How private firms shape public outcomes from within the machinery of the state and global governance.
My research on tax havens, Big Tech, public affairs, and consultancy is united by a common question: how do private firms, lobbyists, consultants, and advisers shape public outcomes, often with less scrutiny than the public decisions they help formulate?
HIGHLIGHTED WORK
Recently, the article Rediscovering the Multinational Enterprise: The Rise and Fall of ‘Corporate Escape’ Studies, (with Rasmus Corlin Christensen, Review of International Political Economy, 2025), traced how the multinational enterprise disappeared from important currents of social-scientific analysis. This research provides the foundation for my book manuscript, Corporate Escape: Why Academics and Politicians Lose Sight of Business Power.
Earlier Work
Article • 2019
Consultocracy and Its Discontents: A Critical Typology and a Call for a Research Agenda (Governance, with Hanna Kuusela), 2019. This widely cited article developed a critical typology of governments’ reliance on external consultants and called for a more systematic research agenda on consultocracy. It built on our Finnish-language, peer-reviewed book on the same topic, published in 2013.
Book • 2022
In the early 2020s, I led a research project on the political consequences of the rise of public-affairs firms. The resulting Finnish-language, peer-reviewed book, co-authored with Mona Mannevuo and Niina Kari and published in 2022, received the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation Prize in 2024. I have since extended its key arguments in a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Lobbying and its Regulation (2026).
Article • 2026
The influence of private sector consultants on public management reforms: taking stock (Public Money & Management, co-authored with Ringa Raudla and Hanna Kuusela). This article provides a systematic review on the literature on the impact of management consultancy firms on public management reforms. It was published in an issue in 2026, unfortunately behind paywall, but the submitted version can be found here.
Practice
To sandbox or not to sandbox? Diverging strategies of regulatory responses to FinTech (Regulation & Governance, with Ringa Raudla, Egert Juuse, Vytautas Kuokštis, and Aleksandrs Cepilovs, 2025). This comparative study examines the political, legal, administrative, and economic factors that explain why governments adopt, or decide not to adopt, regulatory sandboxes for financial technology.