Reinventing Nordic Openness : Transparency and State Information in Finland

The study explores new ideational changes in the information strategy of the Finnish state between 1998 and 2007, after a juncture in Finnish governing in the early 1990s. The study scrutinizes the economic reframing of institutional openness in Finland that comes with significant and often unintended institutional consequences of transparency. Most notably, the constitutional principle of publicity (julkisuusperiaate), a Nordic institutional peculiarity allowing public access to state information, is now becoming an instrument of economic performance and accountability through results. Finland has a long institutional history in the publicity of government information, acknowledged by law since 1951. Nevertheless, access to government information became a policy concern in the mid-1990s, involving a historical narrative of openness as a Nordic tradition of Finnish governing Nordic openness (pohjoismainen avoimuus). International interest in transparency of governance has also marked an opening for institutional re-descriptions in Nordic context. The essential added value, or contradictory term, that transparency has on the Finnish conceptualisation of governing is the innovation that public acts of governing can be economically efficient. This is most apparent in the new attempts at providing standardised information on government and expressing it in numbers. In Finland, the publicity of government information has been a concept of democratic connotations, but new internationally diffusing ideas of performance and national economic competitiveness are discussed under the notion of transparency and its peer concepts openness and public (sector) information, which are also newcomers to Finnish vocabulary of governing. The above concepts often conflict with one another, paving the way to unintended consequences for the reforms conducted in their name. Moreover, the study argues that the policy concerns over openness and public sector information are linked to the new drive for transparency. Drawing on theories of new institutionalism, political economy, and conceptual history, the study argues for a reinvention of Nordic openness in two senses. First, in referring to institutional history, the policy discourse of Nordic openness discovers an administrative tradition in response to new dilemmas of public governance. Moreover, this normatively appealing discourse also legitimizes the new ideational changes. Second, a former mechanism of democratic accountability is being reframed with market and performance ideas, mostly originating from the sphere of transnational governance and governance indices. Mobilizing different research techniques and data (public documents of the Finnish government and international organizations, some 30 interviews of Finnish civil servants, and statistical time series), the study asks how the above ideational changes have been possible, pointing to the importance of nationalistically appealing historical narratives and normative concepts of governing. Concerning institutional developments, the study analyses the ideational changes in central steering mechanisms (political, normative and financial steering) and the introduction of budget transparency and performance management in two cases: census data (Population Register Centre) and foreign political information (Ministry for Foreign Affairs). The new policy domain of governance indices is also explored as a type of transparency. The study further asks what institutional transformations are to be observed in the above cases and in the accountability system. The study concludes that while the information rights of citizens have been reinforced and recalibrated during the period under scrutiny, there has also been a conversion of institutional practices towards economic performance. As the discourse of Nordic openness has been rather unquestioned, the new internationally circulating ideas of transparency and the knowledge economy have entered this discourse without public notice. Since the mid 1990s, state registry data has been perceived as an exploitable economic resource in Finland and in the EU public sector information. This is a parallel development to the new drive for budget transparency in organisations as vital to the state as the Population Register Centre, which has led to marketization of census data in Finland, an international exceptionality. In the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, the post-Cold War rhetorical shift from secrecy to performance-driven openness marked a conversion in institutional practices that now see information services with high regards. But this has not necessarily led to the increased publicity of foreign political information. In this context, openness is also defined as sharing information with select actors, as a trust based non-public activity, deemed necessary amid the global economic competition. Regarding accountability system, deliberation and performance now overlap, making it increasingly difficult to identify to whom and for what the public administration is accountable. These evolving institutional practices are characterised by unintended consequences and paradoxes. History is a paradoxical component in the above institutional change, as long-term institutional developments now justify short-term reforms.

An eroding social justice agenda: The case of physical education and health edu-business in schools

In this paper we draw on current research to explore notions of a socially just Health and Physical Education (HPE), in light of claims that a neoliberal globalisation promotes markets over the states, and a new individualism that privileges self-interest over the collective good. We also invite readers to consider United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s ambition for PE in light of preliminary findings from an Australian led research project exploring national and international patterns of outsourcing HPE curricula. Data were sourced from this international research project through a mixed method approach. Each external provider engaged in four phases of research activity: (a) Web-audits, (b) Interviews with external providers, (c) Network diagrams, and (d) School partner interviews and observations. Results We use these data to pose what we believe to be three emerging lines of inquiry and challenge for a socially just school HPE within neoliberal times. In particular our data indicates that the marketization of school HPE is strengthening an emphasis on individual responsibility for personal health, elevating expectations that schools and teachers will “fill the welfare gap” and finally, influencing the nature and purchase of educative HPE programs in schools. The apparent proliferation of external providers of health work, HPE resources and services reflects the rise and pervasiveness of neoliberalism in education. We conclude that this global HPE landscape warrants attention to investigate the extent to which external providers’ resources are compatible with schooling’s educative and inclusive mandates.

A mercantilização do meio ambiente na cidade de Cabo Frio a partir dos fundamentos de Pierre George

A presente pesquisa mostra a teoria de Pierre George, geógrafo francês que viveu e analisou o século XX. O autor produziu uma leitura crítica da realidade, a partir de um contexto com várias transformações espaciais, guerras, expansão da industrialização, desenvolvimento das políticas do meio ambiente, questões sociais, entre outros pontos. Pierre George analisa o meio ambiente relacionando com o sistema econômico e os fatores políticos, indicando a função importante do espaço o conceito geográfico central. A partir das décadas de 1960 e 1970, há no capitalismo o novo sistema verde, que promete cuidar da degradação ambiental, mas estrategicamente pretende continuar o modelo de desenvolvimento. Esta realidade será incorporada por várias cidades em países desenvolvidos e em países subdesenvolvidos, que usarão o meio ambiente como uma mercadoria. Nesta pesquisa veremos o exemplo de Cabo Frio, Rj, uma cidade turística desde a década de 1950, que utiliza o meio ambiente como uma mercadoria, explorando a praia, os espaços verdes e a lagoa. Então a cidade será um exemplo excelente para confirmar a análise de George

Globalization and basketball in China: governance, market and culture

Chinese sports are developing under very complex and unique political, economic, and cultural circumstances in the global age. This study aims to investigate the process of globalization in basketball through an examination of its multidimensional manifestations. The study aligns itself with Ritzer’s (2003, 2007b) conceptualization of dichotomizing the process of globalization into grobalization and glocalization. On that basis, the trajectory of basketball globalization in China is identified as the result of a contextual and competing interplay between the penetration of the NBA and the consequent engagement of Chinese basketball. A qualitative methodological approach was conducted to achieve the research aim. Data were collected from a number of sources, including official documents and semi-structured interviews with relevant basketball participants. The study reveals that globalization and basketball in China, in the political and institutional dimension, is a conflicting process. The universalization of the NBA’s governance model could not be fully assimilated due to the centralization of power in the Chinese government, which is hindering the further professionalization and marketization of basketball. In the economic dimension, the globalization process is seen to interplay with the local basketball market, which is growing thanks to the adaption of the NBA’s marketing strategies. In the cultural dimension, the study demonstrates that the NBA has to some extent cosmopolitanized and consumerized Chinese basketball culture, while resistance from both the state and the Chinese people has risen, creolizing the globalization of basketball culture in China.

'Trusting the numbers': mineral prospecting, raising finance and the governance of knowledge

Mineral prospecting and raising finance for ‘junior’ mining firms has historically been regarded as a speculative activity. For the regulators of securities markets upon which ‘junior’ mining companies seek to raise capital, a perennial problem has been handling not only the indeterminacy of scientific claims, but also the social basis of epistemic practices. This paper examines the production of a system of public warrant and associated knowledge practices intended to enable investors to differentiate between ‘destructive’ and ‘productive’ varieties of financial speculation. It traces the use of the notion of ‘disclosure’ in constructing and legitimizing the ‘juniors’ market in Canada. It argues that though the work of ‘economics’ may be necessary in the construction of markets, it is by no means sufficient. Attention must also be given to the ways in which legal models of ‘the free-market’ can be translated and constantly re-worked across the sites and spaces of regulatory practice, animating the geographies of markets.

Mining Money: the generative capacities of scientific and legal knowledge practices in the making of resource economies

In 1997 a scandal associated with Bre-X, a junior mining firm, and its prospecting activities in Indonesia, exposed to public scrutiny the ways in which mineral exploration firms acquire, assess and report on scientific claims about the natural environment. At stake here was not just how investors understood the provisional nature of scientific knowledge, but also evidence of fraud. Contemporaneous mining scandals not only included the salting of cores, but also unreliable proprietary sample preparation and assay methods, mis-representations of visual field estimates as drilling results and ‘overly optimistic’ geological reports. This paper reports on initiatives taken in the wake of these scandals and prompted by the Mining Standards Task Force (TSE/OSC 1999). For regulators, mandated to increase investor confidence in Canada’s leading role within the global mining industry, efforts focused first and foremost upon identifying and removing sources of error and wilfulness within the production and circulation of scientific knowledge claims. A common goal cross-cutting these initiatives was ‘a faithful representation of nature’ (Daston and Galison 2010), however, as the paper argues, this was manifest in an assemblage of practices governed by distinct and rival regulative visions of science and the making of markets in claims about ‘nature’. These ‘practices of fidelity’, it is argued, can be consequential in shaping the spatial and temporal dynamics of the marketization of nature.

Finance, social economics and community development

The last three decades have seen social enterprises in the United Kingdom pushed to the forefront of welfare delivery, workfare and area-based regeneration. For critics, this is repositioning the sector around a neoliberal politics that privileges marketization, state roll-back and disciplining community groups to become more self-reliant. Successive governments have developed bespoke products, fiscal instruments and intermediaries to enable and extend the social finance market. Such assemblages are critical to roll-out tactics, but they are also necessary and useful for more reformist understandings of economic alterity. The issue is not social finance itself but how it is used, which inevitably entangles social enterprises in a form of legitimation crises between the need to satisfy financial returns and at the same time keep community interests on board. This paper argues that social finance, how it is used, politically domesticated and achieves re-distributional outcomes is a necessary component of counter-hegemonic strategies. Such assemblages are as important to radical community development as they are to neoliberalism and the analysis concludes by highlighting the need to develop a better understanding of finance, the ethics of its use and tactical compromises in scaling it as an alternative to public and private markets.

Student Satisfaction Negates Pedagogic Rights, Theirs and Ours!

This article outlines how the potential for students to be co-participants, via a critical education, risks being further co-opted through the marketization of higher education by constructing students as consumers with power over academics to make judgments on pedagogic quality through student satisfaction ratings. We start by outlining the relevant components of marketization processes, and their associated practices of financialization and managerialism that have developed in response to the “legitimation crisis” in HE and argue that these have profoundly altered the university landscape with a significant impact on our working practices. Student engagement is increasingly being appropriated as a quantifiable measurement of “student satisfaction”, which then profoundly alters the teaching and learning experience with different understandings of what acquiring knowledge requires and what it feels like. We draw on our experience of working in the post 1992 sector to describe how we are increasingly working under conditions of “reified exchange” and how this affects our relationships with students, other academics and management, eroding our pedagogic rights and theirs in the process. Specifically, we conclude that marketization is likely to further reduce the institutional space and opportunities for both lecturers and students to exercise their “pedagogic rights” to personal enhancement, social inclusion and civic participation through education.

The household revolution: childcare, housework, and female labor force participation

Over the twentieth century, the allocation of womens' time changed dramatically. This paper explores the implications for the allocation of married womens' time stemming from: (1) the household revolution associated with the introduction of a variety of labor-saving devices in the home; (2) the remarkable increase in the relative wage of women; and (3) changes in childcare requirements associated with changes in fertility patterns. To do so, we construct a life-cycle model with home production and childcare constraints. The parameters of the childcare production function are estimated using micro evidence from U.S. time use data. We find that the increase in the relative wage of women is the most important explanation of the increase in married womens' market work time over the twentieth century. Changes in fertility had large effects up to 1980, but little effect thereafter. The declining price of durables has an appreciable effect only since 1980, an effect that is consistent with a broader interpretation of durable goods reflecting the marketization of home production.

`Zealotry or nostalgic regret`? women leaders in technical and further education in Australia : agents of change, entrepreneurial educators or corporate citizens?

Education has been restructured in many Western post-industrial nation states during the 1990s. The Australian Technical and Further Education sector (TAFE) has been particularly susceptible to discourses of responsiveness to the market and the new entrepreneuralism. This article explores how women have been repositioned in contradictory and ambiguous ways as the new entrepreneurial middle managers by existing and emergent discourses that circulated in and through TAFE organizations. In turn, it points to how discourses of change management and client responsiveness took on particular readings within specific institutional and professional cultures of the eight Technical and Further Education institutions (TAFEs). At the same time, the restructuring that arose from the corporatization of TAFE, in a highly gendered process, through the twin strategies of marketization and the new managerialism produced new possibilities for individual women educators who moved up into middle management. Yet these individual women were positioned within highly masculinist 'neo-corporate bureaucratic cultures' that co-opted their passion for the capacity of education to make a difference and incorporated these new entrepeneurial work identities.

Universiti Sains Malaysia and the engagement with sustainability and civil society within globalization

According to some commentators, the dynamics and forces of globalization have lead to a radical rethink in respect to the role of the university in contemporary society. This rethink has taken several guises. For some it involves the radical privatization of universities. For others it involves the democratization of  universities. Universities exist therefore in a globalized world that is increasingly interconnected and where space and time are increasingly narrowed and  accelerated. Within these broad phenomenons’s neo-liberal globalization entails the increasing need to produce profit and the expansion of the logic of neo-liberal hegemony in education in the guise of reframing education as a service industry. The contradictions that characterize Malaysia s engagement with globalization at a national level manifest in debates over globalization and Higher Education. The most pertinent issue in regards to this relates to the problem of sustainability. In the context of neo-liberal globalization sustainability contradicts the fundamental essence of consumption. The idea of human beings as first and foremost  consumers of things is a normative ideal at odds with the concept of a  sustainable future. At a very basic philosophical level the concept and normative project of neo-liberal capitalism and globalization is tied to a concept of individual possessiveness and consumption that radically challenges cultures that do not share such possessively individualistic precepts. Marketization in Malaysian universities must be tempered by also connecting universities to civil society in such a way that tempers both extremes of the state and market and allows a more sustainable relationship between the social frameworks within which it operates.

Bringing innovation to centre stage : the rhetoric of commercialisation and cross-sector collaboration

As a key element in Australia's national innovation system, public sector organizations, such as universities and public-funded research agencies, have increasingly become involved in R&D collaborations with firms. Government policy has encouraged this cross-sector collaboration, and in the most recent policy "act" has focused on the commercialisation of research findings (through which R&D outputs are translated into marketable commodities) and has encouraged public sector organizations to become more directly involved in this activity. But while the policy rhetoric has contributed to a discourse of marketization, through which cultural change in the research performing organizations is both promoted and legitimised, there are other voices in the unfolding policy drama which point to the complex and multifaceted nature of commercialisation in national economies. These countervailing voices emphasise the multiple roles that public sector organizations play in national innovation systems, and this introduces organizational role ambiguity into the discourse leading to confusion among the research performing actors. It is concluded that, given the complex and subtle nature of innovation processes, the traditional dichotomy between applied (or commercially-focused) research and "public good" research is no longer tenable nor helpful in the policy debates.

Higher education mediating institutions and habit

The aim of this paper is to focus discussion on some philosophical issues that informs discussion of the stabilising dimension of higher education as a mediating institution. Backgrounded habits provide the deep context for developing moral practice and other regarding sentiment in higher education. Understanding higher educational institutions as mediating institutions, as forms of associational life which inculcate habit and the development of mores is an important corrective to the discourse of marketization and neo-liberal reform which otherwise crowds out consideration of the role higher educational institutions play in cultural stabilization and social cohesion. This argument we intend to make in this paper is that the stabilizing and associational function of higher educational institutions is critically important to developing habits and mores which are the key support for a society that can still retain a sense of concern and regard for others. 

Development in Kyrgyzstan : Failed State or Failed Statebuilding?

This chapter examines the tensions present in approaches to development in Kyrgyzstan. It argues that development in this small post-Soviet republic has been approached primarily as formal statebuilding (Marquette & Beswick 2011), implying a belief that domestic political institutions and processes are the primary cause of fragility and that the adoption of democratic institutions and free market economic policies will result in development. The consequences of this inherently normative endeavour are explored in terms of the local political economy that has developed since independence and especially in the 2000s. Centrally, it is demonstrated how the competing interests and priorities of donors and local elite have undermined development efforts. On the basis of this analysis, it is suggested that rather than being framed as a failing or failed state, Kyrgyzstan is better understood as a case of failed statebuilding that cannot be remedied by the adoption of the current principles for development in fragile states situations, as adopted by the international community. Instead, the focus needs to be on facilitating the rebuilding of state-society relations both locally and internationally with a view to beginning to check the marketization of the state that has occurred.