Finnish Academics Research Articles

Self-censorship among online harassment targets: the role of support at work, harassment characteristics, and the target’s public visibility

ABSTRACTOnline harassment of professionals with public visibility has many potentially harmful societal consequences, including its probable silencing effect. Targeted individuals may refrain from voicing their opinion, which can negatively affect their professional and personal lives, but also the quality of public debate. This study examined the effect of perceived social support at work and perceived organizational support on self-censorship in response to work-related online harassment. We collected survey data based on representative samples from Finnish academics (N = 2,492), local politicians (N = 510), and media professionals (N = 695). We found that 64% of politicians, 58% of media professionals, and 30% of academics had experienced work-related online harassment. Among university staff, perceived social support from colleagues was negatively associated with self-censorship, and perceived social support from the closest supervisor had similar association among media professionals and politicians. Additionally, the frequency and severity of the harassment, as well as the target’s public visibility and female gender as predicted, along with other sociodemographic characteristics, were associated with self-censorship in response to online harassment. The results suggest that characteristics of the harassment and the target’s work environment influence the silencing effect of work-related online harassment and that perceived social support at work constitutes an important resource in dealing with harassment and its potential consequences.

The Finnish Academic Profession’s Divided Opportunities in Management and Governance

Finnish higher education consists of research-oriented universities and teaching-oriented universities of applied sciences, and both sectors have a role in research, development and innovation. This paper focuses on governance and management at the institutional and academic unit levels, based on responses to several questions in the APIKS survey regarding the influence of academics, performance targets of academic units and the influence of academics in decision making and workload. Institutions in both sectors of Finnish higher education emphasise strategies and are heavily reliant on public funding. Both sectors also have an orientation to strong performance management.

Experiences of arbitrary management among Finnish academics in an era of academic capitalism

ABSTRACT For the last two decades, Finnish universities have faced the implementation of new systems of control and undergone dramatic changes that have worsened academic working conditions – such as corporatisation and budget cuts. This article explores Finnish academics’ experiences of university reforms with a special focus on the consequences it has had in terms of organisational socio-dynamics. We adapt Glynos and Howarth’s logics of critical explanation and apply this theoretical framework to analyse the interviews of academics who, against their own will, did not have their contracts renewed. This approach describes, explains, and criticises the logics – which are social, political and fantasmatic – behind the existence, continuation, and transformation of practices that are very real. Our research findings suggest that there are situations in which experiences of opaque management may occur at university. Academics often found the decision-making processes to be unpredictable and ambiguous, leading to a precarious working atmosphere. Combining the logics approach with micro-level data analysis, we developed the concept of arbitrary management, offering new perspectives for understanding the mediation between social practices and structural reforms. This micro-political analysis provides a new take on how ideologies operate at university in an era of academic capitalism.

Performance Measurement in Academic Work: Surveillance, Control, and Self-Governance

In recent times, performance measurement (PM) and individual performance evaluation have become everyday activities in the higher education sector and the previously collegial university management has taken steps towards a managerial model. The implications of PM for individual academics have had negative tones; resulting for example in increasing stress, anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. Inspired by Foucauldian framework of governmentality, we look at Finnish academics’ experiences of PM in academic work. The empirical material of the study consists of a case study of three Finnish universities. Responses from university employees to open-ended questions collected from a large survey in 2015 with 672 respondents serve as the primary material. The results show that PM combined with ambiguous and undecidable objectives has created a situation where individuals strive to work more and become better, but never reach the point of adequacy. This is where the Foucauldian idea of ‘normality’ merges with the illusionary idea of ‘ideal academic’, causing constant feelings of inadequacy.

Linked Open Data Service about Historical Finnish Academic People in 1640–1899

The Finnish registries “Ylioppilasmatrikkeli” 1640–1852 and 1853–1899 contain detailed biographical data about virtually every academic person in Finland during the respective time periods. This paper presents first results on transforming these registries into a Linked Open Data service using the FAIR principles. The data is based on the student registries of the University of Helsinki, formerly the Royal Academy of Turku, that have been digitized, transliterated, and enriched with additional data about the people from various other registries. Our goal is to transform this largely textual data into Linked Open Data using named entity recognition and linking techniques, and to enrich the data further based on links to internal and external data sources and by reasoning new associations in the data. The data will be published as a Linked Open Data service on top of which a semantic portal “AcademySampo” with tools for searching, browsing, and analyzing the data in biographical and prosopographical research are provided.

Disrupting habits of North–South research collaboration: Learning in co-authoring

One of the frequently mentioned manifestations of asymmetrical relationships in North–South research collaboration has been challenges in co-authoring joint international publications. We critically reflect on our attempt to counteract this tendency and analyse a process of producing an edited volume on practices of citizenship in East Africa, which reports selected findings of a four-year collaborative research project between Tanzanian, Ugandan and Finnish academics. The project was based on philosophical pragmatism, and especially John Dewey’s ideas concerning learning as reformulation of habits. Consequently, our reflection of learning presented in this paper draws from the pragmatist notions of habit and disruption. We analyse how some prevalent habits in support of asymmetrical knowledge production emerged and the ways in which we attempted to reformulate them in our own practices by initiating continuous dialogue within the team, introduction of writing retreats and offering short-term fellowships.

Politics of fire: the commemorative torch rally 612 of the Finnish radical right

ABSTRACTIn the last decade, the radical right has organized numerous torch rallies around Europe. This essay analyses symbolic meanings attached to torches in these events. My case study is the 612-event that has taken place in Helsinki every Finnish Independence Day since 2014. The organizers of the torch procession claim that their event is politically non-committed, patriotic and commemorative. However, the organizers and speakers in the event come from various radical right organizations. Torches are said to symbolize life, continuity, and the ‘eternal Finnishness,’ but in the context of the radical right, the torches may also recall the torch rallies of the Ku Klux Klan, Nazi Germany, the Finnish Academic Karelia Society (AKS) in the 1930s, various similar radical right torch rallies in contemporary Europe, and the petrol bomb attacks against asylum centres around Finland in the autumn 2015. While the speeches held in the event move mostly on quite general patriotic level, one can also find references to more radical right-wing ideology, for example to the theory of the ‘Great Replacement.’ The event is thus illustrative of the ‘doublespeak’ of the radical right: it sends different messages to the general public and the initiated activists.

Following the money? Performance-based funding and the changing publication patterns of Finnish academics

Research on how performance-based funding influences the behaviour and performance of academics is limited in Europe. In this study, we investigate the changing publication patterns among Finnish academics associated with the introduction of awarding funding for publications within specific journals in the national performance-based funding model. We find evidence, particularly in the social sciences, and to a lesser extent humanities, that Finnish academics increasingly target international (English-language) publication outlets and lower-tiered journals. We conclude discussing the possible long-term implications of the current funding formula for both Finnish academia and society.

Emotionally loaded identity and agency in Finnish academic work

ABSTRACTThis narrative study investigated identity, agency and emotions, amongst an under-researched academic group – those without PhDs with primary responsibility for teaching, who are also expected to do research. In this interview-based paper, we examine the experience of such Finnish academics in a research-intensive university. Thematic and then narrative approaches were employed. The findings demonstrated five narratives which indicated both balanced and tensioned relations as regards academic identity, with variable perceptions of agency and emotions embedded. The study contributes in two ways: first, it adds to the little that is known of the experiences of the aforementioned under-researched academic group. Second and more broadly, it provides insight into the emotionally loaded nature of academic work, and highlights the need for future research to explore academic identity and agency as emotionally imbued phenomena.

Enhancing Overseas Chinese Graduate Employability: The Case of Chinese Graduates with Finnish Academic Qualifications

This paper explores ways to enhance overseas Chinese graduate employability by taking Finnish-educated Chinese students/graduates as an example. In so doing, it understands that graduate employability development is a joint effort of multiple stakeholders including students, graduates, academics, program coordinators, employers, and policymakers. Accordingly, it provides arguments and suggestions for how to enhance the employability of these graduates in terms of the labor market context, employers’ beliefs and actions, the responsibilities of higher education institutions, and student/graduate commitment. It also points out two major challenges faced by overseas Chinese graduates as well as their educational providers, which are linked respectively to gaps between what graduates acquire in higher education and what is required in the labor market, as well as gaps from the employers’ perspective: areas where employers need to understand more about universities and catch up with new ideas generated by them.

Enhancing Overseas Chinese Graduate Employability: The Case of Chinese Graduates with Finnish Academic Qualifications

Enhancing Overseas Chinese Graduate Employability: The Case of Chinese Graduates with Finnish Academic Qualifications

PISA, TIMSS and Finnish mathematics teaching: an enigma in search of an explanation

Finnish students’ success on all three content domains of each of the four cycles of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has created much international interest. It has also prompted Finnish academics to offer systemic explanations typically linked to the structural qualities of Finnish schooling and teacher education. Less well-known has been the modest mathematics performance of Finnish grade 8 students on the two Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in which Finland has participated, which, when compared with its PISA successes, has created something of an enigma. In this paper, we attempt to shed light on this enigma through analyses of Finnish mathematics classroom practice that draw on two extant data sets—interviews with Finnish teacher educators and video-recordings of sequences of lessons taught on standard topics. Due to the international interest in Finnish PISA success, the analyses focus primarily on the resonance between classroom practice and the mathematical literacy component of the PISA assessment framework. The analyses indicate that Finnish mathematics didactics are more likely to explain the modest TIMSS achievements than PISA successes and allude to several factors thought to be unique to the Finns, which, unrelated to mathematics teaching practices, may be contributory to the repeated Finnish PISA successes. Some implications for policy-borrowing are discussed.

The ‘entrepreneurial university’, family and gender: changes and demands faced by fixed-term workers

Managerialism and neoliberal changes and demands influence the work and family lives of academics differently in different positions and contexts. In this article, I explore how Finnish academics on short fixed-term contracts have been treated, and how they interpret recent changes and their effects on their work and private lives. I ask how the demands and changes are gendered and what consequences they have for work–family balance and gender equality, as well as whether the changes have been internalised or resisted. Managerialism seems to create new ways to govern oneself and to approach academic work, home, children and gender. I argue that these profound changes are veiled by more visible reforms that seem to threaten academic autonomy, such as time surveillance.

University Under Structural Reform: A Micro-Level Perspective

National governments in several countries have promoted and carried out different forms of mergers, consolidations and alliances within their higher education systems in order to increase efficiency, effectiveness and governmental control to ensure that the universities more directly serve the national and regional economic and social objectives. This article sets out to explore structural reforms between and within universities from a micro-level perspective by investigating how academics make sense of and respond to the structural reforms, and how these reforms shape academic cultures, work practices and identities. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 31 Finnish academics working under structural rearrangements, five core meanings of structural reforms are discerned: structural development as part of a flood of changes, expanding bureaucracy, profiling, searching for partners and branding. The paper concludes that structural reforms along with other managerial transformations foster experiences of competition and polarization at the departmental and individual level of academia, involving redefining what it means to be a successful academic.

The construction of academic identity in the changes of Finnish higher education

This article sets out to explore how academics make sense of the current transformations of higher education and what kinds of academic identities are thereby constructed. Based on a narrative analysis of 42 interviews with Finnish academics, nine narratives are discerned, each providing a different answer as to what it means to be an academic in the present-day university. Narratives of resistance, loss, administrative work overload and job insecurity are embedded in a regressive storyline, describing deterioration of academic work and one's standing. In a sharp contrast, narratives of success, mobility and change agency rely on a progressive storyline which sees the current changes in a positive light. Between these opposites, narratives of work–life balance and bystander follow stable storylines, involving a neutral stance toward university transformations. The paper concludes that academic identities have become increasingly diversified and polarized due to the managerial and structural changes in higher education.

‘State idea’ in the photographs of geography and tourism in Finland in the 1920s

This article examines the landscape photographs of Finnish geography school books and tourist guides published during the 1920s. The photographs participated in the everyday reproduction of nationalism by integrating the ‘state idea’ of Finnish academics into the spatial order of Finland. The content of the photographs reflects the core-periphery relationship embedded in the thinking Finnish academics who conceptualised themselves as part of the authoritative ‘state’ that controlled the entire national territory. The study shows that landscape photographs had an integral role in the processes through which the academic elite negotiated its power in Finnish society.

Boundary-work between work and life in the high-speed university

Drawing upon the notion of acceleration of time in late capitalism, the article addresses the different forms and driving forces of the speeding up of the tempo and rhythm in research work in academia, and the impact of the temporal acceleration on how academics perceive their work and its connection to the private sphere of life. Based on 40 in-depth interviews with Finnish academics representing various disciplinary fields, organisational settings and university positions, three different constructions of the relationship between work and life are discerned: total commitment involving the work-life equation, boundary between time for real work and wasted time, and boundary between work and life. The article discusses the implications these temporal boundaries have on the moral grounding and basic meaning of academic work and the university as an institution.

Gendering violence in the school shootings in Finland

Within barely a year, two school shootings shook Finland. The school shootings shocked Finnish society, forcing media, academics and experts, police and politicians alike to search for reasons behind the violent incidents. Focusing their analysis on the two main Finnish newspapers, Helsingin Sanomat and Hufvudstadsbladet , authoritative sources of information for Finland’s two language communities, the authors maintain that the Finnish case contributes to research on school shootings by evidencing the intimate linkages between the state, gender and violence. The authors argue that violence is to be understood through different discourses about the Finnish state. In particular, they discern three discourses about the state that produce gendered discourses of violence: the welfare state, the realist state and the neoliberal state. The authors conclude that these discourses produce different notions of rational and irrational violence thereby providing different legitimizations for male-embodied/masculine violence.

Different research markets: a disciplinary perspective

Drawing upon the notions of academic capitalism and the transformation of academic research from traditional academic orientation into market orientation, the paper sets out to empirically scrutinize the changing nature of academic research, focusing especially on disciplinary differences. The paper is based on a survey of heads of departments and research units at Finnish universities representing all disciplinary groups (n = 255) and on in-depth interviews with Finnish academics (n = 31) in the fields of humanities, social sciences, technology and natural sciences. Based on the survey data, the funding, selection of research topics, collaboration partners, audiences and publication forums in research are analysed. Following this, five research markets are discerned: academic, corporate, policy, professional and public market, each characterized by its own values and rationality as to what is considered the reference group, basic objective and outcome of research. The paper concludes that the transformation thesis needs to be revisited and specified since on the one hand, academic orientation still remains crucially important in all disciplinary groups, and on the other hand, market orientation entails several kinds of markets, pointing to the versatility of the university–society relationship.

Combining Excellence and Ethics: Implications for Moral Education for the Gifted

In this article the current empirical research on morality and giftedness is reviewed with an emphasis on moral sensitivity. The component of moral judgment has been the most studied aspect in morality. Although high-ability students have been shown to be superior in moral judgment when compared to average-ability students, morality includes other components as well, such as sensitivity, motivation, and character. Furthermore, the critics of Kohlbergian research argue that moral reasoning does not necessarily lead to moral behavior. The gifted students might be able to give “correct” responses in the Defining Issues Test (DIT) test but their actual moral behavior cannot be predicted based on these test results. Hence, the limits of interpretation of these findings need to be acknowledged. The component of moral sensitivity is introduced with case studies regarding Finnish gifted students and Finnish Academic Olympians. The beliefs and values in academic work ethics of the Finnish Academic Olympians are discussed to give examples of how ethics can be combined with excellence in science. Some implications for the moral education of gifted students are suggested based on the research findings.