Research themes

The Changing Academic Profession (CAP) survey was based on a major international consortium of scholars, and the fact that it was state of the art was much based on the efforts of the country teams. Following the CAP survey, more than 600 peer review scholarly papers have been published, and members of the Finnish team were authors of 30 of them. There was also strong infrastructure and research consortium support for the survey, which has enabled the close connections between higher education research and institutions and to relevant publication channels. Previous results from the CAP survey and its successor project (EUROAC) reveal that a substantial gap exists between junior and senior academic staff. For this reason, the newly-devised APIKS survey has been divided into two parts: a General survey of Academic profession and a Survey of Formative Years of scholars.

From 2017, the University of Lapland has become a host organisation for work that extends on the Carnegie survey (about 19,000 respondents), the CAP survey (37,000) and EUROAC (7,000). The consortium has agreed that APIKS Survey data will be deposited in Finland, with an estimated 50,000 - 70000 respondents from countries around the world. European data are located in CSC IDA, and for non-European material, the location is EUDat. APIKS / CAP / EUROAC / Carnegie is the most extensive international time series on the changing scope and content of work in the academic profession.

The users of these data are scholars, authorities and decision makers looking for evidence in the reference countries, as well as higher education institutions and labour market organisations. The questionnaire, sample description and the codebook are attachemnts of this document.

All members of the ProSoc team have experience in studies concerning professions, and are spread across the University of Lapland and elsewhere. Assembling a research subject on the professions under the heading “Research on change in the Arctic and the North’ will enable the use of multi-disciplinary research funding to build capacity and a strong research infrastructure.

Along with the international surveys, the research group’s members have conducted numerous national case studies related to studies of the profession. As an example, the Humanly Effective Leadership research project (funded by The Finnish Work Environment Fund) examined the barriers and opportunities associated with the various professions in the public health care field.

ProSoc enhances research carries out on ecosystem functions, from the management of innovation activities discussing methods and tools to support and facilitate service innovation projects in the formation of innovation ecosystems that benefit tools and techniques to help the evolution of a future vision in decentralized business ecosystems, IoT Technology Roadmap, and Innovation process. 

The research supported by the ProSoc research team is innovating technologies and making discoveries to improve the world we live in by developing digital solutions. The objectives' traj.ectories demarcate to design technologies with sustained impact, with partners business and industrial and service providers involved in our projects. ProSoc is a research team specializing in several sectors, including Transportation Strategies, Smart Logistics, Smart Cities, and Strategic Digital Technologies. We research blockchain-based techniques for the public sector as a potential solution to society's demands for transparency, citizen participation, and cooperation. We are committed to the future with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in finance, healthcare, public services, manufacturing, retail, supply chain, and logistics sectors. We also research how businesses can plan and execute logistics processes in a multi-enterprise and multi-stakeholder environment. ProSoc is also committed to intelligent airports, using connected technologies to optimize passenger flows and airport activities..