When I defended my PhD at the University of Oulu in 2011, the nuclear power company Fennovoima was just about to publish their decision to apply for a new nuclear power plant in Pyhäjoki, south of Oulu, and interest in my findings was good (see an YLE interview with me here). My thesis had focused on public participation in nuclear and hydro power project assessment and licensing procedures, and for my part, one of the most unexpected and hence, exciting outcomes of my research had been the role of consultancies in negotiating highly contested projects between involved actors – most importantly, authorities, developers and the public. I witnessed how highly professional consultant firms had become nodes of an institutional setting, which leaves all others involved dependent on their expertise. Certainly, I wanted to continue investigating this beyond my PhD.

 In December 2014, Kone Foundation granted me a post-doc scholarship to examine the role of consultancies and to discuss implications of this institutional shift. Immediately in January 2015, I started to revisit the empirical data I had collected during my four-year PhD research, to do a literature review on management and consultancy and to prepare for a new set of interviews with practitioners. Over the twelve months I have been granted funding I’m hoping to get several articles published and to produce an edited volume combining researchers’ interests who work on related themes. In the long run, I’d love to get additional funding for an ethnographic research, viewing the work of consultancies from within. But that’s future talk, since I will also be on maternity leave for a while from summer onwards.