Tuomo Peltonen

Aalto University · Department of Management Studies

The extent of harm and suffering caused by the coronavirus pandemic has prompted a debate about whether the epidemic could have been contained, had the gravity of the crisis been predicted earlier. In this paper, the philosophical debate on predictive reasoning is framed by Hume's problem of induction. Hume argued that it is rationally unjustified...

CALL FOR PAPERS for a Special Issue in Journal of Global Mobility

Within contemporary discussions on organizational wisdom, management scholars frequently turn to Aristotle's work to conceptualize wisdom as phronesis, or practical wisdom. Contrary to the prevailing view, this paper argues that Aristotle did not propose an exclusively practical or particularistic conception of wisdom but, instead acknowledged that...

Managerialism and legitimate authority: a Weberian perspective on the coherence of legitimate rulership. ________ Managerialism is one of the most prominent doctrines that have challenged the traditional model of governance in public administration in recent years. This article presents an alternative frame of reference for making sense of the soc...

Kaikkia tasapuolisesti sitovia lakeja pidetään liberaalin demokratian kulmakivenä. Yliopistot ovat verovaroin rahoitettuja, valtaosin julkisoikeudellisia oikeushenkilöitä, joilta voidaan edellyttää laillista viisautta. Tämän artikkelin tarkoituksena on selvittää yliopistojen lakiin ja lailliseen viisauteen liittyviä logiikoita ja perusteluja dokume...

Covid-19 -pandemia on järisyttänyt maailmaa. Tämän terveyskriisin ennakoinnista ja yllätyksellisyydestä on kuitenkin vielä verrattain vähän tutkittua tietoa. Tämän tietokirjan tarkoituksena on tarkastella koronakriisin puhkeamista ja etenemistä tulevaisuustyön, johtamisen ja päätöksenteon näkökulmista. Teoksessa pohditaan myös koronakriisin vaikutu...

The purpose of this article is to advance empirically grounded understanding about the institutional change of Finnish public administration. The review focuses on the employment practices, employing Scott's institutional theory of the three institutional pillars, and highlighting the role of the regulative element. The subject of the case study is...

Osuustoiminta on noussut uuteen kukoistukseen pitkän laskukauden jälkeen. Mutta ovatko tämän päivän suuret osuustoimintayritykset hylänneet alkuperäiset ihanteen yhteisöllisyydestä ja yhteisestä hyvästä? Mitä on tapahtunut osuustoiminnan sielulle? Tämä kirja valottaa osuustoiminnan aatteellisia juuria, liikkeen kehitystä ja osuustoimintaidean rooli...

In this text, I want to shortly reflect on the possibilities and limitations of a broadly spiritual approach to the theory and practice business leadership and organization. In what follows, I contemplate on the possibilities of a "philosophical spirituality" mainly based on Plato and the associated work of Eric Voegelin. Implications for organizat...

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to add to the emerging body of conceptual histories of management by undertaking a reading of three leading Finnish textbooks from the 1950s. Design: Management concepts are analysed through the linguistic dynamics of a set of historically situated Finnish textbooks. The semantic dimension of analysis is con...

This chapter moves the analysis into the domain of economcy. Going through a trove of economics-related articles in a leading Finnish daily, Helsingin Sanomat, this section focuses on the local reception of the emerging financial crisis in the public consciousness and expert opinion during 2007-2009. Media reports consistently downplay the extensiv...

There is an evident lack of rigorous frameworks for making sense of the role and status of spirituality and religion in organizations and organizing, in particular from the perspective of spiritual philosophies of the social. This paper suggests that the philosophy of Plato and his modern follower, political theorist Eric Voegelin could offer a via...

Peltonen, T. (2020) The role of religion in cross-cultural management: three perspectives. In: Osland, Szkudlarek, Caprar & Romani (eds) The Sage Handbook of Contemporary Cross-Cultural Management. (Forthcoming)

LSE Business Review. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2019/03/18/the-possibilities-and-limitations-of-the-emerging-organisational-spirituality-movement/

This chapter analyses mistakes made regarding the collection and interpretation of information and the decision-making process in the context of military operations. The two of the cases concern decision-making in war circumstances, whereas the third discusses the role of the intelligence apparatus information production in an escalation of Cold Wa...

This chapter develops the framework of wisdom that will be applied in the later empirical sections of the book. The framework contains three distinct but interrelated levels of wisdom that are called rational-analytical information, intuitive-experiential knowledge and philosophical wisdom. The first, rational-analytical information, produces knowl...

This chapter moves the analysis into the domain of economy. Going through a trove of economics-related articles in a leading Finnish daily, Helsingin Sanomat, the chapter focuses on the local reception of the emerging financial crisis in the public consciousness and expert opinion during 2007–2009. Media reports consistently downplay the extensiven...

This chapter provides a wisdom-oriented reading of one of the most spectacular business failures of recent times: the collapse of Nokia mobile phones between 2007 and 2015. Using executive biographies and other published accounts of Nokia’s organisational patterns, the chapter attempts to offer a more balanced explanation of the processes behind No...

This chapter presents the first of the case studies examining the processes related to the existence of wisdom in strategic decision-making. The situation explored is one the most well-known incidents during the Cold War: the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Of particular interest here is the conduct of the US president John F. Kennedy in the midst of...

This chapter returns to a more general discussion on the nature of wisdom in decision-making. It first reminds of the central thesis of the book: failures in decision-making or forecasting demonstrate often a lack of philosophical wisdom and associated capability for intuitive reflexivity. The rest of the chapter then discusses the ways to enhance...

This book contributes to the discussion on wisdom in management, leadership and strategy by developing a unique theoretical approach. Integrating rational-analytical, intuitive and philosophical dimensions of wise decision-making, it advocates a broadly Platonic-Socratic view on wisdom. Applying a developed framework of wisdom dynamics, it analyses...

Despite the recent explosion in the scholarly works on spirituality and religion in organizations, the field is theoretically underdeveloped. This introductory chapter introduces a threefold meta-theoretical classification to help make sense of the variety of different understandings of spirituality and religion in organizing and managing. Scientif...

Religion and spirituality has a long history as a topic of various human sciences . This chapter briefly reviews some of the main currents in the psychology and sociology of religion . In psychology, we discuss the classical pragmatist formulation of William James , and explore the role of spirituality in the work of Maslow . In addition, we discus...

In this and the following chapter, the discussion shifts insofar as we will engage with more traditional leadership themes, and strive to develop them further by taking advantage of metaphysical-theological frame of reference. This chapter concentrates on the meaning of sacrifice and martyrdom in leadership. Martyrs are central figures in religious...

Charisma has its origin in religious thought as a divine gift , although it has been heavily secularized in the later sociological and leadership theories. What is today understood as charismatic, magnetic personality and direct appeal to the emotions of the followers should be seen as one of the many possible forms of using one’s divine gifts. The...

This and the following chapter looks into the ways in which spirituality and religion interact with the social and cultural structures of organizational life. Spirituality can be viewed as an element of the dynamics of organizational culture following Martin’s scheme of integrated, differentiated and fragmented cultures. While spiritual and religio...

Taking a more direct inspiration from the practice of organizing monastic life, this chapter scrutinizes the rules and conventions of Christian convents as an example of how religious beliefs and principles translate into secular institutional structures and governance styles. The first example comes from a Finnish Orthodox nunnery , whereas the se...

Despite its apparent usefulness in areas like well-being at work and leadership ethics, religion and spirituality should not be reduced to its manifest functions, or even to it social or experiential dimensions. However, it is challenging to introduce a metaphysical-theological stance in the context of increasing rationalization of the worlds of wo...

Religion and spirituality is often contrasted with the scientific method and academic objectivity, also in organizational studies. However, as this chapter demonstrates, the linkages across religion and natural science are more complex than what the mainstream thinking assumes. Many notable scientists such as Isaac Newton have been motivated by the...

This book contributes to the discussions on the role of spirituality in organizing and leading, taking a philosophically and theologically rigorous perspective. Developing an approach to spirituality informed by Platonist philosophy and classical and mystical streams of Christian theology, the text re-assesses the role of religious insights and bel...

There is a long history of using researcher-generated photography to complement verbal descriptions of culture in ethnographic research. In the recent discussions, photos are no longer treated as authentic or accurate descriptions of the field, but are instead understood as particular representations of organisational life. As manufactured visual a...

In the globalized neoliberal economy, business schools and business science has become a dominant societal institution and discourse. However, this has not directly strengthened the position of business schools in the societal networks of power. This paper examines this paradox by depicting who are the actors in the field and how these actors seek...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to advance the methodological self‐understanding of the emerging field of organizational space and architecture by employing concepts and frameworks from multi‐paradigm and mixed methods research. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a methodological re‐reading of a recent research process that an...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report a study of architectural development and organizational meanings and uses of space in a Finnish university. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws from actor‐network theory and Lefebvre's spatial‐social approach to shed light on the organizational assumptions of the various building phases an...

Since the early 1980s, scholars in organization and management studies have examined their metatheoretical assumptions with particular regard to the relationships among knowledge, power, and signification. In contrast, the international management field seems to have engaged in a continuous disavowal of epistemic reflexivity and a critical trajecto...

International management is a discipline that has yet to develop ethnographic sensitivity to the links between macro-level changes in the political economy and organizational structures and micro-level meanings and everyday life. Hassard et al. (this issue) argue that by using ethnography to study formation of middle managers' communal experiences,...

This article looks at the institutional-level negotiations and configurations between a ‘newcomer’ multinational, the trade union and the association of employers. Developing a relational approach based on Actor Network Theory, the article goes beyond the currently used convergence and divergence perspectives by looking at the effect of MNCs on hum...

This paper emphasizes the contribution of Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot to discussions of workplace spirituality. It is argued that their understanding of spirituality differs significantly from the mainstream management contributions: they view spirituality as a distinct form of post-modern subjectivity in organizations and regard the subject a...

The idea of knowledge as the source of competitive advantage has been celebrated in the management literature for some time. However, our understanding of how knowledge emerges and develops in the actual work practices is still relatively limited. The argument of this paper is that an approach called 'communities of practice' offers a relatively co...

This paper discusses a `postmodern’ alternative to business ethics in the light of two authors: Zygmunt Bauman and Michel Foucault. Despite their different usage of the concepts `ethics’ and `morality', both offer an approach to ethics that avoids the problems of a self-enclosed subject inherent in liberal as well as in communal theories. Bauman an...

This paper links a critical view on human development programmes as “normalization” with narrative analysis of biography construction. Using material on Finnish expatriate employees, the paper analyses how a group of university engineers produced a mature subjectivity, with college degree engineers crafting a position as underdeveloped corporate pe...

Expatriate experience is not only a disconnected occasion for cross-cultural anxiety and adjustment but also an important event in the process of self-development and learning. Following this view and arguing for a discursive approach, the paper focuses on ways in which expatriates themselves tell and interpret their development and movement across...

Diss. -- Helsingin kauppakorkeakoulu.

This article offers a theoretical contribution to the current debate on managing repatriation. Problems with repatriation, such as under-utilization of international experience, poor integration to the home unit and damaged career prospects are well known by now. Less emphasis has been devoted lo understanding the organizational processes leading t...

Managerial careers across borders have been treated as a cross-cultural phenomenon in most research. Within a transnational corporation, however, managerial mobility patterns should be taken seriously as an element of organizational capability. Following this theme, the article proposes a new approach to managerial work experience patterns in compl...