Guaranteeing Desirable Futures: What Schools Offer to Prospective Students When in Mutual Competition
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Jakob Westergren
and
Jonathan Schunnesson
Abstract
In this article we argue that organizational research on competition has left the relation between organizations and consumers largely unaddressed. While marketing scholars have explored how individual organizations try to manipulate the relation with specific groups of consumers, less has been said about how competing organizations collectively form and influence their relation with consumers. This is especially the case in contexts of public services provision, such as education. To explore this relation, we examine how upper secondary schools in a quasi-market fictionalize their offerings to influence students’ desire. By analyzing 117 school descriptions from Stockholm’s (Sweden) upper secondary school market, we identify four ideal types of fictionalized offerings: The Doorman, The Role Model, The Butler, and The Gardener. These fictionalizations perpetuate two consumer fictions, namely desirable futures and identity realization. Through these fictions, prospective students are invited to realize their supposedly incomplete selves. Our research contributes to the organizational study of competition by showing that schools respond to competition by reinforcing a consumption rationality, potentially shaping students’ desire for certain educational qualities. Additionally, we contribute to critical educational research by questioning the assumption that competition fosters innovation.
1 Introduction
Policymakers and scholars often treat competition as a useful tool to increase the variety and quality of goods and services provided by organizations (Le Grand 2009). Even though competition tends to be treated as a naturally occurring process of mutual adaptation between organizations, competition is better understood as an organized – and commonly institutionalized – relationship between actors (Arora-Jonsson et al. 2021). How competing organizations develop a mutual understanding of what they are competing for, and how they are rewarded for successful competitive behavior, has previously been studied (Barnett 2017).
We know considerably less about how competing organizations establish a relation with consumers. Marketing scholars have provided important insights into how individual organizations develop a relation with specific sets of consumers, but the question of how a relation forms between a set of organizations made to compete and their consumers is less developed (Gabriel, Korczynski, and Rieder 2015). It is common to assume that competition encourages organizations to become responsive to consumers’ desire, which, if true, should encourage innovativeness and quality improvement (Turner and Lourenço 2012). Unfortunately, the assumption that organizations respond to consumers’ desire rests on a one-sided view which perpetuates the idea that consumers have given preferences (Bronk and Beckert 2022). Beckert (2021) instead argues that competition gives organizations substantial power to shape consumers’ desire through the creation of fictions which entice consumption.
If we accept Beckert’s assertion that organizations shape consumers’ desire, the use of competition to organize public service provision potentially becomes problematic. Considering the case of education, studies suggest that students as well as parents approach education as a consumption choice (Lubienski 2007) which is used as a means to construct their own individual identities (Lidström, Holm, and Lundström 2014). Exposing schools to competition can therefore influence how young people construct their selves and identities (Pyyry and Sirviö 2024). Unlike organizations supplying consumers with toothpaste, there is endless variety in the dimensions which schools hypothetically could choose to emphasize when constructing their offerings to students. What schools choose to emphasize in their offerings will constitute a formative influence on students’ desire, since consumer audiences are shaped by available offerings (Koçak, Hannan, and Hsu 2009; Hasan and Kumar 2024).
Since parents and students approach choice as a matter of consumption, we should be more concerned about what kinds of offerings schools provide to students when competing. It is frequently assumed that schools try to offer quality education when trying to attract students, but studies indicate that this is not always the case (Mockler, Thompson, and Hogan 2023). Contrary to the envisioned ideal of increased variety and quality of the offerings provided to students, research indicates that competition between schools has a homogenizing effect on the offerings provided (King, Clemens, and Fry 2011). As Lubienski (2006) implies, the homogenizing effect on offerings is likely a result of schools shifting their focus from developing pedagogy to filling classrooms with as many students as possible. Instead of fostering innovativeness, schools seem to adapt to competition in myopic ways (Mockler, Thompson, and Hogan 2023).
Schools can shape parents’ and students’ desire by presenting their offerings as unique and differentiated experiences to be consumed (Reckwitz 2020), which entice parents and students to imagine themselves in a future ideal – yet intangible – state of the world (Beckert 2011). Schools can embed qualities into their offerings which speak to individualistic and particularistic consumer fictions (Beckert 2016, 62), but such qualities must not necessarily be intrinsic traits of education as such. To borrow Beckert’s (2016) terminology, schools can fictionalize their offerings to evoke desire for the ideal in the minds of parents and students. Since consumption choices always hinge on fictions in the minds of consumers, fictionalization is an effective way to shape desire (Beckert 2021). We therefore ask what are the different ways in which schools have fictionalized their offerings?
To investigate our research question, we have chosen to study a critical case – a case of “strategic importance in relation to the general problem” (Flyvbjerg 2006, 229) – in an empirical context where schools are exposed to a high degree of competition on a quasi-market, namely the local upper secondary school market in Stockholm, Sweden (Forsberg 2015). By looking at 117 school descriptions as expressions of school offerings, we identify patterns of fictionalizations among various statements made about what schools offer to students. In our analysis, we find four ideal types of fictionalized offerings which we call The Doorman, The Role Model, The Butler, and The Gardener. In our discussion, we suggest that these four offerings perpetuate two primary fictions, which are guarantee of desirable futures and guarantee of identity realization.
We make two contributions with our work. First, our research contributes to the organizational literature investigating the subjection of public organizations to competition (Arora-Jonsson and Edlund 2024). We contribute primarily by showing that schools respond to competition by constructing offerings which reinforce a consumption rationality in the relation between schools and students. Our contention is that the consumption rationality exhibited in the offerings likely cements a taken-for-granted view of what education is and should be, and it likely influences how individual students construct their own identities as consumers of education. Second, we contribute to critical scholarship in educational research which questions the organizational incentive to innovate through competitive pressures (Mockler, Thompson, and Hogan 2023), a concern which is emerging in research on public services more generally (Hood and Dixon 2015).
2 Schools Attracting Students
In earlier research on the relation between schools and students, attention is often on how parents and students enact school choice (Thelin and Niedomysl 2015). Schools as organizations influencing this choice have historically been blackboxed (Bomark et al. 2019). This is changing as we see a growing literature on supply-side concerns which offers important insights into the behind-the-scenes work of schools trying to influence choice (Wilson and Carlsen 2016). For example, several studies try to map how school leaders conceive of, and respond to, competition (Creed, Jabbar, and Scott 2021; Jabbar 2016). How school leaders perceive of competition in turn influences the content of marketing (Lubienski 2007), which tactics school leaders use to market their schools (Zancajo 2020), and how they work with certain aspects of their offerings such as the development of different programs (Ferry 2014). A few studies highlight how school leaders respond in myopic ways where efforts to improve schools turn into a game of filling classrooms with as many students as possible since ‘every kid is money’ (Jabbar 2015). As suggested by Mockler, Thompson and Hogan (2023), school leaders appear to engage in utility maximization as opposed to educational entrepreneurialism. These studies provide us with two important insights into how schools reason and respond to competition. First, school leaders feel torn in their perceptions and abilities in responding to competition (Holm and Lundström 2011). Second, responses to competition rarely seem to explicitly address pedagogical improvements as a means of attracting students (Lubienski 2006).
A related stream of research has more explicitly probed into how (Johnsson and Lindgren 2010; Wilkins 2012) and where (Dahlstedt and Harling 2017) upper secondary schools try to attract students. These studies problematize whether schools actually provide information or if they simply engage in questionable communication efforts. They also show how communication about schools broadly tends to follow a trend towards individualization. Leaving more general concerns about marketing aside, a few scholars have looked at how schools conceive of themselves in terms of pedagogical identities (Dovemark and Holm 2017; Gustrén 2021), logics (Palme 2008), and orientations towards the job market (Lund 2007).
Although these studies, by and large, address the typical organizational identity concerns of the type “who are we as an organization?”, they do not problematize that schools position themselves as objects for consumption, which parents and students utilize in their own individual identity projects. Moreover, a few of the studies see schools as status- or class-sorting institutions (Forsberg 2018; Dovemark and Nylund 2022), but it is unclear whether these authors consider schools as shaping or satisfying demand. As mentioned in the introduction, it is problematic to assume, or even imply, that school offerings follow from students’ desire because it perpetuates the idea that prospective students – without prior experience of upper secondary education – have given preferences (Bronk and Beckert 2022; Radin 2001). As a case in point, studies show that free choice reduces educational achievement (Abdulkadiroğlu, Pathak, and Walters 2018), thus indicating that students and parents do not know how to choose. It may even imply that some schools offer lower quality as a means of attracting students (Lubienski 2006). These insights bring us to our theoretical approach, which we address next.
3 Fictionalizing School Offerings
As indicated in the introduction, competition refers to a relation in which organizations recognize other organizations as competitors. In this relation the organizations all desire some third party, which is a scarce resource (Arora-Jonsson, Brunsson, and Hasse 2020). In the educational context, this could translate into a relation in which schools all desire to recruit as many students as possible to secure funding. For this relation to become possible in the first place, institutions must transform into organizations (Brunsson and Sahlin-Andersson 2000). Schools must be granted the autonomy to act and decide on their own, with limited bureaucratic directives from above. When institutions turn into organizations, the institution-citizen relation is correspondingly destabilized (Andersen 2020). This historically stable relation is recast in new social relations, such as the one between organization-consumer (Andersen 2020).
An extreme manifestation of the recast social relation between providers of public services and the users of these services is described by Reckwitz (2021, 107), who notes that schools increasingly strive to provide unique and differentiated offerings to attract parents and students seeking individualized and particularized experiences. Teaching, which characterized the institution-citizen relation in the case of education, becomes peripheral to the consumer experience (cf. Andersen 2020; Andersen, Knudsen, and Sandager 2024). This is part of a bigger cultural trend in which organizations attempt to construct various spheres of life as lifestyle choices (Chertkovskaya, Korczynski, and Taylor 2020).
In their role as competing organizations, schools seek to “provide […] what the third party desires” (Christensen and Knudsen 2021, 166). One way of providing what students desire is to influence the relation between schools and students. Put differently, schools can attempt to shape students’ desire. A crucial step in the provision of desirable offerings is for schools to create fictions about the offerings which prospective students find enticing enough to elicit choice. Fiction “pretends a reality where [actors] act as if the described reality were true” (Beckert 2016, 61). To create fictions is to fictionalize, which “allows the attribution of qualities to goods that exist only as imaginaries” (Beckert 2013b, 226). If we combine these insights with theorization on the organization of competition (Christensen and Knudsen 2021), we, in turn, view fictionalizations as fictional statements about an offering which make claims on, or which might form the basis of, a desired third party’s desire.
For example, schools frequently use classroom order as one defining attribute of their offering when communicating with parents and prospective students (Letmark 2022). However, for parents and prospective students it is hard to tell what classroom order means in a specific context for a particular individual prior to attending the focal school. Not only do parents and students likely lack experience with the focal school, but the quality ‘classroom order’ is not an inherent trait of any school. Nonetheless, a fictionalization along the lines of ‘our school is the safest school in this city and you don’t need to worry about bullies here’ could form the basis of a stronger desire for orderly study environments.
Offerings can empirically be seen as the combination of characteristics about a school which schools themselves use in their communication to parents and prospective students, where ‘classroom order’ would be one such characteristic (for a similar approach, see Thelin and Niedomysl 2015; King, Clemens, and Fry 2011). However, we want to theoretically delineate both an offering and the fictionalizations of offerings. We therefore consider school offerings to be constituted by functional, positional, and imaginative elements (Beckert 2011). Any combination of these elements constitutes an offering, but it is primarily the imaginative component which schools can fictionalize due to its association with symbolic, as opposed to functional, qualities (Beckert 2013a). To illustrate with a concrete example, the natural science program in Sweden has a set curriculum, and a student consequently would know, to some extent, what they get in terms of content if they choose to study at such a program. Schools cannot do much about this, and students can easily find information about the program given that the national curriculum is beyond the control of an individual school. This would be one functional quality of a school offering. The natural science program is in Sweden collectively considered an ‘elite’ program, and it is associated with high achieving students and schools offering these programs are often well-reputed (Börjesson et al. 2015). Some students value this kind of status, and schools can, to a limited extent, make use of these collectively perceived symbolic qualities to fictionalize an offering by alluding to fictions about status and popularity.
Finally there is the imaginative element of an offering which contains “symbolic associations with desired events, people, places, or values” (Beckert 2011, 110). Here we could imagine that schools try to incorporate fictions about higher education, high-status jobs, and material gains into the offering. Beckert suggests that the imaginative element can further be broken down into social position, space, and time. Fictionalizations building on time contain statements about desired futures, while fictionalizations building on space contain statements alluding to desired places. Fictionalizations building on social position contain referents to desired social positions or desirable associations to certain people. Within these three imaginative elements of an offering, organizations can embed different forms of identity material (Knights and Morgan 1993; Endrissat, Kärreman, and Noppeney 2017) to entice particular fictions pertaining to social position, space, and time. Such identity material may include, but is not limited to, pleasure and play, participation in activities, morality, experiences addressing the senses, meanings, and stories (Reckwitz 2021).
Having addressed the role of fictionalization and its connection to offerings, we want to highlight four conditions which strengthen the potency of fictionalizations before moving on to our empirical context. First, schools are not entirely free to shape their offerings. Unlike markets for many other goods, there are several regulatory and material constraints to what schools can do, because of official policies (such as national curricula), teacher shortages on the job market, and general workload increases for teachers (Creagh et al. 2023). In other words, the functional element of school offerings is constrained. Another constraint is the many competing frameworks for quality evaluation in education (Lindgren, Hanberger, and Lundström 2016), most of which conceive of pedagogical quality as easily measurable (Lundström 2017). Quality is an elusive and moving target (Bergh 2011), leaving both regulatory bodies (Mufic 2022) and individual schools without means to evaluate pedagogical quality (Hartman 2011). The notion of ‘quality’ therefore turns into a generous umbrella term containing proxies, such as the socioeconomic composition of a school (Ladd 2002). Second, prospective students which schools aim to attract constitute a non-expert audience (Werron 2015). Beckert (2020, 287) suggests that “Experts often have a better understanding of actual material differences, making consumers vulnerable to marketing strategies that build on symbolic value”. The lack of experience may even contribute to students’ desire for particular offerings (Beckert 2021). Third, and related to the first and second condition, fictionalization is made possible when the quality of an offering is difficult to decipher due to problems of evaluation (Nelson 1970), lack of widely agreed upon quality standards, or what is perceived as quality is not inherent to the good itself (Beckert 2020), such as symbolic qualities. Fourth and final, although schools may be limited in creating differentiated offerings, they are organizations with the capability to use language authoritatively. Drawing inspiration from philosophy of language, we need to understand language as something more than an innocent presentation of information. By virtue of being uttered by an authority, language performs the fictionalization as it carries an illocutionary force (Austin 1975), meaning that there is a promise or assertation contained in the utterance.
It is crucial to keep in mind that just like there are constraints in terms of what schools can do about the functional element of their offering, there are also normative constraints limiting what we could expect schools to communicate about the imaginative element of an offering, even if schools are compelled to ‘do things differently’ (cf. King, Clemens, and Fry 2011). Attempts at differentiation may potentially put actors outside the audience’s field of comparison (Karpik 2010, 172), because the lack of common characteristics displayed will make the actor unintelligible in relation to those actors who conform to standard norms and practices (Glynn and Abzug 2002; Zuckerman 1999). Organizations are, therefore, driven to strike a balance between differentiation and conformity (Blomgren, Hedmo, and Waks 2016). This likely limits the variation of fictionalizations in specific educational markets.
4 Methods
4.1 The Quasi-Market for Schools in Stockholm
To resolve our question, what are the different ways in which schools have fictionalized their offerings, we utilize the competitive and delineated market for upper secondary schools in Stockholm, Sweden (Forsberg 2018). Upper secondary school comprises grades 10–12. Although it is non-compulsory, attendance is ubiquitous. As suggested by Forsberg (2015, 13), if one wants to understand the highly marketized educational system in Sweden, then Stockholm is of central importance to study given that this particular market was the fastest to deregulate following the independent school reform of 1992 (Government Bill 1991/92:95), and it is home to the biggest share of private schools among the different Swedish school markets. We therefore treat Stockholm as a critical case useful for revealing insights about the peculiarities of marketized educational systems (Flyvbjerg 2006). That is to say, Stockholm may not be representative of all local markets throughout Sweden, yet will be symptomatic of significant trends in marketized educational systems. What is observed in a critical case is likely to be observed in other less critical cases as well (Flyvbjerg 2006). In what follows we will briefly address some key characteristics of the context in which this case is situated. Thereafter we address our reasoning when choosing a relevant data source to get a satisfying and structured overview of the studied school market.
Although local differences exist in how school choice is organized across Sweden (Sjögren 2023; Arora-Jonsson and Edlund 2024), most schools compete on a quasi-market. Consumers and producers are separated on quasi-markets, since consumers are parents and prospective students, producers are schools, while either the state or municipalities separate consumers and producers as payers (Arora-Jonsson and Edlund 2024). Schools compete by attracting as many students as possible since students are allowed to choose school, and schools receive a set voucher per student from the municipality. It is a fairly standardized fee which the local municipality decides based on costs for a student in a public school. With a few exceptions, schools are not allowed to choose which students to admit since a guiding principle in the school laws is that schools must provide equal opportunity for schooling for all. Admission is therefore typically based on grades from primary school. A second characteristic of the studied context is the presence of for-profit actors, who are not limited by scale nor ownership restrictions (Skyrman et al. 2022). For example, foreign ownership of for-profit chain schools is not uncommon (Legge et al. 2023), and many Swedish for-profit school providers export their pedagogical concepts abroad (Rönnberg et al. 2022). Several of the bigger for-profit actors are also listed on the stock market (Rönnberg, Benerdal, and Carlbaum 2020). For present purposes, we treat the presence of for-profit schools as an expression of the peculiarity of competition on the quasi-market for education. A third and final characteristic of the Swedish context is that competition has, depending on the methods applied, made little to no difference on students’ educational achievements (Edmark, Frölich, and Wondratschek 2014; Hinnerich and Vlachos 2016), but school choice has contributed to exacerbated segregation (Böhlmark, Holmlund, and Lindahl 2016) and grade inflation (Vlachos 2010).
When it comes to choosing a suitable data source, we looked for instances of competitive settings where all schools on the local school market are represented. Aside from the annual school fair in Älvsjö, we were reminded of the increasing popularity and impact of online information and ranking portals (Hasan and Kumar 2024). We therefore turned to the information and ranking portal gymnasium.se which is a website owned by Keystone Education Group – a marketing and student recruitment agency which counts, among others, University of Chicago, Imperial College London, and University of Sydney as clients. During 2022, gymnasium.se had almost five million visits, according to the group. This website can be seen as a menu of school offerings (see Korczynski and Ott 2006) from which prospective students can botanize among available options, similar to an employment website listing vacancies (Salomonsson 2005). It provides a structured overview of the school market in Stockholm and offers a good representation of what offerings schools have constructed and supply prospective students with. Choice of upper secondary school involves many informational avenues, ranging from physical school fairs, open houses, try-out days, friends and siblings, etcetera. However, since we do not investigate school choice this is outside the scope of the current paper.
From this website, we downloaded 147 school descriptions of schools in Stockholm County.[1] 147 is the number of schools appearing when filtering for higher education preparatory programs in the greater Stockholm region on the website. Of these 147, we immediately removed 19 schools with no, or very minimalistic, descriptions. During the process of coding, we removed another 11 schools for the same reasons. This left us with 117 schools. In Table 1, we show the distribution of schools based on ownership, size, student population, and location. Municipal schools are public schools, chain schools have private owners who operate more than one school (regardless of level or location), and private schools have either for-profit or non-profit owners who only operate one school. Chain schools are slightly more generous in their descriptions, but, as we explain in the next section on the use of ideal types as an analytical strategy, we do not expect the descriptions to be contingent on differences in ownership. We only included schools offering university preparatory programs, because there has been a steady increase in the number of pupils attending these programs in relation to vocational programs since 2011 (statistics accessible through the Swedish National Agency for Education), but also because it appears more difficult to distinguish material differences between schools offering such programs. This increases the potency of fictionalizations within the non-expert audience of prospective students. We also believe it is reasonable to delimit our focus to university preparatory programs, because vocational and higher education preparatory programs likely elicit different expectations and aspirations among prospective students (Meyer 1977; Börjesson et al. 2015). We assume that what is being communicated about an offering is done so with the strategic intent to attract students, regardless of whether there is correspondence between statements about an offering and, for example, organizational identity (cf. Gustrén 2021).
Description of empirical material and organizational characteristics.
| Municipal | Chain | Private | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Number of schools (n = 117) | 44 | 57 | 16 |
| Median length of school description (characters) | 1,301 | 1,912 | 1,109 |
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| Min | Max | Median | |
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| Number of studentsa (n = 116 schools) | 19 | 2,155 | 399 |
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161 | 2,155 | 678 |
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19 | 1,107 | 341 |
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25 | 886 | 168 |
| % Of students with highly educated parentsa (n = 116) | 24 % | 94 % | 59 % |
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25 % | 88 % | 57 % |
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24 % | 89 % | 56 % |
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43 % | 94 % | 80 % |
| % Of students with immigrant backgrounda (n = 116) | 4 % | 88 % | 31 % |
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11 % | 88 % | 31,5 % |
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7 % | 88 % | 39 % |
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4 % | 61 % | 12 % |
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| Inner city | Greater city | ||
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| Location (n = 117 schools) | 48 | 69 | |
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13 | 31 | |
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30 | 27 | |
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5 | 11 | |
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(aSource, Swedish national agency for education).
4.2 Using the Gioia Method to Identify Ideal Types
Before describing the analytical process in more detail, we want to stress that the point of interest in our analysis is not how individual schools have fictionalized their offerings – this will vary indefinitely – but rather whether there is any systematicity to this fictionalization. We are looking for ideal types of offerings that emerge as we immerse ourselves in the market for schools (Swedberg 2018). Drawing out ideal types allows us to methodically spell out defining fictionalizations of the school offerings while simultaneously avoiding omissions in the empirical material since all schools – to varying degrees – will reflect one or several of the ideal types (Lopreato and Alston 1970). These ideal types enable benchmarking against empirical reality, thus facilitating theoretical abstraction (Papineau 1976; Morgan 2006). Ideal types are not empirical categories which one assign the studied subjects or objects to, and there is consequently no 1:1 relationship between an ideal type and any particular school. Ideal types of offerings are better seen as composites of the extreme expressions of different fictionalizations identified across the studied material. See Carlbaum, Lindgren, Benerdal, and Rönnberg (2024) for a similar treatment of ideal types as an analytical approach. The ideal type treatment of the data also seems reasonable since earlier studies find that isomorphic pressures in competitive school markets reduce variation among schools (e.g. Mockler, Thompson, and Hogan 2023; King, Clemens, and Fry 2011), but especially between public and private schools (Dovemark and Holm 2017; Lund 2007; Reckwitz 2021). With the benefit of hindsight our identified ideal types appeared consistent across the material, thus strengthening the usefulness of ideal types as an analytical approach.
To arrive at ideal types of offerings in the analytical process, we apply the Gioia methodology (2013). This inductive approach entails the “willing suspension of belief” in the analytical process, which means that researchers should avoid reading all empirical material through the lens of existing research, while simultaneously not being ignorant of it (Gioia, Corley, and Hamilton 2013, 21). In the first step, identifying fictionalized statements in Table 2 and Table 3 (which are presented in the following section), we looked for individual sentences or sections to code, provided that they appeared to address symbolic rather than functional qualities of an offering. That is, did the statements about an offering allude to qualities intrinsic to school and education, or did the statements about an offering allude to qualities or aspects which are neither intrinsic nor core to education? For example, the following statements seemed to describe functional qualities and cannot be considered fictionalized:
UBG can offer their pupils a modern and varied IT-environment. With the school’s 400 computers, the pupils at UBG always have access to a computer. UBG also has new and adapted programs, such as the Adobe-suite
Guarantee of desirable futures.
| Identifying fictionalized statements | Aggregating statements into fictionalizations | Fictionalized offerings |
|---|---|---|
| This palace of knowledge strives to create a sustainable society, Anna Whitlocks gymnasium, municipal | Collectivism and democratic ideals | The role model |
| With the tools acquired here, you will be able to realize your ideas and ensure that global development goes in the right direction, Thoren Innovation School, chain | ||
| Study at a school which has been ranked as one of the best upper secondary schools in stockholm! B lackeberg, municipal | Elitism, heritage, and popularity | The doorman |
| This school resides in a building first inaugurated in 1931, then called ‘the Bourgeois school’, Viktor Rydberg Gymnasium Jarlaplan, chain | ||
| Our mission is to position ourselves as the best school in terms of final grades, Enskilda Gymnasiet, private | Careerism and post-educational prospects | |
| The school is a guaranteed ticket to further education at university! Tumba gymnasium, municipal | ||
| We think that you who choose this school wants a career as a business leader, lawyer, accountant, marketer, or entrepreneur, Sjölins Gymnasium Kungsholmen, chain |
Guarantee of identity realization.
| Identifying fictionalized statements | Aggregating statements into fictionalizations | Fictionalized offerings |
|---|---|---|
| Here you have a unique opportunity to be seen for who you are, but also how you can develop further, Novalisgymnasiet, private | Individualism and student-centered | The butler |
| What is fun for you, is what’s important to us, Realgymnasiet, chain | ||
| The climate is very open and friendly, everyone knows everyone around here, Nacka Enskilda Gymnasium, private | Security, harmony, and relational aspects | |
| At this school, there is a basis of values where staff and students treat each other with respect, understanding, and openness, S:t Eriks Gymnasium, municipal | ||
| Here you will get a quality education in a studious and orderly environment for you to succeed with your studies, Fridegårdsgymnasiet, municipal | Pedagogy and order | The gardener |
| The most important thing is that you learn to learn, Realgymnasiet, chain |
If access to computers would have been part of a claim stressing symbolic qualities, for instance, ‘here you will become prepared for the digitalized future’, we likely would have deemed it a fictionalized claim. In the second stage, aggregating statements into fictionalizations, individual fictionalized statements are aggregated into groups of fictionalizations. We discussed our impressions collaboratively, and seven fictionalizations emerged from this discussion. The aggregated fictionalizations were intentionally broad to accommodate diverse symbolic qualities and fictionalized statements. For example, the aggregated fictionalization ‘individualism and student-centered’ stressed perks unrelated to education and the importance of always putting students’ needs first. In the third stage, fictionalized offerings, groups of fictionalizations are combined into a more abstract dimension, or in our case, ideal types of offerings. These offerings represent the possible consumption choices available to prospective students and parents. We call the ideal types of school offerings as The Doorman, The Role Model, The Butler, and The Gardener. In a final step of the analysis, we execute a frequency count of the ideal types to get a sense of whether certain schools are inclined to stress one type more than others. We present all of this in the following section.
5 Fictionalized Offerings
5.1 The Doorman
The contours of this offering emerged as several schools relied on the idea that upper secondary school is a transitory state between childhood and adulthood – a rite of passage into your future you and a preparation for ‘the real’ reality. Hence, rather than focusing on education as such, The Doorman focuses on projecting ideas about the future and what it might have in store once an individual has passed this acid test of maturity; much like a doorman, the primary role of school is to open up future career opportunities.
The Doorman explicitly stresses how your future will benefit from attending the school. The more modest descriptions concentrate on how courses are adapted to the needs of future employers, how the schools have many collaborations with private and public organizations, or how their mentoring programs with successful businesspeople will give students a head-start, whereas others are more upfront and feature slogans like “A safe ticket to higher education!” (Tumba Gymnasium). The Doorman is also about being seen as a popular, historic, and reputed institution, which seeks to attract students who are ambitious, like-minded, and have their eyes fixed on the next step.
A common theme is to write about the school’s various collaborations with firms, universities, and other public organizations, both locally and internationally. These collaborations entail opportunities for internships, networking opportunities, trying out courses at university, case events, guest lectures, or mentoring programs. It is often highlighted how these initiatives and programs match the needs of the job market:
Learn for real – in the midst of reality
All our programs build on real, outspoken needs in Swedish growth sectors. That’s why we collaborate with the best in each branch of industry to ensure that you learn from people who share your interests and stay at the forefront. Additionally, you get insights into operations, and a network that will benefit you throughout life (Realgymnasiet).
NTI Gymnasiet highlight that they have partnered with Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE) to understand how the school can prepare their students for the flexible job market. This need to adjust for the future and the supply and demand relationships of the job market also became apparent in the way The Doorman repeatedly emphasizes its focus on being a warm-up for university. Or, as one school playfully put it: “Probably the best pre-university education in the world.” (International School of the Stockholm Region).
The Doorman is also prone to make statements about being a way into well-renowned universities by describing how their learning environment emulates the one at university, or how they will help their students to get into the university they want:
Prepare for further studies abroad
We are truly active to help you get accepted to the best schools globally. If you for example want to get into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Oxford or Cambridge we’ll make a plan already during year 1. The cool part is that every year several of our students manage to get accepted to the most prestigious institutions under the toughest competition there is (Procivitas).
The difficulties in getting into any of those universities aside, the concrete offer to make a plan for this during the very first year of upper secondary school is noteworthy (surely, it affects both the root and intensity of the student’s desires). These academic appeals are commonly followed by an outspoken concern for good grades, “Our mission is to position ourselves as the best school in terms of final grades” (Enskilda Gymnasiet).
The Doorman is also prone to exhibit statements about heritage, which is done through descriptions of the buildings in which the school is housed, the longevity of the school, or the history of the school’s surrounding areas:
Tyska Skolan – a traditional school established in 1612
Over 400 years ago Gustaf II Adolf gave the German parish S:t Gertrud in Stockholm permission to establish a German school. In 1612, the first students came into the classroom at Tyska Skolgränd in Gamla Stan and during the centuries that followed, the German-Swedish school collaboration has developed and changed in many ways (Tyska Skolan).
Popularity is similarly important, even though claims to ascertain popularity often appear vague. However, sometimes rankings or other indicators like a high number of applicants are referenced: “Did you know that Thorildsplans Gymnasium was one of the most applied for upper secondary schools in Stockholm during 2014 and 2015?”. In turn, these schools expect future applicants to be highly ambitious, but this seems to be a two-way street; several times, these ambitious ideals are followed with disclaimers where schools inform the reader that students, of course, are encouraged to, even should, have high expectations on the school as well.
The Doorman is not always explicit about what kind of audience it tries to attract. However, it is nonetheless common to specifically emphasize that “like-minded individuals” study at the school, which is interesting since it starkly differs from many other schools that emphasize diversity and inclusivity:
Stockholm School of Economics or the law programs at Lund or Uppsala University are maybe some educations that you aim for after upper secondary school. No matter if you want to go for further education or start your own business, you will find like-minded individuals and build a unique network for the future (Sjölins Kungsholmen).
This excerpt summarizes the very essence of The Doorman. There is no beating around the bush here – upper secondary school is about getting prepared for the next step in life. You will be granted the prerequisites necessary to prepare for studies at the most esteemed universities (or the competencies required to become an entrepreneur), and you will find yourself among a group of like-minded students on the hunt for a prosperous future.
In sum, the key concern for The Doorman is thus about giving the impression of a prestigious and popular institution (rather than a school), “This place is for those who want to move forward.” (Danderyds Gymnasium), where you will ‘network’ and meet people who are or will become successful in their respective field, as well as receive high grades for your ambitious efforts.
5.2 The Role Model
Like the Doorman, the Role Model has a distinct future-oriented focus and emphasis on post-graduation opportunities. It pays much less attention to the student and who they will become career-wise; what matters is instead what the student will be able to accomplish, particularly in terms of societal change:
Do you see yourself as a future world citizen and believe that it is possible to change the world? Then Didaktus Liljeholmen is the school for you. Here the students are passionate about what they think is right and want to make a positive difference for the people in our society (Didaktus Liljeholmen).
The Role Model tries to differentiate itself by inspiring its prospective students, inviting them to be part of a movement or collective of individuals with similar ideas, and enabling them to pursue their presumably already keen interest in issues that go far beyond the classroom. It is common to emphasize human rights, sustainability goals, and certifications or partnerships with the UN or Amnesty, typically preceded or followed by underscoring the global or multinational angle on such topics. In several cases, this is argued to not only be a fundamental part of the school atmosphere but deeply ingrained in the educational objectives:
The school’s task is also to provide the students with a humanistic outlook, i.e., the belief and respect for the individual person and her capability to assimilate knowledge and develop into a good citizen in a democratic society. Showing lucidity, tolerance and mutual respect are cornerstones in the day-to-day life at the school. This, in combination with the school’s size and the mix of nationalities that attend, creates an international, personal and very stimulating environment (Franska Skolans Gymnasium).
Incorporating the teaching of values and a moralistically laden outlook on life as part of the school’s mission in this way is quite extraordinary. However, it is not an isolated case; several have this slightly paternalistic element in their statements about the offering.
The Role Model also stresses “life-long learning,” the notion that we should all be prepared to never stop learning as we progress through life and that this knowledge should be put to use by applying it to “real-life problems.” Aphorisms such as “We take reality into the classroom, and the classroom out into reality!” (Designgymnasiet Kungsholmen) are relatively frequent in this respect, but other schools elaborate further on what this means and how it manifests itself in practice. For some schools, this ‘reality-based’ approach entails giving the students an opportunity to “see the world” and spend time abroad for various amounts of time (anything from short trips to the EU headquarters in Brussels to semester-long exchange studies). In contrast, others indicate that it has a more direct impact on pedagogy by having more project-based learning methods as a core part of the education (or what some schools call “case methodology”). Several schools suggest that this not only shapes the pedagogy, but the actual content of the education as well:
Jensen International – For you with global ambitions!
Jensen’s educational concept “Training for reality” permeates the entire school and pedagogy. Here at Jensen International, you will be given the opportunity to study human rights and how they are achieved at different places around the world. You will trace ecological footprints and companies’ social responsibility, and together with your classmates be given the opportunity to take your responsibility for a sustainable societal development. This will be done together with Jensen International’s partner schools and international collaboration partners (Jensen Gymnasium Internationella).
Another recurring theme for this offering is specific references to democracy and democratic ideals such as diversity, tolerance, and humanity, with reference to a school’s educational offering. That is, students are encouraged to be a part of “discussing and shaping the school’s development and curriculum,” partly to learn “the importance of having your voice heard,” but also to make sure that the “school is on the right track for the future.”
Taken together, the offering of the Role Model is about three things. Firstly, a strong belief in the power of the collective and its ability to change the world for the better; secondly, a global and inclusive perspective on society’s most crucial issues; and thirdly, a natural curiosity to solve these issues and unquenching thirst for the relevant knowledge to do it. In this way, one could say that the Role Model refers as much to the students attending the school as the school itself – the main point of this offering is to make the school recognizable as a member of ‘the cause,’ someone who recruits, supports and promotes the venture of making the world better. This is most readily seen in how it seeks to attract students with specific interests:
You should be interested in how society and the world work. Why does poverty, starvation, child soldiers and child prostitution exist? What does democracy and human rights mean? How can you make an impact on the world around you? What kind of world do you want? (Psykologigymnasiet)
5.3 The Butler
The Butler is mainly concerned about the needs and desires of individual students. It is about adopting a strong service-oriented mentality and instilling an atmosphere of feel-good, such as “Here we believe in you and your ability to do whatever you want.” (Klara Teoretiska) or “As a student, you are the most important to us and therefore we work in relation to your dreams and needs. It is your future that counts!” (S:t Eriks gymnasium). Students at these schools should expect to be seen, heard, and have their needs catered to – the rather overt message being that you will be at the center of attention and, like a butler, the school will care and provide for you.
Another prominent theme that permeates this offering is the school’s social climate, mainly how the school milieu is safe and secure and has an all-around friendly spirit. This relates not only to the student-teacher relation but also to extracurricular activities and partnerships with organizations such as Friends. All in all, The Butler is about being something more than just a school, where the individual and their needs are the very purpose of the school’s existence:
At our school, your personality and preconditions are the basis for how you study. Together with your personal supervisor, you set individual study and grade goals and plan how you should study to reach them. Every week, you evaluate your results and change your strategies if something is not working. You have a personal schedule with varied study forms. You choose what suits and develops you. Kunskapsgymnasiet’s way of working leads to a close contact between students and teachers, a pleasant atmosphere and a lust for learning (Kunskapsgymnasiet).
The Butler focuses on an individual’s well-being to the extent that education appears secondary. However, in the few instances education is a focal concern, it is followed by stressing how the students’ needs would shape the content of classes.
It is also common to take great interest in what kind of school lunch is served, sometimes with as many as 20 different types of salads, other times with a wide variety of gluten-free, vegan and organic options. Student health services are another important aspect of The Butler, which provides teams with psychologists, nurses, counselors, and special pedagogues ready to assist students in any need of guidance. In one specific example, they also have mental training to help students focus better, which entails various relaxation exercises, stress management, and mindfulness practice (Jensen Gymnasium Södra). In line with this focus on student well-being, the social aspect is also very prominent for The Butler:
Blackebergs gymnasium stands out since they care about a good learning environment for both staff and students. The environment is cozy, and many activities are arranged by students. There are many active student associations at the school since Blackebergs gymnasium wants every student to feel safe and experience a sense of community (Blackebergs gymnasium).
The Butler also has a strong concern for the relationship between staff and students – primarily by stressing the lack of hierarchy. Students are encouraged to talk to their teachers about topics ranging from schoolwork to trivial matters such as the weather (“Our door is always open!”).
The sympathetic atmosphere is extended beyond regular school hours. Some schools claim that they have activities such as LAN parties, movie screenings, and groups for role-playing or studying after the school day is over. Certain rooms and equipment are also said to be at students’ disposal if they desire to use them after class since school is “both a working place and a meeting place throughout the day.”
Another element of the social climate is the cozy and welcoming atmosphere expressed through claims about inclusivity. This is done in various ways; sometimes by mentioning how the school is a “small school with big opportunities,” often followed by some version of “everybody knows everybody around here”:
The school is characterized by a familiar tone between everyone who spends their days here; students, teachers and other staff. “Everybody knows everybody” is a fitting expression to describe the school’s atmosphere (Östra gymnasiet).
Other times, inclusivity is displayed through diversity and how students are from different parts of town or that the students attending the school have to be “curious, fearless and open-minded.” A few schools also note that they cooperate with the anti-bullying organization Friends or that the school is becoming LGBTQ-certified.
To summarize, The Butler is mainly about two ideas. Firstly, the student and their needs are the focal concern. Your experience matters and ultimately shapes the school – if you are dissatisfied, we, as a school, are dissatisfied. Secondly, the socializing aspects and the harmonious school environment are crucial elements of the study experience. The school should feel like a second home. It is similar to The Doorman in that it taps into individualism but differs in all other respects. School is about “doing what’s fun,” and going through upper secondary education should, first and foremost, be an enjoyable experience; working hard to ‘become someone’ is not the mantra here, nor is the popularity or prestige of the school any cause for concern.
5.4 The Gardener
As the name suggests, The Gardener puts growth and providing students with the means to grow at the very heart of its mission. What the students learn is not the primary concern, though, but rather “learning how to learn” and the many benefits developing this capacity might bring about:
The most important thing you learn during your years at Realgymnasiet is not some math formula, how to conjugate verbs or lighting a campfire. The most important thing is that you learn to learn. You learn to know yourself and how you in a smart way can handle new situations, acquire new knowledge and pick up new skills (Realgymnasiet).
The Gardener often stresses the importance of maintaining a “peaceful, orderly environment” and “keeping the students focused” as crucial aspects of the learning process. Hence, much like The Butler, the school’s atmosphere is said to be calm and harmonious, but The Gardener also places “high demands on order” and typically has a “code of conduct” that the students must adhere to. This shift in tone, from students’ rights to students’ responsibilities, was a consistent and deviating theme when comparing The Gardener with the other offerings.
The individual still remains at the center of attention; however, personal growth is repeatedly emphasized as an outcome of education. One school even indicates that you would be responsible for “leading others” as you progressed in your education and learned how to lead yourself:
Bernadottegymnasiet in Stockholm gives you the opportunity to grow with the task and learn to handle new and exciting situations. The further you go in your education, the more responsibility you will have at the Bernadottegymnasium. You will first train to lead yourself and then lead others once you have learnt the basics of leadership (Bernadottegymnasiet).
The Gardener also tends to feature what kind of pedagogy is used, although in elusive terms. It ranges from short descriptions like “traditional pedagogical methods” to slightly more specific pedagogical ideas such as “experience-based learning,” where role-playing and simulated scenarios are said to be an integrated part of the education. Regardless of the underlying pedagogical philosophy or how succinctly it is described, the “common thread” is highlighted regularly, as is the tight schedule with few breaks, the caring teachers, and how this altogether make it such a great place to study if you want a good education:
To your aid, you have Klara’s qualified teachers who are all up-to-date on their subjects and truly interested in helping you reach your goals. Thanks to the school’s rigid structure with clear objectives, follow-up, mentorship and well-planned school days with few free periods, your time with us will be educational and give you really good preconditions to develop and succeed in your studies. It is the high quality education that distinguishes us from other schools (Klara Teoretiska Gymnasium Norra).
Note that, like The Doorman, The Gardener also uses mentorship programs, but in a slightly different manner. The kind of mentoring discussed here is about “building a strong one-on-one relationship with your teacher to aid you with your studies.” In contrast, The Doorman has mentor programs where the mentors are handpicked from the business sector to help students plan their future.
A final quality of The Gardener is the explicit focus on the premises and materials used in school. Several times, substantial parts of the school description is basically about how well-equipped the library is or how the rooms are designed in a way that “facilitated learning.”
In sum, The Gardener distinguishes itself by placing education at the forefront. The message is twofold: Firstly, you will ‘learn how to learn,’ and grow as a human being if you study at this school. Students who take their studies seriously because they enjoy learning are said to thrive here. Secondly, the school is merely a guide in your studies – like a Gardener, it can provide you with fertile soil, but in the end, you grow on your own. Hence, The Gardener is looking for youths who enjoy studying and take the initiative to learn on their own, much like the following quote suggests:
We want to be a place where students and teachers dare. A place where joy, creativity, and development are the beacons. A place where humans meet and grow. A place permeated by a passion to learn (Täby Enskilda Gymnasium).
Below, in Table 4, we present a summary of the key dimensions elucidated in the findings. We elaborate on these dimensions in the discussion.
Summary of findings and key dimensions.
| Consumer fiction | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Fictionalized offerings | Desirable futures | Identity realization | |
| The doorman | Participating in knowledge society | Identification with group of ambitious, like-minded individuals | |
| The role model | Participating in global society | Identification with group of ambitious, like-minded individuals | |
| The butler | Developing well-being | Space to be oneself and experiment with identities that correspond to inner self | |
| The gardener | Developing personally | Space to be oneself and experiment with identities that correspond to inner self | |
-
“The bold values on the left are summarized as ”Fictionalized Offerings”. The bold values on top refer to “Consumer fiction”.
Finally, as we have explained previously, we did not expect to identify any major differences in the usage of ideal types, but we were nonetheless curious to see if organizationally contingent differences surfaced. Before moving on to the discussion, we here briefly address a simple frequency count of our inductive analysis. First, we consider the share of schools utilizing each individual ideal type. To do this we simply divide the number of schools that we have coded as utilizing a particular ideal type with the total number of schools. Then we consider the share of schools utilizing each ideal type with respect to organizational characteristics such as status, student population, location, and ownership (see Table 1). For status, we use the share of students with highly educated parents as an indicator (see e.g. Forsberg 2018). In our case, we take the upper quartile of 75 % as an indication of high-status schools. For student population, which is the share of students with immigrant backgrounds, we use a 35 % cutoff (Rangvid 2010). We consider anything below 35 % a homogenous student population. For location, we differentiate between schools inside of the city center road tolls in Stockholm, and those outside. Regarding ownership we differentiate between municipal schools (public owners), chain schools (private owners who operate several schools), and private schools (private owners who only operate one school). Note that there is no 1:1 relationship between a school and the ideal types, and several ideal types may therefore be present in a school description. The total percentage of the frequency counts will therefore not add up to 100 %. Of the 117 schools 27 % use only one ideal type, whereas the remainder use two or more. The normal is thus that schools display hybrids of the ideal types.
Among all schools, The Butler is the most prominent offering as it appears in 67 % of the school descriptions. The Doorman is the second most common offering at 61 %, and The Role Model is the third most common offering at 54 %. The Butler is generally the most frequently occurring offering when accounting for status, student population, location, and ownership. The exceptions concern high status schools where The Doorman is most prevalent (65 %), schools with homogenous student populations where The Butler and The Doorman are equally prevalent (60 %), and municipally owned schools where The Butler and The Doorman also appear at equal rates (66 %). The Gardener is the least prominent among all school descriptions, only appearing in 33 % of the schools. The Gardener is also the least prominent offering when accounting for status, student population, location, and ownership. The only exception is private schools where The Role Model is least frequent (31 %). If we account for hybrids where two ideal types are present in a school description, we find that the combination of The Doorman and The Butler is the most common at 39 %, whereas The Role Model and The Gardener is the least common at 15 %.
6 What Students Should Desire in Education
The central issue in this article is what competition does to the relation between actors exposed to it. Most studies concerned with this issue focus on the relation between competing organizations, while fewer have sought to explore what competition does to the relation between organizations and their consumers – particularly in the provision of public services. We have explored this relation by investigating what schools offer to their consumers under conditions of competition. Competition gives schools considerable power in influencing students’ desire through the offerings they supply. As most students are non-experts, schools have substantial agency in deciding what students and parents should consider to be desirable qualities among schools. Far from merely incentivizing schools to emphasize and improve the quality of their offerings, it is our contention that competition between schools carries the evident risk of altering the relation between schools and students, turning school into a ‘main terrain’ for consumption (Gabriel 2005). Schools create offerings which constitute an assurance of being able to find one’s true self through the provision of various identity material, as if this would offset the existential uncertainty of making the right educational choice. In what remains of the paper we will elaborate on this argument by suggesting that the four offerings provided on the market for upper secondary schools perpetuate two consumer fictions, namely guarantee of desirable futures and guarantee of identity realization. We close the discussion with a reflection on the observed lack of references to unique pedagogy throughout the studied material, and we speculate on the risks of institutionalizing school offerings which no longer are about education.
The first consumer fiction, guarantee of desirable futures, is perpetuated by all four offerings by encouraging prospective students to imagine themselves in some idealized future which can be achieved if the offering is consumed. In the case of The Doorman and The Role Model, the desired future primarily refers to career advancements and global citizenry, similar to what, for example, Lund (2007) and Gustrén (2021) described in their studies of upper secondary schools. The two offerings contain promises about how prospective students will get the opportunity to partake in forming global development in a positive direction, or how they will get guaranteed access to the best higher education institutions. These sentiments are about saving starving children in so-called developing countries, rather than local community engagement or teaching the importance of union involvement. In the case of The Butler and The Gardener, the desired future instead refers to guaranteeing prospective students’ future well-being, The Butler and The Gardener focus on providing study mentors and turning school into a home away from home. The sentiment is ‘accept our offering, and you will unquestionably enjoy your years in upper secondary school.’ These two offerings invite students to think of themselves as leaders in the making instead of fostering servitude and collective responsibility. The consumer fiction perpetuated by the school offerings here make it seem as if education is just another lifestyle choice (Chertkovskaya, Korczynski, and Taylor 2020), and admittedly, it seems a bit difficult to be against the invitation to help make the world a better place or being guaranteed a ticket into well-reputed universities. But, both with regards to social position, time, and space, the offerings are ultimately about what lies beyond upper secondary education, as if the journey through upper secondary school carries no value in itself.
The second consumer fiction perpetuated by the four ideal types of offerings relates to a guarantee of identity realization. The “ideal of an expansive and experimental self” is an increasingly common fiction mobilized by organizations (Reckwitz 2021, 125), and the schools in our empirical material are no exception. Transitions, such as starting a new education or job, have been shown to constitute important rites-of-passage that prompts experimentation with provisional identities and possible selves (Beech 2011; Kogler, Vogl, and Astleithner 2022). The four school offerings effectively tap into these desires of becoming by simultaneously stressing the importance of the individual student and the gravity of choice, as expressed by, for example, S:t Eriks gymnasium: “As a student, you are the most important!” shortly followed by “The choice of upper secondary school and program is a big one, and an important one.”
There is one key distinction among the different offerings, however. Two of the school offerings, The Doorman and The Role Model, allude to the individual’s potential to become someone better than they currently are (Costea, Amiridis, and Crump 2012). This is especially common in so-called ‘elite’ contexts, where organizations set up certain norms and values around a particular (desirable) identity that individuals wish to incorporate into their self-concept (Kamoche and Leigh 2022). Similarly, The Doorman and The Role Model convey that they provide an environment of like-minded students with high aspirations, incentivizing prospective students to identify as such and become members of an exclusive group of up-and-coming, ambitious individuals. In contrast, the two other school offerings, The Butler and The Gardener, appeal to the notion of being oneself instead. This appeal is closely linked to modern ideals of authenticity and that schools constitute what researchers have called ‘identity workspaces’ (Petriglieri and Petriglieri 2010), where students can experiment with identities and work on themselves as part of a wider pursuit of discovering their inner, and presumably more authentic, self. In this way, The Butler and The Gardener do not offer membership into an exclusive group – or any other form of identity that prospective students can identify with – but rather a space in which students can be themselves and figure out who they want to be without social expectations to be in a certain way.
The consumer fiction of identity realization is, unlike guarantee of desirable futures, not an invitation to participate in different futures, but rather an invitation to either identify with various supposedly desirable identities provided through the school offerings, or to explore and freely experiment with their identities within a setting where prospective students can be themselves. In the vocabulary of earlier studies, this observation might be considered an extreme expression of individualization. We believe that what we empirically observe is better seen as an expression of singularization (Reckwitz 2021, 8), where school offerings are pinned on the particular and unique, and “superlatives are expected, fabricated, positively evaluated, and experienced”. The relation between schools and students is then no longer one of fostering character and citizenship, but rather a means for self-actualization. We see this through tropes about living meaningful lives and unlocking one’s full undiscovered potential (Alvesson and Gabriel 2016; Cannizzo and James 2020; Cabanas and González-Lamas 2022), but also through the overt calls for excessive fun, perhaps best expressed by “what is fun for you, is what is important to us!”.
Taken together, none of the four ideal offerings we encounter unambiguously stress the quality or uniqueness of pedagogy in any meaningful way, and throughout the process of coding we were also struck by the conspicuous absence of direct references to functional dimensions of offerings. Our least common ideal type, The Gardener, comes closest to hitting the target, but at best we only get introduced to simple one-liners about ‘experience-based’ learning and how orderly the school is. The Doorman, which promises prospective students access to Ivey League schools, does little to substantiate those statements, making it difficult to see how it would be a sign of quality pedagogy. Only rarely do schools mention any measure of quality, and in those instances, it concerns elusive references to a high number of applicants. The most obvious aspect of a pedagogical offering, teachers, is almost entirely absent in all presented offerings, aside from the occasional mention of ‘our competent teachers’ (Frostenson 2011; Johnsson and Lindgren 2010).
Even if parents and students in theory value quality pedagogy when choosing among school offerings (Chakrabarti and Roy 2010), they are not particularly qualified to differentiate the relevant pedagogical differences between schools, and in practice often end up choosing schools based on symbolic qualities, ethnic and socioeconomic similarity, or geographical convenience (Vlachos 2012). In other words, parents and students choose whatever is available to them and treat other factors than pedagogy as proxies for quality. In the words of Hsieh and Urquiola (2003, 26), “school choice might improve parents’ utility even if it does not improve academic achievement”. If it would be possible to clearly choose between offerings which vary in pedagogical quality, then parents and students likely would choose accordingly (Burgess et al. 2015). With this in mind, the four fictionalized offerings, and the two associated consumer fictions they perpetuate, set “certain rules which actors take for granted, know others take for granted, and incorporate in their decisions and actions” (Meyer 1977, 65). It is of course the case that some parents and students will create their own ideas about what is being offered (cf. Burgess et al. 2015). It may even be the case that they do not buy into the offerings and the fictions promoted, but whenever prospective students and parents communicate with others on the market for schools, they have the available offerings at their disposal as points of references (Koçak, Hannan, and Hsu 2009, 8). That is to say, the offerings become formative for the desired third party’s desire.
7 Conclusions
In this paper, we have asked what competition does with the relation between organizations and consumers, and therefore put the fictionalization of school offerings in the limelight. In doing so, we have heeded calls to explore what offerings are produced by welfare providers and how those may disseminate particular fictions (Korczynski and Ott 2006; Suckert 2022). We have observed how organizations have responded to competitive pressures by inviting 15-year-old kids to approach school choice as just another lifestyle choice (Cannizzo and James 2020; Sataøen, Lövgren, and Neby 2023), thus reinforcing organizations as sites of consumption (Gabriel, Korczynski, and Rieder 2015).
Echoing Hogan, Thompson, Sellar, and Lingard (2018), our findings raise ethical concerns. First, the excessive amount of fun and endless potential communicated through the offerings is in stark contrast to the image of the contemporary classroom portrayed in prior research, where authentic experiences are visibly absent (Krogh 2023; Pyyry and Sirviö 2024), and teachers experience ever-increasing workloads (Ramberg et al. 2020) and threats of violence from parents who are unhappy with their children’s grades (Cowen Forssell, Berthelsen, and Jönsson 2024). Second, the shifting relation between schools and their students brought about by competition seems to change the collective project of education into individualized projects of the self. Yet, it is highly doubtful that school is perceived as uniformly meaningful, and at the same time, the school offerings are presented as the only opportunity to remedy the inadequacy of one’s allegedly incomplete self (Costea, Amiridis, and Crump 2012). The offerings supposedly allow students to accumulate a never-ending number of experiences to differentiate themselves from their peers in the hunt for further educational- or job opportunities (Holdsworth 2017). To add insult to injury, the search for unrealized potential is likely a mantra these students have encountered in earlier education already (Plotnikof and Pors 2024), and they will likely encounter it again in future education (Costea, Amiridis, and Crump 2012). These two points leave us wondering, what happens in a classroom where overworked teachers meet students who have been told that upper secondary school is nothing but an instrument to a future which lies beyond the walls of the school?
It does not seem unreasonable to suggest that this consumption rationality also affects how schools compete for students in the long run (Wedlin 2007). That is, the rules of the game of competition change through the construction of particular offerings (Barnett 2017; Rosa et al. 1999). As a final reflection, we therefore invite readers to think of whether standardized rankings would be beneficial to revert focus from symbolic aspects of offerings to functional aspects, despite the risks of introducing other isomorphic pressures (Wedlin 2007). But, as Elert and Henrekson (2024) argues, it is difficult for parents and students to make informed choices since there is no centralized tool to understand what a quality offering is. Equally important, the lack of standardized criteria of quality makes it difficult for organizations to create quality offerings in response to competition.
Funding source: Svenska Handelsbankens Forskningsstiftelse
Award Identifier / Grant number: P18-0258
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for exceptional editorial guidance from Associate Editor Kathia Serrano Velarde and Editor-in-Chief Robert Jungmann. Our two anonymous reviewers have also been encouraging and supportive throughout the entire review process. In addition, we have received helpful comments at various stages of writing from Justine Grønbæk Pors, Stefan Arora-Jonsson, Maria Blomgren, Henrik Dellestrand, Nina Granqvist, Lucia Crevani, Lovísa Eiríksdóttir, Peter Edlund, Niklas Altermark, Dalia Mukhtar-Landgren, participants in the Quality in Education conference 2023 (Center for Educational Leadership and Excellence, Stockholm School of Economics), and participants in the NOOS Seminar 2024 (Department of Political Science, Lund university). We gratefully acknowledge financial support from Handelsbankens forskningsstiftelser [project: P18-0258].
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Institutional Spheres and Organizational Sociology: Considering the Ecological and Cultural Dynamics of the Macro Realm
- A Pandemic of Possibilities: The Spread of Potentiality-Seeking Organisations under Conditions of the COVID-19 Lockdown
- Conflict Dynamics in Organizational Decision-Making. Muslim Accommodation in Swimming Pools
- Exploring Organisational Controversies as Actor-Networks: Ethnographic Insights from a Brazilian State School
- Guaranteeing Desirable Futures: What Schools Offer to Prospective Students When in Mutual Competition
- Making Sense of Responsibility in Rural Sustainability Work
