AABS Awards Vilis Vītols Prize to Best JBS Articles for 2020 and 2021 

May 13, 2022

The Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies is pleased to announce its selection of three Journal of Baltic Studies articles to receive the 2020 and 2021 Vilis Vītols Article Prize. The Vilis Vītols annual award of $500 is presented to the author of the best article in a given year of the Journal of Baltic Studies. The best article is selected by a committee appointed by the AABS board. Priority is given to articles that encompass more than one Baltic country and thus expressly represent Baltic studies. The winners of the Vilis Vītols Article Prize are announced once every two years.

The articles awarded with the Vītols award have been made freely accessible online by Taylor & Francis, the publisher of Journal of Baltic Studies, and can be found by clicking on the article links below. The articles will remain freely accessible until December 31, 2022.

AABS congratulates the winners of the 2020 and 2021 Vītols award and thanks all scholars who continue to publish articles and book reviews in JBS.

Raminta Pučėtaitė, Anna-Maija Lämsä & Marija Norvaišaitė (2020) Masculinity in flux? Male managers navigating between work and family, Journal of Baltic Studies, 51:2, 179-198, DOI: 10.1080/01629778.2020.1746369

The article sheds light on male managers’ experience as fathers in a post-Soviet context in Lithuania. This empirical study of 12 male managers’ experiences of work-family integration (WFI), their ways of coping with negative experiences, and the role of organizations in reducing conflict and enriching WFI, reveal the emergence of a new paternal identity: fathers who perceive their role as caregivers but for whom this is still subordinate to the dominant role of the breadwinner. Relying on their wife is a man’s dominant coping strategy. Organizations are perceived as family unfriendly. The managerial implications of the need for organizational support are discussed.

Keywords: Equality, fatherhood, gender, Lithuania, male managers, masculinity, post-Soviet context, work-family integration

Dr. Raminta Pučėtaitė is Associate Professor and Principal Investigator of the research group Public Governance at Kaunas University of Technology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities (Lithuania) and Adjunct Professor of Management, Organizational Ethics and Human Resource Management at the School of Business and Economics of Jyväskylä University (Finland). Her research focuses on values management, ethical issues in human resource management, gendered experiences of working life, research and academic ethics, social entrepreneurship and organizational innovativeness in a post-Soviet context. She has published in national and international volumes, including Journal of Business Ethics; Business Ethics – A European Review; Baltic Journal of Management; Journal of Baltic Studies; Journal of Social Entrepreneurship; Transformations in Business and Economics and two monographs.

Dr. Anna-Maija Lämsä is Professor of Human Resource Management at the School of Business and Economics of Jyväskylä University (Finland). She is also leader of the research group called Ethos (Organisational Ethics, Leadership and Human Resource Management). Her research interests are in diversity and equality in working life, career and gender, work-family relationship as well as ethical approaches to management, leadership and organizations. She has published and taught extensively both abroad and in Finland as well as participated in and led many projects nationally and internationally. Her research findings have been published, for example, in Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics – A European Review; Gender, Work and Organization; Gender in Management – An International Journal; Journal of Baltic Management; Journal of Baltic Studies; Scandinavian Journal of Management; International Journal of Human Resource Management; Leadership & Organization Development Journal; Journal of Workplace Learning; Transformations in Business and Economics.

Marija Norvaišaitė is a Ph.D. candidate at Vilnius Univesity, Kaunas faculty (Lithuania). The scope of her work and research includes topics of gender, gender equality, employee behavior, and organizational wellbeing. In her studies, she combines social science fields of management and psychology. Currently, the main area of interest and the topic of her thesis is workplace dignity, with its experiences and outcomes in organizations.

Kazimierz Musiał & Zane Šime (2021) How to build the legitimacy of regional integration on rational foundations: a case of epistemic communities in the Baltic Sea area, Journal of Baltic Studies, 52:4, 483-501, DOI: 10.1080/01629778.2021.1964995

In periods of uncertainty or during critical junctures, scientific advice may be in high demand to provide legitimacy for political decision makers. This article outlines the evolution of expert forms of knowledge and the way those have shaped Baltic Sea region building, including its consultative and collaborative frameworks of agenda setting. The selected cases include HELCOM, the Copenhagen School of international relations and the Baltic Science Network. This article offers an explanation of how these epistemic collectives have produced consensual knowledge, generated legitimacy, and engendered agency of scientific research findings and knowledge-based decisions in national, transnational, and macro-regional settings.

Keywords: Epistemic communities, baltic sea region, science policy, environmentalism, critical junctures, sociology of knowledge

Dr. Kazimierz Musiał is Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Gdańsk in Poland, where he also heads an Interdisciplinary Research Group for the Study of Nordic-Baltic Europe and the Arctic. He holds degrees in Political Science (PhD from Humboldt University Berlin) and Sociology (habilitation degree from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow). His publications include studies of the Nordic welfare states, research on science policy in the Baltic Sea Region and on internationalisation of the Nordic university systems. Current research focuses on the role of epistemic communities and knowledge regimes in the transformation of the Nordic-Baltic area. Apart from his appointment at the University of Gdańsk, in 2015-2017 he worked as Research Leader at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden.

Zane Šime is an Affiliated Researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and an Academic Assistant at the College of Europe in Bruges, Department of EU International Relations and Diplomacy Studies. She has completed research at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS) and the Academy of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). She is a graduate of KU Leuven and the University of Latvia. Zane was a member of the first cohort of the Emerging Urban Leaders programme of the Salzburg Global Seminar. Her previous work experience includes project implementation at the Secretariat of the Council of the Baltic Sea States and Latvian civil service. Zane focuses on EU science diplomacy. Among her research interests are the EU macro-regional governance and the EU-India educational diplomacy in the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) context. 

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