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Pertti Ahonen

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2000-04-03
2000-08-24

A Brief Human Interest Essay on Dutch-Finnish Research

I have come to realise that without particularly trying it  I have produced two pieces of research that have involved analysis of circumstances in the Netherlands. The first one of these had to do with my activities in the field of social studies of science and technology. I extended an earlier study of mine (Ahonen 1995, item 2.3 in the Bibliography) to cover two further countries in the field of natural resource based industrial clusters, namely Australia and the Netherlands. In particular, I compared the technology strategies of the Dutch agroindustrial cluster with those of the Finnish forest-industrial cluster (Ahonen, unpublished, here in my web site).

In 1998 came out my study in Finnish with the English summary "Evaluation Support to the Finnish Central Government"  (Ahonen 1998, item 3.6 in my Bibliography). I had the opportunity to make a study trip to the Netherlands at the end of 1997 to ascertain that evaluation indeed was best established in the Dutch national government of all the world's countries (see my page on Evaluation, Organisations.)

I have also compared the welfare state models of the world's leading welfare states in the context of the technology policy strategies of those countries. I learnt, in particular, that the Netherlands in undeniably a welfare state, but, interestingly, it isorganised along quite different principles than the ones typically applied in the Nordic welfare states. Unfortunately, I never polished the study to make it a publishable piece of research.

In participating in a comparative study on Public Administration programmes in Europe I once again received further confirmation that the Netherlands, together with only a few other European countries such as Finland, France, Sweden and Norway, have a very solid field of academic Public Administration that is also solidly linked to all levels of the practice of public administration (See my Bibliography, item 5.11). If anything, this should increase one's motivation to learn enough Dutch to read Public Administration research published in the Netherlands and in the Flemish Belgium.

With the above background, I was definitely very happy to see an ex-colleague (Saukkonen 1999) to produce a doctoral dissertation made up of a comparison between two small countries, which were exactly the Netherlands and Finland.  Pasi indeed understand what the Low Sky in the name of the well-known Dutch book means.

Only direct reference:
Saukkonen, Pasi. Finland, the Netherlands and the Politics of Nation-State Indentity: A Study on the Political Aspects of National Identity, An Empirical Application to the Dutch and the Finnish Cases. English Summary of a published PhD Dissertation written in Finnish. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura 1999.