Search

The administrative systems of universities attest to a shift towards more managerial forms of leadership. This article outlines how strategic management was introduced in Finland in the 2000s and how this led to a significant de-democratisation of the university organisations, despite academic communities’ resistance and explicit preference for democratic self-governance. The article illustrates how strategic management informed the reconceptualization of Finnish higher education in legislation (nationally), to de-democratise and to structurally reform the HE field, and in practice (locally), to drive through desired administrative reconfigurations. This anti-democratic transformation is embodied in a new institutional model: foundation universities, which have been presented as the flagships of Finnish higher education policy, are also vehicles of de-democratisation. publishedVersion

This article investigates the cultural perceptions and the common sense held by Finnish mutual fund managers on the very wealthy and the rich in times of growing inequalities and increased wealth accumulation at the top. By studying the financial intermediaries on the shop-floor level, who embody the promises of popular finance, the article describes how fund managers working for the small investors make sense of the inequalities caused by financialization. In the research interviews analysed in the article, the mutual fund managers perceive the rich as a necessary and salutary part of the contemporary economy, whose function is to be and behave better than the financialized markets. This common sense concerning the rich helps to legitimize increasing wealth accumulation at the top, so that the fund managers’ perceptions of the rich embody an ideological coalition between the working financiers and the super-rich rentiers, a coalition that contrasts starkly with the promises of popular finance. publishedVersion

2000-luvun alkuvuosina suomalaisessa korkeakoulupolitiikassa yleistyi näkemys kiireellisestä tarpeesta uudistaa järjestelmää. ”Rakenteelliseksi kehittämiseksi” kutsuttu kokonaisreformi tähtäsi resurssien keskittämiseen, yksiköiden karsimiseen ja yliopistojen profiloitumiseen. Tarkastelemme artikkelissa uuden säätiöyliopistomallin syntyä osana tätä kehitystä ja vuoden 2009 yliopistolakiuudistusta. Tulkintamme mukaan säätiöyliopistojen synnyn mahdollistivat valtion, elinkeinoelämän ja yliopistojen ylimmän johdon intressien kohtaaminen. Säätiöyliopistojen syntyprosessissa nämä kolme toimijaa löysivät toisensa uudella tavalla, minkä seurauksena yliopistodemokratia ja yliopistoyhteisöjen valta-asema Suomessa heikentyivät merkittävästi. Valtion, elinkeinoelämän ja yliopistojen johtoportaiden intressien yhdistyessä voitiin marginalisoida demokraattisesti järjestäytyneet yliopistoyhteisöt ja osittain myös sivuuttaa eduskunnan tavanomainen lainsäädäntötyö. Konjunktuurillisen tapausanalyysimme perusteella säätiömallin ja Aalto-yliopiston synnyssä ilmenee selvimmin korkeakoulupolitiikan 2000-luvun suhdanne ja yliopistokentän valtasuhteiden muutos. Säätiömallissa tiivistyvät pitkän linjan yliopistopolitiikan tavoitteet: päätöksenteon keskittäminen, demokratian suitsiminen, elinkeinoelämän vallan kasvattaminen, yliopistojen suurempi vastuuttaminen omasta taloudestaan ja niiden pääomittaminen perusrahoituksen vahvistamisen sijaan. Eetos käy selväksi monista lakia edeltäneistä puheenvuoroista, Aalto-säätiön perustamisprosessista, alkuperäisestä yliopistolakiesityksestä ja säätiöyliopistomallin myöhemmistä vaiheista.

publishedVersion

Family wealth and cross-generational wealth accumulation have recently interested scholars across the social sciences. Debates concerning the economic role of the wealthy now commonly recognise that one dynamic supporting economic inequalities is wealth accumulation across generations. To understand the social dynamics through which dynastic family wealth has managed to persist, this article analyses the social meanings that members of wealthy families attach to their wealth and how these meanings contribute to their class-making. Drawing from 26 in-depth interviews with members of super-rich Finnish families, the article analyses how a dynastic class is actively made and supported by specific social meanings and practices that the inheritors attach to their wealth. By exploring how wealthy heirs produce social meanings and practices that facilitate their wealth accumulation and reproduction as a class, the article contributes to recent interest in elites and social class.

This article examines the moral boundary work of wealthy Finnish entrepreneurs belonging to the country’s top 0.1 per cent of earners. Through 28 semi-structured interviews, we show how these members of the wealth elite construct moral boundaries to legitimise their growing distance from other income groups in a Nordic welfare society. The super-rich entrepreneurs construct self-identities based on hard work, persistence and normality, draw moral boundaries between lazy and hard-working people and create moral distance between themselves and wage earners, the unemployed and public-sector workers. At the same time, these wealthy elite entrepreneurs challenge the moralities of Nordic welfare society. We thus posit that moral boundaries and boundary work should be explored as legitimising discourses embedded in the relations of economic and political power.

This article discusses literary crowdsourcing in the context of critical media studies and aesthetic theories that stress participation. First, it draws an overall picture of the participatory cult...

Jussi Ojajärvi, Erkki Sevänen, Liisa Steinby (toim.): Kirjallisuus nykykapitalismissa. Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden ja kulttuurin näkökulma. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2018, 454 s.

This article investigates collaborative and crowdsourced online writing projects and the economies surrounding them. It describes the conjunctures between collective creativity and contemporary economic regimes and introduces the concept of the promise economy. The article discusses recent literary collaborations that have taken place online between writers who have never met each other in real life and who have never cooperated before. It argues that these cases of collective creation often rest on a specific dialectic between the promises or expectations of these crowdsourced writing initiatives and the failures and disappointments experienced in such projects, which can be seen as participating in a promise economy. “Promise economy” refers to a cultural economy that is based, or dependent, on certain promises that are inscribed in collaborative cultural practices such as cooperative writing, whose dynamics urge participants to create ever-higher expectations for the final product often before the process of creation has even started. This article's analysis of such economies surrounding online creative collaborations and its examination of the dialectics between literary works and the processes behind them contribute to debates on participatory or processual art in the twenty-first century.

This article elaborates the usefulness of material culture studies for research on contemporary cultural products by representing books as transformable objects with social lives, the investigation of which is needed to better understand their social dimensions in times of global cultural flows. The article discusses the case of a controversial literary bestseller, The Bookseller of Kabul, from the perspective of its globally circulating material embodiments. By following the changing peritexts of this international bestseller, the article investigates how specific interpretations of the book proliferate. Special focus is placed on the ahistorical construction of Afghan women in the peritexts of the book.

In the past two decades, transcultural or cross-cultural literary texts have sparked several public controversies in various Scandinavian countries. Bokhandleren i Kabul (2002; The Bookseller of Kabul, 2003), by Asne Seierstad, in Norway; Gomda (1995; Buried Alive) and Asyl (2004; Asylum Granted), by Liza Marklund and Maria Eriksson, in Sweden; the poems of Yahya Hassan (Tahya Hassan: Digte, 2013) in Denmark; and Layla (2011), by Jari Tervo, in Finland are among these controversial texts that are located between cultures. All of these texts have induced arguments between those who write them and those whom they are written about (or who perceive themselves to be the object of the writing). The reasons for these controversies are manifold, but one almost always has to do with the question of realism: that is, to what extent have these texts been written, presented, or read as realistic and generalizing or as generalizable depictions of the texts' respective cultures and people? In recent decades, this problem has been particularly topical in Scandinavia; however, the issue is larger. Similar questions have touched cross-cultural literary texts all the way from The Satanic Verses (1988), by Salman Rushdie, to The White Tiger (2008), by Aravind Adiga (on Rushdie, see Pipes 1990). Are these texts offered to readers as realistic descriptions of alien cultures? Or, alternatively, to what extent are they read as true representations, regardless of their genre? The current article approaches this cross-cultural problem by examining the reception of the Finnish novel Parvekejumalat (2010; Balcony Gods), by Anja Snellman. As one of the first novels written in Finnish to deal with Somali immigration, Parvekejumalat narrates the story of a girl with a Somali background and a Finn who has converted to Islam. In the spring of 2010, several newspaper critiques of Parvekejumalat included a strange and, perhaps, worrying feature. More than one critic seemed to have read this novel, which describes cultural contact zones (Pratt 1992), as a truthful, realistic period piece, revealing aspects of society that had previously gone unnoticed. They read Parvekejumalat as a kind of expose of the taboos of contemporary Finland. As such, the reception of Parvekejumalat seemed to repeat the starting points for many literary conflicts located on the borders of cultures. This article focuses on this question of a realistic reading of Parvekejumalat. Even if Snellman's novel did not ignite an actual public controversy, by examining its reception, we can better understand why narratives located in cultural crossroads so often evoke strong emotions and determine the role of realistic reading practices in the controversies that follow. The article approaches this question by analyzing two sets of data in the reception of Parvekejumalat. newspaper reviews of the novel and entrance exam answers about the novel produced at the University of Turku. The first part of the article examines nine newspaper and magazine critiques of Parvekejumalat and the inclination of these critics to read the novel as a plausible and realistic story. It focuses particularly on critics' tendency to read and interpret the patriarchal violence of the novel in a larger culturalist frame. The second part of the article analyzes entrance exam results concerning Parvekejumalat, which were produced in the Department of Finnish Literature at the University of Turku. (In the Finnish educational system, access to universities is gained through participation in an entrance exam, for which material must always be read beforehand. In 2011, this material included Snellman's Parvekejumalat.) The second part of the article discusses how the examinees perceived the novel as a depiction of the clash between cultures, and tended to confuse the categories of fact and fiction. With the aid of these two source categories, reviews and examinations, I will discuss how Parvekejumalat was interpreted in relation to contemporary reality, which many consider to be plagued by a conflict between the values of Islam and Somali culture, on one hand, and Finnish and Western values, on the other. …

From Geniuses to Promoters – Literary Curators in Contemporary Literature This article introduces the concept of the literary curator and discusses it in relation to the rise of the curators in visual arts. By literary curators the article refers to actors who practice or fulfil curatorial functions in the literary field. In brief, literary curators are actors who mediate, distribute, represent, explain, and promote in new contexts texts that have been produced by others. In doing so, they both create new literary meanings and build their own public persona. More specifically, the article discusses two types of literary curators: textual appropriators and initiators of crowd-sourced writing projects. In the article, the practice is linked both to the historical avant-garde and the poststructuralist critique of the author. Literary curators reflect the theoretical erosion of the autonomous author as the originating subject of texts and meanings, as articulated in poststructuralist theories and avant-garde provocations. Simultaneously, however, the practice of literary curating is deeply rooted in the contemporary needs to promote literature through individuals. Unlike editors and publishers, who often stay in the background, literary curators actively seek attention and publicity for their own practice and build their artistic individuality. Thus, the literary curator can be interpreted as a response to the ambiguous situation in which the author has been theoretically demystified while in practice, and as a brand, it is more omnipresent than ever.

This essay describes the emergence of a 'reading formation' around a Finnish bestselling novel, Layla , investigating how a specific dominant reading of Layla was constructed with the help of different material supports - including TV programmes, blogs, newspapers, websites and advertising infrastructure. The essay sets out Tony Bennett's concept of reading formation and develops it in the context of twenty-first century reading environments, paying special attention to the transformations associated with digital media and the book's material supports. By making empirical use of actor-network theory, the essay suggests that contemporary reading formations should be perceived as hybrid networks of both human and non-human actors, technologies and texts. By focusing especially on the circulation of Layla 's opening sentence across different material platforms, and describing its interaction with different actors, the essay depicts how certain interdependencies between different actors and material mechanisms controlled the proliferation of meanings around Layla . Thus, the essay investigates how specific culturalist meanings of Kurds as a violent and misogynist people were materially constructed at the expense of tendencies to polysemy in the text.

Callus cultures were initiated from the bud apices of 10–40-year-old Scots pines (Pinus sylvestris L.) at different seasons and maintained on modified MS medium without subculturing. Separate sets of experiments were used for analyses of carbohydrate content, ethylene production, amino acid composition, protein patterns andin vitro translation. In each case the change in the colour of the calli was recorded and the fresh mass of the samples measured. The onset of tissue browning was found to be associated with changes in protein pattern, amino acid content, ethylene production and the occurrence of sucrose and accumulation of starch.In vitro translation experiments using poIy(A)+ RNA isolated and purified from the calli indicated that the switch in metabolism accompanying browning is paralleled by activated protein synthesis. Thus, the development of brown colour does not as such seem to be harmful to the tissue. The later, more intense tissue browning and deterioration which is reflected in a reduced capacity for protein synthesis and changes in the free amino acid pool and protein pattern is probably a secondary phenomenon.

publishedVersion