Search results for "political science"

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…

Gender segregation in the employment of higher education graduates

2014

This article examines the employment and placement in the working life of Finnish higher education graduates (i.e. graduates from universities and polytechnics), focusing on gender equality. It reports a study on gender segregation in higher education and working life, considered in relation to Nordic gender equality policies. The data were gathered via a questionnaire administered to graduates in business and administration (n = 1067) and in technology (n = 1087), three years after their graduation. The results showed that men were able to secure permanent and full-time employment more often than women, and men achieved better correspondence between their degree and their employment. Howev…

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…

Strengthening Institutional Isomorphism in Development NGOs? Program Mechanisms in an Organizational Intervention

2017

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in international development struggle between being actors in the mainstream or representatives of alternatives to it. However, many NGOs all over the world align with the mainstream and are increasingly similar to each other. This homogenization results from institutional isomorphism, which is affected by their aspirations to be legitimate vis-á-vis the international field. Consultancies are among the main practices to promote normative isomorphism, but little is known about their micro-level dynamics. Drawing on the notion of program mechanisms in realistic evaluation, we scrutinize how external facilitators in organizational development processes enab…

Transnational Mediated Commemoration of Migrant Deaths at the Borders of Europe

2019

The Teaching Profession in France since the Late Nineteenth Century: Greater Integration or Reinforced Segmentation?

2022

International audience; The emergence, in the mid-twentieth century, of an integrated French educational system that embraces all levels and tracks within a `unique' organised structure of compulsory school education for children between 6 and 16 years of age came with a renewal of the distinctions between the professional identities, trajectories and careers of the various categories of teachers. While this system has helped to redefine, and to some extent blur, the divisions between teaching groups, their professional identities and administrative statuses have remained quite distinct, mainly because of persisting forms of institutional differentiation. In addition, some new lines of divi…