Abstracts: Research Seminars Spring 2004

Victor D. Bojkov (Visiting Marie Curie Fellow, Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK)
Is there a common Nordic dimension as regards the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights?
Analysing the conceptualisation of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (the Charter) within the three Nordic EU member states, one is faced with interesting lines of divergence. The policy that each of them has adopted with regard to three relevant dimensions of study are dissimilar, which logically provokes the question why this is so. These dimensions are a) the particular approaches to the process of creating the Charter; b) the positions on whether it should become a legally binding text or exist as a political declaration and c) the varying conceptualisations of the relation between the Charter and another regional human rights instrument – the Council of Europe’s Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR).
The observed divergence is intriguing because it does not produce the same grouping of countries along all three dimensions. This empirical finding invites the question of what are the causes of divergence and what is the most relevant location where they can be identified. The latter is most broadly divided in two – national peculiarity and international context. The first forms the basis of the republican liberalism thesis, which conceptualises the domestic process of preference formation as the leading element in approaching the issue of creating and participating in international human rights instruments. The second offers strength to the constructivism thesis that the socialising effect of a country’s environment impacts its interest and thus policy.
The paper proposes a synthesis of both theories and analyses national preference-formation in the context of the institutional frameworks it finds itself embedded in. Those taken in the paper are the Nordic Cooperation, the Council of Europe and the European Union. It transpires that, as regards the Charter, neither can offer a sufficient explanation on its own as to why the three Nordic countries diverge in their positions. Taken together, however, they have a better chance of underpinning a comprehensive understanding of the observed difference of opinion and policy. In the study the institutional framework of the EU is naturally privileged for two related reasons: a) it is the location where the Charter had been initiated; and b) the variety of positions within its wider membership embeds and enables the Nordic divergence.

Jeppe Plenge Trautner (PhD candidate, ERU)
Military Culture and Responsiveness to Democratic Control with the Armed Forces
My project centers on how politicians direct the use of military means during multinational military ('humanitarian') interventions. The responsiveness of the armed forces to democratic control depends on firstly, the level of acceptance within the military of the principle that politicians ultimately are in charge, and secondly, the overall responsiveness of the armed forces to being directed. This SPIRIT presentation focuses on the second issue, the responsiveness of the forces to control, a matter which is closely linked to military culture. In the presentation I outline the concepts of military culture and professionalism, and exemplify with observations on current cleavages within the Danish defence forces.

Henrik Halkier and Anette Therkelsen (SPIRIT)
Umbrella Place Branding.
A study of friendly exoticism and exotic friendliness in coordinated national tourism and business promotion.
Recent years have seen an increasing branding of place localities, regions, nations for a variety of different promotional purposes: attraction of tourists, attraction of foreign investors, attraction of new residents and students, or simply to increase the public profile vis-à-vis an external or indeed internal public. As a generic phenomenon branding essentially involves the creation of a coherent identity for a given product which brings forward a set of feelings, values and meanings in the customer and which works on a non-rational level (Randazzo 1995). This is a lesson that private businesses have learned and put into practice for several years, and it is therefore hardly surprising that public policy-makers at the national level have emulated these practices in trying to create unified brands covering the vast range of external activities in which any country is engaged. A unified brand would seem to offer not only economies of scale or fit the traditional notion of a distinct ‘national core’ of values, but also to entail the possibilities of synergy when a unified national image is consistently projected to the external world.
Whether such national branding initiatives involving both tourism and business interests are likely to be successful or advantageous is, however, less certain because the characteristics used to brand a particular place now have to serve many different purposes at the same time: they must seem exotic in order to attract tourist, business-like to cater for foreign investors, and have the right combination of adventure and useful learning to appeal to incoming students. In short, despite its obvious attraction for public policy-makers, a unified brand may either become too heterogeneous (i.e. a non-brand), too bland (appealing to no-one in particular and looking much like most other nations), or too skewed (focusing on the needs of certain activities at the expense of others). Tourism promotion may in other words potentially suffer from becoming part of a unified national brand.
This paper sets out the theoretical and methodological considerations and presents some preliminary analyses of a national initiative to develop a holistic brand for Denmark, which encompasses the external promotion of tourism and other activities designed to attract foreigners to the national space. The paper hence seeks to identify the conditions under which such initiatives may succeed in producing a unified brand that is more effective than their constituent parts and thereby become a useful tool for tourism and other activities.

Kirsten Hviid (AMID)
The Construction of Excluded Identities: Subjective strategies and meanings in social space
This presentation is based on a chapter on Space and Identity constructions. I will present questions, which are related to how immigrant youth develop social and subjective strategies in forms of social organizations and social action. In order to understand these processes, I have been drawing on theories and concepts of space and social organization at a general level and to understand how space can be seen as connected to forms of social action. The youth social strategies to cope with such experiences are to create alternative spaces of meanings and interaction.

Trine Lund Thomsen (AMID)
Immigrant Entrepreneurship as Gendered Social Positions
In my research I investigate the implications of self-employment in terms of gender and identity concerning immigrant entrepreneurs in Denmark. The main purpose of bringing focus on gender is to explore how male and female immigrant entrepreneurs differentiate regarding their motivations behind the strategy of becoming self-employed, and how this relates to the identity construction. In the paper I place focus on the relationship between social position and identity in the immigrants' struggle for upward mobility and social recognition.
Trine L. Thomsen's paper

Rasa Krutulyte (Visiting Marie Curie Fellow, Vilnius University, Lithuania)
Cultural Variation in Country-of-Origin Effect: a study of Lithuanian and Danish Consumers
In today's multinational and cross-cultural marketplaces it is increasingly important to understand how consumers from 'Western' and 'Eastern' cultures evaluate products made in different countries, how different cultural orientations influence Country-Of-Origins (COO) effect upon consumers. I will investigate the importance of COO relative to price, brand, packaging, store, and label information based on evaluations of certain food products used by Danish and Lithuanian consumers. I will gather data by doing interviews and surveys with Lithuanian and Danish consumers, and the research object will be a cereals products such as bread, muesli, cookies, cake, vodka. The key question of my research is: to which extent consumers' cultural orientations influence the way consumers evaluate food products with different COO (Denmark, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Germany)? In fact, I am interested in the issue of evaluation of particular food products made in various countries and its relation with cultural orientations. Until now only little work has been done in this field specifically among consumers of East Europe countries. My research may highlight questions important and useful for marketing science as well as for the practitioners operating in different marketing settings.

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Tordis Borchgrevink (Institutt for Samfunnsforskning, Oslo, Norway)
Dishonourable Integration. The "Honour/Shame Syndrome" in Western Welfare States: anthropological doubts in the face of murder.
The issue points to the interface between seemingly incompatible moral codes, involving notions of the social person, patterns of exchange and senses of justice. As evidenced by empirical facts as well as the very logic of the honour/shame-syndrome, women are designed, so to speak, to become the contested entity between gendered and gender-neutral systems of rights and duties. While it is possible, at least theoretically, to make sense of murder as a rational response to female disobedience and impurity within the framework of a moral universe based on the shame/honour- dichotomy, a variety of new questions arises from the prevalence of the phenomenon in 'modern' welfare societies, for instance: Is there a connection between so called "failed integration policy", and academic cowardice? Is the relationship between 'religion' and 'culture', human beings and economic exchange properly accounted for? What are the similarities between this particular 'syndrome' compared to native 'western' violence against women? Same old story, or something different? On the one hand, what induces in young women the confidence that partaking in a "Danish", "Swedish" or "Norwegian" identity is feasible, when it may prove to be fatal? On the other hand, to the extent that it is true that this 'code' is operative and widespread among certain numerous ethnic groups, why are there so few deaths?

Carole Clavier (Visiting Marie Curie Fellow, University of Rennes 1, France)
Words of Health: Public Health Campaigns, multi-level Governance and Discourse Analysis.
This presentation will first retrace the main issues of the multi-level governance of public health policies, before turning to a presentation of the proposed framework for discourse analysis. The interest in the relationship between public health (e.g. mostly health-related prevention and health promotion) policies and territories stems from the renewed salience of public health issues in Europe and the redistribution of responsibilities between national and local levels of administration and government. Generally speaking, France and Denmark have different attitudes towards decentralisation. But in both countries it appears that the central state plays a major role in the policy by setting public health objectives and a framework for the policy, while implementation takes place mostly at other territorial levels. Therefore, the main research questions are: does territorialisation entail any changes (between territories, in the contents of public health, in the policy-making process, etc.)? And why, or why not?

Public health is a very broad term that could encompass almost any kind of activities; therefore, public health policies may vary in shape and contents between countries. Given the comparative perspective, and to be able to analyse both countries similarly, public health programmes and actions will be analysed through a semi-standardized model, summing up their main dimensions. The internal coherence of the programmes or actions will be further informed through a set of assumptions, related to the public health problems identified and the proposed solutions, to the actors involved and to the territorial positioning of the programme or action.

Laura Salciuviene (Visiting Marie Curie Fellow, Marketing Department, Kaunus University of Technology, Lithuania)
The Influence of cross-cultural Consumer Values
on perceived Brand Image
An important reason for studying brand image is the seeming link between this and preference for the brand. Moreover, a general tenet is that brands with strong positive image stand a better chance of being preferred than those with weak and/or negative images. While a brand image creates association with consumer's culture and characteristics with respect to his/her daily surroundings, managers need to know and understand those particular brand associations that best appeal to their consumers with respect to their values. Likewise, the perceived brand image in relation to consumer values may differ across consumers, so that particular values are considered as more important than those of others. Thereby, companies, which assess consumer values on a global basis, will more easily attain competitive advantage through projecting brand image to consumer-specific issues over those that do not.
If I acknowledge that values influence perceptions towards brands I hold that they seem to be the underlying determinant of consumer attitudes and preferences. Thus, there is no doubt that concentration on the values often provides deeper understanding of how consumers perceive brands and what kinds of benefits they expect when making preferences. This, in turn highlights the importance of formation of brand image with appeal to different cultures and contexts.
In short, I will make an attempt to shed a light on perceptions of a brand image from students' perspective moving towards the empirical results of the qualitative study presenting basic information how the students, who hold different values perceive brand image in choosing high involvement (in this case, mobile phones) shopping goods. Identifying the relationship between brand image dimensions and consumer values will show whether the same brand identities of shopping goods are likely to have the same structure of brand image across consumers between two countries or not.

Victor D. Bojkov ((Visiting Marie Curie Fellow, Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK)
Conflicting Discourses of the International Society in Europe – the Balkans in the process of EU enlargement
The presentation takes the notion of international society as its conceptual framework and claims that weak regional bonds within Europe are unable to sustain the negative impact that the process of EU enlargement exerts on them. Notwithstanding the large number of joint infrastructure projects in the region of South-East Europe encouraged and funded by the Union, on a wider institutional and ideational level the ongoing process of its enlargement fails to materialise the region's integrative potential in the way it does in Central Europe and in the Baltic countries. The main reason is twofold: the lack of institutional and conceptual tools in the Union's architecture and, what is more important, the lack of positive identification with each other among the countries of the region.

Sandra Geelhoed Aidara (SPIRIT Visiting doctoral fellow, EHESS/CADIS, Paris)
Publishers, territory and identity in modernity and late modernity
The profession as a publisher is a typical creation of modernity. The first publisher appeared in Paris before 1789, he accompanied the Enlightenment period and found the structural independence as a profession in the 19th century, era of industrialisation and nationalism. In this paper I would like to question the link between the publisher, territory and identity.

Firstly, I will try to show the link between nation state, national identity and publishing, especially through the description of three major national models of publishing that developed and consolidated themselves in the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Secondly, I would like to show the complexity of the profession of publisher, composed of a multiplity of different layers of action, inducing also a multiplicity of rationals and significances included in this action. The publisher operates in a triangle of three fields of social action: the cultural (motivated by passion, subjectivity), the economic (motivated by risk and merchandising, objectivity) and the political (motivated by engagement and search for recognition). In the period of modernity, the publisher could find a kind of balance between these three fields, as he operated in the field of one nation state, addressing himself to "one nation", using one language, within a period of univocal "national ideology" and being an important actor of cultural production. In late modernity (1980 and after), he seemed to have difficulties keeping the balance between these three networks of influence, linked to globalization, to promotional culture, to the development of mass media and entertainment industries etc. Thirdly, I will present the framework of my PhD research dealing with publishers based in two French regions, Brittany and Alsace. In fact in this period of late modernity, identity and cultural difference seem to crisscross the field of book production. Visuality and orality seem to position themselves more strongly in the field with regard to text. For some becoming a publisher seems to be a way of accomplishing one´s own self-identity. For others, being a publisher is a militant activity linked to nationbuilding and the recognition of national minorities and minority language. Others produce books without editing, using the book as a promotional object. In this sense the book is not so much a "publication" but more like a "publicity".

To conclude, I will try to give some ideas about the emergence of local models within the French publishing model of which the Breton and the Alsatian models are two different examples, we could add as a third model the Languedoc Roussillon region, but where I did not conduct a thorough field research.

Ole B. Jensen (Department of Development and Planning, AAU)
Making European Space. Mobility, Power and Territorial Identity
Taking his point of departure in the latest book from the hand of the lecturer (Jensen & Richardson 2004) this lecture explores how future visions of Europe's physical space are being decisively shaped by transnational politics and power struggles, which are being played out in new multi-level arenas of governance across the European Union. At stake are big ideas about mobility and friction, about relations between core and peripheral regions, and about the future Europe's cities and countryside. The lecture builds a critical narrative of the emergence of a new discourse of Europe as 'monotopia', revealing a very real project to shape European space in line with visions of high speed, frictionless mobility, the transgression of borders, and the creation of city networks.

Reference
Jensen, O. B. & T. Richardson (2004) Making European Space. Mobility, Power and Territorial Identity, London: Routledge