Technocentrism and social fields in the Indian EdTech movement: formation, reproduction and resistance

Abstract

All over the globe, educational technology (EdTech) is being sold to schools as a central mechanism for improving access to quality learning for high poverty populations. There is a growing scholarship that interrogates the institutional drivers of the ‘EdTech craze’. Building on this work, this paper examines how technocentrism as a specific strain of neoliberalism is reflected at both the organizational and institutional levels, both by private and public sectors in the case of school education in India. We argue that using institutional theory to explain complex multi-layered reforms means looking in tandem at macro principles defined through interactions in the organizational field and the re-experiencing and transformation of those processes at the micro level.