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This article contributes to social movement literature and theories of strategic action by making the case for an analytic distinction between habitual and intentional life strategies, namely the ways in which people pursue what they value in life. Housing strategies are one example of life strategies. The distinction helps explain how political players, including social movements, bring about social change (or preserve the status quo) by changing or reinforcing people’s minds and their preferred ways of action. They can achieve their goals by first recognizing these habitual strategies, and then prompting people to articulate or adjust them during interactive, group-level situations. My analysis relies on a qualitative study of Renovation, a controversial urban renewal project in Moscow. I examine how Muscovites revisited, articulated and sometimes revised their housing strategies in response to the surprising, and for some, shocking announcement of the relocation project.

In an era of emerging service work robotization, this article investigates how workers perceive job diversity in robotized work, and how those perceptions relate to job satisfaction and the perceived meaningfulness of a job. The study used a nationwide Quality of Work Life survey (QWLS) data collected in Finland in 2018 (N = 4110), and its subsample of salary earners working in a robotized workplace at the time of the study (n = 535). The data were analyzed using a correlative cross-sectional study design, descriptive statistics, ANOVA, and OLS regression analysis. Against a common belief and previous studies, the findings show that intrinsic job satisfaction at work is on the average lower in robotized workplaces than in nonrobotized workplaces. The aggregate higher job satisfaction and perceived meaningfulness of work were mostly associated with perceived task diversity depending on whether, or how extensively, the employee worked with robots. The study contributes to the scientific robotization discussions with unique empirical evidence of job diversity and well-being. Moreover, the study produces information for working life, organizations, and change management by disclosing the importance of maintaining job diversity in and after implementing technological changes. publishedVersion

In critical social research the concept of employability is associated with the neoliberal imperative that every individual should become a self-responsible, self-improving and enterprising subject in the increasingly precarious labour markets. Despite the prominence of employability in policies governing young people’s intra-European migration, few studies examine migrants’ subjectivities in this context. Building on narrative data, this article adds to our understanding on how neoliberal subject formations function as an instrument for governing young EU migrants’ lives in conditions of precarious labour. Central to this understanding, it develops the concept of passion to depict young migrants’ quest for obtaining work with opportunities for self-development and self-realisation. This concept contributes to the study of highly qualified intra-EU migration by allowing critical analysis of meanings given to mobility in relation to work; by highlighting dynamics of (self-)precarisation in this context; and by advancing debates on social-structural inequality among EU migrants pursuing their quest for passion.

This article presents a Finnish perspective on harmonization within the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). The article analyses results from a study of the judgments and experiences of Finnish civil servants concerning the harmonization of the CEAS. The year 2015 constitutes a shift in asylum policies in many European countries, and a key question is how this shift has influenced the process of harmonization of asylum policies and practices. Senior civil servants working in the state administration of asylum and migration issues in Finland were interviewed anonymously as part of a comparative European research project (CEASEVAL). The interviews indicate that EU‐wide administrative cooperation has developed into a broad and diverse cooperation in recent years. The interviewees in Finland generally found harmonization of the asylum system to be necessary, which was connected to a need for greater predictability of the outcomes of the system. The results of the study suggest that Finnish asylum administration is developing toward harmonized practices involving transnational and supranational administrative cooperation in the field of asylum. The results support the conclusion of previous research that there is a process of horizontal Europeanization in which administrative practices develop organically within national asylum administration, independently of political disagreements at the EU level. This is relevant both to the framing of political issues and to research on Finnish migration and asylum policies, which need to take into account the ongoing European harmonization of policies and administrative practices.

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Background Hospital physicians’ work includes on-call duties to provide 24/7 health care. Previous studies using self-reported survey data have associated long working hours and on-call work with sleep difficulties. To reduce recall bias, we complemented survey data with payroll-based objective data to study whether hospital physicians’ realized working hours are associated with sleep. Methods The study was nested within the Finnish Public Sector study. We used survey data on 728 hospital physicians (mean age 43.4 years, 62% females) from 2015 linked to realized daily working hour data from 3 months preceding the survey. The associations of working hour characteristics with sleep quantity and quality were studied with multinomial logistic regression analysis adjusted for demographics, overall stressfulness of life situation, control over scheduling of shifts, and hospital district. Results One fourth (26%) of the participants reported short (≤6.5 h) average sleep duration. Frequent night work (> 6 shifts/91 days) was associated with short sleep (OR 1.87 95%CI 1.23–2.83) compared to no night work. Approximately one third (32%) of the physicians reported insufficient sleep. Physicians with long weekly working hours (> 48 hours) had higher odds for insufficient sleep (OR 1.78 95%CI 1.15–2.76) than physicians with short weekly working hours ( 12 shifts/3 months OR 2.00 95%CI 1.08–3.72), frequent night work (OR 1.60 95%CI 1.09–2.37), and frequent short shift intervals (≤11 hours; > 12 times/3 months OR 1.65 95%CI 1.01–2.69) compared to not having these working hour characteristics. Nearly half of the physicians (48%) reported at least one sleep difficulty at least two times a week and frequent night work increased odds for difficulties in initiating sleep (OR 2.43 95%CI 1.04–5.69). Otherwise sleep difficulties were not associated with the studied working hour characteristics. Conclusion We used realized working hour data to strengthen the evidence on on-call work and sleep quality and our results advice to limit the frequency of night work, on-call shifts, short shift intervals and long weekly working hours to promote hospital physicians’ sufficient sleep.

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Objectives: Cryptocurrency trading has gained popularity over the last few years. Trading is facilitated by online platforms that enable 24/7 trading. Cryptocurrency trading is potentially attractive to gamblers, and it may increase their gambling problems. Furthermore, cryptocurrency trading might be a particularly harmful activity for those gambling offshore. We investigated whether cryptocurrency trading predicts excessive gambling over time. We also analyzed how cryptocurrency trading combined with offshore gambling is associated with excessive gambling. Study design: This was a population-based longitudinal survey study. Methods: We surveyed a sample of Finnish people aged 18–75 years (N = 1022, 51.27% male) at three time points in 6-month intervals: April 2021 (T1), October to November 2021 (T2), and April to May 2022 (T3). Of the original T1 respondents, 66.80% took part in T2 and T3. Outcome measure was excessive gambling using the Problem Gambling Severity Index, and the predictor was cryptocurrency trading. We adjusted models for onshore and offshore gambling online, excessive gaming (Internet Gaming Disorder Test), excessive internet use (Compulsive Internet Use Scale), excessive alcohol use (Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test), and sociodemographic background factors. We used multilevel regression models to investigate within-person and between-person effects. Results: Cryptocurrency trading has increased in popularity over time. Within-person changes in cryptocurrency trading predicted increased excessive gambling. Excessive gambling was also generally more common among cryptocurrency traders. The full model that was adjusted for the number of confounding factors showed that cryptocurrency trading had a within-person effect on excessive gambling. Of the confounding factors, offshore online gambling, excessive gaming, and excessive internet use had within-person effects on excessive gambling. Offshore and onshore online gamblers and excessive gamers showed more excessive gambling than others. Those participants who were both cryptocurrency traders and offshore gamblers showed significantly higher rate of excessive gambling than others. Conclusions: Cryptocurrency trading is a risky activity and associated with a higher rate of excessive gambling over time. Such activity is especially risky among offshore online gamblers, who could view cryptocurrency trading as another form of gambling or as a way to make money for gambling. Policymakers and counselors should be aware of the risks of cryptocurrency trading. publishedVersion

This research examines digital gender advocacy campaigns in India during the 2010s. By employing thematic analysis and conceptual tools of the social representations theory into the analysis of 250 gender advocacy videos published on YouTube, we answer the following questions: a) How are dangers to women in India discussed in recent video campaigns? b) How is the topic objectified and anchored in multimodal narration? c) How is hegemonic womanhood constructed in the campaigns? The findings suggest that campaigns present two social representations of dangers with sexual harassment depicted as a danger for urban middle-class women and the issues of early marriage, lack of female education, and gender-biased sex selection as rural dangers. The primary solution suggested by the campaigns is to encourage women to actively claim their place in society, placing the main responsibility for changing the situation on women themselves. The secondary solution suggested is to encourage families to support girls and women. Thus, the analysis shows how social representations created by gender advocacy in India put responsibility on individuals and excuse social institutions from addressing inequality, while maintaining power relations and class disparities.

In our society, work is generally considered central to citizenship and individual well-being. However, paid employment is often out of reach for individuals with mental illness. The Clubhouse model is a community-based rehabilitation programme that therefore offers people with mental illness the possibility to enjoy some social advantages of work. However, the status of the day-to-day Clubhouse activities as “work” is a matter of discursive contestation. Drawing on 29 meetings of a Clubhouse rehabilitation group as data, and using conversation analysis and discourse analysis as methods, this study examines two competing interpretive repertoires that are systematically manifested in this context: the capitalist “paid work” repertoire used by Clubhouse clients and the more flexible “productive activity” repertoire used by support workers. The adoption of these two repertoires reflects two competing discursive agendas, which define the scope of mental health rehabilitation and the role of the client in their own rehabilitation process in distinct ways. From this perspective, the support workers' central institutional task is essentially of a discursive and ideological nature—exposing the clients to new ways of talking about their lives with reference to work. publishedVersion

BackgroundSibling resemblance in crime may be due to genetic relatedness, shared environment, and/or the interpersonal influence of siblings on each other. This latter process can be understood as a type of ‘peer effect’ in that it is based on social learning between individuals occupying the same status in the social system (family). Building on prior research, we hypothesized that sibling pairs that resemble peer relationships the most, i.e., same-sex siblings close in age, exhibit the most sibling resemblance in crime.MethodsDrawing on administrative microdata covering Finnish children born in 1985–97, we examined 213 911 sibling pairs, observing the recorded criminality of each sibling between ages 11 and 20. We estimated multivariate regression models controlling for individual and family characteristics, and employed fixed-effects models to analyze the temporal co-occurrence of sibling delinquency.ResultsAmong younger siblings with a criminal older sibling, the adjusted prevalence estimates of criminal offending decreased from 32 to 25% as the age differences increased from less than 13 months to 25–28 months. The prevalence leveled off at 23% when age difference reached 37–40 months or more. These effects were statistically significant only among same-sex sibling pairs (p < 0.001), with clear evidence of contemporaneous offending among siblings with minimal age difference.ConclusionsSame-sex siblings very close in age stand out as having the highest sibling resemblance in crime. This finding suggests that a meaningful share of sibling similarity in criminal offending is due to a process akin to peer influence, typically flowing from the older to the younger sibling.

Decades of techno-economic energy policymaking and research have meant evidence from the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH)—including critical reflections on what changing a society’s relation to energy (efficiency) even means—have been underutilised. In particular, (i) the SSH have too often been sidelined and/or narrowly pigeonholed by policymakers, funders, and other decision-makers when driving research agendas, and (ii) the setting of SSH-focused research agendas has not historically embedded inclusive and deliberative processes. The aim of this paper is to address these gaps through the production of a research agenda outlining future SSH research priorities for energy efficiency. A Horizon Scanning exercise was run, which sought to identify 100 priority SSH questions for energy efficiency research. This exercise included 152 researchers with prior SSH expertise on energy efficiency, who together spanned 62 (sub-)disciplines of SSH, 23 countries, and a full range of career stages. The resultant questions were inductively clustered into seven themes as follows: (1) Citizenship, engagement and knowledge exchange in relation to energy efficiency; (2) Energy efficiency in relation to equity, justice, poverty and vulnerability; (3) Energy efficiency in relation to everyday life and practices of energy consumption and production; (4) Framing, defining and measuring energy efficiency; (5) Governance, policy and political issues around energy efficiency; (6) Roles of economic systems, supply chains and financial mechanisms in improving energy efficiency; and (7) The interactions, unintended consequences and rebound effects of energy efficiency interventions. Given the consistent centrality of energy efficiency in policy programmes, this paper highlights that well-developed SSH approaches are ready to be mobilised to contribute to the development, and/or to understand the implications, of energy efficiency measures and governance solutions. Implicitly, it also emphasises the heterogeneity of SSH policy evidence that can be produced. The agenda will be of use for both (1) those new to the energy-SSH field (including policyworkers), for learnings on the capabilities and capacities of energy-SSH, and (2) established energy-SSH researchers, for insights on the collectively held futures of energy-SSH research.

This chapter discusses Addams’s views on knowledge and how they resonate with evidence-informed and theory-informed social work today. Addams and her colleagues adopted the pragmatist method in experimenting and observing the consequences. Besides experiential and sympathetic knowledge, they also applied multidisciplinary knowledge. The chapter illustrates through a social workers’ group intervention model how Addams’s perspectives on knowledge application have contemporary applicability in social work. In the three analyzed groups, the social workers consciously applied the pragmatist method. The participants experienced this supported them to make their interpretations more explicit or to find new ways to operate in clinical work. This can be described as strengthening their personal epistemic agency. At the same time, the shared discussions and active listening within the group enabled epistemic agency at a collective level. To achieve this, having the group as an organizational structure was significant. Epistemic agency is a metacognitive skill that is at the core of the pragmatist method and is a characteristic of a research-minded practitioner. For contemporary social work, Addams’s thoughts on the scientific mindset, the pragmatist attitude, and using multidisciplinary research could provide insights to obtain a wider understanding of evidence-informed and theory-informed social work as a process.

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In this article, we examine young people's narratives on sexual harassment on how it is endured, objected, observed, and negotiated in diverse everyday life environments. The article is based on an analysis of thematic interviews with 36 young people aged 15–19 living in the metropolitan area of Helsinki, Finland. Altogether 23 young women and 13 young men participated in the interviews which were conducted at educational institutions as individual, paired or group interviews. We analyze young people's narratives on sexual harassment as stories of everyday citizenship and, and more precisely, as acts of citizenship. We have also applied the concept of respectability to study how young women and men construct respectable sexual citizenship. We found out that whereas female respectability suggests that young women should be able to protect their sexual integrity effectively, male respectability expects young men to effectively balance between different positions of masculinity. While young people widely condemn sexual harassment and recognize it as discrimination, the gendered ways of constructing respectability, however, maintain the moral double standard by which young women remain the gatekeepers of sexual consent and young men test its boundaries. publishedVersion

The number of people living without a partner is growing globally, but this demographic shift has barely disrupted the tenacity of the couple norm. Researchers have identified several concrete mechanisms of singlism – practices that feed the unequal treatment of single people. Nevertheless, there is still a need to develop an understanding of how singlism operates affectively. To provide insights into the affective intensities of single lives, we incorporate the notion of affective inequality into an analysis of singlehood and temporality, bringing together a range of data sets to further develop this idea. We examine the varying affective and psychic experiences that characterise how singles feel about their singlehood, how they experience the current moment and how they view the future. We argue that these experiences are shaped by singlism, and that affective inequalities and affective privileges co-condition the possibilities for different types of relationships.

This article suggests a way to concretize the concept of social polarization, which will be most suitable for a) empirical operatio­nalization; b) a complete description of existing social conflicts; c) will be consistent with existing sociological theories. The implementation of this task opens the way to studying this phenomenon through the method of text mining. We see two main problems with the concept of social polarization in sociology: (1) Social polarization is used as a beautiful metaphor to describe contemporary political situations, not as a strong operationalized concept. The concept must create vast opportunities to study social reality, interpret more processes; (2) The mathematic interpretation of social polarization is conducted on somewhat idealized distributions; there is a lack of real empirical data verification. These two problems also create one big problem: mathematical conceptualization of social polarization and empirical studies of social polarization are unrelated. We propose a way to solve this problem through the construction of our social polarization theoretical framework. The way that allowed us to do this was in the concretization of social polarization and its connection with sociological theories of conflict. The article’s key idea is to show that this concept is suitable for operationalization for two reasons: its ability to describe the causes and nature of social conflicts and its measurability. This article also discusses the main modern social polarization theories, their features, advantages, and disadvantages. Since the concept of social polarization is mostly the focus of political science research, the author’s goal was to find opportunities to use this concept in sociology and the ideas that will allow it. There are currently two approaches to studying this issue: the party association approach and the opinion-based group approach. An important task, which was also solved in this article, is the concept’s connection with the sociological concepts of conflict. The path was found using the concept of Lipset and Rokkan. This concept’s key advantage is the combination of social inequality, conflict, attitudes, and social distance. Typically, these concepts are used separately to explain social cleavages. The concept of polarization, in this case, allows them to be integrated into a single whole

In recent years, informal and unauthorised amateur urban design solutions have become an urban trend in the global North. These Do-It-Yourself (DIY) urbanism actions can be playful commentaries, critical interventions or functional improvements to urban spaces. In general, DIY urbanism tries to make urban everyday life better, but it is not always considered a political act. This paper presents an ethnographic case study of a DIY skatepark building in Tampere, Finland, and describes a group of skaters’ political subjectivisation and how they learned hands-on to influence urban governance. After the city’s failed skatepark plan, the skaters turned their discontent into a tactical spatial appropriation, a DIY skatepark, and later shifted their mode of politics to strategic claim-making. By doing so, the skaters became not only skilled skatepark builders, but also an organised association promoting skateboarding and influencing urban development and culture. This paper argues that DIY urbanism has transformative potential to act as a catalyst for bottom-up change in a contemporary city. publishedVersion

This article analyses the implementation of gender budgeting (GB) in Finland. It pays attention to recent shifts in governance and public finance management and their effects on GB. It provides new insight about the relationship between gender mainstreaming and GB. It shows that although a technocratic inside-government approach can yield some results, civil society has an important role in re-politicizing GB and drawing attention to the impacts of economic policies. publishedVersion

While the social and economic costs and benefits of new gambling locations have been studied extensively, less is known about how new venues are experienced in view of city residents’ spatial and sociocultural identities. This study examines residents’ opinions and expectations on a new small-scale casino in the City of Tampere, Finland, as a case of new gambling opportunities in an urban setting. Nine focus group interviews were conducted with 43 Tampere residents three years prior to the scheduled casino opening. The study points out ways in which the residents struggled conceptually with the casino project. When speaking about it, participants drew on an imagery of popular culture, drawing a sharp line between casino gambling and the everyday convenience gambling so omnipresent in Finnish society. As residents of a historical industrial urban region, the participants positioned themselves as critical towards the municipality’s aims to brand the venue in a larger experience economy entity. By drawing on the concepts of city image and city identity, the study is able to demonstrate that the cultural geographical intrusion of new physical gambling spaces can appear as harmful to the city character. In the studied case, this is likely to hamper the City of Tampere’s chances to prevail on the very same experience market, of which the new casino is part.

In the present study, we examine socio-cultural and practical aspects of human papillomavirus vaccination (HPVV) through a multi-sited study of framings. We ask how HPVV is framed in the daily lives of vaccination-aged Finnish girls and in school nurses' everyday work. We then mirror these framings against both each other and Finland's official vaccination campaign. Based on analysis of interviews with 24 nurses and 12 girls and the campaign materials, we argue first that the campaign frames vaccination as an individual, knowledge-based decision reflecting the informed consent principle. Second, however, the vaccination is framed in the everyday lives of eligible girls through gendered social ties and as a gendered and cohort-specific event pivoting around the needle prick. Third, HPVV is not primarily framed in the school nurses' work as preparing the girls for the vaccination decision by sharing official information but through trust-based social relationships with the girls and their parents. We conclude that, as the vaccination is not an issue of individually reflected and knowledge-based decision-making for the two interviewed key groups, the official Finnish HPVV campaign and the undergirding informed consent principle drift into problems in their practical implementation.

In qualitative interviews, challenges such as deviations from the topic, interruptions, silences or counter-questions are inevitable. It is debatable whether the researcher should try to alleviate them or consider them as important indicators of power relations. In this methodological article, we adopt the latter view and examine the episodes of counter-talk that emerge in qualitative interviews on cultural practices among underprivileged popular classes by drawing on 49 individual and focus group interviews conducted in the highly egalitarian context of Finland. Our main aim is to demonstrate how counter-talk emerging in interview situations could be fruitfully analysed as moral boundary drawing. We identify three types of counter-talk: resisting the situation, resisting the topic, and resisting the interviewer. While the first type unites many of the typical challenges inherent to qualitative interviewing in general (silences, deviations from the topic and so forth), the second one shows that explicit taste distinctions are an important feature of counter-talk, yet the interviewees mostly discuss them as something belonging to the personal sphere. Finally, the third type reveals how the strongest counter-talk and clearest moral boundary stemmed from the interviewees’ attitudes towards the interviewer herself. We argue that counter-talk in general should be given more importance as a key element of the qualitative interview. We demonstrate that all three types of counter-talk are crucial to properly understanding the power relations and moral boundaries present in qualitative interviews and that cultural practices are a particularly good topic to tease them out. publishedVersion

Collective bargaining has been under great pressure in Finland and Europe, including demands for increased wage competitiveness and reductions in public sector spending. This article showcases how relatively gender-equal states with strong corporatist traditions, such as Finland, may align with neoliberal austerity policies that have gendered implications, even when gender equality becomes a prominent issue in a policy debate. This article analyzes the case of the Competitiveness Pact, a recent policy reform to lower labor costs initiated by the Finnish government and negotiated with labor market parties. This analysis combines affect theory and a policy-constructivist approach to analyze the positions and documents produced by the government and labor market parties during the Competitiveness Pact negotiations. We identify problem representations regarding national competitiveness and suggest that the problem representations constructed anticipatory regimes that focused on potential future threats and crises, especially those related to the public sector, which was portrayed as a source of potential crisis and a threat to the masculine export sector. The article shows how neoliberal economic and governmental policies exacerbate gender inequality in the labor market with the consent of trade unions. publishedVersion

Complimenting is a valuable skill in mental health care. Today, several clinical models view positive reinforcement as beneficial for the client's process of change; however, they ignore the ambiguous nature of complimenting in social interaction. Drawing on a data set of 29 video-recorded mental health rehabilitation group meetings, and using conversation analysis as the method, we qualitatively analyzed the range of purposes served by positive assessments doing complimenting. Our results showed that compliments were used for 1) encouraging members to participate in the community, 2) increasing the pressure on members to respond, 3) closing down topics that were not relevant for discussion at that moment, and 4) generating exclusion and preparing a member for a negative decision. Our findings demonstrate that not all compliments serve straightforwardly positive interactional goals, as they are used for advancing mental-health professionals' own agendas. Moreover, due to the positive nature of the compliments per se, it is difficult for compliment recipients to resist the functions that compliments are designed to serve. The study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of what might constitute genuinely positive reinforcement in the continually changing context of moment-by-moment social interaction. Complimenting is a valuable skill in mental health care. Today, several clinical models view positive reinforcement as beneficial for the client's process of change; however, they ignore the ambiguous nature of complimenting in social interaction. Drawing on a data set of 29 video-recorded mental health rehabilitation group meetings, and using conversation analysis as the method, we qualitatively analyzed the range of purposes served by positive assessments doing complimenting. Our results showed that compliments were used for 1) encouraging members to participate in the community, 2) increasing the pressure on members to respond, 3) closing down topics that were not relevant for discussion at that moment, and 4) generating exclusion and preparing a member for a negative decision. Our findings demonstrate that not all compliments serve straightforwardly positive interactional goals, as they are used for advancing mental-health professionals' own agendas. Moreover, due to the positive nature of the compliments per se, it is difficult for compliment recipients to resist the functions that compliments are designed to serve. The study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of what might constitute genuinely positive reinforcement in the continually changing context of moment-by-moment social interaction.

PurposeThis paper aims to examine how input from the digital restructuring of the workplace and productivity affects the risk of job loss and unemployment.Design/methodology/approachRelying on the concepts of technological unemployment and the productivity paradox as well as the theory of skills-biased technological change, the analysis incorporated micro-level individual determinants of job loss, macro-level economic determinants of input and the contribution from traditional (machinery and equipment) vs innovative (ICT) factors of production. The model has been also controlled for “traditional” indicators of “outsiderness” in the labour market. The Quality of Work Life Survey, which is a broad-based national interview survey produced by Statistics Finland, for 2018, the latest year available (N = 4,110) has been used in the analysis. Binomial logistic regression has been applied in order to estimate the effects of individual- and macro-level factors on the risk of job loss.FindingsThe results support arguments for the divergence between effects from labour- vs total-factor productivity on the risks of job loss, as well as the divergence between effects for temporary (layoff) vs permanent job loss (dismissal or unemployment). While the contribution from “traditional” factors of production to labour productivity potentially decreases the risk of permanent job loss, input from “innovative” factors of production on total-factor productivity potentially causes adverse effects (e.g. growing risks of permanent job loss).Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the theoretical discussion about technological unemployment and productivity by means of including two different concepts into a single econometric model, thus enabling examination of the research problem in an innovative way.

The shift of society toward sustainable food culture requires collectively challenging meat and dairy-based diets and their role in current practices of eating. This study focuses on how discussions in social media can facilitate reconfiguration in eating. Three practice-theoretical perspectives - practices constituting of elements, eating as a compound practice, and communities of practice - afford us with analytical tools to investigate eating and how the constituting elements are negotiated and recrafted in social media discussions across the compound practice. As empirical data, we use altogether 14,250 social media messages on the Finnish Vegan Challenge campaign. By combining qualitative content analysis with topic modeling, we capture the various themes occurring in these discussions and their relation to changes in eating practices. The results show that within these discussions, social learning among peers covered the whole sphere of eating-related practices from production and distribution to purchasing and cooking vegan food, and to sharing stories and experiences of veganism. Our findings illustrate how these discussions can be seen as forming a reconfigurative community of practice, which can potentially support and facilitate social change of eating toward sustainability also outside the Vegan Challenge community.

To increase understanding about the weak implementation of labour rights in global value chains, this paper examines processes of in-fact informalization that in Cambodia’s garment industry exclude workers from legal protection in a hidden yet effective manner. Informalization in contemporary global capitalism is often examined as driven by capital. This article broadens the analysis to how states and workers contribute to top-down and bottom-up processes of in-fact informalization, and emphasizes the role of workers’ collective organization. In Cambodia, subcontracting and temporary contracts prevent workers from collectively claiming their legal entitlements. In-fact informalization is promoted by the government as a strategy of indirect rule aimed at ensuring political power, and strengthened by the workers’ gendered needs and strategies of intergenerational wellbeing. Together, informal work and insecure lives discourage unionization, which further increases top-down and bottom-up informalization.

The Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) has instigated domestic policy debate aimed at improving education systems’ quality and efficiency. Its high performers are often described as knowledge-based legitimation tools that have become reference societies. This article analyses if and the extent to which PISA affects the choice of reference societies used in education policy. We conducted a systematic literature review of scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles. We identify two ways in which PISA affects the reference societies chosen: it builds but also triggers the collapse of the reference societies used in domestic education policy. However, there are also cases in which PISA has little influence on which countries or regions are used as references. The domestic processes of choosing the reference societies used in education policy emerge as more nuanced than first expected. This article provides a firm basis for a much-needed understanding of the topic. publishedVersion

This study addresses criminal convictions, social disadvantage and problem gambling as an interwoven set of problems. It makes use of data from a population-based gambling survey (n = 7,186) conducted in three Finnish regions. The survey data are combined with national registers to examine associations between sociodemographic factors and gambling severity, comparing persons with and without a criminal record. Gambling behavior included past-year (2016) gambling severity and perceived life-time problem gambling. Social disadvantage was assessed using sociodemographic factors such as education, employment status, level of income and receipt of basic social assistance. Logistic regression analysis showed that both past-year problem or pathological gambling (OR: 2.725) and perceived life-time gambling problems (OR: 2.363) were associated with having a conviction, compared to recreational gambling. Low education, unemployment, low income and receipt of basic social assistance were associated with receiving a conviction. When gender, age and sociodemographic factors were controlled for, odds ratios for both past-year gambling problems (OR: 1.223) and perceived life-time gambling problems (OR: 1.586) did not remain statistically significant. The current study suggests that preventive efforts against problem gambling and interventions in criminal justice systems should be expanded to incorporate the aim of reducing social disadvantage.

In Nordic countries and beyond, there exists a lack of longitudinal, population-level research focused on sociopolitical polarisation and the proliferation of new online activities in the context of changing media usage. In this article, we examine media usage in Finland in 2007 and 2018. We use two nationally representative surveys (N = 1,388 in 2007 and N = 1,425 in 2018) to make comparisons over time and include a wide set of media usage indicators. Applying multiple correspondence analysis, we assess the impact of the proliferation of online activities on the structure of the space of media usage and examine whether the association between media usage and sociopolitical divisions has become more sharply pronounced. The results suggest stability of the structure of media use rather than dramatic change. We discuss these results by reflecting on the relatively strong persistence of “traditional” models of stratification in digital cultural consumption and media practices.

This article investigates the rhetorical use of voices and ventrilocution in occasioned storytelling. We explore the use of external voicing in the narration, arguing that to understand voice as an argumentative resource, it is important to include both material and metaphoric aspects of voice. Our article explicates the differences and relations between these two aspects in a polyphonic life story interview. The material voice involves the acoustic sphere of communication: prosody, intonation and tone, whereas the metaphoric voice is commonly understood as a marker of subjectivity or group interests. We juxtapose the latter ‘representative’ interpretation of voice by applying Richard Walsh’s recent theory of metaphorical levels of the voice. Our material consists of a biographical interview with a 92-year-old woman accompanied in the situation by her daughter. The daughter interferes in the interview by telling competing stories about the family past. To unravel the rhetorical moves in the interview, we apply the concept of ventriloquism and the theory of narrative positioning. Our analysis demonstrates how the purposeful use of the material voice transports and signifies metaphoric voices as characters, actors and identities are negotiated in turn-by-turn unfolding narration.

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This article explores how participatory budgeting (PB), which is described as a travelling policy innovation, has been interpreted in different urban governance contexts, particularly how local settings that are created by contexts and practices enable participation in PB. Travelling policy innovations are sets of ideas or experiments that aim at renewing governance practices and are adopted globally. PB engages citizens to discuss, prioritize and decide about the use of public funds. With empirical data from the cities of Tampere, Łódź, and the Greater Manchester area the article demonstrates that settings of participation in PB are conditioned by (1) socio-political context, (2) objectives setting, (3) resourcing, (4) decision-making and (5) relationship-building. Based on an interpretive view on policy studies, it is argued that these settings enable participation in PB in three ways. Firstly, they influence the continuity of PB; secondly, they suggest particular roles for participants; and thirdly, they formulate the level of interaction. This is demonstrated with three operationalisations of PB, such as pop-up PB, traditional PB and do-it-yourself PB. publishedVersion

In this study, we scrutinise how municipalities can enhance citizen participation as arenas for local democracy. We combine the aspects of institutional structures with citizens’ expectations and viewpoints by analysing citizens’ views on the barriers to and catalysts for participation. We outline the possibilities and map the role of municipalities in enhancing citizen participation. This qualitative study utilises empirical data consisting of 160 essays written by university students. In their essays, students reflect on their roles as participants and think about possible obstacles to participation. The data is analysed using inductive qualitative content analysis. In the analysis, three categories were identified to illustrate and interpret the societal, personal and instrumental-processual factors that affect citizens’ willingness and abilities to participate at the local level. Municipalities can easily address the instrumental-processual factors, whereas affecting societal and personal factors is more difficult. The role of municipalities in enhancing citizen participation is thus restricted, yet important. publishedVersion

This article examines the effects of the vertical disintegration of production on airport terminal workers through the theoretical lens of occupational belonging, highlighting themes of sensory and embodied experience, changing dynamics of employment relationships, and new patterns of inclusion and exclusion. The article contributes to efforts to produce nuanced empirical accounts of the dynamics of post-Fordist work, showing how restructuring had the effect of disrupting employment relations and activity rhythms, while nevertheless preserving ‘the airport’ as a symbolic and relational setting in relation to which occupational belonging could be constructed. The article examines how the work of binding people and jobs, previously undertaken by integrated organisations, was taken up by workers themselves through their personal relationships and will to belong. The article highlights the capacity to undertake this work of belonging as a central dynamic of occupational inclusion and exclusion, a capacity which in this empirical context was experienced as being shaped by age and the ability to make use of personal relationships in navigating precarious employment relations. Based on this empirical analysis, the article argues for belonging as a valuable perspective for studies of materiality, symbolic identification and relationality in post-Fordist work.

Nations and NGOs are promoting the idea of a transition from a petroleum-based civilization to one fueled by renewable energy. But there are many questions about how to proceed. The solution usually proposed is to develop "clean energy" as the underlying basis of a transition. Analysts tend to be concerned with climate change and land use change, with a focus on technical developments. Socio-ecological issues receive scant attention, especially if they relate to oil cities. This article starts from the perspective that progress in saving the planet from destruction can only be achieved by taking seriously past and present injustices and taking measures to rectify them. I use the situation in Port Harcourt, Nigeria to illustrate this proposition. I focus on three interrelated concepts: rent theft, social costs, and just transition. The central problem is rent theft because it is at the root of the "crime of poverty" and the social costs of plundering the land for energy sources. Until they address problems arising from historical injustice, campaigns for a just transition that promote clean energy in a bioeconomy will merely reproduce the central problem. Thus, reparations and land equity must be an integral part of any solution.

Richard Giles, a leading Australian Georgist political economist, suggests that criticisms of mainstream economics can be reduced to three: neglect of the Physiocrats, rejection of Georgist political economy, and the attempted revival of Georgist land economics with faulty variants of those principles. Yet, in defending Georgism, Giles fails to show it can resolve the legacies of chattel slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism. Despite that limitation, Giles shows that the renewal of land economics is essential to achieving economic justice. Along the way, Giles provides original insights about the limitations of modern monetary theory, the Malthusian economics of global migration, and the rise of global nationalism.

The present study aimed to examine longitudinal recovery profiles based on three recovery-enhancing processes, i.e., psychological detachment from work, physical exercise, and sleep. In addition, we examined whether job-related demands and resources predict profile membership and whether profile membership predicts well-being outcomes. The participants were Finnish employees (N = 664) who filled in an electronic questionnaire in three successive years. Latent profile analysis (LPA) revealed five stable profiles of recovery-enhancing processes across time: (1) physically inactive, highly detaching (15%), (2) impaired recovery processes (19%), (3) enhanced recovery processes (25%), (4) physically active, poorly detaching and sleeping (19%), and (5) physically active (29%). In addition, job-related antecedents and well-being outcomes showed unique differences between the five profiles identified. Altogether, our study takes recovery research a step forward in helping to understand how recovery-enhancing processes function simultaneously over the long-term and suggests that, from the perspective of well-being, detachment from work and good sleep are more crucial recovery processes than physical activity. 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

This article discusses how migrant businesses actively contribute to the negotiation of everyday coexistence in a Finnish provincial city. It focuses on oriental barbershops to unpack the interplay between place, power, and social imagination. Against the trope of the ethnic business that reproduces assumptions framing migrant activities in terms of community formation, looking at these salons from the perspective of people’s existential need for emplacement reveals how the dynamics of belonging and marginalization are experienced, navigated, and contested by the barbers of Tampere. While the identity-centredness in the definition of diversity and the social hierarchies implied by the discourses of integration force them to negotiate their presence from the margins, the barbers also compose counter-narratives of coexistence. Grounded in an aspiration for recognition, their stories cast a social imaginary that, without ignoring difference, shifts its emphasis towards an ethics of mutuality, thus unlocking a pathway to challenge essentialization and inequalities. publishedVersion

In this paper, we have used the exceptional circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic as a window for investigating the ambivalent, stereotypical and often-incongruent portrayals of exceptional vulnerability and resilient self-management that define the self-constructions available for older adults. From the onset of the pandemic, older adults were publicly and homogenously presented as a biomedically vulnerable population, and the implementation of restrictive measures also raised concerns over their psychosocial vulnerability and wellbeing. Meanwhile, the key political responses to the pandemic in most affluent countries aligned with the dominant paradigms of successful and active ageing that build on the ideal of resilient and responsible ageing subjects. Within this context, in our paper we have examined how older individuals negotiated such conflicting characterisations in relation to their self-understandings. In empirical terms, we drew on data comprising written narratives collected in Finland during the initial stage of the pandemic. We demonstrate how the stereotypical and ageist connotations associated with older adults' psychosocial vulnerability may have paradoxically offered some older adults novel building blocks for positive self-constructions as individuals who are not exceptionally vulnerable, despite ageist assumptions of homogeneity. However, our analysis also shows that such building blocks are not equally distributed. Our conclusions highlight the lack of legitimate ways for people to admit to vulnerabilities and voice their needs without the fear of being categorised under ageist, othering and stigmatised identities. publishedVersion

Although not adequately studied in the research on youth work, food is and has been an integral element of youth centres. This article examines what characterizes youth centres as foodscapes and explores which aspects of youth centres support the food-related learning of young people. We merge the traditions of youth work research, food education and learning. The data of the study consist of two rounds of focus group interviews ( N = 14) conducted with young people aged 13 to 17. The data are qualitatively analysed using the five aspects meal model, which was developed to analyse foodscapes. The results of this study suggest that when youth centres, as foodscapes, are based on the active participation of young people and offer them opportunities to have an influence on the activities and work with peers, it is easier for young people to be inspired and learn.

The novel coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has had far-reaching effects on public health around the world. Attempts to prevent the spread of the disease by quarantine have led to large-scale global socioeconomic disrup- tion. During the outbreak, public authorities and politicians have struggled with how to manage widespread ignorance regarding the virus. Drawing on insights from social epistemology and the emerging interdisciplinary field of ignorance studies, this article provides evidence that the temporality of non- knowing and its intersection with knowing is a force that leads political decision-making during a crisis. Illuminating the epistemic analysis with statements given by the Finnish government to the media in decision- making documents and in press conferences, this paper proposes that a crisis situation, itself, seems to demand from political decision-makers dynamic action while simultaneously knowing little (‘non-knowing’) about the different fronts of tackling the pandemic. We conclude that non-knowing must be recognized explicitly as an enduring and central condition in deci- sion-making, which we call ‘epistemic humility.’ publishedVersion

Narrative studies have witnessed a growing interest towards positioning analyses and the analysis of master and counter-narratives. While the former tends to prefer a small story approach and to draw on Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis, the latter engages in a variety of methodological approaches and works with narratives of several sizes, often within institutional and political contexts. Counter-narrative is a positional category by name, and it has recently been brought together with positioning analysis in the study of oral narratives. However, the narrative nature of master narratives, as well as their conceptual distinction from dominant discourses, remains largely unaddressed. This article aims at placing master narratives within narrative theory. To that end, we consider the three analytical levels of narrative positioning in terms of master and counter-narratives. By analysing an interview with a 92-year-old Finnish woman, we argue for the empirical relevance of master and counter-narratives within positioning analysis.

Increasingly, people must interact with robot technologies. In this research, we examined attitudes toward robots as equipment and as coworkers and whether these attitudes are affected by the autonomy of the robot among participants living in the United States (Study 1: N = 1003; Study 2: N = 969). Study 1 revealed that respondents had a more positive attitude toward robots as equipment than as coworkers. Technology use self-efficacy and prior robot use experience were associated with more positive attitudes toward both robot positions. Having a degree in engineering or technology was associated with a positive attitude toward robot coworkers, while neuroticism was associated with a negative attitude. Additionally, technology use self-efficacy was found to have a significant indirect effect on the associations between openness and attitudes toward robots as well as conscientiousness and attitudes toward robots. In Study 2, a three-group online survey experiment showed that teleoperated robots and semi-autonomous robots were preferred as equipment over fully autonomous robots. The robots’ autonomy level did not impact attitude toward robot coworkers. Overall, the results suggest that people prefer non-autonomous robots over autonomous robots in the work-life context. The studies provide a comprehensive overview of attitudes toward robots as both equipment and coworkers, and the key predictors of the noted attitudes. The results suggest a readiness for shared autonomy between a human operator and a robot. This should be considered in the design and successful implementation of new robot technologies in workplaces.

This article examines how historical contexts affect the recollection of experiences of rape. We reanalyze sexual autobiographies that were gathered in Finland in 1992 in a sex research project called FINSEX. To illustrate how the time of the rape as well as the time it is recalled shape the possibilities of narrating a life story, we present a close reading of four autobiographies that we place in the context of the collection as a whole, and compare our analysis of the autobiographies to their interpretation in the FINSEX study. The narrative elements of the autobiographies reflect the violent experiences in complex and layered ways. For the authors of these autobiographies, temporal changes in cultural and social understandings of sexual violence enable the reinterpreting of life events and the naming of previously unnamed experiences.

This article seeks to analyse how epistemic work (Alasuutari, 2018; Alasuutari and Qadir, 2019) in Portuguese parliamentary education debates develops through externalisation to world situations (Schriewer, 1990) whose references are used as epistemic capital (Alasuutari, 2018). The study explores debates occurring during Legislature X (2005–2009), in which the number of external references in plenary education debates significantly peaked compared with previous and subsequent legislatures. The analysis demonstrates that there was a change in the (de-)legitimation strategies policymakers used during this legislature. In addition to using the traditional ideological principles associated with each party, deputies often opted to use international organisations and their instruments, alongside reference societies, as authoritative sources to strengthen arguments and persuade their audience of their validity. This suggests that parliamentary policymakers assume that these external elements are useful in earning support for their policy ideas and promoting reform proposals. publishedVersion

This article canvasses the current definitions and framings of “agroforestry” in different academic literature and policies. Three key framings of “agroforestry” are identified in the scholarship and explored for their differences. The findings suggest that the distinct schools of research on “agroforestry” focus on distinct points of departure, and these baseline situations from which transitions to what is called “agroforestry” occur vary in distinct ways from monoculture plantations to primary forests. Political-economic analysis is used to scrutinize three key “agroforestry” transition categories: agroecological, agribusiness, and forest degradation, which the article identifies as agroecoforestry (the good), agrobizforestry (the bad), and agrodeforestry (the ugly) transitions, respectively. Examples of each type are provided based on field research in Brazil, and the results are put into a global perspective. The categories are helpful in identifying the “agroforestry” transitions that are currently marketed as good solutions but might also have negative impacts and in highlighting the agroecological agroforestry transitions that would help simultaneously increase global food production, adapt to and mitigate the climate crisis, and achieve equity and social justice.

The future is rarely problematised in education even though it is self-evident in everyday schoolwork and present also in the management of education. However, we should understand how different future visions influence our understanding of education. In this paper, we apply rhetorical analysis and study how the future of education is rhetorically constructed in Finnish policy texts. Also, we analyze the special characteristic of Finnish future visions, which are based on the idea of Finnish education being top-notch. We focus explicitly on the idea of knowledge and its future relations in school education. In our data, the current school is rhetorically contrasted with the future one. This hastens the need to modernize Finnish school system. This view is reinforced by the needs of the economy and working life. Pathos is frequently used as a rhetorical strategy. Finns are warned about remaining in the past and obliged to change their education immediately. Future visions of Finnish education seem to be limited only to positive aspects. publishedVersion