Jalas, Mikko | Finland

Mikko Jalas has PhD from and works currently as a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of management and international business at Aalto University School of Business in Helsinki, Finland. Since obtaining his PhD in 2006, he has held a position of a post-doc researcher at the Academy of Finland and a visiting scholar at Lancaster University. His research has focused on sustainable consumption, everyday life, practice-theory and social aspects of time, temporality and busyness. Currently he is also conducting research on the adoption of technologies for distributed energy production and on the institutional development of business in new energy solutions as a response to climate change. As a practitioner, he is involved in activities of wind energy companies and energy efficiency service companies.

Project at IAS-STS: Time policies of sustainable consumption

The proposed research plan has two main objectives. Firstly, it seeks to use time use survey data to better understand the prospects of more sustainable and less resource-intensive patterns of private consumption. This is a quantitative study making use of the methods of and contributing to material flow accounting. This part of the work builds on my previous work with time use survey data and on the recently published Finnish data on time use in 2009-2010. In addition my plan is to do comparative studies between European countries.

The second aim of the research is to focus on emerging European time policy and the mechanisms of governance that are implied by such policy. This part engages with the following question: how do patterns of time use and rhythms of everyday life get established and change and what is the role of public policy? Can there be anything like eco-social time policy and if so, what are key policy-processes, who are the relevant actors and what is the outlook for the content of such policy?   

Selected Publications

Jalas, M. (2012). Debating the proper pace of life: an analysis of sustainable consumption policy processes at national and municipal levels. Environmental Politics 21(3): 369-386.

Heiskanen E, Lovio R, Jalas M (2011).Path creation for sustainable consumption: Promoting alternative heating systems in Finland. Journal of Cleaner Production. 19(16): 1892-1900.

Jalas, M (2009). Making time; reciprocal object relations and the self-legitimising time of wooden boating. In Shove, E., Trentman F. & Wilk, R. (eds). Time and the Rhythms of Everyday Life. Oxford, UK: Berg.

Jalas, M. (2005). Everyday Life -context of the Increasing Energy Demands: Time-use Survey Data in a Decomposition Analysis. Journal of Industrial Ecology 9 (1-2): 129-145.

Jalas, M. (2002). A time use perspective on the materials intensity of consumption. Ecological Economics 41: 109-123.