Search results for "Sociology and Political Science"

Responsibilities for just transition to low-carbon societies : a role-based framework

2022

Low-carbon transitions in industrialised societies will have significant social, economic and environmental impacts, raising concerns of justice. Calls for urgent transitions evoke a question about the roles of different actors in advancing transitions and ensuring they are just. While the responsibilities for emission mitigation have been long discussed, responsibilities for making a just transition have not. The question about responsibilities is particularly pressing because of the diverse constellation of actors involved in climate action, including diverse forms of non-state actors from city-level and business alliances to grassroots activists. We examine the responsibilities of state …

Social, health care and rehabilitation educators' competence in professional education—Empirical testing of a model

2021

The social and health care educator's role in educating future professionals need to be stronger emphasised and deserves international recognition. The purpose of this study was to develop and test an empirical model of social and health care educators' competence in higher and professional education. The presented research employed a cross-sectional study design. Data were collected using HeSoEduCo-instrument from 28 educational institutions in Finland. The model was empirically tested with confirmatory factor analysis through Structural Equation Modelling that applied the Full Imputation Maximum Likelihood estimator. A total of 422 social and health care educators participated in the stud…

From Embodied to Disembodied Professionalism? Discussing the Implications of Medico-Managerial Management in Welfare Service Work

2013

Welfare service work is traditionally understood to comprise embodied, situational and social practices of care that are central to a worker’s professional self-image. Over the past few decades, public management reforms have called for reassessment of welfare service workers’ professional accountability through practices of medico-managerial service management. These practices promote the production of transparency and accountability in welfare services work through checking-based trust and disembodied professional practices. This article argues that the changes in the nature of trust toward welfare service professionals have implications for care work cultures and workers’ professional ag…

Perceived threat or perceived benefit? Immigrants’ perception of how Finns tend to perceive them

2022

Research on how immigrants are perceived by locals has flourished extensively within the past decades. Through the lens of integrated threat theory and the threat benefit model, this study examines immigrants’ perceptions of how Finns tend to perceive them based on their lived experiences. In a sample of 103 immigrants from over 40 nationalities living in Finland, results indicate that overall, immigrants believe they are perceived more as a threat than a benefit to the Finnish society. Implications and opportunities for further research are discussed as well. peerReviewed

Paradigms for Political Action. A Draft for a Repertoire

2022

Whether politics is a separate sphere or an aspect of human action is a subject of academic controversy. I focus here on the political aspect of action, which is not exclusive of other aspects. There are no ‘naturally political’ issues nor is there anything completely devoid of a political aspect. I am now taking a step backwards to discuss the seemingly simple ‘political or not’ question, as compared to the ‘political in which sense’ question, which I have discussed elsewhere. In this article, I stay on the ideal–typical level, as I want to discuss alternative ways of marking the criteria for the political aspect, without discussing the views of other scholars in detail. I call the procedu…

Overcoming Barriers to Transnational Organizing Through Identity Work : Finnish-Estonian Trade Union Cooperation

2018

This article analyses a project by Finnish and Estonian unions to adopt ‘organizing model’ strategies through establishing the transnational ‘Baltic Organising Academy’. Initially aimed at Estonian workplaces, successful campaigns inspired Finnish unions to copy the model in Finland. This cooperation was originally motivated by labour market interdependence between the two countries, and the failure of past social-partnership oriented union strategies in Estonia. The willingness of Finnish and Estonian unions to commit resources to transnational cooperation around an ‘organizing model’ marks a dramatic departure from the unions’ previous strategies. This change was accomplished by transnati…

Commissioned Book Review : Aliaksei Kazharski, Eurasian Integration and the Russian World: Regionalism as an Identitary Enterprise

2019

Identity politics of the promotional videos of the European Heritage Label

2019

During past decades, the EU has responded to a variety of ‘crises’ by promoting a common cultural heritage to advance European identity and belonging. This article analyses identity politics conducted in the framework of the EU’s flagship heritage action, the European Heritage Label. I borrow from ‘banal nationalism’ to scrutinise the usage of ‘we’ and ‘us’ in the promotional videos of the European Heritage Label sites as subject positions offered for identification in this heritage discourse. Analysis shows that the subject positions are constituted by an emphasis on the national level, preservation of the past for future generations and the key role of experts in the process of heritage. …

Populism as a pathological form of politics of recognition

2018

This article combines the neo-Hegelian theory of recognition with an analysis of social pathologies to show how the populist formulations of political goals in struggles for recognition are – despite their potential positive motivating force – socially pathological. The concept of recognition, combined with the idea of social pathologies, can thus be used to introduce normative considerations into the populism analysis. In this article it is argued that, although populism is useful in the sense that it aims to ameliorate real experienced lack of recognition through fostering political movements, it is also harmful. The simplified populist representations of collective identities are often g…

Human Rights–Based Social Work and the Natural Environment: Time for New Perspectives

2023

AbstractThe natural environment and sustainability play an increasingly important role in social work as a discipline and profession. This is often described as the ecosocial paradigm. Even though the paradigm shares important ethical foundations with human rights–based social work, the connection between both is rarely examined in social work scholarship. This article addresses the gap by asking the following questions: How is the ecosocial paradigm linked to the human rights discourse in social work? What is the environmental dimension of human rights, and what implications does it have for social work? How can a human rights–based social work encompass the environmental dimension? In res…