Vain hätapua? : Taloudellinen avustaminen diakoniatyön professionaalisen itseymmärryksen ilmentäjänä

Financial Help Alone? Financial help as an exponent of professional diaconal work One essential form of helping people in the Evangelical Lutheran Church s diaconal work is providing economic aid. It can be seen as work which is in accordance with the spirit of the Church Order (4:3). One of the tasks of diaconal work, determined by the Church Order, is to help those whose distress is the greatest and who have no other source of help. This financial support has become a permanent and essential working method, which has also created tension of various kinds. Financial support has been criticized, especially when the support has been used to fill a gap in the social services provided by the government. It has been argued that diaconal work has been forced to take on responsibility for tasks that belong to the welfare state. The tensions involved in the financial support of diaconal work do not only concern the patching up and supplementing of the deficiencies in the welfare state s services but also the question of diaconal workers self-understanding of financial support and how it relates to their professionalism. In this thesis, I examine the experiences and visions diaconal workers have concerning financial support in their work with clients. The viewpoint of my work is the diaconal workers own experiences and interpretations of the meaning of financial support in customer service. In the articles of my thesis, I examined the meanings that diaconal workers gave to financial support in the aspects of work motivation, empowerment, expertise and tensions. The research material of my articles consists of three different data, which are theme interviews from diaconal workers, a survey from diaconal workers of Espoo and a diaconal barometer of 2009. I have analysed the theme interviews and the survey using qualitative content analysis. The results of my articles showed that diaconal workers motivation in tasks concerning economic aid was sustained by the nature and spiritual aspects of support activities. Work that supported empowerment through financial assistance meant influencing the client s personal life, community and local ties and structural circumstances of the surrounding society. Diaconal workers expertise in financial support work can be characterised as horizontal, which means that the expertise was built on acknowledging the client s dignity, the uniqueness of the client s life situation and listening to the client s own voice. Diaconal workers were also experts in community and area-based work. The tensions in financial support work are linked to its unofficial and undefined role in the field of social welfare and the inability of other aiding parties to respond to their duties. The results of my thesis on the experiences and visions of financial support reveal that it is multilateral and multidimensional. Diaconal workers used financial support to help the clients, taking into account their individual, communal, social and spiritual context. The professionalism of this financial support is reflectively related to the client s need of help and the spontaneity and unexpectedness of the situation. Support work was deeply bound to diaconal workers experiences of spirituality as the basic value in their work, the foundation of their idea of humanity and their method of helping others. In different tasks of financial support diaconal workers balanced between traditional, individual client work based on caritas and working methods which are based on supporting the individual s empowerment and active citizenship, as in postmodern social work. Diaconal workers experiences of financial support illustrated the transition or turning point in the professionalism of diaconal work, which involves finding one s own, stronger and clearer professional identity than earlier with respect to other helpers in society. Creating a unique identity is part of the empowerment process of diaconal work, in which it must define its professional role by itself. In postmodern pluralism and the fragmented context of diaconal activities, the question arose as to whether the spiritual traditions and traditional values of diaconal work support the modifications and adaptations needed in new, unpredictable situations. Diaconal work is said to be fast to react, able to predict changes and adapt to those changes. To preserve its sensitive reactive ability, also in the complex postmodern world, it must retain its own views and orientations. Otherwise, the distinctive values and traditions of diaconal work might sustain static diaconal work, employee-centeredness and a smug attitude when defining beneficiaries and needs, which highlights the paternalism of diaconal work. Such paternalism may complicate the progress of working methods which are based on empowerment and citizenship.

Design yrityksen viestintäfunktiona – Designin rooli yrityksen identiteetin viestijänä, sidosryhmäviestinnän ja maineen rakentamisen välineenä

Designin rooli yhteiskunnallisessa keskustelussa on tullut vahvasti esiin viime vuosina. Suur-Helsingin (Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa, Kauniainen ja Lahti) voittama World Design Capital 2012 -titteli on lisännyt osaltaan designiin kiinnittyvää huomiota. Designiin liittyvät ulottuvuudet ovat laajat ja sen tuoma lisäarvo yrityksille on mielenkiintoinen tutkimuskohde, johon voidaan yhdistää myös viestinnän näkökulma. Design on siis muutakin kuin esineiden muotoilua ja suunnittelua. Designia on tutkittu muun muassa artefaktien kautta kommunikaatiovälineenä, mutta designin roolia yritysviestinnässä ei ole juurikaan aikaisemmin tutkittu. Tämän pro gradu -työn tarkoituksena on selvittää, miten design voi toimia yrityksen viestintäfunktiona. Tämän päätutkimuskysymyksen selvittämiseksi etsitään vastaus kolmeen alakysymykseen, jotka perustuvat Joep Cornelissenin yritysviestinnän teorian kolmeen pääkäsitteeseen: yrityksen identiteettiin, sidosryhmäviestintään ja maineeseen. Joep Cornelissenin yritysviestintäteoria on myös tutkimuksen päälähde, jonka lisäksi muun muassa Pekka Aulan maineteorioilla on keskeiset roolinsa. Tutkimuksen aineisto on kerätty teemahaastatteluilla. Haastatteluja tehtiin yhteensä yksitoista ja ne on kerätty niin sanotulla lumipallo-otannalla. Kohderyhmänä olivat designalan ammattilaiset. Noin puolet haastateltavista tekee tutkimus- ja opetustyötä eri yliopistoissa, yksi kaupungin palveluksessa ja loput toimivat eri yrityksissä joissakin johtotehtävissä. Kolmen haastateltavan toimipaikka sijaitsee Lahdessa, yhden Espoossa ja muiden Helsingissä. Analyysimenetelmänä on käytetty niin ikään teemoittelua. Haastatteluaineistosta etsittiin kunkin yritysviestinnän teoriaan perustuvien teemojen yhteyttä designiin, ja yritettiin tulkita, millainen viestinnällinen rooli designilla voisi niissä olla. Haastateltavien näkemykset designista painottivat sen olevan muotoilun lisäksi luovaa ongelmanratkaisua, maineen-, brändinrakentamisen ja designammattilaisten väline, jolla asioista tehdään helpommin lähestyttäviksi ja hallittaviksi. Designilla on lisäksi strategista merkitystä ja se luo lisäarvoa yrityksille. Tutkimus osoittaa, että design toimii yrityksen viestintäfunktiona, kun se erilaisilla tavoilla ja keinoilla viestii yrityksen identiteettiä, toimii sidosryhmäviestinnän ja maineen rakentamisen välineenä. Erilaiset kansainväliset ja kansalliset muotoilupalkinnot ovat yritysten onnistuneen designtyön mittareita. Lisäksi tutkimusaineistosta nousi esiin kolme johtoteemaa designille, jotka ovat: designin viestintä-, väline- ja inhimillisyysteema. Pro gradu -työni antaa uutta kartoittavana tutkimuksena mielenkiintoista ja ajankohtaista tietoa designin roolista ja sen hyödyntämisestä yritysviestinnässä, mutta se ei anna konkreettisia esimerkkejä tai käytännön työkaluja sen toteuttamiseksi. Jatkotutkimuksen kannalta tätä ajatusta olisi mielekästä viedä eteenpäin.

Pelastustoimi alueellisessa kehittämisessä : Länsi-Uudenmaan pelastuslaitoksen saavutettavuus

By law, rescue services must anticipate and plan future rescue situations so that the emergency measures taken in the event of an accident can be accomplished quickly and effectively. To reach this goal, rescue services planning must be up to date. The development of rescue services is di-rected by the Rescue Act, and guidelines such as the readiness program, based on that law. The guidelines give the basic principles for organizing rescue services. This paper studies the ability of rescuers to reach different locations now, and in the future, and whether this happens within the time constraints required by the readiness program. The time per-spective of the study includes both the current time and the future. Predictions of possible future situations are based on zoning information. The goal of the study is to find out whether there are any gaps in the network of fire stations or if gaps will develop in the near future. The strong growth and increase in the population of the greater Helsinki area, and of surrounding towns, creates many challenges for city planning, including rescue services. This study targets the two towns of Espoo and Kirkkonummi, where fast growth specifically into new housing areas, makes planning of rescue services challenging. Many new options are available for planning due to technological developments. The combined methods of planning and geo-informatics used in this study help to determine the need for new resources in rescue services. By using these methods, the planning of rescue services could be done at least 10 years into the future.

Valikoiva muuttoliike Uudellamaalla

This thesis explores selective migration in Greater Helsinki region from the perspective of counterurbanisation. The aim of the study is to research whether the migration is selective by migrants age, education, income level or the rate of employment and to study any regional patterns formed by the selectivity. In the Helsinki region recent migratory developments have been shifting the areas of net migration gain away from the city of Helsinki to municipalities farther off on the former countryside. There has been discussion about Helsinki s decaying tax revenue base and whether the city s housing policy has contributed to the exodus of wealthier households. The central question of the discussion is one of selective migration: which municipalities succeed in capturing the most favourable migrants and which will lose in the competition. Selective migration means that region s in-migrants and out-migrants significantly differ from each other demographically, socially and economically. Sometimes selectivity is also understood as some individuals greater propensity to migrate than others but the proper notion for this would be differential migration. In Finnish parlance these two concepts have tended to get mixed up. The data of the study covers the total migration of the 34 municipalities of Uusimaa provinces during the years 2001 to 2003. The data was produced by Statistics Finland. Two new methods of representing the selectivity of migration as a whole were constructed during the study. Both methods look at the proportions of favourably selected migrants in regions inward and outward migrant flow. A large share in the inward flow and a small share in the outward flow is good for region s economy and demography. The first method calculates the differences of the proportions of favourably selected four migrant groups and sums the differences up. The other ranks the same proportions between regions giving value 1 to the largest proportion in inward flow and 34 to the smallest, and respectively in outward flow the smallest proportion gets value 1 and the largest 34. The total sum of the ranks or differences in proportions represents region s selectivity of migration. The results show that migration is indeed selective in the Greater Helsinki region. There also seems to be a spatial pattern centred around the Helsinki metropolitan region. The municipalities surrounding the four central communes are generally better of than those farther away. Not only these eight municipalities of the so called capital region benefit from the selective migration, but the favourable structure of migration extends to some of the small municipalities farther away. Some municipalities situated along the main northbound railway line are not coming through as well as other municipalities of the capital region. The selectivity of migration in Greater Helsinki region shows signs of counter-urbanisation. People look for suburban or small-town lifestyle no longer from Espoo or Vantaa, the neighbouring municipalities to Helsinki, but from the municipalities surrounding these two or even farther off. This kind of pattern in selective migration leads to unbalanced development in population structure and tax revenue base in the region. Migration to outskirts of the urban area also leads to urban sprawl and fragmentation of the urban structure: these issues have ecological implications. Selective migration should be studied more. Also the concept itself needs clearer definition and so do the methods to study the selectivity of migration.