Hanna Kuusela

Wealth Elite Moralities: Wealthy Entrepreneurs’ Moral Boundaries

This article examines the moral boundary work of wealthy Finnish entrepreneurs belonging to the country’s top 0.1 per cent of earners. Through 28 semi-structured interviews, we show how these members of the wealth elite construct moral boundaries to legitimise their growing distance from other income groups in a Nordic welfare society. The super-rich entrepreneurs construct self-identities based on hard work, persistence and normality, draw moral boundaries between lazy and hard-working people and create moral distance between themselves and wage earners, the unemployed and public-sector workers. At the same time, these wealthy elite entrepreneurs challenge the moralities of Nordic welfare society. We thus posit that moral boundaries and boundary work should be explored as legitimising discourses embedded in the relations of economic and political power.

Learning to own: Cross-generational meanings of wealth and class-making in wealthy Finnish families

Family wealth and cross-generational wealth accumulation have recently interested scholars across the social sciences. Debates concerning the economic role of the wealthy now commonly recognise that one dynamic supporting economic inequalities is wealth accumulation across generations. To understand the social dynamics through which dynastic family wealth has managed to persist, this article analyses the social meanings that members of wealthy families attach to their wealth and how these meanings contribute to their class-making. Drawing from 26 in-depth interviews with members of super-rich Finnish families, the article analyses how a dynastic class is actively made and supported by specific social meanings and practices that the inheritors attach to their wealth. By exploring how wealthy heirs produce social meanings and practices that facilitate their wealth accumulation and reproduction as a class, the article contributes to recent interest in elites and social class.

Literature and Participatory Culture Online : Literary Crowdsourcing and Its Discontents

ABSTRACT This article discusses literary crowdsourcing in the context of critical media studies and aesthetic theories that stress participation. First, it draws an overall picture of the participatory culture or social turn in literature, focusing on literary crowdsourcing and the social values and hopes attached to it. Second, the article discusses the challenges literary crowdsourcing faces, arguing that todays cultural, economic and media environments render the practice vulnerable to different social, economic and aesthetic discontents. Asking to what extent literary crowdsourcing is able to uphold its promises of social value in the literary and media environment characterised by platform capitalism, precarious labour, communicative capitalism and affective economics, the article offers critical tools for analysing literary crowdsourcing and participatory online practices in art.

The Material Trajectories of Cultural Texts : The Bookseller of Kabul and the Ahistoric Women of Afghanistan

Abstract This article elaborates the usefulness of material culture studies for research on contemporary cultural products by representing books as transformable objects with social lives, the investigation of which is needed to better understand their social dimensions in times of global cultural flows. The article discusses the case of a controversial literary bestseller, The Bookseller of Kabul, from the perspective of its globally circulating material embodiments. By following the changing peritexts of this international bestseller, the article investigates how specific interpretations of the book proliferate. Special focus is placed on the ahistorical construction of Afghan women in the peritexts of the book.

Neroja ja promoottoreita

From Geniuses to Promoters – Literary Curators in Contemporary Literature This article introduces the concept of the literary curator and discusses it in relation to the rise of the curators in visual arts. By literary curators the article refers to actors who practice or fulfil curatorial functions in the literary field. In brief, literary curators are actors who mediate, distribute, represent, explain, and promote in new contexts texts that have been produced by others. In doing so, they both create new literary meanings and build their own public persona. More specifically, the article discusses two types of literary curators: textual appropriators and initiators of crowd-sourced writing projects. In the article, the practice is linked both to the historical avant-garde and the poststructuralist critique of the author. Literary curators reflect the theoretical erosion of the autonomous author as the originating subject of texts and meanings, as articulated in poststructuralist theories and avant-garde provocations. Simultaneously, however, the practice of literary curating is deeply rooted in the contemporary needs to promote literature through individuals. Unlike editors and publishers, who often stay in the background, literary curators actively seek attention and publicity for their own practice and build their artistic individuality. Thus, the literary curator can be interpreted as a response to the ambiguous situation in which the author has been theoretically demystified while in practice, and as a brand, it is more omnipresent than ever.