| Summary: | Abstract. Finland is internationally valorised for its education system, quality of life and
high-tech, innovative, competitiveness. However, a critical focus on institutional dynamics
and trajectories of higher education careers illuminates questions about the reproduction of
global inequities, rather than the societal transformation Finland’s education system was once
noted for. The purpose of this self-ethnography of career trajectories within Finnish higher
education is designed to call attention to institutional social dynamics that have escaped the
attention of scholarly literature and contemporary debates about academic work and practice
within highly situated research groups, departments and institutes. Our analysis illuminates
emergent stratification, in a country and institution previously characterized by the absence
of stratification and the ways in which this reinforces - and is reinforced by – the tension
between transnational academic capitalism, methodological nationalism and the resulting
global division of academic labour that now cuts across societies, manifesting within the one
institution Finland’s general population trusts to explain, engage and ameliorate stratification:
Higher Education.
|
|---|