The Business of Education – Challenging the economic grip on education

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Panel Description
The Business of Education has become a central research and teaching field in higher education and beyond. This research topic goes well beyond the influence of private interests shaping policymaking or the expansion of private schooling, in other words, it includes but is not restricted to discussing education as an enterprise or as a business. The Business of Education refers to a global sphere of activities in which a broad range of educational services and goods are produced, exchanged, and consumed. It has experienced an exponential growth during the past two decades and those active in the field cross public and private boundaries and interact in various ways in the production, offer and demand of educational services and goods, covering almost every niche of the education sector and encompassing the fields of policy, practice, and research. The Business of Education displays own approaches and theories that are used to conceptualize and model activities and relationships with other fields and sectors; it accommodates myriad actors and encompasses quite different ways and modes of operation, giving rise to multifarious manifestations in different places and at different times, making it imperative to further understand the relationship across the levels—from local to global. The current exponential growth of the field has been backed by social and technological transformations but was also due to global crises such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemics which opened new windows of opportunity for providers of (digital) education solutions and created a new demand on user-side. Controversies abound as to the impact and/or side-effects of these developments beyond their purely economic import. Indeed, at present many scholarly debates can be found as to the future of the sector.
The panel exploits two meanings of the word business. For once, business refers to all activities considered in terms of profitability, commercial transactions of all kinds. The business of education here is a commercial trade as any other economic activity in modern capitalist societies, as poignantly discussed by Antoni Verger and colleagues as a ‘Global Education Industry’. In a second sense, business denotes application or commitment to a task or purpose, usually a collective one. This understanding of business comes closest to education’s meaning as ‘matters of public concern’, as education philosopher Jan Masschelein phrased.
The panel brings together three papers that address the topic in different and with view to different levels of abstraction and spheres of action. Together they have in common the aim at elucidating the ways in which education has become enmeshed with business/economic rationales. They offer insights into conceptual and empirical research that is crucial to challenging the economic grip on education.

Sub Unit

• Globalization & Education SIG

Organizer

• Marcelo Parreira Do Amaral, University of Münster, Germany

Chair

• Marcelo Parreira Do Amaral, University of Münster, Germany

Individual Presentations

• Paper 1: Challenging the Business of Education – Conceptual Challenges - Marcelo Parreira Do Amaral, University of Münster, Germany

• Paper 2: Education as Business and Business of Education - Jae Park, Education University of Hong Kong; Tamara Savelyeva, The Hong Kong Institute of Education for Sustainable Development

• Paper 3: Private actors in Teacher Education - Paul R Fossum, University of Michigan-Dearborn; Benedict Kurz, Bielefeld University