Arctic state, Arctic nation? Arctic national identity among the post-Cold War generation in Norway

\ua9 2014,Taylor & Francis. In Norway, the Arctic has taken centre stage as a primary political priority. Claiming status as an ‘Arctic state’ may not be controversial based on formal geographical and legal definitions; however, the way in which the Arctic has thus been incorporated in the public\u27s sense of Norwegian national identity is less clear. Against the background of the Norwegian government\u27s discursive construction of a national Arctic identity in its High North strategy, this study assesses the reception this official identity has received. Over 200 young Norwegians, having largely grown up in a post-Cold War world marked by rapidly changing Arctic climate and geopolitics, were asked about their sense of Arctic identity. Contrary to governmental efforts to frame the Arctic as a fundamentally national matter, the respondents\u27 insights highlight the multifaceted nature of identities, as a sense of Arctic identity contextually shifts between sub-national, national and supranational scales. This study thus suggests a balancing act faced by states across the region as they seek to legitimize state-level primacy and national unity in the circumpolar North

Mythologies of Finnishness in Advertising

The purpose of this study is to explore the dimensions of Nordic regionality through advertisement-based narratives of Finnishness. Building from theory on myth, this study responds to the call for more research that reflects “greater sensitivity to place and history” in operationalizing regionally based marketing and consumer research (Chelekis and Figueiredo, Regions and Archipelagos of Consumer Culture: A Reflexive Approach to Analytical Scales and Boundaries. Marketing Theory, 15(3), 321–345, 2015). Through an interpretive inquiry of print advertisements that invoke the idea of Finnishness, we find that mythical portrayals of Finnishness in advertising appeal to, reinforce, and extend a collective sense of national and cultural identity. Advertisements also leverage national symbolism and implied domestic product origins to propagate localist, protectionist, and regionalist narratives with moralistic undertones. A final major theme explicated is the mythical portrayal of a rustic lifestyle of the past, which enables Finnish consumers to regain a material connection with a “paradise lost” of traditional Finnishness. Appeals to international consumer segments also use idyllic imagery from the Finnish countryside and nature in the form of an “exotic other.” We discuss the implications of our analysis for theorizations of mythologies and their relationships with regions and cultural strategy