Abstract
Drawing on the case of upper secondary education in Stockholm, this article analyses school-based responses to a superimposed market and how this is related to social stratification. Furthermore, schools’ and pupils’ encounters with the market are analysed in relation to Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital and strategy. Methodologically, the quantitative method of correspondence analysis is combined with semi-structured interviews with senior administrative officers and principals. Analysis shows how the overarching structure of this particular field – a historically pre-existing social order of upper secondary education in Stockholm – is related to the complex set of strategies that schools develop in the school market. Schools located at the elite pole of the field, serving the educational needs of a small minority of either the wealthy or the culturally rich upper middle class, are less affected by marketization. In the most populous social mid-tier of the field, schools are more likely to turn education into a mass-produced commodity, while schools at the socially dominated pole, without a competitive product, are more exposed to the market’s stratifying impact.
Highlights
Over the last two decades Swedish education has gone through an extensive transformation from being one of the world’s most egalitarian education systems into a decentralized and deregulated market in both primary and secondary education characterized by a publicly funded voucher system, free school choice and the right to run schools as commercial enterprises (Wiborg 2015).These policies offered favourable conditions for a previously non-existent educational market to emerge in Stockholm, a densely populated region with an already socially stratified school system related to increasing housing segregation
In the following quote the principal of NTI elaborates on the school’s market shares with regard to study programmes and profiled branches: When we established our technology programmes with a focus on media, we got 8.9 per cent of all applicants in the entire Stockholm County for the Technology Study programme and if we only look at independent schools with that programme, we have 25 per cent of the market. (School principal of NTI, a school managed by the for-profit company Academedia)
The study presented in this article contributes to the body of research on marketization, school choice and school response with an original relational approach that empirically explores how a superimposed market unfolds in the social field that both schools and families constitute
Summary
Over the last two decades Swedish education has gone through an extensive transformation from being one of the world’s most egalitarian education systems into a decentralized and deregulated market in both primary and secondary education characterized by a publicly funded voucher system, free school choice and the right to run schools as commercial enterprises (Wiborg 2015).These policies offered favourable conditions for a previously non-existent educational market to emerge in Stockholm, a densely populated region with an already socially stratified school system related to increasing housing segregation. Their supply of study programmes and their audiences are based here on the notion of a field, or, more generally put, a social space in which educational institutions occupy different positions.
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