What Can Become of You? Negotiations and Subjectivations in Educational Policy Work in a Swedish Context

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: The Micro and Macro Politics and Practices of Neoliberalism and Schooling

Abstract

How education is organized and what is considered to be its purposes are continuously renegotiated. This paper examines the negotiations by studying how the purposes of education are articulated in terms of economics in contemporary education policy discourses in Sweden and how the subject student is positioned within its discursive structures.

The beginning of the 1990s marks the start of an intense educational policy reform work in Sweden. In the last 30 years the purposes of education has been articulated in economic terms where the purposes of education mainly are understood as providing the labor market with skilled workers in order to improve Sweden’s competiveness on a global market. These articulations in education policy work in Sweden can be linked to an international discussion which Lindblad and Popkewitz (2004) refer to as ‘Educational Restructuring’ wherein the welfare society is put to question in terms of a knowledge society.

The analytical work is theorized within the framework of discourse analysis. In order to study how the purposes of education are articulated in terms of economics and how the subject student is positioned, my starting point has a non-essentialist view. Laclau and Mouffe (2001) describe the subject as a subject position created within a discursive structure. The positioning establishes relations in terms of hierarchical superiority and inferiority (Mouffe 2005). The relationships between the individual, the labor market and the society which is studied in this paper are thereby expected to show a construction of hierarchy between the created positions which may indicate a desire for hegemonic power.

The text analysis in this study consists of a number of official policy texts produced by the Swedish Government, Department of Education, between 1990 and 2011. The methodolo¬gical framework is Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) notions of articulations and subject positions. The analysis is focusing on how, under what conditions and for what reasons relations are constructed and positioned in terms of superiority and inferiority (Howarth 2000).

The analysis expects to show changes in relations where the society and the individual are subordinated the labor market’s need for skill supply which limits the individual’s opportunities to politicize its situation in specific ways.
Analyzing how, under what conditions and for what reasons the purposes of education are articulated in terms of economics and how the subject student is positioned within its discursive structure, gives possibilities to discuss effects on schooling created in hierarchical relations where the society and the individual are subordinated the labor market.

References
Laclau, Ernesto & Mouffe, Chantal (1985). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London/New York: Verso.
Lindblad, Sverker & Popkewitz, Thomas S (2004): Educational Restructuring. International Perspectives on Travelling Policies. Greenwich, Conneticut: Information Age Publishing.
Mouffe, Chantal (2005). The Democratic Paradox. London, New York: Verso.

Author

• Maria Elisabeth Terning, Stockholm University