Geosocial Lives in Topological Polis: Mohamed Bouazizi as a Political Agent

Geopolitical events and developments can hardly be detached from the mundane lives where people confront politicised and politicising matters, share meaningful experiences, build attitudes, and take action. To contribute to understanding how large-scale geopolitics connect with the everyday, this article draws attention to political subjectivity as the condition of possibility of political agency and polis as the geosocial context of political life as experienced, conceived, and practised. Empirically, the paper engages with the tragic end of Mohamed Bouazizi’s life and scrutinises his role in the events and developments generally known as the Arab Spring. Our analysis contests both the dominant interpretation that postulates political import to his acts, and the alternative account that underscores his apolitical stance. Instead, we propose that the international politicisation of Mohamed Bouazizi’s agency unfolded as an accomplishment of many individual and collective actors, including Bouazizi himself in his struggle to cope with emergent aspects of his everyday life.     

Managing competitive software component supplier relationships

This study addresses purchasing challenges faced by companies buying commercial software components. The purpose is to find out how we can understand the purchasing challenges in software component business. First we develop pre-understanding based on knowledge on competitive supplier relationships and competitive bidding. This is elaborated empirically through a qualitative case study. We contribute to prior literature by concluding that the nature of software component supplier relationships is influenced by the object and costs of exchange. We also argue that, in markets like software component business, it is essential to pay attention to the development of the whole supply market.     

Dynamics of sectoral business cycle comovement

Sectoral comovement accounts for a considerable share of the variance of aggregate variables. However, little is known about its time-varying aspects by now. In this article, a multivariate DCC- GARCH framework is employed to study dynamics of sectoral comovement across manufacturing sectors both in the United States and in Germany. To account for possible nonlinearities, asymmetric effects in conditional volatilities as well as in conditional correlations are being assessed. We find that comovement across sectors is not stable but shows irregular movements. Particularly, contractions tend to be more synchronized than expansions in manufacturing sector. Moreover, we examine the role of various aggregate factors for the fluctuations in conditional correlations. Our findings reveal that both the non-constant variability of common factors and the changes in the effects of these factors play role for the fluctuations in sectoral comovement.     

A Missing Citizen? Issue Based Citizenship in City-Regional Planning

City regions are significant sites of economic development, policymaking, and everyday living. Yet in many countries they are weakly institutionalized and therefore lack established democratic practices. This article is based on a study exploring citizen participation in city-regional planning in Finland, where traditional participatory means have largely failed to invite and involve citizens. The analysis approaches city regions relationally, as evolving processes with a changing spatial shape and scope. Through the notion of lived citizenship, including the dimensions of status, practices and acts, the article reveals how the dominant ideas of citizenship in city-regional planning hide from view elements that are significant for citizen participation. Whereas people's rights to participation can largely be fulfilled on a territorial basis in municipalities and states through legal membership in political communities, in the context of weakly institutionalized city-regional planning such status-based forms of participation are typically not available. This vagueness has created an image of a missing city-regional citizenry, which the article sets out to challenge and rework through the notion of issue-based participation as lived citizenship.     

A Geopolitics of the Horse in Finland

The disregard of animal subjectivity in geopolitics is challenged as outdated and arrogant in light of the growing interdisciplinary understanding of the relational, dispersed, and co-evolving nature of agency. First, the war horse is examined by joining the instrumental approach of military history with the emphasis on emotion in animal studies. Knowledge about animal subjectivity is expanded by demonstrating how the horse itself has co-produced the Finnish experience in World War II and the national narrative about this conflict. Calculable territory, biopolitical state intervention, the political ecology of war, affect, and the body build connections between the horse’s war and theory, methodology, and concepts in political geography and geopolitics. Equine labour and response to the state’s geopolitically motivated breeding exercises during peace then bridge animal studies and critical geopolitics, showing how the horse has supported the formation of Finnishness. Finally, a look at contemporary mobility, geopolitics of disease, and biometric bordering exemplifies how the horse continues to adapt to new roles in Finnish society and contribute to human institutions and governance. The examination demonstrates the importance of other-than-human beings in the making of Finland as a political space and place. Suggestions for further studies and data point to opportunity. The article serves those who question rigid categorisations and segmentation of research and pedagogy into intellectually self-contained islands.     

Managing consumption communities

Companies are increasingly searching for ways to manage consumption communities. However, previous studies on consumption communities suggest that managing them is difficult, if not impossible, because communities are self-directed and consist of equal, autonomous actors. This article addresses this paradox and builds on recent conceptualisations of consumption communities as networks. By building on theory about network management functions, we discuss how companies can actually manage consumption communities without authoritarian and hierarchical control. Using three case studies of heterogeneous consumption communities, a footwear brand, a sports lifestyle community and a tableware and glassware design brand, the article identifies eight consumption community management activities. The article makes a theoretical contribution to the literature on consumption communities by introducing a network management perspective. In addition, it offers valuable practical guidance for managers who wish to manage consumption communities proactively at the strategic level and as an essential part of their customer-related management processes.     

On Invariant Coordinate System (ICS) Functionals

Equivariance and invariance issues often arise in multivariate statistical analysis. Statistical procedures have to be modified sometimes to obtain an affine equivariant or invariant version. This is often done by preprocessing the data, e.g., by standardizing the multivariate data or by transforming the data to an invariant coordinate system (ICS). In this paper, standardization of multivariate distributions and characteristics of ICS functionals and statistics are examined. Also, invariances up to some groups of transformations are discussed. Constructions of ICS functionals are addressed. In particular, the construction based on the use of two scatter matrix functionals presented by Tyler et al. (2009) and direct definitions based on the approach presented by Chaudhuri & Sengupta (1993) are examined. Diverse applications of ICS functionals are discussed.