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This paper applies methodological relationalism, leaning on a pragmatist theory of action of classical Deweyan origin, supplemented among other things with Alva Noë's enactivism, to analyze the development of communication technologies as a part of human cultural evolution. Tool‐use and technologies are understood as skillful human activities that form hubs of organized activity in developed human communities. Appreciating the quite slow pace of evolution, the article adopts, all told, a two million year time frame. Six epochs of cultural evolution are distinguished, linked to the introduction of communication tools and technologies as skillful human activities that serve the members of growing communities in the ecological niche at hand. The first two epochs arose from forms of communication serving local, small‐sized hunter‐gatherer bands; the second couple arose with technologies apt for building nation‐wide communities and culture; and the latest two have been propelled by global communication networks, having an impact on billions of people. Finally, certain peculiarities of the presently unfolding World Wide Web epoch, connected in particular to this era's exceptionally efficient behavior modification, are compared with earlier epochs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article takes an evolutionary “reverse engineering” standpoint on Homo discens, learning man, to track down the (learning) mechanisms that played a pivotal role in the natural selection of human being. The approach is “evolutionary sociological”—as opposed to gene‐centred or psychologising—and utilises notions of co‐evolutionary organism–environment transactions and niche construction. These are compatible with a Deweyan theory of action, which entails that in action one cannot but learn and one can only learn in action. Special attention is paid to apprentice‐like learning‐by‐doing peculiar to human socio‐cultural niches since the Pleistocene, which has permitted each subsequent generation to learn the many habits and skills needed in utilising the affordances of action that constitute their ecological niche. Affordances and actions have changed over the history of human–environment transactions, but the core mechanisms of human learning have not changed much. It is increasingly important to appreciate these mechanisms now in the global age “knowledge society,” which is in a way similar to the Pleistocene era: characterised by uncertainty and life‐determining problem‐situations without any ready‐made solutions, it calls for capacities to adapt to changing circumstances, and thus apprentice‐like learning in action supported by savvy epistemological engineering of learning environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper contrasts two different approaches to the educational challenges of the ubiquitous, rapidly developing information and communication technologies (ICT). The first is the constructivist 'knowledge building' theory spearheaded by Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia and recently further developed by Kai Hakkarainen and Sami Paavola; the second is a pragmatist standpoint drawing in particular from John Dewey's ideas about learning as a natural part of human social actions and transactions. The knowledge builders have set their approach out as a suitable answer to the challenges of the present-day, ICT-characterised 'Knowledge Age'. But here it is argued that a pragmatist approach can be advanced that avoids the over-intellectualisation of education characteristic of knowledge builders and thereby offers a viable alternative for improving present-day educational practices in ways that promote appropriate utilisation of ICT in schools in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In accordance with the education policy which puts human capital at its heart, higher education is expected to produce marketable competent professionals in response to the needs of an expansive knowledge-based economy. In one reading, to support competitive knowledge-based economy, higher education students should graduate as young and fast as possible. The article asks whether it is credible that the young & fast principle as an objective for university education would provide a feasible way of enhancing professional labour force to serve knowledge economies. The analysis of study careers of 17,000 European second cycle university graduates shows that transitions from school to higher education to professional employment vary considerably in the 12 countries. The key finding is that countries with rather slow progression in the initial part of the transition tend to do better in the end, and vice versa. Belgium (Flanders) is the most obvious example of young and fast-graduating students that need a relatively long period after graduation to start their professional careers. In Finland, Austria, and Norway, relatively old and experienced graduates are employed rapidly. The time before professional employment after graduation is short for students who have acquired relevant work experience and acquainted themselves with professional fields. The youngest professionals are found in France where they tend to have access to opportunities for professionally relevant training. However, professional employment cannot be fostered by simply trying to recruit student populations as young as possible, but rather by enriching the labour market relevance of their student careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, two alternative naturalistic standpoints on the relations between language, human consciousness and social life are contrasted. The first, dubbed 'intrinsic naturalism,' is advocated among others by the realist philosopher John Searle; it starts with intrinsic intentionality and consciousness emerging from the brain, explains language as an outgrowth of consciousness and ends with institutional reality being created by language-use. That standpoint leans on what may be described as the standard interpretation of Darwinian evolution. The other type of naturalism, in contrast, making use of the concept of evolutionary niches, suggests that the search for the explanatory mechanisms of language and consciousness should begin with the human community (of social action), because that is the cultural niche for everything distinctively human to evolve, including language and human consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In higher education dual systems, graduates are qualified to apply for jobs in same professional fields along two separated educational routes. The research problem is whether the rival applicants for professional positions are treated equally in the labour market despite their different qualifications. From the graduates point of view, to be equal means to have an opportunity to be employed in accordance with one’s professional skill. Applying European survey data, the article tests to what extent the ‘distribution of work’ between university and non-university graduates seems to be based on educational qualifications or actual competence. Among 4,000 German, Dutch, Finnish, and Swiss graduates primarily in business and administration and engineering, only slight and occasional evidence of ‘status-based recruitment’ was found. All in all, the research suggests that from the view of graduate employment, the European dual HE systems work very much following the principle of ‘different but equal’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition research framework combines two selection mechanisms, one non-discriminatory, based on equality criteria for transition from home to education, the other discriminatory, based on suitability criteria for transition from education to labour market. With the expansive, egalitarian Nordic higher education policy as its starting point, and drawing on Bourdieuan-Collinsian ideas and Finnish census data, the article examines changes in inequality of educational opportunity and labour market returns to university graduates over the course of three decades. Two elite university generations (born in 1946 and 1966) and one mass higher education age group (born in 1976) are compared by gender and family background. Differences in participation in university education, as measured by odds ratios, have narrowed in three generations by a sequence: 19.1-10.8-8.2, being still eightfold in favour of students from academic families. The differences in relative returns to university graduates (academic versus non-academic background) were minimal for those born in 1946 (1.01), whereas for the '1966 generation' they were threefold (3.17) in favour of graduates from academic homes. Our simulations predict high returns for the 1966 generation at the mature career stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are realist philosophers and social scientists who believe in the indispensability of social ontology. However, we argue that certain pragmatist outlines for inquiry open more fruitful roads to empirical research than such ontologizing perspectives. The pragmatist conceptual tools in a Darwinian vein—concepts like action, habit, coping and community—are in a particularly stark contrast with, for instance, the Searlean and Chomskian metaphysics of human being. In particular, we bring Searle’s realist philosophy of society and mind under critical survey in this paper and contrast it with a pragmatist, sociologizing approach. Drawing from Dewey, James, and recent antirepresentationalism, we propose for research work a methodological relationalism of its own kind, altogether detached from the ontologies of society and mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysing foundation charters, this article explores the various purposes universities have been said to serve at different periods of time, how the distinction between universities and other educational establishments has been made, and how the actions of the academic community have been justified. The data consist of 225 charters of foundation from the year 1224 to 1999. Granted by rulers, the charters depict universities as being suited to serve widely differing purposes, such as furthering the material and spiritual prosperity of the nation and the local community, strengthening the right faith and training public servants. Charters granted universities privileges such as the status of studium generale and ius ubique docendi, a universal teaching licence. These privileges created a foundation for all later principles generally applicable to the academic world. The universities originating in academic guilds founded for the protection of scholars have always been answerable to societal demands. A certain degree of loyalty by academic people to those in power has, in turn, secured the universities and the academic community their vital integrity and freedom of opinion, publication and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, relationalist approaches to social sciences are analyzed in terms of a conceptual distinction between "philosophizing sociology" and "sociologizing philosophy." These mark two different attitudes toward philosophical metaphysics and ontological commitments. The authors' own pragmatist methodological relationalism of Deweyan origin is compared with ontologically committed realist approaches, as well as with Bourdieuan methodological relationalism. It is argued that pragmatist philosophy of social sciences is an appropriate tool for assisting social scientists in their methodological work, especially as regards problem-driven case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her book Being Human (2000), Margaret Archer presents intriguing pragmatist emphases on practice, embodiment and non-linguistic knowing-how, as regards to understanding humanity. However, as Archer attempts to conjoin these ideas with the morphogenetic realism she has been working on for the last few decades, she ends up holding on to a subject–object dualism, which makes things complicated. The authors’ alternative pragmatist account defended in the article flows from Deweyan pragmatist and Rortian antirepresentationalist insights. The main issues in the article concern Archer’s complicated tripartite concept of knowledge, which is contrasted with a (Deweyan–Rylean) distinction between linguistic knowledge-that and embodied knowing-how. It is argued that knowledge is a natural, sophisticated tool that human organisms use when coping with their environment; it is always acquired on the strength of embodied knowing-how, from some actor’s point of view, but the term ‘knowledge’ itself should be reserved for the propositional, linguistic knowledge-that. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relevance of ontology, the metaphysical study of being, in social sciences through a comparison of three distinct outlooks: Roy Bhaskar's version of critical realism, a pragmatic realist approach the most renowned representatives of which are Rom Harré and Hilary Putnam, and the authors’ own synthesis of the pragmatist John Dewey's and the neopragmatist Richard Rorty's ideas, here called methodological relationalism. The Bhaskarian critical realism is committed to the heavy ontological furniture of metaphysical transcendentalism, resting on essentialist presumptions of causality and social structures, tacitly creating a dualism between individuals and society. Pragmatic realists, for their part, carry much lighter metaphysical baggage than critical realists and, much in a pragmatist vein, accept the idea that social scientists should study society by studying social life—the interwoven activities of individuals. Nevertheless, pragmatic realists only reluctantly, if at all, renounce the subject–object dualism and its ontological implications. Drawing on the ideas of Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty, the writers outline their own antirepresentationalist, antiessentialist approach to social sciences. The proposed methodological relationalism is a pragmatist approach of Deweyan origin. Based on a Darwinian understanding of human beings as organisms trying to cope with their environment, it emphasises the insight that one can neither step outside one's own action, nor withdraw from the actor's point of view, just as one cannot cognitively step outside language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the debate on constructivist learning theory. We contrast the constructivist notion of activity that identifies 'active' with 'conscious' and 'intentional' with John Dewey's habitual conception of action, knowing and learning by doing. As regards language and truth, we defend an anti-representationalist conception that sees words as tools of communication and coordination rather than representations reflecting reality. To compare our Deweyan pragmatist conception of learning with contemporary viewpoints associated with constructivism, we examine and criticise the notions of 'knowledge building' and 'metacognition'. Finally, we consider what Deweyan ideas about learning and growth might mean for education in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the European Union's campaign to create a common European Higher Education Area against a set of comparative results on the state of university education within the region in the early part of the 21st century. Similarities and differences between the countries in the relationships between education and the world of work, degree, structures, quality of education and student mobility.

Examines the emerging field of biotechnology within the context of national innovation system of Finland. Information on the Finnish biotechnology center, BioCity in Turku; Development of technologies and differentiation of customer-specific markets; Categories of the activities of the Finnish biotechnology centers.

This article starts out from the postmodern critique on higher education, which presents a challenge to discard the contemplative conception of knowledge and promotes a pragmatic conception of inquiry, knowing how and higher learning. Experimental everyday inquiry and scientific research do not differ from each other in this respect: both entail learning by doing as the experience accumulating through action shapes both the actor's habits and the knowing how on which they are based. Under the conditions in which the special nature of traditional scientific knowledge is questioned, students should be acquainted with unprejudiced action that experiments with and questions everything we are used to, and yet is based on consideration even in doubtful situations. The article offers a starting point for embedding learning that is achieved by inquiring, experimenting and doing in the higher education curriculum. Although questioning conventional production of contemplative knowledge, the article calls for a strong academic community which allows researchers themselves to decide in their scientific discussions what is science and what is not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the authors' response to the comments on the article "Expanding Education and Improving Odds?" The article focused on the differences in participation in higher education in Finland in the 1980s and 1990s. The comments were made on two bases. The divergent conclusions of empirical analyses depend on the choice of statistical measure for the comparison of class-by-education tables. The discussion concerns how to explain the contents of a class-by-education table.

This article analyses the mechanisms of a state-organized educational system as it functions between households and the labour market, regulating the passage of age cohorts from the home via school to the labour market. One question is what outcomes the educational system actually produces and what mechanisms are at work in the distribution of educational advantage. In terms of disadvantage, the paper assesses solutions for overcoming the skill gap and entrapment problems of post-industrial society by means of education. In addition to describing how the educational system worked in the conditions of a mature Nordic welfare state and an industrial society based on paid work, feasible ways of reorganizing education in the changing work conditions of an increasingly crisis-ridden post-industrial society are also sought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses mainly on the key results of research on the differences in participation in higher education in Finland in the 1980s and 1990s. The recent discussion surrounding the methods of measuring participation in higher education is also considered. The results show that, in 1980, the odds for children of the well educated participating in higher education was 13 times greater than that of children of fathers with only a basic level of education. Since then, the trend has decreased slowly from 12 in 1985 to 10 in 1995. Despite the various egalitarian policy measures applied by the State, the difference in participation, indicated by the odds ratio 10, is still enormous, and the actual situation for youth with poor family backgrounds has not changed during the past decades. The persistent inequality of educational opportunity in relative terms revealed by the odds ratio, which the authors argue to be the appropriate measure for changes over time, is analysed further by exploring regional differences and the differences between various fields of study. It is shown that the real competition for higher education is among the well off. This is illustrated by a metaphor from bicycle racing: even if the tail-end cyclists reach the main pack, the front-runners widen their gap between the main pack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the spread of sports culture, both from a historical and comparative point of view, using British ice hockey as a case study example. Development of British ice hockey in Europe; Influences of the North America in the European ice hockey; Role of Great Britain in the North American and European ice hockey culture.

Offers a look at the higher education and graduate employment in Finland. Details on the employment of graduates in Finland; Details on the unemployment rate of graduates; Relationship between higher education and work.

Examines the student financial aid program in Finland. Benefits the program give to students; Details on the expenditures of students; Direct and indirect financial support for students; Importance of parental support and contributions of students.

Both the rhetoric of human capital and the information society are based on the idea of continuous progress. The politics of European governments rest on a simplified presumption that to produce more and higher educational credentials is the same as to produce more human capital. The information society rhetoric is saying that the expanding human capital serves both societies, firms and individuals as a direct route to economic growth, since people are living and working in the conditions of more knowledge-intensive production in the so-called information society. In this article we will concentrate on analysing the gap between the reborn human capital ideology, represented in current labour market rhetoric, and the everyday realities of human risk capital faced by graduates. We discuss the changing labour markets, presenting an extended model describing the various social mechanisms which affect graduate employment. Information society implies also the ’information State‘, since especially in the Nordic countries, the State still has a firm grip on higher education and the labour market, in spite of the popular market rhetoric. We also ask to what extent, instead of traditional organizational careers and permanent jobs, the future of higher education graduates can be described in terms of boundaryless careers or entrepreneurial work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the attitudes of employers, employees, and the authorities towards various pathways of acquiring vocational competencies in Finland. Institutionalization of schooling; Assessment of the forms and content of vocational training; Interrelations between education and work.

The article delineates a line of development in which special education and the increasing need for it are connected with the gradual institutionalisation of the modern school model in the school system. In a model of this type the teacher must use the limited time available efficiently to attain the set objective; which means that any interruptions or disturbances jeopardize the possibility of achieving important goals with the time-limit, and diversity among students becomes a problem. In other words, the more modem the school, the stricter the criteria for normality, the finer the evaluation system, the finer the screening used and, as a result, the greater the amount of deviance which must be handled by special measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our article, we first interrogate the prevailing monolithic concept of the State, and introduce the concept of 'governmentality' originated by Michel Foucault. We then explore how governmentality has historically been linked with education, and specifically with the evolution of "civilizing the rabble" inculcating deference, and more recently with the development of the Scandinavian 'Caring State'. Finally, we explore the changing tasks of education in a society increasingly characterized by risks and uncertainty, and explore the nature of the social contracts which could correspond to the new conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the historical development of teachers training in Finland against the context of the professionalization tendencies of modern society . The expansion of education is a worldwide historical phenomenon which has taken place in all industrialized countries in an accelerating speed especially since the second world war. It seems that this basic phenomenon including the strong faith on education is going on mostly regardless of political or economic systems of societies. As the result more and more occupational groups have become educated occupational groups qualified by many years of professional graduate training. Gradually school evolved into the basic national school attended by virtually the entire population, the requirements for teachers' recruitment, qualifications and training came to be applied more and more strictly. Finland was the last of the Scandinavian countries to introduce compulsory education, in 1922. Compared with many other countries, Finland accords its primary school teachers relatively high status.

Focuses on higher education in Finland. Problems raised by Finland's educational system; Equality and selection; Significance of socioeconomic background; Gender differentiation in educational pathways; Confidence in education.

Focuses on the demand for graduates in Europe. Employment opportunities; Levels of European higher education; Public and private demand; Distribution of the adult population by educational level; Self-employment as an option for graduates; Research implications.

Considers some of the changes in higher education (HE), focusing on Finnish higher education policy initiatives as of June 1990. Expansion of HE since the 1960s; Evaluation trends in universities; Features of the HE system in Finland.