Search results for "political economy"

The Human Right to Social Security and Its Impact on Socio-Political Action in Germany and Finland

2017

Social human rights have rarely been given attention in social work research or comparative studies on welfare states. The paper aims at filling the gap by analysing the conception of human beings inherent in human rights and in unemployment policy documents in Germany and Finland. Its focus lies on the right to social security, a central norm of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The main question is what impact does the right to social security have on socio-political action in Germany and Finland. The results of the analysis, which was based on the objective hermeneutics, revealed a structural similarity between the conceptions of human beings in both cou…

A social work perspective to the neoliberal mining boom in Finland and the possibility of an ecosocial response

2018

Revealing colonial power relations in early childhood policy making: An autoethnographic story on selective evidence

2021

The COVID-19 pandemic exposes uncertainty, instability and glaring inequality that requires urgent global policy decisions. Historically, bureaucrats regard uncertainty as the enemy and look for tested solutions (Stevens, 2011). In contrast, Fielding & Moss (2010) acknowledge an uncertain future and encourage shifting policy making towards the search for possibilities instead of replicating singular solutions. Escobar (2020) advocates for pluriversal politics, with many possibilities created through collective decision-making by autonomous interlinked networks. In this paper, I combine autoethnography with policy analysis drawing on my own experience in South African early childhood pol…

IPE scholarship about Southeast Asia : Theories of development and state-market-society relations

2020

Contemporary Southeast Asia is a diverse region that is fully integrated into the world economy. Its eleven constituent countries are distinct with unique historical, political, economic, and cultural configurations – as such, they develop unevenly within, and respond accordingly to, the evolution of the global capitalist system. This chapter provides a survey of literatures, themes and debates that have significantly contributed to the study of Southeast Asia from the discipline of international political economy (IPE). It shows how specific IPE scholarship about Southeast Asia since the 1950s have been framed within the general theories of development (i.e., modernization and dependency) …

Violent Conflicts and the New Mediatization: The Impact of Social Media on the European Parliamentary Agenda Regarding the Syrian War

2018

As key institutions in Western democracies, parliaments have gained importance regarding foreign affairs issues in recent years. Their increasing role as moral tribunes and discussion forums on conflict prevention and resolution have led to the parliamentarization of international affairs. The examination of the parliamentary agenda and the actors who shape it constitutes a fundamental part of agenda-setting studies as applied to the media and political systems. Among these actors, mass media must be highlighted, taking into account the complex process of information gathering for members of Parliament, particularly in cases related to international violent conflicts. Moreover, in the speci…

Foreign captains in elite hockey markets: mediatized discourses of professionalization between routes and roots

2018

The commercial internationalization of professional ice hockey is shaped by tensions of (re)routing and (up)rooting since it involves (i) crossing geographic, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries to c...

The Janus face of social innovation in local welfare initiatives

2017

Competing institutional logics in Soviet industrial location policy

2018

The Soviet legacy has been widely demonstrated to have had negative impacts on the regional and economic development of Russia. This article studies the mechanisms of competing institutional logics in Soviet industrial location policies as a source of this adverse heritage. The results indicate that prolonged competition between three institutional logics complicated the adoption and practice of consistent industrial location strategies and contributed to structural problems in economic geography. An analysis of Soviet institutional logics demonstrates parallel forms of competition and coexistence with findings from other institutional environments, paving the way for a broader theoretical …

A moral economy of patents: case of Finnish research universities' patent policies

2013

The primary objective of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of the concept of moral economy for higher education studies through a study of Finnish research universities' patent policies. Patent policies not only stimulate the commercialization of research, they also set norms for behavior and aim to clarify how to distribute rights and responsibilities during the commercialization of research results. My main research finding is that even though institutionalized university patenting is a very recent phenomenon in Finland, policies regulating it have significant similarities to the US case. The main conclusion of this paper is that the question of university patent policies should…

Enterprising Culture : Discourses on Entrepreneurship in Nordic Cultural Policy

2017

ABSTRACTThe sphere of arts and culture has been going through a process of economic reevaluation during the last few decades. Parallel to the rise of a creative economy discourse, which both in its political and scientific forms has highlighted the economic significance of culture and arts, entrepreneurship has become a feature in the cultural policy of many countries. In this article, we compare how entrepreneurship is established and used as a concept in cultural policy discourses in two Nordic countries, Norway and Finland. Through analyzing policy plans and documents, we discuss what is seen as positive cultural or artistic activity in the framework of entrepreneurship, and we identify …