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Purpose – This study looks at the explanations given in Finnish media for the two school shootings that took place in the country in 2007 and 2008. It also investigates how Finnish journalists reflected on the explanations and the problems they posed to journalists’ professional values.

Design/methodology/approach – The study gives an overview of the most common explanations for the two incidents in the media through a textual analysis. A qualitative reading of interviews with journalists after the two school shootings sheds more light on journalists’ reflections on the explanations given. The findings are considered against the concept of professional values of journalism in Finland.

Findings – The media coverage of explanations varied markedly between the two school shootings. After the first rampage, explanations centered on the shooter and portrayed the incident as an “isolated case,” whereas after the second rampage journalists focused on societal problems and authorities’ wrongdoings in their explanations. The change can be attributed to the different nature of the two incidents, plus journalists’ increased need to pay attention to audience feedback in the rapidly changing media landscape. The altered ways of reporting also indicated a partial rethink of the professional values among journalists. With the school shootings, Finnish journalists’ traditionally strong support for deontological ethics as the cornerstone of disaster reporting declined slightly, with teleological ethics gaining prominence.

Originality – The study provides new insights into recent changes and developments of disaster reporting and journalists’ professional values in Finland.

This paper aims to discuss a model for diffusion of innovation among the professionals of primary health-care centers in Finland. The authors answer partially to one of the important questions of the policymakers titled “How primary health-care centers can move toward systems that continuously improve their innovation?”.

A systematic-qualitative framework based on an action research is presented to assess dynamics of diffusion of innovation in the primary health-care centers in Finland.

The authors conceptualize the innovation systems of primary health-care systems by three different diagrams: subsystem diagram, policy structure diagram and causal loop diagram. The investigation reviews innovation process of Finnish professionals (staffs, nurses and doctors) in the frame of a systematic-qualitative analysis. The relationships and consequences of decisions and policies are discussed with a new way of thinking in the health-care sector studies.

The implemented systematic-qualitative research in this article is an innovative approach in the innovation studies of the health-care systems.

The construction industry has struggled with efficiency issues for decades. Organizational culture is identified as one of the biggest hindrances for the enhancement of efficiency in a highly labor-intensive sector such as construction. Based on recent academic studies, Finnish construction industry professionals would embrace clan and adhocracy culture features to achieve a better level of construction efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the promoters and the barriers for making the desired culture change happen in the case company.

The paper presents a semi-structured theme interview case study, including 12 in-depth interviews. The interviews were recorded, and later, transcribed into text, which forms the empirical data of this paper.

The Finnish construction industry must adopt a holistic approach to enhance its prevailing level of efficiency through the culture change. Basic learning and knowledge management processes seem to be missing from the industry and organizational levels. Better knowledge management in the case company would be the first step to start fixing this problem.

Because of the nature of a case study, the research results can be generalized only with caution in the Finnish construction industry. Generalizing the findings in another country would require further studies in a different cultural environment, e.g. in another European country.

The paper includes implications for the development of the organizational culture on the Finnish construction industry level and on an organizational level.

The found influencers are discussed through Engeström’s activity model for the first time in the construction culture context.

Traditionally, the debate on communication value and the contribution of communication professionals to organisational decision-making has been linked to diverging roles (managers, technicians). This chapter introduces an alternative view, based on an exploratory, qualitative study of communication professionals in Finland. It focuses on the diverse ways in which these professionals contribute to organisational decision-making. The results show a rich, constantly developing picture of communication practices, which challenges the traditional dichotomy of manager and technician roles.

This paper illuminates the distinction between individual and organizational actors in business-to-business markets as well as the coexistence of formal and informal mechanisms of coordination in multinational corporations. The main questions addressed include the following. (1) What factors influence the occurrence of personal contacts of foreign subsidiary managers in industrial multinational corporations? (2) How such personal contacts enable coordination in industrial markets and within multinational firms? The theoretical context of the paper is based on: (1) the interaction approach to industrial markets, (2) the network approach to industrial markets, and (3) the process approach to multinational management. The unit of analysis is the foreign subsidiary manager as the focal actor of a contact network. The paper is empirically focused on Portuguese sales subsidiaries of Finnish multinational corporations, which are managed by either a parent country national (Finnish), a host country national (Portuguese) or a third country national. The paper suggests eight scenarios of individual dependence and uncertainty, which are determined by individual, organizational, and/or market factors. Such scenarios are, in turn, thought to require personal contacts with specific functions. The paper suggests eight interpersonal roles of foreign subsidiary managers, by which the functions of their personal contacts enable inter-firm coordination in industrial markets. In addition, the paper suggests eight propositions on how the functions of their personal contacts enable centralization, formalization, socialization and horizontal communication in multinational corporations.

The purpose of this study is to use a steady-state model structure to investigate earnings management (EM) theoretically in the context of different expense theories. Empirically, the objective is to apply the theoretical model to investigate the implicit choice of expense theories for reporting expenses. The study aims to present a new approach to analyze EM.

The study makes use of ten-year time-series data originally from 1,015 Finnish public and private firms to estimate the parameters of the steady-state model, and to investigate which expense theories the firms implicitly follow in financial reporting. The parameters are estimated using the restricted least squares regression method. The final sample included data from 631 firms fulfilling restrictions for the consistency of estimates.

The paper provides empirical insights about expense theories that Finnish firms implicitly follow in financial reporting. Evidence shows that the reporting of expenses mainly follows the units-of-revenue and the rate-of-return theories. Only a small number of firms follow the interest expense theory.

The study is based on a steady-state approach, and therefore, the research results may lack generalizability as only 62% of the original sample firms obtained consistent estimates. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to use more general models for further theoretical and empirical work.

The paper includes implications for a new approach to EM. It also gives implications how to analyze different expense theories in the context of EM both theoretically and empirically.

This paper develops a new approach to investigate EM.

This purpose of this study is to understand how the spread of audit culture and the related public sector reforms have affected Finnish universities’ organization principles, performance measurement (PM) criteria and ultimately their reason for being.

Applying extensive qualitative data by combining interview data with document materials, this study takes a longitudinal perspective toward the changing Finnish higher education field.

The analysis suggests the reforms have altered universities’ administrative structures, planning and control systems, coordination mechanisms and the role of staff units, as well as the allocation of power and thus challenged their reason for being. Power has become concentrated into the hands of formal managers, while operational core professionals have been distanced from decision making. Efficiency in terms of financial and performance indicators has become a coordinating principle of university organizations, and PM practices are used to steer the work of professionals. Because of the reforms, universities have moved away from the ideal type of professional bureaucracy and begun resembling the new, emerging ideal type of competitive bureaucracy.

This study builds on rich, real-life, longitudinal empirical material and details a chronological description of the changes in Finland’s university sector. Moreover, it illustrates how the spread of audit culture and the related legislative changes have transformed the ideal type of university organization and challenged universities’ reason for being. These changes entail significant consequences regarding universities as organizations and their role in society.

The purpose of this paper was to uncover the various difficulties that record-keeping professionals face when they maintain and use functional classification (FC) in Finnish public-sector organisations. An additional aim was to find out how they handle those difficulties in the course of their work.

In all, 22 record-keeping professionals, at three Finnish public-sector organisations, were interviewed. The data generated were then analysed with qualitative methods.

The study identified several difficulties that record-keeping professionals encounter in maintaining and using FC in various ways. In the main, however, the difficulties were not perceived as substantial. The participants had several methods of handling the difficulties in carrying out their work. The study also pointed to a clash between maintenance of FC systems and needs in other contexts of their use.

The difficulties faced and the means of handling them were evaluated only from interviews with record-keeping professionals at three Finnish public-sector organisations. Observation of real-world situations or performance of usability tests might have highlighted different difficulties or even revealed unidentified issues.

Concrete improvements could be performed in organisations for better use of FC. The difficulties identified could be addressed also in FC design and in user training. The results of the study are of relevance for future research into FC’s use.

The study highlights difficulties faced in maintaining and using FC systems. Identification of the various perceptions linked to maintenance and concrete use could be of importance in implementation of FC in organisations.

Depressive disorder has been defined by increasingly specific neurophysiological mechanisms and features during the past two decades. At the same time, depression has grown into an epidemic proportion and become a major public health problem. Consequently, the scope of depressive experience and conduct has also widened and the meaning of depression has multiplied and become equivocal. This chapter analyses how this tension is handled in current Western mental health care. The focus of the study is the role of neuroscientific views in mental health reasoning and practice. The empirical case is the mental health discussion in Finland from the late 1980s to the present day. The analysis of the historical change in understandings of depression in Finnish psychiatry and mental health care provides a view of the relevance of neuroscientific models in defining depressive illness and outlining diagnostic and treatment practices. Moreover, the analysis brings forth the relationship of neuroscientific concepts to other ways of defining depression – epidemiology, diagnostic classification, psychodynamic and other psychological theories – within clinical reasoning. A conclusion to be drawn from the analysis of the Finnish case is that neurobiological concepts of depression have only limited influence on the ways in which the disorder is conceived within the practical context of mental health care. It seems that the idea of depression as a multi-factorial disorder remains a good enough conceptual framework for clinical practice. Even the influence of neurosciences on treatment is still somewhat marginal. Within current practices of depression management, it is not the brain that is treated but risks, symptoms, and persons.

This chapter seeks to better understand the skills and competencies that public relations (PR) professionals use in contributing to organisational decision-making processes. The data were collected by interviewing Finnish professionals using thematic semi-structured interviews. Overall, the results highlight a deep understanding of organisation management and decision-making processes. The most important competencies were business understanding and target group oriented thinking. The findings indicate that important skills are related to writing and social media. Regarding personal attributes, interaction and tolerance to criticism were acknowledged as most crucial. The conclusions suggest that if professionals analyse and review their skills, competencies and personal attributes related to decision making, this will support organisational performance and strengthen the added value of PR function. A reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of their own traits helps professionals enact their expected role in organisational problem solving and decision making.