Museology and employment in the Finnish museum field

Abstract

Museology is a discipline still establishing itself. It can currently be studied in five Finnish universities. Museology came to Finland as early as 1969 when Secretary of Museum Affairs Jorma Heinonen from the Finnish Museums Association gave his first course in museology. It took more than a decade before museology gained status as a university subject in 1983, and about the same amount of time for the first professorship in 1998. Little by little, museology has strengthened its position in Finnish universities, but what has happened on the labour market at the same time?

Emotional distance, detachment, compassion and care: The affective milieu of academic management in the neoliberal university

“…To attain higher social standing, individuals are committed to hard work, but in current meritocratic circumstances, hard work may necessarily never find its fulfilment. As the hard facts of the ratio between short-term and fixed-term contracts and the acceptance rate of funding applications show (Kallio & Kallio, 2023), stable career prospects are only possible for a select few. While showing empathy for the precarity of employees, but also pleading her own experience as a senior researcher who 'knows how things go' ('I have gone down that road myself'), the dean positions herself as a senior who cares for the employees but, with her expertise, instructs them to become inured to survival amid the extreme competition.…”