Neoliberalism and Market Forces in Education provides a wide perspective on the dramatic transformation of education policy in Sweden that has taken place during the last 30 years, with a specific focus on marketization. The marketization of education in Sweden is set in the wider international context of changes in education systems. Markets have shown themselves to be very poor arbiters of justice and equity in education. This chapter shows one example.

Ethical appraisal boards are often argued as being modelled on utilitarian ethical conventions and as operating from a perspective of national political sovereignty that is potentially marginalising and possibly even harmful toward critical qualitative educational research, particularly ethnography. However the argument we advance is that the legislative responsibility of human rights in research shouldn’t be confused with unnecessary bureaucratic intervention, for although the work of ethical appraisal can be experienced as intrusive, threatening toward researcher autonomy and professionalism and unnecessarily bureaucratic, using qualitative research methods to elicit people’s perspectives on their environment is not uncomplicated from the perspectives of human rights, not the least those of young people in school. This tension between a notion of imposed bureaucracy and a necessary protection of rights is considered in the present chapter, which tries to bring a balanced critique of the work of ethical appraisal into view by keeping sight of the value of appraisal without denying that there are some potentially troubling tensions.

From existing research, we know segregation in poverty-intensive and immigrant-dense suburban spaces cannot be easily dissociated from educational inequality and exclusion. Our aim in this paper is to explore the link between urban segregation, social deprivation, migration and education by bringing together the findings from several ethnographic studies conducted in Europe. The starting point for our discussion is the findings from one meta-ethnogaphy which examined youth experiences of territorial stigmatisation, ethnification of poverty and educational inequality in economically challenged residential areas in Nordic cities. Our analysis has attempted to synthesise the findings from that study with those from ethnographies conducted in England and Germany. Results show how formal education is not only failing to contribute to the disruption of the processes which sustain social segregation, poverty and territorial stigmatisation but it is itself subjected to those. We argue that the value of education when this is conceptualised as commodity and promoted in the context of a market economy cannot but be at least partially dependent upon the inequality in its provision.

In its most characteristic form ethnography is usually described as participant observation that involves objectively; and without any political interests in changing the course of history by either affecting the unfolding of events or influencing peoples understanding and self-understanding; participating in people’s lives, watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions and then writing about that which you believe to be most interesting for another specified group. From a critical ethnographic perspective, in today’s presentation I will challenge some of these ideas….

In the presentation I will support the commitment toward participation, interaction and learning from informants in their everyday lives as important. Participant observation and involvement is important as it allows research(ers) to get up close to sites of practice and interaction in order to generate a first-hand experience based account of what is involved in and is understood to shape day to day activities, experiences and understandings. It allows learning from communities of practice on a daily basis in other words, as class cultures with unique, self-valorizing, and expressive (symbolic) properties and it allows exploration of how meaning and action can be understood in association with self-reflection within wider historical structural forces and in terms of their local concrete lived and spoken characteristics. However, whilst admitting to the value of participant observation in ethnography, I want to point out at the same time that the history of ethnography as socio-cultural participant observation is not a wholly innocent one and that ethnographic research also shows a multiplicity of forms of praxis, some of which take serious issue with ideas such as researcher impartiality and neutrality, by making a claim instead for a commitment toward engagement, empathy, critique and feedback in the interests of social and educational transformation.

Der Beitrag basiert auf einer Meta-Analyse ethnographischer Studien zu den Auswirkungen von auf Individualisierung ausgerichteten Programmatiken und Politiken auf schwedische Schulen und Hochschulen und fokussiert die Themen Inklusion und Milieu/Klasse im schwedischen Bildungssystem. Nach einer Einführung in die Veränderungen im schwedischen Bildungssystem werden der methodische Zugang und die Ergebnisse der Studie vorgestellt. Insbesondere werden Spannungen zwischen dem Inklusionsanspruch einerseits sowie Individualisierungs- und Privatisierungstendenzen andererseits identifiziert. Vor dem Hintergrund einer fortgesetzten Reproduktion von Ungleichheitsverhältnissen im Zuge von Individualisierungsprozessen wird besondere Aufmerksamkeit auf diesen Aspekt gelegt.

Based on a meta-analysis of ethnographic research about the impacts of individualisation policies in Swedish schools and higher education, this paper examines issues of inclusion and social class in the Swedish education system. After an introduction into changes in the Swedish education system and the method of meta-ethnography, we will characterise the meta-ethnographical analysis undertaken and present a discussion of its results. Tensions between claims of educational inclusion and tendencies of individualisation and privatisation are identified. Specific attention is drawn to issues of social class due to a further un-evening in the education system as a result of individualisation.

This article is based on a meta-ethnographic analysis of educational research from rural and urban areas in Finland, Norway and Sweden following the reorganisation of educational supply there in line with market policies. Edward Soja’s concept of spatial justice shapes the analysis. Using meta-ethnography, we try to present a contextualising narrative account of spatial justice and injustice in the education systems in the three countries. Thirty-one Nordic ethnographic publications (a mix of monographs, book chapters and articles) have been used in the meta-analysis. Just over half of them come from Sweden, and most are from urban education studies. The other half are relatively evenly divided between Norway and Finland. All were published between 2000 and 2017. Sweden represents an extreme position in relation to the new politics of education markets. Its promotion of school choice and schools-for-profit has attracted significant attention from ethnographic researchers in recent decades and is given particular attention in the article.

This article focuses on how responsibilities and tasks have been allocated between preschool teachers and child-care workers some years after the revision of the Swedish National Education Act and the preschool curriculum in 2010, in which the preschool staffs responsibility was clarified. The revision intended to strengthen the educational quality in preschool by providing preschool teachers with an increased responsibility for the educational activities carried out by preschool teams. Our overall aim was to investigate whether the revision has led to a redistribution of responsibilities and/or tasks in the everyday preschool practice carried through by preschool teams consisting of preschool teachers and child-care workers. The investigation is grounded through observations of the daily work of four mixed teams and analyses of local documents, field conversations and interviews with the team members and their heads. Due to the results there has been some redistribution of responsibilities and tasks. For instance, all the heads have made organizational changes in order to enable preschool teachers to take greater responsibility for educational activities and their quality, which in turn resulted in a more hierarchical organization. The article discusses the complexity associated with the interpretation and implementation of an educational reform and its effects.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in six different types of rural area and their schools in different parts of Sweden, this article identifies how rural schools relate to the local place and discusses some of the educational implications from this. Recurrent references to the local community were present in some schools and people there explicitly positioned themselves in the local rural context and valorised rurality positively in education exchanges, content and interactions, with positive effects on young people’s experiences of participation and inclusion. These factors tended to occur in sparsely populated areas. An emphasis on nature and its value as materially vital in people’s lives was present as was a critique of middle-class metrocentricity. Such values and critique seemed to be absent in other areas, where rurality was instead often represented along the metrocentric lines of a residual space in modernizing societies.