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Interagency collaboration among social workers, teachers, and police is key to countering violent extremism in the Nordic countries by securing comprehensive assessment of cases of concern. Yet, previous research indicates that different institutional logics—perceptions of fundamental goals, strategies, and grounds for attention in efforts to counter violent extremists—exist across professions and challenge collaboration and trust building in practice. In this article, we empirically investigate these claims across social workers (n = 1,105), teachers (n = 1,387), and police (n = 1,053) in four Nordic countries: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Using results from online surveys with professionals, we investigate the distribution of a ‘societal security logic’ and a ‘social care logic’ across professions and the degree to which these institutional logics translate into mutual trust. Through a comparison of institutional logics among practitioners with and without practical experience of interagency collaboration, we investigate whether and how institutional logics tend to mix and merge in hybrid organizational spaces. We conclude that differences in institutional logics across professions are differences in degree rather than in kind, but that such differences are important in shaping mutual trust and that experiences of interagency collaboration are correlated with a convergence toward a ‘social care logic’ conception of countering violent extremism.

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The article re-imagines the current developments of Swedish education into a possible future. Historically, education was organized and funded by the state; however, reforms towards privatization in the 1990s implemented school choice, private schools and a tax-financed voucher system with the option of turning profits on education. A new judicial decision enforced the withholding of data on private ownership and economic spending in education from the public, as transparency was deemed to damage the competitiveness of private schools. Hence, generating profits and business advantage are prioritized over public interests as the organization and provision of education is progressively shaped by privatization. These changes are what prompted us to consider ‘what if all education was privatized’? The first part of the article reviews important developments in public education towards privatization and introduces our theoretical framework. The second part draws on aspects of speculative fiction in a dystopian scenario of an imagined educational apocalypse. The scenario starts in contemporary times and ends in 2121 where the education system is dominated by a financial conglomerate called Nescience Ltd. In this technologically advanced society, artificial intelligence systems have replaced educational institutions and teachers. Expensive tuition and fees have made people indebted to Nescience while learning is transformed into the manufacturing of alienated labourers. To understand these economic transitions and the position of Nescience as a knowledge provider in the future, we use the concept of ‘zombification’ to theorize the infection of privatization in the educational sector.