Wipert von Blücher und Finnland : Alternativpolitik und Diplomatie im 'Dritten Reich'

This dissertation explores the role of the German minister to Helsinki, Wipert von Blücher (1883-1963), within the German-Finnish relations of the late 1930s and the Second World War. Blücher was a key figure – and certainly one of the constants – within German Finland policy and the complex international diplomacy surrounding Finland. Despite representing Hitler’s Germany, he was not a National Socialist in the narrower sense of the term, but a conservative civil servant in the Wilhelmine tradition of the German foreign service. Along with a significant number of career diplomats, Blücher attempted to restrict National Socialist influence on the exercise of German foreign policy, whilst successfully negotiating a modus vivendi with the new regime. The study of his political biography in the Third Reich hence provides a highly representative example of how the traditional élites of Germany were caught in an cycle of conformity and, albeit tacit, opposition. Above all, however, the biographical study of Blücher and his behaviour offers an hitherto unexplored approach to the history of the German-Finnish relations. His unusually long tenure in Helsinki covered the period leading up to the so-called Winter War, which left Blücher severely distraught by Berlin’s effectively pro-Soviet neutrality and brought him close to resigning his post. It further extended to the German-Finnish rapprochement of 1940/41 and the military cooperation of both countries from mid-1941 to 1944. Throughout, Blücher developed a diverse and ambitious set of policy schemes, largely rooted in the tradition of Wilhelmine foreign policy. In their moderation and commonsensical realism, his designs – indeed his entire conception of foreign policy – clashed with the foreign political and ideological premises of the National Socialist regime. In its theoretical grounding, the analysis of Blücher’s political schemes is built on the concept of alternative policy and indebted to A.J.P. Taylor’s definition of dissent in foreign policy. It furthermore rests upon the assumption, introduced by Wolfgang Michalka, that National Socialist foreign policy was dominated by a plurality of rival conceptions, players, and institutions competing for Hitler’s favour (‘Konzeptionen-Pluralismus’). Although primarily a study in the history of international relations, my research has substantially benefited from more recent developments within cultural history, particularly research on nobility and élites, and the renewed focus on autobiography and conceptions of the self. On an abstract level, the thesis touches upon some of the basic components of German politics, political culture, and foreign policy in the first half of the 20th century: national belonging and conflicting loyalties, self-perception and representation, élites and their management of power, the modern history of German conservatism, the nature and practice of diplomacy, and, finally, the intricate relationship between the ethics of the professional civil service and absolute moral principles. Against this backdrop, the examination of Blücher’s role both within Finnish politics and the foreign policy of the Third Reich highlights the biographical dimension of the German-Finnish relationships, while fathoming the determinants of individual human agency in the process.

Kansallisvaltion teräsmiehestä valtakunnan sovittelijaksi : Poliisikulttuurin psykohistorialliset solmukohdat 1930-1997

From Steely Nation-State Superman to Conciliator of Economical Global Empire – A Psychohistory of Finnish Police Culture 1930-1997 My study concerns the way police culture has changed within the societal changes in Finnish society between 1930 and 1997. The method of my study was psycho-historical and post-structural analysis. The research was conducted by examining the psycho-historical plateaus traceable within Finnish police culture. I made a social diagnosis of the autopoietic relationship between the power-holders of Finnish society and the police (at various levels of hierarchical organization). According to police researcher John P. Crank, police culture should be understood as the cognitive processes behind the actions of the police. Among these processes are the values, beliefs, rituals, customs and advice which standardize their work and the common sense of policemen. According to Crank, police culture is defined by a mindset which thinks, judges and acts according to its evaluations filtered by its own preliminary comprehension. Police culture consists of all the unsaid assumptions of being a policeman, the organizational structures of police, official policies, unofficial ways of behaviour, forms of arrest, procedures of practice and different kinds of training habits, attitudes towards suspects and citizens, and also possible corruption. Police culture channels its members’ feelings and emotions. Crank says that police culture can be seen in how policemen express their feelings. He advises police researchers to ask themselves how it feels to be a member of the police. Ethos has been described as a communal frame for thought that guides one’s actions. According to sociologist Martti Grönfors, the Finnish mentality of the Protestant ethic is accentuated among Finnish policemen. The concept of ethos expresses very well the self-made mentality as an ethical tension which prevails in police work between communal belonging and individual freedom of choice. However, it is significant that it is a matter of the quality of relationships, and that the relationship is always tied to the context of the cultural history of dealing with one’s anxiety. According to criminologist Clifford Shearing, the values of police culture act as subterranean processes of the maintenance of social power in society. Policemen have been called microcosmic mediators, or street corner politicians. Robert Reiner argues that at the level of self-comprehension, policemen disparage the dimension of politics in their work. Reiner points out that all relationships which hold a dimension of power are political. Police culture has also been called a canteen culture. This idea expresses the day-to-day basis of the mentality of taking care of business which policing produces as a necessity for dealing with everyday hardships. According to police researcher Timo Korander, this figurative expression embodies the nature of police culture as a crew culture which is partly hidden from police chiefs who are at a different level. This multitude of standpoints depicts the diversity of police cultures. According to Reiner, one should not see police culture as one monolithic whole; instead one should assess it as the interplay of individuals negotiating with their environment and societal power networks. The cases analyzed formed different plateaus of study. The first plateau was the so-called ‘Rovaniemi arson’ case in the summer of 1930. The second plateau consisted of the examinations of alleged police assaults towards the Communists during the Finnish Continuation War of 1941 to 1944 and the threats that societal change after the war posed to Finnish Society. The third plateau was thematic. Here I investigated how using force towards police clients has changed culturally from the 1930s to the 1980s. The fourth plateau concerned with the material produced by the Security Police detectives traced the interaction between Soviet KGB agents and Finnish politicians during the long 1970s. The fifth plateau of larger changes in Finnish police culture then occurred during the 1980s as an aftermath of the former decade. The last, sixth plateau of changing relationships between policing and the national logic of action can be seen in the murder of two policemen in the autumn of 1997. My study shows that police culture has transformed from a “stone cold” steely fixed identity towards a more relational identity that tries to solve problems by negotiating with clients instead of using excessive force. However, in this process of change there is a traceable paradox in Finnish policing and police culture. On the one hand, policemen have, at the practical level, constructed their policing identity by protecting their inner self in their organizational role at work against the projections of anger and fear in society. On the other hand, however, they have had to safeguard themselves at the emotional level against the predominance of this same organizational role. Because of this dilemma they must simultaneously construct both a distance from their own role as police officers and the role of the police itself. This makes the task of policing susceptible to the political pressures of society. In an era of globalization, and after the heyday of the welfare state, this can produce heightened challenges for Finnish police culture.

Certainty or Faith? Arendt's and Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Cartesian Foundationalism

Epistemological foundationalism has for centuries attempted to unify all scientific inquiry into the context of one grand science, the first philosophy. One of the most important tasks of this tradition has been to ground all knowledge on absolutely certain foundations. In this master s thesis I ask the following question: To what extent and under what conditions is it possible to achieve absolute certainty in the sense of the attempts of Cartesian foundationalism? By examining how the 20th century philosophers, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) interpret the epistemological methodology of René Descartes, I claim that the Cartesian achievement of absolute certainty rests on the implicit presupposition of an epistemologically prior form of faith in the world and trust (pistis) in other conscious beings. I show that knowledge is possible only within the context of a common world that is inhabited by several conscious beings that share a common linguistic system. This threefold element is shown to be the bedrock condition for any kind of philosophical inquiry. The main literature sources for this thesis are The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt, Le Visible et l invisible by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Meditationes de Prima Philosophiae by René Descartes and Erfahrung und Urteil by Edmund Husserl.

Pain in juvenile idiopathic arthritis : parents and children as agents of disease management

Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is a severe childhood disease usually characterized by long-term morbidity, unpredictable course, pain, and limitations in daily activities and social participation. The disease affects not only the child but also the whole family. The family is expected to adhere to an often very laborious regimen over a long period of time. However, the parental role is incoherently conceptualized in the research field. Pain in JIA is of somatic origin, but psychosocial factors, such as mood and self-efficacy, are critical in the perception of pain and in its impact on functioning. This study examined the factors correlating and possibly explaining pain in JIA, with a special emphasis on the mutual relations between parent- and patient-driven variables. In this patient series pain was not associated with the disease activity. The degree of pain was on average fairly low in children with JIA. When the children were clustered according to age, anxiety and depression, four distinguishable cluster groups significantly associated with pain emerged. One of the groups was described by concept vulnerability because of unfavorable variable associations. Parental depressive and anxiety symptoms accompanied by illness management had a predictive power in discriminating groups of children with varying distress levels. The parent’s and child’s perception of a child’s functional capability, distress, and somatic self-efficacy had independent explanatory power predicting the child’s pain. Of special interest in the current study was self-efficacy, which refers to the belief of an individual that he/she has the ability to engage in the behavior required for tackling the disease. In children with JIA, strong self-efficacy was related to lower levels of pain, depressive symptoms and trait anxiety. This suggests strengthening a child’s sense of self-efficacy, when helping the child to cope with his or her disease. Pain experienced by a child with JIA needs to be viewed in a multidimensional bio-psycho-social context that covers biological, environmental and cognitive behavioral mechanisms. The relations between the parent-child variables are complex and affect pain both directly and indirectly. Developing pain-treatment modalities that recognize the family as a system is also warranted.

Expert Identity in Development of Core-Task-Oriented Working Practices for Mastering Demanding Situations

The point of departure in this dissertation was the practical safety problem of unanticipated, unfamiliar events and unexpected changes in the environment, the demanding situations which the operators should take care of in the complex socio-technical systems. The aim of this thesis was to increase the understanding of demanding situations and of the resources for coping with these situations by presenting a new construct, a conceptual model called Expert Identity (ExId) as a way to open up new solutions to the problem of demanding situations and by testing the model in empirical studies on operator work. The premises of the Core-Task Analysis (CTA) framework were adopted as a starting point: core-task oriented working practices promote the system efficiency (incl. safety, productivity and well-being targets) and that should be supported. The negative effects of stress were summarised and the possible countermeasures related to the operators' personal resources such as experience, expertise, sense of control, conceptions of work and self etc. were considered. ExId was proposed as a way to bring emotional-energetic depth into the work analysis and to supplement CTA-based practical methods to discover development challenges and to contribute to the development of complex socio-technical systems. The potential of ExId to promote understanding of operator work was demonstrated in the context of the six empirical studies on operator work. Each of these studies had its own practical objectives within the corresponding quite broad focuses of the studies. The concluding research questions were: 1) Are the assumptions made in ExId on the basis of the different theories and previous studies supported by the empirical findings? 2) Does the ExId construct promote understanding of the operator work in empirical studies? 3) What are the strengths and weaknesses of the ExId construct? The layers and the assumptions of the development of expert identity appeared to gain evidence. The new conceptual model worked as a part of an analysis of different kinds of data, as a part of different methods used for different purposes, in different work contexts. The results showed that the operators had problems in taking care of the core task resulting from the discrepancy between the demands and resources (either personal or external). The changes of work, the difficulties in reaching the real content of work in the organisation and the limits of the practical means of support had complicated the problem and limited the possibilities of the development actions within the case organisations. Personal resources seemed to be sensitive to the changes, adaptation is taking place, but not deeply or quickly enough. Furthermore, the results showed several characteristics of the studied contexts that complicated the operators' possibilities to grow into or with the demands and to develop practices, expertise and expert identity matching the core task. They were: discontinuation of the work demands, discrepancy between conceptions of work held in the other parts of organisation, visions and the reality faced by the operators, emphasis on the individual efforts and situational solutions. The potential of ExId to open up new paths to solving the problem of the demanding situations and its ability to enable studies on practices in the field was considered in the discussion. The results were interpreted as promising enough to encourage the conduction of further studies on ExId. This dissertation proposes especially contribution to supporting the workers in recognising the changing demands and their possibilities for growing with them when aiming to support human performance in complex socio-technical systems, both in designing the systems and solving the existing problems.

Psychological consequences of cancer from the salutogenic and dyadic perspective

Previous empirical research has shown that positive, i.e. salutogenic, psychological resources and social support, have health-promoting effects in stressful life situations. In the present study the associations between sense of coherence (SOC), dispositional optimism, partner support, psychological distress, and quality of life among cancer patients and their partners were examined. The data was collected from Helsinki University Central Hospital in 1997 2000 by self-report questionnaires approximately 2, 8, and 14 months post diagnosis. Participants in studies I-IV were 155, 123, 153, and 147 cancer patients and their partners, respectively. The sample of the present study consisted of physically relatively well-functioning patients, whose overall psychological wellbeing was generally good as compared to the healthy population. Partners in this study, however, reacted more strongly to their partners illness and treatment. The partners displayed e.g. higher levels of anxiety and depression than the patients. The results of this study indicated that cancer patients and their partners with strong SOC and who are optimistic report fewer symptoms of distress. Moreover, patients who display an optimistic attitude to life, who receive support from their partner, and who control how they express anger have a better quality of life. The findings also confirmed that the role of the partner is significant in coping with cancer. The symptoms of depression and anxiety in patients and partners were associated, and the partner s optimism seemed to protect also the patient from elevated levels of anxiety. The role of the partner was also highlighted in the couples anger-expression styles. The patients and partners tendency to inhibit anger was associated with decreased partner support and worse patient quality of life. Finally, in the present study we found substantial gender differences. For the patients, partner support was more significant for the women than for the men. Furthermore, for the female patients, the husband s tendency to openly express anger (anger-out) had a negative impact on their psychological quality of life, whereas the wives high anger-out seemed to predict good psychological quality of life in the men. Also, in this study the female partners reported higher levels of anxiety and depression as compared to the male partners. The results of the present study extend the previous literature on positive psychological resources and psychological wellbeing among cancer couples. Furthermore, these findings support the theory on SOC and optimism as health-promoting factors. However, the construct of SOC seems to include other important elements besides optimism. The findings of this study are applicable in designing new rehabilitation programmes for cancer patients and their partners.

Lionhearts of the Playworld : An ethnographic case study of the development of agency in play pedagogy

This is an ethnographic case study of the creation and emergence of a playworld – a pedagogical approach aimed at promoting children’s development and learning in early education settings through the use of play and drama. The data was collected in a Finnish experimental mixed-age elementary school classroom in the school year 2003-2004. In the playworld students and teachers explore different social and cultural phenomena through taking on the roles of characters from a story or a piece of literature and acting inside the frames of an improvised plot. The thesis takes under scrutiny the notion of agency in education. It produces theoretically grounded empirical knowledge of the ways in which children struggle to become recognized and agentive actors in early education settings and how their agency develops in their interaction with adults. The study builds on the activity theoretical and sociocultural tradition and develops a methodological framework called video-based narrative interaction analysis for studying student agency as developing over time but manifesting through the situational material and discursive local interactions. The research questions are: 1. What are the children’s ways of enacting their agency in the playworld? 2. How do the children’s agentive actions change and develop over the spring? 3. What are the potentials and challenges of the playworld for promoting student agency? 4. How do the teachers and the children deal with the contradiction between control and agency in the playworld? The study consists of a summary part and four empirical articles which each have a particular viewpoint. Articles I and II deal with individual students’ paths to agency. In Article I the focus is on the role of resistance and questioning in enabling important spaces for agency. Article II takes a critical gender perspective and analyzes how two girls struggled towards recognition in the playworld. It also illuminates the role of imagination in developing a sense of agency. Article III examines how the open-ended and improvisational nature of the playworld interaction provided experiences and a sense of ‘shared agency’ for the students and teachers in the class. Article IV turns the focus on the teachers and analyzes how their role actions in the playworld helped the children to enact agency. It also discusses the challenges that the teachers faced in this work and asks what makes the playworld activity sustainable in the class. The summary part provides a critical literature review on the concept of agency and argues that the inherently contradictory nature of the phenomenon of agency has not been sufficiently theorized. The summary part also locates the playworld intervention in a historical frame by discussing the changing conceptions of adulthood and childhood in the West. By focusing on the changing role of play and art in both adults’ and children’s contemporary lives, the thesis opens up an important but often neglected perspective on the problem of promoting student agency in education. The results illustrate how engaging in a collectively imagined and dramatized pretend play space together with the children enabled the teachers to momentarily put aside their “knower” positions in the classroom. The fictive roles and the narrative plot helped them to create a necessary incompleteness and open-endedness in the activity that stimulated the children’s initiatives. This meant that the children too could momentarily step out of their traditional classroom positions as pupils and initiate action to further the collective play. Engaging in this kind of unconventional activity and taking up and enacting agency was, however, very challenging for the participating children and teachers. It often contradicted the need to sustain control and order in the classroom. The study concludes that play- and drama-based pedagogies offer a unique but undeveloped potential for developing educational spaces that help teachers and children deal with the often contradictory requirements of schooling.

Evaluation of driving ability of the disabled persons in the context of the psychological activity theory

In the future the number of the disabled drivers requiring a special evaluation of their driving ability will increase due to the ageing population, as well as the progress of adaptive technology. This places pressure on the development of the driving evaluation system. Despite quite intensive research there is still no consensus concerning what is the factual situation in a driver evaluation (methodology), which measures should be included in an evaluation (methods), and how an evaluation has to be carried out (practise). In order to find answers to these questions we carried out empirical studies, and simultaneously elaborated upon a conceptual model for driving and a driving evaluation. The findings of empirical studies can be condensed into the following points: 1) A driving ability defined by the on-road driving test is associated with different laboratory measures depending on the study groups. Faults in the laboratory tests predicted faults in the on-road driving test in the novice group, whereas slowness in the laboratory predicted driving faults in the experienced drivers group. 2) The Parkinson study clearly showed that even an experienced clinician cannot reliably accomplish an evaluation of a disabled person’s driving ability without collaboration with other specialists. 3) The main finding of the stroke study was that the use of a multidisciplinary team as a source of information harmonises the specialists’ evaluations. 4) The patient studies demonstrated that the disabled persons themselves, as well as their spouses, are as a rule not reliable evaluators. 5) From the safety point of view, perceptible operations with the control devices are not crucial, but correct mental actions which the driver carries out with the help of the control devices are of greatest importance. 6) Personality factors including higher-order needs and motives, attitudes and a degree of self-awareness, particularly a sense of illness, are decisive when evaluating a disabled person’s driving ability. Personality is also the main source of resources concerning compensations for lower-order physical deficiencies and restrictions. From work with the conceptual model we drew the following methodological conclusions: First, the driver has to be considered as a holistic subject of the activity, as a multilevel hierarchically organised system of an organism, a temperament, an individuality, and a personality where the personality is the leading subsystem from the standpoint of safety. Second, driving as a human form of a sociopractical activity, is also a hierarchically organised dynamic system. Third, in an evaluation of driving ability it is a question of matching these two hierarchically organised structures: a subject of an activity and a proper activity. Fourth, an evaluation has to be person centred but not disease-, function- or method centred. On the basis of our study a multidisciplinary team (practitioner, driving school teacher, psychologist, occupational therapist) is recommended for use in demanding driver evaluations. Primary in a driver’s evaluations is a coherent conceptual model while concrete methods of evaluations may vary. However, the on-road test must always be performed if possible.

The Relational Self, the Social Bond and the Dynamics of Personal Relationships : A Sociological Analysis

This study analyses personal relationships linking research to sociological theory on the questions of the social bond and on the self as social. From the viewpoint of disruptive life events and experiences, such as loss, divorce and illness, it aims at understanding how selves are bound to their significant others as those specific people ‘close or otherwise important’ to them. Who form the configurations of significant others? How do different bonds respond in disruptions and how do relational processes unfold? How is the embeddedness of selves manifested in the processes of bonding, on the one hand, and in the relational formation of the self, on the other? The bonds are analyzed from an anti-categorical viewpoint based on personal citations of significance as opposed to given relationship categories, such as ‘family’ or ‘friendship’ – the two kinds of relationships that in fact are most frequently significant. The study draws from analysis of the personal narratives of 37 Finnish women and men (in all 80 interviews) and their entire configurations of those specific people who they cite as ‘close or otherwise important’. The analysis stresses the subjective experiences, while also investigating the actualized relational processes and configurations of all personal relationships with certain relationship histories embedded in micro-level structures. The research is based on four empirical sub-studies of personal relationships and a summary discussing the questions of the self and social bond. Discussion draws from G. H. Mead, C. Cooley, N. Elias, T. Scheff, G. Simmel and the contributors of ‘relational sociology’. Sub-studies analyse bonds to others from the viewpoint of biographical disruption and re-configuration of significant others, estranged family bonds, peer support and the formation of the most intimate relationships into exclusive and inclusive configurations. All analyses examine the dialectics of the social and the personal, asking how different structuring mechanisms and personal experiences and negotiations together contribute to the unfolding of the bonds. The summary elaborates personal relationships as social bonds embedded in wider webs of interdependent people and social settings that are laden with cultural expectations. Regarding the question of the relational self, the study proposes both bonding and individuality as significant. They are seen as interdependent phases of the relationality of the self. Bonding anchors the self to its significant relationships, in which individuality is manifested, for example, in contrasting and differentiating dynamics, but also in active attempts to connect with others. Individuality is not a fixed quality of the self, but a fluid and interdependent phase of the relational self. More specifically, it appears in three formats in the flux of relational processes: as a sense of unique self (via cultivation of subjective experiences), as agency and as (a search for) relative autonomy. The study includes an epilogue addressing the ambivalence between the social expectation of individuality in society and the bonded reality of selves.

Just say no? The influence of personal goals, beliefs, psychosocial adjustment, and parental relationships in drug use by adolescents

The study in its entirety focused on factors related to adolescents decisions concerning drug use. The term drug use is taken here to include the use of tobacco products, alcohol, narcotics, and other addictive substances. First, the reasons given for drug use (attributions) were investigated. Secondly, the influence of personal goals, the beliefs involved in decision making, psychosocial adjustment including body image and involvement with peers, and parental relationships on drug use were studied. Two cohorts participated in the study. In 1984, a questionnaire on reasons for drug use was administered to a sample of adolescents aged 14-16 (N=396). A further questionnaire was administered to another sample of adolescents aged 14-16 (N=488) in 1999. The results for both cohorts were analyzed in Articles I and II. In Articles III and IV further analysis was carried out on the second cohort (N=488). The research report presented here provides a synthesis of all four articles, together with material from a further analysis. In a comparison of the two cohorts it was found that the attributions for drug use had changed considerably over the intervening fifteen-year period. In relation to alcohol and narcotics use an increase was found in reasons involving inner subjective experiences, with mention of the good feeling and fun resulting from alcohol and narcotics use. In addition, the goals of alcohol consumption were increasingly perceived as drinking to get drunk, and for its own sake. The attributions for the adolescents own smoking behavior were quite different from the attributions for smoking by others. The attributions were only weakly influenced by the participants gender or by their smoking habits, either in 1984 or 1999. In relation to participants own smoking, the later questionnaire elicited more mention of inner subjective experiences involving "good feeling. In relation to the perceived reasons for other people s smoking, it elicited more responses connected with the notion of "belonging. In the second sample, the results indicated that the levels of body satisfaction among adolescent girls are lower than those among adolescent boys. Overall, dissatisfaction with one's physical appearance seemed to relate to drug use. Girls were also found to engage in more discussions than boys; this applied to (i) discussion with peers (concerning both intimate and general matters), and (ii) discussion with parents (concerning general matters). However, more than a quarter of the boys (out of the entire population) reported only low intimacy with both parents and peers. If both drinking and smoking were considered, it seemed that girls in particular who reported drinking and smoking also reported high intimacy with parents and peers. Boys who reported drinking and smoking reported only medium intimacy with parents and peers. In addition, having an intimate relationship with one's peers was associated with a greater tendency to drink purely in order to get drunk. Overall, the results seemed to suggest that drug use is connected with a close relationship with peers and (surprisingly) with a close relationship with parents. Nevertheless, there were also indications that to some extent peer relationships can also protect adolescents from smoking and alcohol use. The results, which underline the complexity of adolescent drug use, are taken up in the Discussion section. It may be that body image and/or other identity factors play a more prominent role in all drug use than has previously been acknowledged. It does appear that in the course of planning support campaigns for adolescents at risk of drug use, we should focus more closely on individuals and their inner world. More research on this field is clearly needed, and therefore some ideas for future research are also presented.

Roman Ingarden’s Objectivity vs. Subjectivity as a problem of Translatability

Ingarden (1962, 1964) postulates that artworks exist in an “Objective purely intentional” way. According to this view, objectivity and subjectivity are opposed forms of existence, parallel to the opposition between realism and idealism. Using arguments of cognitive science, experimental psychology, and semiotics, this lecture proposes that, particularly in the aesthetic phenomena, realism and idealism are not pure oppositions; rather they are aspects of a single process of cognition in different strata. Furthermore, the concept of realism can be conceived as an empirical extreme of idealism, and the concept of idealism can be conceived as a pre-operative extreme of realism. Both kind of systems of knowledge are mutually associated by a synecdoche, performing major tasks of mental order and categorisation. This contribution suggests that the supposed opposition between objectivity and subjectivity, raises, first of all, a problem of translatability, more than a problem of existential categories. Synecdoche seems to be a very basic transaction of the mind, establishing ontologies (in the more Ingardean way of the term). Wegrzecki (1994, 220) defines ontology as “the central domain of philosophy to which other its parts directly or indirectly refer”. Thus, ontology operates within philosophy as the synecdoche does within language, pointing the sense of the general into the particular and/or viceversa. The many affinities and similarities between different sign systems, like those found across the interrelationships of the arts, are embedded into a transversal, synecdochic intersemiosis. An important question, from this view, is whether Ingardean’s pure objectivities lie basically on the impossibility of translation, therefore being absolute self-referential constructions. In such a case, it would be impossible to translate pure intentionality into something else, like acts or products.

On the Problem of Participation in Strategy: A Critical Discursive Perspective

We still know little of why strategy processes often involve participation problems. In this paper, we argue that this crucial issue is linked to fundamental assumptions about the nature of strategy work. Hence, we need to examine how strategy processes are typically made sense of and what roles are assigned to specific organizational members. For this purpose, we adopt a critical discursive perspective that allows us to discover how specific conceptions of strategy work are reproduced and legitimized in organizational strategizing. Our empirical analysis is based on an extensive research project on strategy work in 12 organizations. As a result of our analysis, we identify three central discourses that seem to be systematically associated with nonparticipatory approaches to strategy work: “mystification,” “disciplining,” and “technologization.” However, we also distinguish three strategy discourses that promote participation: “self-actualization,” “dialogization,” and “concretization.” Our analysis shows that strategy as practice involves alternative and even competing discourses that have fundamentally different kinds of implications for participation in strategy work. We argue from a critical perspective that it is important to be aware of the inherent problems associated with dominant discourses as well as to actively advance the use of alternative ones.

The Contested Terrain of Globalization: Review and Conceptual Clarifications for Management Studies

The concept of globalization has become a shorthand for making sense of contemporary society. It reflects large-scale economic and social change, which affects people differently and evokes different viewpoints. Globalization is thus a highly contested concept and phenomenon. Contradictory and competing views, in turn, seem to be based on different interpretations of the present dominant forms of globalization, and of the material, economic, social and cultural conditions that these forms produce and give rise to. We view globalization not only as a significant set of economic, financial, social, political and cultural forces but as a powerful and contested discursive space. In this article, we present an overview of recent literature to introduce different thematic perspectives on globalization, to specify different ideological and discursive bases to approach globalization, and to place multinational corporations (MNC:s) within this context. Our account is not exhaustive, rather, it is intended as a basis for further discussion on the nature and role of multinational corporations in complex ”global” society

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.

Pulp and Paper Fiction: On the Discursive Legitimation of Global Industrial Restructuring

Despite the central role of legitimacy in social and organizational life, we know little of the subtle meaning-making processes through which organizational phenomena, such as industrial restructuring, are legitimated in contemporary society. Therefore, this paper examines the discursive legitimation strategies used when making sense of global industrial restructuring in the media. Based on a critical discourse analysis of extensive media coverage of a revolutionary pulp and paper sector merger, we distinguish and analyze five legitimation strategies: (1) normalization, (2) authorization, (3) rationalization, (4) moralization, and (5) narrativization. We argue that while these specific legitimation strategies appear in individual texts, their recurring use in the intertextual totality of the public discussion establishes the core elements of the emerging legitimating discourse.