Den praktiknära forskningens innehåll, utformning och genomförande är ett omdebatterat ämne inom vetenskapssamhället. I en replik på tidigare inlägg av Malin Tväråna skriver Hanna Sjögren om vikten av att inte bara rikta blicken mot de forskningsfrågor som ställs och lärares roll i forskningen. Diskussionen behöver även inrymma frågor om forskningens finansiering och de monetära ramar som utbildningsvetenskapliga forskare verkar inom (red.).

The aim of this paper is to explore differences in how civil servants in Sweden organize and justify their policies towards families who do not make a school choice. We draw on theories about competition as a social construction as well as different notions of justice in education. We present descriptive statistics from a large-scale quantitative data set and conduct a qualitative content analysis of interviews with civil servants to study school choice policies in Sweden, well known for its consumer and market-oriented education policies for the past 35 years. We identify that municipalities that organize mandatory school choice have both different policies and different justifications towards families who, despite information campaigns and other activities, fail or refuse to make an active school choice. The study makes an empirical contribution to the previously theorized relationship between choice and competition and offers a nuanced understanding of differences in how local authorities organize and justify allocation policies in their school choice regimes. We raise the question of whether extensive localized differences towards families are justified in an educational system that has an outspoken agenda towards equal treatment and equally good education for all no matter of the student’s family background.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how relations between education and emotions can be explored through an autoethnography of researcher-parental experiences of school marketization. A further objective is to suggest a methodological approach for deepening the understanding of how school-market-emotions are inherently shaped by ideology. The two authors identify and analyse their emotions while being approached as consumers of education for their own children. They use critical concepts from a post-Marxist tradition to connect the hyper-abstract impersonal structure with their deeply personal experiences and emotions. By moving between the positions as both parents and researchers, the authors reflect on shared and disparate emotions when social class and public and private values come into play. The paper builds on insights from autoethnographic research that utilises personal experiences as the means to explore researcher-parental conundrums in a critical manner.

In this paper, we shed light on the mundane performance of market-logics in public educational settings by focusing on municipality websites in Skåne County, Sweden, that inform parents about local school choice policies and procedures. We build on existing knowledge about the importance of websites in school choice systems. The aim of the paper is to 1) identify different ways in which Swedish municipalities configure parents in local school choice settings and 2) relate these configurations of parents to different ideas about the purpose of education. We draw on theoretical insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) on how technical systems shape their own (future) users as well as the theoretical conceptualisation of education as a private and public good. Our data derives from 27 municipalities in the Skåne County in southern Sweden. We identify two types of scripts in the data; one that expects parents to make a choice and one that does not expect such a choice from the parents. In conclusion, our study indicates that children and their families in Sweden might encounter different understandings of the aims and responsibilities related to education, depending on which municipality they live in.

This paper explores strategies and rationalities of local authorities when handling non-choosers, e.g.  parents who fail or don’t make a school choice for the sake of their child. As such we aim to contribute to research on school choice and the role of local authorities in constructing competition (e.g., Karlsson, 2024). 

Within our ongoing research project on the local organization of school allocation (funded by the Swedish Research Council), we explore how the school choice reform is implemented in Swedish municipalities and the everyday struggle between neoliberal ideas of private choice and the lingering ideas of the comprehensive education system as a public good. We argue that the practical organization of school allocation involves the issue of balancing private and public goods. This struggle entails everyday ethical, political, as well as practical matters that are related to the role and discretion of civil servants (Brodkin, 2020). While there is a vast literature on school choice in a European context, less research has focused on how local authorities organize, manage, and construct competition in relation to education (exceptions are e.g., Dabisch, 2022; Sjögren, 2024). 

Within our project, we have mapped and identified four distinct ways in which the 290 Swedish local municipalities organize school allocation for 6-year-olds. In this presentation, we use data from municipalities that expect parental activity through different versions of ‘mandatory’ school choice. Among these 127 municipalities, 48 % were found to fill remaining spots with the ‘non-choosers’ following the allocation of those who expressed their preferences through school choice, while 52 % were found to place children of ‘non-choosers’ in the school closest or near the home. To explore the rationalities of these differences, we interviewed civil servants in 16 of the municipalities with different policies towards ‘non-choosers’. The 16 municipalities represent a broad range pertaining to demographic characteristics.

We analyze the rationalities of municipalities’ management of non-choice with the help of Simmel’s work (2008[1903]: 977) on competition as “one of the decisive traits in modern life”, and recent conceptual development of competition as a social construct (Arora-Jonsson et al. 2020). Key is that competition is seen as having four constituent elements: actors, their relationship, senses of scarcity, and a desire for something. When one or more of these elements is not in place, competition becomes diffuse. This framework is instructive for theorizing how and with what rationalities competition is constructed in certain ways in different municipalities. 

References of the Symposium Paper  (up to 200 words):

Arora-Jonsson, S., Brunsson, N., & Hasse, R. (2020). Where Does Competition Come From? The role of organization. Organization Theory, 1(1), 2631787719889977. https://doi.org/10.1177/2631787719889977

Brodkin, E. Z. (2020). Discretion in the Welfare State. In T. Evans & P. Hupe (Eds.), Discretion and the quest for controlled freedom (pp. 63–77). Palgrave Macmillan.

Dabisch, V. (2022). Which child to which school? How local politicians shape catchment areas, school choice and diversity. European Educational Research Journal, 14749041221116252. https://doi.org/10.1177/14749041221116252

Karlsson, T. S. (2024). Exploring the Acceptance of the Public Consumer in Scandinavian Governance: An Essay About Choice as Both a Right and an Obligation. Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 28(4), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.58235/sjpa.2024.23113

Simmel, G. (2008[1903]). Sociology of Competition. The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers Canadiens de Sociologie, 33(4), 957–978.

Sjögren, H. (2024). Unruly customers? How parents’ (in)actions trouble civil servants and local school choice systems. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 68(7), 1382–1394.

Paper offers following Country / National perspective:

Sweden 

Marketisation permeates education systems in the Nordics, and this development is accompanied by the introduction of various choice and consumer-oriented policies. The idea of the citizen as someone who is willing and capable of choosing between different welfare services – including schools – is axiomatic in much of contemporary public policy (Dovemark et al. 2018). While there is a vast literature on school choice in the Nordic countries, less research has focused on how local authorities organize, manage, and construct quasi-markets and competition in relation to education. 

In this paper we aim to contribute to the research on school choice and the role of local authorities in constructing competition for school allocation in Sweden. We do this by exploring the strategies and rationalities of local authorities when handling the non-choosers, e.g. those parents who, for one reason or the other, fail or refuse to make a school choice for the sake of their child. We draw on literature within school choice, policy and organizational theory that highlights the importance of the ‘organizer’ (Arora-Jonsson et al 2020) or ‘market stewards’ (Malbon & Carey 2021). In our case, we focus on the local authorities, and how they organize, manage, and construct competition, as well as their rationalities in relation to the contextual dimensions in where these ‘policy enactments’ take place (Braun et al 2011).  

Within our research project on school allocation, we have mapped and identified four distinct ways in which the 290 Swedish local municipalities organize school allocation for 6-year-olds. In this paper, we use data from municipalities with two of these school allocation systems, Type 1 (n=114) and 2 (n=13) that expect parental activity through different versions of ‘mandatory’ school choice. Furthermore, we analyze qualitative interviews with civil servants in 16 of these municipalities with different policies towards the ‘non-choosers’. 

Results show that non-choosers are managed in two different ways. About half of the municipalities place children of non-choosing parents in schools near their homes, for example by estimating what school they would have chosen if they had made an active choice. The other haft place children after all active choosers have received their school placement. Hence, local authorities merit active and passive actors in their school choice systems rather differently, where various parts of the regulation, the right to a school near home or the right to school choice, are used to justify different policy enactments. The latter disadvantages the passive actors and hence invokes an institutionalization of parents as consumers in creating competition.  

En ny statlig utredning vill skärpa reglerna kringskolplikt, men Sveriges syn på närvaro i skolan är unikt snäv och alla elever kan inte följa kraven på fysisk närvaro. En skola som inte är till för alla bör vara försiktig med att göra anspråk på att vara obligatorisk, skriver utbildningsforskarna Christian Norefalk och Hanna Sjögren.

Homeschooling, which can be defined as “the practice of families choosing to wholly or partly educate their children in settings other than schools” (Myers, 2020, p. 212), is profoundly restricted in Sweden, but to different degrees permitted in all other Nordic countries (Eurydice, 2018). It is therefore reasonable to assume that the very meaning of ‘the right to education’ have come to stand for different things in the different countries, with potential consequences for the relationship between families, schools and the state across the different nations. National configurations of the relation between families, schools, and the state have consequences for individual citizens in each Nordic state. 

In this paper we argue that there is a need for clarifying the meaning of education in relation to homeschooling in a Nordic context, that can bring about a more nuanced and precise language to talk about the right to education. We use different philosophical perspectives on education, as well as educational policy on homeschooling in Sweden and Finland to discuss different understandings of the right to education in the Nordics.  

Essential for developing a more nuanced and precise language to talk about the right to education is the insight that the right to education can be approached in different ways and is relevant from the perspective of various fields such as law, ethics, and history, as well as political science and sociology among others.  

From a pedagogical and philosophy of education perspective, the question of how education should be understood becomes central in the talk about the right to education (see e.g. Dewey’s ‘education as growth’, Peters’ ‘education as initiation’, Illich’s ‘deschooling’, Curren’s ‘initiation into practices that express human flourishing’ and Masschelein’s & Simons’ ‘defence of the school’). Despite this, there has been little discussion of the notion of education underpinning this right. Therefore, a more considerable attention needs to be given not just to the implementation of the right, but also to its conceptualization (McCowan, 2010 & 2012). How can we understand the right to education in relation to pedagogical relations, upbringing, Bildung, schooling and learning goals?

 On the one hand, education is often considered synonymous with schooling, and it is easy to miss both the complexity of a student's school experience and a broader understanding of how the concept of education can be understood (McCowan, 2012). In most parts of the world, schools are seen as natural, self-evident and inevitable (Papastephanou, 2014) and in Sweden, public schooling under a national curriculum is compulsory for all children.  

On the other hand, education is also often understood as reaching some specified learning goals. In the Finnish context, the obligation to learn means that instead of participating in the teaching organized through official schools, a person can acquire knowledge equivalent to the basic education by, for example, studying at home. This is referred to as “hemundervisning” (["home teaching"] i.e. homeschooling). However, the focus is on learning outcomes and knowledge goals rather than on the pedagogical process itself.