Group Beliefs : Studies on the Nature and Logic of Collective Doxastic Attitudes

This thesis studies the nature and logic of collective doxastic attitudes, or what is referred to in ordinary language as "group beliefs". Beliefs and other intentional attitudes are attributed to groups and collections of people, and such attributions are used to explain and predict the actions of groups. The thesis develops an understanding of group beliefs as voluntarily adopted views or acceptances rather than as ordinary beliefs. Such an understanding can provide new answers to questions concerning collective knowledge and justification of group beliefs, and it allows developing modal logics with collective doxastic and epistemic notions. The thesis consists of six articles. The first three articles are philosophical studies concerned with the nature of group beliefs. The last three articles are logical studies that aim at developing proof-theoretical calculi for reasoning about collective doxastic attitudes.

Struggling over subjectivity: A discursive analysis of strategic development in a group

We have seen growing interest in discursive perspectives on strategy. This perspective holds great promise for development of an understanding on how strategy discourse and subjectivity are intertwined. We wish to add to this existing research by outlining a discursive struggle approach to subjectivity. To understand the complex subjectification and empowering/disempowering effects of organizational strategy discourse, this approach focuses on organization-specific discourse mobilizations an various ways of resistance. Drawing on an analysis of the discourses and practices of ‘strategic development’ in an engineering and consulting group we provide an empirical illustration of such struggles over subjectivity. In particular, we report three examples of competing ways of making sense of and giving sense to strategic development, with specific subjectification tendencies. First, we show how corporate management can mobilize and appropriate a specific kind of discourse to attempt to gain control of the organization, which tends to reproduce managerial hegemony, but also trigger discursive and other forms of resistance. Second, we will illustrate how middle managers resist this hegemony by initiating a strategy discourse of their own to create room for manoeuvre in controversial situations. Third, we show how project engineers can distance themselves from managerial-initiated strategy discourses to maintain a viable identity despite all kinds of pressures. Although our examples are case-specific, we believe that similar discursive dynamics also characterize strategizing in other organizations.

The Hybrid Consumer: Exploring the Drivers of a New Consumer Behaviour Type

A dramatically different consumption pattern seems to be emerging among a vast group of consumers. This may mean that conventional consumer stereotypes and segmentation theory are becoming outdated. The so called hybrid consumers seem to increasingly opt for both premium and budget alternatives in various product and service categories while mid-priced alternatives are losing share in their consumption basket. Although this type of polarisation, or dispersion, is already recognized as an important change, hybrid behaviour is still largely under-researched. The present study aims to analyze the possible drivers of hybrid consumption and by identifying typical categories and situations of trading up versus trading down derive tentative characteristics of hybrid consumption for further research on the topic. A tentative pattern of hybrid consumption was identified, which relates trading up to high-involvement, discretional spending and trading down to low-involvement necessities. However, it was also found that hybrid consumption transcends product category boundaries and may thus be less straightforward than previously perhaps assumed. In addition, a purchase pattern continuum was developed, accounting for various degrees of hybrid consumption.

Influence of forest owners as an interest group in achieving the forest policy goals in Finland.

XVIII IUFRO World Congress, Ljubljana 1986.

Interruption and Uncooperativeness in Academic ELF Group Work : An Application of Linear Unit Grammar

This study addresses the challenge of analyzing interruption in spoken interaction. It begins with my observation of eight hours of academic group work among speakers of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in a university course. Unlike the common findings of ELF research which underscore the cooperative orientation of ELF users, this particular group gave strong impressions of interruption and uncooperativeness as they prepared a scientific group presentation. In the effort to investigate these impressions, I found that no satisfactory method exists for systematically identifying and analyzing interruptions. A useful tool was found in Linear Unit Grammar or LUG (Sinclair & Mauranen 2006), which analyzes spoken interaction prospectively as linear text. In the course of transcribing one of the early group work meetings, I developed a model of LUG-based criteria for identifying individual instances of interruption. With this system in place, I was then able to evaluate the aggregate occurrences of interruption in the group work and identify co-occurring interactive features which further influenced the perception of uncooperativeness. Finally, these aggregate statistics directed a return to the data and a contextually sensitive, qualitative analysis. This research cycle illuminates the interactive features which contributed to my own impressions of uncooperativeness, as well as the group members orientations to their own interruptive practice.