This article is based on the outcomes of the research project on changes in everyday life during the pandemic, conducted at the beginning of lockdown in Poland with the use of CAWI questionnaire. We focus on results related to defining the positive aspects (PA) of the pandemic, describe the kinds of PA noticed by the respondents, categorise the identified PA (by values, concepts of order, and social change they referred), and analyse how sociodemographic characteristics of the respondents differentiate the responses. We argue that the perceived PA were directed towards individual rather than the general social well-being, that they express hope for maintaining rather than transforming the status quo, and that the nature of recognised PA is more defensive than progressive. Contrary to our initial assumptions, statistical analyses also suggest that the PA perception does not correlate with respondents' socio-demographic characteristics as strongly as expected, which allows for an assumption that other, more situational and personality traits factors also influence the researched phenomenon.

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This paper discusses a research project that attempted to examine selected public institutions' response strategies to a pandemic. The most important research question of the project was the relationship between the pandemic and innovativeness of the sector of public institutions (understood as the desire to introduce new ways of operating, new inter-institutional links, new patterns of relations with stakeholders, etc., resulting from the knowledge provided to individual institutions by functioning under the conditions of the pandemic). During qualitative research we found that the researched institutions' predominant reaction to the challenges of the pandemic was not an orientation towards innovation but a striving to maintain a mode of functioning that is as similar as possible to that from before the pandemic. The innovations made (transition to remote working, simplification of some administrative procedures) resulted from external pressure to a greater extent and internal reflexivity to a lesser extent. The narratives captured in the study about the everyday life of public institutions during the pandemic have three common elements. First, they all focus less on large and spectacular innovations and more on micro-innovations (not treated as innovation, but understood as dozens of micro-improvements, minimal adjustments to existing routines). Second, they all miniaturize the experience of the pandemic, regarding it as events so extreme as to be useless for designing a better institutional order. Thirdly, all the reconstructed narratives are situated in an institutional zone of in-between, which means that they perceive themselves as a transparent medium fluctuating between the state and society and as a subject without influence on the shape of its own functioning. On the one hand, this would depend on the level of civic culture and, on the other hand, on the policy created at the highest levels of the state.

The article comprises an attempt to answer the question why some material objects are, in a social and cultural sense, more long-lasting than others. The answer lies in the model of the life-space of the things. This space is created by two basic dimensions. The first is defined by the character of the relationships created by the objects (this dimension comprises the opposition between the technical relations versus the communicative ones). The second is defined by the character of the relationship between the body of the user and the material object (this is created by the opposition: accessible or inaccessible to sensory experience). The transition of the material object through this space is the life-way of the object, and it is precisely this which defines the longevity of the object and thus the length of time it persists within a specific community. The author determines that long-lasting objects are above all those which are linked with the community, or users, by single, unambiguous relationships and links, while those which have ambivalent and multiple links are of shorter lifespan. Whether or not a thing has a long life or not is determined therefore by the multiplicity of meanings it has which render impossible its role as a stabiliser of the links that constitute a community, as a foundation of the individual’s identity, a guarantee of ontological security.

Databases are a form of social performance. This means that their creation is, as Jon McKenzie says, a challenge to the social order -an attempt to stop the changes or to run them. Databases are constructed mainly in order to cognitively and technically control a fragment of reality, to increase the effectiveness of our actions. Thus, although the database seems to be something sedate, dead set of information, its essence lies in the startup of human action, and thus on the transformation of the existing order. This starts with the collection of information and their transformation into the data, with correlation them with each other, seeking within them patterns and trends and in the end, using knowledge for transformation of reality. At each stage of constructing the database we encounter so performance -action that expresses a claim to change reality and that results in starting the activity of individuals, stimulation of various forces. This look at the database promotes their defetishisation as hard reference point for our activity -they are at every stage the effect of overlapping of performative actions.