Writing Feminist Futures : Connecting Form and Meaning in Popular Speculative Fiction for Women

The thesis analyses how three recent works of popular speculative fiction construct their ideologically feminist message. The Power by Naomi Alderman, The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird, and Dietland by Sarai Walker all create feminist utopias that engage in social critique of contemporary society. Their feminisms are influenced by fourth-wave feminism and include recognisable connections to current public discussions. However, the novels’ subversive societies only focus on the effect of gender on social hierarchies of power, omitting the intersectional examination of other factors influencing the position of a group or an individual despite introducing characters identified as belonging to marginalised groups. The feminisms introduced by the novels therefore follow a mainstream understanding, instead of suggesting new or controversial ideas. All three novels reverse gender roles and place women in previously male-dominated positions of power. Their feminisms question the stability and validity of the patriarchal power hierarchies in contemporary societies. The novels connect this feminist message to their form by using narrative tools recognised as typical for fiction written by women, particularly their voice and narrative situation. To instil familiarity within their subversive stories the novels borrow elements popularised by chick-lit and include visual breaks in the narrative. The paratextual elements further contextualise the novels as social critique to ensure a feminist reading. The connection between form and meaning supports authorial intention over the reading of the novels and the interpretation of the feminisms of the novels as intended, allowing for their ideologies to become accessible to a wide readership.Pro gradu analysoi kolmen viihteellisen spekulatiivisen romaanin tapaa rakentaa feministinen ideologia. Naomi Aldermanin The Power, Christina Sweeney-Bairdin The End of Men ja Sarai Walkerin Dietland tarkastelevat kriittisesti nyky-yhteiskuntaa feministisen utopian kautta. Niiden feminismit pohjaavat neljännen aallon feminismille ja viittaavat tunnistettavasti tämänhetkiseen julkiseen keskusteluun. Romaanit kuitenkin keskittyvät yhteiskuntakritiikissään vain sukupuolen vaikutukseen sosiaalisten valtasuhteiden määrittäjänä eivätkä tarkastele intersektionaalisesti yksilön tai ryhmän positiota, vaikka identifioivat osan hahmoista marginalisoituihin ryhmiin. Romaanien rakentamat feminismit seuraavatkin valtavirtaista feminististä ajattelua eivätkä tuo siihen uusia tai vielä kiistanalaisia näkemyksiä. Jokainen kolmesta romaanista kääntää odotetut sukupuoliroolit päälaelleen ja asettaa naiset patriarkaalisessa yhteiskunnassa miehille tyypilliseen valta-asemaan. Niiden feminismit kyseenalaistavat nyky-yhteiskunnan hierarkian vakauden ja oikeutuksen. Romaanit tukevat feministisiä ideologioitaan käyttämällä kerronnassa ääntä ja kertojaa naiskirjallisuudelle tyypillisellä tavalla. Kumouksellisen juonen rinnalla romaanit hyödyntävät erityisesti chick-lit-kirjallisuudesta tuttuja visuaalisia elementtejä luomaan tunnistettavuutta. Parateksti sekä kirjojen kannet kontekstualisoivat romaanit yhteiskuntakriittiseksi naiskirjallisuudeksi vahvistaen niiden feminististä luentaa. Muodon ja viestin yhdistäminen tukee tekstin intentiota ja tekstien tulkintaa feministisinä, mikä mahdollistaa romaanien ideologian leviämisen laajalle lukijakunnalle samankaltaisena

Doing Well by Doing Better: Entrepreneurs and Sustainability

We examine how entrepreneurial ventures can employ sustainability to do well (create a competitive advantage) by doing better (creating more social good than is created by Corporate Social Responsibility). We compare and constrast CSR and sustainability and examine factors influencing the competitive strategies of large, established firms versus entrepreneurial firms. We conclude that established firms are likely to focus on CSR while entrepreneurial ventures are more likely to pursue sustainability as a strategy for creating private and social value and durable competitive advantage. Established firms will do well by doing good, while entrepreneurial ventures will do well by doing better

Management Education and the Professions

Ongoing concerns about a perceived disconnection between management education and management practice and the limited skill base of business school graduates are evident in the literature. These problems have been looked at through various lenses, and the professional model of education has shown promise in addressing perceived problems with business schools and their graduates. Using concepts from the sociology of the professions including jurisdiction, professional identity, and the nature of professional work, this article explores recent criticisms of management education and addresses the stages and issues involved in migrating to a model of education that mirrors that used in the professions

Language and Communication in Entrepreneurship Research

Language and communication play critical roles in the process of entrepreneurship and are at the heart of a so-called entrepreneurial skillset. To succeed, entrepreneurs need to have efficient communication skills on the one hand, and language awareness and discursive consciousness on the other. This chapter sets out to lay out the current state of research that addresses the role of language and communication in entrepreneurship and published in major entrepreneurship publication outlets written by entrepreneurship scholars. This review demonstrates that despite studying questions related to language and communication, there seems to be no or very little cross-fertilization between entrepreneurship scholarship and disciplines concerned with language, communication and/or discourse. We also provide a case study based on a specific area of entrepreneurial activity: crowdfunding. We hope this chapter will inspire linguists who scrutinize entrepreneurial interactions to be mindful of entrepreneurship theories and the specific contexts of the industry.This book chapter is published as Parhankangas A, Darics E. Language and Communication in Entrepreneurship Research. In: Darics E, ed. Language Awareness in Business and the Professions. Cambridge University Press; 2022, Chapter 3;39-61.https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108696159.006. Posted with permission

The Aha Moment! The Effects of Serendipity and Innovation on Crowdfunding Performance

Serendipity has played a significant role in the history of invention. Yet, little is known about whether serendipitous inventions are perceived as more or less innovative and thus achieve greater success in seeking funding than those resulting from deliberate processes. The current study explores this issue using a matched-pair sample of 168 serendipitous and non-serendipitous inventions used by entrepreneurs to raise capital through crowdfunding. The results demonstrate that serendipitous inventions are more positively related to crowdfunding success than non-serendipitous ones via perceptions of product innovativeness. Thus, serendipitous inventions appear to be socially rewarded rather than penalized in the context of crowdfunding.This article is published as Oo, P. P., Sahaym, A., Hmieleski, K. M., Chan, R., & Parhankangas, A. (2024). The Aha Moment! The Effects of Serendipity and Innovation on Crowdfunding Performance. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/10422587241254069. Posted with permission. © The Author(s) 2024.Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC 4.0). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage)

Critical Language and Discourse Awareness in Management Education

Communication and, through it, language have become key elements of business and organizational life. How organizations interact within their walls and with the outside world fundamentally affects business processes, creating organizational culture, shaping public perceptions, and influencing consumer choices. This essay calls for a greater acknowledgment of language and communication and suggests that management educators may want to review how they are incorporated in management education curricula. Expanding on the skill-based approach typically adopted in business school classes, the essay points to the utility of exposing business students to the dual function of language as a means of doing work and as a social action that constitutes social reality. Drawing on examples from scholarship in linguistics and discourse analysis, the essay demonstrates that the ability to notice, identify, and reflect on linguistic and discourse practices is a crucial managerial skill. Nurturing such analytical and thinking skills enables people to become not only better communicators but also critical thinkers able to understand and challenge when social control, power, or injustice is enacted in organizations

The role of gender in entrepreneur-investor relationships : A signaling theory approach

Author's accepted version (postprint).Available from 11/01/2018.This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Alsos, G. A. & Ljunggren, E. (2016). The role of gender in entrepreneur-investor relationships: A signaling theory approach. Entrepreneurship: Theory & Practice, which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/etap.12226. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving (http://olabout.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-820227.html).This study adopts a gender perspective to analyze funding decisions made by an investment fund that invests equity stakes in new ventures. Prior research has indicated that there is gender skewness in risk capital investments resulting from a combination of demand- and supply-side issues. We apply signaling theory to examine the interface between demand and supply to understand gender biases related to risk capital investments. In-depth analyses of decision documents from four investment cases show that gender plays a role in the signals that are communicated in the prefunding entrepreneur–investor relationship

Reward-Based Crowdfunding Research and Practice

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Attributes of legitimate venture failure impressions

The current research investigates the effectiveness of impression management strategies available to entrepreneurs to foster social legitimacy with stakeholders following venture failure. We use a conjoint experiment to examine how different attributions of causes of failure influence the general public's legitimacy judgments. The most effective strategy proves to be the entrepreneurs distancing themselves from the failure, in that they attribute the failure to external factors that are not under the entrepreneurs' volitional control, and brought about by circumstances that are unlikely to reoccur. Our analysis also considers how the audience members' dispositional agreeableness and general self-efficacy influence judgment formation

Insight versus Effort. Communicating the Creative Process Leading to New Products

Studies of the creative process identify two relevant sources of new ideas and products: Insight, a sudden, dreamlike, illuminating experience; and effort, deliberate, structured, hard work. With the aim of investigating the communication of the creative process,this research proposes that consumers hold associations between insight and arts, and between effort and sciences. These lay theories induce differential evaluations of new products: consumersevaluate more favorably artistic and scientific products presented as the outcome of insight or effort, respectively. The strength of the proposed effects, however,depends on the level of consumer expertise in the relevant product domain. We maintain that,as audience expertise increases, lay theories become less relevant and the effects of creative process narratives are attenuated. Five studies support the proposed conceptual framework and showthatnarratives of thecreative process influence the evaluations of new products, depending on the product domain and on consumer expertise