Research teams

Since the mid-1980s, Western industrialised societies have undergone a number of fundamental changes. Industrial structures in most countries have shifted progressively from secondary production to a service and knowledge-based economy. This development has taken place in the general context of the liberalisation of international trade and finance capital. Under the auspices of neoliberalism, many sectors of public administration have begun to move from resource governance to market governance. Since then, real markets or quasi-markets have assumed ever greater significance. In Europe, the harmonisation of legislation within the European Union has also played a part. These transformations have also taken place in Finland. Though it may be possible to find internal explanations for the changes that Finland has experienced, they are clearly related to international developmental trends.

The research teams that form the Research Network on Transnational Socio-Cultural Processes (TRAP) have researched different aspects of this complex process of change for a long time. The acronym TRAP can be read as a reference to ‘territorial trap', a term coined by John Agnew to denote the persistent imagination of human societies as nation-state containers. In the studies conducted by the research teams, Finland has often been used as a case example viewed from a global perspective. By outlining different unintended consequences of contemporary governance, the research has been relevant to articulating potential problems and giving voice to marginal positions.

The five research teams that constitute TRAP focus on different, yet interrelated, aspects of the interface between national and transnational socio-cultural processes. This interface is strongly conditioned by the ‘territorial trap' - the deeply held conceptualisation and comprehension of the social world in state territorial terms. Each research team approaches this problematic from vantage points that we deem to be key: governance, socialisation, journalism, popular culture, and the narratives of identity. The teams ask what has changed during the past two decades, how these changes have been experienced, conceptualized and interpreted by agents, and what effects they have had. In sum, the framework of the Centre could be characterized as a meta-theoretical approach to globalisation in the sense that we do not simply study recent changes and label them as globalisation. We also stress that framings such as globalisation are part of the total picture.