Heli Kaatrakoski, M.A. (Educ)
Email: heli.kaatrakoski@helsinki.fi
Tel.: +358 9 191 44251
Fax: +358 9 191 44579
Postal address:
Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research
P.O. Box 26
FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland
Current Activities
Recently I worked in a research project: Options of privatization and shared responsibility: organization of work and mastery of change in new hybrids of private and public sectors. Now I am a full-time doctoral student.
Short Biography
I am interested in the change in the societal division of labour between the public, private and third sector and how it is connected to the extensive structural change in Finnish welfare society. The change is guided by the neoliberalist New Public Management doctrine, which for example stresses market logic in organisation’s activity. Customer orientation, following market logic, is one of the arguments justifying the movement towards new organisational forms like purchaser-provider split, privatisation, Public-Private-Partnership (PPP), outsourcing, net budgeting etc. Other arguments are for example economy, productivity, efficiency and risk management. They all are very interesting arguments, but there isn’t much evidence that private sector (or third sector) could organise services and production better and more economically than can public sector.
The customer orientation point of view is interesting as when stressing the customer orientation, the employees’ point of view is sometimes forgotten, which means that the balance between customers, employees and productivity is unstable. In other words, productivity and the organisation’s point of view is emphasized and the quality of working life and the employee’s point of view is neglected.
NPM doctrine also stresses productivity, auditing, evaluation and accountability, which can become a problem: how can we for example evaluate the quality of education or other similar “products”. Even in private the sector the “position” or “meaning” of different evaluation tools, quality systems, score cards etc. may have changed from a quality management to a control tool.
My aim is to analyse in this NPM field the discourse of customer orientation, economy and accountability.
I graduated from Lahti Commercial College (Foreign Trade Section) in 1988 and after graduation I worked in several positions in public and private sector. My Master's degree I received in Adult Education from University of Helsinki, Deparment of Education in 2001. My minor subjects were Psychology, Communications, Management and General Education. In 2003 I started working as a Research Coordinator in the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research. My current position is a full-time Project Researcher/Doctoral Student in a project called: Options of privatization and shared responsibility: organization of work and mastery of change in new hybrids of private and public sectors. http://www.edu.helsinki.fi/activity/pages/research/hybridi/
Documents
Web Links
Loppuraportti, Yksityistämisen ja yhteisvastuun ylisektoraaliset vaihtoehdot
Monitoimijaorganisaation kehittäminen
Tampereen kaupungin toimintamalliuudistus käytännössä
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