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NGO presence is an important factor driving the policy discussion in the field of EU environmental policy, where key legislation on climate is on its way and expected up until 2030 in order to materialise the EU:s climate ambitions. Renewable energy is of the cornerstones of EU climate and energy policy in the transport sector, and the EU biofuel policy has been of topical concern for some time now. A large share of the renewable energy in the transport sector is still expected to come from biofuels, which have raised questions about the sustainability and climate benefits of EU biofuels policy. The sustainability issues of biofuel production are kept topical not least because of active pressure from media and NGOs. Internationally, in the aftermath of the worldwide food price rise of 2007-2008, environmental NGOs were successful in turning political pressure on the topic of biofuels and land grabbing. Similarly, in the EU, environmental NGOs are vocal in this policy field and pressure from them probably played an important role in pushing the European Commission to bring forward the legislative proposal of the ILUC Directive in 2012, which aimed at limiting the negative effects of EU biofuel production and to raise the climate benefits of EU biofuels - a case of high importance for the environmental NGOs. J.L. Austin’s speech act theory outlines that to say something in the right circumstances is not always merely saying or describing, but doing something. Austin’s theory of speech acts provides both the theoretical and methodological frameworks for this thesis, where the aim is to analyse how policy is constructed through language and how environmental NGOs participate in the construction of EU biofuel policy. Rather than asking about the reasonings or possibilities behind the NGOs intentions or possibilities to participate in the shaping of policy, the aim is to show that policy is constructed by certain norms through certain speech acts. The thesis analyses NGO utterances in a set of publications and compares these utterances to the final legislative act in order to see how successful the NGO speech acts were and to what extent they were directly or indirectly reflected in final legislation. The thesis finds that saying something in the right circumstances and in the right way is indeed not only saying or describing something, but doing something. Language and words are used to do things, and the NGOs analysed here are successful in participating in the construction of EU biofuel policy through the use of language and speech acts.

Tutkielman tarkoituksena on tarkastella, miten ihmisen oleminen ja oppiminen liittyvät yhteen Martin Heideggerin filosofiassa. Tavoitteena on osoittaa, että oppiminen on sama kuin näkökulman ja mielialan muuttuminen. Tutkielman lähtökohta on Heideggerin kritiikki kartesiolaista maailmankatsomusta kohtaan. Kartesiolaisen maailmankuvan mukaan maailma koostuu subjekteista ja objekteista, ihmismielen sisäisestä ja sen ulkopuolisesta maailmasta. Heidegger väittää, että inhimillistä kokemusta ei voida erottaa sisäiseksi ja ulkoiseksi. Ihminen on jo valmiiksi erottamaton osa maailmaa eli sitä, mikä kartesiolaisessa maailmankuvassa mielletään ulkoiseksi maailmaksi. Näitä periaatteita käsitellään Heideggerin Oleminen ja aika -teokseen nojautuen mutta myös käyttäen sen kommentaareja, jotka ovat kirjoittaneet Richard Polt ja Hubert L. Dreyfus. Heideggerin käsite 'aukio' (clearing) tarkoittaa tilaa, jossa maailma näyttäytyy ihmiselle tietynlaisena riippuen siitä, minkä mielialan kanssa ihminen on samalla taajuudella eli toisin sanottuna, mikä näkökulma hänellä on. Oppiminen on mielialan tai näkökulman muutos. Kun ihminen oppii, asiat näyttäytyvät hänelle eri tavalla. Tutkielmassa esitellään Heideggerin totuuskäsitys taideteosesimerkin kautta. Samalla tavalla kuin maalauksen katsominen kertoo ihmiselle totuuden maalauksen kohteen käytöstä tai tarkoituksesta, hänen näkökulmansa kertoo hänelle asioiden totuuden kunakin hetkenä. Tässä määritelmässä totuus tarkoittaa minkä tahansa asian merkitystä. Taideteosesimerkki on peräisin Heideggerin luentokokoelmasta Taideteoksen alkuperä. Oppimisprosessissa maailma näyttäytyy ihmiselle eri tavalla kuin ennen. Opettajan tehtävä on antaa oppilaan oppia eli sallia hänen näkökulmansa muuttua luonnolliseen tahtiin pakottamatta. Tylsyyden tunne on olennainen oppimisessa, koska se sallii näkökulman muutoksen helpommin kuin muut mielialat. Ajatusten perusteluun on käytetty esimerkiksi Jan-Erik Mansikan artikkelia vuodelta 2009. Inhimillisen kokemuksen kokonaisvaltaisuus ja Heideggerin käsitys ihmisen maailmassa-olemisesta tarkoittaa oppimisen kannalta, että kokemuksemme totuudesta muuttuu. Ajattelu on mielialan muutosta ja oppiminen on ajattelua ajassa. Tätä näkemystä voidaan hyödyntää kasvatustieteissä. Esimerkiksi ajan merkitystä oppimisessa ja piilo-opetussuunnitelman roolia voidaan tutkia näistä lähtökohdista käsin.

The topic of this study is to explore how the senior business leaders construct their attitudes and describe the role of trust in the context of business transformations related to the company's business and organization, for example during mergers or acquisitions (M&A) and hyper-growth. The focus of the study is on attitudes constructed by these leaders and observed through their argumentation when talking about trust. These attitudes and argumentation are examined from the theoretic-methodological approach of qualitative attitude approach, offering a unique angle to trust research, widely dominated by quantitative research. The qualitative attitude approach relies on rhetorical social psychology and constructivist viewpoint, which draws attention to the socially constructed nature of argumentation when examining attitudes. In the qualitative attitude approach, attitude is seen as relationist, where attitude is viewed to be built in argumentation. Examining the argumentation of speech provides new insights into the role of trust in an organization. The research data consisted of five individual interviews of experienced corporate executives in top management positions (members of the company’s executive leadership team or the board of directors). The interviews were conducted in the spring and summer of 2019. These semi-structured interviews consisted of seven attitude prompts to which comments were requested. Five prompts addressed trust within the organization and two addressed leadership. In their speech, the interviewees formed statements and justifications to the questions and topics at hand, substantiating and negotiating their views. The study identified 20 different attitude constructs related to trust and two attitude constructs related to leadership overall. These attitudes were constructed from the classification of statements and justifications that emerged from the interview material. According to the qualitative attitude approach, analysis was conducted on two levels: through classifying and interpretative analysis. Attitudes were interpreted based on six evaluative argumentation patterns when talking about trust, forming six rhetoric versions of trust: Trust as a relational and interactional phenomenon across different organizational levels, Trust as an organizational catalyst, Trust as an outcome of multidimensional elements, Trust as an intentional act, Trust as a collective construct, and Trust-building as a leadership skill. The senior leaders formed these versions of trust from four subject positions - Trustor, Trustee, Observer and Evaluator of Trust, and Active Trust Builder. Positive, conditional, and negative justifications, subject positions, self-reflection, framing, and social influence were used as rhetoric and social resources to form attitudes related to trust. In the trust speech of senior business leaders, trust is described as an atmosphere of common trust, building material, and a bedrock of the company, that must be consciously and collectively built within organizations. Modern leadership was described as a school of fish with collective intelligence, a team jointly creating success. Trust-building needs to be contributed by the whole organization but it’s also seen as a leadership skill just like budgeting. The benefits of trust for organizations are empirically indisputable. Trust helps an organization to bear and share risks, creates psychological safety at all levels of the organization as well as supports risk-taking and decision-making in transformational situations.

The number of unskilled workers working in Finnish manufacturing has been declining in recent years. From 2010 to 2017 the total number of workers in Finnish manufacturing declined by roughly 40 000 workers and the number of unskilled workers, as defined in this paper, declined by roughly 30 000 workers during the same time-period. This paper examines the role that outward foreign direct investment has played in the decline of the employment of unskilled workers in Finnish manufacturing over the years 2010-2017 and whether foreign direct investment directed to certain countries has contributed to the decline more than investment directed to other countries. Theories on international fragmentation of production suggest that the most unskilled labour-intensive processes are shifted to countries more abundant in unskilled labour. To estimate the effects of foreign direct investment on the number of unskilled workers working in Finnish manufacturing a dataset containing the average annual wage of all workers in Finnish manufacturing, the value of output, the value of the stock of machinery and the number of employees in foreign affiliates is used. The dataset covers the years 2010-2017.Turnover in foreign affiliates and the value of imported intermediate goods are used as alternative measures for foreign direct investment in separate models. The regression model is a first differences model where the number of unskilled workers is the dependent variable and the other variables mentioned above are the independent variables. The first differences models do not yield any statistically significant results and neither do alternative specifications used in this paper, which are a second differences estimator and a lagged effects estimator where the all other variables are differenced twice and the variable describing foreign direct investment is differenced once. These results do not necessarily mean that foreign direct investment has played no role in the decline of the number of unskilled workers working in Finnish manufacturing but the effects are not significant on an aggregated industry level. This question should be studied more carefully using more specific industry-level data or even firm-level data.

The way the field of Global Development Studies treats the concept of development” is far from consistent. Furthermore, with the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals the focus of Global Development Studies has become even more divided. There is particularly a gap in the literature when it comes to examining the current definition of development in Global Development Studies. This thesis tries to bridge this gap by exploring how development is defined in contemporary development studies journals and institutes. This thesis follows the notion that meaning imposed on concepts make a difference, thus, concepts cannot be employed freely without perpetuating some type of mental structures. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to review how contemporary scholars in Global Development Studies infer meaning on the concept of development through their academic articles. The study was conducted as an integrative literature review and thoroughly explored the implicit meanings given to development. The material used as data for the study were articles published by two institutes, the Global Development Studies research unit at the University of Helsinki and the International Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and in three key journals, Development and Change, Globalizations, and World Development. The analysis was carried out in two stages, a primary deductive analysis on the abstracts of 259 articles, and a secondary inductive analysis on 19 representative articles read in their entirety. Using the theoretical framework of Nightingale (2019) on Narratives of Sustainable Development, eight narratives of development were formulated and utilised as a framework in the primary analysis. The results show that most scholars in Global Development Studies employ the concept of development freely, without explicit consideration given to its meanings. The narrative of development as Freedom is most frequently contributed to in the articles, and a focus on human capabilities is prevalent throughout most of the articles reviewed. Whereas alternatives to development is present as a recurring narrative, the classical approach to development, particularly as something done in favour of the Global South and with a focus on economic factors, is still more salient in the results. Additional studies on this topic with a larger scope and a more open search strategy would be welcomed. Future research should also be conducted on other areas of importance to development, such as the working papers produced by multilateral organisations, to further inform our understanding of how the meaning of development is constructed.

This thesis attempts to examine how much a representative consumer per each country is willing to pay to avoid global warming by analysing their welfare gains from having a smoother consumption path. Temperature variations affect economic activity, and consumption is subject to shocks related to global warming. I start by reviewing the economic literature that studied the relationship between temperatures and economic activity. I highlight which are the main effects on the economy that are correlated to rising temperatures and I review the methods that are usually employed by economists to assess environmental damages. I then take a sample of 163 countries and compute the welfare gains for each country for having a smoother consumption path, following the method used by Lucas (2003). To do this, I use country-level household consumption data and I set values for the risk aversion coefficient following the suggestions of the previous economic literature. I repeat the experiment with a smaller sample of 72 countries, this time using country-specific risk aversion coefficients retrieved from Gandelman and Hernández-Murillo (2015). In both cases, I obtain that most of the countries have welfare gains lying in the order of 10^-2 and 10^-3. Using annual temperature data, I test the Spearman correlation coefficient between welfare gains and average temperatures. Although the previous literature stressed the adverse effects of global warming on the economy, I find no significant correlation between these two variables. Countries that are more at risk do not display higher welfare gains than countries with a lower risk of imminent climate damages. To explain my results, I then consider determinants of risk aversion other than temperature and conclude that risk aversion, and consequently the value of welfare gains, can depend on several other factors.

Small number of firms with substantially high growth create most new jobs. These firms have caught lots of attention, but little is known about the persistence of their fast growth. In this thesis I investigate the growth persistence of high-growth firms in Finland during 2001-2010. High-growth firms are identified as the fastest growing on percent of all firms and growth is indicated by growth in employees and growth in sales. Results show that high-growth firms tend to have low growth rates in the following period and the probability of repeating fast growth is small. The rapid growth thus does not predict high growth in the future.

Carbon pricing is gaining momentum across developing countries such as the Philippines. Along with its strong commitment to increase the shares of renewable energy sources and excise taxes on fuels already in place, the government passed the House Bill No. 4939 aiming to tax households Php 1 for every kilogram of $CO_2$ emission per kilowatt hour (kWh) of power consumption. This raises varying opinions in the public if carbon tax is necessary compared to the amount of emissions of the country as a whole, amounting only to .48\% of total global emissions. Existing literature yields diverse results on the progressiveness of carbon tax in terms of its distributional effects. Most developed countries with active carbon taxation prove it to be progressive across different income groups. However, in developing countries such as the Philippines, studies show varying outcomes -- some argue that carbon tax would be regressive and would hurt the most vulnerable populations. Others also say that it would most affect the middle class, while few conclude that it can progressive in some developing countries. The Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) is used in this thesis to determine the change in household consumption across different income groups in the Philippines. The results show a regressive reaction to the increase in the price of electricity. The simulation resulted to a nearly similar pattern in the overall changes in consumption by varying degrees. The changes are most substantial in the poorest and richest households, meanwhile slight changes in the middle groups. However, by taking the income and cross-price elasticity of demand, the commodities are determined to be whether a necessity or luxury good and a complement or substitute good. The maximizing household then decides from which commodities to cut back in order to compensate to the carbon tax on electricity. The lowest income has the most percentage increase in the consumption of electricity, compensating from the necessities such as food. The middle groups follow by less percentage increase. Meanwhile, the highest income decreases its budget share for electricity, making way to increase on its other more important expenses. The elasticity of demand for carbon-intensive goods plays a role in determining the distributional effects of a carbon tax. In this thesis, the Php 1 carbon tax would affect the lowest income household in substantial amount compared to their actual energy consumption. This concerns policy makers of the social equity, and fairness of carbon tax. The House Bill No. 4939, when approved, takes the first step to adapting carbon tax in the Philippines.

Tutkielman tavoitteena on tarkastella uintiseurojen valmennusorganisaatioita liikunta- ja urheilupolitiikan toimeenpanijoina. Taustalla on liikunnan ja urheilun kansainvälisessä yhteiskunnallisessa teoreettisessa keskustelussa esiin noussut vastakkainasettelu kilpa- ja huippu-urheilun kehittämisen ja mahdollisimman monille kansalaisille liikunta- ja urheilumahdollisuuksien tarjoamisen välillä. Jälkiperustahakuisen tutkimusotteen avulla on tarkoituksena analysoida tämän vastakkainasettelun tuottamisprosessia liikunnan ja urheilun keskusjärjestötason rakenneuudistuksesta (1993) tähän päivään. Toinen keskeinen taustatekijä on tällä hetkellä käynnissä oleva Suomen Olympiakomitean koordinoima huippu-urheilun muutostyö. Tämän tarkoituksena on tuottaa huippu-urheilun suomalainen malli, joka on eettisiltä periaatteiltaan kestävä ja mahdollistaa suomalaisten urheilijoiden menestymisen kansainvälisissä arvokilpailuissa. Valmennusorganisaatioiden diskursiivista toimintaympäristöä tarkastellaan Ernesto Laclaun kehittämän ideologia- ja diskurssianalyysin avulla. Tätä käytetään myös tutkielman analyysimenetelmänä, tarkasteltaessa kelluvien merkitsijöiden kiinnittymistä diskursseihin. Diskursiivista toimintaympäristöä analysoidaan liikunnan ja urheilun yhteiskunnallisella toimintakentällä tuotetun liikuntaa ja urheilua kaikille -diskurssin ja kilpa- ja huippu-urheiludiskurssin vastakkain asettelun avulla. Liikuntaa ja urheilua -diskurssin vaikutusta valmennusorganisaatioihin tutkitaan kulttuuris-kognitiivisen institutionalismin mukaisen institutionalisaation avulla, jossa keskeistä on jaettujen uskomusten objektifikaation kasvu. Huippu-urheilun muutostyön toimeenpanoa analysoidaan alhaalta ylöspäin suuntautuvan John Campbellin translation -toimeenpanomallin avulla. Tässä mallissa keskeistä on, että politiikan toimeenpanossa olemassa olevilla rakenteilla, käytännöillä ja merkityksillä on aina väliä.Tutkimuksessa hahmotetaan huippu-urheilun muutostyön toimeenpanoa uinnissa tämän prosessin kannalta keskeisen Huipulle tähtäävän uimarin urapolun avulla. Vertaan valmennusorganisaatioiden paikallista kiinnittymistä diskursseihin urapolun kriteereihin ja analysoin tämän vaikutusta toimeenpanoon. Tutkielman keskeisiä tuloksia olivat, että kahtiajaottelun takia valmennusorganisaatioissa on käynnissä jatkuva kamppailu merkityksenannoista. Jatkuva kamppailu on johtanut siihen, että kummankaan diskurssin merkityksenannot eivät ole täysin institutionalisoituneet valmennusorganisaatioiden toimijoiden asenteisiin, eikä toimintatapojen merkityksenantoihin. Ne näyttäytyvät limittäisinä diskursseina paikallisesti valmennusorganisaatioissa. Tällä tutkimuksessa nähdään olevan väliä huippu-urheilun toimeenpanon kannalta, joissain valmennusorganisaatioissa mahdollistavasti ja joissain tuoden toimeenpanolle merkittäviä haasteita.

Migration has been increasing steadily during the past decades and it has become an important phenomenon around the globe. It affects both the developed and the developing world and most of the migration still happens from a poorer country to a richer one (South-North migration). Migration can have both positive and negative effects for the source country’s economy. On one hand, the so-called 'brain drain', where the much-needed talent flows away, can be considered as a bad phenomenon. On the other hand, this negative effect can be mitigated i.e. by the resulting intra-family remittances that contribute to the economy of the source country. Nowadays, the amount of remittances is over three times the amount of the Official Development Aid (ODA). The possibility for migration could also potentially build an incentive for the source country’s individuals to gain education. The purpose of this thesis is to explain these effects in the context of the Least Developed Countries. In this thesis, a model is being built, which explains both the education investments and the remittance decision-making in among the families in the LDCs. The starting point is a two-sided altruistic OLG-model between the parent and the child. It explains the parent’s incentive to invest in her child’s education and also her child’s incentive for remitting money to his parent. The model is first derived in a closed country after which it is compared to a model that is open for migration. It is assumed that both the educated and non-educated worker’s can migrate. When the wage ratio between the educated and non-educated workers’ is smaller in the country of destination than in the source country, the educational attainment level doesn’t increase. Another important issue is the fact that the poor families are liquidity constrained. These assumptions, together with the symmetric information of the true ability of the migrants, are found to decrease the educational attainment level in the source country. Hence, migration seems to benefit the economies of the LDCs only from remittances. If the model assumes asymmetric information between the employer of the destination country and the migrant worker, it is possible to derive a result where the educational attainment level of the source country increases. This is because the workers with lower productivity can benefit from the higher output of the high-productivity workers. The effect is, however, temporary and if the workers are able to signal their true ability with low enough costs, the effect is also relatively small. Asymmetric information might, however, explain the discrimination that the higher than average ability migrants face and thus also explain the high proportion of entrepreneurs among the migrants compared to the destination country’s population. This thesis doesn’t take into account the effects of remittances to the economic growth. The results of the model, however, suggest that at least the LDCs may suffer from the migration due to the decreased attainment level of education and thus the resulting lower per capita output. Migration can hence deepen the poverty trap that the poor countries already face. If, however, the received remittances are used in education or other investments that helps the economy grow, the migration can still be positive also for the poor countries. The remittances may at least help to reduce the poverty of the LDCs in absolute terms.