Representing and intervening in Swedish education—Mediating and adjudicating by grading numbers

• Author: Hans Hasselbladh,Eva Bejerot
• Published date: 01 February 2020
• Date: 01 February 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/faam.12213

Received: 9 August 2017 Revised: 11 December 2018 Accepted: 28 February2019

DOI: 10.1111/faam.12213

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Representing and intervening in Swedish

education—Mediating and adjudicating by grading

numbers

Hans Hasselbladh Eva Bejerot

Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden

Correspondence

HansHasselbladh, School of Business, Örebro

University,S-701 80, Örebro, Sweden

Email:hans.hasselbladh@gmail.com

Fundinginformation

RiksbankensJubileumsfond, Grant/Award Num-

ber:SGO14-1205:1

Abstract

Educationalreforms are attempts to transform and reconstitute con-

ceptions of knowledge, the practice of teaching and the forms of

subjectivity associated with being a teacher, pupil, and parent. We

will investigate a particular aspect of the extensive changes that

have swept across the landscape of Swedish education over the last

decades. We will show how the grading system has come to fulfill

a mediating role between progressivist educational ideas and neo-

liberal notions of individual choice and entrepreneurship, by way of

adjudicating and mediating educational performance for individual

pupils, schools, and the education system at large. The aggregated

output of the grading system is used for instrumental purposes such

as performance management, quality management, and bench mark-

ing in the school system. Grading and its associated practices extend

throughout the entire school system, defining success and failure

fromindividual classrooms to the national level as the dominant form

of representing school performance. The gradingsystem was initially

intended to reshape the inner workings of education in Sweden but

subsequently became the “gold standard” deployed in various man-

agerialpractices. Our analysis demonstrate the performative powers

when seemingly innocent techniques are put to use in public sector

reforms and new worlds are made and unmade bycomplex constella-

tions of seemingly mundane techniques and ideational frameworks.

KEYWORDS

educational reform, governmentality, grading, management control,

system, the functions of accounting

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and repro-

duction in any medium, providedthe original work is properly cited.

c

2019 The Authors. Financial Accountability & Management published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd

20 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/faam FinancialAcc & Man. 2020;36:20–32.