Welfare institutions as knowledge factories: Danish ‘welfare export’ of childcare know-how to China

ABSTRACT

This article examines how public welfare institutions in Denmark are reconfigured into knowledge factories. Since the 1990s, Denmark has sought to export “welfare” solutions as a way of extracting knowledge on social practices already happening in institutions of the welfare state for economic purposes. Through a case study of “welfare export” of knowledge about childcare from Denmark to China, the article analyses the Danish commodification of welfare know-how to a global market. This article draws attention to the practical outcomes of such efforts by the Danish State, focusing on one public educational institution in Denmark, VIA University College. In particular, the article sheds light on the practical arrangements of commodifying “Danish childcare know-how”. Drawing on theoretical insights from post-workerism and a body of qualitative empirical material, the article discusses how the phenomenon of “welfare export” does not result in privatisation but rather challenges and blurs the line between “public” and “private”. The article argues that “welfare export” activates techniques within public welfare institutions normally associated with corporations. That is, knowledge taught within Danish institutions becomes a product for (and simultaneously creates) a “market niche”. Welfare institutions are, in effect, turned into knowledge factories.

KEYWORDS:

• welfare export
• cognitive capitalism
• childcare know-how
• welfare factories

Introduction: “They have forgotten that they are learning”

I am smiling. I find myself surrounded by some forty Chinese early childhood teachers and a teacher from the Danish University College, VIA, in the outskirts of Chengdu, China. They are laughing, clapping, and jumping around, as they design a game that they will play with children enrolled in the kindergarten later the same day. Chants are frequently heard throughout the room as the groups prepare. The room is sparked with joy. “They have forgotten that they are learning”, the Danish teacher informed me. This joy – playful yet noisy state of being – was exactly what the teacher from VIA University College intended to create when we walked through the gates of the kindergarten four days ago (Field notes, 28 October 2018). The event that unfolded before my eyes was the manifestation of a phenomenon that for the last three decades in Denmark has been debated under the label of welfare export.

In short, welfare export designates the nation state’s effort to commodify knowledge on how to conduct social practices and organise social life in an institutional setting. Situated in the outskirts of Chengdu for a week, I watched how these Chinese early childhood teachers were eager to learn so-called “Danish childcare know-how” exported to them by the Danish public education institution VIA University College. Yet, before such an event could take place, several social, political, and economic practices, arrangements, and translations were carried out in order to “export” particular knowledge to the Chinese early childhood teachers. In this article, I ask how the social practices of exporting Danish childcare know-how reconfigure the arrangement and logics of Danish welfare institutions such as public education institutions?

For decades, welfare export was promoted as a viable marketing strategy by the Danish Government, policy makers, businesses, and public institutions to stay competitive as a small nation-state in the “global knowledge economy” (see e.g. Deloitte and Kraka, 2019; Nordic Council of Ministers, 2005). In 2014, the Vice Dean of VIA University College at the time even argued that “welfare export is sound business practice” (Friese, 2014). As a political construction, the “exceptional” Nordic welfare state model has always played an important role in the Nordic cultural imaginary as well as identity, and has even been highlighted as the Nordic countries’ best brand (see e.g. Browning, 2007; Marklund, 2017). In other words, the phenomenon of welfare export aligns with the fulfilment of this cultural imaginary of the Nordic countries as the happiest and must trustful region in the world as a result of their exceptional statecraft.

In the following, I explore how the institutional arrangement of the welfare state is reconfigured through the (attempted) export of Danish childcare know-how to China. Focusing specifically on the Danish educational institution, VIA University College, I analyse how the phenomenon of welfare export involves specific techniques within public welfare institutions that are normally associated with enterprises. Focusing on these techniques, I consider how welfare institutions which are normally seen as primarily providing state-funded education for Danish citizens, are hereby reconfigured into what I conceptualise as “knowledge factories”. I do not use the term welfare institutions as knowledge factories in a literal sense. Rather, I apply the notion to analytically highlight the reorganisation of welfare institutions in an era of capitalism where knowledge has become an object for accumulation. These “factories”, in other words, aim to rationalise and standardise bodies of knowledge already taught within national public education institutions into a “market niche” for sale on what is termed the “global market of education” (Ball, 2012). For the last two decades, China has been a specific target for Danish know-how on childcare as well as eldercare welfare practices (e.g. Elers, 2012; Randrup, 2012). As highlighted in Danish media since the beginning of the 2000s, China is a main “target for business” due to the country’s fast-paced economic growth and demographic changes which have created new demands among its population, in particular in the rising middle class in China (e.g. Dombernowsky, 2016; Schmidt, 2014).

The article analyses the empirical phenomenon of Danish childcare know-how targeted at the educational market in China as an example of how contemporary capitalism “sets in motion a continuous cycle of private reappropriation of public goods” (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 301). Drawing on theoretical insights of post-workerism, I show how welfare state apparatuses are reconfigured into a political medium for capital. In this way, welfare institutions is subsumed to the logics of contemporary capitalism that increasingly rely on “capturing” aspects of abstract and common resources such as cultural products, different forms of knowledge, or social institutions to produce surplus value (Andersen, 2021a; Fumagalli & Mezzadra, 2010). This reconfiguration of the welfare state apparatus occurs as capital becomes less able to organise the cycle of production.

A comprehensive body of literature focuses on how knowledge is “borrowed”, “transferred”, and “translated” into different systems, structures, and localities by various actors. For example, studies of so-called “policy transfer/diffusion” (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Steiner‐Khamsi, 2012), “comparative education” (Verger, Fontdevila, & Zancajo, 2016; Waldow, 2017), “organisation studies” (Czarniawska & Sevón, 2005; Røvik, 2016), or “travelling concepts/theory” (Neumann & Nünning, 2012; Said, 1982). However, while I draw inspiration from these studies, my errand in this article is another. Focusing specifically on the political-economic aspects of Danish childcare know-how as an expression of welfare export, I pay attention to how welfare institutions are turned into strategic centres for valorisation in contemporary capitalism. Thus, through the analytical notion of welfare institutions as knowledge factories, I explore the social practices that reorganise the organisational framework of educational institutions to produce a “market niche” out of Danish welfare practices.

Cognitive capitalism and living knowledge as ‘raw material’

Drawing attention to how “knowledge” has become an object for accumulation, I argue that the emergence of the phenomenon of welfare export must be understood in relation to the transformation of capitalist modes of production. To do so, I draw on the theoretical insights of post-workerism focusing on theoretical ambitions to conceptualise the tendential nature of contemporary capitalism. Whereas Marx (1976) sets out to describe the laws of capital accumulation through the transition from manufacture to an industry-based economy, scholars frequently labelled as post-workerist, seek to describe the transition from industry to knowledge-based economy accordingly. To describe this transformation from an industrial to a knowledge economy, traditional post-workerism takes its point of departure in a passage in Marx’s (1939 that has come to known as “Fragments on Machines”. Here, Marx addresses the way in which social knowledge – what he terms the “general intellect” – becomes pivotal for the further development of capitalism (Marx, 1939, p. 706). Thinking along these lines, Moulier-Boutang (2011), among others, denotes this development through its cognitive tendencies by coining the term cognitive capitalism (Fumagalli, 2013; Lucarelli & Vercellone, 2013; Moulier-Boutang, 2011; Vercellone, 2007). With this term, the focal point for the analysis of contemporary capitalism is how certain “knowledge” is “already here”, subsumed within the logics of capitalism, rather than something that arises “out of the blue” (Hardt & Negri, 2017). The notion of subsumption refers to the way that capitalism subordinates the labour process for capital valorisation and occurs through stages of formal and real subsumption. While formal subsumption refers to redirection of labour processes not under the control of capital, real subsumption refers to the reorganisation of labour processes dictated by capital. In an age of cognitive capitalism, the focal point is the reorganisation of the modes of production. Emphasis in this process is on both formal and real subsumption of already existing knowledge, and how this becomes the main object for accumulation.

Focusing particularly on the role of labour, cognitive capitalism, like industrial capitalism, needs the labour power provided by the worker to turn it into “dead labour” at the factory’s assembly line. Contrary to expectation, as capitalism has become cognitive, it needs the worker in its entirety, i.e. the worker’s personality expressed through their “living labour” (Hardt & Negri, 2000; Lazzarato, 1996; Virno, 2007). For instance, the teachers at VIA University College that travel to China are not only carriers of Danish childcare know-how, but also part of the commodity themselves. The modes of production are, in other words, “a place between the ears of the worker” (Kristensen, 2008). Thus, the valorisation under cognitive capitalism rests on capital’s attempt to transform living knowledge produced in all kinds of social interactions into dead knowledge through standards, regulations and the like that instrumentalises knowledge in order to extract value (Roggero, 2011). When living knowledge is key to the capitalist system, it is not as a scarce resource such as raw materials like coal or steel under industrial capitalism. Rather, it is a resource of excess that needs to be constantly defined and mobilised. An example of this transformation is the way in which the concept of “human capital” plays a key role in a wide array of research traditions in social science. Focus is thus directed to the need for the subject to “self-invest” and for governments to “invest” in its population’s health, education, and even in a phenomenon such as “welfare export”.

In the context of cognitive capitalism, the role of the welfare state is drastically transformed as the centre of production shifts from the factory to the entire social realm. Rather than safeguarding the worker against various risks, the welfare state is seen as one of the main agents in securing the reproduction of the workforce. Thus, welfare institutions no longer merely provide services to citizens, but instead become a tool to mobilise and govern knowledge on the practices already occurring within the institutional setting. This it is not a matter of privatisation or cutting back welfare. Instead, the welfare institutions are both formally and really subsumed within the logics of cognitive capitalism which tries to extract value out of already existing knowledge (Andersen, 2021b; Monnier & Carlo, 2010). The subsumption of welfare institutions occurs through the processes of standardisation and segmentation of labour through the production of particular bodies of knowledge. On the one hand, welfare institutions such as public educational institutions reproduce processes of standardisation where division of labour is characterised by particular bodies of knowledge. On the other hand, this initiates processes of segmentation where different “professions” are created and seen as distinct from each other; each with its own body of knowledge (Andersen, 2021b; Hjort, 2013). Welfare institutions, I argue, are therefore not only “welfare” institutions providing citizens with a service as needed granted by the welfare state. In other words, during cognitive capitalism, welfare institutions are also rich in collective knowledge, which is subsumed to the logics of capital as it increasingly dictates the production of knowledge. In effect, welfare institutions are turned into knowledge factories.

Through the analysis of the processes activated by the efforts to “export welfare”, the notion of knowledge factories touches on how spaces, that produce knowledge, have become the strategic centre for capitalism (Lazzarato, 2009). Just as the assembly line in the factory had to be put in place in order to produce material commodities, welfare institutions, too, need to create organisational infrastructures to produce immaterial commodities. That is, a certain number of social practices within the institution must be initiated for the “export of welfare” to happen, as I will show later. Furthermore, this leads to a particular re-composition of the division of labour within these organisations. This re-composition has the purpose of emphasising the productive potential of knowledge as a commodity capable of being exported to the global educational market. Thus, the analytical notion of welfare institutions as knowledge factories is not only a question of knowledge production, but also of legal and social re-arrangement in which they are embedded and allow them to “participate on the market”. Hence, while the definition of knowledge factories is closely tied to how the university is transformed from being “an old factory of knowledge” to become the unbounded “raw material” of cognitive capitalism, it also draws attention to the complex spaces of overlapping labour practices – both cognitive and affective – that constitute the university as a site in the first place (Raunig, 2013). The increasing need to translate abstract, tacit knowledge into standardised, codified knowledge thus enacts multiple new forms of labour practices that reorients the organisational framework of the educational institutions (Andersen, 2021b).

Methodology

To theorise how welfare institutions are reconfigured into knowledge factories, I take my point of departure in the practices of VIA University College since its establishment in 2008. Located in the middle of Jutland, VIA is one of six public University Colleges in Denmark. It is responsible for the education of so-called “professionals” such as teachers, nurses, social workers, pedagogues, etc. in its region. Throughout the 2010s, the institution was at the forefront in Denmark when it came to the “export” of Danish childcare know-how to China, which makes it an exemplary case.

To unfold how VIA University College constituted itself as the forefront of “welfare export”, I draw on a variety of empirical material. I draw, in part, on documents such as strategic plans, minutes from board meetings, public news as well as advertising material to display the product of Danish childcare know-how produced by VIA University College in the period from 2012 to 2020. I also draw on field notes from my fieldwork in China where I observed Danish childcare know-how being taught in a kindergarten in China, as well as interviews with the Head of the so-called “International Office” at VIA University College and the teachers at VIA University that at least once had taught in China. Fieldwork was conducted in late 2018 where I, as highlighted in the introduction of this article, observed Danish childcare know-how being taught in a Chinese kindergarten in the outskirts of Chengdu situated in the Sichuan region. The fieldwork lasted for one week and allowed me to get valuable first-hand experiences of what was presented to the Chinese buyers as well as how the Chinese buyers perceived and reacted to “the product” of Danish childcare know-how offered by the teachers representing VIA University College. The experiences gained from the fieldwork runs through implicitly the following analysis in order to get a comprehensive understanding of the “welfare export” phenomenon. In addition to the expert interview with the Head of the International Office, the interview material consists of two “group session” interviews with four and three Danish teachers respectively. At the time of the interviews, all the teachers were employed at VIA University College and involved in the export of Danish childcare know-how. The group session interviews allowed me to get insight into what the Danish teachers could (or could not) agree on when it came to Danish childcare know-how and VIA University College’s attempt to export such know-how to China.

Each of the interview sessions lasted around one and half hour. They were recorded and subsequently transcribed and handled following the guidelines of Danish Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. All the interlockers were anonymised and signed an informal consent. Furthermore, all details from my fieldwork have also been anonymised. For this reason, I have not mentioned any names, positions, or specific locations other than the ones that is already public available. In turn, in the Chinese setting, I was highly aware of the fact that my position in the room as the white middle-class man acting as teaching assistant for a product that the Chinese participants had paid money to “enjoy” in some ways made me part of the commodity itself. Thus, I was always to stay close to the teacher from VIA University College whenever I found myself in the kindergarten, as I was mostly interested in the labour process of presenting, translating, and disseminating their concept of Danish childcare know-how.

This combination allowed me insight into internal discussions about “welfare export” to China at VIA University College from multiple angles. In the following, I analyse the establishment of an industrial logic within public educational institutions such VIA University College where “internationalisation”, as Øland, Brodersen, and Thorhauge Frederiksen (2013, p. 2) argue, “is the export of didactical specialities, which correlates with strategic considerations on growth and innovation on the regional as well as the national level”. Thus, I draw attention to how VIA University College has assembled an infrastructure that makes the “welfare export” of Danish childcare know-how possible. The following three sections analyse VIA University College efforts to commodify Danish childcare know-how, i.e. the labour of reconfiguring a public educational institution into factory of knowledge. First, I trace the imaginaries of a local entrepreneurial institution with a global outlook as portrayed in strategic plans and internal discussions by the Board of Directors. I then move on to show how China became the primary target for export and the role of academic partnerships as an intermediary. Lastly, I analyse the commodification of Danish childcare know-how as a product.

Global outlook, local entrepreneurship

Since the 1990s, Denmark has tried to export “welfare” solutions by extracting knowledge on social practices already happening within welfare for economic profit. A policy change in Danish legislation in 1992 is the key to understanding the emergence of “welfare export” in its current form. Here, municipalities were allowed to collaborate with so-called joint-stock companies, helping these companies with so-called “preparatory work” and “refinement of knowledge”. As written in the policy (Erhvervsudvalget, 1991, my trans.):

Municipalities and county municipalities may participate, according to the provisions of section 3, financially and managerially in companies for the purpose of the sale process and further develop knowledge which has been accumulated in the municipality or county in connection with the solution of municipal or county-municipal tasks.

This became even more convenient with the establishment of University Colleges in 2008 – a centralisation of smaller vocational institutions such as “Pedagogical Colleges” (Pædagogseminarer) with “Centres of Higher Education” (Centre for Videregående Uddannelse) under the same roof. The establishment of University Colleges also brought a change to legislation, specifically touching on the issue of public procurement to foreign countries. It appears as the subcategory known as “Chapter 2a” of the legislation Bekendtgørelse af lov om professionshøjskoler for videregående uddannelser, which determines the purpose and task of these specific educational institutions. As Section 10a in the legislation reads: “The University College may, as a separate revenue-covered enterprise, offer degrees and training programmes abroad” (Ministry of Higher Education, 2019). In other words, it allows locally anchored public institutions in Denmark to tap into the material and immaterial flow of global capital. An initial starting point to explore the process of “public” institutions becoming more like an enterprise is to analyse the strategic plans that are produced by the apex of the institution. These documents are the outcome of the strategy, which resemble the guidelines that enterprises issue and follow within a given period to, for example, meet the expectation of shareholders. Such plans are not likely to affect lower levels in an institution the size of VIA University College in terms of direct impact in everyday practices. However, concerning the phenomenon of “welfare export”, these plans seem to have played a crucial role in reconfiguration of the institutional arrangement of the University Colleges.

In 2012, VIA University College presented a novel strategy plan for the entire organisation with the title Your Future – Our Ambition: Imagine VIA 2020 (2012). One of the “intentions” stated that the organisation wanted to “commit globally from a local perspective”. As the organisation pinpoints, VIA University College intends to use its “global commitment and local education environments for rewarding cultural meetings” (VIA 2012:12). It clearly mirrors the wording in the 2020 plan from the Danish Government, which states the “need to have a global outlook and national anchoring” (The Danish Government, 2010): A global outlook that should lead to “heightened insight”, as the Government later phrased it (The Danish Government, 2013). In this way, internationalisation tendencies trickled down from the national political level to the regional institutional level within the Danish welfare state. Even though VIA University College is an educational institution bound to a particular region of Denmark, it does not exclusively see itself constrained to this region. On the contrary, it perceives itself as having an increasingly global outlook.

Since the implementation of the strategy plan in 2012, the board of directors at VIA have launched and implemented two new up-to-date strategy plans ‒ in respectively 2015 and 2018. Both plans are titled Co-creating Better Societies (VIA, 2015b, 2018b).¹ With these plans, the intentions were specified in more detail. In 2015, the agenda was to promote “new learning styles”, “an increased focus on private businesses”, “a strong social commitment”, and “a flexible organisation” (VIA, 2015b, p. 7). In 2018, it stressed that “VIA’s international commitment is to contribute to the global provision of education, mobility, research collaboration, and export of educational programmes and courses” (VIA, 2018b, p. 7). As highlighted in the Danish version of the strategy plan – yet left out of the English version – the predominating discourse reflected in these strategic plans is that they as an educational institution “have to throw [them]selves actively into the development and influence it positively” (VIA, 2018a, p. 4, my trans). However, it is never specified what VIA University College means more precisely in regard to influencing the development positively and what “the development” is referring to.

The constitution of a global outlook as an organisation is therefore one of the ways that characterises “the development” that VIA University College strives for. Another aspect that overlaps with the attempt to constitute this global outlook is the increased focus on the employability of its students. Here, the discourse of “entrepreneurship” has entered into the strategic plans to reach this goal of being a local and global educational institution in Denmark. The focus on student employability is a common characteristic for educational institutions today. It is also a characteristic that makes them more dependent on business sectors and the needs of the labour market towards which they must channel their study programmes. VIA University College tackles this dependence on the business sector by, on the one hand, setting up public-private partnerships. On the other hand, the organisation itself is turned into a business. “At VIA”, as the organisation emphasises: “we call the frame of this transformational journey ‘the entrepreneurial educational institution’” (VIA, 2015a, p. 7). The logic in these plans seems to have an impact on the organisation itself as it has forced them to think “internationally” with an “entrepreneurial mindset”, which, in turn, highlights how ideas, techniques, and practices from the private sector are imported into the public sector (see also Ball & Youdell, 2007).

Focusing on the reconfiguration of the legal, social, and economic institutional framework that underpins the phenomenon of welfare export sheds light on how the line of division between “public” and “private”, “unproductive” and “productive” blurs. Drawing attention to how cognitive capitalism changes the logics within these institutions is therefore not a matter of looking for the process of privatisation. Rather it is about the activation of specific techniques normally associated with enterprises that allow public educational institutions “to compete as one of various actors within the educational marketplace” (Roggero, 2011, p. 27). This initiates a process in which public institutions become more like an enterprise, rather than an enterprise. The organisation is forced to think about their performance as an organisation through goals and metrics for measurements (Ball, 2012; Hjort, 2012; Rikap & Harari-Kermadec, 2020). By making the institutions “enterprise-like”, they operate “on the market” by commodifying the knowledge that they already teach inside the walls of the institutions. Thus, knowledge co-produced in the local setting is translated into an ideological commodity which is sold on the global educational market.

In the following, I analyse how China, as the primary target for VIA University College’s welfare export of childcare know-how, is an exemplary of how such ideas, techniques, and practices are activated within the welfare institution.

Made for China

The reconfiguration of VIA University College is closely related to the practical arrangements of the International Office and the intention to conceptualise an “exportable” product to China. “All this”, as the Head of the International Office stressed while pointing to a document presenting a detailed plan of a week-long course recently conceptualised for a kindergarten in China as well as an advertising brochure, “has been developed in relation to it being sold to China”. As the former Vice Dean, Peter Friese, expressed in a newspaper article, “we have a product that they would like to have” (Schmidt, 2014). While it might seem easy to dismiss the importance of such strategy plans produced and published by the board of directors, the same ideas were constantly reproduced in VIA University College’s efforts to commodify Danish childcare know-how to China. Indeed, the Head of the International Office specifically commented on these plans when explaining how he was given his current position:

Previously, we had several small offices, an international project office, a mobility office, and then there were several offices around, which were more or less self-employed. […] In 2015, it was decided to merge these several offices into one at which I got the job [ed. as Head of the International Office]. Therefore, from November 2015 until now, we have been through a major reorganisation, where organisational plans and action plans have been landed. […] At this time, yes, we are 60–70 people involved in organising. Few are full-time at the international office, but we are now 12 inside the office.

(Interview, June 28, 2018)

To put the numbers mentioned by the Head of the International Office into perspective, VIA University College employs (as of 2020) 2,134 workers yearly, making it the largest University College in Denmark. Drawing on both the previous smaller organisations’ (pedagogical seminars and centres of higher education), international agreements made it possible for VIA to highlight the fact that they have had partners in China since 2001 (VIA, 2015d).

In total, VIA University College has around 20–30 partners in China.² Along with local municipalities in Denmark, Viborg Municipality and Horsens Municipality, VIA is specifically channelling its activities towards the Chinese region of Sichuan (Sørensen & Friese, 2016). The activities of these municipalities are vital gatekeepers for VIA University College. As the Head of the International Office told me, “[i]t is clear that in Chengdu where we primarily work, there were some who had done preliminary work and were known”. In regard to doing business in China, the Head of International Office explained to me that it had been a place where “people [Danish educational organisations, red.] spent a lot of money without getting anything out of it”. Yet, this time it was expected to have a better outcome due to more strategic targeting.³ “So, at some point – and I don’t really remember when”, he told me, “it was decided by the Board of Directors and the Executive Board that China should be – for the entire VIA – a focus area”. In the brochure VIA in China, which was last edited in December 2015 according to the document properties, VIA University College describes their two main activities as, on the one hand, academic cooperation with partner institutions and, on the other, “sell[ing] Danish know-how in the form of education, training and consultancy services” (VIA, 2015d, p. 3). These activities not only complement each other, as they write in the brochure, but are rather, as an appendix to a Board of Director meeting in June 2015 shows, seen as closely connected to each other. Here, “relationships built within one type of collaboration can generate new relationships, skills development, and knowledge exchange in another type of collaboration” (VIA, 2015c, p. 3).

However, internationalisation of VIA University College does not only rest on the need to create relationships to their advantage. As highlighted in one of the minutes from the Board of Directors meeting in late 2018, VIA emphasises how international co-operation within education can help to increase the possibility of business co-operation (VIA, 2018c). Academic partnerships as well as private partnerships are, as they stress on numerous occasions (websites, advertising material, board meetings etc.), part of their “DNA” as a university of applied sciences. VIA University College’s practices are not confined to the area of education solely; they can foster public-private partnerships beyond this area into co-operation and enterprises. The objective is allegedly not only to capitalise on the “interest from China” but also to make sure that these activities “stick” through binding partnerships. Hence, VIA University College envisions itself as an intermediary organisation that, for example, attracts “talented students” from around the world and helps “employers look for candidates with Chinese experience” while also capitalising on the interest in Danish childcare know-how (VIA, 2015d). Hence, academic partnerships are interconnected to the sale of “Danish know-how”, as these activities are the practices that both maintain and foster existing and new relationships with potential buyers.

Having the ambition of transforming themselves into a global entrepreneurial knowledge factory due to the experienced demand for Danish childcare know-how from China, how, then, does VIA University College produce the practical arrangements of the Danish childcare know-how concept that is sold? And how does VIA University College market this concept that is sold to the educational agencies and kindergartens mentioned above? These are the questions that the rest of the article will answer.

Danish childcare know-how as a commodity

The establishment of academic partnerships in China is therefore highly strategic for the sale of Danish childcare know-how in the country. The actual business agreements that VIA has made with institutions in China span from private education companies and agencies to public kindergartens. VIA signs a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the respective partners that want to purchase “know-how courses” for either two or three years. This is done to secure some level of fixity in the collaboration with these institutions as they, of course, vary in size, aims, and interests. The employees at VIA – both the Head of the International Office as well as the teachers that I interviewed – would normally signify the commodity of “Danish know-how” as “packages” that include a number of “courses”. As of 2018, 24 inserts on different pedagogical topics made up the supply of courses. At the same time, as the Head of the International Office noted, VIA University College put a lot of effort into revising the sales promotion material in addition to efforts to formulate the actual know-how. “We also made a nice flyer, so we had something to hand out. And suddenly, we got to sell courses”, which meant a development from one course to six-seven courses the first year after this change while VIA University College was selling 25 courses as of 2018. VIA uses these inserts as representations of 24 courses (see Figure 1), which then can be put into three different overarching frameworks making up the package of “Danish childcare know-how”.

Figure 1. Inserts from via in both Chinese and English.

Source: Available from VIA University College’s website www.viadenmark.cn/en. Last seen in 2020.

The framework of each package that is bought by the respective kindergartens is made up by either a total number of six or nine courses that runs for two or three years, respectively. The kindergarten mix-and-matches courses to assemble the specific package suited to their needs and desired profile. The packages that run for three years are, unsurprisingly, the most advanced ones, whereas those that run for two years are simpler. Each year, three courses are taught in China. All of them last for 30 hours and takes place in the kindergarten setting as engagement with children during exercise is crucial. “Some of them”, the Head of the International Office said, “just want something that is Danish”, whereas others, for example, “do not want the course on ‘creativity and innovation’” or want to have “philosophy and children as a salient feature of their kindergarten. Well, that is up to them” (Interview, 28 June 2018). Yet, the most popular programme is the one in which VIA University College composes six courses which build on conversations with Chinese buyers, i.e. public and private kindergartens.

Even though the available products in 2018 were 24 different courses, the intrinsic feature of these packages is, on the one hand, a way for VIA University College to problematise the idea of conceptualisation that they, on the other hand, paradoxically does to conceptualise their version of Danish childcare know-how. In fact, the Head of the International Office emphasises this struggle to conceptualise “Danish know-how”. However, “in reality”, as one of the teachers who had frequently taught in China highlighted, “one could probably say that Danish children’s pedagogy is not concept-based … You might say. But it is starting to become that” Interview, 9 January 2019). Beyond the academic discussion reflected in the quote, the logic at play here is the idea of “just-in-time” production: If there is a demand for “something Danish”, VIA University College finds a way to deliver it. As the Head of the International Office expressed in one particularly noteworthy dialogue, I had with him:

Author: The packages and courses you already have developed and that you are selling right now must be because they are the most attractive?.

Head of the International Office: Uh, so of course, the courses we have put into the packages, these are the ones we consider to be the most sought after. But then again, there are always new things added. For example, the one around philosophy [referring to a previous example he provided where it was in demand]. Do we have it [individual teaching of such subjects] at all here at the University College/education, right? It turns out that we do.

Author: But it’s a small subject, right?

Head of the International Office: Well, I don’t know. It is not an area that has a strong presence [domestically at VIA University College], but we can do a course in it for those 30 hours. And we can also find educators who … are interested in taking it

(Interview, June 28, 2018)

What the Head of the International Office highlights in this quote is exactly the way VIA University College is enterprise-like and not an enterprise where the University College is a strategic space for the mobilisation of specific know-how. On the one hand, it grants insights into the internal logic that allows public educational institutions to act on the market. On the other hand, it shows how local social practices are already happening as part of educational obligations that are commodified for the purpose of welfare export. Teachers already read, disseminate knowledge, and interact with the students enrolled in the Danish educational system. The teachers attached to the International Office would then teach the course that relates to what they teach in Denmark. The commodity, in other words, is believed to always-already be in production. It is “in stock” for a global market.

Yet this “stock”, as highlighted by the Head of the International Office, is closely related to the actual “consumption” of the product. Even though VIA understands that “we have a product that they would like to have”, the University College does not accurately know who “they” are. The aim is therefore not necessarily to show them “the product” but rather to fulfil a need “they” might have. In other words, the perceived values of the kindergartens become the basis for the concrete conceptualisation which is supposed to fulfil the future needs of the kindergartens. Danish childcare know-how is therefore not envisioned as something that is simply consumed but rather a commodity that evolves in the relationship between VIA University College and Chinese buyers. The commodity that VIA University College seek to deliver, in other words, taps into a calculable future in relation to both transforming and impacting teachers and children, which in turn leads to an impact on society in general. This is particularly evident in the advertising material where semiological features of economic science (graphs) or natural science (microscopes) are juxtaposed with happiness or curiosity (children smiling) (see Figures 1 and 2). This juxtaposition is present throughout the publications of VIA University College – from strategic plans to commercial videos uploaded to the Chinese companion to Youku (see Andersen (2020, pp. 183–86) for an exhausting analysis). VIA University College, in other words, see the child as the body of an uncertain future where Danish childcare know-how is presented as an economic rationale that allows potential buyers to strategically transform the near future into a calculable one by turning the child into an object for modulation.

Figure 2. The earlier the investment, the happier the child.

Source: Publicly available marketing material produced by VIA University College

Conclusion

The effort to commodify Danish childcare know-how as a form of welfare export shows how VIA University College establishes a long list of social practices to transform the arrangement of their institution into an entrepreneurial organisation with a global outlook. By shedding light on these social practices, I have drawn attention to the subsumption of public education institutions as the organisation is internally reorganised to become like an enterprise in the efforts export Danish childcare know-how. Specifically, through the empirical example of the Danish educational institution, VIA University College, I show how the phenomenon of welfare export transforms welfare institutions into knowledge factories in which existing collective knowledge production within welfare institutions is subsumed within logics of capitalist valorisation. This subsumption occurs through the activation of specific techniques within public welfare institutions that are normally associated with enterprises. In this way, welfare institutions become strategic centres for valorisation in cognitive capitalism, as the collective knowledge already in place in these institutions becomes a main object for accumulation.

To pinpoint the characteristics of these techniques, I discussed the role of “University Colleges” as a welfare institution. I focused on the historical implications of public educational institutions becoming more like an enterprise that not only delivers education programmes in the local setting but is also encouraged by the state to make income elsewhere on the global educational market. I then analysed how VIA University College, since its establishment in 2008, has made such a move by emphasising the vision of being an entrepreneurial University College with a global outlook. China was identified as one of the primary customers for this global outlook and, as such, the place to direct the export of Danish childcare know-how. I stressed the idea of VIA University College’s engagement with local municipalities to open up “the Chinese market” through academic partnerships. These academic partnerships make it possible for VIA University College to export their concept of Danish childcare know-how. Finally, I analysed what the product of Danish childcare know-how is comprised of and the way that it is advertised by VIA University College where both instances are produced in relation to the consumer, as they become an integral part of the commodity itself. All this ideally targets a Chinese audience both in the material of the product itself and in the advertising.

The historical development of VIA University College’s attempt to export “Danish childcare know-how” to China grants insight into how the logics of cognitive capitalism alter the institutional framework of the welfare state in its quest for surplus value. While my analysis has only focused on the practices of VIA University College, the political ambitions of the Danish welfare state to engage in a global education market has enacted a set of transformations of public educational institutions like the University Colleges in Denmark. These transformations highlight how welfare institutions normally seen as “public” due to providing state-funded education for Danish citizens are reconfigured with the goal of commodifying knowledge from the study programmes already taught in the local setting into know-how as a “market niche” for the global market of education.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Marlene Spanger for highly constructive and careful feedback. I would also like to thank Mira C. Skadegård and the Intersectionality Research Network at Aalborg University for fruitful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Magnus Andersen

Magnus Andersen is an Independent Researcher. He holds a PhD in Social Science from Aalborg University, Denmark.

Notes

1. This is a slight revision from the Danish version, which can be directly translated into the title “Imprint on the world” (Aftryk på verden) (VIA, 2015a). What is more is the strikingly lacking translation of the Danish paragraphs in the English version if one compares the two versions. The Danish version is much longer and filled with way more information than the English one.

2. According to their website in 2018, these partners both public and private childcare institutions such as Golden Apple Education Group, Mdoudou Kindergarten, Coco Sunshine Kindergarten, SheCare, She Hong Ba no. 1 Kindergarten, Horsens Chengdu Kindergarten and Primary School, High-tech Zone Education Bureau, and Famous Angel Chengdu.

3. “Knowing the Chinese market” is a general discourse even among some of the largest companies in the world, as Zhou has shown in undefined.