Browsing by Subject "säädösvalmistelu"

The aim of the Master's thesis was to investigate the perceptions held by various social actors on the pupil and student welfare during the enactment of the first integral act on pupil and student welfare (1287/2013). The political interest in pupil and student welfare has increased in the past two decades and it is now seen as part of the preventative activities seeking to curb the social exclusion of children and young people. The present research is concerned with the sociopolitical purpose(s) of pupil and student welfare as defined in the referral statements of the draft law. The underlying paradigms of the statement givers' discourse are investigated in the theoretical framework of analytics of government. The purpose of the research was to contribute to the understanding of the sociopolitical discourse(s) on the welfare of children and young people, to shed some light on the ideological currents behind these discourses and to shake their self-evident and uniform nature. The empirical data of the research consisted of 55 referral statements of the draft law available on the web page of the Finnish Government. The reading of the data was based on the basic assumption of critical discourse analysis of the interconnected relationship of language and power. Meaningful phrases were conceptualized into theoretical regimes of governing for the purposes of the analysis. In addition to the "welfare state" and "neoliberal" regimes, the analysis is contextualized by the historical development of the pupil and student welfare and the referral statement procedure. In order to analyze the sociopolitical purpose of pupil and student welfare, four categories were created to illuminate the discourses consisting of the nature, object, realization, responsibility and form of the pupil and student welfare activity. The research shows that the discourse on the sociopolitical purpose of pupil and student welfare has adopted the linguistic concepts of the neoliberal regime although there is variation to be found in the rationalities defining the pupil and student welfare. The focus of the discourse was not the wellbeing of the individual but the needs of the society. This state of affairs common to all four discoursive categories created a tense relationship between the individual and society that was seen to be in connection with the typical sociopolitical discourse of today and to disengage the pupil and student welfare from its historical premise.