This article explores how a growing apparatus of edupreneurial actors offers solutions for the current ‘school crisis’ and how these commercial actors become taken for granted in the public school system. The Swedish case is interesting, as it involves a once-strong welfare state that is now associated with both the neoliberal discourse of competition and the outsourcing of policy work. Two examples – research-based education and the digitalization of education – serve to illustrate how a crisis narrative is translated into edupreneurial business ideas and how companies become established in the edupreneurial market through ‘public/private statework’. Bacchi’s notion of problematization is used to analyse processes through which the crisis has become a hegemonic truth and thus an obvious object for (business) intervention. In addition, this study shows how the commodification of school limits what becomes the ‘research base’ for schooling. The results point to the importance of how the problem is constructed and what is represented (or not) in this problematization process, for example, how critical research is left out. Another important conclusion is that the crisis narrative and policy reforms nurture the existence of these private companies.

One of the most important aims of schooling is to give all children an equal education. Despite this, social differences continue to be reproduced and earlier studies show that there is a relationship between low socioeconomic background of students and low achievement in science education. Building upon sociological frameworks (foremost Bourdieu and Bernstein) the overall aim of this thesis was to contribute to a more complex description and analysis of inequalities in education, focusing on social class in the science classroom. Inspired by an ethnographic approach, the data was produced in a Swedish compulsory school. The students, aged fourteen and fifteen, were followed during a five week unit on physics. Firstly, descriptions and analyses revealed that the knowledge threshold in the classroom was lowered. This was done in hidden negotiations between the students, the teacher, the sociohistorical legacy of science education, and a social discourse. It created a knowledge threshold which was altered not only for students from lower classes but for all the students in the classroom. Secondly, the communication showed that being able to translate, interpret and adapt to new or changed ways of talking increased the possibilities of understanding what ways of talking and acting that were valid or not. Ways of talking were created and influenced in an intricate interplay between the practices in the classroom, the teacher, and the students often in hidden negotiations. Together they constructed what ways of talking that was valued. For example, in strongly controlled dialogues, more students could be heard and evaluated. However, it became a type of communication based on the lowest common denominator that in the long term might exclude all students. Thirdly, laboratory work lessons could be filled with curiosity and exciting challenges. However, the regulative discourse totally overrode the instructional discourse and became decisive. In addition, laboratory work in this classroom was a social process that needed and was expected to be performed in groups. This became problematic since the grades were awarded to individuals. Moreover, the reactions and the effects of a hierarchical class-marking group process became decisive. The groups became to some extent safe havens for the students, on the other hand, undermined their chances in the classroom. Science learning and teaching in this classroom was a social process and could not be correlated to, for example, inborn facilities per se nor to certain agents in the field. Social class was manifested in the science class, for instance in the dialogues or in laboratory work always performed in groups. Social class must be understood as collective processes and in relationship with, for example, the value that science is ascribed.

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This paper explores educational trade fairs as part of the contemporary networked governance of public sector education. The focus is on the forms and functions of network governance in educational trade fairs and how different powers of private and public networking actors and ideas are played out, including the wider implications for education. Based on an event ethnographic case study of a Nordic educational technology fair, the study identifies three significant forms of how network governance powers are constituted: through consensual culture, blurred public-private actor roles, and market individualised addresses. Together this network governance has de-politicising effects that mask power imbalances and evoke democratic challenges for public sector education. The paper discusses how diffused market networking powers shape a national public education sector, and the forms of resistance and responsibilities within such governance. The merits of in-depth process-based event ethnography, which includes social media data, are raised and problematised.