economic growth, a decrease in job satisfaction, a labour shortage, and the increased availability of research funds led to rise in research-assisted workplace development. Sociologically oriented research into working life became well established at universities and other research institutions²⁹.

Currently, research on occupational health focuses on advances to foster individual health and wellbeing. The concept of health has been widened from the level of the individual to the company or organisation. For instance, studies on stress, which used to focus on the health of the individual, have been expanded to look at the organisation. As a researcher from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health points out, "health has become an attribute of organisation"³⁰. Since job insecurity and work overload are reflected in employees' wellbeing and work ability, an increased need for psychosocial research and services has emerged to foster smooth reorganisation in the labour market and to monitor and intervene against the negative consequences of reorganisation, such as stress and burnout.

Finland has over 40 units involved in research on work, including 24 units at universities and 18 other research units or institutes such as the Institute of Occupational Health, the Rehabilitation Foundation, STAKES, and the Technical Centre of Finland. The units at universities include departments of educational studies, political science, business, psychology, medical science, and technology.³¹. The following section describes some research units studying wellbeing in the workplace or organisational issues conducive to wellbeing. STAKES and the Rehabilitation Foundation, where research focuses more on rehabilitation, were introduced earlier.

THE FINISH INSTITUTE OF OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH (FIOH) is a public corporation supervised by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. The FIOH is the biggest organisation in Finland working in occupational health care and has six regional institutes in addition to its central institute. FIOH's mission is to promote employees' health and well-functioning workplaces. FIOH conducts research, disseminates information, and offers expert services and training.

FIOH's research concentrates on employees' health, elements of a good working environment, physical and mental pressures in the workplace, potential dangers, safe work methods, and occupational accidents and illnesses. About 230 research projects are underway annually. One of these, Human Resources for Work, is dedicated to supporting and developing people's resources for coping with the demands of working life. Its research focuses on human resources, well-being, stress, and burnout in the work environment as well as the impact of workplace culture and intrapersonal factors on an employee's health and the ability to work.

WORK RESEARCH CENTRE, TAMPERE UNIVERSITY

The Work Research Centre (WRC), founded in 1988, is a unit of the University of Tampere Research Institute for Social Sciences. It is the largest unit in Finland in its field. The Centre is dedicated to research into work and working life and provides post-graduate training and extension studies. It covers a wide range of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, social policy, administrative science, and pedagogy. Current and future research concerns include: organisational learning; the emergence of the information society and evolving practices in working life; restructuring the labour market; equality and gender perspective in working life; public sector modernisation, human resources and work organisations; and work and education. Over the past years, the WRC has increasingly devoted its resources to participation in comparative research projects in Europe and in broader international research networks.³²