Liminality is a sufficiently comprehensive concept to allow the description and interpretation of how we experience change as existing in a “betwixt and between time”. A situation of liminality implies an intrusion, always difficult to manage, of chaos, of the erratic, into the harmony of everyday life. The activation of ecological sensitivities can lead to spontaneous liminal experiences, triggered by the awareness that the world around us is a changing environment. We intend to show that notions from phenomenology, such as home-world and alien-world, allow the interpretation of climate change as a situation of liminality that we experience due to the de-familiarization of the environment. The way we understand and interpret the world we live in is based on its normality, understood as constantly experienced in our daily bodily behavior. The notion of the home-world expresses the inter-subjective way in which we experience the natural world, as a world that is already given to us. Because its environmental meanings are actively imprinted in our lived corporeality, the home-world becomes a foundational standard against which changes in the natural environment are always cognitively compared within intuitive, already-constituted terms. The same world may appear alien to us when we become aware of sufficiently significant changes in the normality of our everyday experience, associated with discontinuities or disturbances. Because it places the familiar and known in tension with the unfamiliar and unknown, a liminal experience is always, at a subjective level, epistemologically transformative. To the extent that the surrounding natural world loses its already-given character, we will perceive it as an alien-world, more or less different from the one in which we lived our daily lives.

Values remain notoriously difficult to “capture” because they cannot be directly observed. Attitudes and opinions are the only known indicators of their presence. The relationship between values and attitudes or opinions is that between latent and manifest, so that values can be justifiably inferred from observed attitudes and expressed opinions. Nevertheless, this is an epistemological limitation to reckon with. So, the alternative we propose is to explore cultural values as an integral part of social representations. We want to show that social representation theory can help with identifying values in an accurate and reliable manner. It is only due to the fact that we already have a common representation of social reality that we can develop attitudes that can then be manifested by expressing opinions. If values directly intervene in the formation of attitudes, they will surely be part of the representations that triggered that formation in the first place. Using a mixed-method approach, professionals’ representations of their professional role were explored in order to identify the values associated with it. As cognitively processed cultural constructs, values can be identified as elements of the central node of professionals’ representation of their profession.

This article examines the phenomenological constitution of time in digital work, focusing on how senior IT professionals retrospectively articulate the relation between organizational rhythms, embodied experience, and biographical meaning. Based on an anamnetic and metaphor-oriented analysis of interviews with ten senior professionals from the emerging technology hub of Iași, Romania, the study approaches organizations as intersubjective worlds of embodied practice, structured by shared rhythms, technological mediation, and historically sedimented forms of corporeal participation. Drawing on theories of organizational temporality, acceleration, embodiment, and historical intercorporeality, the analysis shows how participants make sense of their professional trajectories through recurring metaphors of immersion, gravitation, impossible puzzles, hamster wheels, and chronophagous machines. These figurative constructions condense complex experiences of synchronization and desynchronization, revealing how work may be lived either as resonance, continuity, and existential investment, or as fragmentation, bodily dissonance, exhaustion, and alienation. The findings suggest that digital work cannot be understood only as a sequence of tasks, deadlines, and technological cycles, but must also be interpreted as a spatio-temporal field in which the body, memory, and professional identity are gradually formed. In this sense, organizational life appears as an existential negotiation between acceleration and sedimentation, collective rhythm and subjective temporality, technological demands and the embodied history of the working subject.