Minna Leinonen

Mobile phone call openings: tailoring answers to personalized summonses

Conversation analytical (CA) methodology was used to specify the new opening practices in Finnish mobile call openings, which differ systematically from Finnish landline call openings. Since the responses to a mobile call orient to the summons identifying the caller, answers have changed and diversified. A known caller is greeted. The self-identification opening that was canonical in Finnish landline calls is mainly used for answering unknown callers, while channel-opener openings involve orientation to ongoing mutual business between the speakers. Some of these changes reflect real-time coordination of the social action that the mobility of mobile phones enables. In all, the adoption of new ways of answering a call shows that people orient themselves to affordances that new technologies allow them. Mobile phone communication opens a salient new area both for the analysis of talk-ininteraction itself and also for understanding communicative behaviour in the era of ubiquitous information technology.

Challenging and reinforcing gender boundaries at work

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse management and employee experiences of gender divisions at work and to reflect on gender boundaries using the method of democratic dialogue. It also considers the use of experiences in efforts supporting workplace democracy.Design/methodology/approach – Finnish action research project sought to promote both gender equality and democratic dialogue. Content analysis is applied on group discussions on promoting gender equality at work.Findings – Gender divisions in organizations were widely recognized. Challenges arose from the incompatibility of images of gender and gendered images of work. Participants’ perspectives varied depending on their hierarchical position.Research limitations/implications – Democratic dialogue provides tools to approach sensitive topics that need special attention in promoting gender equality.Practical implications – Work organizations need to use forums that bring together management and employee perspectives with a gender‐sensitiv...

Intersections of gender, age and occupational group in the Finnish defence forces

Purpose – Addressing the challenges expressed by organization researchers and Leslie McCall with her conceptual framework of intercategorical analysis, this paper contributes to the methodological debate on intersectionality. The purpose of this paper is to explore intersectionality on the organizational level in the Finnish defence forces (FDF). In the paper, the authors explore how the interactions between categories of gender, age, and position in the organization explain the concerns of employees in the changing military organization. Furthermore, the authors also investigate the types of intersectional mechanisms behind the empirical observations. Design/methodology/approach – The logistic regression analysis is based on a survey addressed to the whole salaried personnel in the FDF in 2011 (n=8,093, response rate being 54 per cent). Findings – In line with McCall’s (2005) intercategorical approach, the analysis shows that the plain examination of main effects of the variables will not suffice, but th...