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ABSTRACT
This paper suggests that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) education policy work of the last 20 years has achieved a paradigmatic shift in the thinking and framing of education; however, this process was not exclusively based and dependent upon the cold rationality of numbers. Crucially, as the article will show, it has also involved processes of socialisation and learning. The paper argues that a constructivist-institutionalist perspective based on the notion of socialisation provides adequate tools to explain the dominance of the OECD in the education policymaking world. The paper makes use of policy learning theory to show how and why it is the coming together of various actors in social terms that sustains and reinforces the numbers game, rather than simply the validity or strength of the numbers themselves. It uses the case of the publication of the OECD Review of Swedish education in 2015 to empirically flesh out the argument. Although the influence of the OECD has been great to a number of countries, Sweden is perhaps one of the few that displays such unanimity of public opinion and the academic and policymaking worlds in regard to the indispensability of the OECD as an education policy expert and actor.
In memoriam
I would like to devote the paper to the memory of the good friend and colleague Dr John Smith, Institute of Education, Dublin City University.
Acknowledgements
My most sincere thanks go to my colleagues Christian Lundahl (University of Örebro), Joakim Landahl (University of Stockholm) and Martin Lawn (University of Edinburgh) for their comments, as well as the generous funding by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet). Many thanks also to Radhika Gorur (Deakin University) and the anonymous reviewer 1 for her/his tireless and meticulous reading and commenting of this paper.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Here we follow Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson’s preference of the term ‘transnational’ versus ‘global’ governance, since ‘the label “transnational” suggests entanglement and blurred boundaries to a degree that the term “global” could not’ (Citation2006; 4 – for a more developed argument see also Hannerz, Citation1996).
2. The concepts of translation and assemblage have a strong footing in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and especially Actor-Network theory. Åm (2016) criticised Clarke et al. for their use of the concepts without referring explicitly to STS. Indeed, an institutional approach does not marry very well with STS’ use of the concept of translation; although it would have been an interesting discussion, it is not possible to achieve this here. Therefore, the paper uses the looser term ‘interpretation’ to evoke the change of meaning and adaptation Clarke et al. (Citation2015) persuasively discuss.
3. For a detailed list of its members see here: https://pasisahlberg.com/news/swedish-school-commission/.
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Sotiria Grek
Sotiria Grek is Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. She works on education policy, transnational policy learning, the politics of quantification, knowledge and governance. She has co-authored (with Martin Lawn) ‘Europeanising education: governing a new policy space’ (Citation2012, Symposium) and co-edited (with Joakim Lindgren) ‘Governing by Inspection’ (Citation2015, Routledge). She was recently awarded a European Research Council Starting Grant (ERC-StG-2016) to study ‘International Organisations and the Rise of a Global Metrological Field’ (2017–2021). She is currently writing a monograph on ‘Educating Europe: EU Government, Knowledge and Legitimation’ to be published by Routledge in 2017.