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In 2001, Faroese Viking Metal band Týr entered a Faroese music competition with their song ‘Ormurin Langi’, which was a reinterpretation of a famous Faroese kvæÐi (a form of European ballad believed to derive from the Middle Ages) by the same name. Hearing this piece of medieval Faroese heritage represented through metal music was not something anyone had ever experienced before. This chapter will therefore explore how Faroese Viking metal – through its musical and visual style – interprets Faroese kvæÐi, which are themselves interpretations of a Faroese medieval past. The combination of Faroese traditions and contemporary metal music does have a societal and cultural effect. What, therefore, happens when the local and the global intersect and create something that cannot be considered global, but is however not purely local either, as it is in Faroese Viking Metal? The interpretation of several kvæÐi in Faroese Viking metal does not exactly perpetuate the authentic, but rather it presents them in a new form and ensures their circulation and repetition through a more globalised and popular media and Viking romanticism is therefore caught up with contemporary sociocultural imaginings of Faroese identity.

The chapters in the Nationalism and Identity in Metal Medievalism section consider a range of historical figures and practices as presented in metal music. Amaranta Saguar García’s analysis of references to El Cid in ‘The Return of El Cid: The Topicality of Rodrigo Díaz in Spanish Heavy Metal’ focusses on issues of nationalism and the varying representations of El Cid in a range of songs. In a similar manner, Annika Christensen’s ‘Making Heritage Metal: Faroese KvæÐi and Viking Metal’ looks at the interplay of medieval ballads and modern folk metal as part of the group Tyr’s investment in celebrating and articulating Faroese identity. While these two essays work with specific examples of national identities, Shamma Boyarin’s ‘The Prophet Himself Had Knowledge of Him: Nile’s “Iskander D’hul Kharnon” and a Different Kind of Metal Medievalism’ uses the figure of Alexander the Great to address the broader question of the ways that representations of classical and medieval figures define civilisations. Dean Swinford’s ‘Black Metal’s Medieval King: The Apotheosis of Euronymous through Album Dedications’ examines the medievalisation of Euronymous and its relation to black metal’s medievalist self-representation. Within this collaborative chapter, the authors explore the areas of greatest overlap in our explorations of metal music and medieval culture: nationalism and identities, neofascism, the whitewashed Middle Ages, and issues of historical authenticity in neomedievalism.

The primary explanation for the marked rise in real wages in both England and Flanders, from the later fourteenth to mid fifteenth centuries, was a combination of institutional wage stickiness and deflation. In both countries, nominal wages had indeed risen after the Black Death (1348), but so had the cost of living, with a rampant inflation that lasted until the late 1370s in England and the late 1380s in Flanders. Thereafter, consumer prices fell sharply but money wages did not - or, in Flanders, not as much as did consumer prices. The other thesis of this paper is that these later medieval price movements were fundamentally monetary in nature.

As organizations aim to become increasingly diverse, it is important to understand how perspectives of potential future leaders vary across culture and gender. This study aims to advance the understanding of the persistent gender gap in management.

Samples from the gender-segregated Qatar and the co-ed Denmark present a unique opportunity to investigate the potential effects of gender. Here, 115 Middle Easterners and 121 Scandinavians rated perceived importance of job-related skills, networking upward and serendipity in leadership acquisition.

Effects of gender showed that compared to men, women across cultures expected that serendipity has less to do with leadership acquisition. Middle Eastern women also showed low expectations regarding networking with people in powerful positions. Nevertheless, both genders showed conviction of meritocracy by rating job-related skills as the most important factor in leadership acquisition. Cross-culturally, Scandinavians presumed job-related skills to be more important than Middle Easterners.

Despite meritocracy beliefs, it appears that gender differences in perceived possibility of leadership acquisition contribute to the gender gap in management. Scandinavian women relied more on networking than Middle Eastern women, but still lacked faith in serendipitous opportunities compared to male peers. Perceived luck enhances achievement motivation. If men rely more on luck than women, then they are more confident in succeeding and more ambitious about pursuit of leadership. Women’s lack of faith in serendipity might affect their career ambitions negatively even in societies emphasizing equality.

This is the first study that directly focuses on gender differences in perception of opportunities for leadership acquisition through serendipity.

The Scandinavian states are universally seen as very well-functioning bureaucracies with some of the lowest levels of corruption in the world. In scholarly debates on state building, Francis Fukuyama has used the Scandinavian countries and the phrase ‘getting to Denmark’ as a metaphor for the apparent mystery of how states can come to be governed by well-developed bureaucracies and highly functioning state institutions. This chapter presents a study of state institutions and bureaucracy in Denmark–Norway and Sweden over a 250-year period from the mid-seventeenth to the end of the nineteenth century. The study demonstrates how bureaucracies conforming to Weber’s later model were gradually established in the Scandinavian monarchies in this period. The chapter also presents the results of three empirical studies of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, which indicate how the level of corruption in the state administration had been limited by the middle of the nineteenth century. In Denmark, the institutional framework set up after the establishment of the absolute monarchy in 1660, along with continuing reforms to improve the administration in the period of absolutism between 1660 and 1849, came to form an important basis for an administrative culture based on the rule of law. In Sweden the rule shifted between absolutism and constitutionalism, but both the Danish–Norwegian and the Swedish monarchies saw the establishment of strong and comprehensive state hierarchies with a king at the top level who set out to guarantee the rule of law and attempted to be merciful to his subjects. Lutheranism played a decisive and durable role as moral backbone in Scandinavian societies and in the establishment of a shared political culture. These elements, in combination with the establishment of Weberian-type bureaucracy, had, by the end of the nineteenth century, worked to limit corruption in the state administration of the Scandinavian countries.

Immigrant and native child poverty in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden 1993–2001 is studied using large sets of panel data. While native children face yearly poverty risks of less than 10 percent in all three countries and for all years studied the increasing proportion of immigrant children with an origin in middle- and low-income countries have poverty risks that vary from 38 up to as much as 58 percent. At the end of the observation period, one third of the poor children in Norway and as high as about a half in Denmark and in Sweden are of immigrant origin. The strong overrepresentation of immigrant children from low- and middle-income countries when measured in yearly data is also found when applying a longer accounting period for poverty measurement. We find that child poverty rates are generally high shortly after arrival to the new country and typically decrease with years since immigration. Multivariate analysis shows that parents years since immigration and education affect risks of the number of periods in persistent poverty. While a native child is very unlikely to spend nine years in poverty, the corresponding risk for a child to a newly arrived immigrant was found to be far from negligible. Much of the pattern is similar across the three countries but there are also some notable differences.

This chapter examines how structural factors related to gender, managerial level, and economic sector could impact the level of experienced person/role conflict in management based on a representative survey conducted among managers in Norway. Person/role conflict appears relevant for understanding emotions in organizations and is linked with emotional dissonance and emotional labor through theoretical and empirical considerations. Our findings reveal that the effect of gender remains significant when controlled for economic sector and managerial level. This indicates that experienced person/role conflict can be partially caused by perceived incongruity between internalized and gender role-related expectations as well as managerial role-related expectations.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a “parachuting internationalization” metaphor as an alternative strategy that firms may choose to enter foreign markets compared to Uppsala Model and Born Global Model. This proposed new metaphor seeks to integrate the Uppsala and the Born Global Models to show that firms can attain success in the age of globalization if they are adept at devising creative strategies that help them overcome the challenges in a psychically distant environment.

This is a research paper that develops theoretical perspectives inspired by the Yin Yang thinking as well as the “thick descriptive” multiple case studies.

“Parachuting internationalization” embraces essential elements of the Born Global and the Uppsala Models and refers to a firm’s strategic targeting of markets with great potentials, correct positioning, swift actions, and fast learning, thus enabling the firm to circumvent the conventional wisdom of liability of foreignness, cultural distance, and psychic distance. “Parachuting internationalization” is essentially a GLOCAL approach which can be implemented in practice in terms of global vision, location, opportunity, capital, accelerated cultural learning and quick action, and logistics.

The “parachuting internationalization” metaphor is derived from interviews with four Scandinavian firms’ experiences that have entered into the Chinese market. This research reveals that two seemingly opposite approaches, i.e., the Born Global and the Uppsala Models, can be fruitfully combined and reconciled to generate a third novel approach.

To date, there has been little attempt to reconcile and/or integrate the Born Global and the Uppsala Models of internationalization. The paper enriches the ongoing debate on the internationalization of firms in the international business literature that has relied primarily on the Uppsala Model or Born Global Model. The study shows that a third way, i.e. the “parachuting internationalization” is both theoretically innovative and practically feasible.

Folk metal is an immensely varied genre but an interest in the past in general, and the remote barbarian past, in particular, is a universal and defining characteristic. Performers evoke history in a number of ways, including musical sound, visual imagery, and lyrical subject matter, but the most emphatic tactic adopted (albeit by a minority of bands) is by the use of lyrics in dead languages (defined as those with no speakers for whom they are a mother tongue). Europe has many of these, of which much the most prestigious is Latin; folk metal bands, however, tend to use one or other of the vernacular languages, invariably that spoken during the earliest and formative period of their own national group. This practice of singing in dead languages originated in 1994 with the Norwegian band Enslaved, in a period in which extreme metal bands were self-consciously rejecting English – pop music's dominant tongue – in an attempt to distance themselves from what they saw as inauthentic neo-liberal Anglo-American cultural hegemony. From its beginnings, it had strongly patriotic and nationalistic overtones but it is argued that the ancient texts from which lyrics are taken also acquire a quasi-religious character for listeners, not least because of the occulted and numinous air imparted by the opaqueness of the language. The acts that have most often composed lyrics in dead languages have been Scandinavian – singing in Old Norse – but the most popular act that currently engages in it is Eluveitie, from Switzerland, who, whilst mostly performing in modern English, include at least one song on every album in reconstructed ‘Gaulish’. This linguistic strategy is at once a means of locating Eluveitie within the ‘code’ of folk metal, a method of acquiring the sub-cultural capital associated with ‘authenticity’, and an opportunity to align themselves with internationally-familiar and popular ‘Celtic’ identity and sensibilities.