Becoming an international man: Top manager masculinities in the making of a multinational corporation

Purpose We address gender and management in contemporary globalization by focusing on the ways in which male top managers in a multinational corporation (MNC) construct their identities in interviews with researchers. Design/methodology/approach Our qualitative analysis is based on interviews with virtually all top managers in the Nordic financial services company Nordea (53 men and two women). Findings We specify how becoming international induces a particular masculine identity for the top managers. In becoming international, however, their national identification persists. The unstability of the MNC as a political constellation leaves room for questioning the transnational identity offered. Originality/value Our findings suggest that in the global world of business, national identity can also be interpreted as something positive and productive, contrary to how it has been previously treated in feminist and men’s studies literature.

Kohti määrittämätöntä : Maahanmuuttajien vertaisryhmiin osallistuneiden naisten toimijuus

In this research, I examine the agency of women who has taken part in peer groups for immigrants organized by Finnish refugee council. My thesis is connected with post-colonial feminist research where difference and power have been studied especially from the view of those inferior positions. Agency is the main tool that I use in this thesis. I examine how peer groups are significant in the speech of women and how women s agency shows in their lives. My goal was to examine how women build their lives in a new environment. I also want to show an alternative view in the discussion about integration by telling about the lives of the women. My data is from single and group interviews, from one peer group meeting that I observed and conversations with the peer mentors. Altogether I interviewed 29 women from the age of 18 to elderly people. Women had emigrated from eight different countries. I also used educational material made for peer group mentors as my data. According to my study, the peer groups were significant for women especially because of the social relations made in the groups and the knowledge achieved about Finnish society. Also the language skills achieved in the peer groups were important. In the peer groups women realized to fill the competences acquired to make their space of agency wider. Women s agency was sometimes quiet and it aimed to maintain. This kind of agency made the foundation to everyday life in Finland. It was also used to create relation to the country of emigration. Agency occurred also as toleration. Especially when confronting racism or when women had to give up customs that were important to them. The sense of agency grew in peer groups. This and through perceiving their competences women pondered the paths in their future. Women spoke of themselves as foreigners and made distinction with the majority of population. In the educational material and in the speech of the mentors, the image of Finnishness was unlimited. Women did not find space for them in the concept of Finnish. The intercommunication between women and the majority of population was narrow and those were formed mainly in context of the work of the majority of population. In my research, I noticed that women have enough knowledge, skills and competences for agency, only the space for it is narrow. When speaking about integration, immigrants are seen as objects to be activated. I suggest that from this way of speaking focus should be changed from activation to deconstruction of the positions shown to women.

Miten esiopetusmateriaaleissa esitetään sukupuolta

Earlier school text book studies (eg Tainio and Teräs 2010, Blumberg 2007; Ohlander 2010) have shown that women are underrepresented in school books, both in illustrations and texts, and the genders are represented stereotyped. The study will examine how gender in seen on pre-school education materials. The aim of this study is to determine what kind of representations, discourses and the subject positions of the gender are presented in pre-school materials. This study utilizes a feminist research method. The theoretical starting points are the social constructivist, poststructuralist theory and gender studies. The concept of gender as a social construct. The research used content analysis as well as discource analysis and deconstructive reading. The material was used four different publishers, WSOY, Tammi, Otava and Lasten Keskus preschool integrated material packages, which contain the child's exercise book or booklet, and teacher's guide. The analysis examined the quantity of gender-specific images and gendered words and phrases, and representations of gender, subject position, and discourses, and what linguistic means had been used for representation of masculinity and femininity. Based on the results there were on average more masculine characters and words as feminine in the illustrations and stories of pre-school materials. Feminine and masculine characters representations emphasized traditional gender stereotypes, especially in external characteristics and clothing. Genders had the highest available, with the subject position of stereotypes with reduced mobility, but also other kinds of subject position was observed. The data found in the following gender discources: difference discource, diversity discource and similarity discource. The highest number occurred in the difference and diversity discources. However, there were differences between the different materials. In some materials there were more diverse gender representations and other materials highlighted the differences between genders. Overall, the genders were represented stereotypically in the pre-school materials.

Liikuntavammaisten henkilöiden kokemukset kuljetuspalveluista "Pyörittelen siinä sitten peukaloita ja odotan sitä typerää erilliskyytiä"

Tutkielmani tarkoituksena on selvittää liikuntavammaisten henkilöiden kokemuksia kuljetuspalveluista. Tutkielmaa varten olen haastatellut Helsingissä asuvia vammaispalvelulain mukaisia kuljetuspalveluja käyttäviä henkilöitä. Haastateltavista kolme oli naisia ja kaksi oli miehiä.. Tutkielmani on laadullinen ja tutkielmani viitekehyksenä on fenomenologinen viitekehys. Haastattelumenetelmänä käytin avointa haastattelua. Haastateltavat tutkielmaani valitsin lumipallo-otantaa käyttäen. Tutkielmani tarkoituksena on tuoda näkyväksi se, miten käytettävissä olevat kuljetuspalvelut vaikuttavat liikuntavammaisten arkielämän sujuvuuteen ja minkälaisia kokemuksia vammaisilla on kuljetuspalveluista. Tuon myös näkyväksi sitä miten vammaiset kokevat yksilösuojan toteutuvan kuljetuspalveluita käytettäessä ja miten onnistunutta vammaispolitiikka on liikuntavammaisten kohdalla. Haastateltavista kaksi oli opiskelijoita ja kolme oli työelämässä. Tekemieni haastattelujen perusteella näyttää siltä, että vammaiset kohtaavat edelleen syrjintää arjessa liikkumisen osalta. Toimimattomat kuljetuspalvelut asettavat suuria haasteita vammaisten arjessa selviytymiseen rajoittaen vammaisten osallisuutta niin työhön, vapaa-aikaan, opiskeluun kuin ihmissuhteiden ylläpitämiseenkin. Yksilösuoja ei näyttänyt toteutuvan haastattelemieni vammaisten kohdalla heidän käyttäessään kuljetuspalveluita. Vammaispolitiikan asettamat tavoitteet yhtäläisistä ihmisoikeuksista muiden kanssa eivät näytä toteutuvan vammaisten kohdalla. Vammaiset ihmiset on laitettu toimimaan robotin tavoin aikataulujen ohjaamina unohtaen ihmisyys. Kuljetuspalveluita käyttäessään haastattelemani vammaiset kertoivat joutuneensa kohtaamaan liikkuessaan pelkoa, ahdistusta, yksilösuojan loukkaamista, intimiteettisuojan rikkomista ja välinpitämättömyyttä. Tutkielmani keskeisimpinä kirjallisuuslähteinä ovat olleet Simo Vehmaksen teos Vammaisuus.Johdatus historiaan, teoriaan ja etiikkaan, Minna Harjulan teos Vailinaisuudella vaivatu.Vammaisuuden tulkinnat suomalaisessa huoltokeskustelussa 1800-luvun lopulta 1930-luvun lopulle, Lauri Rauhalan teos .Ihmiskäsitys ihmistyössä, Michael Oliverin teos Understanding disability . From theory to practice sekä Susan Wendellin teos Rejected body. Feminist philosophical reflections on disability.

Elämää suuremmat sankarittaret : Suomalaisen teatterin elämäkerralliset taiteilijahahmot vuosina 2000 - 2010

In the first decade of the 21st century, national notables were a significant theme in the Finnish theatre. The lives of artists, in particular, inspired the performances that combined historical and fictional elements. In this study, I focus on the characters of female artists in 18 Finnish plays or performances from the first decade of the 21st century. The study pertains to the field of performance analysis. I approach the characters from three points of view. Firstly, I examine them through the action of performances at the thematic level. Secondly, I concentrate on the forms of relationships between the audience and the half-historical character. Thirdly, I examine the representations of characters and their relationships to the audience using myth as a tool. I approach characters from the frame of feminist phenomenological theatre study but also combine the points of view of other traditions. As a model, I adapt the approach of the theatre researcher Bert O. States, which concentrates on the relation between a play s text and an actor, and between an actor and the public. Furthermore, I use the analysing tools of performance art in an examination of performances counted among the contemporary performance genre. The biographical plays about these artists are concentrated in the domestic sphere and take part in the conversation about the position of women in both the community and private life. They represent the heroines work, love, temptations and hardships. The artists do not carry out heroic acts, being more like everyday heroines whose lives and art were shared with the audience in an aphoristic atmosphere. In the examined performances, criticism of the heterosexual matrix was mainly conservative and the myths of female and male artists differed from each other: the woman artist was presented as a super heroine whose strength often meant sacrifices; the male artist was a weaker figure primarily pursuing his individualistic objectives. The performances proved to be a kind of documentary theatre, a hybrid of truth and fiction. Nonetheless, the constructions of subject and identity mainly represented the characters of the mythical stories and only secondarily gave a faithful rendition of the artists lives. Although these performances were addressed to the general and heterogeneous public, their audience proved to be a strictly predefined group, for which the national myths and the experience of a collective identity emerged as an important theme. The heroine characters offered the audience "safe" idols who ensured the solidity of the community. These performances contained common, shared values and gave the audience an opportunity to feel empathy and to be charmed by the confessions of well-known national characters.

Domestic labour relations in India : Vulnerability and gendered life courses in Jaipur

This study explores labour relations between domestic workers and employers in India. It is based on interviews with both employers and workers, and ethnographically oriented field work in Jaipur, carried out in 2004-2007. Combining development studies with gender studies, labour studies, and childhood studies, it asks how labour relations between domestic workers and employers are formed in Jaipur, and how female domestic workers trajectories are created. Focusing on female part-time maids and live-in work arrangements, the study analyses children s work in the context of overall work force, not in isolation from it. Drawing on feminist Marxism, domestic labour relations are seen as an arena of struggle. The study takes an empirical approach, showing class through empiria and shows how paid domestic work is structured and stratified through intersecting hierarchies of class, caste, gender, age, ethnicity and religion. The importance of class in domestic labour relations is reiterated, but that of caste, so often downplayed by employers, is also emphasized. Domestic workers are crucial to the functioning of middle and upper middle class households, but their function is not just utilitarian. Through them working women and housewives are able to maintain purity and reproduce class disctinctions, both between poor and middle classes and lower and upper middle classes. Despite commodification of work relations, traditional elements of service relationships have been retained, particularly through maternalist practices such as gift giving, creating a peculiar blend of traditional and market practices. Whilst employers of part-time workers purchase services in a segmented market from a range of workers for specific, traditional live-in workers are also hired to serve employers round the clock. Employers and workers grudgingly acknowledged their dependence on one another, employers seeking various strategies to manage fear of servant crime, such as the hiring of children or not employing live-in workers in dual-earning households. Paid domestic work carries a heavy stigma and provide no entry to other jobs. It is transmitted from mothers to daughters and working girls were often the main income providers in their families. The diversity of working conditions is analysed through a continuum of vulnerability, generic live-in workers, particularly children and unmarried young women with no close family in Jaipur, being the most vulnerable and experienced part-time workers the least vulnerable. Whilst terms of employment are negotiated informally and individually, some informal standards regarding salary and days off existed for maids. However, employers maintain that workings conditions are a matter of individual, moral choice. Their reluctance to view their role as that of employers and the workers as their employees is one of the main stumbling blocks in the way of improved working conditions. Key words: paid domestic work, India, children s work, class, caste, gender, life course

Perheelliset naisministerit mediassa: Analyysi lehtiteksteistä

Tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan sitä, miten perheellisistä naisministereistä kirjoitetaan ja millaisia representaatioita nämä kirjoitukset heistä tuottavat. Tarkasteltaviksi on valittu kolme mediakohua herättänyttä tapausta. Ensimmäinen näistä on viestintäministeri Suvi Lindénin päätös jatkaa ministerin tehtävässään lapsen adoptoimisesta huolimatta vuonna 2007. Toinen tarkasteltava mediakohu syntyi vuonna 2008, kun opetusministeri Sari Sarkomaa päätti erota tehtävästään perhesyihin vedoten. Kolmas tapaus on ympäristöministeri Paula Lehtomäen päätös olla lähtemättä tavoittelemaan keskustan puheenjohtajuutta ja sen mahdollisesti mukanaan tuomaa pääministerin paikkaa. Kaikki kolme tapausta herättivät laajaa keskustelua tasa-arvon toteutumisesta politiikassa. Menestyneiden poliitikkonaisten uran ja yksityiselämän yhteensovittamisen teemaa on käsitelty paljon eri joukkotiedotusvälineissä ja journalismin eri genreissä. Naistenlehdet ovat olleet yksi keskeinen paikka, missä naisten kamppailua kahden ristiriitaisena pidetyn maailman välillä on saatu seurata. Tässä tutkimuksessa on keskitytty tarkastelemaan sitä, miten aihetta on käsitelty uutisjournalismissa ja nimenomaan sanomalehdissä. Uutisia, pääkirjoituksia, mielipidekirjoituksia ja muita lehdessä ilmestyneitä juttuja sisältävä aineisto on kerätty Helsingin Sanomista, Ilta-Sanomista ja Iltalehdestä. Aihetta lähestytään feministisen mediatutkimuksen näkökulmasta. Työssä nojaudutaan sosiaalisen konstruktionismin ja representaatioteorian ajatuksiin. Teoreettisena viitekehyksenä on feministinen teoria sukupuolesta sosiaalisena konstruktiona. Teorian keskeinen ajatus on se, että sukupuoli ei ole pysyvä ja muuttumaton, vaan jatkuvasti sosiaalisessa vuorovaikutuksessa, erityisesti kielenkäytössä rakentuva ja muuttuva. Media on yksi keskeinen yhteiskunnallinen instituutio, jossa sukupuolen määrittelykamppailua käydään. Analyysimetodina tutkimuksessa on diskurssianalyysiä lähellä oleva tekstianalyysi. Tutkimusaineiston analyysi osoittaa, että media käsittelee naispoliitikkojen kohdalla enemmän näiden yksityiselämään liittyviä kysymyksiä, erityisesti perheen ja poliittisen uran yhteensovittamista. Politiikan huippupaikoilla toimiessaankin naiset ovat ensisijaisesti naisia ja äitejä ja vasta toissijaisesti poliitikkoja. Yksityisen piiriin kuuluvien velvollisuuksien täyttäminen näyttäytyy analyysin perusteella edellytykseltä sille, että heidän osallistumisensa politiikkaan katsotaan sopivaksi. Työssä käytetyt keskeisimmät lähteet ovat Annabelle Srebernyn ja Liesbet van Zoonenin Gender, Politics and Communication, Karen Rossin ja Carolyn Byerlyn Women and Media, Liesbet van Zoonenin Feminist Media Studies, Anna Mäkelän, Iina Puustisen ja Iiris Ruohon Sukupuolishow, johdatus feministiseen mediatutkimukseen, Erkka Railon Henkilökohtainen on poliittista sekä Irma Kaarina Halosen Matka journalismin sukupuolittumisen strategisille alueille.

The Biopolitics of Gender

This dissertation inquires into the relationship between gender and biopolitics. Biopolitics, according to Michel Foucault, is the mode of politics that is situated and exercised at the level of life. The dissertation claims that gender is a technology of biopower specific to the optimisation of the sexual reproduction of human life, deployed through the scientific and governmental problematisation of declining fertility rates in the mid-twentieth century. Just as Michel Foucault claimed that sexuality became a scientific and political discourse in the nineteenth century, gender has also since emerged in these fields. In this dissertation, gender is treated as neither a representation of sex nor a cultural construct or category of identity. Rather, a genealogy of gender as an apparatus of biopower in conducted. It demonstrates how scientific and theoretical developments in the twentieth century marshalled gender into the sex/sexuality apparatus as a new technology of liberal biopower. Gender, I argue, has become necessary for the Western liberal order to recapture and re-optimise the life-producing functions of sex that reproduce the very object of biopolitics: life. The concept of the life function is introduced to analyse the life-producing violence of the sex/sexuality/gender apparatus. To do this, the thesis rereads the work of Michel Foucault through Gilles Deleuze for a deeper grasp of the material strategies of biopower and how it produces categories of difference and divides population according to them. The work of Judith Butler, in turn, is used as a foil against which to rearticulate the question of how to examine gender genealogically and biopolitically. The dissertation then executes a genealogy of gender, tracing the changing rationalities of sex/sexuality/gender from early feminist thought, through mid-twentieth century sexological, feminist, and demographic research, to current EU policy. According to this genealogy, in the mid-twentieth century demographers perceived that sexuality/sex, which Foucault observed as the life-producing biopolitical apparatus, was no longer sufficiently disciplining human bodies to reproduce. The life function was escaping the grasp of biopower. The analysis demonstrates how gender theory was taken up as a means of reterritorialising the life function: nature would be disciplined to reproduce by controlling culture. The crucial theoretical and genealogical argument of the thesis, that gender is a discourse with biopolitical foundations and a technology of biopower, radically challenges the premises of gender theory and feminist politics, as well as the emancipatory potential often granted to the gender concept. The project asks what gender means, what biopolitical function it performs, and what is at stake for feminist politics when it engages with it. In so doing, it identifies biopolitics and the problem of life as possibly the most urgent arena for feminist politics today.

Trafficking in human beings and Foucauldian biopower : A case study in the expansion of the human rights phenomenon

Trafficking in human beings has become one of the most talked about criminal concerns of the 21st century. But this is not all that it has become. Trafficking has also been declared as one of the most pressing human rights issues of our time. In this sense, it has become a part of the expansion of the human rights phenomenon. Although it is easy to see that the crime of trafficking violates several of the human rights of its victims, it is still, in its essence, a fairly conventional although particularly heinous and often transnational crime, consisting of acts between private actors, and lacking, therefore, the vertical effect associated traditionally with human rights violations. This thesis asks, then, why, and how, has the anti-trafficking campaign been translated in human rights language. And even more fundamentally: in light of the critical, theoretical studies surrounding the expansion of the human rights phenomenon, especially that of Costas Douzinas, who has declared that we have come to the end of human rights as a consequence of the expansion and bureaucratization of the phenomenon, can human rights actually bring salvation to the victims of trafficking? The thesis demonstrates that the translation process of the anti-trafficking campaign into human rights language has been a complicated process involving various actors, including scholars, feminist NGOs, local activists and global human rights NGOs. It has also been driven by a complicated web of interests, the most prevalent one the sincere will to help the victims having become entangled with other aims, such as political, economical, and structural goals. As a consequence of its fragmented background, the human rights approach to trafficking seeks still its final form, consisting of several different claims. After an assessment of these claims from a legal perspective, this thesis concludes that the approach is most relevant regarding the mistreatment of victims of trafficking in the hands of state authorities. It seems to be quite common that authorities have trouble identifying the victims of trafficking, which means that the rights granted to themin international and national documents are not realized in practice, but victims of trafficking are systematically deported as illegal immigrants. It is argued that in order to understand the measures of the authorities, and to assess the usefulness of human rights, it is necessary to adopt a Foucauldian perspective and to observe the measures as biopolitical defence mechanisms. From a biopolitical perspective, the victims of trafficking can be seen as a threat to the population a threat that must be eliminated either by assimilating them to the main population with the help of disciplinary techniques, or by excluding them completely from the society. This biopolitical aim is accomplished through an impenetrable net of seemingly insignificant practices and discourses that not even the participants are aware of. As a result of these practices and discourses, trafficking victims only very few of fit the myth of the perfect victim, produced by biopolitical discourses become invisible and therefore subject to deportation as (risky) illegal immigrants, turning them into bare life in the Agambenian sense, represented by the homo sacer, who cannot be sacrificed, yet does not enjoy the protection of the society and its laws. It is argued, following Jacques Rancière and Slavoj i ek, that human rights can, through their universality and formal equality, provide bare life the tools to formulate political claims and therefore utilize their politicization through their exclusion to return to the sphere of power and politics. Even though human rights have inevitably become entangled with biopolitical practices, they are still perhaps the most efficient way to challenge biopower. Human rights have not, therefore, become useless for the victims of trafficking, but they must be conceived as a universal tool to formulate political claims and challenge power .In the case of trafficking this means that human rights must be utilized to constantly renegotiate the borders of the problematic concept of victim of trafficking created by international instruments, policies and discourses, including those that are sincerely aimed to provide help for the victims.

Raíces ideológicas de la perspectiva de género

Resumen: El feminismo radical o de género tiene sus orígenes históricos, su matriz ideológica y su modo dialéctico de entender la relación varón-mujer, en el pensamiento marxista (Engels, de Beauvoir, Firestone). La “antítesis” de esta lucha de sexos es la revolución feminista radical, y su principal instrumento revolucionario y de penetración cultural es la ideología de género. La fase central de esta revolución es el apoderamiento, por parte de las mujeres, de los medios de reproducción. Los medios que han demostrado ser más aptos para lograr la victoria son el aborto por decisión privativa de la mujer, la fecundación artificial y el matrimonio entre personas del mismo sexo. La revolución se libra en el campo cultural y, luego, en el jurídico.

Pertsonaia protagonista femeninoen ezaugarriak eta bilakaera euskal narratiba garaikidean

361 p.

La maternidad en el imaginario de las escritoras vascas

Ejemplar dedicado a: Salud pública desde la perspectiva de género: hitos e innovación / coord. por María Teresa Ruiz Cantero

Quebec's "écriture au féminin" and translation politicized

Eguíluz, Federico; Merino, Raquel; Olsen, Vickie; Pajares, Eterio; Santamaría, José Miguel (eds.)

Angela Carter's focus on celluloid dreams

Santamaría, José Miguel; Pajares, Eterio; Olsen, Vickie; Merino, Raquel; Eguíluz, Federico (eds.)

Relaciones amorosas de pareja en las trayectorias vitales de las mujeres encarceladas

[ES]La tesis doctoral analiza las experiencias amorosas de pareja de mujeres encarceladas, con el doble objetivo de visibilizar a las mujeres presas en el ámbito de las ciencias sociales y de introducir las especificidades de las mujeres encarceladas en los debates sociológicos y feministas acerca del amor. Las escasas aproximaciones al amor entre las mujeres presas han tendido a explicar sus relaciones de pareja desde el concepto de “dependencia emocional”, que, como se muestra en la tesis, presenta dos debilidades básicas, de un lado la tendencia a la psicologización y patologización de cuestiones de claro sustrato social; de otro la homogeneización de experiencias que presentan gran diversidad. Otra debilidad de ciertos análisis sobre las mujeres presas y aquellas excluidas socialmente, es que se han basado en concepciones sexistas acerca de las mujeres transgresoras como “malas mujeres”, por considerar que no cumplen con las expectativas culturales y sociales asociadas a los supuestos atributos de género. Esta tesis doctoral adopta una epistemología basada en la crítica feminista que busca modelos analíticos alejados de los estereotipos y la estigmatización de las mujeres transgresoras. Desde una perspectiva metodológica cualitativa, el trabajo de campo fue desarrollado en la cárcel de Nanclares de Oca (País Vasco) durante el 2008. Desarrollé un trabajo etnográfico de observación participante y entrevistas en profundidad semiestructuradas que elaboraban información sobre aspectos relativos a sus trayectorias de vida (familia de origen, vivienda, empleo, nivel educativo, situación penal y penitenciaria, estado de salud, etc.) y sus experiencias amorosas de pareja. En mi análisis, he rastreado la diversidad y variabilidad de las experiencias amorosas de las mujeres presas, el impacto del encarcelamiento en sus trayectorias amorosas y en la configuración de su intimidad, los elementos que hacen para estas mujeres del amor un “cautiverio”, y al mismo tiempo, las estrategias “liberadoras” que despliegan en sus desarrollos afectivos. El amor puede constituir un cautiverio para las mujeres ya que favorece la acomodación a unos roles de género que definen a las mujeres como dependientes y carentes de libertad. Al mismo tiempo, el amor se puede entender como una “estrategia emocional”, una forma de superar las consecuencias del encierro y de lograr ciertos estándares de “normalización” social, en un contexto en que se encuentran excluidas socialmente y fuertemente estigmatizadas.