Insecurity related to working life by age groups in Finland and Estonia in the 1990s

This article compares the reasons for insecurity related to working life in different age groups in Finland and Estonia, and the coping strategies evident in the two countries. Insecurity related to working life is more common in Finland than in Estonia. The differences between the two countries are more distinct with respect to experienced work-related insecurity than to an experienced lack of well-being linked to work. This shows that feelings of insecurity are affected not only by external factors, but also by internal factors linked to a person's earlier development. The most common causes of insecurity for people of working age are unemployment, mental strain and difficulties in interpersonal relationships at the work place. The individual's willingness to find means of coping at work is more clearly evident in Estonia than in Finland. People of working age in Finland are more likely to attempt to change the external conditions of work than are their Estonian counterparts.     

STRANGE YET STYLISH HEADGEAR VR consumption and the construction of gender

This article examines how gender is inscribed and reproduced in the consumption of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. The focus is on how virtual reality systems become embedded in 'everyday life' through leisure and consumption, and how the spectacles and disciplines associated with consumption sites produce gendered virtual subjects. Studies of new communications technologies have tended to polarize between 'cyberpunk'/'cyberfeminist' visions of bodily transcendence in 'cyberspaces', and the critique of such visions from social theorists who focus on the reproduction of social and cultural inequalities through technical systems. These approaches tend to neglect the specific sites in which the social relations of VR are played out. A 'multi-sited' ethnographic study of immersive virtual reality systems is the basis for discussion of how virtual reality technologies produce gender in specific sites. Virtual systems are positioned and used differently in various locales such as arcades and art galleries, bars and theme parks and cafes. The article discusses the practices of consumption which (re)produce and maintain conventional bodily and subjective boundaries. What relationships are becoming institutionalized? Are new conventions of gender created in these consumption relationships? The construction of spectacle and space, and the specific bodily disciplines required for participation in virtual realities in locations of consumption is particularly important in the formation of gender dynamics. Multiple subject positions are offered through competing technical, economic and cultural practices in diverse sites. These positions can establish new conventions of virtual identities and experiences, but also remain shot through with familiar operational categories of gendered identities and bodily practices. This article argues that immersive virtual reality technologies cannot be understood without some consideration of the locales in which they are embedded, and the social identities they make possible or constrain. A local, reflexive and feminist orientation assists in understanding the gendered dynamics associated with 'becoming virtual'.