The Emergence and Structuring of the Global Education Industry: Toward an Analytical Framework

• In Event: The Global Education Industry: Emerging Edu-Businesses and Education Markets

Abstract

This paper examines the rise of the global education industry in both OECD countries and in developing countries. Education is a very broad sector that faces an increasing and variegated global demand at many levels. This makes education an increasingly attractive sector for a range of business actors and service providers, including transnational corporations, consultancy firms, corporate foundations, international schools and universities, and financial agencies (Ball 2012). The political and economic activities of this amalgam of actors, despite not being necessarily coordinated, contribute to constructing education as an emerging industry sector. The construction of education as an increasingly globalized industry sector is an economic project with clear political and cultural implications (Labaree 2007). To advance such a project, business-based agents with the collaboration of a range of state actors and international organizations need to, on the one hand, advance more market-oriented governance structures, rules and norms in the education sector and, on the other, generate new profitable educational services and/or transform traditionally de-commodified services into profitable ones.

This paper has three main objectives. First, it defines the phenomenon of the global education industry and provides data on a range of indicators that show the international expansion and growth of this emerging phenomenon. These data come from secondary sources such as the reports on current trends in the education industry published by GSV-Advisors or BMO Capital Markets. Second, it identifies and systematizes the factors and conditions that are behind the emergence and expansion of the education industry in a broad range of activities and territories, according to recent literature on education globalization and the marketization of education. Third, it provides a conceptual and theoretical framework to analyze the changing nature and the structural forces underpinning the global education industry as well as their particular effects in the politics of education internationally. This framework, which is grounded in sociology of markets literature, considers that there are three main forces that are particularly relevant in structuring emerging social fields, such as the global education industry, namely networks, cognitive frames and institutions (Beckert 2010). In tune with the panel structure, the paper reflects on two different levels of engagement between global business and education. They are, on the one hand, the role of corporate actors in selling educational reform packages and related services (including curriculum development, test preparation, and teacher training services) to governments and, on the other, the role of corporations and philanthropies in the governance of education and, more broadly speaking, in the configuration of education agendas and preferences.

Ball, Stephen. 2012. Global Education Inc.: New Policy Networks and the Neo-Liberal Imaginary. London: Routledge.

Beckert, J. (2010). How Do Fields Change? The Interrelations of Institutions, Networks, and Cognition in the Dynamics of Markets
. Organization Studies 2010; 31; 605-627.

Labaree, D. F. (2007). Education, Markets, and the Public Good: The Selected Works of David F. Labaree. New York: Routledge.

Author

• Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona