In just a couple of decades, Finland evolved from one of Europe s lowest educated countries to the top performer of the international PISA ranking. Behind this -success story-, there was a conscious strategy to use educational policies for creating a more equal society. Tracing the development of Finnish higher education system after WWII, this book depicts the role of educational expansion in the making of the welfare state. It focuses on the 1970s degree reform and the challenges brought by the 1973 Oil Crisis, resulting in the rise of New Public Management. Though meticulously planned, the...

The volume undertakes a comparative analysis of the various discursive traditions dealing with the connection between modernity and historicity in Southeastern and Northern Europe, reconstructing the ways in which different "temporalities" produced alternative representations of the past and future, of continuity and discontinuity, and identity.

Is there a "Nordic history"? If so, what are its origins, its scope, and its defining features? In this informative volume, scholars from all five Nordic nations tackle a notoriously problematic historical concept. Whether recounting Foucault's departure from Sweden or tracing the rise of movements such as "aristocratic empiricism," each contribution takes a deliberately transnational approach that is grounded in careful research, yielding rich, nuanced perspectives on shifting and contested historical terrain.