A Systems View on the Floora Project in Finnish Music Institutions

The first case in this panel, the Floora project, was initiated in 2013 in the capital area of Finland by a group of instrumental teachers. They created a way to make extracurricular instrumental studies more accessible to students with lower socio-economic status through active local and national policy work, fundraising, and by involving social workers in student recruitment. In the beginning, the teachers created a network between the social workers’ system in the municipalities , the student services of the partner schools, and the third-sector in order to reach underprivileged families and young people. Currently, approximately 160 students have been offered the possibility of studying music without having to pay or participate in the entrance tests normally conducted by music institutions. Additionally, many of the students selected by social workers are boys and those with an immigrant background, so students who have largely been absent from music institutions.

This presentation examines the Finnish music institution as a social system with Floora as a social investment. Based on Luhmann (1995), it is assumed that the perceived purpose of a social system defines its boundaries. Through systems analysis and three different systems models, the presentation illustrates how teachers can be seen to be at the heart of the transformative work of the music institution system, and how Floora redefines the system’s boundaries. In line with a social systems framework, the models are not seen to be representing reality per se; rather, as Berger and Luckmann (1966) argue, they should be understood as mental representations, in this case, arrived at through negotiation in professional discourse facilitated by a systems analysis scholar. Systems models function as heuristic aids that help music institutions and policy makers develop new ideas of how social systems could be transformed to better adapt to their changing operational environment; how the system could develop resilience; and how institutional learning could be enhanced.