Welfare state transition in the making: Focus on the niche-regime interaction in Finnish elderly care services

摘要

The study tackles the socio-technical transition in Finland's elderly care within the framework of the multi-level perspective of transitions, with a specific focus on the confrontation between niche and regime levels. Despite the recognised societal importance of rethinking the welfare state and elderly care in it, the direction of change is not straightforward. Even though the regime is experiencing destabilisation, remarkable inertia, deriving from old trajectories, exists, in both technological development and socio-institutional adaptation. Our analysis is based on four case studies that represent different development processes aiming at changes in the elderly care system. In the analysis, we have identified several lock-ins that act as barriers to the niche breakthrough and transition in elderly care according to whether they are related to confrontation either between technologies, between practices or between practices and technologies. Barriers were identified in the form of technical incompatibilities and usability problems, professional roles and responsibilities and a lack of training and systemic thinking, for instance. Overcoming these confrontations can be facilitated through learning different professional and work cultures, smoothening organisational and sectoral borders as well as facilitating users' adoption of technologies. The study contributes to the research on transition dynamics and responds to the need to analyse the complex process between niches and regimes.