For competition to work, the competitors have to be remade
When public education is marketized, competition can reshape schools before the anticipated competitors even arrive. A new study co-authored by CELE-affiliated researcher Stefan Arora-Jonsson examines how preparing for competition can transform schools, relationships, and educational priorities.
A reform that permits competition does not thereby create it. Where a public service has been delivered without competition, its providers need to be reorganized before they can compete, and that reorganization precedes competition.
A new open-access article in the Journal of Organizational Sociology, “Between Equality and Competition: The Organisational Consequences of Imagined Competition,” follows one Swedish school through that reorganization across two decades. The study is authored by Maria Blomgren, Stefan Arora-Jonsson, and Jakob Westergren. Stefan Arora-Jonsson is Professor at Uppsala University and affiliated with the Center for Educational Leadership and Excellence (CELE) at the Stockholm School of Economics.
“Earlier research asks what follows from competition,” says Arora-Jonsson. “We ask what comes before it. Competition does not arrive on its own. It requires that a good deal of what was already there is adjusted, reoriented and reorganized.”
That reorganization does not need actual rivals to set it off. It can be structured by competition that is only anticipated - by whom an organization expects to face and how it expects the contest to be won. The authors call this imagined competition, and its consequences do not depend on the anticipated rivals ever arriving.
Assembling a competitor
Before the 1991 school reforms, a Swedish school was allocated its students and its budget from above. It did not strategize, and it had little reason to distinguish itself from other schools. Turning such a school into a competitor means organizing a leadership able to decide for itself, an identity outsiders can distinguish from other schools, and a view of students as not only recipients of education but also a resource to be competed for.
The study follows one school through that construction. A Swedish municipality founded it in 2005 in anticipation of private providers entering the local market, and almost every founding decision followed from the expectation of having to compete.
Those private providers, however, did not appear in the school’s segment of the local market for another 16 years. The competition remained imagined, but the reorganization it prompted did not. Two municipal schools with overlapping programs found themselves competing with the new school from the day it opened, and both saw their admission grades fall before they managed to respond.
Competition travels inward
Competition did not remain between schools. It also began to shape relationships and expectations within the school.
Students described the appeal of being surrounded by others who were constantly pushed to perform, but this also fed stress and ill health. One teacher recounted parents asking for an “A-warning” if their child risked receiving anything below the highest grade, an inversion of the standard warning for students at risk of failing. Looking back on the school’s first decade, the first principal said it had become so oriented toward achievement that “good enough” no longer existed.
The retreat
Around eight in 10 of the school’s students came from families with academic backgrounds, compared with roughly four in 10 across the town’s upper-secondary schools. Teachers, trained in a profession committed to equality of educational opportunity, grew uneasy about an intake that, as one put it, did not reflect reality.
The municipal board that had authorized the school came to see the concentration of privileged students as something to correct. Over the following decade, the school broadened its intake, and a principal appointed in 2020 set about dismantling the elite identity, including removing the word “best” from the school’s Instagram description.
Underneath lies a tension that the authors suggest is built into marketization itself. A school made into a competitor acquires goals of its own, attractiveness, distinction, a defensible position, that are separable from the educational task it exists to perform. The two can be pursued together up to a point, beyond which they pull apart.
Similar dynamics might be expected wherever competition is introduced into services with public-good characteristics: a hospital as an organization has interests that align with care as a task only up to a point.
Read the article (open access):
"Between Equality and Competition: The Organisational Consequences of Imagined Competition", Journal of Organizational Sociology.
