This webinar explores how socio-cultural frameworks and mental models shape energy transitions and resource extraction in Finland and Sweden, highlighting the tensions between dominant paradigms and place-based resistance.
Petra Berg (University of Vaasa) explores the deeply ingrained collective mental models shaping the ongoing energy transition trajectories by identifying and conceptualizing the institutional and cognitive elements that sustain dominant social paradigms.
Sara Persson (Södertörn University) examines a conflict around prospecting for vanadium in southern Sweden to show how an ‘extractive place’ was articulated by the prospecting company - and how trajectories of resistance (linked to agriculture, tourism, culture and nature) can be understood as acts of decommodification of place, emphasising competing and embedded exchange- and use-values.
About the speakers
Petra Berg is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Marketing and Communication, University of Vaasa, Finland. Her research interests encompass macromarketing, energy behavior, and transition management, with a particular focus on marketing systems, social paradigms, sustainability transitions, and the cybersecurity of social-cyber-physical energy systems.
Sara Persson is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Business Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden. She studies how discourses related to sustainability transitions are verbalised and materialised in different contexts and by various interest groups. Her current research focuses on justice issues in prospecting for critical minerals in Sweden.
The webinar is part of the PhD course “Critical Perspectives on Green Transitions and Organizing Alternatives” organized by Hanken School of Economics and Umeå School of Business, Economics and Statistics and with support from the Nordic Academy of Management (NFF) and Umeå Transformation Research Initiative (UTRI).