Search results for "Social technology"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
Rural futures in developed economies: The case of Finland
2015
Abstract This study presents four possible images of rural futures in Finland: decentralized bio-economy, colonial countryside, museum countryside and rural business islets. They are distilled through literature reviews, futures workshops and futures tables. Alternative specifications of structures, contents and agencies result in highly divergent states of key dimensions and, consequently, divergent rural futures. This diversity challenges the conventional public wisdom or intellectual monoculture that considers decay as the only future for rural areas. Key challenges in crafting plausible but divergent futures images are finding an appropriate level of abstraction or “flight altitude”, es…
Educational Governance: Politics, Administration and Professionalism
2014
The current restructuring of Nordic educational governance systems is creating new relationships between the state, local authorities and schools and, therefore, between politicians, managers and educational professionals. With inspiration from transnational agencies – primarily the OECD – new chains of governance are being created. Some elements of governance are being de-centralised, whilst other elements are being re-centralised. The couplings of economies, human resource management and operations are being loosened while at the same time the links between an educational content, aims and accountabilities are being tightened. This tendency has also led/made many municipalities to restruc…
Managing categories: The role of social technology in kindergarten teachers’ work to promote early intervention and integration
2021
Early intervention and integration are highly valued ideals in kindergartens in Norway. Building on two research projects informed by institutional ethnography, the authors address how kindergarten teachers ‘do’ early intervention and integration in their everyday work. They argue that this work largely revolves around managing categories, whether making categories fit people or making people fit categories. In this work, the kindergarten teachers rely on social technology that is influenced by a ‘psy-discourse’. Despite good intentions, the social technology and the professionals’ use of it ends up constructing the categories they are intended to help or ‘heal’.