Search results for "Sociology and Political Science"
showing 10 items of 2215 documents
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…
Equal access to the top? Measuring selection into finnish academia
2019
In this article, we draw a parallel between equality of opportunity in educational transitions and equality of opportunity in academic careers. In both cases, many methodological problems can be ameliorated by the use of longitudinal rather than cross-sectional data. We illustrate this point by using Finnish full-population register data to follow the educational and academic careers of the 1964–1966 birth cohorts from birth to the present day. We show how the Finnish professoriate is highly selected both in terms of parental background and in terms of gender. Individuals of different backgrounds differ greatly in the likelihood of completing different educational and academic transitions, …
Institutional Autonomy and Academic Freedom in the Nordic Context — Similarities and Differences
2013
Owing to their common history, similarities in language and culture, long traditions in political collaboration and the shared Nordic societal model, an assumption is often made that the operational and regulatory context of universities is similar in the five Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. In this article, we examine the relationship between the Nordic higher education institutions and their specific governments. The interpretation of institutional autonomy and academic freedom in the Nordic countries is discussed with support from recently collected empirical data, Nordic university legislation and the topical research literature. We describe the differenc…
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…
Industrial Citizenship, Cosmopolitanism and European Integration
2014
Abstract. There has been an explosion of interest in the idea of European Union citizenship in recent years, as a defining example of postnational cosmopolitan citizenship potentially replacing, or at least layered on top of national citizenships. We argue this form of EU citizenship undermines industrial citizenship, which is a crucial support for the egalitarianism and social solidarity on which other types of citizenship are based. Because industrial citizenship arises from collectivities based in class identities and national institutions, it depends on the nation state erritorial order and the social closure inherent in this. EU citizenship in its current ‘postnational’ form is realize…
Digital Islamophobia: The Swedish woman as a figure of pure and dangerous whiteness
2016
This article addresses the digital culture of Islamophobic bloggers, focusing on the online circulation of a forensic photograph of a Swedish woman who was assaulted. The analysis shows how through appropriating this image, the bloggers created a unifying, imagined whiteness in the transnational Islamophobic network. The empirical analysis clarifies how this one image migrated and transformed in the blogosphere and legitimated the recurrent discursive trope of “Muslim rape.” This image became a subcultural “memory freeze frame” crystallizing the contemporary Islamophobic ideologies articulated in connection to race, ethnicity, nation, gender, and sexuality. The viral circulation of this im…
Not just daycare: nordic mothers in research, development and innovation navigating work and childcare
2022
Nordic welfare policies mitigate work–childcare reconciliation; however, they are not enough for mothers working in intensive work cultures. In addition, there are differences among the three Nordic states in both work–family policies and cultural norms as to how they should be used. In this article, we study the resources mothers who work in research, development and innovation (R&D&I) in Finland, Norway and Sweden rely on in their work–childcare reconciliation. Thematic analysis of interviews with 74 professionals resulted in identifying four main resources: father involvement, parental leave system and daycare, flexible working, and grandparent help and networks. Our analysis brings to v…
When did biopolitics begin? : Actuality and potentiality in historical events
2022
The article addresses the ongoing debate about the origins of biopolitics. While Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics approached it as a modern rationality of government, Agamben’s Homo Sacer series presented biopolitics as having a longer provenance, dating back to the antiquity. These polar positions are not mutually exclusive but coexist in these and other theories of biopolitics, which approach its object as both modern and ancient, having its chronological origin in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries yet also possessing a prehistory of precursors. The article interprets this dual origin in terms of Paolo Virno’s theory of historical temporality, which distinguishes between the chron…
"Tentative lessons of experience: Arendt, essayism, and ""the social"" reconsidered"
2014
The article addresses the role of the essay in Hannah Arendt’s theorizing. By paying attention to Arendt’s style, we are better able to draw the full conclusions from the well-known fact that she was not a system-builder but took her bearings from concrete experiences. First, the concept of experience—too often taken at face value—is explicated. It is argued that Arendt’s understanding of the concept cannot be reduced to her personal experiences, but must be read against the background of the common world. A crucial dimension in the incorporation of experiences into the Arendtian political theory is the essayistic style of her writings. The essay, as an experimental and tentative platform,…