Reijo Miettinen
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199692613
- eISBN:
- 9780191750762
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199692613.001.0001
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Innovation, Political Economy
The Nordic welfare states have been at the top of the lists of national competitiveness throughout the 2000s. The Nordic welfare model is deemed able to combine equality, welfare and ...
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The Nordic welfare states have been at the top of the lists of national competitiveness throughout the 2000s. The Nordic welfare model is deemed able to combine equality, welfare and economic efficiency. Among the Nordic countries, Finland has been considered as an epitome of information society, of high-quality education and systemic innovation policy. In order to make sense of the Finnish development, this book puts political economy, innovation studies, welfare state research, organizational institutionalism and cultural-historical psychology into dialogue with each other. It develops an approach of studying institutional change and learning based on cultural-historical activity theory. This approach is used to analyze the emergence and development of the Finnish comprehensive school system. The steadfast success of Finnish students in the PISA studies shows, against neoliberal principles, that a public school system inspired by educational equality can achieve excellent results with moderate costs. The book outlines a model of an enabling welfare state which develops further the capability cultivating universal services created by the welfare state in the 1960s–1980s. In future these services — produced by multi-professional collaboration — will be increasingly tailored to meet the needs of different individuals and specific life situations. They enable citizens to cope with risks and to meet the challenges of the rapidly changing labour market. An enabling democratic welfare state fosters local experimentation as well as learning in collaborative communities and developmental associations. It mobilizes well-educated professionals and practitioners to innovate in all spheres of society and in this way deepens democracy within the society.
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The Nordic welfare states have been at the top of the lists of national competitiveness throughout the 2000s. The Nordic welfare model is deemed able to combine equality, welfare and economic efficiency. Among the Nordic countries, Finland has been considered as an epitome of information society, of high-quality education and systemic innovation policy. In order to make sense of the Finnish development, this book puts political economy, innovation studies, welfare state research, organizational institutionalism and cultural-historical psychology into dialogue with each other. It develops an approach of studying institutional change and learning based on cultural-historical activity theory. This approach is used to analyze the emergence and development of the Finnish comprehensive school system. The steadfast success of Finnish students in the PISA studies shows, against neoliberal principles, that a public school system inspired by educational equality can achieve excellent results with moderate costs. The book outlines a model of an enabling welfare state which develops further the capability cultivating universal services created by the welfare state in the 1960s–1980s. In future these services — produced by multi-professional collaboration — will be increasingly tailored to meet the needs of different individuals and specific life situations. They enable citizens to cope with risks and to meet the challenges of the rapidly changing labour market. An enabling democratic welfare state fosters local experimentation as well as learning in collaborative communities and developmental associations. It mobilizes well-educated professionals and practitioners to innovate in all spheres of society and in this way deepens democracy within the society.
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