Social sciences
Below you will find SWOT analyses of the different fields of social sciences in Finland. The analyses have been compiled by discipline-specific groups of researchers. At the end of each section, you will find links to PDF versions of the material for printing.
Communication | Economics | Education| Law | Political science, public administration | Psychology | Social sciences
Communication: SWOT analysis
Communication : Strengths
- Broad scope of communication sciences
- Good international links even in small fields (in a Finnish context)
- High social significance, in the best interests of Finnish society
- Multidisciplinary and international research teams very common
- Many examples of high-quality research and top researchers
- Quick to respond to societal and cultural research issues
- Previous networking activities good foundation for national cooperation
- Active international mobility and contacts to international organisations
- Good library and information services at universities
- Good equipment base
- Status as a scientific discipline
Communication: Weaknesses
- Staff restructurings (in particular reductions in support staff) at universities take time away from research
- Unclear distribution of research between universities and polytechnics
- Research directions too influenced by how research funding is allocated
- Contemporary (e.g. technology-oriented) research projects and studies too focused on case studies
- Research insufficiently targeted at theory formation
- Need for PhDs in the field not recognised outside the universities
- Currently no permanent forum for national cooperation
- No Centres of Excellence or FiDiPro Professors (Finland Distinguished Professor Programme) in the field
Communication: Opportunities
- Large university units create new kinds of research combinations
- New regional opportunities in collaborations between universities and polytechnics
- New kinds of innovative cooperation models with other disciplines
- Intradisciplinary coordination, in particular in utilisation and development of infrastructure
- Highlighting broad scope in international contexts, applying it to international research projects
- Rapid internationalisation of early-stage researchers, contacts to units at the cutting edge of research
- Open access publishing
- New research directions thanks to a rapidly changing world and the quick response ability of research
- New research questions and opportunities for multidisciplinary projects thanks to increased multiculturalism in Finland
- Identification of new research interfaces
- New contacts outside academia thanks to new formats for dissertations
Communication: Threats
- Value of communication sciences in new, larger but increasingly profiled university units
- Relying on skewed publication and quality indicators
- Ability to respond to the challenges of contemporary phenomena at the theory level
- Finding talented and motivated graduate students
- Requirement of mobility viewed as an intrinsic value; importance of high-quality work environments – whether domestic or foreign – not sufficiently emphasised
- Scarce university resources possible threat to keeping ICT and other such equipment (that quickly becomes outdated) up to date
- Rising service fees for material acquisition and limited availability of material due to a lack of resources in archives services and libraries
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Economics: SWOT analysis
Economics: Strengths
- High-level national researcher training (Finnish Doctoral Programme in Economics, Finnish Doctoral Programme in Business Studies)
- Significant increase in research in the 2000s
- Good employment rate for doctoral graduates
- Short-term international mobility popular option
- Funding for mobility readily available (e.g. the so-called Foundations’ Post Doc Pool)
- Collection of unique material (Finnish tradition of statistics compilation, collaboration between companies and researchers)
- Supply of top individuals and strong research teams (but not in abundance)
Economics: Weaknesses
- Publication activity emphasis on quantity, not enough on quality (skewed incentive system: what you order is what you get)
- Too small research units
- Research too influenced by regional policy
- Insufficient funding for basic research
- Professors seen as administrators and money-seeking machines
- Limited long-term international mobility
- Ineffective support services for international mobility
- Lack of national mobility
- Financial pressures encourage applied research
Economics: Opportunities
- Change in university funding model
- Tenure-track system
- Sabbatical system (incl. senior researchers)
- Forming larger international research teams
- International students
Economics: Threats
- Lack of appeal of academic research careers, problems in recruitment
- University-specific doctoral programmes jeopardise national researcher training
- Viewing international engagement as having intrinsic value
- Uncritical emphasis on multidisciplinarity
- Rising material costs (databases), increasing disparity
- New Government Programme, belt-tightening in the public sector
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Education: SWOT analysis
Education: Strengths
- Advances in the field
- Great need for pedagogical knowledge, not just in the education sector but in society at large
- Broad scope, in great demand for multidisciplinary projects
- Supply of new, talented early-stage researchers
- Finnish school system’s (and, in a wider sense, Finland’s) success, knowledge base and competitiveness built on research-based education
- Education an essential part of Finnish culture
Education: Weaknesses
- Fairly active mobility from the perspective of research activity, but not covered by existing indicators
- A variety of research directions, which causes certain fragmentation
- Scattered and unstructured infrastructures
- Lack of EU and/or international funding for research (not enough funds for coordination and administration, no support system)
- Strengths largely unidentified, overlooked and underutilised, at least at international level
- Crumbling of national inter-university cooperation due to lack of support from indicators, systems or funding policies
Education: Opportunities
- Networking and collaboration
- New paradigms and ‘hot spots’
- Educational and social innovations
- International expertise in education (education export and related research)
- New research designs (e.g. experimental interventions)
- Multidisciplinary research programmes with extensive links to education
- Readiness for cross-disciplinary research, both comparative and cross-cultural
Education: Threats
- Indicators and funding opportunities benefit the natural sciences; distinctive and field-specific character of education to be acknowledged and safeguarded
- Lack of funding sources, cut-backs in funding from the Academy of Finland
- Supplementary funding and full cost model for universities
- Position of human sciences amid intensifying competition and in national research policy (e.g. declining number of network-based graduate schools)
- Challenges of building and funding research careers at different career stages
- Temporary employment
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Law: SWOT analysis
Law: Strengths
- Strong theoretical foundation and international competitiveness
- Opportunities for interaction in society: legal scholars’ influence on societal debate and legislation
- Good and varied employment opportunities for doctoral graduates
- Good experiences of national-level cooperation, in particular in doctoral training
Law: Weaknesses
- Strong national orientation, difficulties in international cooperation (seems unnatural)
- Problematic position scientifically and in terms of funding
- Assessing the quality of research and classifying publications according to criteria that are unsuitable because of the special characteristics of the discipline
- Lack of research team tradition, individualism, territorial awareness
- Limited availability of supplementary funding
- Lack of work distribution nationally between units
- Applying research-based education on general degree requirements
Law: Opportunities
- Flexibility: opportunities for units to make rapid changes, profile themselves and be successful; distribution of work between units may raise level of research
- Multidisciplinarity and high international standards of theoretical research; ample market opportunities
- Increase in demand for research because of increasing legalisation
- International appeal of doctoral training
- Increasing mobility: ‘roaming professorships’ and teacher exchange
Law: Threats
- Becoming an auxiliary science and/or descending into a technical expert service
- Research capacity at risk of excessively descending into societal engagement
- Waning innovation: Too much left to individual actors?
- Overall cut-backs in research funding
- Failed research indicators: leads to fragmentation and over-specialisation
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Political science, public administration: SWOT analysis
Political science, public administration:
Strengths
- Research at a good international level
- Extensive international publishing by researchers, also in other languages than Finnish, Swedish and English; good international contacts
- Good success in competition for research funding
- Popular field, great number of students applying for Bachelor’s programmes
- Good employment situation for graduates
Political science, public administration:
Weaknesses
- Small discipline
- Poor infrastructure at universities
- Student-to-staff ratio too high
- Lack of foreign researchers
- Limited inter-university cooperation
- Scarce international funding opportunities for research
- Constantly having to apply for funding too time-consuming
- Uncertain status of postdoctoral researchers
- Researchers’ inability to highlight their expertise
Political science, public administration:
Opportunities
- Increasing societal need for research into politics and administration
- International mobility and networks
- Intensifying European cooperation
- Success in competition for funding
- Generational change
- Research fragmentation and interdisciplinarity as drivers for new perspectives
Political science, public administration:
Threats
- Loss of theoretical coherence due to fragmentation and interdisciplinarity
- Cut-backs in core funding to universities
- Short-range science policy
- Over-bureaucratisation of universities and research organisations
- Top-down controlling of research
- Policy-makers’ inability to understand the significance of the social sciences, which weakens the status of the discipline
- Researchers detaching themselves from Finnish societal debate
- Relative drop in international exposure of research as the number of researchers remains steady in Finland but increases elsewhere
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Psychology: SWOT analysis
Psychology: Strengths
- High-level research
- International research
- Quantitative productivity
- Multidisciplinarity important in research projects (e.g. cognitive neuroscience, school and learning research, collaboration with medicine)
- A number of successful projects where solid basic research has generated significant applied research and applications
- National and international networks
Psychology: Weaknesses
- Psychology as a scientific discipline: blurred position due to structural changes in university and research institute system
- Lack/Discontinuation of Centres of Excellence, lack of Academy Professors and FiDiPro Professors (Finland Distinguished Professor Programme)
- Significance of psychology lost in multidisciplinary projects (e.g. in current practice, impossible to catalogue multidisciplinary publications as psychology publications)
- People selected for their scientific qualifications not provided with enough opportunity to do research (lack of support staff, difficulties in equipment and method management, increasing bureaucracy)
- Professorial job descriptions increasingly unclear
- Not enough international staff in Finland, partly due to a lack of flexible funding opportunities
- International research visits (e.g. at the postdoctoral stage) undervalued
Psychology: Opportunities
- Creative combining of strengths and know-how both within the field and across disciplinary boundaries
- Collaborating, networking and finding partners in such a small country
- Finnish psychological science held in high regard
- New funding opportunities in Europe, provided they more strongly integrate themes of human wellbeing
- Introducing psychological knowledge in other disciplines and in new kinds of applied contexts
- Expansion to nearby disciplines
Psychology: Threats
- Losing the benefits gained from the university network of psychology (Psykonet) in basic education, researcher training and cooperation
- Increasing competition and decreasing collaboration between universities: weakens disciplines (such as psychology) that benefit from national cooperation
- The identification of psychology as a scientific discipline at risk
- Fewer researchers employed in costlier and therefore fewer projects funded by the Academy of Finland
- Fading publication activity in discontinued Centres of Excellence
- Lack of new Centres of Excellence and Academy Professors
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Social sciences: SWOT analysis
Social sciences: Strengths
- Good national and international level
- Popularity, strong position
- Recognised societal need for doctoral graduates
- National graduate schools performing well
- Profiling of researchers/research teams/universities helps in recruiting talented scholars
- Strong national operating environment favourable to research
- Powerful tradition of qualitative research
- Research data collected by reliable organisations (e.g. Statistics Finland, National Institute for Health and Welfare, Social Insurance Institution of Finland)
- Abundance of complete, reliable statistics and registers
- Good international networks between both individual researchers and research teams
Social sciences: Weaknesses
- Very few Finnish Centres of Excellence in social sciences; limited researcher mobility nationally and internationally
- Health sciences perspectives (for instance) stronger, as research designs focused on social aspects retreat
- Small research units fail to reach critical mass
- Limited theoretical debate and organisational research
- Difficulties in putting complete materials and registers into research use due to high costs
- Requirements of international engagement take away from Finnish-language publishing and public debate in the social sciences
- Anglo-American dominance as frame of reference for research
- Limited recruitment of international graduate students, uncertain selection criteria
- Lack of resources for guidance of international students
- Insufficient resources allocated to graduate studies at universities
Social sciences: Opportunities
- Re-thinking of priorities due to university restructurings
- Re-evaluation of distribution of work between universities and state research institutes
- Optimal utilisation of supplementary funding
- Improved research quality and research designs thanks to increased international cooperation
- Higher-quality and more varied studies through multi-methodology and new, quantitative methods of analysis
- Wider research networks through collaboration with researchers from BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China); more versatile social research through collaboration with smaller EU countries
- More critical selection of graduate students, active follow-up of studies; contribute to completing doctoral degree in the planned time
- Supporting international mobility, entering it into plan for graduate studies
- Agreement between Statistics Finland and universities could increase availability of complete data for research use, at a reasonable price
- Increasing opportunities for staff by further developing the sabbatical system
Social sciences: Threats
- Marginalisation of even strong research fields due to pressures related to university profiling
- Too much competition between subjects and between universities
- University Act (2010) raised concerns at universities about diminishing financial resources
- Universities increasingly dependent on external funding
- Research diverging from national-level societal debate
- EU research funding policies dictate how research should be targeted
- Concerns about how the funding cuts to British social science research will affect Finland
- Difficulties in attracting talented students to Finland
- International competition a threat to science and science progress
- Limited time available for research at universities
- Decrease in number of funded graduate school positions threat to science and new scientists
- Lack of research support staff at universities
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