In this article the author intend to use an epistemological concept and its categories of description to analyse two specially chosen biographies reflecting diverse postmodern life patterns. Postmodernity, or in fact the postmodern order, refers to the concept of order-making dimensions discussed in the previous article concerning hypermodernity. It is treated there as casual and variable with regard to the category of relations and work, and the only certainty for the individual, in regard to future possibilities or necessities, is the individual’s own identity. This article adds the category of resonance to the characteristics of postmodernity, as a synonym for a person’s primary entanglement in the world. It is a category of which individuals are increasingly aware, on which they reflect, and which they make an object of their experience.

This paper discusses contemporary transformations in the way work is organised and the consequences for the stability of careers and biographies. It debates the widely held belief that organised and predictable life-course paths (including professional careers) have ceased to exist and that work itself has lost its stabilising quality. Biographical data collected among Polish employees of transnational corporations within the project “Poles in the World of Late Capitalism” proves that even though transnational corporations are widely criticised for propelling neoliberal tendencies in the global economy, they provide a means of protecting their employees against today’s uncertainty and occupational risk. Three empirical cases are presented to show how work in a transnational corporation may contribute to achieving and maintaining stability for persons who have had troublesome experiences of working in other sectors of the labour market.

The study was conducted to assess and substantiate the key systemic problems of the national engineering of different countries in the context of economic globalization. To achieve this goal, the study used the author’s method to assess the dependence of mechanical engineering in Ukraine, Poland and Germany on imports of intermediate goods. According to the results, it was determined that in the periods of increasing economic globalization of mechanical engineering in Ukraine, Poland and Germany has undergone systemic destructive changes and is in a threatening state, from the standpoint of economic security. In particular, in Ukrainian and Polish mechanical engineering, the dependence on imports of high-tech intermediate goods is excessively high. In contrast, German engineering, unlike Ukraine’s and Poland’s, is less dependent on imports of high-tech products, but requires much more resource-intensive intermediate goods. It is analytically substantiated that the identified problems with the import dependence of mechanical engineering in Ukraine, Poland and Germany are the result of irrational, one-sided perception of economic globalization by the main economic entities of these countries.