Anna Kuokkanen

Management paradigms in personnel magazines of the Finnish metal and forest industries

Purpose – The paper seeks to examine the manifestation of management paradigms in personnel magazines of Finnish metal and forest industry corporations from the 1930s to recent years.Design/methodology/approach – The research data consist of articles of personnel magazines on management. The articles were analyzed by quantitative and qualitative content analysis.Findings – The findings indicate that normative paradigms, such as industrial betterment, human relations school, and cultural theories, have been discussed in personnel magazines more than rational paradigms, although earlier studies suggest that in general rational management paradigms have been more influential in Finland. The frequent use of normative paradigms can be seen as a tool in enforcing the role of personnel journals in generating a sense of belonging and togetherness among employees. Normative paradigms are also discussed more frequently in the articles that are written from the viewpoint of the worker than those written from the vie...

Transformation of the Finnish employee ideal in job advertisements from 1944 to 2009

In this article we examine transformation of the Finnish employee ideal since the Second World War. Our qualitative analysis is based on the data of 490 job advertisements from 1944 to 2009, and follows the change in employee requirements during this period. Our results show that requirements for transferable, particularly interpersonal, skills increased considerably during the research period. While workmanship, diligence, competence and work experience were the most common employee requirements in the job advertisements of the 1940s and 1950s, employees today are required to possess qualities such as stress resilience, flexibility, productivity, inventiveness and the desire to learn new things. The qualities required of white-collar employees have increased in particular. We conclude that, unlike the post-war period, today the ideal employee is characterized by flexibility and interpersonal skills reflecting changes in the organization of work, work organizations and work culture.

Management paradigms in Finnish journals and literature between 1921 and 2006

This article examines when the information on central management paradigms first arrived in Finland, and how they have been discussed in Finnish journals. Our key findings reveal that rational paradigms – scientific management and structural analysis – dominated management discussions in Finnish journals until the 1980s, and that discussion on management paradigms in Finland in the twentieth century appears to have been characterised by a slow transition from rational ideology towards normative ideologies. We also found that Barley and Kundas thesis (1992) regarding the alternation of rational and normative ideologies is not really applicable to Finland: it would seem that the emergence and adoption of paradigms coincide more with changes in economic and business structure and influences arriving from abroad.