Our traditional way of organising issues of this journal is to go for a combination of resonance and difference. We usually try to have a set of papers that have something in common with each other – could be methods, substance area, or theory – while differing in everything else. Our journal has been lucky to host a set of discussions on world society theory, epistemic governance, and domestication of policies – and another set centred around the new pragmatic sociology with French roots. Creating an issue often means also balancing these traditions along with the plethora of different takes from other vibrant branches of cultural and political sociology.
For this issue, we follow the same principles but for the first time within a tight geographical focus. Being a journal of the European Sociological Association, the geographical representation is something we think (although it does not affect the peer review process in any way). This means aiming to have papers with empirical material from all-over Europe and the world. Sometimes, however, focusing on a specific region can give insights one could otherwise overlook. In this issue, we have papers from Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway.
Nordics of course provide fertile ground for ‘most-similar’ type of comparisons. Common history (to a degree), and a closely related language (excluding us weird Finns) and political culture provide the starting point. Many current problems are also shared: Nordic societies were in many ways homogenous and somewhat isolated and/or closed prior to this millennium. Immigration, automation, and reactions to information technology and globalisation, opening of the societies, and the troubles of the social democratic welfare state are problems that all of the countries face. On the political side, the rise of anti-immigration and far-right parties has had huge effects on the political landscape.
As always, when one looks a bit more closely, even ‘most similar’ cases actually show huge variation. What looks like a common Nordic culture breaks down into a gamut of shades – suspicious but hopefully also mutually loving. When a Finn looks west, he sees the talkative and open Swedes and almost continental Danes, and even among the Nordics, our Slavic influences often make themselves known. Policy responses to the common political issues are varied, from Denmark combining perhaps more liberalised labour market policy with a social democratic co-option of far-right concerns over immigration and its effects, to Swedish exclusion of anti-immigrant parties from the government, and to Finland, where the Finns Party was part of the government coalition – with Norway somewhere in between.
Covid-19 relief and reconstruction bills, together with the enlarged role of central banks, have brought big government back to economic policy. Nordic model of strong state intervention and infrastructure spending is seeing interest again from both sides of the Atlantic. Nordic culture has however always included interesting paradoxes over strong individual rights and strong collectivist moral repertoires.
Our four papers in this issue all revolve around these cultural and structural issues in the northern end of the continent. One paper asks about how Danish unemployed are valued in moral terms, and another maps the moral universe of Norwegian working class. Our Finnish paper looks at the intersection of a global liberal-minded startup culture and the traditionally more social democratic value system. These are different explorations of cultural and political changes that are under way. Our fourth paper looks at the Ukrainian Diaspora in Sweden and asks, how a conflict abroad is changing the ethnic identification of Ukrainians in Sweden.
Nordic welfare state models have been really successful in the past but have faced tensions in recent decades. From Denmark, we have Mathias Herup Nielsen’s paper Money, Competences or Behavior? On the many Worths of the Unemployed which charts the moral economy of unemployment. If the economy is predicated on full employment, and if individuals both assess their self-worth on the basis of salaried work and have their relative status in society judged on the basis of work, then unemployment can potentially mean a devastating blow to an individual. Nielsen’s article is an interesting take on the fact that the tensions the welfare state models face are not only economic in nature – they also have moral manifestations.
Ove Skarpenes, in his paper Defending the Nordic model: Understanding the moral universe of the Norwegian working class also investigates the moral manifestations in the cultural repertoires utilised by Norwegian white working class. His argument is that the Norwegian welfare state sill acts as a buffer against neoliberal capitalism. This, in turn, affects the moral ideal types of working class and how they acted upon in politics.
Neoliberal capitalism of course is much more than just an economic idea – it is also a set of cultural ideas. In his paper Domesticating Startup Culture in Finland, Henri Koskinen looks at one part of this cultural repertoire – the startup culture – and asks, how a global form of culture is localised and domesticated into a national culture. The global Silicon Valley led startup culture celebrates individuals, success, and quick failure as a way of growing. These have never been the virtues associated with Finnish culture in general – they can even be said to be somewhat antithetical to it. So, the question of adapting the tenets to Finnish culture provides and interesting window to both startup and Finnish culture.
Fourth paper, Sofia Voytiv’s Conflict Reterritorialization: Shifting Group Boundaries in the Diaspora during the Armed Conflict in the ‘Homeland’ takes us to all-together different direction. She follows the effects of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia has on the Ukrainian diaspora in Sweden, and finds that the ethnic identification becomes intertwined with attitudes toward the conflict. Whether one counts herself (and is counted by the social group) as Ukrainian depends on attitude towards Russia.
This theme continues in book reviews. Liviu Chelcea reviews Materializing Difference: Consumer culture, politics, and ethnicity among Romanian Roma by Péter Berta. The book (and the review) offer us a glimpse into ethnic relations – and human relations more broadly – as defined through material objects. Szalbolcs Pogony’s review essay flips this question on its head and asks rather what happens when citizenship itself becomes an object, either an asset individuals can wield in a strategic manner, or in a more sinister vein, a commodity that can be bought and sold in the market. With Covid-19 vaccination programmes tied to citizenship rights, and vaccination passports in the horizon, these questions have both fundamental and timely relevance.