and proxy measures of missed appointments and dropout.

The idea of heredity—that qualities of body and mind are somehow inherited from one’s parents—has profoundly shaped many aspects of the human experience: from our attempts to understand variation in personality and intelligence, to popular attitudes about gender, race, and social hierarchy, to the methods employed to increase crop yields and the value of horses and cattle. Heredity: A Very Short Introduction traces both the technical study of biological inheritance and the ideological use of the concept of heredity from antiquity into a modern age of molecular biology in which a brave new prospect is emerging: the capacity to manipulate the human genome itself.

This chapter provides a detailed argument as to why philosophical ethics is a problematic starting point for theorizing psychiatric ethics practice. Following this critique, the author reviews values-based practice (VBP) as offering a practice framework to theorize the particular domain of psychiatric ethics practice. Values-based psychiatric ethics (VBPE) is based upon VBP and focuses on the role of clinician virtue, as well as analytic and clinical skills in working with stakeholders, a “trumps-hierarchy” heuristic which identifies hidden personal and social values, as well as social power structures, and a focus on technique and immediate practical “doing” in clinical encounters. Detailed examples of application are provided.

This chapter discusses the available ‘toolkits’—or mechanisms—for resolving all types of banks and their affiliates, with the caveat that such tools can only be implemented on a case-by-case basis. In order to demonstrate the coverage of these methods, the hierarchy of approaches to bank failure is as follows: sale of the business by the purchase of assets and the assumption of liabilities (i.e. a purchase and assumption transaction), write-down or conversion of long-term unsecured debt into equity (bail-in), liquidation, and state aid (bail-out). Additionally, the normal state of resolution for a business in the commercial world is a restructuring in which creditors consent to a variation in their rights in order to maximize the residual value of an insolvent commercial company for the collective benefit of all its stakeholders and preserve its critical operations for the benefit of the broader market—a method that should be adapted for use in the banking industry.

Some commentators maintain that the historical content and context of Confucian relations (based on familial hierarchical relations) prohibit Confucianism from offering a general account of relations and virtues that can be extended to equals and strangers beyond the family, that is, justice. I challenge such an account by showing that even though the Confucian virtues are cultivated first in the family, they transcend the family hierarchy and apply to everyone else. Apart from the universal applicability of the Confucian virtues, I show how self-determination is inseparable from the exercise of justice. Accordingly, I explore the familial, social and political resources in Confucianism for self-determination.

As a political variety within Leninism, different from what is usually called national communism, national Stalinism systematically opposed any form of liberalisation, let alone democratisation. Reactionary and self-centered, it valued autarky and exclusiveness. The fundamental values of such a regime are political voluntarism, sectarianism, radicalism, cult of hierarchy and authority, scorn for parliamentary democracy, and constitutionalism. This article first analyses the origins and the model for national Stalinism, and then looks at four cases amongst Eastern European countries in the post-Stalin era: Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, and Poland. In contrast to Nikolai Lenin, for Joseph Stalin, the complete, irreversible victory of socialism in Russia was not contingent upon the success of proletarian revolutions in the West.

This book brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to explore how political and institutional context influences the governance of basic education in South Africa at national, provincial, and school levels. A specific goal is to contribute to the crucial, ongoing challenge of improving educational outcomes in South Africa. A broader goal is to illustrate the value of an approach to the analysis of public bureaucracies, and of participatory approaches to service provision which puts politics and institutions at centre stage. Stark differences between the Eastern Cape and Western Cape provinces offer something of a natural experiment for exploring the influence of context. The Eastern Cape’s socio-economic, political, and institutional legacy resulted in a low-level equilibrium trap in which incentives transmitted from the political to the bureaucratic levels reinforced factionalized loyalty within multiple patronage networks, and which is difficult to escape. The Western Cape, by contrast, enjoyed a more supportive environment for the operation of public bureaucracy. However, bureaucracy need not be destiny. The research also shows that strong hierarchy can result in ‘isomorphic mimicry’—a combination of formal compliance and a low-level equilibrium of mediocrity. Participatory school-level governance potentially can improve outcomes—as a complement to strong bureaucracies, or as a partial institutional substitute where bureaucracies are weak. Whether this potential is realized depends on the relative strength of developmentally oriented and predatory actors, with the outcomes not fore-ordained by local context, but contingent and cumulative—with individual agency by stakeholders playing a significant role.

This chapter examines the how the literature of the Dharmaśāstra expresses both the way that social relations and worldviews articulate conceptions of the human body and the way that the body comes to be experienced by individuals. The material examined includes mythical and cosmological views of the human body, followed by consideration of the Brahmin’s body, the ascetic body, the criminal and sinning body, the impure body, the body of the penitent, the corpse, and others. The chapter argues that texts such as Manu Smṛti set up a strong correlation between cosmological conceptions, social hierarchy, and ways in which the body is dealt with as the subject of dharma. As a result, the body comes to be experienced as the locus of these broader cultural values.

This chapter reviews some relevant technical material in three stages. Section one outlines Frege’s conception of (ideal) thoughts and their components, some difficulties for this conception, and a familiar hierarchy of types—starting with <e> and <t>, corresponding to entities and truth values—that is often presupposed in discussions of linguistic meaning. Section two reviews the essential aspects of a typologically spare Tarskian semantics for a possible language of thought whose expressions are all sentential. Section three shows how such a mental language could be extended in a more Fregean way. Given this background, we can envision many versions of the idea that meanings are instructions for how to access and assemble concepts, depending on how the space of accessible/constructible concepts is constrained.

Chapter 4 provides an analysis of the patterns of default verb movement identified in Chapters 2 and 3. First, it shows that the attested macro-typologies are not accidental choices of the languages, but rather stem from a compensatory mechanism between syntax and morphology in licensing the Tense, Aspect, and Mood (TAM) interpretation of the verb, whereby verb movement only occurs in cases of poor paradigmatic instantiation of TAM, that is in cases when TAM chief values are not expressed by synthetic and non-syncretic paradigms. Second, a technical implementation of this proposal is offered which allows the modelling of this instance of variation into a parameter hierarchy, along the lines envisaged by the Rethinking Comparative Syntax research group. To conclude, the data from Brazilian Portuguese are assessed against the expectations of the proposed mechanism.

This chapter undertakes a survey of commands and similar speech acts in Lao, the national language of Laos. The survey draws upon a corpus of naturally occurring speech in narratives and conversations recorded in Laos. An important linguistic resource for expressing commands is a system of sentence-final particles. The particles convey subtle distinctions in meaning of commands, including matters of politeness, urgency, entitlement, and expectation. These distinctions are illustrated with examples. Forms of person reference such as names and pronouns also play a role in the formulation of commands, particularly in so far as they relate to a cultural system in which social hierarchy is strongly valued. Various other linguistic issues related to commands are examined, including negative imperatives, complementation, indirect strategies for expressing commands, and serial verb constructions.

This chapter expands on the idea of norm-governed productivity. Because this approach opens the door for a more straightforwardly political assessment of corporate hierarchy, this chapter considers how theories of workplace democracy stack up against this view of corporate efficiency. It argues that radical and participatory democrats are prone to error by essentially doing the mirror image of what the Chicago school does: where Chicago school scholars conflate firms for markets and obscure their cooperative nature, radical democrats often mistake firms for purposive communities and obscure their economic nature. While democratic theorists are right that undefended authority exists within firms and is a problem, they are often in danger of utterly discounting efficiency. It concludes with a more exact enunciation of norm-governed productivity, which emphasizes the manner in which efficiency concerns necessitate a bounded application of noneconomic values.

Chapter 1 explores the motives behind the expositions. New South boosters at the fairs presented an argument for an industrial, modern, and imperial South. They exhibited the region as future-oriented, open to northern investment and industrial development. At the same time, the expositions were not singular spaces. The fairs looked to the future, while celebrating the region’s past. They praised the machine, while remaining ambiguous about its true effects. Architecture suggested the stability and achievements of the past and yet subtly condemned the modern city. Despite these contradictions, the Atlanta and Nashville expositions did present a fairly unified vision. A dream that made few excuses for the southern past, the fairs spread bourgeois values in the present and suggested a future in which a class and racial hierarchy joined to form a peaceful yet powerful New South.

This chapter focuses on the interviews and ethnographic observation conducted by a group of sociologists with Tyneside shipbuilders in 1968–71. Re-examining the interviews suggests several conclusions: class was important to many of the men, but its significance varied depending on context and was closely linked to gender identity. Many closely associated class with snobbishness and hierarchy, and these were things the shipbuilders generally condemned. Instead, they emphasized ordinariness, authenticity, and individuality, all values with deep roots in male, working-class culture. In their attitudes to politics, the effects of the decline of deference were visible: a significant minority of men voiced sceptical or hostile comments about the Labour Party, politics, and/or trade union hierarchies. Individual self-interest was the basis of trade union solidarity for many, and the decline of deference therefore drove greater unofficial strike activity, restless militancy, and even outright insubordination.

Decision making is the process by which alternatives are deliberated and chosen based on the values and goals of the decision maker. In this chapter, we describe recent progress in understanding how living organisms make decisions and the implications for engineering artificial systems with decision-making capabilities. Nature appears to re-use design principles for decision making across a hierarchy of organizational levels, from cells to organisms to entire populations. One common principle is that decision formation is realized by accumulating sensory evidence up to a threshold, approximating the optimal statistical technique of sequential analysis. Sequential analysis has applications spanning from cryptography to clinical drug testing. Artificial perception based on sequential analysis has advanced robot capabilities, enabling robust sensing under uncertainty. Future applications could lead to individual robots, or artificial swarms, that perceive and interact with complex environments with an ease and robustness now achievable only by living organisms.

Although the concept of “charismatic” leaders is commonplace in political discourse, many academics hold that the notion is vague and these leaders’ alleged appeal to voters untestable. This chapter sets out a conceptualization of such leaders, focusing on radical mission, personal presence, symbiotic hierarchy, and Manichean demonization. It then considers four broad theories about why charismatic leaders have notable effects (and why the radical right gathers support): socioeconomic change and crisis, political opportunity structures, cultural legitimation, and psychological affinities. While it is important not to overstate the powers of most leaders, the chapter concludes by arguing that we need to appreciate the role of “coterie” charisma over an inner core, helping to keep parties together. Moreover, charismatic leaders exert a centripetal appeal, particularly to authoritarians and/or those least interested in politics, creating a more differentiated following than the affective bond stressed in the classic Weberian model.

The joint pursuit of commercial and societal objectives will likely require non-traditional (non-hierarchical) ways of organizing. This chapter discusses the prospects for one promising alternative: “organizational democracy.” This is a flatter form characterized by distributed decision rights, a deliberative culture, and employee ownership. Other alternatives to hierarchy have emphasized individualistic values of autonomy and empowerment. In contrast, organizational democracy emphasizes the collective. Relevant work in political philosophy underlines analogous dimensions including representation, deliberation, and a collective point of view. The last point makes it different from work on solidarity and class or group interest. In multi-objective organizational democracy there are trade-offs and these are negotiated. Representation and deliberation come to the foreground. Unlike in traditional organizations, however, negotiations are not regarded as transaction costs to be minimized; rather they are brought to the foreground and cultivated. The chapter illustrates these ideas and discusses challenges and avenues for future research.

Structures and dynamics characterized in this book as ‘associative’—that is, pertaining to contractual relationships and interactions between power-wielders who were not arranged in a clear hierarchy—were not confined to leagues and alliances. In the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, a range of challenges beyond the remit of individual authorities were addressed through multilateral treaties. This gave rise to a variety of associative configurations and solutions, such as coinage unions to preserve currency values, ‘castle-peaces’ (Burgfrieden) between co-lords with intermingled rights and properties, and treaty-based relationships between two or more co-rulers within a princely dynasty. Upon close examination, even those entities depicted in unitary terms in most historiography of the Empire—‘territories’ and their ‘estates’—were structured as loose and overlapping networks of contractually related actors. The constituents of principalities depicted themselves as collectivities engaged in associative negotiation, often at Tage (diets—also the favoured format for discussion within alliances).

From the early eighteenth century into the 1830s, Great Britain was the only major country in the world to adopt gold as the sole basis of its currency, in the process absorbing much of the world’s supply of that metal into its pockets, cupboards, and coffers. During the same period, Britons forged a nation by distilling a heady brew of Protestantism, commerce, and military might, while preserving important features of its older social hierarchy. All That Glittered argues for a close connection between these occurrences, by linking justifications for gold’s role in British society—starting in the 1750s and running through the mid-nineteenth century gold rushes in California and Australia—to contemporary descriptions of that metal’s varied values at home and abroad. Most of these accounts attributed British commercial and military success to a credit economy pinned on gold, stigmatized southern European and subaltern peoples for their nonmonetary uses of gold, or tried to marginalize people at home for similar forms of alleged misconduct. This book tells a primarily cultural origin story about the gold standard’s emergence after 1850 as an international monetary system, while providing a new window on British exceptionalism during the previous century.

Justice Across Ages is a book about how we should respond to inequalities between people at different stages of their lives. Age structures our social institutions, relationships, obligations, and entitlements. There is an age for voting, an age for working, and an age when one is expected (and sometimes required) to retire. Each stage of life also corresponds to specific forms of social risks and vulnerabilities. As a result, inequalities between age groups and generations are numerous and multidimensional. And yet, political theorists have spared little time thinking about how we should respond to these disparities. Are they akin to those patterned on gender or race? Or is there something relevantly distinctive about them that mitigates the need for concern? These questions and others are answered in this book and a theory of justice between co-existing generations is proposed. Age structures our lives and societies. It shapes social institutions, roles, and relationships, as well as how we assign obligations and entitlements within them. There is an age for schooling, an age for voting, an age for working, and an age when one is expected (and sometimes required) to retire. Each life-stage also brings its characteristic opportunities and vulnerabilities, which spawn multidimensional inequalities between young and old. How should we respond to these age-related inequalities? Are they unfair in the same way that gender or racial inequalities often are? Or is there something distinctive about age that should mitigate ethical concern? Justice Across Ages addresses these and related questions, offering an ambitious theory of justice between age groups. Written at the intersection of philosophy and public policy, the book sets forth ethical principles to guide a fair distribution of goods like jobs, healthcare, income, and political power among persons at different stages of their life. Drawing on a range of practical cases, the book deploys normative tools to distinguish objectionable instances of inequalities from acceptable ones and in so doing, critically assesses a range of policy remedies. At a time where young people are starkly under-represented in legislatures and subject to disproportionally high unemployment rates, the book moves from foundational theory to the specific policy reforms needed today. As moral and political philosophers have noted, it can be tempting to assume that age-based inequalities are morally trouble free, since over the course of a complete life, a person moves through each age groups. Yet, Justice Across Ages argues that we should resist this assumption. In particular, we should regard with suspicion commonplace and widely tolerated forms of age-based social hierarchy, such as the infantilization of young adults and older citizens, the political marginalization of teenagers and young adults, the exploitation of young workers through precarious contracts and unpaid internships, and the spatial segregation of elderly persons. If we ever are to live in a society where people are treated as equals, we must pay vigilant attention to how age membership can alter our social standing. This position carries important implications for how we should think about the political and moral value of equality, design our social and political institutions, and conduct ourselves in a range of contexts that includes families, workplaces, and schools.

‘PHILOSOPHY, or the doctrine and discipline of ideas’ as S. T. Coleridge understood it, is the theme of this book. It considers the most vital and mature vein of Coleridge’s prose writings to be ‘the contemplation of ideas objectively, as existing powers’. A theory of ideas emerges in critical engagement with thinkers including Plato, Plotinus, Böhme, Kant, and Schelling. A commitment to the transcendence of reason, central to what Coleridge calls ‘the spiritual platonic old England’, distinguishes him from his German contemporaries. This book pursues a theory of contemplation that draws from Coleridge’s theories of imagination and the ‘Ideas of Reason’ in his published texts and extensively from his thoughts as they developed throughout published works, fragments, letters, and notebooks. He posited a hierarchy of cognition from basic sense intuition to the apprehension of scientific, ethical, and theological ideas. The structure of the book follows this thesis, beginning with sense data, moving upwards into aesthetic experience, imagination, and reason, with final chapters on formal logic and poetry that constellate the contemplation of ideas. Coleridge’s Contemplative Philosophy is not just a work of history of philosophy; it addresses a figure whose thinking is of continuing interest, arguing that contemplation of ideas and values has consequences for everyday morality and aesthetics, as well as metaphysics. The book also illuminates Coleridge’s prose by analysis of his poetry, notably the ‘Limbo’ sequence. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, scholars of religion, and of literature.

Hard coal mining is characterised by features that pose numerous challenges to its current operations and cause strategic and operational problems in planning its development. The most important of these include the high capital intensity of mining investment projects and the dynamically changing environment in which the sector operates, while the long-term role of the sector is dependent on factors originating at both national and international level. At the same time, the conditions for coal mining are deteriorating, the resources more readily available in active mines are being exhausted, mining depths are increasing, temperature levels in pits are rising, transport routes for staff and materials are getting longer, effective working time is decreasing, natural hazards are increasing, and seams with an increasing content of waste rock are being mined. The mining industry is currently in a very difficult situation, both in technical (mining) and economic terms. It cannot be ignored, however, that the difficult financial situation of Polish mining companies is largely exacerbated by their high operating costs. The cost of obtaining coal and its price are two key elements that determine the level of efficiency of Polish mines. This situation could be improved by streamlining the planning processes. This would involve striving for production planning that is as predictable as possible and, on the other hand, economically efficient. In this respect, it is helpful to plan the production from operating longwalls with full awareness of the complexity of geological and mining conditions and the resulting economic consequences. The constraints on increasing the efficiency of the mining process are due to the technical potential of the mining process, organisational factors and, above all, geological and mining conditions. The main objective of the monograph is to identify relations between geological and mining parameters and the level of longwall mining costs, and their daily output. In view of the above, it was assumed that it was possible to present the relationship between the costs of longwall mining and the daily coal output from a longwall as a function of onerous geological and mining factors. The monograph presents two models of onerous geological and mining conditions, including natural hazards, deposit (seam) parameters, mining (technical) parameters and environmental factors. The models were used to calculate two onerousness indicators, Wue and WUt, which synthetically define the level of impact of onerous geological and mining conditions on the mining process in relation to: —— operating costs at longwall faces – indicator WUe, —— daily longwall mining output – indicator WUt. In the next research step, the analysis of direct relationships of selected geological and mining factors with longwall costs and the mining output level was conducted. For this purpose, two statistical models were built for the following dependent variables: unit operating cost (Model 1) and daily longwall mining output (Model 2). The models served two additional sub-objectives: interpretation of the influence of independent variables on dependent variables and point forecasting. The models were also used for forecasting purposes. Statistical models were built on the basis of historical production results of selected seven Polish mines. On the basis of variability of geological and mining conditions at 120 longwalls, the influence of individual parameters on longwall mining between 2010 and 2019 was determined. The identified relationships made it possible to formulate numerical forecast of unit production cost and daily longwall mining output in relation to the level of expected onerousness. The projection period was assumed to be 2020–2030. On this basis, an opinion was formulated on the forecast of the expected unit production costs and the output of the 259 longwalls planned to be mined at these mines. A procedure scheme was developed using the following methods: 1) Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) – mathematical multi-criteria decision-making method, 2) comparative multivariate analysis, 3) regression analysis, 4) Monte Carlo simulation. The utilitarian purpose of the monograph is to provide the research community with the concept of building models that can be used to solve real decision-making problems during longwall planning in hard coal mines. The layout of the monograph, consisting of an introduction, eight main sections and a conclusion, follows the objectives set out above. Section One presents the methodology used to assess the impact of onerous geological and mining conditions on the mining process. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is reviewed and basic definitions used in the following part of the paper are introduced. The section includes a description of AHP which was used in the presented analysis. Individual factors resulting from natural hazards, from the geological structure of the deposit (seam), from limitations caused by technical requirements, from the impact of mining on the environment, which affect the mining process, are described exhaustively in Section Two. Sections Three and Four present the construction of two hierarchical models of geological and mining conditions onerousness: the first in the context of extraction costs and the second in relation to daily longwall mining. The procedure for valuing the importance of their components by a group of experts (pairwise comparison of criteria and sub-criteria on the basis of Saaty’s 9-point comparison scale) is presented. The AHP method is very sensitive to even small changes in the value of the comparison matrix. In order to determine the stability of the valuation of both onerousness models, a sensitivity analysis was carried out, which is described in detail in Section Five. Section Six is devoted to the issue of constructing aggregate indices, WUe and WUt, which synthetically measure the impact of onerous geological and mining conditions on the mining process in individual longwalls and allow for a linear ordering of longwalls according to increasing levels of onerousness. Section Seven opens the research part of the work, which analyses the results of the developed models and indicators in individual mines. A detailed analysis is presented of the assessment of the impact of onerous mining conditions on mining costs in selected seams of the analysed mines, and in the case of the impact of onerous mining on daily longwall mining output, the variability of this process in individual fields (lots) of the mines is characterised. Section Eight presents the regression equations for the dependence of the costs and level of extraction on the aggregated onerousness indicators, WUe and WUt. The regression models f(KJC_N) and f(W) developed in this way are used to forecast the unit mining costs and daily output of the designed longwalls in the context of diversified geological and mining conditions. The use of regression models is of great practical importance. It makes it possible to approximate unit costs and daily output for newly designed longwall workings. The use of this knowledge may significantly improve the quality of planning processes and the effectiveness of the mining process.