This book elaborates on and critiques the global neoliberal reform movement in higher education in university contexts in Ethiopia, South Africa, Sweden, and the USA in two distinct ways.  Firstly, by showing both the constitutive form and deprecating effects of global neoliberal reforms on university fields through the adoption, and consequences of academic capitalism and the dominance of corporate governance strategies. Secondly, by identifying and critically analysing the ways academics maintain and promote professional agendas for and against academic capitalism, by means of strategies of accommodation, ambivalence, resilience, and resistance, respectively that together illustrate:  

The dominant forms of conformity toward academic capitalism from academics and A volume of ambivalence, a significant measure of moral outrage, and the development of strategies of resilience and resistance toward the neoliberal project of academic capitalism in higher education. The book also problematizes resilience as protective and adaptive in its relationship to academic capitalism, before foregrounding the moral foundations of resistance toward the proto-capitalistic transformation of universities. This is illustrated by local efforts to protect important constitutive elements of a moral education system from economic control and exploitation. In this way, the book provides examples of erudite opposition to and critique of the marketization of higher education in general and the creation of selfish, ego-centric and narcistic individuals through the education system. In addition to this, by using examples from Ethiopia, South Africa and Sweden, the work critically reviews linguistic colonialism and the efforts for decolonizing national/local languages. 

The book is a valuable academic resource to students from advanced levels upwards in higher education in different subject fields including education and education work, didactics and higher education policy and politics.

Global education policies make a commitment to inclusive education, yet initial teacher education seems to struggle in preparing teachers for this task. We explore this matter in the present article. Life stories, participant observation and individual interviews over a period of two years with 28 preservice specialist teachers in an ongoing ethnographic study provide the data. The findings describe the presence of hegemonic ways of thinking, influenced by neoliberal principles, that have shaped conceptions of inclusive education. This hegemonic thinking is based on a deficit model of schooling that encourages the practice of exclusionary teaching methods rather than inclusive education. The article discusses the implications of this for initial teacher education and education for teaching in inclusive schools. 

For this new issue, JPHE, Vol. 6 No. 5 (2024), we have selected seven papers that we think illustrate the core of the journal. We have also asked three of JPHE’s distinguished Editorial Board members to summarise and comment on three of the 13 issues we have produced since we started. They were invited to select one issue each. The intention is to show readers, reviewers, and authors the high quality we represent, but also the variety and creativity of the papers we produce.

This article derives from ongoing higher education governance research in Sweden using a mix of ethnographic methodologies and data to explore and analyse patterns of gender and class inequality and injustice. The article has very specific data comprising two STEM doctoral appointment procedures together and uses a particular methodology called Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA). It raises questions relating to potential discrimination and injustice in the appointment procedure, including pure fabrication related to applicants’ competences and symbolic violence. Such violations are not uncommon in STEM, particularly toward women according to previous research, both within the ongoing project and by other researchers. Internal governance structures and procedures should anticipate and combat these tendencies. The article indicates that this did not happen in relation to the investigated appointment processes. 

Against the backdrop of global convergences in education reforms, a growing focus on teacher competences has emerged in European policy discourses about teacher professionalism and professional learning and development that has driven an expanding international and national CPD market involving both state and private operators. Developments in Sweden are an example, and the aim of this article is to identify and explore the discourses on teacher professional learning that seem to proliferate on this newly emerged and expanding market and their connections with and consequences for teacher professionalism. Two sets of data have fed the analysis. These are (a) CPD invoices and (b) interviews with school principals. The analysis indicates that the dominant discourses discursively shape teacher professionalism in relation to ideas about teachers as learners as collegial consumers of knowledge. Policy recommendations about peer learning become a subordinated element of a dominant discourse that prioritises and privileges the agency of knowledge producers, such as consultancies, compared to other actors as intermediaries. Commodification is a new key intermediary process in professional learning for teacher professional development. 

This article reveals national-authority-endorsed privatisation of teachers’ continuing professional development (CPD) in the wake of a shift towards more centralised national interventions in Swedish schools. Drawing on data from the Collaboration for Best School (CBS) initiative, the context of the article is a recent state programme that encourages underperforming schools to collaborate with the Swedish National Agency for Education (SNAE) to raise students’ achievement standards and thereby increase equality within and between schools. Guided by meta-governance theory, our analysis revealed that SNAE operates as a meta-governor on behalf of the state to replace university researchers as CPD providers with specific private-sector actors. The results provide evidence of SNAE-enabled substitution processes through three network governance strategies: 1) hidden and authorised substitution, 2) trust building and hybrid participation, and 3) collective reproduction and solutionism. Taken together, these governance strategies reflect national-authority-endorsed privatisation in action, suggesting that SNAE primarily operates as an ideology-driven conduit for private economic interests. The article concludes with a call for new collaborative and autonomous implementation strategies for teachers’ CPD that can further the interests of the teaching profession.

This article reveals national-authority-endorsed privatisation of teachers’ continuing professional development (CPD) in the wake of a shift towards more centralised national interventions in Swedish schools. Drawing on data from the Collaboration for Best School (CBS) initiative, the context of the article is a recent state programme that encourages underperforming schools to collaborate with the Swedish National Agency for Education (SNAE) to raise students’ achievement standards and thereby increase equality within and between schools. Guided by meta-governance theory, our analysis revealed that SNAE operates as a meta-governor on behalf of the state to replace university researchers as CPD providers with specific private-sector actors. The results provide evidence of SNAE-enabled substitution processes through three network governance strategies: 1) hidden and authorised substitution, 2) trust building and hybrid participation, and 3) collective reproduction and solutionism. Taken together, these governance strategies reflect national-authority-endorsed privatisation in action, suggesting that SNAE primarily operates as an ideology-driven conduit for private economic interests. The article concludes with a call for new collaborative and autonomous implementation strategies for teachers’ CPD that can further the interests of the teaching profession.

This article uses meta-ethnography to identify the challenges of working in solidarity with the experiences and interests of marginalised and exploited social groups. It focuses on what the main challenges seem to be, and on how to overcome them in struggles to change education in just directions by means of educational research. It is therefore a paper of interest from a methodological and a research political perspective relating to how critical researchers challenge the status quo and undermine the dominant hegemony in education and education policy in their research. A clear message from the analysis concerns the importance of understanding of the ontological class position of research for change and what to do in research in the interests of justice based on this understanding. Another message relates to the subjective and objective sides of transformative action, and a third a two directional threat towards it. 

This study explores the integration of migrants in education and the labour market from the perspectives of professionals working with young migrants in Swedish rural municipalities. It compares interview data referring to the situation during the refugee crisis in 2015 with data referring to the period 2019–2022. It addresses the organisation of teaching, how professionals talked about integration in relation to the local labour market and how integration-related practices and discourses developed from 2015 to 2022. The findings indicate a major change over time in the educational integration strategies and practices. Migrant children were mainly taught in separate preparatory classes in 2015, but by 2019–2022 there was a general aim to integrate them rapidly in regular classes. In terms of labour market integration there was also a discursive change. In 2015 the main hope was that the migrants’ reception would create short- and long-term jobs for the local population and contribute to the survival of local services and life. In contrast, in 2019–2022 the main expressed hope was that migrants would stay permanently and contribute productively to their new societies’ labour forces.