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The literature on friendship reveals particular tensions within the notion of friendship; tensions such as that between the significance of similarity by comparison with difference within the relationship; or the tension between liking a friend for his traits and qualities and liking him uniquely. The work of Jacques Derrida in The Politics of Friendship helps to elucidate the first of these tensions, beginning with an examination of the claim sometimes attributed to Aristotle: ‘O, my friends, there is no friend’ to argue that friendship as fraternity can become the schema that democracy adopts for the future. This paper explores and argues for the inter-relatedness of two questions about friendship in the context of politics: Can friendship act as a model for political community? And is friendship itself a political relationship? It argues that while both these questions can be answered in the affirmative, those answers create value by providing a guide that can support the development of our complex identities as mature individuals and citizens.

Kramer and Kramarae have identified four sets of masculine gendered ideas that are used in conceptualising the Internet: anarchy, frontier, democracy and community. These are constitutive ideas as opposed to regulative ones; in other words they constitute the Internet. I suggest two alternative constitutive ideas, but not necessarily ‘feminine’ ones, that might be used as constituent parts of the Internet. These are reflexivity, or examining what we are about, and pluralism. The more widespread adoption of these two principles as constitutive ethics would have a profound effect on teaching and practice of using not just the Internet, but developing and using ICT more generally.

The purpose of the paper is to discuss and illustrate how contemporary market discourses rearticulate socio-political relationships and identities, including the rights, duties, and opportunities of individuals and categories of individuals as citizens. More specifically, the purpose is to analyze how “economic citizenship” is articulated and negotiated in the intersection of (Nordic) welfare state ideals and shareholder-oriented market discourses. The paper further elaborates on how different identity markers, especially gender and class, intersect in these articulations and contribute to exclusionary practices.

The paper approaches the articulation of economic citizenship through an empirical study that focusses on business media representations and online discussions of a major factory shutdown in Finland. Drawing from discourse theory and the notions of representational intersectionality and translocational positionality, the paper analyzes how gender and class intersect in the construction of economic citizenship in the business media.

The study illustrates how financialist market discourses render citizenship intelligible in exceedingly economic terms, overriding social and political dimensions of citizenship. The business media construct hierarchies of economic citizens where two categories of actors claim full economic citizenship: the transnational corporation and the transnational investor. Within these categories, particular systems of privilege intersect in similar ways, rendering them masculine and upper middleclass. Whether interpreted as hegemonic or counter-hegemonic, the financialist discourses rearticulate the social hierarchies and moral landscape in Finnish society.

The paper contributes to critical/feminist management studies by elaborating on the role of the business media as an important site of political identity work, positioning, and moral regulation, where neoliberal ideas, based upon and reproducing masculine and elitist systems of privilege, appear as normalized and self-evidently valued.

Women managers have to cope with greater pressures than men managers. If employers recognised and tackled this both women and men managers could do their jobs more effectively.

A major research study investigating the problems and pressures associated with being a female manager in contrast to male managers, is described, along with the relationship between these pressures and their effects on the managers themselves. The research implications of the findings are also presented, with special emphasis on training needs and organisational policy changes that are required. A model of occupational stress is presented, comprising pressures faced by female and male managers at work, at home and socially, individual influences, and the effects these pressures have in terms of behavioural (e.g. work performance, alcohol intake) and psychosomatic stress symptoms (e.g. headaches, anxiety, etc).

A fear appeal is a communication tactic designed to scare people into adopting desired behaviors (e.g. wash hands to avoid contracting COVID-19). While it is generally acknowledged that fear appeals can be persuasive at motivating behavior, this paper aims to identify how to optimally identify how to optimally frame the focal threat to increase their effectiveness as well as to uncover additional underlying processes.

The authors conducted four experimental studies.

This research validates that exposure to fear appeals can strongly motivate behavior. However, this study shows that this effect is moderated by threat specificity. Specifically, this study demonstrates that people are more motivated to engage in behaviors that facilitate threat avoidance after exposure to a personally relevant threat that represents a nonspecific (e.g. aging appearance) rather than a specific outcome (e.g. wrinkles). This effect is mediated by perceptions of assimilation (versus contrast) to the focal threat. This study reliably shows the effect across three threat domains (i.e. aging appearance, weight gain, illness) and for different behaviors.

Theoretically speaking, this study contributes to the fear appeal literature by identifying a new type of message framing that has the potential to increase fear appeal’s persuasive power, and uncovering a distinct mechanism by which fear appeals impact behavior. Practically speaking, the findings confirm that fear appeals have the potential to help marketers mobilize consumer behavior, especially when the communication highlights a nonspecific rather than specific threat.