Browsing by Subject "charisma"

This thesis explores how a university department, Creation Mine (CM), constructs creativity and seeks serendipity through communality within Aalto University in Espoo, Finland. Through their daily aspirations of low bureaucracy and anti-structure, the Mine community oppose the university structure – even though they are a part of and reproduce the bureaucracy in their community activity. The inherent juxtaposition between the communal ideals of structurelessness and the highly structural Finnish university bureaucracy causes a plethora of contradictions within the Mine, among its employees and external university bureaucrats alike. This thesis examines precisely these moments of deviation and conflict to understand how creativity and anti-structure are pursued in the space of a structure and how such contradiction is lived through in the daily lives of bureaucrats and creative workers. This research is based on anthropological methods of ethnographical inquiry and participant observation that took place from mid-November 2021 until the end of April 2022. Through Victor Turner's theorisation of liminality and social anti-structure, communitas, I examine the cultural emblem of the community – CM's intense product development course (DCC). The DCC transformed from a university course to a rite of passage through the course rituals. The cultural values and norms of the Creation Mine manifest in the DCC – it is a performance and spectacle of the whole community. Hence, the course's liminal values of emotional connection, equality, and humility are deemed inherently normative within the community. They are pursued, fortified and – notably – disrupted in the Miners' daily work life. Such liminal ideals are imperatively opposed to the university bureaucracy and cause social friction within the Mine. The idealisation of liminality creates a space for informal power structures and membership standards to form. Due to the informal rhetorics and organisation style, such standards and power structures remain obscure and ambivalent – even for the Mine members. Hence, informal standards become exclusionary determinants within the emotional community and, by extension, the workplace. The American-style performative informality, combined with the underlying Finnish bureaucracy and the multinational staff, renders the community's informal and formal power structures distorted and even invisible. The co-existent and contrasting organisational logics cause misunderstandings, frustration and informal grouping within the Mine, creating continual ambivalence among the staff. However, the community's emotional dwelling is not organised solely through structureless ambitions but under charismatic authority. Utilising the classic ideal types of Max Weber, I examine the conflicting charismatic and legal authority structures within the Mine. As the community congregates under its charismatic leader, denying bureaucratic structures from the communal space causes friction between the Creation Mine and external university bureaucrats. Regardless, the Miners must be able to collaborate with their external colleagues, despite the seemingly mutual prejudice towards each other. Thus, personal politics, familialism and play are utilised to render the external bureaucrats at least tolerable and cooperation possible. Thus, in their daily work life, The Miners must manoeuvre between many different and contrasting authority structures and ideals of structurelessness to find belonging in the communal space and workplace.

In this study the religious representations in the Facebook following of India’s current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, are explored and analysed. The study is a theoretically informed netnographic study and its background is in the previous studies of charisma and the concept of natural religion or natural cognitions related to religion. On the essentialist–social constructionism scale the study situates itself in the essentialist end, treating the research material as an expression of the reality behind it, not just as socially constructed. As far as is known, this study is the first study using online material to analyse religious representations in the following of a secular leader figure. The research material, or data, for this study comes from Narendra Modi’s official Facebook fan page http://www.facebook.com/narendramodi.official and the comments on it. A total of of 6,617 comments were manually collected from the fan page on four separate dates: 6 November 2012, 20 November 2012, 20 July 2014 and 6 August 2014. After the collection of the comments, a software tool in python language was written to index the comments. The nature of social media, and the Internet in general, makes it mandatory to treat the research material as a mere snapshot of Modi’s rapidly changing Facebook fan page and not as a continuously existing mass of data. The different years for the material gathering represent two different political and social positions of Modi. In 2012 he was the Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat and a popular Prime Minister candidate. In 2014 his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), won the general election, which consequently made Modi the Prime Minister of India. The analysis of the comments and the religious representations in them thus also includes a comparative aspect, taking note of his changed social position. The analysis of the research material shows that while some of the commenters are passionate haters of Modi, the majority of his Facebook followers are big supporters of him and are charismatically oriented in their following. On his fan page, Modi is treated as a god, as a messenger of god and compared to religious figures such as Buddha and Swami Vivekananda. A savior belief in Modi is also strongly present in the comments. Some comments also show deep emotional commitment to Modi. As a new finding the study also shows that online charismatic following includes belief in reaching the leader personally through the comments despite there being hundreds of thousands of messages: some of the comments contain very personal requests and messages to Modi. As a conclusion, this study clearly supports earlier findings on charismatically oriented following drawing from natural cognitions related to religion, and shows that even in the following of a non-religious leader religious representations are clearly present. The study also reveals that social media provides a fruitful platform for the study of non-reflective beliefs. The main references for this study are: Kimmo Ketola’s The Founder of the Hare Krishnas as Seen by Devotees. A Cognitive Study of Religious Charisma (2008), Ann Ruth Willner’s The Spellbinders: Charismatic Political Leadership (1984), Justin Barrett’s Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology: From Human Minds to Divine Minds (2011), Lee A. Kirkpatrick’s Attachment, evolution and the psychology of religion (2005), Kingshuk Nag’s The NaMo story: A Political Life (2014), Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (2011) and Robert V. Kozinets’s Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online (2010).