Asking the critical questions: An evaluation of social work students' experiences in an international placement

Preparing social work students for the demands of changing social environments and to promote student mobility and interest in overseas employment opportunities have resulted in an increasing demand for international social work placements. The literature describes numerous examples of social work programmes that offer a wide variety of international placements. However, research about the actual benefit of undertaking an overseas placement is scant with limited empirical evidence on the profile of students participating, their experience of the tasks offered, the supervisory practice and the outcomes for students' professional learning and career. This study contributes to the existing body of literature by exploring the relevance of international field placements for students and is unique in that it draws its sample from students who have graduated so provides a distinctive perspective in which to compare their international placement with their other placement/s as well as evaluating what were the benefits and drawbacks for them in terms of their careers, employment opportunities and current professional practice.

Medicalising Prohibition : Harm reduction in Finnish and International Drug Policy

The increase in drug use and related harms in the late 1990s in Finland has come to be referred to as the second drug wave. In addition to using criminal justice as a basis of drug policy, new kinds of drug regulation were introduced. Some of the new regulation strategies were referred to as "harm reduction". The most widely known practices of harm reduction include needle and syringe exchange programmes for intravenous drug users and medicinal substitution and maintenance treatment programmes for opiate users. The purpose of the study is to examine the change of drug policy in Finland and particularly the political struggle surrounding harm reduction in the context of this change. The aim is, first, to analyse the content of harm reduction policy and the dynamics of its emergence and, second, to assess to what extent harm reduction undermines or threatens traditional drug policy. The concept of harm reduction is typically associated with a drug policy strategy that employs the public health approach and where the principal focus of regulation is on drug-related health harms and risks. On the other hand, harm reduction policy has also been given other interpretations, relating, in particular, to human rights and social equality. In Finland, harm reduction can also be seen to have its roots in criminal policy. The general conclusion of the study is that rather than posing a threat to a prohibitionist drug policy, harm reduction has come to form part of it. The implementation of harm reduction by setting up health counselling centres for drug users with the main focus on needle exchange and by extending substitution treatment has implied the creation of specialised services based on medical expertise and an increasing involvement of the medical profession in addressing drug problems. At the same time the criminal justice control of drug use has been intensified. Accordingly, harm reduction has not entailed a shift to a more liberal drug policy nor has it undermined the traditional policy with its emphasis on total drug prohibition. Instead, harm reduction in combination with a prohibitionist penal policy constitutes a new dual-track drug policy paradigm. The study draws on the constructionist tradition of research on social problems and movements, where the analysis centres on claims made about social problems, claim-makers, ways of making claims and related social mobilisation. The research material mainly consists of administrative documents and interviews with key stakeholders. The doctoral study consists of five original articles and a summary article. The first article gives an overview of the strained process of change of drug policy and policy trends around the turn of the millennium. The second article focuses on the concept of harm reduction and the international organisations and groupings involved in defining it. The third article describes the process that in 1996 97 led to the creation of the first Finnish national drug policy strategy by reconciling mutually contradictory views of addressing the drug problem, at the same as the way was paved for harm reduction measures. The fourth article seeks to explain the relatively rapid diffusion of needle exchange programmes after 1996. The fifth article assesses substitution treatment as a harm reduction measure from the viewpoint of the associations of opioid users and their family members.

The International Large Detector: Letter of Intent

The International Large Detector (ILD) is a concept for a detector at the International Linear Collider, ILC. The ILC will collide electrons and positrons at energies of initially 500 GeV, upgradeable to 1 TeV. The ILC has an ambitious physics program, which will extend and complement that of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A hallmark of physics at the ILC is precision. The clean initial state and the comparatively benign environment of a lepton collider are ideally suited to high precision measurements. To take full advantage of the physics potential of ILC places great demands on the detector performance. The design of ILD is driven by these requirements. Excellent calorimetry and tracking are combined to obtain the best possible overall event reconstruction, including the capability to reconstruct individual particles within jets for particle ow calorimetry. This requires excellent spatial resolution for all detector systems. A highly granular calorimeter system is combined with a central tracker which stresses redundancy and efficiency. In addition, efficient reconstruction of secondary vertices and excellent momentum resolution for charged particles are essential for an ILC detector. The interaction region of the ILC is designed to host two detectors, which can be moved into the beam position with a push-pull scheme. The mechanical design of ILD and the overall integration of subdetectors takes these operational conditions into account.

Ihmissalakuljetus ja ihmiskauppa Helsingin Sanomissa ja Dagens Nyheterissä

Human smuggling and trafficking in human beings are phenomena that are often represented as global and growing problems. Human smuggling means that a person is taken to a country illegally which means that smuggling does not exist without states. Trafficking in human beings by contrast means the exploitation of persons which makes it a human rights violation. The news coverage about both phenomena, especially about human trafficking, has grown rapidly during the last decade. However, there has not been research on the news coverage about phenomena in Finland and the news coverage on trafficking in human beings is little researched even in European countries. In this thesis I am comparing critically the newspaper content on the phenomena in Finland and in Sweden from the viewpoint of political and moral geography. Besides the contexts of the news, I paid attention to how identities in different scales, including the scale of the body, were represented in the news and how the boundaries between different identities were drawn in the news. As a methodology I used content analysis to classify the context of the news and discourse analysis to analyze how the different scales and boundaries between them were represented. The results address that in Finland especially the human smuggling is considered as a border issue and Finland´s location between East and West is emphasized, which points out that Finland´s location is a crucial part of the Finnish identity. In addition the linkages between human trafficking and prostitution are often debated in the news from different aspects. In Sweden meanwhile its´ political activeness in the fight against trafficking in human beings and international crime especially in the EU level are emphasized. Trafficking in human beings likewise prostitution according to Swedish law is seen as violence against women and the news are strongly against buying of sex as well. The states themselves, the state authorities and the EU are represented as active actors in both countries whereas international crime is represented as a threat and regions outside EU as chaotic. Additionally, illegal immigrants and the victims of trafficking are stigmatised. According to the results, the news coverage of both phenomena are used in constructing a more integrated national and European identity.

Effective Rural and Urban Innovation Policies International Conference in Seinäjoki 5.–6.2.2009

The present collection of articles is based on international conference that was held in Seinäjoki, Finland in February 2009. The topic of the conference was Effective Rural and Urban Policies and it was organised in co-operation between University Consortium of Seinäjoki, Seinäjoki Technology Centre and City of Seinäjoki. The presented papers approached the drivers of regional development from several aspects and in different kind of regional contexts across various countries. As a whole the different contributions formed a comprehensive story of those factors that are shaping the development of both rural and urban regions in global economy. The role of local innovation environment and dynamic of social processes that are ‘oiling’ the interaction between individuals within networks inspired several scholars. Also development of physical infrastructure as well as the recent development of economical models that can predict the regional impacts of large scale investments was discussed in many presentations. Clear focus with cultural and disciplinary diversity formed a fruitful basis for the conference and it was easy to learn something new. On the behalf of all organisers I would like to thank all participants of the conference and especially our foreign colleges who had travelled from distances to spend some winter days in Seinäjoki. As we all know this kind of publication does not appear automatically. All authors have done great job by finding time for writing from their busy schedules. Terttu Poranen and Jaana Huhtala have taken care of the technical editing of this publication. Sari Soini was the main organiser of conference and she has also as a editor kept the required pressure to finalize this book. In addition to University of Helsinki, conference was financially supported by the University of Vaasa, City of Seinäjoki, Lähivakuutus and Regional Centre Programme. These contributions are highly appreciated.

ISO 13567 - The Proposed International Standard for Structuring Layers in Computer Aided Building Design

Layering is a widely used method for structuring data in CAD-models. During the last few years national standardisation organisations, professional associations, user groups for particular CAD-systems, individual companies etc. have issued numerous standards and guidelines for the naming and structuring of layers in building design. In order to increase the integration of CAD data in the industry as a whole ISO recently decided to define an international standard for layer usage. The resulting standard proposal, ISO 13567, is a rather complex framework standard which strives to be more of a union than the least common denominator of the capabilities of existing guidelines. A number of principles have been followed in the design of the proposal. The first one is the separation of the conceptual organisation of information (semantics) from the way this information is coded (syntax). The second one is orthogonality - the fact that many ways of classifying information are independent of each other and can be applied in combinations. The third overriding principle is the reuse of existing national or international standards whenever appropriate. The fourth principle allows users to apply well-defined subsets of the overall superset of possible layernames. This article describes the semantic organisation of the standard proposal as well as its default syntax. Important information categories deal with the party responsible for the information, the type of building element shown, whether a layer contains the direct graphical description of a building part or additional information needed in an output drawing etc. Non-mandatory information categories facilitate the structuring of information in rebuilding projects, use of layers for spatial grouping in large multi-storey projects, and storing multiple representations intended for different drawing scales in the same model. Pilot testing of ISO 13567 is currently being carried out in a number of countries which have been involved in the definition of the standard. In the article two implementations, which have been carried out independently in Sweden and Finland, are described. The article concludes with a discussion of the benefits and possible drawbacks of the standard. Incremental development within the industry, (where ”best practice” can become ”common practice” via a standard such as ISO 13567), is contrasted with the more idealistic scenario of building product models. The relationship between CAD-layering, document management product modelling and building element classification is also discussed.

The international match: Metaphors as vehicles of social identity building in cross-border mergers

This article focuses on cultural identity-building in the cross-border merger context. To provide an alternative to the dominant essentialist analyses of cultures and cultural differences, cultural identitybuilding is conceptualized as a metaphoric process. The focus is on two processes inherent in the cross-border merger context: construction of images of Us and Them and construction of images of a Common Future. Based on an analysis of a special metaphor exercise carried out in a recent Finnish–Swedish merger, the article illustrates how the metaphoric perspective reveals specific cognitive, emotional and political aspects of cultural identity-building that easily remain ‘hidden’ in the case of more traditional approaches.

Becoming an international man: Top manager masculinities in the making of a multinational corporation

Purpose We address gender and management in contemporary globalization by focusing on the ways in which male top managers in a multinational corporation (MNC) construct their identities in interviews with researchers. Design/methodology/approach Our qualitative analysis is based on interviews with virtually all top managers in the Nordic financial services company Nordea (53 men and two women). Findings We specify how becoming international induces a particular masculine identity for the top managers. In becoming international, however, their national identification persists. The unstability of the MNC as a political constellation leaves room for questioning the transnational identity offered. Originality/value Our findings suggest that in the global world of business, national identity can also be interpreted as something positive and productive, contrary to how it has been previously treated in feminist and men’s studies literature.

Varities of National Metonymy in Media Accounts of International Mergers and Acquisitions

International mergers and acquisitions (M&As) often invoke national identification and national cultural differences. We argue that metonymy is a central linguistic resource through which national cultural identities and differences are reproduced in media accounts of international M&As. In this paper, we focus on two revealing cases: the acquisition of American IBM Personal Computer Division (PCD) by the Chinese company Lenovo and the acquisition of American Anheuser-Busch (A-B) by the Belgian-Brazilian company InBev. First, we identify the forms, functions and frequencies of national metonymy in media accounts of these cases. We present a typology that classifies varieties of national metonymy in international M&As. Second, we demonstrate how these metonyms combine with metaphor to generate evocative imagery, engaging wit, and subversive irony. Our findings show that national metonymy contributes to the construction of emotive frames, stereotypes, ideological differences, and threats. Combinations of national metonymy with metaphor also provide powerful means to construct cultural differences. However, combinations of metonymy with wit and irony enable the play on meanings that overturns and resists national and cultural stereotypes. This is the first study to unpack the deployment of metonymy in accounts of international M&As. In doing so, it also opens up new avenues for research into international management and the analysis of tropes in management and organization.

Essays on the Determinants of International Portfolio Investments

Investors significantly overweight domestic assets in their portfolios. This behavior which is commonly called “home bias” contradicts the prescriptions of portfolio theory. This thesis explores potential reasons for the “home bias” by examining the characteristics of the investing and the target countries and features of the interaction between them. A common theme of the four essays is a focus on the importance of information about foreign markets in explaining the share of these markets in investors’ portfolios. The results indicate that the size of the equity ownership in another country strongly relates to the distance to the financial capital of that country, and to trade in goods with and direct investments (FDI) to that country. The first essay empirically investigates the relationship between trade in real goods and portfolio investments. Overall, the evidence indicates a substantial role for trade in reducing the information cost relating to portfolio investments. The second essay examines the implications of the launch of the European Monetary Union (EMU) on international portfolio investments. The evidence on the allocation of Finnish international portfolio investments is more consistent with an information-based than a diversification motive explanation. The third essay employs new data for a large number of countries and further explores the role of trade on international portfolio investments. The results indicate that trade provides important information especially on firms in countries in which the corporate governance structure and the information environment of firms generate less reliable information. The fourth essay examines the relationship between direct investments (FDI) and portfolio investments. In contrast to the predications of portfolio theory, it provides evidence that FDI is a complement rather than a substitute for portfolio investments.