Abstract: | We introduce and study adhesive spaces. Using this concept we obtain a characterization of stable Baire maps \({f : X\to Y}\) of the class \({\alpha}\) for wide classes of topological spaces. In particular, we prove that for a topological space X and a contractible space Y a map \({f : X \to Y}\) belongs to the nth stable Baire class if and only if there exist a sequence \({(f_k)_{k=1}^\infty}\) of continuous maps \({f_k : {X \to Y}}\) and a sequence \({(F_k)_{k=1}^\infty}\) of functionally ambiguous sets of the nth class in X such that \({f|_{F_k}=f_k|_{F_k}}\) for every k. Moreover, we show that every monotone function \({f : \mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{R}}\) is of the \({\alpha}\) th stable Baire class if and only if it belongs to the first stable Baire class. |