Professor, Director
Office: Atalpa 217
Email: risto.heiskala@tuni.fi
Tel. +358 40 741 7518
Web, institutional: https://research.tuni.fi/iasr/
Web, personal: http://www.ristoheiskala.fi
Risto Heiskala is Professor and Director of the Institute for Advanced Social Research (IASR) at the University of Tampere. He completed his PhD at the University of Helsinki in 1997 and has since been Academy Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki, Professor of Public and Social Policy at the University of Jyväskylä and Professor of Sociology at the University of Tampere. He is Member of the Board of the University of Tampere and Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. In addition to the IASR, he currently leads the Finnish research team in the project Creating Economic Space for Social Innovation (CrESSI, 2014-18, EU Frame Programme 7/Oxford University), the project European State Nobility and Fatal Problems (ESN, 2017-21; the Academy of Finland, and chairs the Board of the Research Centre for Knowledge, Science, Technology and Innovation Studies (TaSTI).
His research interests include social and cultural theory, historical sociology, institutionalist study of organizations and sociology of knowledge. His publications in English include books Policy Design in the European Union. An Empire of Shopkeepers in the Making? (Palgrave 2018), Social Innovations, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Making Sense of Structural Adjustment Processes in Industrial Sectors, Regions and Societies (Edward Elgar, 2007) and Society as Semiosis. Neostructuralist Theory of Culture and Society (Peter Lang 2003) as well as articles in journals such as Acta Sociologica, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, European Journal of Cultural Studies, International Review of Sociology, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, Journal of Political Power, Semiotica and Social Science Information.
Teaching:
- IASR events
- FILT10: Seminar on Theoretical Social Research: Schmitt, Arendt, and The Political