As the importance of transnational arenas and actors in governing education has increased over the last decades there has been a growing number of studies trying to conceptualise the ‘soft power’ exercised by these actors. Important contributions have been made in order to understand these new governance practices stated in terms of ‘governing at a distance’, ‘governing by numbers’ and/or ‘governing by inspection’, all of them emphasising that it has to do with governance exercised without legal power. This is also the rationale behind the starting point of this paper. The aim of this paper is not primarily to find a new way to conceptualise these governance practices but to show how these practices in recent years have come to accommodate a growing number of constituents traditionally associated with legal government such as curriculum guidelines and policy instructions. The emergence of a European ‘crisis discourse’ from the mid 00s and onwards is discussed as an important reason why new governance strategies have been developed to strengthen central control over national educational reforms in Europe. Discussing the governance exercised by the European Union in this paper in terms of ‘governing by instruction’ is an attempt to complement rather than replace previous conceptualisations and to problematise the emergence of new forms of central control and direct involvement from the European Commissions in policy making in the member states. In order to follow the process from the EU to the member state level Sweden serves as a national example. The paper draws on two kinds of empirical material, partly on an analysis of central official policy documents produced by the EU and the Swedish government and partly by documents related to the development, communication and implementation by the European Commission of country-specific recommendations, using Sweden as the national policy arena.  Theoretically the paper draws on earlier work on Europeanisation in education (Lawn & Lingard 2002; Grek 2008; Grek & Lawn 2009; Lawn 2011; Lawn & Grek 2012) where Europeanisation is understood as a general process towards a strengthened coordination of national educational policies.

Method

In order to examine the shifts towards strengthened governance as communicated in the policy documents, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)(Chouliaraki & Fairclough 1999; Wodak 2002) is used as a methodological approach. Critical discourse analysis enables a systematic analysis of policy texts as parts of social practices continuously making and remaking our understanding of the world. Understanding discourse as part of social practice thus makes discourse constitutive, not just for human thinking, but also for human action. From this position policy texts are seen as materialised expressions of discourse. Fundamental to the analysis is to see discursive interaction as ‘sites of struggle’ where different actors, ideologies and/or positions struggle for dominance (Wodak 2002). In order to capture this discursive interaction I have used Reisigl’s (2008) four different categories of discursive strategies in the systematic analysis. The first one is ’nomination’ and refers to how different phenomena are described. The second one is ’predication’ and refers to what positive and/or negative attributes are given to these phenomena. ’Argumentation’ then has to do with the arguments that are used to legitimise and/or delegitimise different positions. ’Perspectivation’ finally means an analysis of the basic positions upon which the three above strategies are based.

Expected Outcomes

The study shows that the overall understanding of the governance rationale of the European educational policy space can best be described in terms of ’soft governance’ where the use of objectives, indictors, benchmarks and inspections are central elements. But it will also show that due to a European crisis discourse emerging around the mid 00s there has been a shift towards an increased introduction of elements traditionally linked to more centralised forms of government, which calls for conceptual rethinking. The argument of the paper is that the concept ‘governing by instruction’, presented in this paper will, as a result of the analyses, contribute to the understanding of the multifaceted governance exercised by the EU as a practice containing simultaneously soft and hard elements and where the harder ones have come to play an increasingly important role in the light of the emergent European crisis discourse.

References

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