This paper explores by means of content analysis the extent to which the Finnish biggest companies have adapted socially responsible reporting practices. The research focuses on Human Resource (HR) reporting and covers corporate annual reports. The criteria has been set on the basis of the analysis of the documents published at the European level in the context of corporate social responsibility (CSR), paying special attention to the European Council appeal on CSR in March 2000. As CSR is a relatively new (...) concept in Finland, the paper also contributes to the discussion on interface between HR reporting (especially as based on measurements such as Human Resource Accounting and Intellectual Capital schools) and corporate social reporting practices. The results of the content analysis indicate that social reporting practices are still at an early stage of development in Finland. The most reported theme was ‘training and staff development’. A positive sign was that the majority also disclosed themes ‘participation and staff involvement’ and ‘employee health and well-being’. Furthermore, nearly one-third made references to their work atmosphere or job satisfaction survey. However, disclosures lacked overall consistency and comparability with each other and especially quantitative indicators were disclosed by few. Further concern was lack of information related to the theme equal opportunities and going beyond a sheer disclosure of age or gender structure. The other issues rarely disclosed were those related to employee work–life balance and integration of disadvantaged groups in the labour markets. (shrink)

Heidegger’s philosophy has received radically different readings. These different approaches grow from philosophical differences rooted, at least to some extent, in national philosophical traditions. Although it is not possible any longer to draw strict boundaries between different philosophical traditions by reference to nationality or to language, there certainly are tendencies and points of emphasis that differ depending on the context in which Heidegger is read. There are many different ways of reading Heidegger. I confine myself to two: the orthodox approach (...) and the applicative pragmatist approach. As an example for these approaches I have taken Heidegger’s controversial essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art.”. (shrink)

This paper explores the dynamic potential inherent in stable looking technological systems. I follow a small Finnish heating business and describe how alternative production practices were established within Finnish forestry. The case shows an interesting development in a sector where local activities have traditionally been coordinated through standardised practices and the physical structure of the forest. My focus is on micro-level shifts of power and I analyse the changing position of local actors in the margins of conventional forestry to understand (...) the fragile nature of the forestry standards. They not only stabilise forestry practices but enable complex interactions and new combinations of actors. Therefore, they also increase the degrees of freedom. My analysis draws from theoretical perspectives of technology studies, actor-network theory and recent discussions in geography on the spatial distribution of power. (shrink)

In this article, we want to show the relevance and importance of melancholy as an aesthetic emotion. Melancholy often plays a role in our encounters with art works, and it is also present in some of our aesthetic responses to the natural environment. Melancholy invites aesthetic considerations to come into play not only in well-defined aesthetic contexts but also in everyday situations that give reason for melancholy to arise. But the complexity of melancholy, the fact that it is fascinating in (...) itself, suggests the further thought that it may be considered as an aesthetic emotion per se. To this end, we argue that it is the distinctive character of melancholy, its dual character and its differences from sadness and depression, which distinguishes it as an aesthetic emotion. (shrink)

This study investigated the factorial validity of the 58-item Corporate Ethical Virtues scale :923–947, 2008). The major aim was to test the invariance of the factor structure across different organizational samples. The CEV scale was designed to measure eight corporate virtues: clarity, congruency of supervisors, congruency of senior management, feasibility, supportability, transparency, discussability, and sanctionability. The data consisted of four organizational samples that are operated in the private and public sector. The results of confirmatory factor analyses supported the hypothesized eight-factor (...) structure, as well as its alternative second-order factor structure, where high correlations between the first-order factors were explained by a general CEV factor. These factor structures remained the same across samples, lending strong support for the group invariance assumption of the scale. Thus, the 58-item CEV scale was found to be a valid tool for measuring the aspect of ethical organizational culture in different organizations, and its use can be recommended for future research. (shrink)

This is the first volume to mobilize encounters between the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and the rich developments in cultural studies of music and sound. The book takes seriously the intellectual and political challenge that the process philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari poses for previous understandings of music as permanent objects and primarily discursive texts. By elaborating on the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari in innovative ways, the chapters of the book demonstrate how musical and sonic practices (...) and expressions can be reconsidered as instances of becoming, actors in assemblages, and actualizations of virtual tendencies. The collection pushes notions of music and sound beyond such long-term paradigms as identity thinking, the privileging of signification, and the centrality of the human subject. The chapters of the volume bring a range of new topics and methodological approaches in contact with Deleuze and Guattari. These span from movement improvisation, jazz and western art music studies, sound and performance art and reality TV talent shows to deaf musicians and indigenous music. The book also highlights such fresh ways of doing analysis and shaping the methodological tools of music and sound studies that are enabled by Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy. Their philosophy, too, gains renewed capacities and potential when responding to ethnographic, cultural, ethnomusicological, participatory, aesthetic, new materialist, feminist and queer perspectives to music and sound. (shrink)

The present study had two major aims: first, to examine the construct validity of the Finnish 58-item Corporate Ethical Virtues scale (CEV; Kaptein in J Org Behav 29:923–947, 2008) and second, to examine whether the associations between managers’ perceptions of ethical organisational culture and their occupational well-being (emotional exhaustion and work engagement) are indirectly linked by ethical strain, i.e. the tension which arises from the difference in the ethical values of the individual and the organisation he or she works for. (...) The sample consisted of 902 managers from different organisations, in middle and upper management levels, aged 25–68 years. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) provided support to the hypothesised eight-factor structure of the CEV scale; i.e. the scale contained the factors of clarity, congruency of supervisors, congruency of senior management, feasibility, supportability, transparency, discussability and sanctionability. In addition, it emerged from the CFAs that the high intercorrelations of these factors can be explained by the second-order factor of ethical culture. The managers’ perceptions of the ethical culture prevailing in their organisations were associated with their occupational well-being both directly (high-work engagement) and indirectly via a low level of ethical strain (low-emotional exhaustion). Thus, the findings indicated that the ethical culture of organisations plays a major role in managers’ occupational well-being. (shrink)

The aims of this study were to investigate what kinds of personal work goals managers have and whether ethical organisational culture is related to these goals. The sample consisted of 811 Finnish managers from different organisations, in middle and upper management levels, aged 25–68 years. Eight work-related goal content categories were found based on the managers self-reported goals: (1) organisational goals (35.4 %), (2) competence goals (26.1 %), (3) well-being goals (12.1 %), (4) career-ending goals (7.3 %), (5) progression goals (...) (6.8 %), (6) prestige/influence goals (4.2 %), (7) job change goals (4.2 %) and (8) employment contract goals (3.9 %). Ethical organisational culture operated as a context for personal goal setting: Those managers who evaluated their organisational culture as more ethical were more likely to report organisational goals (e.g. goals toward the success or performance of the organisation). However, if managers gave lower ratings regarding ethical culture, then they named job change and career-ending goals in more cases. Therefore, investing into ethical virtues of the organisational culture can promote managers’ personal work goals, which also benefit the organisation. (shrink)

In this book, fourteen international authors across various fields analyze the concept of chiasm and its role in human perception and experience, discussing the work of major philosophers like Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, and Deleuze, and adapting their ideas to cultural analysis.

In the concept of place the problems of ethics and aesthetics overlap in a particularly interesting and fruitful way. When an area or site becomes a place for us, we are not indifferent to it. A place is something to which we have a strong and significant relation; in my usage of the term “place”, place is defined by our personal connections to an area. Not every environment suits everyone. Although we can visually familiarise ourselves with many milieus, “placing” ourselves (...) somewhere is something else, and requires compatibility between individual and environment. Place is a place for me – its significance arises largely, although not exclusively, from meanings and values it gains through me. This has both ethical and aesthetic consequences: our judgments are based on the personal attachment we have to a place, and these judgments are strongly determined by our interests. (shrink)

This article gives an overview of Finnish aesthetics in the past forty years. I will introduce major figures who have done research in aesthetics and topics that have been investigated. I will divide the field of aesthetics in two: philosophy of art and environmental aesthetics. Especially the latter has gained a lot of prominence in Finnish aesthetics, and there are also institutional settings that have made this possible. But philosophical problems in the arts have been scrutinized intensively, too. Finnish aestheticians (...) have taken inspiration both from the Anglo‐American analytic tradition and the German and French phenomenological tradition. In order to put the contemporary considerations into some perspective, I will give a brief outline of the early stages of Finnish Aesthetics. The early 20th century was a heyday in Finnish Aesthetics. (shrink)

Članek poda fenomenološki prispevek k estetiki vsakdanjosti, pri čemer izhaja iz nekaterih konceptov, ki jih je razvil Martin Heidegger. Cilj je razumeti pravo naravo same vsakdanjosti v vsej njeni dolgočasnosti in sivini ter poudariti, da v vsakodnevnosti obstaja estetski vidik. Estetika vsakdanjosti ni le »izjemno v navadnem«. Da bi razumeli celoten obseg estetike vsakdanjosti, moramo raziskati fenomen navadnega in vsakdanjega. V pričujočem članku je ontologija človekove vsakdanje eksistence razložena s pojmi kraja, življenjskega sveta, domačnosti in tujosti. Estetski vidik vsakdanjega temelji (...) na teh eksistencialnih strukturah. Človekova eksistenca se večino časa godi na domačem kraju – ki je lahko dom, delovni prostor ali pa poznani predeli v domačem mestu. Ko se premikamo po domačem območju, občutimo izkustveno ukoreninjenost in varnost. Element nepričakovanosti, ki je včasih povezan z občutkom tesnobe ali celo strahu, umanjka. Prav to dejstvo, da ni nobenih presenečenj, da stvari potekajo gladko, kot pričakujemo, je prijetno. Početi stvari na rutinski način ima določene vzorce, ki so zadovoljujoči, v njih pa je tudi estetski vidik. Estetika vsakdanjosti se nahaja v odsotnosti izjemnega, v občutku počutiti se doma in imeti nadzor. Estetika domačega je estetika manka, tiha fascinacija z odsotnostjo zahtev iz okolice. (shrink)

The first half of this collection addresses these themes as given voice by the philosopher and critic Arthur Danto, while the second part contains essays of a more independent cast which assume a variety of stating points aimed at illuminating the theoreticity, temporality, computability, and abstract possibilities of present and future arts.

Background:Nurses frequently face ethically demanding situations in their work, and these may lead to stress of conscience. Working life is currently accelerating and job demands are intensifying. These intensified job demands include (1) work intensification, (2) intensified job-related planning demands, (3) intensified career-related planning demands, and (4) intensified learning demands. At the same time, many healthcare organizations are implementing major organizational changes that have an influence on personnel.Aim:The aim of the study was to investigate the association between intensified job demands (...) and stress of conscience, and whether their association is moderated by organizational change experiences among nurses. Experiences of organizational change may expose employees to stress of conscience or serve as a buffer because employees appraise, involve, and cope with changes differently.Research design:Questionnaires measuring stress of conscience, intensified job demands, and organizational change experiences were completed by nurses (n = 511) in a healthcare district undergoing a major organizational change.Ethical considerations:Throughout, the study procedures were implemented according to the guidelines of the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity and the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments. According to the Finnish regulations, because participation was voluntary, informed consent was requested, and participants were advised of their right to withdraw from the study at will. No permission from an ethics committee was necessary.Findings:Work intensification and personal worry considering organizational change were associated with more severe stress of conscience among nurses. Nurses’ experiences of managements’ competent handling of organizational change buffered the association between work intensification and stress of conscience.Conclusions:During organizational changes, management may alleviate nurses’ stress of conscience by proper communication and support procedures. (shrink)

The main aim of the present study was to examine whether an ethical organizational culture is associated with sickness absence in a Finnish public sector organization at both the individual and work unit levels. The underlying assumption was that employees working for organizations that are characterized by a strong ethical organizational culture report less sickness absence. The sample consisted of 2192 employees from one public sector city organization that included 246 different work units. Ethical organizational culture was measured with the (...) Corporate Ethical Virtues scale covering eight sub-dimensions. Sickness absence was inquired by asking the participants to report how many days they had been absent from work because of their own sickness over the past year. Multilevel structural equation modelling showed that, at the individual level, perceptions of a strong ethical organizational culture were associated with less sickness absences after controlling for the background factors. This link was not found at the work-unit level. The findings indicate that an ethical organizational culture plays a significant role in enhancing employee well-being measured as sickness absence. It seems that especially supervisor’s ethical role modeling and possibilities to discuss about ethical issues are important factors in preventing sickness absence in the organizations. (shrink)

The aim of the present longitudinal study was to quantitatively examine whether an ethical organizational culture predicts turnover among managers. To complement the quantitative results, a further important aim was to examine the self-reported reasons behind manager turnover, and the associations of ethical organizational culture with these reasons. The participants were Finnish managers working in technical and commercial fields. Logistic regression analyses indicated that, of the eight virtues investigated, congruency of supervisors, congruency of senior management, discussability, and sanctionability were negatively (...) related to manager turnover. The results also revealed that the turnover group is not homogeneous, and that there are several different reasons for leaving. The reasons given for turnover were grouped into five different categories: lay-off, career challenges, dissatisfaction with the job or organization, organizational change, and decreased well-being/motivation. ANCOVA analyses showed that those managers who stayed in their organization perceived their ethical culture to be stronger than those in turnover groups, and especially compared to groups 3 and 5. The results acquired through different methods complemented and confirmed each other, showing that by nurturing ethical virtues an organization can decrease job changes and encourage managers and supervisors to want to remain in their organization. (shrink)

Intensified job demands originate in the general accelerated pace of society and ever-changing working conditions, which subject workers to increasing workloads and deadlines, constant planning and decision-making about one’s job and career, and the continual learning of new professional knowledge and skills. This study investigated how individual characteristics, namely negative and positive affectivity related to competence demands, and multitasking preference moderate the association between IJDs and cognitive stress symptoms among media workers. The results show that although IJDs were associated with (...) higher cognitive stress symptoms at work, that is, difficulties in concentration, thinking clearly, decision-making, and memory, competence demands-related negative affectivity explained the most variance in cognitive stress symptoms. In addition, IJDs were more strongly associated with cognitive stress symptoms at work in individuals with high competence demand-related negative affectivity, and low multitasking preference. Altogether, the present findings suggest that HR practices or workplace interventions to ease employees’ negative affectivity from increasing competence demands at work could usefully support employees’ effective cognitive functioning when confronted with IJDs. (shrink)

On 18–19 May 2018, a symposium was held in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Ronald W. Hepburn (1927–2008). The speakers at this event discussed Hepburn’s oeuvre from several perspectives. For this book, the collection of the revised versions of their talks has been supplemented by the papers of other scholars who were unable to attend the symposium itself. Thus this volume contains contributions from (...) eighteen notable scholars of different disciplines, ranging from contemporary aesthetics and art theory through to philosophical approaches to religion, education and social anthropology. It also includes a bibliography of Hepburn’s writings. The essays were first published in two special issues of the Journal of Scottish Thought, vols. 10–11 (2018–2019). -/- Ronald William Hepburn was born in Aberdeen on 16 March 1927. He went to Aberdeen Grammar School, then he graduated with an M.A. in Philosophy (1951) and obtained his doctorate from the University of Aberdeen (1955). His tutor at Aberdeen was Donald MacKinnon (1913– 1994), a Scottish philosopher and theologian, the author of A Study in Ethical Theory (1957) and The Problem of Metaphysics (1974). Hepburn taught as Lecturer at the Department of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen (1956–60), and he was also Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York University (1959–60). He returned from the United States as Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham University. In 1964, he was appointed as a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and between 1965 and 1968 he was also Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge. From 1975 until his retirement in 1996, he held the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. He died in Edinburgh on 23 December 2008. His philosophical interests ranged from theology and the philosophy of religion through moral philosophy and the philosophy of education to art theory and aesthetics. Notably, Hepburn is widely regarded as the founder of modern environmental and everyday aesthetics as a result of the influence of papers in the 1960s which pioneered a new approach to the aesthetics of the natural world. (shrink)

So far, the field of business ethics lacks validated measures for assessing virtues at the organizational level. The aim of this study is to investigate the measurement invariance of a shortened Corporate Ethical Virtues scale. In this manner, we contribute to validating an instrument that is both psychometrically sound and efficient to use. We conducted two survey studies of two independent groups (managers and school psychologists). Confirmatory factor analysis supported the eight‐factor model of the scale, and we found it to (...) be invariant in two different occupational groups. The managers gave higher appraisals of ethical culture than the psychologists did in seven out of the eight dimensions. We found that despite the contextual differences, the shortened scale measures the eight dimensions of organizational ethical virtues, as intended. Thus, the use of this more compact scale can be recommended for future studies, which will hopefully stimulate more research on ethical culture in various work contexts. (shrink)

The aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate the temporal dynamics of ethical organisational culture and how it associates with well-being at work when potential changes in ethical culture are measured over an extended period of 6 years. We used a person-centred study design, which allowed us to detect both typical and atypical patterns of ethical culture stability as well as change among a sample of leaders. Based on latent profile analysis and hierarchical linear modelling we found longitudinal, concurrent (...) relations and cumulative gain and loss cycles between different ethical culture patterns and leaders’ well-being. Leaders in the strongest ethical culture pattern experienced the highest level of work engagement and a decreasing level of ethical dilemmas and stress. Leaders who gave the lowest ratings on ethical culture which also decreased over time reported the highest level of ethical dilemmas, stress, and burnout. They also showed a continuous increase in these negative outcomes over time. Thus, ethical culture has significant cumulative effects on well-being, and these longitudinal effects can be both negative and positive, depending on the experienced strength of the culture’s ethicality. (shrink)

This study investigated the reasons that leaders have given for their leader role occupancy. By using a mixed-method approach and large leader data, we aimed to provide a more nuanced picture of how leader positions are occupied in real life. We examined how individual leadership motivation may associate with other reasons for leader role occupancy. In addition, we aimed to integrate the different reasons behind leader role occupancy into the framework of sustainable leader careers and its two indicators: leader’s health (...) and performance. The survey data consisted of 1,031 leaders from various sectors of working life. Qualitative analysis revealed that leaders mention various factors behind their leader role occupancy, resulting 26 themes. After inductive investigation of the data, theory-driven analysis focused on the sustainable career components and agency vs. non-agency. Qualitative data was quantitized based on the theory-driven categories for statistical analysis. Based on the these analysis, we found out that only Affective-Identity MTL predicted all of the studied reasons behind leader role occupancy, whereas the other motivation types did not. All of the reasons for leader role occupancy except non-agentic ones were related to both leaders’ own and their followers’ occupational well-being. Leaders with more person-related and agentic reasons for leader role occupancy experienced better occupational well-being. Person- and context-related and agentic reasons behind leader role occupancy associated also with followers’ occupational well-being, but the associations differed from those of leaders’ well-being: person-related and agentic reasons associated with followers’ exhaustion, but this association was not found among leaders. Our study provided important information for practitioners in the field of human resources and development, as it has shown that if the reasons for leader role occupancy mainly reflect circumstances or other non-person-related reasons, the experienced occupational well-being and person-career fit may remain weak. It is necessary to try to support the leadership motivation for those leaders, or to shape the job description in such a way that it can also offer the experiences of meaningfulness from aspects other than self-realization through a managerial role. (shrink)