Sukupuoli ja organisaatiot liikkeessä? Gender and Organisations in Flux?

Viimeaikainen sukupuolta ja organisaatiota käsittelevä tutkimus ja kirjallisuus on saanut paljon (toisinaan epäsuoria) vaikutteita feminismiä ympäröivistä keskusteluista. Lisäksi naisten aseman ja kokemuksien tunnistaminen organisaatioissa ja johtamisessa on vaikuttanut tutkimukseen. Erilaisten kansainvälisesti tutkittujen aiheiden kirjo on laaja: sukupuolisuhteet organisaatioiden ja johtoryhmien kulttuureissa ja kommunikaatiossa; sukupuolittunut työnjako; sukupuolittuneet hierarkiat, valta, auktoriteetti ja johtajuus organisaatioissa ja johtamisessa; sukupuolittuneet markkinat; sukupuolittuneet kuvat, symbolit ja mainokset; sukupuoli ja IT teknologia; seksuaalisuus, häirintä, kiusaaminen ja väkivalta organisaatioissa; työn ja kodin yhteensovittaminen; ja niin edelleen. Myös akateemiset organisaatiot sekä niiden sukupuolittuneet valtasuhteet ja johtaminen kaipaavat kipeästi huomiota. Useimpia mainituista alueista on tutkittu ainakin jonkin verran mutta paljon työtä on vielä myös jäljellä. Tämä kokoelma esittelee ajankohtaista suomalaista tutkimusta seuraavista teemoista: tasa-arvo organisaatioissa, naisjohtajuus, yrittäjyyden sukupuoli, verkostot, sukupuolen representaatio sekä sukupuoli ja uusi teknologia. Kokoelma on työryhmän yhdessä koostama joten se on ennen kaikkea yhteistyön tulos. Recent research and literature on the gendering of organisations has been strongly influenced, though sometimes indirectly, by debates in and around feminism, and on recognising women and women’s situations, experiences and voices in organisations and management. The range of topics and issues that have been studied internationally is vast: gender relations in organizational and management groups, cultures and communication; gender divisions of labour; gender divisions of hierarchy, power, authority and leadership in organizations and management; gendered markets; gender imagery, symbols and advertising; gender and information technology; sexuality, harassment, bullying and violence in organisations; home-work relations; and so on. There are also key issues of gender power relations in academic organizations and management themselves, which need urgent attention. Though most of these areas have been researched to some extent, much remains to be done. This collection brings together current Finnish research on: Equality in Organisations, Women in Management, Gender and Entrepreneurship, Networks, Representation of Gender, Gender and ICTs. The book has been put together by an editorial team and is thus first and foremost a collective effort

Personnel Managers and Crisis Situations. Emotion-handling Strategies

This study focuses on personnel managers in crisis situations. The interviewed personnel managers referred to emotions as a central element to be dealt with in a crisis. However, until recently, the exploration of emotions in organisational life has been de-emphasised or ignored. This study aims to bring to the surface aspects of personnel work that have so far been neglected or remained invisible. It specifically examines how personnel managers handle employees’ and their own emotions in a crisis. Based on the interviews, a number of emotional episodes were constructed. They describe the type and context of the crisis and the person(s) whose emotions are handled. The main findings of the study are the five emotion-handling strategies that could be constructed from the data. The negotiation-like manner in which personnel managers handled emotions in crisis situations proved especially interesting. They were actually negotiating emotional value for their organisations. Further, they handled their own emotions within the frame of two logics of appropriateness labelled mothering and guide-following. The episodes described also enabled identification of the values enacted by the personnel managers in handling emotions. The study provides descriptive information on emotion handling, a current and relevant feature in the practice of personnel management. It seeks to offer a frame for developing practical principles that can be helpful in a crisis. It also offers the opportunity to consider a variety of difficult situations that personnel managers may confront in their work

REVISING CURRICULA TO MEET THE FUTURE OF WORK

The world of work is changing rapidly. The ever-developing technology is changing the way we work and do business. Platform economy and consumer behaviors in using new services are tearing many traditional industries apart. Creative destruction is eating away those companies who are not able to renew themselves. At the same time, competence needs and professions change, and we can no longer fare through our careers on an education or degree we once obtained, instead, we all need to renew ourselves and update our competences. In 2021, a renewal of the Finnish higher education legislation presented the Finnish universities of applied sciences with a new task: Continuous learning. In theory, this was not a new task as all Finnish higher education institutions (HEI) had been offering further education in various ways and formats for years already. In practice, the new task calls for a fundamental change in our way of thinking. Educating degree students is a familiar task for HEIs, but incorporating continuous learning students, a heterogeneous group of consumers, who have very varying profiles, is something new. These learners would come to require completely new services and learning design from HEIs. The trends influencing this are consumerization, omnipresence of services, and ease of use everywhere. The need for renewing Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences was obvious, and the timing was right. The drivers for change were technological development, change of work, needs for learning new competences (number of learners and competence needs) and lengthening of careers, and these all created the frame and the demand for Haaga-helia to become a meeting place for continuous learning. From the start, it was obvious that the learning offering, i.e. the curriculum, should be commensurate for Haaga-Helia’s modern service industries and dynamically updating. At the same time, it would need to serve the needs of both degree students and learners who were joining to update their skills and competences. Finally, the curriculum had to be flexible in a manner that allows students to build an individual degree and learning portfolio. In a world where resources are increasingly scarce, renewal also calls for rethinking: how could we do things smarter? Despite this, our aim was not to become more efficient economically, but rather to stay abreast with the changing world and to respond to the needs this change brings along in an agile manner. In this article we present an academic renewal, the biggest development and change project ever to have taken place in Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences. The change was extensive and spanned over multiple years. The objectives of the academic renewal were crystallized as observations of the changing operating environment. An earlier version of this article was already published in Finnish (Hiillos & Huttunen, 2022). In this article, we extend our discussion to initial experience from the renewal as well as areas where we have found room for improvement

Maija kukkarossa? Talouden valta ja vallaton talous Naistutkimuspaivat 2005 [ The economic power of color and the economy - Naistutkimuspäivät 2005 ]

Naistutkimuspäivät järjestettiin marraskuussa 2005 ensi kertaa kauppatieteiden piirissä Helsingin kauppakorkeakoulun ja Svenska Handelshögskolanin sukupuolitutkimusta tekevien tutkijoiden toimesta. Päivien teemaksi oli valittu talouden valta. Tavoitteena oli virittää keskustelua siitä, mihin talouden valta ylettyy, miten talouden valta sukupuolistuu ja minkälaisia sukupuolistavia vaikutuksia taloudellisilla ilmiöillä on. Konferenssi kokosi yhteen lähes 200 naistutkimuksesta kiinnostunutta osallistujaa 13 työryhmään

Narratives by women managers about spousal support for their careers

In this article we present a qualitative study of spousal support for the careers of women managers. The research material consists of the narratives of 25 women managers in Finland. The study has two main implications. Firstly, unlike previous studies, we use a narrative approach to demonstrate that a woman manager's career and spousal support are experienced as ambiguous and evolving over the career. The support was constructed by the women managers as flourishing, irrelevant, deficient or inconsistent. Secondly, to increase our knowledge about gender relations, we combine discussion of the topic with gender order analysis and suggest that gender order is critical for an understanding of the nature of spousal support. We conclude that a male spouse who is willing to break the traditional gender order and provide his wife with various forms of support is often constructed as having a positive influence on the career of his woman manager wife. The study calls attention to families as sites of doing gender.peerReviewe

Naisjohtajuuden tutkimus Suomessa historiallisesta näkökulmasta

In this article, the aim was, on the one hand, to give from a historical perspective an overall picture of academic research on women’s leadership in Finland, and, on the other hand, to evaluate the development of this research. The chosen time-span was from 1985 to 2005. The data comprised 92 publications which were analysed by content analysis. The results showed that the research debate on women’s leadership became widely established in Finland only towards the latter end of the 1990’s, that is, following a 10–15 years time lag compared to much of the international discussion. Research on women’s leadership in Finland has been conducted predominantly by women, with only a few men showing interest in this area. During the chosen time-span most of the work has been published in university or research centre series, while internationally refereed journal articles were quite few. However, in the 2000’s the number of international journal articles has increased somewhat. Epistemologically, the Finnish research has seemed to follow international trends, specifically the relative proportion of qualitative research increased in the 2000’s. With regard to content, themes related to equality and discrimination have been the most prevalent, even if research on women’s careers and women managers’ position in work life were quite often a focus. It seems that Finnish research on women’s leadership is growing and becoming more diverse in orientation and focus. The next step is likely to be greater internationalisation of Finnish research on women’s leadership which would involve increasing international publishing and networking, as well as multinational research projects