Abstracts 2002
Sosiologia Volume 39, Number 1, 2002:
Three Dimensions of the Concept of Generation - The Importance of the Discursive Level in the Construction of Generational Consciousness
Semi Purhonen, Master of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki
The article examines the Mannheimian view of the concept of generation in a critical sense and argues that it lacks a full-size elaboration of the idea of a "discursive dimension" of generation, which is of great importance in the construction of societal generations, especially with regard to generational consciousness. The starting point is the notion that the traditional Mannheimian concept of generation appears to be somewhat insufficient if the focus of interest is on large-scale societal generations and their experiences.
Although the Mannheimian view of the process of the "actualisation" of generations, with its key concepts such as "generation location" and the "generation unit", provides a framework which has a certain value, it is argued that its scope is limited to the "objective dimension" of societal generations. This objective dimension includes three elements, namely biological age group, the age group's shared experiences, and the "actualised" (i.e. politically mobilised) generation, based on a shared key experience. Ultimately this Mannheimian view is convincing only in those analyses which concentrate on the politically mobilised generation unit as the visible part of a larger societal generation that is never in itself the focus of attention. However, in order to have the relevance which Mannheim claims the concept of generation has, some kind of idea of large-scale generations is also required; only then does it become possible to speak about generational consciousness in a wider sense. Without the idea of a "subjective dimension" of generation, i.e. a generational consciousness or "we-sense" which the members of a generation all share, it is impossible to understand generation as an important form of collective identity.
The discursive dimension of societal generations has remained particularly underdeveloped. This is crystallised in the way that the political mobilisation of a generation unit is usually seen as the only possible way for a generation to become actualised. Contrary to this, the term "discursive dimension" (of a generation) is used in the article to refer to all the possible ways of articulating generational experiences (with political mobilisation being only one possible way). Understood in this sense, the discursive dimension becomes important since it is possible to argue that generational consciousness is always based on some kind of discursive breakthrough, especially the institutionalisation of the name of the generation in question. Moreover, it is argued that the discursive dimension functions as a mediating level between the objective and subjective dimensions of a generation.
After a short discussion on the problems the discursive dimension creates for empirical research, the article concludes that the sociology of generations has to take into account not only the "objective" and "subjective" dimensions, but also the third, discursive dimension of generation, if its object is to understand the phenomen on of societal generations as fully and richly as possible.
Constructing social relationships in interaction: An analysis of a phone call
Anssi Peräkylä, PhD, Esa Lehtinen, MA, Pirjo Lindfors, MSocSci, Pirjo Nikander, PhD, Johanna Ruusuvuori, Doctor of SocSci, Liisa Tiittula, PhD, University of Tampere</p>
Social relationships come into being through day-to-day social interaction. With the help of a case analysis, this article attempts to illustrate the conversational practices that construct and reproduce social relationships. In the research data these practices include the participants' choices regarding the production of actions that elicit reciprocity, referring to other people and seeking, presenting and avoiding evaluations. The article shows how the participants' particular social relationships are produced with the help of the aforementioned practices. Since the practices of language usage and interaction are not private but shared by the members of a culture, it is reasonable to assume that the conversational means analysed in this article are in use also when other people are building other kinds of relationships.
Notion of activity in studies of sense-making: Methodological considerations on qualitative analysis
Ritva Engeström, Doctor of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki
The article discusses methodological issues related to the empirical study of sense-making. Sense making is considered in the context of people's activities, thus bringing the issue of reflexivity to the forefront. The writer focuses on different possibilities to understand the role of activity in the analysis of reflexivity, i.e. in the analysis of the actors' interpretative work and the accounts people give of their actions. The article points to methodologically constructed differences between these possibilities and discusses the alternative options of research design. The alternatives do not negate each other but reflect a polycontextual notion of an ongoing event from the viewpoint of reflexivity.
Two examples of analytical practice are used to shed light on the discussion. Drawing on ethnomethodology, conversation analysis is considered to be a 'pioneer' in the empirical analysis of reflexivity. It manifests the idea of intersubjectivity as a reality achieved in and through situated actions, belonging to conversation and institutional interaction. Taking dialogicality as a starting point, the writer examines an alternative approach that is informed by the cultural-historical theory of activity and draws on Bakhtinian thoughts. Dialogical processes are considered to be socially constructed, historically emerging and internally conflicting processes of rationality. The analysis of situated actions moves beyond the versions of intersubjective reality by focusing on language use through practices which constitute institutional activities.
Analytical practices share a methodological concern in studying meanings as phenomena which are in the making. The concern is to explicate how people's actions are studied in relation to cultural continuity. In aiming to reach orderliness in a socially constructed reality, conversation analysis relies on culturally standardised features of interaction, already known in and by society. Dialogical analysis reconstructs people's actions of sense making as manifesting the epistemology of change. In the article, analytical practices of studying actors' interpretative work are depicted for comparison with the help of two kinds of empirical units, namely the unit of observation (concerning reality to be constructed) and the unit of analysis (concerning situational actions of sense-making).
Sosiologia Volume 39, Number 2, 2002:
Economic Growth, Inequality, and the Economic Position of the Poor in the Period 1985–1995
Olli Kangas, Doctor of Social Sciences, University of Turku
The purpose of the article is to present a preliminary evaluation of the correctness of the so-called trickle-down theory, which argues that wider income differences are good for economic growth, and that growth is good for the poor. Widening income disparities would thus benefit the poor and, consequently, the theory fulfills Rawlsian principles of justice. Income data for 21 countries, for the period 1985–1995, was obtained from the Luxembourg Income Study. According to the results, there are no clear connections between inequality and economic prosperity; inequality does not encourage economic growth, and inequality does not help the poor. The greater the inequality, the worse the absolute income level of the poor. Moreover, the more prevalent the cross-sectional poverty, the more permanently the poor are stacked in their desperate position. In this respect our theory is seen to be false. However, the trickle-down theory is partially correct in arguing for the beneficial effects of economic growth for the poor: the absolute income level of the poor is dependent on what is happening in the national economy, while the incidence and depth of poverty in advanced countries is not so much associated with economic factors but is rather perceived to be a result of national distributive strategies.
The Promise of Medicine and the Politics of Life
Ilpo Helén, Doctor of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki
This essay analyses the power of modern medical technology from a historical perspective. The essence of that power is the promise that the scientific and technical art of healing makes the contemporary western man. Whereas the earlier stratum of modern medicine promised to conquer lethal illnesses such as tuberculosis and cancer, today’s most advanced medical technology – first and foremost molecule genetics – seeks the knowledge and means to shape life ’itself’ on the level of molecules and cells. It thereby promises everybody personally the chance to cure and rectify their own bodies’ and vital functions’ ’faults’ and ’shortcomings’, to enhance their quality of life right down at the basic level of cells and molecules.
Apart from conquering death, contemporary medicine is focussed on the improvement of life ”itself” and individualised health design, where one’s own life becomes the focal point of the ontological power of medicine and politics. To put it more precisely, the politics of life within modern medicine deals with uncertainty with regards to how far our knowledge and techniques will enable us to go as they reshape the conditions of our existence.
Sosiologia Volume 39, Number 3, 2002:
Did Finland stagnate? Social mobility and long-term unemployment in Finland 1970-1995
Jani Erola, Master of Social Sciences, Turku School of Economics and Business Administration
Pasi Moisio, Master of Social Sciences, European University Institute
In this paper we compare the social class of 31- to 35-year-old Finns in 1990 and 1995 to the social class of the head of the childhood family in 1970. The mobility tables were constructed using the Eriksson and Goldthorpe classification. The long-term unemployed were coded either as a singular class of destination or according to their last occupation in the class schema. Analysis showed that neither the absolute rate of mobility nor the pattern of fluidity has changed much in Finland since the last mobility studies of the 1980s. Absolute mobility is 70% among men and 83% among women, but there are still inter-generational mobility barriers between white- and blue-collar occupations, especially for men. Women tend to locate into white-collar employment in such a way that those women coming from white-collar families usually become lower-grade professionals, while those coming from blue-collar families tend to become routine non-manual employees. The recession of the early 1990s created high numbers of long-term unemployed, but it seems that they do not yet form a large enough group to have a substantial effect on mobility. The social origin of a person did not ensure protection from long-term unemployment, although those of working class origin were at most risk.
Education, Gender and Division of Labour
Sirpa Kolehmainen, Doctor of Social Sciences, University of Tampere
The article analyses the gender-specific structures of education and, in particular, how the gender-specific structures of education and occupations are intertwined. The perspective is that of equality between the sexes in society. I will describe how the level of education rose and education became differentiated by gender in Finland in the 1970s and 1980s. I will analyse whether the heightened level of education has eradicated occupational differentiation between men and women in the labour market; whether entering gender-specific education is followed by a gender-specific working life and career; and whether entering education typical for the opposite sex enables the dissolution of gender-specific divisions of labour. The longitudinal statistical data was compiled by Statistics Finland on the basis of population surveys conducted between 1970 and 1990.
Gender is one of the most significant categories into which society is organised. As gender is a key structure also in education, the education system produces gender-specific knowledge, skills and degrees. The choices men and women make are different, and they end up in different positions, occupations and fields of the labour market, which results in differences in the hierarchy. The division of labour between the sexes is a significant factor in the wider issues of gender inequality. Women's jobs and occupations are less prestigious and financially less rewarding than those held by men.
The level of education has risen fast in Finland since the 1960s. Presently women are more educated than men. Women's heightened level of education has not, however, changed the fact that different fields of education are strongly differentiated by gender. The educational choices of both men and women were as differentiated in 1990 as they were in 1970. Similarly, the principal rule in the labour market is still that men and women work in occupations typical for their sex. The gender divisions within education and the labour market reinforce one another.
On their own, educational choices untypical for one's sex do not eradicate the division of labour between the sexes in the labour market. The principal rule is that men stick to masculine occupations regardless of whether their degree is from a masculine, feminine or in this respect neutral field. Education has advanced women's chances of entering the work force and, moreover, the increased number of women in higher education has also strengthened the position of women in the labour market in more masculine occupations. Making educational choices that are typical for men was not, however, a necessary precondition for women ending up in masculine occupations. Also, women whose educational choices were feminine or in this respect neutral held masculine occupations more often than before. The principal rule also applies to women; they end up in occupations typical for their sex, regardless of their educational background.
Education is a significant factor in gender equality; even though educational choices do not necessarily affect the practices in working life that advance gender differentiation. Aiming for equality does not mean that men and women should start acting in a similar manner. Equality means that men and women have identical and equal opportunities and are treated as equals in both education and working life.
Is Poverty Inherited? The intergenerational transmission of poverty and dependence on income support
Ilpo Airio, Master of Social Sciences, University of Turku
Mikko Niemelä, Master of Social Sciences, University of Turku
This article studies intergenerational transmission of poverty and dependence on income support. From the perspective of social mobility, hereditary poverty actually constitutes social immobility, which is a key factor in cultures of poverty and dependency. The intergenerational variation in poverty is analysed from two perspectives. Firstly, how does a poor childhood manifest itself at an adult age - is poverty inherited? Secondly, is dependency on income support transmitted from one generation to the next?
The data consists of a survey conducted in 2000 (N=2400). The data forms a cross-section, and the sample consists of Finnish-speakers aged between 18 and 70.
According to the results, family background is a significant factor, even though there was no evidence of extensive inheritance of poverty and dependence on income support. Childhood and present-day poverty are, however, linked. Similarly, growing up in a family that received income support clearly adds to the risk of needing it in adulthood. A weak position in the labour market and low education are key factors behind present-day second-generation poverty and dependence on income support. Additionally, of those living on income support, young people under 35 years of age stand out from other age groups in that lowly educated unemployed young people who are second-generation recipients seem to be worst off of all.
Divided by a Common Job Market? Documenting the Employment Opportunities of Non-nationals in Finland
Akhlaq Ahmad, Master of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki
This paper discusses the attitudes and practices of employers towards the recruitment of immigrants, and their unequal access to employment opportunities in the Finnish labour market. The empirical data was gathered using the participant observation method, by answering 400 job advertisements and going through all the processes that a job seeker generally encounters in applying for a certain post. Drawing on the findings, the paper emphasises the sociocultural dimension of the labour market regarding immigrants' differential access to employment opportunities. The paper argues that, while human capital attributes such as education, language competence and previous work experience constitute essential conditions for immigrants' integration into the labour market, deficiency in these alone fails to provide a sufficient explanation for disproportionately high rates of unemployment among non-nationals. It is suggested that such a discrepancy in immigrants' and certain social groups' access to the labour market, and their allocation across the occupational hierarchy, is not the result of insufficient skills and education per se. Rather, it stems from the sociocultural embeddedness of the labour market, in which the underlying preferences of employers exclude a certain category of workers from consideration for employment. The paper therefore attempts to argue that the idea of a labour market in which the actors sell and hire labour according to the rational rules of supply and demand is rather open to doubt. Instead, it is proposed that the concept of the labour market could be more fruitfully studied as a socially and culturally constructed space, where the rules of supply and demand are shaped by a particular sociocultural reality.
Sosiologia Volume 39, Number 4, 2002:
Genetics, ethics and the incommensurability of moral positions
Piia Jallinoja, Doctor of Social Sciences, National Public Health Institute (Finland)
During the 1990s the use of prenatal screening technologies increased in Finland. Some heralded the situation as giving parents more possibilities to be in control of their and their off-spring’s health and lives. Others were worried that eugenic thinking was raising its head anew. The article analyses the disputes over and contradictions of clinical genetics, prenatal screening and abortions because of the disability of the fetus (so called selective abortions) as well as the ways in which professionals have tried to govern the situation. The puzzling morality of selective abortion is at the heart of disputes over prenatal screening. This reflects the ambivalent status of the fetus – the silent but nevertheless central actor in relation to prenatal screening and abortions. As a technical operation, abortion is a routine procedure, conducted as any other operation. On the other hand, as a choice in a woman’s life, abortion is an exception, to be considered carefully and seriously. As Keith Tester has characterized the abortion debates in the US, incommensurability characterizes also these debates over selective abortion, disability and parental responsibility. Within the field of medicine, problems related genetics and other new technologies have been addressed to an increasing extent by developing ethical guidelines and recommendations, by establishing ethics committees and by encouraging public discussion on ethics. In guidelines voluntariness and autonomy are repeated principles. The situation is paradoxical, however, and characteristic of modern societies: On the on hand there are constant demands for more ethical rules; on the other hand these rules cannot but remain superficial, since they have to be open and flexible in the face of new scientific discoveries and individuals’ life situations. Even though ethical rules are increasingly developed dissatisfaction with the state of ethics remains. A further contradiction exists between modern ethics setting the rules for advancing prenatal screening technologies and the real-life situations of pregnant mothers. In a situation where a mother has to decide about abortion an array of questions arises that is much more vast than the technical organization of voluntary, informed choice and consent, stretching to the question of how to live one’s life.
Conceptions of citizens in biotechnology policy - citizens, consumers and human beings in Finland and the European Union
Karoliina Snell, Master of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki
The rapid development of biotechnology, with its potential financial and social benefits on the one hand and the public concerns its applications raise on the other, has generated a need for a formulation of biotechnology policy. In this article, Finnish policies, strategies and memos are compared to those of the European Union. The focus is on how members of society are perceived in these documents; whether they are seen as citizens, consumers, human beings or a population affects the way in which the relationship between society and science and technology is understood. It also determines to whom the policies are responsible, and whether members of society are seen to have active or passive roles in policy-making. European Union documents place a great emphasis on citizen participation, while Finnish documents reveal a more passive idea of the citizen. Instead of being active participants in public discussion, they are perceived as a population, an object of action that can be studied and controlled. Another way of seeing members of the public in EU and Finnish documents is as human beings. Although humans are active in relation to their own bodies, they do not participate in societal decision-making. Most importantly, in both EU and Finnish documents, another detectable shift is the emergence of consumers as actors instead of citizens. Consumers are active only in the market – they do not have social responsibility for their actions. The article deals with these four conceptions of the public and their implications for the relationship between science and society.
Offender, patient or anonymous client? The controversial identification of the drug abuser
Toivo Hurme, Student of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki
The article discusses one aspect of the state controlled lifestyle risks in contemporary welfare state, the drug use. The focus of the paper is on the problematic drug user subject that is constructed in the discourses and concrete practises of Finland’s drug policy officials in 1995-2001. The theoretical inspiration for the discussion is to be found in the foucauldian analytics of government and discourse analysis, in which the social reality is expected to be a result of an ongoing process of governing of the social action, and governing of the self. The background of the article is Finland’s changed drugs situation. During the 1990’s, the consumption of illicit drugs as well as drug related problems increased tremendously. The Finnish drug policy has tried to adapt to this development, and new policy measures have emerged. The article deals with these new approaches and compares them with the traditional control practices. In the late 1990’s, new health information points for drug addicts, which included free and anonymous needle exchange services, were implemented. These services can be seen as an outcome of the ’New Public Health’ policy, extended to the field of drug policy. This policy avoids individualistic and moralistic actions and arguments, and operates on the level of certain population, in this case intravenous drug users. The traditional drug control mechanisms - policing, individual sentencing, diagnosis and treatment – are individualising, excluding and normalising techniques of power. The New Public Health approach shifts the aims of drug policy away from these targets to the environment and habits of drug use, and tries to influence on these by providing information and instruments for safer drug use. The traditional drug policy measures see the drug user either as an unmoral offender or pathological patient, who should be normalised and re-integrated to society by individually defined sanctions and treatment processes. However, the Public Health oriented drug policy understands the drug user as a rational actor capable of making choices for his own good, a client who should be responsibilised and empowered to act accordingly. The new adaptive drug policy practises have emerged beside the criminalising police control and pathologising medical control. As a result, the actual drug policy in Finland is at rather ambivalent situation. The official practises implicate different aims and different understanding about the subject of the policy, and this may problematic also for the life and identity of the drug users themselves.
You get what you ask for. Sex survey questionnaires and homosexuality in Finland
Tuula Juvonen, Doctor of Social Sciences, University of Tampere
This article focuses on the underlying assumptions of the questionnaires of three subsequent national sex surveys published in 1974, 1993 and 2001. I analyse especially the changes of questionnaire structure and wording in regard to homosexuality, in order to study how and to what effect research itself creates and legitimises certain sexual distinctions in Finland. The first survey conducted by Kai Sievers, Osmo Koskelainen and Kimmo Leppo in 1971 - the very same year when homosexual deeds for both women and men were legalised in Finland – explicitly excluded homosexuality as a topic to be explored fully. The decision was made due to a sample size of 2250, which would not have allowed for a decent analysis of a minority sexuality, but also because the non-responses in the pilot study indicated homosexuality to be, at that time, a too sensitive issue to report. When Elina Haavio-Mannila and Osmo Kontula got public funding for their research in early 1990s, they decided on doing comparative research by only slightly modifying the preceding questionnaire. Modifying was done by leaving out some old questions and adding in, when necessary, new topics. Yet the new questions concerning homosexuality were just uncritically added in the margins of the already existing heterosexual frame of the old questionnaire. The old questions for their part were not critically proved for their validity and reliability in a situation where the laws concerning homosexuality were rapidly changing. The structural distinction between hetero- and homosexuality was again enforced in subtle changes and differences in respective question wordings. Same problems became pointed in the repeated comparative survey by the same research team in late 1990s. The decisions concerning the architecture of the questionnaires and the wording used created a marked heteronormative bias not only in the questionnaires, but also in reporting the results and in the following public discussions. Thus taking all these surveys together they were effective in enforcing a hostile climate towards homosexual people in Finland by just privileging uncritically the taken for granted heterosexual norm.