Pertti Alasuutari, author of numerous canonic textbooks on qualitative research.

Researcher profile:

A highly respected sociologist

Professor Pertti Alasuutari enjoys writing.  He looks for fresh, new approaches to research and textbooks.

Text: Mikko Niemelä
Photo: Jonne Renvall
Translation: Virginia Mattila 

Pertti Alasuutari is a sociologist, cultural studies scholar, paterfamilias and a highly significant figure in the development of both Finnish and international qualitative research.  His career has gone from strength to strength as regards advancement in Finnish academia, as witnessed by some twenty books, and numerous articles in both Finnish and foreign journals.

Yet Professor Alasuutari insists that he did not consciously choose the career of a sociologist.

Professor Alasuutari completed his school education in Rovaniemi, Lapland in 1975 and went to study technology at the University of Oulu.  But not for long.  In 1977 he dropped out and began to dream of becoming a journalist, in the meantime doing supply teaching.

"In summer I studied journalism at summer university in Lapland and began my military service"

His days in the army driving a desk led him to another state agency.  In autumn 1978 the train from the north arrived in Tampere with the 22-year-old on board.  He had gained admission to study sociology.

"For the first year I only studied journalism, and didn't even set foot in the Department of Sociology," grins Professor Alasuutari.

Career development

In 1983 the Westermarck Society awarded a prize for a master's thesis to the youthful Alasuutari.  The thesis was entitled "The Realm of Male Freedom".  The ethnographic approach was to describe the alcohol culture of a group of men patronizing a suburban pub.

"Jorma Siltari and I did this study together and it emerged that going to the pub is freedom, like having a night off from family life."

That master's thesis put his career on an upward trajectory which shows no sign of slowing down.  Immediately after the completion of the master's thesis Alasuutari was awarded a scholarship by the Finnish Foundation for Alcohol Studies, which served to support him for the next two years.  However, he never used up the entire sum as he obtained a post at the University as academic assistant in the Department of Sociology and Social Psychology - a natural corollary for a sociologist aiming at a career in research.  The very next year, 1986, Alasuutari took a leave of absence for a term;  that time was spent as a research student in the USA, at the University of California with his wife Maarit and sons Juuso and Eero.

"It was a useful experience.  It became easier to publish internationally and naturally my language proficiency improved."

From the perspective of an international career that year was indeed significant.  Alasuutari met the internationally renowned alcohol researcher Harry Levine.

"I gave Levine an article I had written."

"He called later and asked where I had learned to write so well."

Levine offered Alasuutari a publishing contract.

Four years later Alasuutari, who completed his doctoral dissertation on alcohol culture at the University of Tampere had in no way sunk into oblivion:  His dissertation Desire and Craving: A Cultural Theory of Alcoholism  was published in 1992 by the State University of New York Press, just as Levine and Alasuutari had planned at the end of the 1980s.

Motivated by a new angle

The regular approach in Alasuutari's studies and what is known as the theoretical methodological background rely on the discourse analytical approach of Michel Foucault.  His work Toinen Tasavalta (= the second republic) of 1996 is one of Alasuutari's most significant works on discourse analysis.  In it he divides Finland into three periods each dominated by a certain discourse, namely the discourses of ‘moral economy', ‘planned economy' and ‘competition economy'.  Alasuutari has also written textbooks on qualitative research.

"In qualitative research, and especially outside Finland, the matters most referred to are my taxonomy of the various stages in qualitative audience research"  Professor Alasuutari explains.

When Pertti Alasuutari left Rovaniemi in Lapland in 1975 he was 19 years old.  Thirty years later he has achieved all that can be achieved in academia.  For him finding motivation for new research is closely connected to his passion for writing.

"Writing is the greatest delight for me in research and the challenge to find a fresh approach to things," says the professor, who in 2009 will begin as an academy professor of the Academy of Finland.  A new book is to be expected - on surprise, surprise - change in society.