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The Governing-Evaluation-Knowledge Nexus
This Open Access book analyses the interplay between governing, evaluation and knowledge with an empirical focus on Swedish higher education. It investigates the origins, logics, and mechanisms of evaluation and quality assurance reforms and their dynamic interactions with institutional, national and European policy contexts. The chapters report findings from extensive empirical studies that offer detailed insight into the work of governing in higher education, by giving voice to actors at various levels and positions including the ministry, national agency and University employees. Central themes include the influence of European policy, changing system designs, media relations and quality assurance enactments in University institutions. The book also explores the ways in which an emerging professional cadre, labelled qualocrats, enacts and mediates evaluation and quality assurance policy and practice. Taken together, the expanding evaluation machinery in Swedish higher education highlights the pivotal role of knowledge as a governing resource, and points to special features of evaluation as a particular form of practice that makes knowledge work for governing.
Governing by Inspection
In recent decades, governing practices in education have become highly contradictory: deregulation and decentralisation are accompanied by re-regulation and increased centralisation, contributing to considerable governing tensions in and across different national systems and within the emergent European education policy space. On the one hand there is the persistence of performance monitoring through target-setting, indicators and benchmarks, and on the other, the promotion of self-evaluation and ‘light touch’ regulation that express a ‘softer’ governance turn, and promote self-regulation as the best basis for constant improvement. Drawing on research undertaken into three national s...
Promoting Active Citizenship
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book analyses the considerable variation in the shares of private provision for core services in education, health and social services, in the Scandinavian countries. The chapters compare countries, service areas, and the for-profit, non-profit and public sectors. Each focuses on different levels of change: the mix of welfare providers, national laws and regulations, governance in municipalities, nursing homes and schools, and finally, the consequences experienced by the users of the services. The authors ask which combinations of governance structures, service sector providers, and user choice give the best results for active citizenship. Promoting Active Citizenship will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including Public Administration and Management, Non-Profit Management, Social Policy, Innovation in Public Service, Social Care and Education and School Research.
Tracking Discourses
Written by researchers from a wide variety of disciplines, this report explores the two most influential theoretical discourse traditions, namely Discourse Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis. Based on numerous Swedish and Scandinavian case studies, this account reveals the usefulness of the study of discourse and exemplifies how the two discourse analytical perspectives can be combined to offer diverse and problem-oriented strategies in the study of politics, identity, and social change.
Contesting Nordicness
The terms ‘Nordic’ and ‘Scandinavian’ are widely used to refer to the politics, society and culture of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. But why have people felt the need to frame things as Nordic and why has the adjective Nordic become so prominent? This book adopts a rhetorical approach, analysing the speech acts which have shaped the meanings of the term. What do the different terms Nordic and Scandinavian have in common, and how have the uses of these terms changed in different historical periods? What accounts for the apparent upsurge in uses of the rhetoric of Nordicness in the 2010s? Drawing on eight case studies of the uses of Nordic and Scandinavian from the nine...
Scrutinising the Nordic Dimension in Education
This edited volume scrutinises the Nordic dimension within education and how this notion affects, frames and sets direction for school and education in policy, practice and educational research. The book interrogates what unites and divides Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden and analyses how the notion of the Nordic dimension has become conceptualised and institutionalised in different educational settings. Comparative studies of national education policies and practice across these five small North European countries – and Scotland as a case beyond – explore how the Nordic dimension relates to national, regional and transnational collaborations. Further, the book queries the d...
A Loud but Noisy Signal?
Explores how public opinion affects policy-making in education and the conditions that make party and interest groups politics matter more.
Children, Families, and States
Due to the demand for flexible working hours and employees who are available around the clock, the time patterns of childcare and schooling have increasingly become a political issue. Comparing the development of different “time policies” of half-day and all-day provisions in a variety of Eastern and Western European countries since the end of World War II, this innovative volume brings together internationally known experts from the fields of comparative education, history, and the social and political sciences, and makes a significant contribution to this new interdisciplinary field of comparative study.
Interdisciplinary Sustainability Education
This volume calls for a reevaluation of internationalization, focused on faculty and curriculum design of interdisciplinary perspectives on sustainability education. The contributing authors reflect on the transformative intercultural experiences that drove their internationalized course redesigns. The chapters provide a blueprint for interdisciplinary course designs—many of which employ Collaborative Online Intercultural Learning (COIL)—which embed intercultural experiences into their pedagogies. Building on Zhang and Gee’s (2023) theory of learning as a Design Experience, the contributors describe active pedagogies which create a culture of community and caring to address perspective...
Privatization of Early Childhood Education and Care in Nordic Countries
This book explores the increasing role of private providers in early childhood education and care (ECEC) as they become a core part of the Nordic welfare model—one that once rejected for-profit involvement in public welfare. Within this context, ECEC has become the key battleground over private providers’ role in the welfare system. Chapters compare five Nordic countries: Iceland, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, to discuss possible benefits from having different types of providers—public, nonprofit, and for-profit—in the welfare mix. To conclude, the authors also provide a comparative perspective on governance of the ECEC sector and on the development and functions of the Nordic welfare model.
