[diss] Kauppakorkeakoulu / BIZ

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/50

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Affect in Collective Organizing
(2025) Grünbaum, Leni
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
This doctoral dissertation explores the role of affect in collective organizing, namely in the context of change processes. Current research has shown that affective flows, which emerge in encounters between humans and materialities, can energize groups, generate a sense of connection, and drive collective action. Overall, the potential of affect to enhance or constrain the participants’ capacity to act makes affect essential to the success of expert-led change processes. Scholars have, however, highlighted that despite the choreographing of managers, facilitators and other actors, affective flows remain unpredictable. We therefore need to extend our knowledge of how affect bears upon change processes. How do affective flows enhance and shut off possibilities for connection, openness, responsiveness, and multiplicity that allow participation and moving forward? The dissertation addresses these aims through three essays based on an ethnography with three child psychiatric teams at a Nordic university hospital. Each essay examines the coaching process—in which I acted as the researcher-coach—as it unfolded with one of the teams. Resting on a relational ontology, the essays do not foreground the actions of individuals. Instead, they focus on the ever-shifting relations among humans, and humans and materialities, viewing this ongoing movement as collective organizing. The first essay attends to the collective leadership process, through which the team pursued direction and created spaces for co-action, while tracing how the process unfolded through collective affective gravitation and affective points of inflection. The second essay focuses on affective attunement, or the intentional disposition to affect and be affected. It shows how affective intensities shape the participants’ capacity to act by enabling or disabling response-ability, which refers to the embodied ability to notice and respond to others. The third essay addresses communitas— spontaneous experiences of existential connection—conceptualizing it as a relational accomplishment that unfolds through an affective dynamic, in which both humans and nonhuman elements participate. This dissertation makes two main contributions to the studies of affect in organizational research. First, it theorizes and empirically illustrates two types of affective dynamics—centered on collective gravitation and affective points of inflection, and respectively, affective resonance—that shape how affective flows emerge and shift, thus either expanding or reducing the group’s collective capacity to act. In doing so, the dissertation provides tools to help scholars recognize and follow how affect shapes collective organizing in situated contexts. Second, the dissertation makes a methodological contribution by indicating that to grasp the lived sense of affective events, researchers must immerse themselves in the empirical setting and engage with the affective flows. Additionally, it encourages researchers to combine different forms of writing differently to craft texts that convey the affective tone and speak to the senses. Overall, the dissertation emphasizes that because affective flows are open-ended, the outcomes of collective organizing cannot be predetermined. The dissertation also offers practical suggestions to coaches, process consultants and organizational actors seeking to support change.
Deimosology - Producing enjoyment in the excessive impasse of techno-driven consumer culture
(2025) Ahlberg, Oscar
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
This doctoral dissertation consists of three independent articles and one synthesising introduction. The introduction presents the concept of deimosology as a speculative endeavour to grapple with wicked eschatological problems of our capitalocentric present. The articles are grounded in a post-structural and psychoanalytic onto-epistemological stance and are developed with a sensitivity to the unconscious desires and affects that operate in the backdrop of our quotidian lives and shape our way of being in the world. While approaching different topics, the articles share an underlying motivation to map out affective deadlocks that occlude attempts at systematic change. This stark state of capitalist realism, where a socio-political form of organising beyond our current one is not only deemed unfeasible but presented as unimaginable, lies at the heart of what deimosology aims to address – namely why are we so locked in place, and what critical and affirmative projects can we envision if clarion calls to consumers, managers, and various stakeholders rationality continuously fail to produce effects. By theorising the central role of unconscious enjoyment in capitalist consumer culture, its intensification through technology and the subjects produced by it, the articles form the starting point for addressing such questions.
Essays on Blockchain Technology and Digital Economics
(2025) Mohazab, Amin
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
In this first essay, together with my co-authors, we examine the economic mechanism of cryptocurrency mining. By presenting a profit function, a maximization equilibrium is obtained. The model provides a formal approach to the demand for hashing power as a function of revenues, mining costs and the number of miners. We consider how the equilibrium is affected by passive miners. We use these results to introduce a formulation of the price elasticity of the demand for hashing power with respect to the cost of energy. The model is simulated using Reinforcement Learning algorithms that arrive at similar equilibrium results. The article concludes with the implications of the model for policymaking. The Bitcoin Payment System (BPS) is the first and the most prominent decentralized protocol to send monetary transactions all around the world. The BPS does not use a predetermined fee mechanism. Instead, users propose fees they are willing to pay and the market determines the transactions that will be transmitted. In the second essay, I use a multi-unit share auction model to analyze the payoffs of the participants. I first use transaction data to non-parametrically estimate the marginal valuations of the bidders in the network and then estimate the payoff of the participants in every state of the system. As a result of the analysis, I realized that when the system is getting congested users bid closer to their marginal valuations so their payoffs would be decreased. On the other hand, miners would earn more since they are the service providers who collect fees at each step. Multiple cryptocurrencies suffer a bottleneck effect: blocks are limited in size and the protocols restrict their expected arrival rates. On the other hand, this congestion creates incentives to set transaction fees. We show that this incentive structure suffers from moral hazard, where miners have incentives to induce congestion to increase fees. In this third essay, together with my coauthor, we present this result using two approaches: Auction Theory and Reinforcement Learning. While Game Theory studies strategic behavior between rational players, Machine Learning is based on blind players finding optimal strategies by brute force iteration of trials. The Auction Theory model presented in this paper is a multiunit discriminatory (or pay-as-bid) auction with single-unit demand. We add to the standard model the element of supply reduction, characterize the symmetric equilibrium and present how to expand it as the number of players grows asymptotically. The Machine Learning part focuses on Q-learning, a well-known application of reinforcement learning algorithms. The main finding has significant policy implications: decentralization, one of the core strengths of proof-of-work protocols, doesn't necessarily apply to block-level incentives.
Essays on transportation and the environment
(2025) Palanne, Kimmo
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
Tackling climate change requires setting a price on CO2 emissions. In the transportation sector, the most straightforward way to achieve this is to impose a tax on fuel. However, fuel taxes often face strong public opposition due to their perceived unfairness. To evaluate these concerns, the first two essays of this dissertation study how the economic burdens created by fuel taxation are distributed in society. In the first essay, my co-authors and I analyze the distributional impacts of fuel taxation by estimating how strongly fuel taxes are passed through to fuel prices. Using gas station-level data on fuel prices, we study the price effects of a large diesel tax increase implemented in Finland in 2012 and document two main findings. First, on average only 80 percent of the tax increase was passed through to diesel prices, meaning that a part of the tax burden was borne by fuel suppliers. Second, pass-through rates exhibited systematic regional variation such that diesel prices saw the largest increases in the most rural and lowest-income areas. In the second essay, my co-author and I study the distribution of fuel tax burdens in more detail at the household level. We measure tax burdens as the share of disposable income spent on fuel taxes and estimate these burdens for nearly all Finnish households in 2016. The analysis is made possible by car-level data on mileage and fuel economy, as well as individual-level data on income and other socioeconomic characteristics. We find that fuel taxes are not regressive among the population of all households. Rather, upper middle-income households bear the highest average burdens. This finding is explained by car ownership being uncommon at low incomes. In contrast, if we only consider car-owning households, fuel taxes do appear regressive. However, differences across income deciles explain only 1.5 percent of the total variation in tax burdens. The substantial horizontal variation is difficult to explain with observable household characteristics, but we find that households that live in more rural areas, have children, or are employed tend to face higher burdens. Finally, we show that average tax burdens across income deciles could easily be equalized by redistributing the tax revenue, but the large within-decile differences are almost impossible to eliminate with transfers. If fuel taxes cannot be increased due to public opposition, alternative climate policies might be needed. In the third essay, I study the effects of public transit pricing on car use and emissions. I analyze a 2019 pricing reform in the Helsinki region in Finland that lowered public transit fares by 45 percent for individuals living in a specific travel zone. Using individual-level data on mileage, car ownership and home locations, I compare individuals who received the price cut to those who lived just outside the travel zone and experienced almost no change in prices. I find a clear reduction in mileage in response to the price cut, with cross-price elasticity estimates ranging between 0.06 and 0.27. However, I find no response in car ownership. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the cost of reducing emissions with this reform landed in the range of €1000–€3000 per tonne of CO2, making the price cut an expensive climate policy tool.
Essays on public procurement
(2025) Jääskeläinen, Jan
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
This thesis studies competition in public procurement. It consists of three essays, each of which looks at the competitive process in public procurement from a different perspective. In the first essay, we study the extent and determinants of competition and its role in determining prices in public procurement using uniquely comprehensive and rich data from Finland and Sweden. We supplement our study with qualitative interviews. Competition is extremely low in both countries. All regions and contracting authority types, and most industries face the issue. In addition, bidders are typically heterogeneous in size, which likely further limits competition. Competition seems to work as expected as (standardised) prices decrease with the number of actual and potential bidders. The perceived reasons for lack of competition are many and vary between industries but are typically related to communication practices and professionalism in public procurement. Accordingly, we show using contracting authority office level norms as instrumental variables that the use of scoring auctions is detrimental to competition, especially in industries where their use is not typical. Bidder friendly dialog, strategies and practices are proposed as remedies. In the second essay, we study preferences of 900+ real-world public procurement officials in Finland and Germany. This is an important pursuit as they report having sizeable discretion and minimal extrinsic incentives. Through conjoint experiments, we identify the relative importance of multiple features of the procurement outcomes. Officials prioritise avoiding unexpectedly high prices over seeking low prices. Avoiding winners with previous poor performance is the most important feature. Officials avoid very low competition, while litigation risks and regional favouritism matter less. Preferences and office interests appear well-aligned among bureaucrats. The third essay examines the consumer side of the public procurement process and what happens after the procurement auction is concluded. In the essay, I study the Finnish market for physiotherapy services, which can be divided into a private market and two public procurement markets - one organised by municipalities, the other by the Finnish social security institution. Using data on prices and firm characteristics across five regions, I estimate the demand in the three markets and find the following: First, unobserved quality is positively correlated across markets; second, demand is very price-elastic in the private market, somewhat price-elastic in the municipal market where civil servants choose the physiotherapist, and inelastic in the market operated by the Finnish social security institution where consumers choose their therapist without knowing or paying the price. These findings indicate that freedom of choice might come with a price when consumers themselves bear no costs.
Exploring behavioral economics in archival auditing research
(2025) Nickpour, Mohammadali
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
This doctoral dissertation comprises an introduction and three self-contained essays that, using archival data, examine the role of innate personality traits, reputation concerns, and compensation incentives in shaping the judgment and behavior of individual auditors. The first essay investigates the relationship between the inherent characteristics of audit partners and audit quality. Drawing on political psychology literature, it argues that individuals' political activism reflects their extraversion and openness to experience. Using data on political campaign contributions in the United States, the study finds a consistent positive association between audit partners’ extraversion and openness to experience, as indicated by their political contributions, and various aspects of audit quality. These findings underscore the significance of considering individual differences in the recruitment and training processes within audit firms. The second essay explores the influence of reputation concerns on auditor behavior. It hypothesizes that the identification of individual engagement partners in the United States, as mandated by PCAOB’s Rule 3211, increases their reputation concerns. The results indicate that, among clients with existing or potential internal control material weaknesses, there is an increased likelihood of adverse internal control opinions in the post-Rule 3211 period. In addition, in the post-Rule 3211 period, clients with high internal control risk experience a significantly greater increase in audit fees and audit report delays compared to clients with effective internal controls. Furthermore, the study shows that adverse opinions increase the likelihood of early audit partner rotations within the same audit firm. These findings are valuable for regulators and audit firms seeking to understand how auditors’ reporting on internal controls has evolved in response to engagement partner identification and heightened reputation concerns. The third essay examines how individual audit partners respond to horizontal pay disparities among partners within audit firms. The study utilizes Belgian data, a setting in which most audit partners establish limited liability management entities through which they perform audit services and bill the audit firm. This structure allows for observing the actual partner compensations. The findings reveal that greater pay disparity among partners is associated with lower audit quality, with partners earning below the firm's average delivering lower-quality audits as overall compensation disparity increases. The results are more pronounced among male and early-career audit partners. Further analyses dismiss the alternative explanation that these findings are driven by auditors with lower ability or quality. This study provides practical insights for audit firms in designing effective compensation systems for partners.
Industrial Organization Studies on Pharmaceutical Markets
(2025) Markkanen, Jaakko
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
This thesis comprises three unpublished essays. The first essay analyzes the effectiveness of consumer choice policies in the Nordic pharmaceutical markets. Using quasi-experimental methods and data matched across countries by active ingredients, the results show that pharmaceutical expenditure per dose decreases by 40% under stricter pricing regimes, without adversely affecting pharmaceutical availability or consumption. Regimes that increase consumer incentives are effective, but those that address both consumer and producer incentives are the most successful. The second essay examines the impact of retail markup regulation on wholesale and retail prices in the Finnish pharmaceutical market. Employing both reduced form and structural analyses, I find that a reduction in pharmacy markups leads to increased wholesale prices, with only half of this increase passed on to retail prices. The study also suggests that adjustments in VAT rates could counterbalance the increased manufacturer revenues resulting from lower retail markups. The third essay evaluates the impact of relaxing entry regulations in the Finnish pharmacy market. Our simulation results show that the existing entry restrictions primarily benefit incumbent pharmacists at the expense of consumers. Furthermore, although entry regulations are motivated by the goal of ensuring equal access to local pharmacy services, our results suggest that almost all consumers benefit from deregulation. The number of pharmacies increases, particularly in urban areas, whereas rural areas and regions with older populations benefit less. However, increases in fixed costs and reduced labor productivity outweigh consumer surplus gains, indicating excessive entry from a social welfare perspective.
Essays on Asset Pricing and Funding Conditions
(2024) Nissinen, Juuso Petteri
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
This thesis consists of an introduction and four essays that all address the impact that funding conditions have on global asset prices. The first essay, which is a joint work with Sara Ferreira Filipe and Matti Suominen, investigates the roles of global funding constraints and funding risk in the currency markets. We demonstrate how funding risks significantly influence global currency carry trade activity, currency volatilities, currency correlations, and currency returns. The second essay addresses the impact of currency-specific funding conditions on global markets. When funding is globally constrained, the relationship between expected returns and risks varies significantly depending on the choice of measurement currency. The expectedreturns align best with risks in the currency where the relative funding conditions are most favourable. The third essay shows that although rising interest rates and tightening credit constraints reduce funding positions in a given funding currency; the policy alternatives have opposing effects on an alternative funding currency. While increasing interest rates make the alternative currency more attractive as a funding source, tighter credit limits reduce the available risk exposure also for the alternative currency. In the fourth essay, joint work with Markus Sihvonen, we show that eurozone government bond convenience yields, which are the credit risk-controlled bond prices relative to the safe German bond, are driven by relative funding costs and funding risks. We provide novel causal evidence for this mechanism by leveraging exogenous changes in funding costs within the Eurosystem's funding programs.
An Employee Perspective on Management Control Effectiveness - Measurement and Mechanisms
(2024) Falk, Kerstin
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (monograph)
Empirical research has mostly shown that management control (MC) practices are linked to positive organizational outcomes. However, it is not fully understood how these MC practices actually contribute to improved organizational performance. Grounded in emerging literature within management accounting and human resources, this dissertation aims to unravel intricate employee-level mechanisms through which MC practices affect individual behaviours and finally organizational performance. Hence, this work addresses research on MC effectiveness by shifting the focus from the traditional manager-centric perspective to the crucial yet often overlooked realm of employee perceptions. Two empirical studies are conducted. The first study systematically develops a novel scale for quantifying employee-perceived result and action control quality (eRCQ and eACQ). The second study explores a process model of MC effectiveness from an employees' perspective. According to this process, employees respond to management practices by forming individual perceptions and developing a certain attitude towards the work or organization which results in different individual outcome variables that finally lead to a certain behavior and performance at the organizational level. Four consecutive mechanisms can be revealed within the relationship of the use of MC and employee behavior: employee perceptions, employee engagement, mental wellbeing, and turnover intention. In conclusion, this dissertation advances our knowledge of effective MC systems by providing a nuanced understanding of how employees responses to controls can be explained. The proposed process model elucidates the sequence from control design to impact, offering useful guidance for organizations that seek to boost performance through engaged and happy employees.
Essays on Health Policy and Human Capital
(2025) Olkkola, Maarit
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
This doctoral dissertation consists of three essays that explore topics related to health policy for children. The first two essays examine the introduction of publicly provided universal child health services in Finland in the 1940s. The first essay focuses on the effects of these services on the Finnish child mortality transition, while the second essay considers their longer-run impacts on human capital accumulation. In contrast to these broad-based health services, the third essay zooms in on the human capital effects of one specific publicly provided health service: a mass vaccination campaign against the childhood disease measles in the United States. Specifically, the first essay examines the introduction of universal child health centers in every municipality in Finland in the 1940s. These centers offered regular child health counseling visits for children under school age, both on-site and at home. The essay uses newly collected, individuallevel child mortality data to estimate the effects of the reform on child mortality at different ages. For children aged between one month and one year—who were the most intensively targeted by the policy—the essay finds that access to rural child health centers reduced postneonatal mortality by 9 deaths per thousand live births (27 percent of baseline postneonatal mortality). This figure corresponds to approximately half of the overall decline in postneonatal mortality in Finland during 1945–1950 or approximately one-fourth of the overall decline in the mortality of children under age five. For children aged one to four, the essay finds a reduction in the mortality of boys of approximately 18 deaths per thousand live births (67 percent of baseline mortality for boys in this age range). In contrast, the survival benefits for girls remain uncertain. The second essay follows the impacts of the child health centers into adulthood. It finds that children who gained access to universal child health services in the 1940s were two percentage points more likely to complete either academic secondary school or a tertiary degree and earned approximately two percent more income in adulthood. These benefits were largest for children who gained access prior to birth but they also accrued to children who gained access up to age three. The estimated benefits appear clearer for girls than for boys. However, the benefits for boys may be underestimated because boys were more likely to survive due to the child health centers, according to the findings in the first essay. A bounding exercise suggests that the true effect on income is more likely to lie in the interval between two and five percent. The third essay, based on joint work with Philipp Barteska, Sonja Dobkowitz, and Michael Rieser, also focuses on the human capital effects of a health intervention. It suggests that the first nationwide mass vaccination campaign against measles increased educational attainment in the United States. Its empirical strategy exploits variation in exposure to the childhood disease across states right before the Measles Eradication Campaign of 1967–1968, which reduced reported measles incidence by 90 percent within two years. The essay finds that the reduction in measles exposure increased the years of education on average by approximately 0.1 years in the affected cohorts.
Realizing Strategic Value from Digital Innovation Initiatives - Digital Innovation Theory-Driven Portfolio and Transformation Management
(2024) Salonen, Jukka
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
The executive management of a company plays a critical role in strategy formulation and achieving the company's financial targets. Strategy implementation requires investment in various initiatives and investments in digital innovation initiatives have increased considerably in recent years, and they now account for a major part of companies' overall investment portfolio. Simultaneously, innovative use of digital technologies is triggering transformation processes in organizations, thereby changing the nature of many traditional service and manufacturing companies. In many organizations, CEOs executive management teams are finding it challenging to realize strategic value for the company and its customers from these investments. On the one hand, existing studies have not been able to adequately connect innovation portfolio management (IPM) to digital innovation theories to support portfolio management of digital innovation initiatives (PMDII). On the other hand, practitioners find it challenging to manage digital transformation by using the theories of digital innovation, digital transformation, and Industry 4.0 transformation. This research aims to enrich the theory and practice of realizing greater strategic value from digital innovation initiatives through portfolio management and transformation management. Digital innovation theory forms the backbone of this research, and it is used to clarify and simplify digital-innovation-specific portfolio and transformation management measures. Dissertation consists of three published articles where the first research paper focuses on analyzing and understanding the status of the research on digital IPM and value realization. This study is utilizing systematic literature review as a method. The second research paper focuses on how IPM theory can be developed for PMDII by considering the specific demands related to digital innovation. On the third research paper the role of executive management in the transformation driven by digital innovation is analyzed. Both in the second and third paper utilize single case study with grounded theory research method. This dissertation places digital innovation theory at the core of managing portfolios of digital innovation initiatives and the digital transformation triggered by such initiatives. Studies provide novel models for digital-innovation-specific portfolio management and digital transformation management to realize strategic value.
Individual decision-making for social value - Understanding behavior in purchasing and supply management
(2024) Kenny, Katie Elizabeth
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
Purchasers play an important role in sustainable supply chain decisions. With little legal oversight and varying regulations, they have flexibility in their boundary spanning role. Yet what drives individual purchasers to choose products with social value in mind is not often explored. In order to address a discovered limitation of existing SSCM literature, this led me to ask the overarching question: What role can or do individuals play in achieving social outcomes at an inter-organizational level? This dissertation explores the nuances of decision makers within three different contexts, using two behavioral theories and two methods. In Essay I, we sought to understand factors driving high prevalence of low-cost pricing strategies in healthcare vs value-based procurement. Agency the-ory was used to identify (1) cost-saving incentives, (2) risk-sharing contracts, and (3) stronger (versus weaker) clinical evidence as factors influencing deci-sion-making. We conducted a 2x2x2 between-subjects scenario-based vignette experiment and found the negative effects of intra-organizational cost saving incentives on value-based purchasing (VBP) adoption; the positive impact of inter-organizational risk-sharing contracts, and the challenge of leveraging clinical evidence to support value claims. In Essay II, risk preferences of decision-makers were explored via their assessment of financial and social risks. The association between gender and risk is oft studied in behavioral economic contexts yet our understanding of how/why remains lacking in supply chain management. Gender role theory (GRT) was used to identify the potential relationship between gender effects of risk probability ambiguity and social issue specificity. A 2x2x2 scenario-based role-playing experiment found that when given an ambig-uous probability of an issue occurring, female students tend to choose the more sustainable product choice when compared to the choices made by males in our student sample. However, similar results do not replicate in the professional sample. Economic and social assumptions regarding gendered behavior were thus not fully supported in this context. Essay III quantitatively explored the intersection of gender role stereotypes and sustainable purchasing and supply management (SPSM) using Q-sorting. Results showed preliminary agreement that certain behaviors were perceived as feminine and others masculine. Because practitioners perceived SPSM behaviors according to gender role stereotypes, further investigation of the intersection between gender and SPSM is supported. Recognizing patterns in how we categorize certain purchasing behaviors as masculine or feminine is important for understanding and combatting our implicit biases that inhibit women's advancement in PSM and how that may concern sustainability integration. Overall, the nuances of PSM decisions which can have social impacts were discussed.
Skilled yet minoritized: An equality, diversity, and inclusion perspective on skilled migrants in multilingual organizations
(2024) Back, Hilla
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
This dissertation advances language-sensitive international business (IB) research through an equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) perspective, and adds insight into language as a dimension of diversity. To date, these fields have remained largely disconnected. Through single case studies of two multilingual organizations in Finland, I shed light on the discrimination, marginalization, and differential status of a specific minority group: linguistic minorities not proficient in the local language of their host country. In this dissertation, these linguistic minorities are international students in higher education and migrant professionals in a professional service firm. These individuals are skilled migrants who are a scarce and valued asset as countries worldwide combat talent deficits, decreasing birth rates, and aging populations. This dissertation is comprised of three empirical papers of the two multilingual organizations. The data sources include primary data such as interviews and surveys, and secondary data in the form of internal EDI documents and statistics, as well as national media coverage. The findings showcase how language acts as a form of discrimination, necessitates coping strategies from those not proficient in the language, fuels inclusion-related tensions, and thus influences EDI-implications in multilingual organizations. This dissertation provides theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions. Theoretically, by utilizing a paradox perspective, it advances knowledge on the key role of language in fueling and surfacing inclusion-related tensions, leading to outcomes that impede the inclusion of linguistic minorities. It also conceptualizes language-based discrimination in multilingual organizations, and links coping strategies of linguistic minorities to inclusion implications. Empirically, it contributes by documenting and analyzing experiences of discrimination, marginalization, and differential status of minority language groups across face-to-face and virtual spaces in a non-Anglophone context. Lastly, this dissertation offers a methodological innovation by showing how composite narratives can be used in IB to depict different perspectives. In summary, in this dissertation I advance extant knowledge in both language-sensitive IB and EDI in IB research through a focus on the experiences of the minority group of skilled migrants in multilingual organizations. I also offer practical implications on how to achieve a polyphonic organization in which different linguistic resources are equally respected.
From Touch to Tech: Essays on The Implementation of Person-Centered Care
(2024) Seittu, Henriikka
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
Person-centered care (PCC) is a foundational element of modern healthcare. Digitalization is its key enabler. On the one hand, digitalization promotes central aspects of PCC, such as shared decision-making and relationship building. On the other hand, it can impede empathy and compassion, both of which are taken for granted in non-digitalized, face-to-face settings. This dissertation, a collection of three essays, explores how different aspects of PCC can be achieved across digitalized and face-to-face healthcare interactions to optimize PCC outcomes. By examining patient experiences across three healthcare and wellbeing contexts, this dissertation aims to identify an optimal mix of digitalized and face-to-face elements. Taken together, insights from this dissertation will enhance patient-relevant experiential outcomes such as feelings of empowerment, adherence to treatment plans, and overall well-being.
Leveraging the impact of analytics on organizational performance – a multi-method study
(2024) Hirvonen, Marjut
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
Today, companies are obliged to optimize their increasingly complex internal and supply chain operations to gain a competitive edge. It is commonly agreed that the use of analytics can benefit decision-making by, for instance, economizing on cognitive effort to solve even intractable problems and producing insights to maximize business value. Several methods are used for this purpose, including mathematical optimization, simulation, and statistical analyses. However, despite plenty of methodological research on analytics, few studies have focused on examining the practical benefits of analytics. Such benefits vary and their magnitude is unclear, as is the organizational path to achieving them. This dissertation studies the impact of analytics on organizational performance, its benefits, and its successful deployment. The approaches used move from a general to a more specific level. Essay I conducts a comprehensive meta-analysis of the impact of analytics on organizational performance. Essay II examines the reasons for the success and failure of analytics deployment based on interviews in multiple case studies. Essay III identifies, in a real-world case study, the benefits obtained from deploying advanced analytics for supply chain optimization of renewable fuels by using a quantitative comparative analysis between the analytics and legacy planning tool. The meta-analysis in Essay I provides evidence of a strong correlation between analytics capabilities/practices and organizational performance. The following terms for different analytics capabilities and practices were formed to describe the variety of analytics: analytics implementation, resourcing, management, use, quality, and skills. Their impact was then investigated on financial, market, and operational performance. The most significant effect was detected between analytics skills and market performance, as well as between analytics management and financial performance. Essay II identifies key enablers for the successful deployment of prescriptive analytics based on interviews with users, managers, and top management. These enablers are leadership and management support, sufficient resources, user participation, and a common dialogue. However, while end users tended to highlight user participation and skills, managers and top management emphasized more the importance of organizational changes. The findings showed that differences in views were smaller the more successful the case was, and vice versa. Essay III quantifies monetary benefits brought by analytics and also identifies less tangible benefits, such as improved data management. The results indicate the benefits of analytics and assist practitioners in ensuring that key enablers are in place to increase the likelihood of the successful deployment of prescriptive analytics. The results support the inclusion of analytics in a company's strategy, as well as improvement of the personnel's analytics skills to achieve more developed decision-making.
Environmentally and economically sustainable business via commercial and contract management as a leadership strategy instrument
(2024) Hirvonen-Ere, Suvi
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
While the imperative to advance sustainability and fight the grand challenges of our time is widely acknowledged, effective response has been lagging. In parallel with companies thriving to meet their environmental sustainability targets, their leadership has to achieve economical business goals. As companies globally lose a sum equivalent to 9.2 % of their annual revenues due to poor contract management (International Association for Contract and Commercial Management, 2012; World Commerce and Contracting, 2020), a systemic framework and coherent corporate governance are required. As the company is as sustainable as its supply chain, the impact of greening supply chains can be immense. While battling value leakage, contract value erosion and cost of poor quality, and improving contractual quality, cost efficiency and risk management throughout the contract lifecycle, could commercial and contract management be used in an expanded and enhanced manner, outside of and in addition to its core functions, to help organizations achieve also their sustainability goals? This question illustrates the overarching theme of this thesis. First, Article I explores how businesses could promote (transport) sustainability and incentivize the green economy via contract management. Second, Article II explores how companies could move toward environmentally sustainable supply chains and how contract management can help them along in their transformation. Third, Article III examines how contract management could advance environmentally sustainable development. Here, the term 'sustainable business' is twofold: first, the term refers to environmental sustainability, and second, to producing economically sustainable, profitable business growth. Commercial and contract management is examined as the systemic and efficient business framework and coherent private governance to achieve both environmentally and economically sustainable business. The approach is multidisciplinary. Article I utilizes the goal-oriented teleological method under the socio-economic and socio-legal umbrella. Article II uses empirical qualitative semi-structured in-depth interviews and a multiple case study. Article III draws from literature from sustainability practices. The findings indicate that while there is room for expanded utilization for commercial and contract management to accelerate sustainability in businesses, it already shows potential as a future success factor. The articles present several managerial implications for business practice. The gains are achievable, if companies started using contract management as proposed in this dissertation.
Beyond the Western Archetype: Intersectionality and Power in Women’s Entrepreneurship in a Poverty Context
(2024) Ginting-Carlström, Carmelita Euline
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
The Western archetype of women's entrepreneurship, grounded in neoliberal values, pervades the literature on women's entrepreneurship in poverty contexts. This dissertation critically examines the prior literature and highlights the limitations of a Western archetype as the standard for women's entrepreneurship and empowerment in poverty contexts. The dissertation employs intersectionality and post-structuralist feminist theory to examine how the interplay between power and intersecting identities contributes to the heterogeneity of women's experiences of, and struggles with, entrepreneurship in a poverty context. The three articles that constitute this dissertation problematize dominant assumptions in the literature by delving into the microprocess of women entrepreneurs' discourses. Article 1 examines the variety of interpretative repertoires leveraged by women entrepreneurs in a poverty context to legitimize their entrepreneurial activity. It demonstrates that intersecting identities grant women access to a distinct array of discursive resources that both challenge and maintain existing power structures. Article 2 delves into the process of subjectification through post-structuralist discourse analysis to understand how women make sense of their position as mothers who are also entrepreneurs. It shows that women draw on multiple, sometimes conflicting, discourses to negotiate their fluid positions. Article 3 employs a phenomenology of place to enhance the contextualization of research, including entrepreneurship research, in non-Western contexts. It incorporates 'place' as a dynamic and experienced concept, demonstrating that Western perspectives may not always align with local viewpoints. Collectively, these articles reveal a unique form of empowerment that diverges from the Western archetype. Instead, women's empowerment involves the skillful utilization of discursive resources derived from their intersecting identities and fluid, subjective positions. Accordingly, the dissertation proffers theoretical contributions for a more nuanced understanding of women's entrepreneurship in poverty contexts. It also provides methodological and critical reflections on conducting research in poverty contexts that pave the way towards a more inclusive type of theory development in women's entrepreneurship research.
Enterprise Social Media for Knowledge Brokering
(2024) Leppälä, Mia
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
Increasing use of enterprise social media (ESM) for organizational communication and collaboration has fundamentally changed how knowledge is shared and created. Despite the benefits, the abundant availability of information within organizations can sometimes cause confusion, feelings of inadequacy, and even information overload. This doctoral dissertation focuses on knowledge brokering, as it bridges gaps between diverse domains and ensures that relevant information and insights are effectively used within organizations. Discussions on the ESM platforms of two knowledge-intensive organizations were examined to answer the main research question: "How does ESM influence knowledge brokering?" This dissertation comprises four essays. Essays 1 and 2 explore how knowledge brokers can be identified based on their ESM discussions. Essay 3 provides a comprehensive literature review on knowledge brokering and highlights the affordances of ESM for knowledge brokering. Finally, the empirical study reported in Essay 4 utilizes ESM data to uncover attention patterns within organizational communication. Overall, this doctoral dissertation sheds light on how knowledge brokering can leverage ESM to connect individuals, share knowledge, and create new insights, potentially mitigating information overload. It makes four main contributions. First, building on social network theory, this study extends knowledge brokering literature by demonstrating how knowledge brokers, both individuals and intraorganizational groups, can be identified through digital discussions on ESM based on their communicative actions. Second, it identifies the dual role of ESM affordances in both enabling and constraining knowledge brokering, and proposes a framework to analyze and understand the complex interplay of knowledge brokering and ESM. Third, it demonstrates how ESM reveals patterns in attention dynamics within organizational communication. Fourth, it presents innovative methodological approaches to analyze large sets of real-time ESM data, free from self-reflective bias, enabling the observation of individuals and teams in their authentic environments. Furthermore, by complementing qualitative analysis with computational techniques, it introduces a dynamic perspective to the traditionally static view of networks in social network theory, and reveals how organization level patterns are influenced by and influence individual actions over time.
Essays in Structural and Technological Change
(2024) Stenhammar, Aapo
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
In the first essay, I study the intergenerational effects of Finland's Field Reservation Policy introduced in 1969. In the analysis, I use variations in the eligibility to the policy and regional differences in the attractiveness to it. I find that the policy that incentivized farmers to stop farming did not improve the economic outcomes of the farmers, but it did have a significant impact on their children. They achieved higher levels of education, moved away from working in agriculture into administration and managing positions, and they earned more in adulthood. Surprisingly, the effects are driven by children with lower cognitive ability. In the second essay, I focus on the political effects of the same reform on the parliamentary elections of 1970. In particular, I study how the take-up of the policy contributed to the win of a populist agrarian Finnish Rural Party. By using exogenous mass above the eligibility threshold as an instrument in IV design, I show that a percentage-point increase in the field reservation share leads to a 1.1 percentage-point increase in the vote share of the populist party. I find both qualitative and quantitative evidence for two separate explanations for the political reaction. Identity-based backlash fueled by offended farmers who wanted to keep on farming, and negative externalities, like losing social communities and polluting fallow fields, arising from field reservation. I also show that while the policy decreased the local overall taxable income, it did not affect income per capita. The third essay studies the effects of a technology subsidy program on employment and skill demand in Finnish firms 1994–2018. In the main analysis, we compare close winners and losers of the subsidies. We find that while the program induced investments in new technologies like CNC machines and robots, it also increased employment but did not change skill composition. We find evidence that firms used the subsidies mainly to expand their production rather than automate their work. The results are also in line with broader associations between machine investments and skill shares in Finland while IT expenditure is associated with skill upgrading.
Essays on optimal environmental regulation and information economics
(2024) Hokkanen, Topi
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (monograph)
This monograph studies optimal environmental regulation under asymmetric information and carbon leakage risk. I use tools from the fields of mechanism design and microeconomic theory to study how the possibility of firms' relocation to less regulated countries as a result of domestic regulation, i.e. carbon leakage affects incentive-compatible environmental regulation. To address this question, I build a stylized model of a single country which regulates global externalityproducing firms by way of incentive-compatible regulatory schemes, i.e. mechanisms. I allow the firms to possess private information on their costs of abatement and carbon leakage risk as typedependent outside options. In the first chapter of this monograph, I introduce my main model and derive the optimal secondbest regulatory mechanism for the monopolist country. I find that novel regulatory distortions arise from relocation risk and that the optimal second-best mechanism sometimes implements stricter regulation that would be socially optimal. Interestingly, I find that carbon leakage is also not necessarily an indication of a failed regulatory policy, but rather an optimally induced result of it. The second chapter of this monograph extends the basic model by relaxing the assumption that the domestic regulator cannot commit to cross-border transfers. I show that conditional crossborder transfers rectify the major drawback of the simple mechanisms discussed previously: the fact that the regulator is losing socially valuable firms and therefore also abatement. With crossborder transfers, the regulator is able to buy the otherwise leaked abatement directly from the relocating firms themselves, essentially outsourcing both the firms and their abatement. The second extension considers exogenous regulatory policies implemented in the other country. I show that the regulator benefits from any such policies - be they price or quantity-based, since they serve to decrease the outside options of the firms, thus making the firms more captive in the home country at the outset. The third and final chapter of this monograph analyzes a situation where two countries compete for externality-producing firms by way of incentive-compatible regulatory mechanisms. Using a simplified version of my main model, I show that a Bertrand-like race to the bottom results, where both countries' social welfare dissipates fully in the resulting equilibrium. The main cause of this is the lack of relocation frictions for the firm, pitting the countries against one another as Bertrand competitors. I extend the model to account for a fixed preference of a firm in favor of the other country and show that in this case, the preferred country reaps this preference for its own benefit in every resulting equilibrium.

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