Browsing by Subject "Identity"

The discourses of Young Muslim men in the West have tended to focus on marginalisation, deviancy and threat. Often the voices of the targets of these stigmatizing discourses are not heard and thus, they do not have the possibility to re-define or resist the dominant discourses. This Thesis investigates how young Muslim men living in Finland, surrounded by discourses of threat and marginalisation, construct Muslimness and how they position themselves and others in that construction. The data was collected by semi-structured thematic group interviews, conducted in small groups or dyads, with 12 young men aged from 18-29 years. The data was analysed using a Critical Discursive Psychological approach, focusing on how the young men are constructed and positioned by the larger societal discourses and how they respond to these constructions, as well as on how they construct their identities in the immediate interaction situation. The analysis focused on three concepts; interpretative repertoires, ideological dilemmas and subject positions, which all shed a light on how identities are constructed and negotiated in interaction in relation to the sociocultural context. In the data 3 interpretative repertoires, 3 ideological dilemmas and 5 subject positions were distinguished. The results show that the participants negotiate their identities in relation to various actors, as well as in relation to relevant identity categories such as gender and generation. In their talk, it can be distinguished that they sometimes accept and repeat, yet sometimes question and re-define how Muslimness is constructed in the societal discourses.

The goal of this thesis is to better understand the role and the impact of the DiscoverEU initiative. It allows 18 year-old EU citizens to travel and explore Europe for up to a month by giving them a free Interrail pass. The Interrail programme however, was not created by the EU but is being used as a tool by the latter to promote European solidarity, their vision of a European identity and to further a sense of belonging. To conduct this study, I used Instagram to gather the participants’ posts and captions. All the data I gathered was public and the participants remained anonymous throughout my thesis. I proceeded with qualitative content analysis to analyse my data in order to observe what kind of narrative was being created online by the participants. European identity, the significance of travel and the decision to target the younger generations were topics of particular interest throughout this thesis. DiscoverEU aims at providing a shared experience these young people can relate to and bond over so that the EU becomes something concrete in their mind, something they can identify with and support later on in their life as well. This thesis finds that the EU is using DiscoverEU as a tool to promote European identity in numerous ways. The participants are sharing mostly positive experiences but only a few European statements about European identity. However, criticism towards the better off was also raised.

Research has shown how individual identity may be either a burden or a supporting factor to group behavior. The issue is of relevance to business research where especially the field of supply chain management has been concerned with how relationships between supplier and buyer organizations may be facilitated. Yet, the interorganizational context has remained relatively less studied compared to the intraorganizational in terms of identity, whereas supply chain management studies have often disregarded behavioral factors. This study contributes to these shortcomings by examining how the identity types of organizational identity, collective identity and intergroup relational identity relate to commitment to supply relationships through the interaction of perceived supply disruption risk and individual risk attitude. Particularly, it is argued that individuals exhibit identity-protective cognitions and may, thus, assess risks threatening their identities as lower than others. A moderated mediation model with the constructs identity type, perceived supply disruption risk, individual risk attitude, and commitment to supply relationship was tested by collecting data from (N=)42 business students with a scenario-based role-playing experiment. The respondents were primed with an identity and consequently surveyed with items regarding the studied constructs. The data was then analyzed with exploratory factor analysis and moderated regression analysis. The results indicate that identity type is related to perceived supply disruption risk so that when an identity among the organization or supply chain relevant to an individual decision-maker exists, they tend to perceive the risks lower. However, the type of identity was of no significance to the strength of this effect. Likewise, the assumed mechanisms of mediation and moderation were not supported by the data. The findings show how the activation of organizational and interorganizational identities are essential in terms of organizational behavior and interorganizational relationships. On the one hand, identity may influence individual perceptions regarding other organizations. On the other hand, the identity or the perceptions do not always lead to congruent behavior. In this vein, it is possible that commitment to a relationship is more about what one commits to, than to whom. Future research could account for this and extend the presented model with more observations and concepts for better explanatory power.