Moral panic,moral regulation and essentialization of identities: Discursive struggle over unethical business practices in the Finnish national media

The study sheds light on the language of moral panic and moral regulation in the Finnish news media over a 9-year period on the subject of cartels and cartel agreements. What makes the case particularly interesting is that the object of the most explicit moral panic was the introduction of new laws (leniency programmes) designed to regulate illegal cartel behaviour. The main argument is that the construction of both moral regulation and moral panic in news media takes place through essentializing discursive claims that contribute to national identity construction. The study contributes to current literature on moral panics as ideologico-discursive phenomena and throws some light on the power-laden discursive processes that work to reconstruct, essentialize and stabilize identities. In addition, there are some suggestions as to why some moral panics fail to develop.     

Grid-group cultural theory and the causal mechanism approach as requisite partners. Explaining enforcement decisions in West European labor inspection

As street-level bureaucrats, labor inspectors enjoy much autonomy and discretion in the performance of their job. To avoid this freedom being abused, two measures are often taken. First, supervisors keep oversight by inspecting case files. Second, labor inspectors are subjected to a competitive system of targets that encourages competition. These two measures resemble two subtypes of organizational control in grid-group cultural theory, respectively hierarchical and individualistic control. The impact of both types of control has been analyzed in an ethnographic case study in four field organizations of West European labor inspection. The overarching grid-group cultural theory framework was particularly valuable to illustrate how tensions between hierarchical and individualistic control lead to inconsistencies in the enforcement styles that labor inspectors apply. However, it did not seem sufficient to explain why labor inspectors apply a hierarchical enforcement style in some investigations and an individualistic enforcement style in others. This paper illustrates how the integration of grid-group cultural theory with two middle-range theories in the causal mechanism approach (i.e. moral disengagement and role strain theory) could provide such proximate explanations and thus strengthen the explanatory power of grid-group cultural theory.