Miehen kunnia. Modernin miehen taistelu häpeää vastaan (‘Honour of a man. Modern man's battle against shame’ 1994) was the fourth part of the trilogy, a work written in two years from male biographical material combined with analysis of popular culture and newspaper articles, with recession-gripped Finland setting the scene. The central proposition transcends the specifics of the time: a man’s honour is in danger of collapsing into shame if he cannot cope. Shame extends to masculinity and is not limited to performance at work or other external things. A man can contain his anxieties with work, which provides a sense of control and increases self-esteem – It supports masculinity. Not bad, but it threatens to emasculate him if he loses his job or succeeds worse than others. Then masculinity becomes a zero-sum game, where the status of one person detracts from the status of another.

I wrote the book on masculinity because I was invited to use the material gathered in a biographical competition. The charged discussions about gender roles discouraged me from tangling with gender studies, but the work sensitised me, however, to the effect of gender differences in various connections. Evolutionary psychology and the psychology of economics later emphasised honour and relative status as central explanatory factors.

When I was asked to speak about anxiety during the recession years of the 1990s, no one wanted to know about it in a general human sense but rather in connection to a shock in one’s own workplace in a time of cuts and organisational changes.

I began to collect information on working life, from statistics on stress to the statements of experts. After a period of leave to conduct research, this culminated in the book Työelämän huonontumisen lyhyt historia. Muutokset hyvinvointivaltioiden ajasta hyperkilpailuun (‘A short history of the deterioration of working life. From the welfare state to hyper-competition’ 2004, updated and expanded by 160 pages in 2007). The book followed the mainstream American-German literature in describing the ever quickening change from the period of middle-class expansion to a time of deteriorating terms of remuneration and job insecurity as a result of the competition for global investment and increases in the supply of labour.

I didn’t feel the book to be in any way radical, and the transfer of petit bourgeois mentality from an agrarian society to salaried work could have also been understood as an interpretation of entrepreneurial motivation. The book was constructed around the concepts of fair exchange, reciprocity in psychological contracts, room for manoeuvre and experiences one’s own influence. The big picture was not built around illustrative interviews but from the results of published surveys and economic history. The book was deliberately free from psychological explanations in order to avoid the charge that social problems were being individualised (although they are individualised when the incongruence between challenges and resources leads to stress, which weakens performance and causes depression, eventually even alienation). From the feedback I received, the book was an emancipating read for those who were able to use it to understand change and notice that they were not alone in their experiences. It was condemned as pessimistic by those who thought that research into working life should be about adapting workers to the given conditions rather than investigating the historical reasons for those conditions. Today, the decline of the middle-class is a daily topic of conversation, but 10 years ago the prevailing public opinion in Finland was that thanks to Nokia Finns could buck the trend.

While earlier psychohistorical works had focused on the self-control of the bourgeoisie and the birth of entrepreneurial motivation, developments beginning at the end of the 20th century forced me to consider what happens when entrepreneurialism and self-control fail to help one control the events one is subject to or prevent losses and failure.