Risk factors and survival routes: social exclusion as a life-historical phenomenon

Social exclusion is a popular and widely used concept in the social sciences as well as in current European policy rhetoric. However, there is no general agreement on the content and use of the term; it has been used differently and for different purposes in different historical and social contexts. In this article, the social exclusion is understood as life-historical phenomenon. Two cases have been selected as representing the most extreme trajectories based on a larger follow-up study concerning former students of residential institutions for young people with emotional and/or behavioural difficulties in Finland. The cases give us an example of a detailed life-course analysis, with the emphasis on risk and protective factors and demonstrate that the process of social exclusion is a complicated issue that cannot totally be understood by analysing the statistical connections between certain risk factors and the life-course.     

On the limits of a realist conception of knowledge: a pragmatist critique of Archerian realism

In her book Being Human (2000), Margaret Archer presents intriguing pragmatist emphases on practice, embodiment and non‐linguistic knowing‐how, as regards to understanding humanity. However, as Archer attempts to conjoin these ideas with the morphogenetic realism she has been working on for the last few decades, she ends up holding on to a subject–object dualism, which makes things complicated. The authors’ alternative pragmatist account defended in the article flows from Deweyan pragmatist and Rortian antirepresentationalist insights. The main issues in the article concern Archer’s complicated tripartite concept of knowledge, which is contrasted with a (Deweyan–Rylean) distinction between linguistic knowledge‐that and embodied knowing‐how. It is argued that knowledge is a natural, sophisticated tool that human organisms use when coping with their environment; it is always acquired on the strength of embodied knowing‐how, from some actor’s point of view, but the term ‘knowledge’ itself should be reserved for the propositional, linguistic knowledge‐that.     

High tick abundance and diversity of tick-borne pathogens in a Finnish city

Urban Ecosystems - The sheep tick Ixodes ricinus is the primary vector for various zoonotic diseases, including Lyme borreliosis and tick-borne encephalitis (TBE), in Europe. Because both abundance...     

(De)politicizing good governance: the World Bank Institute,the OECD and the politics of governance indicators

Since the early 1990s there has been a surge in international efforts to calculate the comparative performance of states in terms of various characteristics of governance. In this article we show how numerical objectification of social phenomena can function to depoliticize potentially political issues. As a case of example we examine the evolving field of measuring good governance through analyzing the documentation of the World Bank Institutes established Worldwide Governance Indicators and its recent contender, the OECD project “Government at a Glance”, which argues to provide an alternative to the existing rankings. Although we observe certain methodological discontinuities in measurement practices of the OECD, these have hardly been serious enough to activate its potential in repoliticisizing the issue of “good governance”. Moreover, the work of OECD further strengthens and legitimates the epistemic expert authority of global index producers.     

The evolution of Homo Discens: natural selection and human learning

This article takes an evolutionary “reverse engineering” standpoint on Homo discens, learning man, to track down the (learning) mechanisms that played a pivotal role in the natural selection of human being. The approach is “evolutionary sociological”—as opposed to gene‐centred or psychologising—and utilises notions of co‐evolutionary organism–environment transactions and niche construction. These are compatible with a Deweyan theory of action, which entails that in action one cannot but learn and one can only learn in action. Special attention is paid to apprentice‐like learning‐by‐doing peculiar to human socio‐cultural niches since the Pleistocene, which has permitted each subsequent generation to learn the many habits and skills needed in utilising the affordances of action that constitute their ecological niche. Affordances and actions have changed over the history of human–environment transactions, but the core mechanisms of human learning have not changed much. It is increasingly important to appreciate these mechanisms now in the global age “knowledge society,” which is in a way similar to the Pleistocene era: characterised by uncertainty and life‐determining problem‐situations without any ready‐made solutions, it calls for capacities to adapt to changing circumstances, and thus apprentice‐like learning in action supported by savvy epistemological engineering of learning environments.     

Mapping the landscape of strategy tools: A review on strategy tools published in leading journals within the past 25 years

This article taps into the question of the materialized forms of theorizing in strategy: the strategy tools presented in publications over the past 25 years. This study conducts a systematic search and review of 482 published abstracts and 88 full text articles introducing tools to aid strategizing. The contribution of this study builds on the theoretical classification framework and review of strategy tools to illustrate what might be termed the toolbox of strategy from the publications in leading management journals. The review suggests that the landscape of strategy tools is surprisingly traditional and that contemporary developments in strategic thinking have not yet been transformed into usable tools. Furthermore, the study also provides some recommendations for the developers of new strategy tools in terms of topics and methodological considerations.     

Autonomous Agency in Anti-Dualistic Social Ontologies: A Compatibilist Notion

Anti-dualistic social ontologies, those highlighting the intrinsic interdependency of agency and structure as two sides of the same coin, are sometimes criticized for failing to provide a satisfactory account of autonomous – capable and free – agency, or even denying the reality of such agency. This paper contests these claims, arguing that anti-dualistic ontologies only conflict with autonomous agency when the latter is understood in a highly voluntaristic sense, whose ideational roots go to what philosophers of free will call “incompatibilist” intuitions of freedom. Those intuitions suggest that actions (intentions, decisions) ultimately determined by extrinsic causes lack the kind of freedom presupposed by moral responsibility, so when agentive autonomy is presumed to involve such freedom, it does indeed cohere poorly with the anti-dualistic picture of intrinsically structured agency. Herein, however, an alternative, “compatibilist” notion of autonomy is advanced, such that does not conflict with extrinsic determination and is therefore congruent with anti-dualistic social ontologies.     

Epoch-Making Changes in the Cultural Evolution of Communication: Communication technologies seen as organized hubs of skillful human activities

This paper applies methodological relationalism, leaning on a pragmatist theory of action of classical Deweyan origin, supplemented among other things with Alva Noë’s enactivism, to analyze the development of communication technologies as a part of human cultural evolution. Tool-use and technologies are understood as skillful human activities that form hubs of organized activity in developed human communities. Appreciating the quite slow pace of evolution, the article adopts, all told, a two million year time frame. Six epochs of cultural evolution are distinguished, linked to the introduction of communication tools and technologies as skillful human activities that serve the members of growing communities in the ecological niche at hand. The first two epochs arose from forms of communication serving local, small-sized hunter-gatherer bands; the second couple arose with technologies apt for building nation-wide communities and culture; and the latest two have been propelled by global communication networks, having an impact on billions of people. Finally, certain peculiarities of the presently unfolding World Wide Web epoch, connected in particular to this era's exceptionally efficient behavior modification, are compared with earlier epochs.