Corporate Actors in Education

• In Event: New Directions in the Study of Global Policy Actors in Education

Abstract

This paper explores the rising presence of corporations shaping educational reforms and practices around the world. Nation-states have traditionally been the main regulator, funder, and provider of educational and other public services. However today, nation-states increasingly work with other autonomous, or partly autonomous education-service and product providers or as the primary regulators of privately provided services (Dale 1997).

The scale and scope of corporate engagement in education is increasing. Public- private partnerships, corporate social engagement programs, new policy hybrids and funding mechanisms are highly conducive to privatization and the current context of increased demands on public education systems worldwide. Corporations are being called upon to deliver their products, services and expertise, thus creating new markets and business opportunities within the education sector.
I use a political-economy perspective, including issues of power, production and world order to study the social processes that corporations represent and participate in (Cox 1981). The paper highlights how new economic development strategies underpinned by knowledge as a new factor of production have emerged. The pursuit of building knowledge-based economies has led to new service industries and product development activities (Robertson 2008).

I use two major sources of data in this study. The first includes a wide variety of books, websites, newspapers, magazines, press releases, speeches, policy documents, research reports, and scholarly journals. The second source includes qualitative data from an in-depth study of one company's tens-of-million dollar investment in education including project site visits, observations, content analysis and interviews with corporate leaders and community and government stakeholders.

The paper will first provide the context for the analysis through a description of the scale and scope of corporate activity in education and a typology of corporate social engagement motivations and activities in education. A wide variety of examples of corporations working in education are provided from the publishing, management consulting, school-franchising and technology sectors. Lastly, the paper will highlight the complexities and implications of corporate engagement in education. I will critique the mechanisms and motivations driving corporate engagement in global policy processes in education. I argue and highlight how the education sector has become an important site for advancing commercial interests around the world.

This paper aims to fill the void in the literature by investigating the motivations, social processes and structural characteristics through which corporate actors are increasingly operating in education policy and the implications of these trends for governments around the world.

References

Cox, R. W. (1981). Social forces, states and world orders: Beyond international relations. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 10(2), 126-155.

Dale, R. (1997). 'The state and the governance of education: An analysis of the restructuring of the state-education relationship'. In A. H. Halsey, H. Lauder, P. Brown and A. Stuart Wells (eds) Education Culture, Economy, and Society. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Robertson (2008). '"Producing" knowledge economies: The World Bank, the KAM, education and development. In M. Simons, Olssen, M; Peters, M. (eds) Re-reading Education Policies: Studying the Policy Agenda of the 21st Century. Netherlands: Sense Publishers.

Author

• Zahra Bhanji, University of Toronto