Selling out Education in the Name of Digitalization: A Critical Analysis of Swedish Policy

Sweden aspires to become ‘the best in the world at utilizing the opportunities of digitalization’ and is internationally recognized for its digital performance. Education has been identified as instrumental for the digital transformation of Swedish society, and efforts are made to accelerate the dig...

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Autores principales:	Marita Ljungqvist, Anders Sonesson
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN
Publicado:	Taylor & Francis Group 2021
Materias:	critical discourse analysis digitalization higher education policy neoliberalism welfare Education L
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/c4baf227512044e88fc6bc24c807190f
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:c4baf227512044e88fc6bc24c807190f2021-12-01T14:40:59ZSelling out Education in the Name of Digitalization: A Critical Analysis of Swedish Policy2002-031710.1080/20020317.2021.2004665https://doaj.org/article/c4baf227512044e88fc6bc24c807190f2021-11-01T00:00:00Zhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20020317.2021.2004665https://doaj.org/toc/2002-0317Sweden aspires to become ‘the best in the world at utilizing the opportunities of digitalization’ and is internationally recognized for its digital performance. Education has been identified as instrumental for the digital transformation of Swedish society, and efforts are made to accelerate the digitalization of the educational system. As governments’ demands for digitalization get increasingly loud and persuasive, it is important to critically explore what values and ideologies are embedded in the argumentation. In this study, we use Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the Swedish Digitalization Commission’s report ‘For digitalization with the times’. Our results demonstrate that the policy argumentation, despite being anchored in traditional Swedish welfare values, is characterized by a coherent and reductionist neoliberal framing of education. Students are represented as self-managing entrepreneurial citizens with a moral obligation to renew their human capital and adapt to market demands, while the educational system is constructed as a flexible, largely automated, infrastructure for ‘life-long learning’, in which teaching is reduced to ‘facilitating’. We suggest that such discourses around education in Swedish policy rest upon three preconditions: digitalization as an interconnective policy object, Swedish digitalization policy making as soft governance, and the Swedish welfare model as susceptible to discursive drift.Marita LjungqvistAnders SonessonTaylor & Francis Grouparticlecritical discourse analysisdigitalizationhigher educationpolicyneoliberalismwelfareEducationLENNordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, Vol 0, Iss 0, Pp 1-14 (2021)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN
topic	critical discourse analysis digitalization higher education policy neoliberalism welfare Education L
spellingShingle	critical discourse analysis digitalization higher education policy neoliberalism welfare Education L Marita Ljungqvist Anders Sonesson Selling out Education in the Name of Digitalization: A Critical Analysis of Swedish Policy
description	Sweden aspires to become ‘the best in the world at utilizing the opportunities of digitalization’ and is internationally recognized for its digital performance. Education has been identified as instrumental for the digital transformation of Swedish society, and efforts are made to accelerate the digitalization of the educational system. As governments’ demands for digitalization get increasingly loud and persuasive, it is important to critically explore what values and ideologies are embedded in the argumentation. In this study, we use Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the Swedish Digitalization Commission’s report ‘For digitalization with the times’. Our results demonstrate that the policy argumentation, despite being anchored in traditional Swedish welfare values, is characterized by a coherent and reductionist neoliberal framing of education. Students are represented as self-managing entrepreneurial citizens with a moral obligation to renew their human capital and adapt to market demands, while the educational system is constructed as a flexible, largely automated, infrastructure for ‘life-long learning’, in which teaching is reduced to ‘facilitating’. We suggest that such discourses around education in Swedish policy rest upon three preconditions: digitalization as an interconnective policy object, Swedish digitalization policy making as soft governance, and the Swedish welfare model as susceptible to discursive drift.
format	article
author	Marita Ljungqvist Anders Sonesson
author_facet	Marita Ljungqvist Anders Sonesson
author_sort	Marita Ljungqvist
title	Selling out Education in the Name of Digitalization: A Critical Analysis of Swedish Policy
title_short	Selling out Education in the Name of Digitalization: A Critical Analysis of Swedish Policy
title_full	Selling out Education in the Name of Digitalization: A Critical Analysis of Swedish Policy
title_fullStr	Selling out Education in the Name of Digitalization: A Critical Analysis of Swedish Policy
title_full_unstemmed	Selling out Education in the Name of Digitalization: A Critical Analysis of Swedish Policy
title_sort	selling out education in the name of digitalization: a critical analysis of swedish policy
publisher	Taylor & Francis Group
publishDate	2021
url	https://doaj.org/article/c4baf227512044e88fc6bc24c807190f
work_keys_str_mv	AT maritaljungqvist sellingouteducationinthenameofdigitalizationacriticalanalysisofswedishpolicy AT anderssonesson sellingouteducationinthenameofdigitalizationacriticalanalysisofswedishpolicy
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Selling out Education in the Name of Digitalization: A Critical Analysis of Swedish Policy

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