Niilo Koljonen information

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Finnish. (January 2015) Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Finnish Wikipedia article at [[:fi:Niilo Koljonen]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|fi|Niilo Koljonen}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Niilo Koljonen (1927–2004) was a Finnish social scientist. He survived the concentration camps of the Soviet Union, and later studied at the Harvard University in the United States. He studied the democratization processes in Finland at the Finnish Department of State (Prime Minister's Office,and also developed ideas and concepts related to social systems in business world. he is considered a major figure in the unification of Finnish trade unions.^[1]

His magnum opus is a book about Corporate Democracy (Työntekijä ja Yritysdemokratia - January 1966). In his theories Koljonen argues that "the superior-subordinate system in business enterprises is the enemy of individual freedom. Companies are suffering from this performance," and "concentration of economic power in the hands of too few is alien to democracy." The book presents a world in which society in general has accepted democracy and right to vote, but the economic power is concentrated in a few hands, and business world is suffering from lack of worker motivation and poor decisions of the elite. Koljonen describes the empirical data sets on the basis of human motivation in terms of fertile forms of business where every employee is "inner entrepreneur", who is working towards a common goal. Foreword to the book was written by Mauno Koivisto.^[2] Koljonen set up a Corporate Democracy Association. Tarja Halonen, another president of Finland, was a founding member in the association.^[3]

In his youth, Koljonen struggled for years to be free from the Soviet Union concentration camps. Niilo Koljonen was the first Finn ever to draw up a map of the Soviet Union concentration camps. In 2012, award-winning book publisher and writer Sofi Oksanen released the map 2012 through Silberfeldt, at the National Audiovisual Archive.^[4]