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The extent of harm and suffering caused by the coronavirus pandemic has prompted a debate about whether the epidemic could have been contained, had the gravity of the crisis been predicted earlier. In this paper, the philosophical debate on predictive reasoning is framed by Hume’s problem of induction. Hume argued that it is rationally unjustified to move from the finite observations of past incidences to the predictions of future events. Philosophy has offered two major responses to the problem of induction: the pragmatic induction of Peirce and the critical rationalism of Popper. It is argued that of these two, Popper’s critical rationalism provides a more potent tool for preparing for unanticipated events such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Popper’s notion of risky predictions equips strategic foresight with clear hypotheticals regarding potential crisis scenarios. Peirce’s pragmatic induction, instead, leans on probabilities that are slower to be amended as unexpected events start unfolding. The difference between the two approaches is demonstrated through a case study of the patterns of reasoning within the World Health Organization in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.

Purpose: While there is anecdotal evidence that internationally mobile workers often form isolated nation-based communities or “expatriate bubbles,” previous academic scholarship on the expatriate communities and their subjective boundaries is limited. The primary purpose of this article is to advance the theoretical or conceptual understanding of expatriate communities as bubbles. Design/methodology/approach: As developed by Lamont and Molnár (2002), the theory of symbolic boundaries is applied and set to scrutinize the production and maintenance of insulated expatriate communities. Empirically, an ethnographic study of a community of Finnish expatriates in a Southeast Asian country is undertaken to describe how symbolic boundaries are constructed. Findings: The main theoretical implication of the paper is the recognition that expatriates themselves are involved in creating the “bubble.” The boundaries separating the national expatriate community are not externally imposed but can be viewed as consequences of the active boundary work of the expatriates. The empirical study demonstrates how the Finnish expatriates negotiated the symbolic boundaries of their community, drawing on cultural, moral and spatial modalities in different levels of boundary work. Originality/value: There need to be more systematic attempts to develop a theoretically grounded understanding of insulated expatriate communities and their boundaries. This article contributes to the sociological conceptualization of expatriate bubbles by utilizing the symbolic boundary approach, which adds perspective to the embryonic theory of the subjective boundaries of expatriate communities. The multiplicity of different types of symbolic boundaries and their modalities suggests that an expatriate bubble is rarely a finished state or structure.

The importance of labor relations in newly formed multinational corporations is discussed by focusing on food-retail sector in Finland.

Business is becoming increasingly international with many employees being transferred to overseas work places. Expatriate adjustment involves some anxiety and confusion as well as self-development and learning. A new study analyses the ways in which expatriates develope their career cycles, focusing on the careers of Finnish engineers and managers.

Multinational business organisations are trying to establish why the expatriate's career fares less well after repatriation than employees who remain at home. The organisation would prevent such problems from occurring if it were to adopt a global perspective on human resources management to facilitate the pursuit of productive career paths for those employees who travel abroad.

Within contemporary discussions on organizational wisdom, management scholars frequently turn to Aristotle’s work to conceptualize wisdom as phronesis, or practical wisdom. Contrary to the prevailing view, this paper argues that Aristotle did not propose an exclusively practical or particularistic conception of wisdom but, instead acknowledged that wisdom broadly conceived consists of two types of intellectual virtue: theoretical wisdom (sophia) and practical wisdom. Aristotle’s ultimate position regarding the relations between sophiaand phronesishas remained, however, ambiguous, giving rise to different interpretations, and, more substantively, to the major appropriations of Aquinas, Heidegger and Gadamer. An analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of exemplary contributions to management wisdom suggests that research has predominantly applied Heideggerian and Gadamerian understandings of Aristotelian wisdom, while an Aquinian interpretation is largely absent in contemporary elaborations. Interpreting the Aristotelian notion of wisdom as dedicated purely to practical phronesisnarrows the discussion on the nature of (organizational) wisdom within an Aristotelian framework in ways that do not give full credit to the breadth and complexity of Aristotle’s thought.

There is an evident lack of rigorous frameworks for making sense of the role and status of spirituality and religion in organizations and organizing, in particular from the perspective of spiritual philosophies of the social. This paper suggests that the philosophy of Plato and his modern follower, political theorist Eric Voegelin could offer a viable perspective for understanding organizational spirituality in its metaphysical, political and ethical contexts. Essential for such a philosophical reflection is the postulation of the transcendental realm as the ultimate reality that provides the fullest templates for order, knowledge and ethicality. It is argued, in the footsteps of Voegelin, that modern organizations and modern organization theory should seek to re-awaken the lost experiences of the divine Beyond by re-animating religious symbols and myths of transcendence as devices for a spiritually opened consciousness.

There is a long history of using researcher-generated photography to complement verbal descriptions of culture in ethnographic research. In the recent discussions, photos are no longer treated as authentic or accurate descriptions of the field, but are instead understood as particular representations of organisational life. As manufactured visual artefacts, photos reflect the conditions surrounding their production within ethnographic practice, but at the same time their ethnographicness is contingent on the shifting interpretations and uses of images in scholarly representations. The purpose of this paper is to add to the emerging body of performative visual ethnography by re-reading and narrating a set of photos of university organisation taken originally as a part of another field research project. By presenting the photos depicting the organisation from the viewpoint of a cosmopolitan academic, and complementing the images with critical narratives about some of the personal experiences of living and working under a regime of intensifying control and managerialism, a multi-modal representation of ‘how it feels being there’ is offered. The challenge of photographic ethnography is to retain the specific sensitivities related to the visual format while at the same time being able to spin an accompanied narrative that enables a creative dialogue between the pictures and the words.

This paper links a critical view on human development programmes as "normalization" with narrative analysis of biography construction. Using material on Finnish expatriate employees, the paper analyses how a group of university engineers produced a mature subjectivity, with college degree engineers crafting a position as underdeveloped corporate persons. It is shown how college engineers initially adapted a contending "global" ideal rather than the prevailing engineer image in their story-telling. The straightforward style of narration, however, exhausted the internationalization version of their development and left them reproducing a "getting to maturity" position as expatriates craving home organization engineer values and networks. University engineers, in contrast, employed sophisticated telling techniques to create a sense of gradual revelation, this contributing to the emergence of close to normality subjectivity. Case suggests that organizational narratives of self face the task of not only separating the subject from the non-subject but also of managing the tension between the attainability and the unat-tainability of developmental ideals.