Hanken School of Economics

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems into Earth Observation (EO) research and innovation has catalyzed significant advancements in environmental monitoring, humanitarian response, and urban planning. However, these developments also raise novel regulatory and ethical challenges, particularly in light of the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act (EU AI Act), which introduces a tiered risk-based framework for the governance of AI systems. This paper provides the first comprehensive examination of how the EU AI Act, and its provisions concerning high-risk AI systems as delineated in Annex III, apply to EO-based applications. Through a structured analysis of EO use cases across key domains, such as access to public and private services, law enforcement, critical infrastructure, migration, and biometric surveillance, we illustrate how the same EO AI system may be variably classified depending on its intended purpose, autonomy level, and deployment context. We demonstrate that while many current EO AI systems are not yet autonomous enough to trigger high-risk classification, the rapid technological trajectory suggests an increasing prevalence of high-risk EO applications in the near future. Furthermore, we argue that EO researchers and developers must proactively engage with the regulatory demands of the EU AI Act, not merely to ensure compliance, but to contribute to the development of methodological tools, such as explainability, risk assessment, and auditability, that are essential for ensuring responsible AI innovation. By linking legal interpretation with technical and ethical considerations, this paper contributes to an emerging interdisciplinary framework for governing AI in the EO domain under conditions of legal uncertainty and accelerating innovation.

Marketing as a discipline faces critical juncture due to fragmented and largely tactical focus and misalignment with business, environmental, and societal needs. The ongoing debate in reputable marketing journals about how to resolve marketing’s dilemma has not yielded clear results. It appears to be taken for granted what marketing is. This article states that marketing based on the management approach has become myopically focused on activities without a clear purpose. The article advocates a transformative approach, in which the perspective is raised from what marketing does in an activity-based framework to what marketing is on a higher level as an overarching phenomenon. Thus, marketing’s inner meaning and purpose is in focus. Once this has been established, the choice of marketing decisions and activities should be a matter of consideration. By understanding marketing as a phenomenon, the discipline can potentially become inclusive in several ways, helping various institutions to embrace it and make it possible to reconcile conflicts between marketing’s many stakeholders and between commercial and environmental interests.

Nationalism impacts contemporary organizations in diverse ways that extend beyond global politics, international relations, or economics. Based on an integrative theoretical review of nationalism in management and organization research, we identify six approaches across three level of analysis. At the micro level, nationalism is reflected in individuals' (1) cultural (dis)association with one or several nations and (2) identity construction and identity work. At the meso level, nationalism can be found in (3) intraorganizational practices and norms and in (4) interorganizational relations and strategies. At the macro level, nationalism can be seen as part of (5) economic policies and structures and of (6) political rhetoric and media discourses. On this basis, we develop an integrative theoretical framework that illuminates the multifaceted and dynamic nature of nationalism across levels of analysis. We also propose an agenda for future research that focuses on blank spots in prior research and zooms in on connections between different levels. This includes research on varieties and constructions of nationalism, new forms and implications of nationalism in global organizations, populism and mediatization of nationalism, and epistemological and ethico-political issues in studying nationalism and contemporary organizations.

Social media influencers strive to establish themselves as knowledgeable, desirable sources of information for consumers’ purchase decisions. However, the glut of sponsored product endorsements on social media fuels consumer skepticism and undermines influencer trustworthiness. Arguably, deinfluencing content—organic social media posts in which influencers discourage consumers from purchasing certain products—might help restore trust. Drawing on influencer marketing research, attribution theory, and persuasion knowledge, the authors derive a conceptual model to predict how deinfluencing content affects consumers, influencers, and brands. With a specific focus on short, vertical videos, a pilot study and four preregistered experiments involving 1,456 participants demonstrate that deinfluencing content enhances influencer trustworthiness by reducing skepticism about their motives, which thereby strengthens consumers’ purchase intentions toward subsequently endorsed products. However, the effectiveness of influencer recommendations diminishes if they appear in sponsored collaborations with brands whose products the influencers have previously discouraged. These findings offer theoretical insights into the evolving landscape of influencer communications and provide actionable implications for influencers seeking to build trust-based relationships with online audiences, as well as for brands considering collaborations with influencers who share deinfluencing content.

This commentary responds to Christian Grönroos’s call to reorient marketing by grounding it in the phenomenon itself rather than in activity lists. We extend his provocation by arguing that marketing must be understood as an integrated being–doing phenomenon constituted through social practices, not as an abstract essence detached from what marketers, organizations, and customers actually do. Drawing from philosophical debates on essence and action, as well as practice-theoretical perspectives, we contend that marketing emerges through recurrent processes of value formation, resource integration, and promise orchestration embedded in institutional contexts. We further argue that Grönroos’s appeal to restore demand fulfilment requires deeper engagement with the institutional and sociocultural forces that shape demand. Finally, we propose three interlocking domains: relational value creation in use, integrated promise orchestration, and institutional governance of market practices, as foundational lenses for conceptualizing marketing phenomenon. Regrounding marketing in societal and practice-based realities advances a robust, institutionally informed ontology capable of guiding research and practice in an era marked by global, ecological, and socio-economic challenges.