The aim of this study is to examine how a particular object for consumption, professional development for teachers and principals, is marketed to schools, and what propositions and understandings are embedded in such offers. Adopting a conceptualization of marketing as a "perpetual questioning machine," the study deploys and develops a…

This article examines the national and European policy contexts that shaped the Swedish internationalisation agenda in higher education since 2000, the policy ideas that were mobilised to promote it, and the national priorities that steered higher education debates. The analysis highlights how domestic and European policy priorities, as well as…

How knowledge capitalism retools the scope of academic research and researchers is an issue which this article ties to the project market in the ethos of knowledge capitalism. In Finland, academic research has been forced to apply for funding in project-based activities reflecting European Union policies. The project market, which in this article…

In this article, we address the questions: How is the purpose of higher education constructed within policy texts from the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), England and Sweden? How does this position students in making the transition from Bachelor to Masters? We do this through analysis of two recent policy documents from each of the EHEA,…

The project of establishing a European community since World War II has been further advanced by adding - besides the four freedoms of free movement of goods, persons, services and capital - a fifth freedom -- the free circulation of researchers, knowledge and technology -- that intends to promote community building at the level of higher…

This article examines how the value of higher education (HE) is currently being (re)framed in two European countries: England and Portugal. HE has been central to a global discourse on the future of knowledge economy, whilst also being subject to the policy framework of New Public Management. Being so, the changing value of HE is related to the…

The principal aim of this article is to provide a historical overview of 25 years of competence policy in the European Union, highlighting connections between past and current initiatives and outlining possible scenarios for the decade to come. The article presents the social investment turn in social policy as the critical political background…

Within the process of harmonizing and strengthening Europe as a competitive knowledge economy education is presented as a basic pillar of economic growth in a multitude of European policy papers. But how do individuals respond to incentives coming from European education politics? (How) are they appropriating given targets and how do they engage…

This paper presents and engages with Basil Bernstein's rich conceptual grammar in order to generate a sociological account of the outcomes for teachers' work, identity and social class, of strategic shifts in governance to the global scale. Our aim is to develop a two-way conversation between Bernstein's conceptual grammar and how best to theorise…

Educational researchers and academics cannot ignore the ever-present call for education, and schooling in particular, to reflect the needs of the twenty-first century knowledge economy. Since the 1990s, national curricula and education systems have reflected this call in their focus on technology and shifting pedagogy to increasingly…

New forms of activities now shape and govern the Swedish education system, based on governance through comparison. The focus on comparison can be regarded as soft governance and different types of (self-) evaluations and valuations are, at present, deeply embedded keystones in the decentralised education system. Recently this has, together with…

The article discusses an East/West divide in Europe in university knowledge production. It argues that the communist and post-communist legacies in the four major Central European economies studied (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic) matter substantially for educational and research systems. The differences in university…