Joy, pride, and shame: on working in the affective economy of edu-business

Abstract

This study focuses on what people working in edu-business want to achieve. The aim is to explore (1) how the edu-business sector is discursively constructed as a work-place and part of the education system, and (2) how this discourse is organized within an affective economy – that is how the valuation of emotions distinguish what are considered as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ subjectivities, practices, and institutions. The analysis draws on interviews with 22 people working in Sweden’s edu-business sector. The results illuminate three discourses: a bureaucratic, an entrepreneurial, and a profit discourse. Emotions attached to the bureaucratic discourse are anxiety, guilt, and boredom. Connected to the entrepreneurial discourse are joy, creativity, and well-being. Shame and pride are attached to the profit discourse. The affective economy constructs the business sector as desirable and the public sector as its opposite. Studying ‘the bright side’ of neoliberalism helps us to understand its power.

Keywords:

• Neoliberalization
• edu-business
• emotions
• discourse analysis
• affective economy

Introduction

As several studies have illustrated, education systems worldwide have been subjected to neoliberal politics and commercial agendas. Research has focused on how policies have been re-written and how everyday school life has been transformed. The present paper seeks to understand these transformations through focusing on the people working in the edu-business sector, that is, in commercial companies selling products and services to educational institutions. How do they – former teachers, school leaders, businesspeople – justify their choice to work in this sometimes contested sector?¹ Taking this perspective, we seek to go beyond the common discourse of ‘commercial actors equal bad education’ to make the picture more complex. Hogan et al. (2018, 627) have argued that one-sided criticism might be ‘diverting attention away from some key questions’. One such question to pose might be why edu-business is a desirable venture for people committed to working in education. We argue that if we want to challenge the neoliberal policies of, and the commercial involvements in, education we must recognize the driving forces of this business beyond economic incentives. By analyzing how individuals working in the sector justify their engagement, we intend to unpack the discursive conditions that make a marketized education system possible.

The analyses will address how persons working in edu-business navigate between what we conceptualize as the ‘dark’ and the ‘bright’ side of neoliberalism. Although neoliberal reform embraces ‘a complex, often incoherent, unstable and even contradictory set of practices’ (Shamir 2008, 3), neoliberalism, as an umbrella term, performs well in terms of catching the far-reaching implementations of market solutions, competition mechanisms, performativity management, freedom of choice, and efficiency in the compulsory education system that are characteristic of twenty-first century global education governance (Ball 2016; Rizvi and Lingard 2010). It is well known that neoliberal reform is played out differently in local policies and practices, depending on the different historical and cultural roots of the political system (Maroy, Pons, and Dupuy 2017; Peck 2012). However, neoliberal governing is not only about policy and politics. An essential assumption for this paper is that neoliberalism, as a set of loosely entangled ideas and realizations, operates from both ‘out there’ – in politics and the economy – and from ‘in here’ – in the head, the heart, and the soul (Ball 2016, 1047; c.f. Ong 2007). By this, we mean that neoliberal reforms have changed not only global education policy and politics but also our ‘identity and subjectivity, how we value ourselves and value others, how we think about what we do, and why we do it’ (Ball 2016, 1046–1047).

From the assumption that neoliberalism organizes education, this paper has two aims. Firstly, we explore how people working in edu-business discursively construct it as a desirable workplace. Secondly, we investigate how this discursive construction is entangled in an affective economy, that is how different emotions, with different cultural value, are attached to different aspects/contexts of education and edu-business. Drawing on interviews with people working in Sweden’s edu-business sector, we argue that analyzing neoliberal emotions is key to understanding, and critically discussing, the growth of the sector and the subjectivities, practices, and institutions that are constructed as desirable within it.

The notion of ‘affective economies’ derives from Sara Ahmed’s (2004) rich conceptual apparatus. The concept helps us understand how emotions are culturally valued and capitalized on. As an example, Ahmed (2010) illuminated the role and power of happiness in our time. The economy of happiness involves, for example, a cultural understanding of happy people as being successful, as well as an industry around positive thinking. Making other people happy is also considered as an improvement since ‘To feel better is to get better’ (Ahmed 2010, 8), and thus to do better. Also included in the economy of happiness is the construction of ‘the Other’, the non-desirable subjectivity, such as the melancholic migrant (Ahmed 2010), or – as will be discussed below – the anxious teacher. Thus, emotions are not analyzed as something happening within us, but as something that is ‘circulated socially and politically’ (Zembylas 2022, 2–3), and as organizing how we perceive and value the world (Zembylas 2022; Ahmed 2004, 2014a). This conceptualization of emotions as not only something individually felt, but also as a collective atmosphere in which emotions become culturally possible and valued, helps us to understand how emotions contribute to making neoliberal policies and practices reasonable (Anderson 2016; Pitton and McKenzie 2022; Coleman 2022). Hence, we conceptualize feelings as something individually felt, emotions as how they are expressed socially, and thereby also discursively constructing and valued within the affective economy of a particular political rationality: the neoliberalization and commercialization of public education.

The following two sections include a contextualization of the neoliberalization of education, particularly our case, Sweden, as well as earlier work on neoliberal professionals and emotions in education. These two sections also serve as a theoretical background for the analysis, presented in the next methodological section and applied in the analysis and the discussion.

The neoliberalization of education

Numerous studies have demonstrated how neoliberal reform, implemented in education systems, has changed daily work in schools (e.g. Hogan et al. 2018; Player-Koro and Beach 2014) and the role and agency of teachers (e.g. Appel 2020; Carlgren and Klette 2008; Connolly and Hughes-Stanton 2020; Erlandson, Strandler, and Karlsson 2020; Gupta 2021; Perryman and Calvert 2020; Stacey 2020). Neoliberal reforms seem to be increasingly restricting teachers’ professional autonomy (e.g. Blocking 2020, Stacey 2020) while simultaneously opening up professional possibilities (e.g. Hogan et al. 2018; Grimaldi and Ball 2021). It is important to highlight this ambiguity to understand the interplay of neoliberal policies and discourses, and the subjects and emotions that we are interested in in this paper.

The study was conducted in Sweden, a country once commonly acknowledged as having a strong welfare state with a nationally regulated educational system. However, for more than 30 years, privatization and commercialization have been strong movements in the delivery and organization of education encouraged by neoliberal politics (Dahlstedt and Fejes 2019). In Sweden, approximately 25,000 companies operate within education, including private delivery of formal education (independent schools), as well as services and products offered to schools (such as in-service training, consulting services for school development, and ed-tech products) (Rönnberg et al. 2020). Emerging from a neoliberal political agenda, this edu-business sector has not only changed the economic flows and the actors involved but also the working conditions for those within the sector. Competition has become a guiding star. For instance, the choice-centered reforms and liberal regulations for operating independent schools that were implemented in Sweden the 1990s have led to a situation where schools are competing for both staff and students (Fredriksson 2009; Simons, Lundahl, and Serpieri 2013).

During the same period, and like many other countries (OECD 2020), there has been an increasing lack of certified teachers. Competition between students, staff, and schools has become a naturalized element of the system and its subjects, as have the neoliberal elements of, for instance, self-realization and self fulfilment. As argued by Ball (2016), it has become part of how we value ourselves and each other. In this vein, neoliberal agendas and the growth of the edu-business sector have also entailed new career paths for teachers, or, more widely speaking, for people in education. In contemporary education, education careers can take place either within schools or outside of them – for instance in the expanding government education agencies, as education developers in management departments of the local school authorities, in the numerous NGOs in education, or, as studied here, in edu-business. This diversification of the sector and its career opportunities can be understood not only from the perspective of competition but also as bureaucratization. New public management (NPM) requires intensified follow-ups, quality assurance, and new expertise (Novak 2019) at all levels of the system. Neoliberal reforms involve control as well as freedom (Connell, Fawcett, and Meagher 2009).

Neoliberal professionals and emotions

Managerial NPM cultures have long challenged teachers’ values, health, and job satisfaction (Ball 2003; Blocking 2020; Stacey 2020). As Stephen Ball stated in ‘The Teacher’s Soul and the Terrors of Performativity’:

…teachers are represented and encouraged to think about themselves as individuals who calculate about themselves, ‘add value’ to themselves, improve their productivity, strive for excellence and live an existence of calculation. They are ‘enterprising subjects’, who live their lives as ‘an enterprise of the self’ (Rose 1989), as ‘neo-liberal professionals’. (Ball 2003, 217)

From all corners of the world – represented here in this short review by Australia, Canada, Britain, Estonia, India, Mexico, the Nordic countries, and the USA – teachers’ professional agency in the wake of neoliberal reform has been reported as decreasing while feelings of anxiety are increasing (e.g. Appel 2020; Golden 2018; Näkk and Timoštšuk 2021). Accountability cultures have emerged as the main explanation for teachers leaving, or wanting to leave, their profession and experiencing that the demands of their jobs ‘outstrip their capacity to adapt’ (Perryman and Calvert 2020, 18). Feelings of lack of autonomy have stifled creativity, sense of purpose, and breach of trust (Golden 2018; Appel 2020; Näkk and Timoštšuk 2021) – resulting in a number of severe consequences. From surveys of the Nordic countries, Swedish teachers, in particular, have expressed pressure on them to accomplish (measurable) learning among their pupils (Carlgren and Klette 2008). Some scholars have even suggested that there has been a ‘neoliberal assault’ (Levinsson and Foran 2020, 2) on teachers, who – due to the increased emphasis on testing, evaluation, and inspection – have been reduced to ‘managerial drones’.

However, the research literature also suggests that the neoliberalization of education opens up professional possibilities for individuals (Hogan et al. 2018; Grimaldi and Ball 2021). For example, in Gupta’s study (2019), in an Indian context, teachers used entrepreneurial strategies to deal with managerial cultures. This means ways of coping with increasing demands regarding efficiency, competition, and bureaucracy are sometimes to be found within the neoliberal logic. In the literature, we can also see tendencies of increasing differences, even polarizations, between private and public educational actors. Although subtle, this is an interesting trend in the context of this study as it touches upon what we have identified as tensions, or struggles, between discourses deployed by our interviewees to describe why they as professionals are situated in edu-business. One illustration from the literature is Connolly and Hughes-Stanton (2020) study of teachers in the private education sector, who they claim ‘often adopt a deterministic deprofessionalization account, not in relation to themselves, but to their professional colleagues in the state sector’ (729). This would suggest that deprofessionalization is discursively attached to the ‘public’, while its opposite, professionalization, relates to the ‘private’. This distinction can partly be understood as a form of resistance to the state that was strong in the wake of neoliberal politics in the 1970s. The state was claimed to produce alienation through bureaucracy and feelings of being surveilled and governed (Anderson 2016, see also Hall 1988). Within the development of this ‘state phobia’ (Foucault 2008), negative emotions were culturally attached to the public sector and positive emotions to private business solutions. As stated above, we draw on Ahmed’s work on affective economies and how emotions could be seen as ‘sticky’; they connect subjectivities, practices, and institutions to categories such as ‘successful’, ‘flexible’, or ‘unproductive’ (Ahmed 2004). Emotions set up distinctions for what is seen as good, normal, or desirable – but what is normal varies between contexts. According to Askins and Blazek (2017), emotions such as worry and anxiety are attached to the neoliberal audit culture. However, studies of neoliberal education environments have also emphasized emotions of stress, shame, aggression, guilt, fear, and feelings of out-of-placeness (Gill 2010; Moffatt et al. 2018). Nevertheless, ambiguity is again present. For instance, in a study of university researchers, Valero, Jorgensen, and Brunila (2019) emphasized the following:

It is instantiated in how researchers and research institutions generate and operate through a constant ambivalence between, on one hand, an effect of anxiety, insufficiency, competitive entrepreneurship, and violence, and, on the other hand, an effect of positive optimism, self-improvement, and contempt. It is in the constant interplay of these ambivalences that mechanisms for effecting precarious neoliberal subjectivities are to be found. (137)

As we will show, the emotional ambivalence that Valero and colleagues emphasized also characterizes the interviews in this study, albeit with the exception that our interviewees have found a way to escape the bad feelings that are attached to the neoliberalized school. As Morley and Crossouard (2016, 164) state, ‘Neoliberalism is not just about injury (Gill 2010); it can also be about reward and recognition – material and symbolic’. Anderson (2016, 736) claims we need to ‘treat the term ‘neoliberal affects’ with caution’ as there is no determinism of what is actually felt. Rather, the affective life is ambivalent and multiple. The sections following the methodological staging will show how the neoliberalization of education, for people in certain positions, can be discursively attached to both negative and positive feelings, something that we argue can contribute to the understanding of the expansion of commercial actors in education.

Methodological staging

This paper builds on data from a larger study² in which we followed the work of education companies in the Swedish education market and related stakeholders. The companies were selected based on an initial mapping of the edu-market (Ideland, Jobér, and Axelsson 2021), where we approached companies of different sizes, ranging from a handful of employees to hundreds. The companies operate within different business areas, such as the production and retailing of teaching materials, in-service teacher-training, consulting services, and digital education products. With the exception of two, all of the companies we contacted agreed to participate.

From this study, interviews with 22 individuals were selected because they explicitly talk about why they work in edu-business. These interviewees have various professional backgrounds and current positions (see Table 1), something that might have consequences for their individual sense-making of professional choices. All interviewees appear in the article with fictional names. They provided signed informed consent and were given the opportunity to review and make changes to their transcript. To maintain the anonymity of the informants, the names of the companies have been omitted, as has redundant company information³ and personal information. We recognize that more knowledge about their backgrounds could have enriched the analysis; but to keep the anonymity of the interviewees, we needed to minimize such elements.

Table 1. Background and current position of the interviewees at the company.

Interviewee	Male (M)/Female (F)	Background	Position in company
Benny	M	Teacher	Project manager
Bo	M	Engineering	CEO
Clas	M	Business	CEO
Ebba	F	School leader	Founder, educational developer
Henrik	M	Business	CEO, founder
John	M	Business	Founder and former CEO
Katie	F	Teacher	Educational consultant
Lena	F	School leader	Founder, educational developer
Madeleine	F	School leader, teacher	CEO
Maria	F	Teacher	Process manager
Martin	M	Vendor	Founder, former CEO
Mats	M	Teacher, teacher trainer	Educational consultant
Mattias	M	Research	Developer
Michael	M	School leader, school developer	Deputy CEO
Olof	M	Research	Director
Oscar	M	School leader, teacher trainer	CEO
Peter	M	Vendor	Salesman
Pia	F	Teacher	Educational consultant
Robin	M	Teacher, school developer	Head of sales
Sara	F	Teacher	Educational consultant
Sophia	F	Teacher	Educational consultant
Viktoria	F	Business	CEO

The interviews lasted for 1–2.5 h and followed a semi-structured interview guide, which served to open a conversation about edu-business work, its content and premises, such as the companies’ relations to education providers and schools, and their views and visions on schooling, the interviewees’ job descriptions, and ‘why they do what they do’ in edu-business.

Analyzing qualitative data can be compared to walking a long, undulating road with many turns and exits. The analysis starts in the design of the study and is not completed until the article is submitted. Thus, different questions need to be asked of the data at different stages of the analysis, meaning that some findings also work as points of departure for new questions. Describing this process as straightforward would be dishonest (Tracy 2010). Instead, we will aim for transparency about the process of interpreting the interviews to understand the enticement of edu-business, its cultural embeddedness in a neoliberal rationale, and what emotions are attached to that.

The analysis is grounded in the tradition of Foucauldian discourse analysis: the interviews are analyzed as reflecting and constructing how one can think, talk, and do edu-business, but also education. This way of understanding and employing the notion of discourse means it could be considered as systems of thoughts that are normalizing, and alienating, certain emotions, beliefs, practices, subjectivities, etc. Thus, discourses are productive in the sense that they produce possibilities, and restrictive in the sense that they discursively displace others (Foucault 1971). This implies that our interviewees’ descriptions of their sense-making of, and feelings for, working in edu-business are interpreted as socially and culturally organized, and organizing, emotions rather than as individual experiences. This does not mean that the experiences are not experienced or that the feelings are not felt. It simply means that the present study focuses on how emotions are discursively organized and valued within a particular affective economy (Ahmed 2010).

The analysis was conducted in different phases. First, the interview transcripts were coded with respect to content. In that analysis, the codes represented what the interviewees addressed when talking about teaching, learning, knowledge, personal biographies, policy, business, etc. Secondly, we selected codes associated with reasons for working in edu-business, such as the interviewees’ formal education, employment trajectory, current job situation, achievements, and personal driving forces. As we were curious about profit as a possible incentive, we selected parts of the interviews that were labelled with codes, such as money, profit, and salary. We not only extracted these fractions from the interview transcripts (approximately 12,000 words), but also went back to the full transcripts to make sure we had not missed anything of value beyond the initial coding.

Thirdly, the selected transcripts were analyzed with respect to how the interviewees talked about – discursively constructed – working in edu-business, also in comparison with earlier employment in schools and elsewhere.⁴ For this purpose, the transcripts were thematically analyzed from how the interviewees made sense of why they work in edu-business. The reasons for working in business touched upon both personal and professional motivations. Therefore, we have outlined the results from three following motives: (1) What’s in it for me? (2) What’s in it for the school? (3) What’s in it for the company?⁵ Even though these findings were interesting in themselves, since they made the picture of edu-business more complex, we wanted to dig deeper into how these standpoints could be understood from the literature on neoliberalized education. Thus, fourthly, we analyzed the interview data from different aspects of neoliberal governance and identified three main discourses that are organizing the sense-making of working in edu-business: the bureaucratic discourse, the entrepreneurial discourse, and the profit discourse. The bureaucratic discourse is constructed by elements tied to NPM, such as demands for documentation, evaluation, and accountability. The entrepreneurial discourse is composed of elements such as freedom, flexibility, and creativity. The profit discourse constitutes discussions about economic risks and gains.

Finally, to understand how neoliberal governance is materialized ‘in here’, we unpacked what emotions were attached to these three discourses, that is, how emotions with different cultural value were stuck to – and thus served to normalize and alienate – practices, subjectivities and ways of performing education as well as business. In sum, by looking at what emotions are attached to bureaucracy, entrepreneurialism, or profit-making, we can further understand the cultural conditions for edu-business actors in a neoliberalized education system.

Results

In the following we will show how the bureaucratic, the entrepreneurial, and the profit discourse organize sense-making in edu-business on personal, institutional and company level. The analysis focuses on how the discourses are attached to emotions with different values within this specific affective economy.

What’s in it for me?

From the analysis of personal motives for working in edu-business, it is evident that those who have been working within the educational system, as teachers and school leaders, use the bureaucratic discourse to explain why they have left school, even though they are engaged in schooling. Lena, who used to work as a school principal, described how she could not bear the responsibility of fulfilling the demands placed upon her. This is something that she explained with her ambition to do good:

… I am a very responsible person. And as a principal, you are accountable for all pupils. The fulfilment of the pupils’ objectives is by far the most important responsibility. As a principal, one has a very complex duty; and you are accountable for the work environment as a representative of a public authority. You are accountable on so many levels – to parents, to employees, and so on. If I, as a principal, can’t live up to that responsibility and be responsible for every child and ensure the well-being of every child and that they reach their goals, then I feel unwell. That level of responsibility isn’t for me. I can’t avoid it. And then it exhausts me because I can’t satisfy all the demands. [frustrated] (Lena)

As a school principal, Lena was overwhelmed by the increasing demands and responsibilities placed upon her. The literature on teacher/school leader agency within systems of neoliberal governance bears witness to similar accounts. The description of feelings of loss of professionalism and agency is an all too well-known story of accountability/audit cultures (cf. Lopes 2009; Appel 2020; Näkk and Timoštšuk 2021). Further, Lena expressed guilt about not being able to fulfill her tasks (cf. Nairn and Higgins 2011; Moffatt et al. 2018), and a way to be relieved of that guilt was to move to the private sector. Consequently, Lena quit her job as school principal to work as a consultant for other principals, helping them to organize their work and to handle difficult situations. Now, not only does she feel good about her work, but she sees herself as a professional and not the ‘managerial drone’, as Levinson and Foran (2020) discussed. In Lena’s account, the private sector has developed into a possible escape route for overworked school staff.

The story about finding a (private, commercial) context for fulfilling the norms for the enterprising subject (Ball 2003), and thus feeling better, is a recurrent one. Mats is a former teacher and university teacher trainer who entered the private sector as a consultant in a midsize company. He now works with school development and teacher training on a commercial basis. For him, the transfer to a business company, where he manages his own time and job tasks (more or less), was a form of liberation:

If you look at the municipality, it had a clear structure, for better or worse. The boundaries were clear, and you were pretty much stuck in that structure. Even more so in teacher education, I’d say. And there they frankly wouldn’t need to have been so strict, yet the boundaries were very limiting; and it wasn’t easy to think outside of the box. If you look at our company, the boundaries are very fuzzy, and you can constantly change them to fit the needs of customers and projects. There are no rules stating ‘that is absolutely not allowed’. As long as it benefits us as well as the customer, it’s totally okay. (Mats)

Feelings of freedom and autonomy are common elements in the entrepreneurial discourse. These feelings appear important for the professional identity and for the individuals’ well-being. Connected to well-being is also the feeling of meaningfulness and of being true to one’s own values. It is important for the entrepreneurial subject to work with something that one is dedicated to: ‘I work devotedly with things, so it’s not really a job. Between work and devotion’ (Maria). Even an interviewee who works solely with selling emphasized the working culture and the sense of being part of something important: ‘It feels in a way fun to be able to work with something [that is] value-driven. Then it is, for me at least, an intellectual challenge and journey’ (Peter). The reason for working in edu-business is thus discursively attached to the sense of devotion and individual reward.

It is also evident that the bureaucratic and the entrepreneurial discourses are constituted as opposites that emphasize the differences between working in the public school sector as opposed to the business sector. In the latter, the emotions of freedom, flexibility, and meaningfulness are the most elevated. Viktoria, head of a staffing agency for substitute teachers, drew on the entrepreneurial discourse when describing the motives for the persons that are employed by her company:

If anything, we’re a career platform because you want to try new jobs under safe, organized conditions – maybe you’re curious about another school, a different approach – then you’d use this as a springboard to get along. And then when you’re feeling done, when you feel that ‘now I don’t want to work all that much’– when you’re a little older, then you’d rather work at a temping agency than in a school. (Viktoria)

Together, the bureaucratic and the entrepreneurial discourses revolve around a tension between the rigid, inflexible public sector and the flexible, fun, private sector, which appears an important explanation for why the interviewees work in the private sector. However, in the entrepreneurial discourse, the flexible labor market, despite its insecure employment status, is attached to positive feelings, such as personal freedom. Anxiety and insecurity, which in other contexts are associated with a neoliberal labor market (e.g. Valero, Jørgensen, and Brunila 2019; Moffatt et al. 2018), are in our study not emphasized at all in relation to the private sector. While this could be due to the interview situation and the positions the interviewees have in the companies, the non-expression of these emotions is still relevant in the discursive construction of education and edu-business. Within this affective economy, the boundaries between the public and the private sector are made up as the difference between controlled bureaucracy and flexible entrepreneurialism.

Instead of dwelling on the insecurity in the private sector, some interviewees talk about the escape from school as an adventure into something new and yet unexplored. For Pia, her job at a digitalization company was an opportunity that suddenly appeared. She had just been offered a position as an IT pedagogue in a school when her current employer called to headhunt her:

That day I had stood in front of my principal and my colleagues saying that ‘I have the best job in the world. I will not change my job, and I like it so incredibly much here’. And the same afternoon the company gets in touch. And I thought, oh my God, I have just said these things! But I thought that No, I just have to – you only live once, I thought … I have to try. (Pia)

For Pia, the adventure is also connected to feelings of joy – another emotion attached to the entrepreneurial discourse. According to the interviewees, it is fun to work in the private sector, both in terms of collaboration with colleagues and the work tasks per se. Or, as expressed by Bo, a manager at a midsize company, ‘But this is very enjoyable, I think it’s bloody fun to be in charge’ (Bo). In the first decades of the twenty-first century, joy, or happiness, might be one of the highest valued emotions. Ahmed (2014a; b) even talked about a ‘happiness duty’, which is the obligation to be positive and optimistic instead of dwelling on negative aspects such as profiting from education, racism, or environmental disasters, and to work to make others happy. Happiness is, according to Ahmed (2010), a promise that directs us towards certain choices. Thus, happiness also becomes a boundary marker delineating those who deal with societal problems in the ‘correct’ way. Joy is attached to the entrepreneurial discourse as related to the freedom of ‘choosing’ one’s own career, to do what feels good for oneself – but also, as will be illustrated below, to do good for others.

What’s in it for school?

In the previous section, the reasons for working in the edu-business sector were related to the interviewees’ own well-being, self-fulfillment, and happiness. However, the incentives are also strongly connected to a will to improve schools, but from the position of working in the business sector. Motives are thus both personal and social, or even altruistic.

Bo underlined the quality that results from operating in a market and argued that the business sector cannot afford to not ‘deliver’, which he claims is the case with public actors. The insecurity, the risk of not selling enough, is again expressed as a positive thing:

You don’t need to take responsibility for anything when you work there [in the public sector]. It’s only once you run your own company that you need to take responsibility for what you achieve and what you don’t. No one buys your products if it’s all crap. Yes. And what do you have to do then? You’ll have porridge for dinner. And when there’s a risk of having porridge for dinner,… that makes a hell of a difference. (Bo)

Competition, insecurity, and entrepreneurialism equal high quality, according to Bo and other entrepreneurs in the edu-business sector. Through the entrepreneurial discourse, the market is often justified as self-regulating: ‘bad elements’ are expected to disappear from the market due to capitalistic logics. This normalization of entrepreneurialism in the public sector is also made by drawing on NPM elements in the bureaucratic discourse. As an opposite to a flexible market, the public school system emerges as a place where deprofessionalization is palpable, and the sector too tied to regulations, target achievements, and productivity requirement. Teaching in schools is not equated with feelings of fulfilment or possibility, but rather the opposite. Further, the business sector is described as an important link between school and the ‘reality’ and an important driver of a fundamental change:

You could say, ‘this [snaps fingers] will change everything from the ground up; of course, you have to join’. There and then, that was the reason for me getting aboard, and that is the question that has motivated us ever since. That is, the world is undergoing a fundamental change, and schools will either fall behind even further, or it has to embrace this change. (Michael)

Michael, who works at an ed-tech company, talks about the digitalization of education, where ‘reality’, ‘future’, and ‘fun’ are to be achieved through the digital shift in education. ‘Fun’ is not only for the employees in edu-business but also for the teachers and students. The emotion is, in the interviews, attached to what the business sector can provide. The school system is on the other hand described as stuck in the old days – a discourse that has been repeated and taken as an incentive for pervasive policy reforms regarding the digitalization of Swedish schools (Ideland, Jobér, and Axelsson 2021; Ideland 2021). Again, the bureaucracy is claimed as an opposite to the enjoyable entrepreneurialism, a discourse strengthening the position of the business sector. Robin, who has quit teaching for commercial ed-tech, also emphasized the problem with rigid structures in school. For him, the need to change these structures is an important justification for working in the ed-tech sector. Even stronger is the bureaucratic discourse in Bo’s story of starting, and for a long time running, a company in edu-business. He talked about bureaucrats – that is, according to him, people in the public sector – as obedient and ‘useful’ (in a slightly derogatory way), as the opposite to change agents working for the future:

But, there is a force in the small company, and it would be a shame if that force wasn’t used for development. There are a lot of people who want something, for God’s sake, and who can do it and test it against the market to see if anyone is willing to buy. There’s no danger in that […] We’re a power house. We’re proud of it. We deliver every day! (Bo)

In Bo’s account, pride is what you, as a part of the entrepreneurial experience, should feel when you ‘deliver’. Pride is also described as an emotion that can be sold. In Ebba’s work, she does not merely point out problems and solutions, but also wants her customers to feel better. Her starting point as a leadership consultant is to ‘build pride’. She describes how a job can start:

That’s when we decide, ‘I’ll have the sleepy gang; yup, those are mine!’ And then I, together with the principal, arrange kickoff meetings for them. There’ll be a swarm of students soon, and teachers must feel pride and nothing else regarding their work. How do we create that? (Ebba)

Ebba states that she sells pride, but also a promise of efficiency and order. She talks about how she has identified deficits within school organizations, leadership skills, and order: ‘I may not be able to do all the ‘this and that’ that other managers do. But I create order, and that can be nice when everything’s like chaos’. Ebba’s description of why she is working in business instead of a school provides an illustrative example of how outsourcing parts of educational work is normalized. Through her company, she capitalizes on and makes use of her best leadership skills: organization and making people feel engaged and proud. Beyond that, the work of principals – the boring stuff mentioned in the previous section – is not part of the deal. Hence, Ebba partly displaces bureaucracy with entrepreneurialism. This is a recurrent theme in our material in what is described as a necessary change for the educational system. In that sense, in Bo’s words, the entrepreneur is ‘a force’ for development.

It has been argued that the normalization of business actors in education is dependent on a deficit discourse in the Swedish education system. Schools and teachers are described as needing help, and the business actors as those who can provide that help (Ideland, Jobér, and Axelsson 2021). The deficit, or even crisis, discourse has been an important element in the implementation of neoliberal political systems worldwide, in the name of efficiency, accountability, and not least, modernization (Klein 2007). However, as it has been stated here, the entrepreneurial problem-solving is not only described as providing models and tools for teaching and administration, but also as making people who work in schools feel better. Anxiety, boredom, and stress are discursively constructed as possible to replace with joy and pride. The interviewees underline that helping and contributing to the common good also ‘feels good’ for them. In other words, working in edu-business is described not only as self-realization but as an altruistic project. Ahmed (2010) argued that, in the cultural valuation of emotions, the normative population (that is, white, middle-class) has a mantra: what feels good must be good. To make others feel better, and thus to be and do better, brings value to the helpers. The business of selling good feelings – fun, pride, creativity, and relief from trouble – is discursively constructed as a win-win situation, which is an important insight in the search for understanding how edu-business has developed into a normalized, even desired, part of the Swedish education system.

What’s in it for the company?

As has been illustrated, the interviewees used both individual and social/institutional reasons to explain how they have ended up in the edu-business sector. However, what struck us was that economic motives were rare, or even absent, when the interviewees outlined their professional histories and motives. But, when explicitly asked about the role of money, two things were clear: profit was described as necessary for the company, but not always for the individuals. Furthermore, the profit discourse is partly attached to emotions other than those associated with the entrepreneurial and bureaucratic discourses.

Although the importance of profit was often downplayed in the interview data, it was recognized in different ways. For example, the interviewees working in a management team attached profit to a sense of responsibility towards their employees. Oscar emphasized that he is not interested in profit from his business with in-service training: ‘I’m not making any money from this. I earn back my expenses, roughly’ (Oscar). Michael accentuated that his company, compared to ‘other’ companies, is value-driven and is working in the best interest of the students – not for economic gains:

If companies that aren’t driven by values engage in schools and are only looking to make profit, I think it’s problematic. But I think it’s equally as problematic as the fact that it can upset me when people tell us we’re only in it for the money. Of course, we want to earn money because otherwise my 100 employees won’t have any food on their tables. (Michael)

This quote illustrates the complexity of the entrepreneurial discourse and the tensions between trying to do good and running a profit-based company earning money from the tax-financed school-system. Bo expressed a similar opinion, illustrated above, when he talked about the risk of being forced to eat porridge. There, responsibility is attached to the profit discourse, but in a more positive way than in the bureaucratic discourse. Responsibility, which is seen as something one takes rather than as forced upon one, is a culturally valued emotion.

In ‘defense of’ edu-business, the interviewees quoted above can be said to explicitly recognize that they are aware of suspiciousness towards commercial actors in the educational system. Still, they stated that the pros trump the cons. However, Martin, for example, stated that some of the teachers who work in his company still need to internalize some business ideals:

It’s difficult to find an educator who also has a sense for business. They’re passionate about what they do, but you also must be able to reach closure. That’s our biggest challenge. We have 15 educators employed, and they have felt ashamed. They have felt ashamed of what is in my DNA: that you should get paid if you do something well. Conversely, one doesn’t have to overcharge, but simply be fair and get paid. They have learned to wrap up a deal and sell, and they have become so damn proud. (Martin)

Shame is an emotion that is attached to the profit discourse, especially in the interviews with and statements about former teachers now employees (not in charge, as with the interviewees quoted above) at the companies. For instance, Sara said, ‘Even today I’d feel, when they buy the service from me, I feel dirty’ (Sara). Sophia stated:

Well, I think that actors who are looking to make a profit from schools – for me that is quite unserious. Like, if you work in education, you want to do it with your heart, and you want to … It’s for the sake of the pupils that we do this. Then, of course, if you are a company, you earn money. (Sophia)

Sophia expressed ambivalence about being a part of the commercial sector, between the positive feeling of doing good for schools and students and the subsequent negatively charged obligation to make money out of that. She is aware of the shame in making money out of schools, yet she believes in the company’s idea. Shame is a culturally interesting emotion. Salmela (2019) conceptualized it as a master emotion in neoliberalism, connected to the failure to live up to expected performance standards. Ahmed (2014a) pointed to shame’s cultural effect to correct what is done wrong. For instance, national shame regarding, for example wars and abuse, has served as a way to achieve redemption. On the other hand, individual shame is an emotion that makes us turn inwards towards our own rights and wrongs, rather than focusing on societal problems. Being subjected to shame, from yourself or from others, is something that people want to escape, just like anxiety because of overwhelming responsibility or lack of autonomy. It is telling that the male participants in this study⁶ managing the companies convey the need to replace shame with pride. This is not only because one should feel better, but also because being responsible for others to get better should make their employees feel proud. Again, in the affective economy of edu-business, bad feelings need to be transformed into good feelings to fulfill the norms of the entrepreneurial subject and thus uphold the image of a business sector doing good for schools. Repeated uplifting narratives (Ahmed 2014b) about how edu-business is not only about personal economic gain but also about creating possibilities for others is another important element in the normalization the of edu-business.

Concluding discussion

With this study, we wanted to contribute knowledge on the interplay between neoliberal policies, subjectivities, and emotions (cf. Ball 2016; Pitton and McKenzie 2022). How can we understand the contested phenomenon of edu-business not only as a political or economic project but also as a desired workplace? The neoliberalization of education is complex and comprises multiple forces – of which some have been illuminated in this article.

We conclude from the interviews that reasons for working in the edu-business sector relate not only to individual career opportunities but also to personal well-being and to aspirations to do good for schools or for a company. Two main discourses – the entrepreneurial and the bureaucratic – organize how the interviewees make sense of working in the business sector. These discourses reflect what we have argued as different ‘sides’ of neoliberalism. We also suggest that these two discourses constitute each other as opposites: forming and drawing from a crisis narrative of a school system stretched to its boundaries by administrative burdens versus a flexible, joyful private sector. In other words, in these accounts the entrepreneurial side of neoliberalism is elevated: stressing commercial solutions that offer individual agency to contest the other, the bureaucratic audit culture. Hence, the bureaucratic discourse retrieves its relevance from the ‘dark side’ of neoliberalization and describes school as a place in need of modernization. Schools appear as inefficient or inhuman workplaces in which the accountability for those who work there outrun what can be realized. Accordingly, to conclude from the interviews, schools cannot be helped from the inside. Instead, working for the sake of schools can be successfully achieved from its outside, from edu-business, where one’s specific expertise can be traded. The ‘bright side’ of neoliberalism, which is about opening up possibilities for individuals in the system, is constructed through an entrepreneurial discourse. In this discourse, the commercialization of educational tasks is constructed as offering flexible, efficient, creative, human-friendly workplaces where entrepreneurial subjectivities flourish (Ball 2003), in sharp contrast to the ‘managerial drones’ in school (Levinsson and Foran 2020). From the discourse analysis undertaken in this study, we argue that to understand why commercial solutions are offered to educational problems we also need to examine how the public sector is discursively produced as the commercial sector’s opposite.

Some of the interviewees spoke of an escape from schools to edu-business, thereby making it possible for them to become proud professionals who do what they perceive as meaningful work for schools and for feeling good. This escape is spatial – from one job to another. However, it is also emotional – from bad feelings to good feelings. With help from Ahmed (e.g. 2004; 2014a), we have explored the affective economies of edu-business and how emotions are attached to discourses that are organizing what is good and bad: for the individuals themselves, for schools, and for the company. From the outset, we suggested an understanding of the neoliberalization of education as taking place ‘in here’, governing how we, as neoliberal subjects, value ourselves and others (Ball 2016, 1046–1047). As stated above, emotions have different cultural values. Good, appropriate emotions are joy, flexibility, sense of meaningfulness, and capability – emotions that attach to the entrepreneurial discourse and subjectivity. Attached to the bureaucratic discourses are emotions such as anxiety, guilt, boredom, inflexibility, and lack of autonomy, which are used to describe work in schools. These emotions have been highlighted in the literature on neoliberalization of education (e.g. Appel 2020; Golden 2018; Valero, Jørgensen, and Brunila 2019; Näkk and Timoštšuk 2021). We claim that the observation that these discourses operate as opposites – attaching positive feelings to entrepreneurialism and the private business sector and negative feelings to schools and the public system – are important for understanding why the edu-business sector is growing. The study illustrates how emotions distinguish good subjectivities and practices from bad and become moral sensors for what must be not only the private good (well-being, self-realization) but also the common good (a better school, cf. Ahmed 2004, 2010). Edu-business must, according to the ones working in it, be good because it feels good to work there and it can make others feel better. ‘In here’ (Ball 2016), guilt and anxiety are expected to be transformed into a sense of capability and creativity; and boredom is seen as possible to replace with joy, meaningfulness, and flexibility. ‘Out there’ (ibid), edu-business is discursively constructed as a place where it is possible to achieve the goals of the neoliberal, entrepreneurial subject – in strong contrast to the opportunities offered by the public school system.

In the analysis, we also identified a third discourse: the profit discourse. However, and as we have already touched upon, for people working in edu-business, the neoliberalization of education is not necessarily about injury. Rather, it is described as a possibility (cf. Anderson 2016; Morley and Crossouard 2016). Surprisingly, economic reward is not highlighted in the interviewees’ accounts (even though that could be dependent on the interview context). Rather, profit emerges as a necessary evil, as a part of the job that demands emotional labor, at least for some of the interviewees. In this discourse, shame is supposed to be replaced with pride, a valued emotion within the affective economy. However, the ambivalent emotions attached to the profit discourse also help us recognize how political questions (who governs education and for what reason?) have been diminished into questions of personal well-being and/or shame. The uncomfortable feelings that relate to making private profit from public schools are transformed into individual feel-good – pride. What could be political issues are thus transformed into individual, emotional issues. As Ahmed (2010) and others (Brunila and Sivonen 2016; Ecclestone and Hayes 2019; Brown and Donnelly 2022) have pointed out, the so-called therapeutical turn in Western culture has made us turn inwards instead of considering problems as intersubjective or political⁷. Drawing on the literature, and on the insights from this paper, we argue that further studying the affective economy of neoliberalism and edu-business can help us both to understand why the business sector is a luring workplace and how the commercialization and neoliberalization of education also entails de-politization. We have argued that the education policy research field would benefit from nuancing its criticisms of marketized education systems. Not because such systems are good, but because we need to engage more deeply with the forces that are upholding the policies advocating these systems and the conditions that make them possible. Some of the forces are political or economic, others are emotional. Most of them are both.

Acknowledgements

We thank our fellow colleagues at Malmö University; Anna Jobér, Magnus Erlandsson, Thom Axelsson and Hanna Sjögren and the two reviewers for careful reading and for valuable comments.The study was funded by Swedish Research Council [DNR 2017-01657] and Crafoord Foundation [DNR 20180742].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Crafoord Foundation [DNR 20180742]. Swedish Research Council [DNR 2017-01657].

Notes

1 Acknowledging, of course, that such “choices” can be more or less deliberate.

2 The material in the larger study consists of observations, documents, websites, commercials, and interviews with 28 individuals from edu-business, in addition to interviews that were conducted with principals and school managers. Six of the interviews with edu-business people were left out of the analysis of this paper because they did not address the question of why they were working in the commercial sector. The interviews with school staff could have been used for a comparative analysis; however, that was beyond the scope of the study. The observations could have been analyzed from the perspective of the affective economy, but the focus of the paper concerned how emotions are discursively used in the justification of working in edu-business. Other publications from the project address other research questions and data (e.g. Ideland 2021; Ideland and Serder 2022; Player-Koro, Jobér, and Bergviken-Rensfeldt 2022; Jobér 2023).

3 No ethical approval was required for the study according to Swedish guidelines for good research practice (Swedish Research Council 2017). Ethical reviews should only be performed if sensitive personal data is handled, i.e. information on race or ethnic origin, political views, religious or philosophical beliefs, union membership, health, sexual life or sexual preferences, or genetic or biometric data.

4 Of course, these motives must be understood in light of the specific interview situation.

5 The interviewees are not categorized under these headlines; rather, they reflected on the three different reasons for engaging in edu-business.

6 Here there is, of course, a gender aspect to consider, but that is beyond the scope of this article.

7 One could argue that this article does not recognize the political problems since it is looking at entrepreneurs’ emotions rather than actual consequences in school.