Browsing by Subject "neoliberalism"

In this sociolinguistic study that applies multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) methods the aim was to examine what kinds of ideas of health are expressed in the American dietary guidelines and what kind of health discourse these ideas are a part of. Based on Machin and Mayr’s (2012) ideas on semiotic resources, linguistic and visual patterns, that can communicate ideas, ideologies, power patterns, attitudes and other messages, the study focuses on ten pages of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020-2025. The expressed sentence structures and word choices, among other visual and linguistic factors, are evaluated, and then connected to the sociocultural background. This qualitative sociolinguistic study found that through the choices the authors and other creators of the U.S. dietary guidelines report 2020-2025 have made, the Guidelines express neoliberal health views and contribute to health discourse that has the potential to sustain similar views. Linguistic and visual analysis concludes that especially the individual’s responsibility and freedom are underlined in the Guidelines’ language and content. The analysis also notes the contrasting expression of the role of the environmental factors, such as the food and retail establishments and manufacturers, and the multimodal aspects that in addition to the neoliberal discourse of health express other discourses of health.

This thesis is about the sociocultural phenomenon of start-up entrepreneurship. Contemporary society is home to a growing obsession towards entrepreneurship, with entrepreneurial action regarded as a possible solution to a wide spectrum of social problems. Entrepreneurial action and the acquiring of an entrepreneurial way of thinking and operating is widely considered to contribute to the common good, in reality having potential for a positive impact on society. Hence entrepreneurship is promoted in social policy and education in an effort to educate citizens towards entrepreneurial agency. All in all, an interesting shift is happening with entrepreneurs positioning themselves as producers of the common good ”making the world a better place one pizza at a time”, while farmers traditionally identifying as ”producers” are becoming more ”entrepreneurial”. Entrepreneurial agency as a new form of agency suitable for any individual in almost any field of action originates from the neoliberal discourse and the emphasis on individual freedom and entrepreneurialism. Like Margaret Thatcher famously stated, ”there is no society, there are individual men and women”. This highly individualistic approach to the reorganisation of society and the reinforcement or restoration of the class dominance of a small global elite was voiced as an alleged antidote to the perils of socialism, and culturally connected to the positive ideals of the entrepreneur as a free, self-reliable, innovative and efficient individual. This was the neoliberal re-invention of the entrepreneur that transformed the idea of the entrepreneur as primarily a business operator to that of the morally worthy individual simply doing the right thing. The fruits of the labour would then trickle-down as collectively beneficiary. This thesis is an ethnographic study on start-up entrepreneurs in the Greater Helsinki start-up ecosystem working to promote their companies. Through interviews and observational data, this thesis studies the start-up entrepreneur as the epitome of this contemporary entrepreneurial agency. Start-up entrepreneurship sometimes referred to as ”entrepreneurialism on steroids”, is a form of often tech-related entrepreneurialism aimed at fast growth with the help of investments - a sort of ”rags to riches” narrative. But the work is demanding with statistically most start-up companies destined to fail, with a very small percentage becoming successful in finding markets, growing and returning the investments while providing lucrative ”exits” for the founders. Utilising positioning theory this thesis focuses on three themes related to start-up entrepreneurs: their identifications and boundary work in separating them as a specific social group, the outspoken motivations behind their actions and the troubles that arise from their endeavours. Through dress code, speech norms and the acceptance of the Weberian idea of the entrepreneur as ”a special actor” and capable problem-solver, the identity of the start-up entrepreneur is constructed and ritualistically verified in events like SLUSH. The origins of the neoliberal discourse are interestingly present in these motivations, with a majority of the interviewees emphasizing the altruistic side of their social entrepreneurialism and the importance of freedom in life. They are free to achieve. But on the other hand, the possibility of unimaginable financial gain brings certain ambiguity to the situation. In the words of one interviewee: ”Anyone who says they don´t dream of getting rich in a start-up company is lying.” Finally, among all the positive hype that surrounds successful start-up companies and entrepreneurship partly due to the way they are portrayed in the media, there are problems ahead for many. Stress and financial troubles combined with the shame and possible debt resulting from going bankrupt manifest themselves as severe physical symptoms, mental health problems, insomnia and burnout. This can in turn have a dramatic impact in dictating the lives of the start-up entrepreneurs. Following the ideas of critical entrepreneurship studies and contributing to the lack of research on the topic, this thesis suggests that due to the influence of the neoliberal discourse on the way entrepreneurship is framed and celebrated as well as the severity of the resulting problems for many, there should be a more critical and analytical approach to the seemingly value-free promotion of entrepreneurship. It is necessary to ask whose interests are actually getting promoted through increased entrepreneurial agency, and whether the alleged promotion of common good is in fact contributing to any issues other than the convenience of the every-day lives of the middle-class.

This thesis examines the role of markets in speeches made by Ministers of Finance Iiro Viinanen and Jyrki Katainen in the plenary sessions of the Finnish parliament in 1991-1994 and 2007-2010. The aim of this study is to analyse political discourses in speeches made about state budget proposals during two economic crises, the depression of the 1990s and the Global Financial Crisis. The thesis employs Bob Jessop’s Cultural Political Economy approach to view crises as moments of contestation for hegemonic discourses and ideologies, and an opportunity to examine political and social change in the age of neoliberalism through speech. Both crises were also characterised by the contestation of the relationship between Finland and the EU, first centred around accession to the EU and in particular the role of EMU convergence criteria in designing economic policy, and in the second crisis on the nature of centre-periphery relations amid the Eurozone crisis. The purpose of this research has been to uncover the way in which ministerial speeches reflect the neoliberalisation of Finland through a specific national context, which is characterised in particular by the relationship between the state and individual, the moral nature of economic decision-making, the increasing influence and power of the civil service on decision-making through the Ministry of Finance, and the gradual replacement of defence policy by economic policy as the defining factor of Finland’s independence and sovereignty. The thesis explores these concepts through the use of Theo van Leeuwen’s conceptualisation of discourse as the recontextualisation of social practices, analysing the speeches using a comparative and thematic perspective. The analysis finds that while the Ministers of Finance did not draw on discourses of legitimation by authority with regards to the Ministry of Finance, the consistent themes during both periods drew heavily on themes of absolute necessity, responsible decision-making, moralistic attitudes towards the Finnish citizen, and constructions of unity of the Finnish people. Both Ministers also referred to market forces, investor confidence, and trust as existential questions for the sovereignty of the nation and emphasised the need for permanent changes in Finland towards the direction of a neoliberalised market economy. Similarly, the Ministers appeared to draw on paternalist understandings of the state as a shepherd of its people, a guardian of a small nation against predatory international forces, and yet a reasoned disciplinarian of an irresponsible child. The study concludes that in particular the discourses on which the Ministers draw that rely on moralistic and paternalistic articulations of the relationship between the state and the individual can be seen as indicative of the national context of neoliberalisation in Finland. Furthermore, the extent to which the crises are framed as learning opportunities varies, though both Ministers consistently refer to the permanence of the changes (structural in particular) to be made to the Finnish economy, and in differing ways envision a new age in Finland, nonetheless one of credibility, responsibility, and a stable market economy. The study also offers new avenues for research, particularly for the wider debate in parliament and crisis construals therein, in addition to using the theory and the methods of this thesis to analyse other crises, perhaps non-economic in nature, such as the COVID-19 crisis. Furthermore, the thesis also suggests that further research could be conducted on the paternalistic and moralistic aspects of ministerial politics in particular.

This thesis presents an ethnographic and discourse analytical approach to the construction of Saudi Arabian nationhood in the post-2016 era following the inception of the national, neoliberal economic reform plan Vision 2030. The analysis examines a dual dataset consisting of ethnographic data as well as textual and visual sources produced for the most part in the context of Saudi Arabia’s National Day and Founding Day celebrations. The framework of analysis draws on social constructivist theories of nationalism as well as Marxist approaches to political economy. The work focuses on the interlinkages of contemporary Saudi nationalism, capitalist political economy and the creation of neoliberal-national subjectivities by examining three core research questions. (1) How are national futures envisioned and pasts remembered in the context of state and elite production of nationalism? (2) How are certain femininities produced as national and what are the qualities that make up national femininities in state and elite discourse? (3) How do national celebrations participate in constructing Saudi Arabian nationhood and what are some popular responses to or understandings of nationalism in their context? The analysis shows how the neoliberal economic reform plan Vision 2030 constructs national, neoliberal subjects by projecting the image of a self-governing, economic and youthful Saudi citizen. Vision 2030 also emerges as an economic imaginary of a future techno-utopian Saudi Arabia, where the “giga projects” undertaken under Vision 2030 have been realized through the ambition-turned-labor of ideal citizens. Meanwhile, Founding Day surfaces as an invented tradition seeking to establish continuity with an “authentic” and suitable Saudi Arabian past at a time when the kingdom is in the midst of a period of economic and social change. The production of national subjects also occurs along gendered lines by producing neoliberal-national femininities: women occupy a dual role as both carriers of tradition and symbols of the nation and its modernity. Also popular Founding Day celebrations surface as practices that contribute to shaping subjectivities through the creation of embodied experiences of the nation along with visualizing its glorified past and utopian future. Participants in such events also participate in this subject formation by deciding whether to take part in celebrations and, if so, how.

The platform economy has emerged in the past two decades to become a remarkably profitable and increasingly global industry. The explosive growth of platform firms can be attributed to the outsourcing of almost all aspects of business operations to minimize costs. This is coupled by their motivation to grow rapidly to capture disproportionately large market shares. Consequently, platform firms have become global behemoths, and the labor which sustains their growth has come to be known as “gig work”, in which self-employed contractors work whenever they please, without the traditional protections provided to formal employees. The goal of this dissertation is to explain these mechanisms in relation to their potential impacts on income inequality. This dissertation tests two hypotheses: the outsourcing hypothesis and market concentration hypothesis. Each hypothesis proposes a causal chain whereby outsourcing and market concentration in the platform economy lead to disproportionate economic power and greater economic insecurity, and consequently links these outcomes to a double movement in the U.S. income distribution. Methodologically, this research employs contrastive comparisons, whereby exemplary platforms are compared with their traditional competitors, namely Uber with the taxi industry, Amazon with Walmart, and DoorDash with Domino’s Pizza. From these contrastive comparisons, evidence is gathered to demonstrate key differences between platforms and their traditional competitors. Additionally, this research is contextualized in terms of historical and ideological trends, particularly the gradual re-emergence of income inequality and the development of neoliberal hegemony. The findings demonstrate that through unique combinations of the hypothesized mechanisms, platform businesses do proliferate greater economic insecurity, and generate disproportionate economic power between platform providers and platform managers and owners. However, evidence directly linking these outcomes to downward or upward pulls in the U.S. income distribution remains inconclusive. That said, substantial evidence was found for the rejection of the outsourcing hypothesis. Evidently, given the complexity of social systems, the findings from this research may be inherently difficult to generalize on a global or systemic level. As such, I conclude that further research is necessary to draw more decisive and generalizable conclusions regarding the interplay between income inequality and the platform economy.

This thesis is a study about Portuguese people who were learning mindfulness meditation in order to overcome stress. The primary question the thesis reflects on is: How do people attach value to what they are doing in situations where there is no clear set of criteria? The research is based on a 10-week ethnographic fieldwork which was conducted in Lisbon, Portugal during spring 2015. The data consists of material gathered by participant observation in two mindfulness meditation centers, combined with interviews and informal talks. By analyzing accounts of the research participants, the study identifies stress as an inherently social experience, and caused by an excess of work and a constant requirement to multitask. The study analyzes these notions by applying Marxist-influenced anthropological analyses of time and combines these with the anthropologist Marilyn Stathern’s (1992) concept of postpluralism. Building upon these theories, the study identifies stress which the research participants reported to be related to the logic of time within neoliberalism. The study observes that being mindful is experienced as a way to live with stressful situations, even though the practice does little to challenge the initial circumstances that caused the research participants feel stressed. Thus, the study suggests that mindfulness teaches the practitioners to recalibrate their values, offering the capacity to give less value to issues the practitioners found stressful. In this vein, mindfulness meditation is interpreted to respond to a particular Western problem in contrast to the Eastern (Buddhist) origins of the practice. The study however pays also attention to contradicting ideas of good life within the West, namely in gendered Portuguese expectations on how much time one should give for others in contrast to the individualistically oriented practice. Thus, the study highlights certain ambivalences present. On one hand, mindfulness responds to stress, as the practice helps keeping the contradictory logics of work and kinship separated. On the other hand, the practice is a retreat from the social and thus does not necessarily ease the initial problem the research participants had. As a conclusion, the study argues that the mindfulness practitioners feel the strain that neoliberal flexibility causes. It is however pointed out that people are not governed by the neoliberal logic and find ways to remove its logic from their own values.

Socialt entreprenörskap är ett fenomen med ökande popularitet och avspeglar mycket av det som värderas i dagens västerländska samhälle. Det går ut på att försöka lösa sociala problem med hjälp av affärsmodeller och en balansgång mellan sociala och ekonomiska mål. Ur ett samhällsvetenskapligt perspektiv diskuterar jag socialt entreprenörskap och hur det kan ses som ett tidstypiskt fenomen. Jag undersöker vilka som är drivkrafterna bakom socialt entreprenörskap och dess sociala kontext. Socialt entrepenörskap väcker frågor kring om det pågår en förändring i värderingar som uttrycks via valen av arbetsplatser, konsumtion och vilka aktörer som ges utrymme i sociala frågor. Avhandlingens slutsats är att globalisering, teknisk utveckling, neoliberalism och postmoderna värderingar tillsammans skapar en grogrund för socialt entreprenörskap genom ett uppmuntrande av värdeladdade, marknadsbaserade lösningar på sociala problem.

The starting point of this thesis is the question of a probable tension between educational and economic objectives in art museums. I have chosen to approach this question by focusing on gallery education. My primary aim has been to analyse what kind of concepts, goals and values gallery education is founded on. I have also deliberated upon the change in gallery education during the last decades. The data for this thesis was produced by interviewing gallery educators in nine (9) separate interviews. The interviews were partly structured and proceeded according to chosen themes. I have analysed the interviews by using the discursive approach. The main themes and negotiations that arose in the interviews were set between institutional and individual point of views, but also between economic objectives and intrinsic values. As a result of the analysis of these negotiations I have constructed a discursive field of gallery education. On this discursive field gallery education is approached from four points of view – as an experience, as service, as learning, and as an opener of new horizons. On the basis of the discursive field, I conclude that gallery education and its development at the present time has two strong emphases: individual experience and economic interests. These emphases are partly opposite and partly supportive to each other. There is a tendency to underscore the economic objectives and design activity according to these objectives. Sometimes this tendency is opposed and answered by using the concept of experience. By using experience it becomes possible to keep the economic objectives at a distance. On the other hand, the stress on experience shifts activity to more individualistic ways of thinking and sometimes further away from cultural and educational goals. On the basis of this thesis it seems that emphasizing individualism in general is producing a need to strengthen the connection between society and individuals, and anchor the activity back to the society. It also seems that this is done by bringing the focus back to the intrinsic values of the activity by applying the goal of societal effects to gallery education as a separate object.

Taking the Social Democratic Party of Finland (SDP) as a case study, this thesis contributes to the understanding of how the SDP and centre-left parties more generally were neoliberalised, this is to say how they became to embrace the idea that society is best organised through markets and competition. Drawing from the work of Stephanie Mudge, the thesis focuses on party experts, those party actors oriented towards producing truth-claims of society, hence affecting the way parties conceive the world and speak. Expert’s knowledge, however, is contingent on their social locations. They are often also situated in professional fields that tend to condition which ideas count as legitimate, making their positions explanatory relevant with regards to parties’ disposition and rhetoric. Methodologically the work draws from the tradition of historical sociology and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social fields. The material utilised consists of (auto)biographies; past historical and social scientific research; reference works; SDP’s archival documents; and historical newspaper and magazine writings and interviews. The central argument is that Mudge’s account—taken as the work’s hypothesis—of the neoliberalisation of centre-left parties in “core countries” (the UK, the US, Sweden, and Germany) is inadequate in the case of the SDP embedded in Finland’s peripheral context. Mudge asserts that a central driver in the parties’ neoliberalisation was the interdependence between the political field of the party and the field of economics, which developed as interwar economic disruption incited an intense search within economics for novel ways to control the economy via public spending and demand management. This also led to an influx of academic economists with a “Keynesian ethic” to centre-left parties. The interdependence, however, allowed for economics’ politicisation from the 1960s onwards, this then influencing the field’s reorientation away from Keynesianism and towards monetarism and subsequently leading to the emergence and triumph of new party experts possessing a “neoliberal ethic”. Relatively stable interwar economic development, the bourgeoisie’s post-Civil War dominance in the society and academia, and the Finnish economics’ “backwardness” meant that no comparable need for seeking novel solutions existed nor was there responsiveness for the ideas developed abroad. Consequently, no interdependence between the SDP and economics developed in interwar or immediate postwar years. In the 1960s economic experts did gain a central position within the party. But these experts were not connected with the academia nor did the SDP embrace “Keynesian” prescriptions, the party and its experts instead banking on the combination of economic planning and export-led growth strategy. Neither was evidence found of economics’ politicisation as a left-wing discipline. Instead, it was oft precisely the SDP’s economic experts that critiqued “Keynesian” academic economists. In sum, arguably no interdependence between economics and the SDP developed either in this period. Instead, a new hypothesis is posited as an alternative account, namely that the SDP’s neoliberalisation can be better accounted for through the interdependence that developed between the bureaucratic field’s economic institutions and the party. Conjecturally, the interdependence, owing, among other things, to the SDP’s political appointments to the state, was politicised and the ideas of economic planning and the state’s control of the economy’s important elements were discredited in the context of the 1970s economic downturn. The interdependence, however, also led to novel kinds of experts—the state economists—gaining a powerful position within the SDP and making their interpretation of the economy common sense in the party. These experts perceived that their role in politics was to advance the “general interest” of the nation and the amorphous “people”, not any segment of it. With the export businesses hegemonic in society, in effect, this meant an emphasis on their profitability, cost competitiveness, and inflation and subsequently wage repression and budget constraint. The affinities between neoliberal notions and this policy conception and the habit in the Finnish state to conceive the world in terms of “external necessities” meant the state economists possessed great responsiveness to neoliberal ideas. While gaining preliminary support from evidence this hypothesis requires further work on several counts.

In recent years, the role of economic models in guiding government policy has provoked discussion as human wellbeing and the state of the environment are threatened by multiple sustainability challenges, most notably by the ecological sustainability crisis. The mainstream economic approach has received criticism since it has not been able to solve these challenges and thus, several alternative approaches in pursuit for a just and sustainable future have gained popularity both nationally and internationally. In this thesis I focus on the wellbeing economy concept in the Finnish welfare state in the early 2020s. Wellbeing economy was introduced in Finland by the Finnish Federation for Social Affairs and Wealth (SOSTE) in 2012 to highlight the interdependency of human wellbeing and economy. The concept has since been developed and realized by different actors of the society, but it is not yet that well-known among the public. To find out the potential role of this new economic approach in the transition towards sustainable welfare society, it is important to get a clear picture of how the concept is interpreted by its advocates. Therefore, in my case study, I examined the expert narratives of wellbeing economy. My main research question is: What does the concept of wellbeing economy mean in Finland in the early 2020s? This question is complemented by two sub-questions: 1) What are the shared contents and practices associated with wellbeing economy? and 2) What are the key differences between different conceptions of wellbeing economy? The underlying disagreements in theory and in practice of wellbeing economy might impact the integrity of the concept even if the concept formulation of wellbeing economy seems consistent. I conducted seven (7) semi-structured expert interviews from five (5) different organizations during the spring 2021. The interviews were thematically analysed with a focus on the memes of neoliberal narratives and the memes of alternative narratives as well as the conflicting memes in alternative narratives. In this study, a meme is defined as the structural component of a narrative. Finally, I identified similarities and differences in these building blocks of wellbeing economy narratives between different experts. I found that there were more shared memes than differences in the experts’ conceptions of wellbeing economy. Most of the interviewees mentioned memes of neoliberal narrative. All the interviewees mentioned the alternative narrative memes connected networks, sustainability, cooperation with others, and human dignity, prosperity, and wellbeing. Most of them also considered the Covid-19 pandemic as an opportunity in crisis. However, the meme a new economic system created the greatest division in the interpretations of wellbeing economy. In conclusion, some interviewees supported the neoliberalism more clearly while others opposed this narrative, and the rest were not clearly for or against the growth-agenda. The ambiguity of the concept especially in terms of economic growth should be further discussed in addition to specifying, for instance, what is meant by sustainability and wellbeing in wellbeing economy. Further research is also needed to find out how the discussion about wellbeing economy concept will develop in Finland and internationally.