Comments
Thanks for a thought-provoking presentantion and the drawings! Just a quick question: are you focusing explicitly on the cold war era or also analyzing the ways in which the economic depression of the early 1990s impacted the discussion on soft values?
Hi! Thank you for this question, it is one I have had on my mind for some time. Since this research about soft values is going to be turned into an article, I have had some challenges in trying to fit everything together. This has meant that I have had to cut down on some of the perspectives I originally had planned to include, one of them sadly being specifically the depression’s impact on the soft values rhetoric. However, I hope to return to this subject at some point in the future, as it at least spontaneously feels like there could be some interesting twists and turns to sort out there.
Hello Martin,
Thank you for your presentation. You have an intriguing research setting with vastly different ideologies in cross roads, coming to similar points of view from different starting points (environmentalist and economist) and then diverging again. I wonder if you intend to use these processes of coming-together and diverging again for your analysis of the soft values experience in the cold war, or are they rather the results of your analysis?
Also, when you refer to the cold war era as the backdrop of your research setting, it makes me curious about how the cold war itself influenced soft values and their competitiveness? Or is it just a chronological period definition?
Hi Raisa,
Thank you for your comment and questions! I will try to answer them to the best of my abilities. I find that I have an easier time giving an answer to your second question, so I’ll start there. The cold war era could definitely be seen as something which influences soft values, in the more specific sense that there seems to be an “opening up” of futures, if you will, in the Finnish debates in the beginning of the 1980s, that is, more possible ways into the future could be politicised. In this short presentation, I did, however, mostly use it as chronological delimitation, as for instance the environmental movement’s link to the cold war as a context, although it exists, would have taken too long to delve into (Norwegian ecophilosophy, critique of left-right politics etc.)
The first question about the processes of coming-together and diverging in soft values is a bit trickier, since this research is still ongoing and not all pieces of the puzzle have found their places. However, as I mostly work from a theoretical and methodological premise of conceptual history I would say that I am analytically most interested in the possible futures entailed in soft values. Therefore, I am inclined to view these processes as observations made from my material, and dressed in my (yet somewhat flimsy) analytical language, in the sense of coming-together and diverging experiences of time in the concept of soft values.
Many thanks for your presentation. I was wondering, were these “soft values” developed from both the economic and environmentalist sides of your research largely a domestic development in Finland, taking inspiration from international conceptualizations and discourses and then reused and applied in Finnish contexts exclusively? Or were they – perhaps at a later stage – also actively used/promoted as “Finnish” values abroad?
Anna Derksen
14.3.2022 15:36
Hi! Thank you for your thought provoking questions! The concept of soft values definitely has its roots in a more international setting, but I have not been able to pinpoint exactly where. However, the way that the environmentalist movement conceptualises soft values are in line with how some Norwegian ecophilosophers (like Sigmund Kvalöy) speaks about a need for change in the “values” of western societies, although not explicitly using the term soft values. Similarly, the way soft valeus are applied around economics lines up with how the american notion of “soft skills” is used in for instance books on management etc.
At least up until the early 2000s I haven’t seen any sign that they would be used to conceptualize some sort of Finnish values in a more international setting.
Martin Pettersson
15.3.2022 09:51