The Diverse Impacts of the Neo-liberal Social Policies on Children’s Welfare and Social Work with Young People: The Finnish Perspective

This article discusses the impacts of globalization, neo-liberal social policies and the Finnish economic recession of the 1990s on children's and young people's welfare. It summarises some of the impacts of Finnish social policies on the everyday lives of families with children and highlights some of the features of the recent and current debates surrounding youth delinquency and the societal reactions to young generations. All this contributes to a contradictory and conflicting societal context which challenges experts in the field of child welfare social work experts to operate - as expected - at the right moment, legally and effectively. Instead of being overly-defensive for the ‘good old’ ways of practicing social work with children, the authors invite social work scholars and practitioners to reconceptualise both the concept of children's citizenship and its position both in child welfare theory and practice in the context of children's global rights.

Integrating a traditional minority into a Nordic society: Elite discourse on the Finnish Roma

Contemporary citizenship studies have been more concerned with the theory and philosophy of citizenship than with empirical studies. The general objective of this contribution is to broaden the understanding of how notions of citizenship are constructed and re-valued in the social world. The study draws on a qualitative analysis of political elite discourse on Romani issues in the Finnish Parliament from 1989-2003. How issues concerning the Roma are debated elucidates the dilemmas of universal rights and duties within the Nordic welfare model, and the possibilities for cultural diversity within this framework. While the Finnish parliamentary debate accentuated tolerance and the acceptance of difference as strengthening factors for Finnish social citizenship, it was not before the new millennium that the political discourse changed to increasingly stress notions of discrimination and structural inequalities in relation to the incapability to provide for a full an inclusive citizenship as regards the Romani minority.

The "bizarre" valency behaviour of Finnish verbs

The paper discusses two cases of valency alternations in Modern Finnish that to our knowledge have not attracted much attention. We discuss sentences (a) in which a verb which is normally used intransitively, i.e. without an object, is used transitively, i.e. with an object, and (b) in which a transitive verb appears with a new type of object.