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Professor (full, tenured) of Communication Sciences
LUT University
+358-(0)46-8510784
hannele.seeck@lut.fi
Visiting Professor
The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
The Department of Media and Communications
Cambridge Fellow/Clare Hall Fellow (October 2023-)
University of Cambridge, Clare Hall College
Expertise
Organisational communications; Crisis communications; Global communications; Soft Power; Ideology; Discourse; Propaganda; Foucault; Governmentality; Critical Management Studies. Current interests: Ideology, propaganda & AI; Democracy, news & AI; Soft power & South-Korea.
Biography
Professor Seeck has published about 100 academic and professional publications on organisational studies, media and communications and critical management studies. She has authored several books. Her recent publications include contributions to Organization, Media, Culture & Society, Management Learning and IJMR. Please see the list of publications for more information.
The research conducted, for example, at University of Cambridge, LSE and LUT—which is global, interdisciplinary and critical with the profound aim of making the world a better place to live—has always been vital to Professor Seeck because those are her underlying reasons for conducting research and being an academic in the first place.
The UK university system, particularly the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), has greatly influenced Prof. Seeck’s intellectual history. She completed her MSc, PhD and postdoc at The London School of Economics in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science and has previously served as a Senior Visiting Fellow (2010–2015) in the Department of Media and Communications, where she is currently a Visiting Professor. For the academic year 2023–2024, she received a renowned Fellowship to University of Cambridge/Clare Hall College.
Her research is mostly qualitative and deeply interdisciplinary, combining social theory, political science, history and organisational studies with media and communications research. Her research has a strong sociological twist and historical orientation. Prof. Seeck’s work reflects her interest in soft power, power relations and control mechanisms in the workplace and society at large, their historical development, new forms of materialisation and their interplay with subjectivity. Her research focuses on the global and local travel of ideas, ideologies and discourses, as well as on agency, power and governance.
In her current research on ideology and propaganda (joint research with LSE colleagues, particularly with Prof. Rantanen), Prof. Seeck focuses on (1) theories of ideology and propaganda and their different functions; (2) how they have been previously researched methodologically; and (3) what kinds of materials are needed to study them empirically. Rather than concentrating on the content of ideology and propaganda, the research will focus on the functions of ideology and associated propaganda in different societal contexts. The interest is in ideological propaganda particularly in the context of AI, as AI systems need to be able to recognise and detect different forms of propaganda and ideological propaganda.
Regarding Prof. Seeck’s background prior joining LUT University. Prof. Seeck received a full tenured professorship in 2016 in Management and Organisations, University of Turku, Finland. Since 2008, she has been a permanent Adjunct Professor of Organisational Communications at the University of Helsinki, Faculty of Social Sciences, Communication and Media Studies. She has also been an Adjunct Professor at the National Defence University in the Department of Leadership and Military Pedagogy since 2010.
She is an active member of many international organisations of the field. She has, for example, been an active member of the Academy of Management since 2004. In recent years, her papers (with coauthors) have also been nominated by different academic divisions many times for the prestigious Carolyn Dexter Best International Paper Award, and her paper (with coauthors) also won the John F. Mee Award in 2021. She has also received recognition from journals; for example, her coauthored paper was the most cited article in Organization for the past three years. She has gained research funding, mostly from the Academy of Finland and several trusts and foundations. She is also a regular reviewer for many journals of the field and serves, for example, in the Editorial Advisory Board of Management Decision. She has administrative experience as Chair/Head of Subject, Principal Investigator and Team Leader.
In terms of positions of trust and societal impact, she has led several research projects, for example, for major global corporations and for the Prime Minister’s office. She led the well-recognised investigation commissioned by the Prime Minister’s office of management and communication in Finland of responses to the Asian tsunami disaster. She is familiar with both private and public sector research and practice. For a number of years, she was a fellow of the Finnish Business and Policy Forum (EVA), the main business think-tank in Finland. She is also a member of the Boardman Management Study Group. She is Vice-Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board for National Defence, MATINE, Ministry of Defence.
She has wide-ranging pedagogic training, including recent training in neuroscience and learning. She has previous formal pedagogic training from the LSE (Teacher Accreditation Programme) and the University of Helsinki (65 ECTS, 2019–2021). She has taught extensively for 20 years, totalling some 50 courses in English and Finnish. She has taught at all levels. She has also experience, for example, in curriculum planning at all levels. Her teaching competence in English has been formally assessed and was graded as excellent in her nomination to her previous and current positions. She believes that, in teaching, the most important thing is to guide learners to think for themselves. Her basic approach to teaching is a social constructionist one; that being said, on the broadest level, she believes that the students and the teacher develop together, shaping and modifying our understanding of the world around us. Her teaching practice is aimed at facilitating the acquisition of the transferable skills of analysing, criticising and synthesising theories and practices, developing the learners’ own argumentation and debate skills and questioning the prevailing paradigms. She firmly believes that these skills are both a prerequisite for excelling oneself and of great use in organisational and societal life.
For potential PhD candidates.
I supervise PhD’s particularly in the following fields and topics:
- Global Media & Communications
- Organisational & Management Communications
- Crisis Management & Communications
- Power; soft power; ideology & propaganda
- Foucault; ‘production of ‘truth’ and governmentality; CMS
- AI & propaganda; AI & ideology; AI, news and propaganda; Democracy, news, propaganda & AI
- Strategic narratives and geopolitics
- Soft power, media & communications, particularly the cases of South-Korea and Hollywood
- Crisis, sustainable HR & innovation
- Crisis, social innovations and cross-sectoral partnerships.
Research Expertise & Interests
Current research interests: Soft power; Ideology, propaganda & AI; Democracy, news & AI; Soft power & South-Korea.
Select Publications
I have tried to include different type of publications in order to show the interdisciplinary and versatile nature of my work. I strongly believe that the problems of contemporary societies often need deeply interdisciplinary approach.
Seeck, Hannele & Kantola, Anu (2022). The role of professional elites in shaping management practice: How the old mentalities condition the adoption of new management ideas. Management Learning. (3. September; E-pub ahead of print) https://doi.org/10.1177/13505076221111008
Seeck, Hannele, Sturdy, Andrew, Boncori, Anne-Laure, & Fougère, Martin. (2020). Ideology in Management Studies. International Journal of Management Reviews, 22(1), 53–74. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ijmr.12215
Kantola, Anu, Seeck, Hannele, & Mannevuo, Mona (2019). Affect in governmentality: Top executives managing the affective milieu of market liberalisation. Organization, 26(6), 761-782. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508418821002
Hannele Seeck and Lamberg, Juha-Antti (2019). Evolving Management Ideas. In The Oxford Handbook of Management Ideas, Edited by Andrew Sturdy, Stefan Heusinkveld, Trish Reay, and David Strang. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-management-ideas-9780198794219?cc=fi&lang=en&
Fougère Martin, Segercrantz, Beata, & Seeck, Hannele (2017). A Critical Reading of the European Union’s Social Innovation Policy Discourse: (Re)legitimizing Neoliberalism. Organization 24(6), 819-843. (The most cited paper of Organization of the past three years, November 2020) http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1350508416685171
Seeck, Hannele & Diehl, Marjo-Riitta (2016). A Literature Review of HRM and Innovation – Taking Stock and Future Directions. International Journal of Human Resource Management 28 (6), 913-944. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09585192.2016.1143862
Seeck, Hannele & Rantanen, Terhi (2015). Media Events, Spectacles and Risky Globalization – A Critical Review and Avenues for Future Research. Media, Culture & Society 37(2), 163-179. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0163443714553493
Kantola, Anu & Seeck, Hannele (2011) Dissemination of Management into Politics: Michael Porter and the Political Uses of Management Consulting. Management Learning 42(1), 25-47. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1350507610382489
Some selected (older) examples of
Curriculum planning and Teaching
Public outreach
Researcher profile in LSE online: https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/
Google scholar profile: http://scholar.google.fi/citations?user=6hOGEEMAAAAJ
Contact information / Yhteystiedot
Sähköposti: hannele.seeck (at) lut.fi
Professor Hannele Seeck 