Stories of Survival: Knowledge Intensive Organisations and the Finnish 1990s Recession

The recession that hit the Finnish economy at the beginning of the 1990s has been regarded as unusually severe. Organisations’ failure to survive the recession has been researched in their various aspects. However, the reasons for why and how organisations that survived did so have been explored to a somewhat lesser extent. This study concerns organisations that survived rather than those that failed to do so, as studying successful experiences is acknowledged as an important source for learning how to counteract future failure. The thesis examines four knowledge intensive organisations, with the focus on managerial and social aspects of the crisis handling processes. The study deals with managers’ and co-workers’ stories about organisational attempts to survive, rather than seeking to identify causal relationships. Drawing upon a narrative approach and a social constructionist perspective, the crisis handling processes are treated as reconstructions and rationalisations of what happened. A primary assumption of this thesis is that we make sense of experiences in retrospect, and the aim is to describe the handling of crisis situations and the hardships related to economic difficulties, by focusing on the interviewees’ explanations of how those difficulties were dealt with. The stories are about taking control despite the threats induced by an extremely severe economic recession, remaining active, how the managers and their co-workers dealt with the uncertainty experienced, and how the organisations subsequently survived. The analysis also interrogates such issues as trust, authenticity, legitimacy, identity and nostalgia in crisis contexts.

Sensemaking in the Third Space - Essays on French-Finnish Bicultural Experiences in Organizations and Their Narratives (summary section only)

Research on cross-cultural and intercultural aspects in organizations has been traditionally conducted from an objectivist, functionalist perspective, with culture treated as an independent variable, and often the key explanatory factor. In order to do justice to the ontological relativity of the phenomena studied, more subjectivist research on intercultural interactions, and especially on their relationships with the dynamics of cultural identity construction, is needed. The present research seeks to address this gap by focusing on bicultural interactions in organizations, as they are experienced by the involved individuals. It is argued that such bicultural situations see the emergence of a space of hybridity, which is here called a ‘third space’, and which can be understood as providing ‘occasions for sensemaking’: it is this individual sensemaking that is of particular interest in the empirical narrative study. A first overall aim of the study is to reach an understanding of the dynamics of bicultural interactions in organizations; an understanding not only of the potential for learning and emancipatory sensemaking, but also of the possibility of conflict and alienatory ordering (this is mainly addressed in the theoretical essays 1 and 2). Further, a second overall aim of the study is to analyze the reflexive identity construction of four young French expatriates involved in such bicultural interactions in organizations in Finland, in order to examine the extent to which their expatriation experiences have allowed for an emancipatory opportunity in their cases (in essays 3 and 4). The primary theoretical contribution in this study lies in its new articulation of the dynamics of bicultural interactions in organizations. The ways in which the empirical material is analyzed bring about methodological contributions: since the expatriates’ accounts are bound to be some kind of construction, the analysis is made from angles that point to how the self-narratives construct reality. There are two such angles here: a ‘performative’ one and a ‘spatial’ one. The most important empirical contributions lie in the analysis of, on the one hand, the alternative uses that the young expatriates made of the notion of ‘national culture’ in their self-narratives, and, on the other hand, their ‘narrative practices of the third space’: their politics of escape or stabilization, their exploration of space or search for place, their emancipation from their origin or return to home as only horizon.