Search results for " development"
showing 10 items of 21333 documents
More educated, more mobile? Evidence from post-secondary education reform
2016
More educated, more mobile? Evidence from post-secondary education reform. Spatial Economic Analysis. This paper examines the causal impact of the level of education on within-country migration. To account for biases resulting from selection into post-secondary education, it uses a large-scale reform within the higher education system that gradually transformed former vocational colleges into polytechnics in Finland in the 1990s. This reform created quasi-exogenous variation in the supply of higher education over time and across regions. The results based on multinomial treatment effects models and population register data show that, overall, polytechnic graduates have a significantly highe…
Moral distress among social workers : the role of insufficient resources
2015
The present study examined moral distress among Finnish social workers and the role of perceived resource insufficiencies in explaining it. The aim was to shed light on this understudied phenomenon in the field of social welfare. The study focused on work-related moral distress, defined as impaired wellbeing that is connected to the continual inability to implement actions that one considers morally appropriate. The survey data were collected with an electronic questionnaire between the years 2011 and 2012. The respondents (n = 817) were social workers in the public social welfare services and the overall response rate was 46.5 per cent. Nearly 11 per cent of the respondents reported experi…
Growth Into Citizenship: Framework for Conceptualizing Learning in NGO Interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa
2018
This article develops a theoretical framework for analyzing adult learning in projects aiming to strengthen citizenship implemented by nongovernmental organizations, especially in the contexts of sub-Saharan Africa. On the basis of a review of international development research, we suggest that a new framework should address the need for a conceptualization of learning as a gradual process and for capturing the gap between ideal models and everyday experiences of citizenship. We argue, building on John Dewey’s philosophy, for a framework of growth into citizenship, and introduce the notions of learning as reorganization of habits and the method of democracy as an avenue for learning as nove…
Exploring the scientific discourse on cultural sustainability
2014
Abstract There has been growing interest in policy and among scholars to consider culture as an aspect of sustainable development and even as a fourth pillar. However, until recently, the understanding of culture within the framework of sustainable development has remained vague. In this study, we investigate the scientific discourse on cultural sustainability by analyzing the diverse meanings that are applied to the concept in scientific publications. The analysis shows that the scientific discourse on cultural sustainability is organized around seven storylines: heritage, vitality, economic viability, diversity, locality, eco-cultural resilience, and eco-cultural civilization. These story…
Reconsidering passivity and activity in children’s digital play
2016
The discussion around children’s digital game culture has resulted in two contradictory images of children: the passive, antisocial children uncritically and mechanically consuming digital game content and the active, social children creatively using and interacting with digital game content. Our aim is to examine how these seemingly contradictory ideas of “active” and “passive” children could be considered. By means of empirical examples of children playing digital dress-up and makeover games, we will point out that for the successful use of these concepts, they need to be thoroughly contextualized. By discussing the context and referent of activity and passivity, it is possible to overcom…
Does Finland Need Raciolinguistics?
2017
A growing number of applied linguists and language educators in the US/North American context advocate for and from a scholarly perspective which views language issues in relation to racial issues and vice versa. The emergent field of raciolinguistics highlights the relationships between language and race/racism and has brought about research that investigates their intersections. Should scholars in Finland adopt (and adapt) such an approach to scholarly work? Three Finland-based scholars explore this question in a question ("prompt") - response format.
Strengthening Institutional Isomorphism in Development NGOs? Program Mechanisms in an Organizational Intervention
2017
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in international development struggle between being actors in the mainstream or representatives of alternatives to it. However, many NGOs all over the world align with the mainstream and are increasingly similar to each other. This homogenization results from institutional isomorphism, which is affected by their aspirations to be legitimate vis-á-vis the international field. Consultancies are among the main practices to promote normative isomorphism, but little is known about their micro-level dynamics. Drawing on the notion of program mechanisms in realistic evaluation, we scrutinize how external facilitators in organizational development processes enab…
Corporate business model transformation and inter-organizational cognition: the case of Nokia
2013
This article distinguishes between a firm’s corporate business model and business models of its various business units. Our aim is to provide new insights into how executives’ cognitive processes can influence corporate business model transformation decisions. We focus especially on top managers’ recognition of inter-organizational cognitions, that is, such cognitions about the firm and its businesses that are shared by the top managers and stakeholders of the firm in the industries and communities where it operates. We support our theoretical work with an historical case study of Nokia’s corporate business model transformation between 1990 and 1996, which proved highly successful. We find …
A Cluster Analysis Approach to Profile Men and Women’s Volley Positions in Professional Tennis Matches (Doubles)
2021
(1) Background: Tennis ball tracking technology allows the aquirement of novel and reliable data about several performance indicators, such as volley positions. This information is key to understand match dynamics in doubles tennis and to better help preparing players for the demands they will face in match play. As such, the purpose of this study was to describe and compare the different types of volley positions in men’s and women’s doubles professional tennis. (2) Methods: Ball tracking data were collected for 46 women (Billie Jean King Cup) and 96 men’s doubles matches (Davis Cup). The variables used were the distance to the net, the distance to the centre of the court and the height of…
Assessing travel time-based accessibility to outdoor ice skating fields for children in Helsinki during the COVID-19 pandemic
2022
This paper was written within the research project called “Equality in suburban physical activity environments, YLLI” (in Finnish: Yhdenvertainen liikunnallinen lähiö, YLLI) funded by the Suburban Programme 2020–2022 (in Finnish: Lähiöohjelma 2020–2022, decision number VN/10837/2020). Informal sport is central to Finnish children’s leisure and physical activity time. This paper aims to build a better understanding of the travel time-based accessibility to informal sports facilities, specifically to ice skating fields, for children and adolescents (aged 7–19) in the city of Helsinki. We focused on the winter of 2020–2021 because COVID-19 restrictions on indoor activities resulted in ice skat…