Editorial: Changes in a Human Life

The subject of the volume Changes in a human life is the process of the broadly understood transformation taking place in the lives of both individuals and whole communities. It is a process that may have various faces and characters and that may refer to numerous fields of research and various contexts. Therefore, the group of notions that the authors of this volume focus on is comprised of those related to the problems of disability, fatherhood, prostitution, intelligence, corporate work or migration. The included articles are of an overview, exploratory and empirical nature. However, all of them bring the reader closer to the processuality, changeability and dynamism of the lives lived by individuals and communities.

The world is built from social meanings, ascribed by people (...). The matter of changing the state of affairs consists in transforming the ascribed meaning. (Soder 1989: 121) I t is often emphasized that the lives of individuals and whole societies are connected with omnipresent dynamics, and the existence of contemporary man may be perceived as a process of permanent change. In a sociological context, the change means the transformation of one system status to another. Separate changes are interconnected, overlapping, and they trigger subsequent transformations. Therefore, they create a series of subsequent phases or stages of a given process, causally conditioned (Sztompka 2005:20-27).
The transformations may take place in various fields and in different dimensions, and they may be analyzed on various levels: macro-social (in whole societies and international systems), mezosocial (taking place in local communities and large organizations) and micro-social (within small groups and human attitudes). These levels penetrate and stimulate each other, creating a space for various social phenomena.
The psychosocial mechanisms and consequences of the processes of social transformations provided a topic of interest for scholars from the Chicago School, who were the first authors of works applying life records (Szczepański 1976:36). As far back as 1921, in the work entitled Old World Trains Translated (Park, Miller 1921), which related to the Americanization of emigrants, particular chapters were devoted to, among others, the problems of lost status, adjustment to the individualist society, the func-tioning of immigrant societies, or interconnected institutions (Golczyńska-Grondas 2014:21). Herbert Blumer (2007) in turn, one of the key representatives of the Chicago School, believed that a change poses an indispensable attribute of a society, which -as he claimed -was not a static structure, but rather a being that is dynamically reconstructed within a course of interactions taking place between individuals. He stated that social reality is of a processual nature, based on the interpretation of the meanings of common definitions of particular situations agreed on by its members. Individuals are active and fully aware actors here, acting on the basis of meanings ascribed to objects, therefore co-creating reality, and not reacting passively and lifelessly to external stimuli (Blumer 2007). Individuals that interact with one another communicate, thus creating the basis for the construction of a real and intersubjective world of people endowed with the sense of their own ego. Society, in turn, is created, maintained and transformed thanks to people's abilities not only to think and define, but also to self-reflect and self-evaluate, presenting the result of human actions, how all significant aspects of their life are interpreted on a current basis (Szacki 2002:545 and further). Hence, society is a process of entities that adjust to each other during interactions, acting in a specific social context (Blumer 1975:78;2007:55-60). The individuals interpret a given situation on a current basis, which means that each course of action is constructed from the beginning (Blumer 2007:17).
At the same time, as is pointed out by Anselm L. Strauss (1959:94-95), being influenced by new con-

ditions, external circumstances and various types
The subject of the volume Changes in a human life is the process of the broadly understood transformation taking place in the lives of both individuals and whole communities. It is a process that may have various faces and characters and that may refer to numerous fields of research and various contexts.
Therefore, the group of notions that the authors of this volume focus on is comprised of those related to the problems of disability, fatherhood, prostitution, intelligence, corporate work or migration. The  Strauss (1968;1975), this notion describes the evolution of a given phenomenon, the appearance of subsequent stadia as well as everything that supports their creation and devel- ies -which is based on 'objective indicators' and statistical analysis, the level of integration is measured and assessed as 'low' or 'high', 'sufficient' or 'insufficient'. Therefore, the authors decided to ask the migrants themselves what integration means to them. The analysis of the narrative interviews conducted with Ukrainian, Srilankese and Senegalese men and women living in the South of Italy has demonstrated that integration for them is related more strongly to the notion of a 'good life' than to the desire to become 'one of us'. From their narratives emerges the idea of integration as acceptance and satisfaction but without aspirations for equality, participation and full social and political rights, which calls for more active integration policies.