Joakim Lindgren

Mediating school inspection - Key dimensions and keywords in agency text production 2003-2010

This paper reports on an analysis of how school inspection in Sweden – its aims, directions and procedures – is portrayed in texts produced by the responsible national authorities. The study involves a textual analysis of official annual accounts and plans (texts directed to the government, municipalities, schools and the public) produced by the National Agency for Education and the Swedish Schools Inspectorate. The analysis concentrates on key concepts conveying the dominant ideas of inspection and education. The analysis is structured around four dimensions that are based on an understanding of inspection as education governance and on the characteristics of the Swedish education system. The results suggest that the rhetoric and dominant ideas of schools inspection changed when the responsibility for inspection was transferred to the Swedish School Inspectorate in the autumn of 2008. Key concepts before that time are more supportive of schools and municipalities, recognising local conditions. Later, a language with the intention of detecting shortcomings and supporting an ideology of individual rights and juridification is apparent.

In the Public Eye: Swedish School Inspection and Local Newspapers: Exploring the Audit-Media Relationship.

This paper focuses on the dual dependencies apparent at the intersection of the media society and the audit society by empirically exploring and discussing the relationship between Swedish local newspaper coverage and school inspection activities. The research questions pertain to the Inspectorate’s media strategy, how inspection is represented and conveyed, the messages sent, and who gets to speak. Literature on governance, and the role and function of the media in the wider audit society is applied theoretically. Four municipalities were selected to represent different demographical and economical structures and previous inspection experiences. The empirical material includes interviews with leading inspection officers and newspaper articles. The local newspapers portray the Inspectorate as a legitimate institution acting on behalf of and protecting the public, and even more so, the educational consumer. The current format used by the Inspectorate – a succinct reporting only on deviations – links with a favored format of the media, reinforcing the tight media–inspection relationship and leading to implications for education governance and policy.

“Great Location, Beautiful Surroundings!” Making Sense of Information Materials Intended as Guidance for School Choice

Following international trends during the last decades of the 20th century mechanisms of marketization, freedom of choice, and competition were introduced into the Swedish compulsory school system, thereby transforming it into one of the most de‐regularized in the world. The overall aim of the pilot study presented here is to shed light on a phenomenon that has occurred as an effect of the shift in policy—namely on the information or marketing material which is directed from schools to families as guidance for school choice. The primary aim is to generate a conceptual basis for further research into the choice‐related communication between schools and families. The information material analyzed consists of three annual volumes of a brochure, produced by the local education office in a middle‐sized Swedish city area. Aside from picturing the content in terms of 145 symbolic expressions, sorted into 10 thematic categories, the results show how the material can be understood as made up of emotional imageries that give little guidance but that carry salvation stories on education and learning that have a transformative potential, as it opens up a new space for the governing of institutions and individuals.

Mobilities of Youth: Social and Spatial Trajectories in a Segregated Sweden.

This article explores youth mobilities in three geographic and socio-economically diverse Swedish contexts. The concept of mobility has become an important feature of individualistic discourses of responsibility relating to inclusion, lifelong learning and self-regulating entrepreneurial behaviour. This article draws attention to the fact that geographical mobility, as a form of human agency, is closely related to social mobility and hence to both spatial and social inequalities. Using life-history interviews and statistical data, the article explores how space, class and ethnicity are related to education and social inclusion and exclusion as young people are spatially situated yet move, desire to move, dream about moving, seek to move and fail to move, as they migrate through, in and out of social communities. The analysis displays how these mobilities are framed by local traditions and circumstances that both enable and restrict. Such mobility might involve processes of personal development and learning, and be the calculated consequence of each individuals chosen life-career. However, mobility might also arise as flight from a stigmatised place. In these cases, refusal to move can also be seen as a form of resistance. Once we recognize that place and mobility are fundamental attributes of all identities, we open the door for future studies addressing these issues in almost any field. (Easthope, 2009, p. 78)

Diaspora biographies balancing ideology and utopia : On future orientations of immigrant youth in a segregated Sweden

This is an article on the utopian life projects of immigrant youth in a disadvantaged Swedish community. These projects are analyzed through the concept of utopian diaspora biography which describes a process whereby a high level of aspiration concerning education and labour is accumulated as a consequence of the social, temporal and spatial dynamic of the biography. Utopian diaspora biographies, it is suggested, are fragile projects that reproduce political notions of meritocratic social mobility and individual agency. However, they may also explore individual possibilities and thereby challenge hierarchies in a segregated education and labour market. The risks and potentials associated with these modernist projects are analyzed through Ricoeur’s (1986) thoughts on ideology and utopia. It is suggested that the diaspora condition implies a movement between different internal systems of ideology and utopia — between a modern, Fordist system and a late modern, post-Fordist version. The article is based on life history interviews.

Biography as Education Governance.

This paper examines the increasing interest of Swedish schools to construct, analyze, assess and control the individual progression and social integration of students using biographical registers. I argue that this tendency—involving biography as a form of governance—can be seen as a revision of early 20th-century biographical research by the Chicago School of Sociology. In this paper I consider the theoretical, methodological and political background of the Chicago work in order to compare it to the Swedish use of student biographies. Their current use involves a twofold subjectification of students—as “objects” of assessment and as “relays” for assessment. Finally, this subjectivity is understood in relation to international initiatives in education restructuring where new ways of governing—often labeled as progressive—impose social control, heighten individual responsibility and, not least, create new forms of social exclusion.

Spaces of social inclusion and exclusion—A spatial approach to education restructuring

The decentralised Swedish school system has become increasingly directed to the construction of self-governing and responsible pedagogic identities that are supposed to enable integration and participation. Drawing on the work of the geographer Edward W. Soja, I acknowledge how material and symbolic spatialisation intersect with the local production of included and excluded identities in the context of restructuring education. The paper is based on a study in two areas in a segregated Swedish city; one disadvantaged and one advantaged area. I use a wide range of data such as policy documents, questionnaire data, longitudinal statistics, interviews with local politicians, school actors and former students. The findings show that former students from the disadvantaged area were more often excluded from further education and were dependent on social welfare to a higher extent. Moreover, they faced low expectations and were simultaneously excluded from new educational processes that explicitly aim at social inclusion. In the paper I discuss how ethical ideals of decentralisation and participation, and the evaluation of such policies in terms of access to further education and work, conceal the local production of excluded identities. This production, I argue, is based on an amalgamation of material conditions and spatial representations.

Learning, coping, adjusting : making school inspections work in Swedish schools

School inspections involve multiple forms of governing. Inspection activities are regulative, inquisitive and meditative and correspondingly initiate different forms of ‘inspection work’ in schools and governing bodies. The aim of this paper is to explore the inspection work in Sweden carried out before, during and after inspection events. This paper is based on interviews with professionals who perform inspection work, such as head teachers and responsible key actors within municipalities and independent school chains; documentation analysis of forms and accounts sent to the Swedish schools’ inspectorate; and observations of inspection events. The results show that inspection work is rendered possible by transparent inspection schemes that govern in advance. Inspection work is geared towards internalising routine evaluative thinking and documentation. Quality assurance, or ‘systematic quality work’, has become the new panacea in the ‘evaluation society’. The inspectees turn their organisations inside out and learn to cope with inspections through adaptation or even strategic behaviour. Coping with inspections also involves the translation of bureaucratic demands and negative feedback into organisational learning.

Knowing inspectors' knowledge : forms and transformations

This chapter focuses on the governing work of Swedish school inspectors with regards to the role and function of knowledge. As professionals, inspectors are situated as relays and brokers of policy standing in contact with both the political arena and practice arenas. School inspectors use and produce knowledge and they rely on, search for, accumulate and communicate different forms of knowledge. In this chapter, we seek to understand knowledge in the inspection context as existing in three phases, namely as embodied, inscribed and enacted (Freeman and Sturdy in Knowledge in policy—embodied, inscribed, enacted, Policy Press, Bristol, pp. 1–17, 2014). The aim is to identify and discuss different phases of knowledge in inspectors’ work by asking how the different forms of embodied, inscribed and enacted knowledge are manifested, incorporated and transformed in the course of inspection. The chapter illustrates how different forms of knowledge are intertwined with issues of legitimacy, accountability and control, which is argued to be important for how inspection and the work of inspectors’ are perceived and judged in different contexts and settings.