Cultural differences affecting claim handling process and perceived quality in Finnish-Japanese paperboardbusiness

Tutkimuksen tavoitteena oli selvittää Suomen ja Japanin välisten kulttuurierojen vaikutus valitustenkäsittelyprosessiin ja laatukäsityksiin case-yrityksen ja sen asiakkaiden välillä. Teoreettisen viitekehyksen muodostamisessa käytettiin näkemyksiä kulttuurista, kulttuurienvälisestä viestinnästä, valitustenkäsittelystä ja laatukäsityksistä. Kulttuurierojen tarkastelemiseksi esiteltiin kulttuurien ulottuvuuksia eritteleviä viitekehyksiä ja kulturaalisten tekijöiden vaikutusta viestintään. Suomen ja Japanin kulttuureja esiteltiin myös yksityiskohtaisemmin aikaisempien tutkimusten valossa. Työn empiirisessä osassa tutkittiin case-yrityksen sisäisiä sekä yrityksen ja sen asiakkaiden välisiä näkemyseroja. Tutkimus suoritettiin laadullisena case-tutkimuksena, jossa tarkasteltiin myös toimenpiteitä case-yrityksen liiketoimintaympäristön parantamiseksi. Tarvittava tieto kerättiin kirjallisuudesta, artikkeleista, taustahaastatteluilla sekä haastattelemalla yrityksen henkilöstöä Suomessa ja Japanissa samoin kuin sen japanilaisia asiakkaita. Japanilaiset asiakas/toimittaja-suhteet ovat ulkomaalaiselle yritykselle haastava liiketoimintaympäristö. Luottamuksen rakentaminen pitkällä tähtäimellä vaatii läheistä kommunikointia vastapuolen tuntemiseksi, jotta voidaan kehittää tuotteita paremmiksi ja vähentää valituskustannuksia. Laatuajattelua tulee myös yhdenmukaistaa tuotteiden ja palvelujen laadun parantamiseksi.

Cultural differences in web-based health information seeking of Finnish and Japanese students

Abstrakti

Animal Lovers, Bridge-Builders, and Supervising Watchdogs: Framing and Civil Society Construction by Japanese Pro-Animal Organizations in the Kansai and Tokyo Areas

Unlike their counterparts in Europe and America, the citizen organizations acting for the well-being of animals in Japan have not received scholarly attention. In this research, I explore the activities of twelve Japanese pro-animal organizations in Tokyo and Kansai area from the perspective of social movement and civil society studies. The concept of a ‘pro-animal organization’ is used to refer generally to the collectives promoting animal well-being. By using the collective action frame analysis and the three core framing tasks – diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational – as the primarily analytical tools, I explore the grievances, tactics, motivational means, constructions of agency and identity as well as framing of civil society articulated in the newsletters and the interviews of the twelve organizations I interviewed in Japan in 2010. As the frame construction is always done in relation to the social and political context, I study how the organizations construct their roles as civil society actors in relation to other actors, such as the state, and the idea of citizen activism. The deficiencies in the animal welfare law and lack of knowledge among the public are identified as the main grievances. The primary tactic to overcome these problems was to educate and inform the citizens and authorities, because most organizations lack the channels to influence politically. The audiences were mostly portrayed as either ignorant bystanders or potential adherents. In order to motivate people to join their cause and to enforce the motivation within the organization, the organizations emphasized their uniqueness, proved their efficiency, claimed credit and celebrated even small improvements. The organizations tended to create three different roles for citizen pro-organizations in civil society: reactive, apolitical and emphatic animal lovers concentrating on saving individual animals, proactive, educative bridge-builders seeking to establish equal collaborative relations with authorities, and corrective, supervising watchdogs demanding change in delinquencies offending animal rights. Based on the results of this research, I suggest that by studying how and why the different relations between civil society and the governing actors of the state are constructed, a more versatile approach to citizens’ activism in its context can be achieved.

Imagining a New Society: Public Painting as Politics in Postwar Finland

The thesis is the first comprehensive study on Finnish public painting, public artworks generally referred to as murals or monumental paintings. It focuses on the processes of production of public paintings during the post-WWII decades in Finland and the complex relationships between the political sphere and the production of art. The research studies the networks of agents involved in the production of public paintings. Besides the human agents—artists, assistants, commissioners and viewers—also public paintings were and are agents in the processes of production and in their environments. The research questions can be grouped into three overlapping series of questions: First, the research investigates the production public paintings: What kinds of public paintings were realised in postwar Finland—how, where, by whom and for what purposes? Second, it discusses the publicness of these paintings: How were public paintings defined, and what aspects characterised them as “public”? What was their relation to public space, public authorities, and audience? And third, it explores the politics of public paintings: the relationship between Finnish public painting, nationalism, and the memory of war. To answer these questions, extensive archival work has been performed, and over 200 public paintings have been documented around Finland. The research material has been studied in a sociological framework and in the context of the political and economic history of Finland, employing critical theories on public space and public art as well as theories on the building of nationalism, commemoration, memory, and forgetting. An important aim of this research was to open up a new field of study and position public painting within Finnish art history, from which it has been conspicuous by its absence. The research indicates that public painting was a significant genre of art in postwar Finland. The process of creating a national genre of public painting participated in the defining of municipal and state art politics in the country, and paintings functioned as vehicles of carrying out the agenda of the commissioning bodies. In the formation of municipal art policies in Finland in the 1950s, public painting connected to the same tendency of democratising art as the founding of public art museums. Public painting commissions also functioned as an arena of competition and a means of support for the artists. Public paintings were judged and commissioned within the realm of political decision-making, and they suggested the values of the decision-making groups, generally conveyed as the values of the society. The participation of official agents in the production allocated a position of official art to the genre. Through the material of this research, postwar public painting is seen as an agent in a society searching for a new identity. The postwar public painting production participated in the creation of the Finnish welfare society as indications of a humane society. It continued a tradition of public art production that had been built on nationalist and art educational ideologies in the late 19th and early 20th century. Postwar public paintings promoted the new national narrative of unification by creating an image of a homogeneous society with a harmonious communal life. The paintings laid out an image of Finnishness that was modern but rooted in the agrarian past, of a society that was based on hard work and provided for its members a good life. Postwar public painting was art with a mission, and it created an image of a society with a mission.

The importance of package design to Japanese consumers: The role of visual and informational elements of package design in decision making

The importance of package design as a marketing tool is growing as the competition in retail environment increases. However, there is a lack of studies on how each element of package design affects consumer decisions in different countries. The objective of this thesis is to study the role of package design to Japanese consumers. The research was conducted through an experiment with a sample of 37 Japanese female participants. They were divided into two groups and were given different tasks: one group had to choose a chocolate for themselves, and the other for a group of friends. The participants were presented with 15 different Finnish chocolate boxes to choose from. The qualitative data was gathered through observation and semi-structured interviews. In addition, data from questionnaires was quantified and all the data was triangulated. The empirical results suggest that visual elements strongly affect the decision making of Japanese consumers. Image was the most important element which acted as both, a visual and an informational aspect in the experiment. Informational elements on the other hand have little effect, especially when the context is written in a foreign language. However, informational elements affected participants who were choosing chocolates for a group of friends. A unique finding was the importance of kawaii (cuteness) to Japanese consumers.