This article examines the spread of new public management (NPM) across European education\ud systems as it has traversed national boundaries. While recognising the transnational dimensions\ud of the spread of NPM, the authors offer new insights into the importance of national contexts in\ud mediating this development in educational settings by focusing upon NPM within three European\ud countries (England, Italy and Norway). We reveal its recontextualisation in these sites and the\ud interplay between NPM, and local and national conditions. This analysis is underpinned by a theoretical framework that seeks to capture the relationship between education and the state\ud and to reveal tensions produced by NPM both as a shaping force and an entity shaped by local\ud conditions in these contexts. The article concludes by focusing upon the complexities and\ud specificities of NPM recontextualisation in the three countries as a basis for a reflection upon\ud possible future policy trajectories

Contemporary research on the European policy space in education has paid much attention to decentralisation, deregulation and new modalities of privatisation and marketisation, but there is less focus on how these processes and policies are actually played out in education. It is argued that understanding the role of commercial actors, new local and global markets and public-private partnerships in the governing of education becomes increasingly important. The aim of the article is to introduce the special issue on commercialisation of the European Educational Research Journal by discussing some general issues: theoretical and methodological considerations when studying privatisation and commercialisation in the governing of education, conceptual clarifications, and finally, possible themes and topics for study, but also for further debate.

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This article deals with the ‘troubled history’ of head teachers’ evaluation in Italy, as a specific strand of the controversial and fuzzy embedding of New Public Management (NPM) discourse in the Italian education system. Since the 1990s, NPM has shaped both policy agendas and professionals’ subjectivities, leading the way to a process of reculturing and restructuring of education. Drawing on policy texts’ analysis and in-depth interviews with key policy actors and professionals, we focus on the discursive problematisations underpinning the repeated attempts to evaluate heads and their ‘leadership as a lever for improvement’ and their implications in\ud terms of processes of subjectivation. The article offers a descriptive\ud mapping of the entering of NPM in the Italian education system and\ud analyses some ironies of the Italian NPM turn, addressing the paradoxical performative powers of the NPM strategies for the transformation of expertise and the regulation of the activities of professionals

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