Evaluating China’s aspirations for cultural soft power in a post-globalisation era

‘Soft power’ has been a concept that has generated great political and scholarly interest in China, as it raises the question of how to achieve cultural standing commensurate with the nation’s growing economic significance. But from the perspectives of communication and cultural studies, we can identify limits with both ‘soft power’ as a concept and how it understands culture and communication, and the assumptions made about the capacities of state cultural promotion through media to appeal to global audiences. Drawing upon case studies of the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, India, Japan and South Korea, this article identified challenges and opportunities for China in growing its international cultural soft power in a ‘post-globalisation’ era.

Bi-cultural content publication on a digital noticeboard: A design and cultural differences case study

We present our observations of Aboriginal Australian practices around a custom digital noticeboard and compare our insights to related research on cultural differences, literacy and ICT4D. The digital noticeboard was created, upon a request by the community Elders, to foster communication across the community. The initial design, informed by discussions and consultations, aimed at supporting the local Aboriginal language and English, both in written and spoken form, at supporting the oral tradition, and at accommodating for different perceptions and representations of time. This paper presents observations about the first encounters with the digital noticeboard by those members of the community that took part in its conceptualization. Such observations reinforce existing knowledge on such cultural phenomena as collectivism and time perception, issues related to literacy, moderation and censorship. We contribute to framing such knowledge within a concrete case study and draw implication for design of tools for bi-cultural content publication.

Kuluttajamuotti : Kuluttajuuden tuottamisesta mainonnan instituutioissa

Advertising and marketing institutions produce categorisations of different groups of population. These categorisations serve as tools for addressing the potential consumers. This research is about how and what kind of categorisations of consumerhood are produced and how they are used as governing patterns within the institutions of advertising. My goal is to shed light on methods, cultural patterns and discourses for making people become consumers, objects for marketing measures. The data consists of 23 qualitative thematic interviews with Finnish advertising professionals. Moreover, examples are drawn from professional magazines and brochures of media agencies and marketing research organisations. First, I present some of the the official consumer categories in the consumer monitors produced by research organisations. Then, I analyse the unofficial consumer categories which are produced by advertising professionals in the interviews. The methodological framework is based on discourse theory and especially on Michel Foucault s ideas on power, governmentality, and discourses. Discursive categorisation of the population is one of the means of governmentality used in marketing and advertising. Knowledge of the consumer research is used as a tool for governing the potential consumers. Even though the real consumers always have a possibility to behave against the marketer s wishes. The marketers can not make people buy certain products or services, but they aim at influencing people in a way that they want to buy the products and start to govern themselves. As result, I present six unofficial discursive consumer categories, which are used by the advertising professionals. The consumerhood may be represented as rational, self-fulfilling, indifferent, whimsical, manipulated or sovereign. However, The discursive consumer categorisations are overlapping and controversial. The interviewed advertising professionals construct their own particular position in relation to the consumers which are viewed as others . On the other, the interviewees may talk about themselves as consumers. Finally, I maintain that the consumers and target groups of advertising are viewed as commodities in advertising institutions. The end product of the product development is not only the product but the aim is to produce the consumer of the product. The research of the ways advertising professionals aim to govern the consumers gives knowledge on the networks of power in which people act within consumer culture.

Local Politicizations : A Comparison of Finns and French Practicing Democracy

This study examines how do the processes of politicization differ in the Finnish and the French local contexts, and what kinds of consequences do these processes have on the local civic practices, the definitions and redefinitions of democracy and citizenship, the dynamics of power and resistance, and the ways of solving controversies in the public sphere. By means of comparative anthropology of the state , focusing on how democracy actually is practiced in different contexts, politicizations the processes of opening political arenas and recognizing controversy are analyzed. The focus of the study is on local activists engaged in different struggles on various levels of the local public spheres, and local politicians and civil servants participating in these struggles from their respective positions, in two middle-size European cities, Helsinki and Lyon. The empirical analyses of the book compare different political actors and levels of practicing democracy simultaneously. The study is empirically based on four different bodies of material: Ethnographic notes taken during a fieldwork among the activities of several local activist groups; 47 interviews of local activists and politicians; images representing different levels of public portrayals from activist websites (Helsinki N=274, Lyon N=232) and from city information magazines (Helsinki-info N=208, Lyon Citoyen N= 357); and finally, newspaper articles concerning local conflict issues, and reporting on the encounters between local citizens and representatives of the cities (January-June in 2005; Helsingin Sanomat N=96 and Le Progrès N= 102). The study makes three distinctive contributions to the study of current democratic societies: (1) a conceptual one by bringing politicization at the center of a comparison of political cultures, and by considering in parallel the ethnographic group styles theory by Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman, the theory on counter-democracy by Pierre Rosanvallon and the pragmatist justification theory by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot; (2) an empirical one through the triangulation of ethnographic, thematic interview, visual, and newspaper data through which the different aspects of democratic practices are examined; and (3) a methodological one by developing new ways of analyzing comparative cases an application of Frame Analysis to visual material and the creation of Public Justification Analysis for analyzing morally loaded claims in newspaper reports thus building bridges between cultural, political, and pragmatic sociology. The results of the study indicate that the cultural tools the Finnish civic actors had at their disposal were prone to hinder more than support politicization, whereas the tools the French actors mainly relied on were frequently apt for making politicization possible. This crystallization is defined and detailed in many ways in the analyses of the book. Its consequences to the understanding and future research on the current developments of democracy are multiple, as politicization, while not assuring good results as such, is central to a functioning and vibrant democracy in which injustices can be fixed and new directions and solutions sought collectively.

A cultural assessment of family dispute resolution: Findings about access, retention and outcomes from the evaluation of a Family Relationship Centre

The cultural appropriateness of human service processes is a major factor in determining the effectiveness of their delivery. Sensitivity to issues of culture is particularly critical in dealing with family disputes, which are generally highly emotive and require difficult decisions to be made regarding children, material assets and ongoing relationships. In this article we draw on findings from an evaluation of the Family Relationship Centre at Broadmeadows (FRCB) to offer some insights into and suggestions about managing cultural matters in the current practice of family dispute resolution (FDR) in Australia. The brief for the original research was to evaluate the cultural appropriateness of FDR services offered to culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities living within the FRCB’s catchment area, specifically members of the Lebanese, Turkish and Iraqi communities. The conclusions of the evaluations were substantially positive. The work of the Centre was found to illustrate many aspects of best practice but also raised questions worthy of future exploration. The current article reports on issues of access, retention and outcomes obtained by CALD clients at various stages of the FRCB service.

A cultural assessment of family dispute resolution: Findings about cultural appropriateness from the evaluation of a family relationship centre

The cultural appropriateness of human service processes is a major factor in determining the effectiveness of their delivery. Sensitivity to issues of culture is particularly critical in dealing with family disputes, which are generally highly emotive and require difficult decisions to be made regarding children, material assets and ongoing relationships. In this article we draw on findings from an evaluation of the Family Relationship Centre at Broadmeadows (FRCB) to offer some insights into and suggestions about managing cultural matters in the current practice of family dispute resolution (FDR) in Australia. The brief for the original research was to evaluate the cultural appropriateness of FDR services offered to culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities living within the FRCB’s catchment area, specifically members of the Lebanese, Turkish and Iraqi communities. The conclusions of the evaluations were substantially positive. The work of the Centre was found to illustrate many aspects of best practice but also raised questions worthy of future exploration. The current article reports on overall cultural appropriateness, particularly identifying barriers which may inhibit access and how acculturation may play a role in reducing perception of barriers. An earlier article reported on access, retention and outcomes for these CALD groups (Akin Ojelabi et al., 2011).

Discursive Matrixes of Motherhood : Cultivating Decency and Emotion in Finnish and French Mother-talk

Discursive Matrixes of Motherhood examines women's discourse on their experiences of new motherhood in Finland and France. It sets out from two culturally prevalent turns of speech observed in different social forums: in conversations amongst mothers with tertiary education and in the print media. The pool of data includes: 30 interviews, 8 autobiographically inspired novels and 80 items from women's magazines. With instruments loaned from the toolbox of rhetorical analysis, the recurrence of certain expressions or clichés is analyzed with regard to the national, cultural, biographical, political and daily contexts and settings in which the speaking subjects are immersed. "Staying at home is such a short and special time", the first expression under scrutiny, caught the sociological eye because of its salience in Finland and because it appeared as contradictory with a core characteristic of the Finnish context:long family leave. The cliché was found to function as a discursive micromechanism which swept mothers' 'complaints' under the proverbial carpet. Proper emotions and decency in mother-talk thereby appear as collective achievements. An opposite phenomenon - that of the scaling up of rewards procured by children - was also discerned in the data. Indeed, the French expression "Profiter de mon enfant" ["making the most of my child"/"enjoying my child"] is interpreted as a crystallization of a hedonist ethos of motherhood in everyday language. Secondly, the recurrence of this utterance is analyzed in the light of a requisite located in child-rearing expert literature: that of pleasure that women should take in mothering. Hence, one of the rules found to structure the discursive matrixes of motherhood is the laudability and audibility of enjoyment and conversely the discretion and discouragement of 'complaints'. The cultivation of decent matches between certain categories of emotions and certain categories of individuals also appears as a characteristic of discursive matrixes. One of the methodological findings relates to the fact that such matches may be constituted as sociological objects through the identification of recurrent discursive crystallizations in a given culture. Ideal matches may crystallize in turns of speech and mismatches can be managed through clichés. Becoming a mother entails an immersion in such a particular economy of speech. Key words: mothers, motherhood, transition to parenthood, family, emotions, morality, bonds, rhetorical analysis, discourse analysis, media analysis, France, Finland, comparative sociology

Cultural Trauma and Life Stories

The purpose of this work is to use the concepts of human time and cultural trauma in a biographical study of the turning points in the recent history of Estonia. This research is primarily based on 148 in-depth biographical interviews conducted in Estonia and Sweden in 1995-2005, supplemented by excerpts from 5 collections and 10 individually published autobiographies. The main body of the thesis consists of six published and of two forthcoming separate refereed articles, summarised in the theoretical introduction, and Appendix of the full texts of three particular life stories. The topic of the first article is the generational composition and the collective action frames of anti-Soviet social mobilisation in Estonia in 1940-1990. The second article details the differentiation of the rites of passage and the calendar traditions as a strategy to adapt to the rapidly changed political realities, comparatively in Soviet Estonia and among the boat-refugees in Sweden. The third article investigates the life stories of the double-minded strategic generation of the Estonian-inclined Communists, who attempted to work within the Soviet system while professing to uphold the ideals of pre-war Estonia. The fourth article is concentrated on the problems of double mental standards as a coping strategy in a contradictory social reality. The fifth article implements the theory of cultural trauma for the social practice of singing nationalism in Estonia. The sixth article bridges the ideas of Russian theoreticians concerning cultural dialogue and the Western paradigm of cultural trauma, with examples from Estonian Russian life stories. The seventh article takes a biographical look at the logic of the unraveling of cultural trauma through four Soviet decades. The eighth article explores the re-shaping of citizen activities as a strategy of coping with the loss of the independent nation state, comparatively in Soviet Estonia and among Swedish Estonians. Cultural trauma is interpreted as the re-ordering of the society s value-normative constellation due to sharp, violent, usually political events. The first one under consideration was caused by the occupations of the Republic of Estonia by the Soviet army in 1940-45. After half a century of suppression the memories of these events resurfaced as different stories describing the long-term, often inter-generational strategies of coping with the value collapse. The second cultural trauma is revealed together with the collapse of the Soviet power and ideology in Estonia in 1991. According to empirical data, the following three trauma discourses have been reconstructed: - the forced adaptation to Soviet order of the homeland Estonians; - the difficulty of preserving Estonian identity in exile (Sweden); - the identity crisis of the Russian population of Estonia. Comparative analyses of these discourses have shown that opposing experiences and worldviews cause conflicting interpretations of the past. Different social and ethnic groups consider coping with cultural trauma as a matter of self-defence and create appropriate usable pasts to identify with. Keywords: human time, cultural trauma, frame analysis, discourse, life stories

Cultural considerations in will-making in Australia: A case study of Islamic or Sharia-compliant wills

This article explores the influence of cultural and religious beliefs and laws on how individuals make decisions about asset distribution through wills, drawing on a case study of Islamic will makers. Findings highlight diversity in beliefs and practices within Australian Islamic communities. When drafting a will people from culturally diverse backgrounds need to accommodate their religious and cultural values and local law. Implications of research findings for legal policy and practice in Australia are discussed.

Not in their genes: phenotypic flexibility, behavioural traditions and cultural evolution in wild bonnet macaques

Phenotypic flexibility, or the within-genotype, context-dependent, variation in behaviour expressed by single reproductively mature individuals during their lifetimes, often impart a selective advantage to organisms and profoundly influence their survival and reproduction. Another phenomenon apparently not under direct genetic control is behavioural inheritance whereby higher animals are able to acquire information from the behaviour of others by social learning, and, through their own modified behaviour, transmit such information between individuals and across generations. Behavioural information transfer of this nature thus represents another form of inheritance that operates in many animals in tandem with the more basic genetic system. This paper examines the impact that phenotypic flexibility, behavioural inheritance and socially transmitted cultural traditions may have in shaping the structure and dynamics of a primate society--that of the bonnet macaque (Macaca radiata), a primate species endemic to peninsular India. Three principal issues are considered: the role of phenotypic flexibility in shaping social behaviour, the occurrence of individual behavioural traits leading to the establishment of social traditions, and the appearance of cultural evolution amidst such social traditions. Although more prolonged observations are required, these initial findings suggest that phenotypic plasticity, behavioural inheritance and cultural traditions may be much more widespread among primates than have previously been assumed but may have escaped attention due to a preoccupation with genetic inheritance in zoological thinking.

Kriitkko Einari J. Vehmas ja moderni taide

The doctoral dissertation Critic Einari J. Vehmas and Modern Art deals with one of the central figures of the Finnish art scene and his work as an art critic, art museum curator and cultural critic. The main body of research material consists of the writings of Einari J. Vehmas (1902 1980) from 1937 to the late 1960s. Vehmas wrote art reviews for magazines, and from the year 1945 he was a regular art critic for one of the major newspapers in Finland. Vehmas was heavily inclined towards French literature and visual arts. Marcel Proust and Charles Baudelaire influenced his views on the nature of art from the late 1920s onwards. Vehmas is commonly regarded as the most influential art critic of post-war Finland. His writings have been referred to and cited in numerous research papers on Finnish 20th-century art. A lesser known aspect of his work is his position as the deputy director of the Ateneum Art Museum, the Finnish national gallery. Through his art museum work, his opinions also shaped the canon of modern art considered particularly Finnish following the second world war. The main emphasis of the dissertation is on studying Vehmas s writings, but it also illustrates the diversity of his involvement in Finnish cultural life through biographical documents. The long chronological span of the dissertation emphasises how certain central themes accumulate in Vehmas s writings. The aim of the dissertation is also to show how strongly certain philosophical and theoretical concepts from the early 20th century, specifically Wassily Kandinsky s principle of inner necessity and Henri Bergson s epistemology highlighting intuition and instinct, continued to influence the Finnish art discourse even in the early 1960s, in part thanks to the writings of Vehmas. Throughout his production, Vehmas contemplated the state and future of modern art and humanity. Vehmas used a colourful, vitalistic rhetoric to emphasise the role of modern art as a building block of culture and humanity. At the same time, however, he was a cultural pessimist whose art views became infused with anxiety, a sense of loss, and a desire to turn his back on the world.

Sireenit, floksit ja iirikset- Puu-Käpylän koristekasvit

Puu-Käpylä (“Wooden Käpylä”), a neighbourhood of Helsinki, is the earliest example of the Garden City Movement in Finland. The suburb of valuable wooden architecture was built between 1920 and 1925, with the aim to provide a healthy housing area for working-class families with many children. The houses were erected by a co-operative (Käpylän kansanasunnot, “People?s Dwellings”) and they are protected by the city plan since 1960?s. However, the historical value of the sheltered courtyards has not been investigated. The aim of this study was to survey the garden flora of Puu-Käpylä and to evaluate the authenticity of the courtyard gardens. The survey covered the area of one residential quarter (1.2 ha) with twelve 2-storey semi-detached timber houses arranged around a common yard, which was originally appointed for the tenants? vegetable gardens. The houses are still rented, and each flat is allowed a small lot of the courtyard for cultivation. A complete list was made of all perennial, ornamental plant taxa present in the quarter. Spring bulbs were missed due to the timing of the survey. Generally, the plants were recorded on species level, with the exception of common lilacs, shrub roses, irises and peonies that were thoroughly studied for cultivar identification. It was assumed that plants initially grown in the courtyard could be distinguished by studying Finnish garden magazines, books and nursery catalogues published in the 1920?s and by comparing the present vegetation to surviving documents from the quarter. The total number of ornamental plant taxa identified was 172, of which 17 were trees, 47 shrubs, 7 climbers and 101 herbaceous perennials. The results indicated that a major part of the shrubs, climbers and perennials presumably originated from the 1970?s or later, whereas ca. 70 % of the tree specimens were deemed as original. The survey disclosed a heritage variety of common lilac, resembling cultivar „Prince Notger?, a specific peony taxon, Paeonia humilis Retz., cultivated in Nordic countries since long ago, and a few historic iris varieties. Well-preserved design elements included front gardens on one side of the quarter, a maple alley on another side as well as trees at the garden gates. Old garden books and magazines did not shed much light on the Finnish garden flora commonly used in the period when Puu-Käpylä was built. However, they gave a valuable picture of contemporary planting design. Nursery catalogues offered insight into the assortment of ornamental plants traded in the 1920?s. Conclusions on the authenticity of the current flora were mainly drawn on the basis of old photographs and a vegetation survey map drawn in the 1970?s. This study revealed a need for standardization of syrvey methods applied when investigating garden floras. Uniform survey techniques would make the results comparable and enable a future compilation of data from e.g. historic gardens.

Profligate Descent : The Cultural Transformations of Evolutionary Narrative

This dissertation traces a set of historical transformations the Darwinian evolutionary narrative has undergone toward the end of the twentieth century, especially as reflected in Anglo-American popular science books and novels. The study has three objectives. First, it seeks to understand the organizing logic of evolutionary narratives and the role that assumptions about gender and sexuality play in that logic. Second, it asks what kinds of cultural anxieties evolutionary theory raises and how evolutionary narratives negotiate them. Third, it examines the possibilities and limits of narrative transformation both as a historical phenomenon and as a theoretical question. This interdisciplinary dissertation is situated at the intersection of science studies, cultural studies, literary studies, and gender studies. Its understanding of science as a cultural practice that both emerges from and contributes to cultural expectations and institutional structures follows the tradition of science studies. Its focus on the question of popular appeal and the mechanisms of cultural change arises from cultural studies. Its view of narrative as a structural phenomenon is grounded in literary studies in general and feminist narrative theory in particular. Its understanding of gender and sexuality as implicated in discourses of epistemic authority builds on the view of gender and sexuality as contingent cultural categories central to gender studies. The primary material consists of over 25 British and American popular science books and novels, published roughly between 1990 and 2005. In order to highlight historical transformations, these texts are read in the context of Darwin s The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, on the one hand, and such sociobiological classics as E. O. Wilson s On Human Nature and Richard Dawkins s The Selfish Gene, on the other. The research method combines feminist narrative analysis with cultural and historical contextualization, emphasizing discursive abruptions, recurrent narrative patterns, and underlying continuities. The dissertation demonstrates that the relationship between Darwin s evolutionary narrative and late twentieth-century evolutionary narratives is characterized by reemphasis, omissions, and continuous rewriting. In particular, contemporary evolutionary discourse extends the role assigned to reproduction both sexual and narrative in Darwin s writing, generating a narrative logic that imagines the desire to reproduce as the driving force of evolution and posits the reproductive sex act as the endlessly repeated narrative event that keeps the story going. The study argues that the popular appeal of evolutionary accounts of gender, sexuality, and human nature may arise, to an extent, from this reproductive narrative dynamic. This narrative dynamic, however, is not logically invulnerable. Since the continuation of the evolutionary narrative relies on successful reproduction, the possibility of reproductive failure poses a constant risk to narrative futurity, arousing cultural anxieties that evolutionary narratives need to address. The study argues that evolutionary narratives appease such anxieties by evoking a range of cultural narratives, especially romantic, religious, and national narratives. Furthermore, the study shows that the event-based logic of evolutionary narratives privileges observable acts over emotions, pleasures, identities, and desires, thus engendering a set of conceptual exclusions that limits the imaginative scope of evolution as a cultural narrative.

Cultural differences and capability transfer in cross-border acquisitions: the mediating roles of capability complementarity, absorptive capacity, and social integration

This paper presents an integrative model of the impact of cultural differences on capability transfer in cross-border acquisitions. We propose that cultural differences affect the post-acquisition capability transfer through their impact on social integration, potential absorptive capacity, and capability complementarity. Two dynamic variables – the use of social integration mechanisms, and the degree of operational integration of the acquired unit – are proposed to moderate the effects of cultural differences on social integration and potential absorptive capacity. The implications for acquisition research and practice are discussed.

Cultural differences and postmerger problems: Misconceptions and cognitive simplifications.

Researchers and practitioners have increasingly explained post-merger organizational problems with cultural differences, especially in the context of cross-border mergers and acquisitions. It is suggested here that cultural differences have great explanatory power in the context of post-merger change processes. There are, however, problems with a number of superficial cultural conceptions that are common in research in this area and in managerial rhetoric. This critical article provocatively delineates misconceptions widely held by researchers and practitioners in this field, which not only disregard cultural differentiation, fragmentation, inconsistencies and ambiguities, but further, illustrate a lack of understanding of cultural permeability and embeddedness in the environment, an overemphasis on abstract values and lack of attention to organizational practices, an overemphasis on initial structural differences and lack of attention to the new cultural layer, a lack of recognition of the political dimensions and a failure to recognize cultural differences as sources of value and learning. In this article, the theoretical problems associated with these misconceptions are examined and new conceptual perspectives suggested. The risks at stake for decision makers are also discussed.