Search results for "Commercial"
showing 10 items of 973 documents
Rationalising public support for private early childhood education and care: the case of Finland
2019
In Finland, early childhood education and care (ECEC) is traditionally publicly provided. However, private ECEC provision has increased during the past decade, largely as a result of financial support from the public sector. Drawing on qualitative interviews with municipal decision-makers, this article identifies three frames within which publicly subsidised private ECEC provision and marketisation are rationalised: the pragmatic frame, the government frame and the choice frame. The results show that even though market logics and tendencies seem to have gained a strong foothold in local policies, there is a keen interest in universalism and maintaining public control over local ECEC provisi…
Mapping the dilemmatic space of early childhood education and care practitioners when challenged by children’s curiosity
2018
This article explores the notion of curiosity as a gateway to value dilemmas in early childhood education and care practices. The concept of dilemmatic space (Honig) is used to highlight the complexity of educational practices. Through an ethnographic approach based on video-observation and stimulated recall interviews, the reflections of the practitioners in three early childhood education and care institutions in Norway are analysed regarding situations in which curiosity was challenging and in which explorative behaviour was stopped, transferred or adjusted. The analyses allowed the construction of several axes of dilemmatic space, such as Equality versus Supporting the Individual, Socia…
Constructing relational space in early childhood education
2014
This paper examines early childhood education (ECE) by applying and developing relational-spatial perspectives on everyday life in educational institutions for young children. The aim is to investigate the dynamic process of construction of space and to illustrate with selected empirical episodes how this process occurs in ECE. Drawing on authors such as Soja and Bourdieu, the starting point for the analysis is that space is socially produced in everyday interactions in a process that intertwines the physical environment and concrete objects, personal interpretations of physical and cultural space, and cultural and collective views about space in ECE. We illustrate this process with ethnogr…
Negotiating Ethics-in-Action in a Long-term Research Relationship with a Young Child
2021
AbstractThis article continues the discussions of relational ethics put forward in Human Arenas in “Arena of Ethics” (Hilppö et al., 2019). Our aim in this article is to explore and discuss relational ethics, as ethics-in-action, in a long-term research relationship with a child. Our question is: How is ethics-in-action negotiated during critical incidents in the construction of a research space that involves a long-term research relationship with a young child? This article is based on a research project that focused on children’s transitions in early childhood education and care (ECEC). These transitions include the transition from home care to ECEC as well as transitions from child group…
Kindergarten space and autonomy in construction - Explorations during team ethnography in a Finnish kindergarten
2018
Abstract Children’s autonomy is a cultural ideal in Finnish early childhood education and care (ECEC). In this article we examine autonomy in spatial terms. The theoretical background is developed by applying spatial sociology. Our starting point is that space is relationally produced, thus, we understand space as continuously negotiated, reconstructed and reorganized phenomena. In this article, we investigate the production of space by different actors in ECEC and seek to show how autonomy is also continuously produced and re-produced in the negotiation of space. For this investigation we use data collected as part of a team ethnographic project in a Finnish kindergarten. The project inclu…
European Capital of Culture Designation as an Initiator of Urban Transformation in the Post-socialist Countries
2012
Since 1985, the EU has designated cities as European Capital of Culture (ECOC) for 1 year at a time. Various ECOCs have used the designation as a tool to revive the city space. The cultural initiatives, such as the ECOC designation, are the EU's political instruments, whose significance has increased during the recent decades, and through which the EU aims to influence various political objectives, such as the unity of the Union and economic growth. These particular objectives were brought into the focus of the ECOC initiative during the Eastern enlargement of the Union. Since 2007, various Central and Eastern European cities have aimed to regenerate their economy through large construction…
Geovisualizing the sail-to-steam transition through vessel movement data
2017
International audience; Technological transitions in the maritime and port industries go along with increased transport and economic efficiency, resulting in faster movements and longer travelled distances. Yet, such transformations may also enhance disparities between winners and loosers, should they be ports or shipping companies. This research focuses on the particular case of the transition from sail to steam over the period 1890-1925, which witnesses the rapid replacement of sailing vessels, the latter concentrating 65% of the world fleet in 1890 but only 3.5% in 1925. It applies a variety of measures to compare how these two layers overlap in the network (at links and ports) and what …
Rethinking Community Quality of Life in Latin American Countries
2017
The community is a totality which is meaningful to the people that form part of it. In this sense community is more than a geographic concentration; it is a concept that implies the inclusion of diversities and their being allowed to share within it. It is related to social support, intersubjective, participation, consensus, common beliefs, and a joint effort which aims at a major objective: intense and extensive relationships. Quality of life is a multidimensional concept (Bramston 2002) and comprises objective and subjective components (Cummins and Cahill 2000). Quality of life in the community is a specificity of quality of life in general, and community well-being is also a predictor of…
A Shift Towards Academic Capitalism in Finland
2013
Academic capitalism is currently a widely studied topic amongst higher education scholars, especially in the United States. This paper demonstrates that the theory of academic capitalism also provides a fruitful perspective for analysing the restructuring of Finnish higher education since the 1990s, although with reservations. It will be argued that many reforms in Finnish universities since the 1990s, and especially in the early 2000s, have integrated Finnish universities more tightly with the new knowledge-based economy. As some recent empirical studies indicate, activities and practices related to academic capitalism remain, however, unevenly distributed among different disciplines, and …
The State of the Unions
2021
What defines an economic region and distinguishes it from other spatial concepts? This fundamental question is addressed based on the dimensions of space, borders, action and time. An overview of the landscape of African Regional Economic Communities (RECs) follows. RECs are briefly portrayed, and the bewildering multitude of RECs is demystified to create a better understanding of the pattern of economic integration in Africa. The exercise is guided by a matrix of general-purpose versus functional/sectoral as well as effectual versus ineffectual/dormant economic unions. This analysis forms the basis for a critical discussion of the African Union’s practice of only granting official recognit…