People
Jari Ojala
Jari Ojala is professor of history at the Department of History and Ethnology in University of Jyväskylä. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Scandinavian Journal of History. Ojala's research interests include business history (shipping, forestry, and media industries), industrial evolution, and institutional economics. He is especially interested in the role of information in economic activity over a long time span. The time period of his research is from the early modern period up to our days.
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Web page at the Uni. Jyväskylä
Heli Valtonen
Dr. Valtonen is currently working as a researcher at the Department of History and Ethnology in the University of Jyväskylä. She is involved in research projects Creating corporate social responsibility and Leaders and their business values in Finland and the United States since the late nineteenth century. Her recent work includes for example Does Culture Matter? Entrepreneurial Attitudes in the Autobiographies of Twentieth-Century Business Leaders in Finland and the United States.
Web page at the Uni. Jyväskylä
Turo Uskali
Dr. Uskali is currently working as a senior research scholar at the Department of History and Ethnology at the University of Jyväskylä Finland, and as a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford (SBS). From March 2006 to June 2007 he was a visiting scholar at Innovation Journalism programme /SCIL at Stanford University (U.S.).
His current research focuses on innovation journalism, journalism as organized work and history of innovation journalism in comparative perspective. His objective here is to draw from existing, lively work on evolution of innovation journalism (business, technology, science journalism) in many parts of North America and Europe to identify relevant insights about theinterface of business, economy, technology, science and media.
Web page at the Uni. Jyväskylä
Vilma Luoma-aho
Dr. Vilma Luoma-aho is a researcher at the Innovation Journalism Program at Human Sciences & Technology Advanced Research Institute (H-Star) at Stanford University. She holds a PhD in Organizational Communication and Public Relations and her career has included consultation, academic teaching and research. She has published book-chapters and articles in Finnish, English and Swedish on organizational reputation, stakeholder relations and social capital in journals such as Corporate Reputation Review, The International Journal of Public Sector Management and Tiedotustutkimus. She has a short practitioner background in the public sector, and has been a visiting scholar at Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California and University of Leipzig, Germany. Her current research interests include organizational legitimacy and reputation formation of innovations.
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Stanford
Silicon Valley Innovation Institute
Tiina Hemminki
Tiina Hemminki (MA) is a doctoral student at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä. Her Master’s Thesis concentrated on the properties and credit relationships of peasants in Sweden and Finland 1796—1830. In her dissertation project in Finnish History, she expands the theme to concern all population groups, while the period of time still remains in the early 1800s. She is interested in both tangible and intangible (e.g. networks, trust) assets, as well as relations between them. Comparison is the basis of the study, and both quantitative and qualitative methods are used. Her main primary sources consist of up to 2000 probate records from two parishes in Sweden and Finland.
Anna Hjorth
Anna Hjorth is a doctoral student at the Department of Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä. She holds a Master’s Degree in Art History and in Art Business and has a career background in the auction business. Her ongoing dissertation project concentrates on the role of social capital in business setting. In her study, Hjorth aims to the produce a view on the potential possibilities of the utilising trust and reputation in obtaining consignments during or as a result of a valuation process in the field of fine art auctions. Hjorth’s main research interests include secondary art market, trust, reputation, individual social capital and credibility.
Jukka Jouhki
Dr. Jukka Jouhki is a cultural anthropologist at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, and a visiting scholar at the Institute of Communication Research of Seoul National University. Jouhki's research aims to produce a qualitative and holistic view on contemporary South Korean media culture. The main themes of the research are media politics, ubiquitous network society visions, and the new media use of young urban generation in Korea.
Blog: An Anthropologist Goes Techno
Academia
Sofia Kotilainen
Sofia Kotilainen (PhD, MSSc) is working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä. Her current research focuses on naming practices, trust and reputation. She has studied naming practices in Finnish rural family communities, and the ways of thinking that they reveal: personal names were cultural symbols that formed immaterial capital in local social relations. Her recent publications include e. g. Suvun nimissä (In the Name of the Family - Naming Practices in Central Finland from the beginning of the Eighteenth to the Mid-twentieth Century. Bibliotheca Historica 120. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society 2008), and The Genealogy of Personal Names: towards a more productive method in historical onomastics (Scandinavian Journal of History, 36:1, 44-64). She has also written a monograph and several tens of articles published in journals and newspapers popularising historical and ethnological research.
Web page at the Uni. Jyväskylä
Early Modern Morals
Antti Malinen
Antti Malinen is a postgraduate student at the Department of History and Ethnology in University of Jyväskylä. In his study The Boundaries and Roles of the Public Power: Government of Social Welfare and its Organization, Development, and Management, 1917-1992 he analyses historically shifting foundations of legitimacy and the related changes in administrative forms and practices in Finnish public administration. The sources of his study consist of both organisational and individual archival material, newspaper articles and interviews. Malinen's areas of research interest also include: development of industrial democracy in Finland, study of how interventionist social legislation are being challenged and delegitimised in time.
Juuso Marttila
Juuso Marttila (MA) is a doctoral student at the University of Jyväskylä, Department of History and Ethnology, and his major is Economic History. He has studied the formal and informal institutional development of the University in his previous work. He has been part of the organizational evolution and dynamics research group since 2006 and has published since a study on the recent history of the Department of Information Science at the University of Jyväskylä. Moreover, Marttila has already presented his work in domestic and international conferences. His main research interests lie in the analysis of Nordic industrial evolution and local institutions, especially in ironwork communities.
Pasi Nevalainen
Pasi Nevalainen (MA) is a doctoral student at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä. In ongoing doctoral dissertation he studies how and why the role of the Finnish state is required to change between 1940s and 1990s. Nevalainen examines particularly the postal and telecommunications services, which transferred in 1990 from state agency to public corporation and were incorporated later in 1990s. Main research themes are deregulation and the changing role of state-owned business.
Maare Paloheimo
Maare Paloheimo (Lic. Phil.) is a doctoral student at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä. Her Master Thesis (2004) and Licentiate Thesis (2007) focused on business political involvement in early 19th century Finland. She continues with the same research theme in her ongoing dissertation project. Her aim is to identify and analyze political strategies employed by Finnish businessmen engaged in large-scale entrepreneurial businesses. She is especially interested in the iron industry, forest industry, shipping, and trade.
Web page at the Uni. Jyväskylä
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Esa Ruuskanen
Dr. Esa Ruuskanen received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Jyväskylä in 2006. He works as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Oulu. His research focuses on three areas – the first of which is the history of the utilization and protection of mires in the Nordic countries, Germany, the Netherlands and the British Isles since the late 18th century, the second of which is the rhetoric of the nuclear energy policy in Japan, Finland and Sweden from the Geneva conference to the Post-Fukushima era, and the third of which is cultural understanding and interpretation of extreme weather events in the Nordic countries since the 17th century.
Timo Särkkä
Timo Särkkä, Lic. Phil., holds a post doctoral researcher post in the Academy of Finland research project The rise, fall and re-emergence of business organizations: Retrospective and prospective views on the forest-based industries (2008-2010). In his research Särkkä studies the British paper industry corporate political activity, c. 1800-2000.
In his Ph.D. thesis Hobson's Imperialism: A Study in Late-Victorian Political Thought Särkkä examined J. A. Hobson's (1858-1940) social and economic theory of imperialism. Traditionally scholars have been more interested in the Empire's impact upon the world than on its impact upon Britain. The case was quite opposite for Hobson who widely discussed imperialism's impact upon Britain's democratic institutions, its economy, its politics (in which foreign policy dominated at the expense of social policy) and the influence of imperialism upon the British mindset.
Timo Särkkä has previously been a Junior Research Fellow of the Emil Aaltonen Foundation and has also worked as an Assistant in history at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä. He is also an associate member of the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change (CoE PolCon).
Olli Turunen
Olli Turunen (MA) is a doctoral student at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä. In 2007, his Master's Thesis was selected as the Thesis of the Year in the Faculty of Humanities. He has already presented his work in domestic and international conferences. He is particularly interested in the evolution of institutional thought among the German Historical School and the subsequent impact of this period on New Institutional Economics. His dissertation project From Intangible Capital to Institutional Agencies: Ideas of Human and Social Capital versus Institutional Explanation in German Historical Economics explores the evolution of institutional thought in relation to the concepts of intangible assets among the German historical economists, and engages this discussion to the modern debate on institutions and immaterial capital.
Web page at the Uni. Jyväskylä
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Academia
Merja Uotila
Merja Uotila (MA) is a doctoral student at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä. In her dissertation project she studies rural artisans in the Early-Nineteenth-Century Finland, time period when majority of Finnish artisans, like the majority of the Finnish population, lived and worked in the countryside, and operated within a different institutional structure than urban artisans. The study analyzes who were rural artisans and what were the subsistence strategies.
Web page at the Uni. Jyväskylä
Panu Uotila
Panu Uotila (MA) is a doctoral student and is working as an assistant in Journalism at the University of Jyväskylä, Department of Communication. His dissertation project Online Journalism as a Genre explores new types and the future of Online Journalism as a specific journalistic genre. The study also analyzes what kind of influence the changes in readers' news consumption have on journalistic content in newspapers and on media economics. Before his career at the University Uotila has worked several years as an economic journalist in television, channel MTV3, Kauppalehti Business News.
Web page at the Uni. Jyväskylä
Miina Virmasalo
Miina Virmasalo (MA) is a doctoral student at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä. Her main research interests include structural changes in the energy sector and the energy policy behind the changes. In her ongoing doctoral dissertation she studies energy policy in Germany concentrating on the Bundestag debates concerning the future of nuclear energy in the 1990s. In her research she analyses the contexts of the proposal to abandon nuclear energy and the changes in political thought. Virmasalo is particularly interested in structural and political changes driven by evolution of political thought.
