Senior Research Fellow (Utacas)
1.8.2010-31.7.2011

Office: Pinni B, room 3088
Phone: 03 3551 7026
Email: lea.henriksson@uta.fi

My broad research interests are welfare state change and policy. I am particularly interested in the ways in which social and cultural forces such as globalization, Europeanization and New Public Management create new occupational and educational orders.

The UTACAS project titled “Making and managing occupational boundaries – the Finnish case of social and health care teachers” focuses on the interplay between lifelong learning and welfare service reforms which create claims for the redesign of the workforce, occupational identities and collective agency in educational work. The study seeks to understand the types of categories which are most helpful in understanding ‘occupations’ when global interconnectedness and flows disrupt older patterns of occupational belonging. The study will produce a comprehensive and transnational understanding of current policy frameworks as well as considering their wider implications for the reconfiguration of human service labor force in knowledge societies.

The research project examines the contested boundaries between health care and social services from the perspective of teachers and educators and does so through interviews and analysis of policy documents. The politics of boundaries are studied through the interlinkage of macro, meso and micro levels by applying a history-, gender-, and context-sensitive analysis. The research project contributes to social policy and the sociology of work and occupations and, to some extent, also to the sociology of education.

The research strategy includes empirical investigation of local sites. In the research process, the case of Finland is designed, studied and contrasted together with the cases from Australia, Germany and Great Britain to engage in global ethnography and transborder theorizing. International research co-operation is conducted with the project funded by Australian Research Council, Discovery Project (2009-2011) Making and managing occupational boundaries between education and work led by Professor Terri Seddon, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia.

http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/yti/henkilokunta/henriksson.html