’Bursting With Activities‘: Impression Management as Edu-Business in School-Age Educare

Abstract

Starting from an understanding of contemporary society as occupied with a dominant trend in image-boosting, the study explores how school-age educare centers engage in edu-business when promoting themselves through self-presentations on their websites. Using a qualitative method with an analytical attention directed towards unexpected angles, these self-presentations are problematized in terms of discursive impression management and with a focus on how messages are communicated by using different discursive resources to make the presentations trustworthy and selling. The edubusiness logic found on the websites is not primarily about competition between different school-age educare centers, but is instead about competition between compulsory school and school-age educare, as well as the choice to participate or not in the education offered in the school-age educare centers.