Biography as Education Governance

Abstract

This paper examines the increasing interest of Swedish schools to construct, analyze, assess and control the individual progression and social integration of students using biographical registers. I argue that this tendency—involving biography as a form of governance—can be seen as a revision of early 20th-century biographical research by the Chicago School of Sociology. In this paper I consider the theoretical, methodological and political background of the Chicago work in order to compare it to the Swedish use of student biographies. Their current use involves a twofold subjectification of students—as “objects” of assessment and as “relays” for assessment. Finally, this subjectivity is understood in relation to international initiatives in education restructuring where new ways of governing—often labeled as progressive—impose social control, heighten individual responsibility and, not least, create new forms of social exclusion.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Professor David Hamilton, who helped me with language usage in this paper.

Notes

1. Swedish terms are, if possible, translated according to the official dictionary for education and resesearch available at the Ministry of Education, Research and Culture: http://www.regeringen.se/content/1/c6/02/07/44/4926b65e.pdf

2. This development is contemporary to an international paradigmatic shift in thinking that can be found across the social science disciplines—a shift that has been characterized as a biographical turn (Chamberlayne, Bornat, & Wengraf, 2000, p. 1).

3. Ref. 94-4273: 1, University Library of Umeå.

4. Pragmatic ideas of social responsibility, often advocated in the discourse of deliberative communication drawing on Mead and Dewey, have a significant impact on contemporary Swedish educational research as well as on Swedish educational policy and practice (Englund, 2005; Tholander, 2005, p. 115). Overall, Dewey has a status of an “indigenous foreigner”, a hero of progress, in the Swedish history of school reform (Popkewitz, 2000, p. 175).

5. However, the 75-year-old Stanley, looking back at his encounters with his “creator”, Clifford R. Shaw, also expressed feelings of humiliation and hostility: “If anyone ever had an influence on me it was Shaw … He would laugh at me, you see … I would be inclined to say, ‘Who the hell is this guy, I'd like to punch him in the nose’” (Snodgrass, 1982, in Denzin, 1992, p. 41).

6. DAMP (Deficits in Attention, Motor control and Perception) is a Swedish term that coincides with the neuropsychiatric diagnosis ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).

7. In the meetings between home and school papers or print-outs are of primary importance but ICT is also widely used and specially designed Internet-based tools are available on the market (cf. http://www.unikum.net/iup/).

8. It is worth noticing that this process involves a kind of reinvention of the famous Thomas dictum which was originally a theoretical position held by the Chicagoans (Denzin, 1989, p. 52): “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas & Thomas, 1928, pp. 42–43).

9. With regard to Denzin's remark on the link between the early biographical studies and the origin of the “surveillance society” it is worth mentioning the substantial increase of camera surveillance in and outside Swedish schools (municipal compulsory- and upper secondary school). According to the Swedish Data Inspection Board (2005) this phenomenon increased from almost 0 to 8% between 2003 and 2005. Another 14% of the schools were about to install cameras in the near future.