On family, varieties of fauna and treetops

Having returned from my travels, it was time to spend some time with the kids and let Outi have a bit of peace and quiet. So, off we went. It was a beautiful morning and I grabbed my Nikon with a telephoto lens to let off some steam.

Our first stop was the beach - pulla and pillimehu (cinnamon rolls and straw-lemonade) all around. Then off to the beach.

A seagull...



a pair of ducks, bathing in light...



... and two examples of the mammalian, two-legged persuasion...



For some reason, I don't like to publish many pictures of family members and friends on my blog. I guess I feel that in most cases, it may be best to let them decide what to publish and what not when the time comes. However, I was struck by the notion of how much this blog may meet the tone of old men's biographies, discussing all sorts of anecdotes about colleagues and celebrities, brushing off family members with a slight nod. The Finnish pop group Ultra Bra once made a remark about Marshall Mannerheim's (the most celebrated Finn in Finland) memoirs:

"Olen lukenut muistelmiasi
en ymmärrä sinua lainkaan
kerrot sodista ja hevosista
vaimostasi on kaksi riviä
lapsistasi ei mitään"

"I've read your memoir
I can't figure you out
you go on about wars and horses
there are two lines about your wife
and nothing about your kids."

Now, there are two explanations: a) men take their families as granted; b) men leave their families out of memoirs out of respect.

Anyway, off we went to the playground. On the way, we saw some birds...

A robin, I think...



I have no idea what this yellow fellow is called, not to mention in English...



Another unidentified neighbor...



And another one...



This fellow I know - it's a badger!



Signs of spring...



I just realized that I have a thing about treetops. I seem to like photographing them. As a child, I created a bond with the tops of nearby trees, as they seemed to be faces. In a way, each treetop is unique, and defines the "personality" of the tree in question. This is retrospective sensemaking, looking at the endless number of treetops stored on our computer.





Of course I failed to take my camera when we talk a walk with Iivari at dusk. There were swans, Canadian geese and all sorts of weird aquatic birds abound, while the morning's variety had been more mundane. Well, I guess you just have to take my word for it.

Back in Oxford

I closed my UK tour with a quick visit to Oxford. Arriving at around 10 PM, the Oxford I saw was a rather magical place. Walking to New College from the bus stop was like walking into a fairy tale.

During my last visit, I had forged a relationship with a magnolia tree, growing on the courtyard where the visitor's lodgings are. I was delighted to see it bathed in the warm glow of morning light.



Had a quick but productive meeting with Richard and a luxurious lunch at the college. Got a glimpse of Michael Dummett, one of the key figures in late 20th century analytical philosophy (an anti-realist) in the common room.
The New College gardens...



A quick snapshot of a spire, just for the sake of it...


And off to the bus stop I went.

Glasgow, April 9th

Henri Schildt, the third of our team of researchers working on the paper revision flew to Glasgow from London on the previous day. Henri was one of the PhD students at TKK when I started there as a post doc. He used to be one of those irrirating characters who excelled at a wide variety of things: good at math, extremely intelligent, a likeable character, master programmer, inclined towards philosophical thinking, etc.

Henri and John...



We concluded after lunch and I took a stroll downtown Glasgow to pick up a few gifts for Outi and the kids. In one shop window, an oxymoron of a product was on display - a matchbox-sized Kerry King Marshall amplified with an allegedly massive sound. Well...

Here's a picture of Kerry King...



And here's the massive amplifier on display...



Oh well. I took an evening flight to London and a bus to Oxford for a short visit. On the plane, I devoured a delightful snack of a comic book that I had bought from Forbidden Planet, "Ministry of Space." Beautifully drawn, nice retro look and a smart, little story. Recommended.

Glasgow, April 8th

The next day dawned much brighter and I was off to another day of serious scientific thinking with John. On the way to the business school, I captured some images of city life.

My take on the absurd, Campus Rocks Wednesdays, and a guy with a tree growing out of his head...


Church and crane...



Oh, well...



A bloke on a stick, with a seagull on his head...



British dumpsters are far classier than their Finnish kin...



Lounge lizard...



My take on the tourist photo genre...



I was thrilled to find Forbidden Planet in Glasgow. Helped myself to a healthy dose of comic books. There was also some stuff in their shop window which looked pretty essential to me.



Apparition...



Another tourist picture...


The crowd gathering for my presentation. A nice and smart audience with some very useful comments offered.

Glasgow, April 7th

Glasgow greeted me with gray weather. Once again I was caught off guard by the friendliness and warmth of the people I interacted with, beginning with the hotel reception, continued by the waitress in a coffee shop, and a lady I asked for directions while trying to find Strathclyde Business School. On entering the building, I was greeted by a television screen, welcoming my humble presence.



The pleasure was all mine.

The town of Glasgow is a smörgåsbord of different architectural styles. After doing six hours of intense discussion about our paper's reviewer responses, John took me to a walk to the town's necropolis, which he tells me means "burial hill".



My previous encounter with the word 'necropolis' was from Neil Gaiman's comic book Sandman
where there was a town of the dead called Litharge, which housed a civilization of undead, who lived down the river on which other civilizations left their dead. They had a magnificient 'necropolis' where they conducted one of the "five approved methods of bodily disposal." The boy hero of the story dreams of a life beyond the necropolis and the mountains.

By the way, those interested in Gaiman's work might want to download "A study in emerald", the best Sherlock Holmes story I've ever heard, read by the author himself. You can get the story free here.



The Glasgow's necropolis turned out to be less sinister from Gaiman's vision. It was a very pleasant place to take a stroll and forget our troubles for a while.

On jet planes, Foucault and all that

I was off to the U.K. for some heavy-duty scientific work with some heavy-duty colleagues. Leaving on Sunday on a business trip is a melancholic exercise. We live in an area where lots of businesspeople live nearby, and I always get this cold feeling when the taxis take the business men and women away from their families on Sunday evening.

Anyway, this was what I did this time. I was looking forward to a couple of days of uninterrupted thinking with some really smart people. John Sillince, Henri Schildt and I had a just received a revision request from a tough journal and we needed to devise a strategy on how to deal with it. John hosted the meeting in Glasgow. To top that off, I had a meeting at Oxford with Richard Whittington, to work on our paper on how managers become strategists, presented at EGOS 2007.



On the plane, I read a new paper on strategy as discourse by Ezzamel & Willmott, published in a recent issue of Organization Studies. As this is more or less my core field of interest, an article in a good journal is always an event.

I had tried to give this paper one of my usual "ten minute glances" at work and had failed miserably. As I got the sense that the text might reveal its secrets only under closer scrutiny, I had booked some "quality time" at the airplane for this purpose.



I was right. The paper had no discernible tables, figures or other summarizing instruments that you usually find reviewers insisting on at good management journals. The contribution was written in narrative form, in a sense not similar to Foucault, Ezzamel & Willmott's main theoretical inspiration. Many of my colleagues find Foucault difficult. I think the reason may be that you cannot glance at it and find neat definitions and summaries for concepts often attributed to him like "panoptic gaze" or "disciplinary power". You have to read the whole narrative to make sense of what he is saying. The whole narrative, on the other hand, is often very compelling, insightful and witty, i.e., great fun to read. I discovered this by accident when I took Discipline and Punish with me to a family holiday on the Azores and had a great time reading it. Later on, I have found many of the ideas useful in my work. After that, I don't approach Foucault as a "difficult author" but as a treat. It is just that you have to book enough time to read one of his works to be able to appreciate it.

Anyway, about Ezzamel & Willmott. I found their introduction to Foucault's contribution to Organization Studies in the paper's theory section quite compelling. For the reasons mentioned above, Foucault is not the easiest author to introduce. I made a mental note about wanting to explore further what Foucault meant by "systems", a concept used by social theorists across the board (and abhorred by others).

The results section also contains a number of compelling examples about power/knowledge nexus Foucault is widely known of promoting. I found myself quoting the paper in my presentation at Strathclyde, as one example about Stichco's new CEO promoting a way of working based on "fact, not anecdote".

On pp. 210-221, Ezzamel and Willmott note that:

"We have acknowledged the impossibility of providing any definitively or conclusively authoritative representation of the ‘reality’ of (our) narrative(’s) construction. Ultimately, a narrative’s plausibility and contribution depends upon the (power/knowledge) relation of its readers’ interpretive amenability to its discursive invitation. Does the narrative resonate with the reader’s socially organized concerns? Is it met with indifference? Or does it arouse their hostility? It is the power-invested sense of solidity or self-evidence of the discursive interpretation or translation of accounts that conditions their reception as compelling, confusing, contentious or contemptible."

Well, did the paper resonate with me? Yes and no. While I was certainly sympathetic to the approach taken in the paper, and the paper gave rise to a number of thought processes, I was not completely sure about the final argument that the paper was making about discourse and strategy work. For me, the paper was another example about how discursive practices give rise to particular social realities, if a compelling one. I was missing a particular, specific finding about strategy work that I could take with me. It was a good remainder about the value of alternative analyses on strategy work, as the authors note on pp.

"It is to be expected that Foucauldian analysis will be found wanting by researchers working in traditions where it is assumed or expected that analysis should self-evidently serve, or be positively consequential for, a research agenda which, not exceptionally, is presumed or compliantly conceded to be the only worthwhile agenda. It is perhaps only when the limits and precariousness of knowledge claims are appreciated — along with their political and ethical responsibilities— that the relevance and value of alternative forms of analysis becomes contemplatible. Indeed, it has been suggested that appreciating the contribution of alternative forms of analysis that are directly attentive and responsive to ‘the crisis of representation’ (Calas and Smircich 1999: 650) then becomes a necessity, not a pointless diversion."

This is a good point and well put. Strategic management is rich with all sorts of discourses, seeking hegemony. After all, it is the strategy scholars who stay in best hotels.



I also gave myself the pleasure of marveling at landscape photos, which is something that I often to while traveling. I had brought with me the landscape photography masterclass book Developing Vision and Style, brought to us by a Joe Cornish, Charlie Waite, David Ward and their students. The book, in addition to representing a collection of sublime photos, also contained an interesting debate on issues such as: "should I aim for an identifiable style in my work." The struggle for consistency in creating an identifiable style without becoming predictable is something that faces, not such artists, but also us organizational scientists in their work. We struggle for a "voice" but do not wish to get stuck, repeating the same message over and over again.

For instance, if one goes to website hosting the works of such master photographers as Joe Cornish, Charlie Waite or David Ward, one sees that after a while, there are identifiable aspects to the artists' images. But every new image contains something unpredictable, and is a new challenge to the beholder.

On breaking down in front of class

Oh, how I long for those carefree days from my youth, when catching a flu meant a couple of days off school, watching videos and relishing the misery of one's existence. Nowadays a flu means that you end up working nights because your kids can't go to the kindergarten because they are sick too.

Oh, moan, moan.

Luckily, the kids are better now and I just have to work during the daytime while recovering from a flu. One of my favorite activities in a period like this is teaching class. Yesterday, I literary broke down in front of a class full of communications students as I had a huge coughing fit. You could say I "turned Bob Fleming" on them.

"Bob Fleming", you ask? Take a look at this. You'll see what I mean.