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Major international surveys and reports have considerably altered the expectations and outlooks of national policymakers in education over the last three decades. Through a comparative content analysis of bibliographies in policy documents, this article explores the intermediary bodies that facilitate salient interconnections between international organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and national policymakers and experts who prepare comprehensive school reforms in three Nordic countries: Denmark, Norway and Sweden. This article builds on a large Nordic research project that studied the transfer and translation of international policies in a Nordic reform context. It extends the study by examining the role of publishers as intermediary policy brokers that legitimize the usage of OECD knowledge as significant members of instrument constituencies. This study enhances our understanding of the variations in citation patterns across policy documents from three Nordic countries. It also investigates the extent to which differences in instrumental constituencies arise from institutional arrangements and the ideational foundations underpinning reform trajectories. Additionally, it examines the topics addressed by these reforms and the governments’ affiliations with new policy brokers supported by both public and private publishers.

This article argues for the problematic dominance of education research striving for relevance for policy and practice, with little to no consideration of its contribution to shared internal disciplinary discourse. Drawing on non-affirmative education theory, we use empirical examples from the Swedish context to contend that such a one-sided focus on external relevance may lead to a relevance paradox in which education research becomes increasingly irrelevant while striving for relevance. Two issues are discussed in relation to this development. First, such a discourse on education research runs the risk of becoming undisciplined in the sense that it becomes detached from the shared disciplinary language, with little to no connection to fundamental education theory. Second, education research runs the risk of becoming uncritical. In closing the gap between practice/policy and research, education researchers jeopardise their critical distance and become subordinated to practitioners and policymakers in an unequal and uncritical relationship. Finally, we argue for a more dynamic and reflexive understanding of the relevance of education research, where the reflexive relationship between policy/practice and fundamental education theory research is understood as the thing that makes it possible for disciplinary discourse to thrive.

The aim of this article is to explore the interrelationships between a national government and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in terms of the power and legitimization of education reforms, here based on the reciprocal dependence of the two actors. Although the current case study only analyses the shifting relationships between Sweden and the OECD, the assumption is that the case is quite representative of the ambiguities of power in the relationships between the OECD and its smaller member countries and the Nordic countries in particular. To explore the relationship between the Swedish national government and OECD, we make use of discursive institutionalism as a general framework. For a closer understanding of the standpoints of the OECD and Sweden on different matters and at different times, two explanation logics are used. The discourses we found characterizing the different kinds of relationships over time are a discourse of opposition, a discourse of mentorship and a discourse of subordination. We argue that there are both ideational and institutional reasons affecting the conditions for cooperation on educational policy. Although institutional reasons strengthen the maintenance of the cooperation, ideational reasons both challenge and develop the nature of the collaboration between the OECD and Sweden.

The present article tests counterintuitiveness theory and methodology in relation to religious dream imagery using data on religious dream content. The endeavor adopts a “fractionated” or “piecemeal” approach where supernatural agent (SA) cognition is held to be a pivotal building block of purportedly religious dreaming. Such supernaturalistic conceptualizations manifest in a cognitive environment of dream simulation processes, threat detection, and violation of basic conceptual categorization characterized by counterintuitiveness. By addressing SA cognitions as constituents of allegedly religious dream imagery, additional theorizing and supporting data are presented in a growing body of research in the cognitive science of religion (e.g., Barrett et al., 2009;Hornbeck and Barrett, 2013;Barrett, 2017) and on religious dreaming (McNamara and Bulkeley, 2015;McNamara, 2016). The aim of the article is partly to map and align contemporary theorizing regarding counterintuitiveness and CI schemes with empirical qualification of the prosaic hypothesis about the predominance of supernaturalism in allegedly religious dreaming. This is done by (1) exploring the crucial topic of the pervasiveness of cognitive counterintuitiveness; (2) testing Barrett’s counterintuitiveness coding and quantifying scheme (CI scheme) for counterintuitiveness in the context of religious dreaming by assessing intercoder reliability; and (3) exploring the prevalence and base rate frequency of counterintuitiveness in dream reports. This undertaking aims to contribute to the methodology and understanding of religious dream cognition, as well as to establish the cross-cultural base rates of counterintuitiveness in dreams for future research.

Phosphorus has been identified as a critical element by the European Union and recycling efforts are increasingly common. An important phosphorus-containing waste stream for recycling is municipal sewage sludge (MSS), which is used directly as fertilizer to farmland. However, it contains pollutants such as heavy metals, pharmaceutical residues, polychlorinated bi-phenyls (PCBs) and nano-plastics. The interest in combustion of MSS is continuously growing, as it both reduces the volume as well as destroys the organic materials and could separate certain heavy metals from the produced ashes. This results in ashes with a potential for either direct use as fertilizer or as a suitable feedstock for upgrading processes. The aim of this study was to investigate co-combustion of MSS and biomass to create a phosphorus-rich bottom ash with a low heavy metal content. A laboratory-scale fixed-bed reactor in addition to an 8 MWth grate-boiler was used for the experimental work. The concentration of phosphorus and selected heavy metals in the bottom ashes were compared to European Union regulation on fertilizers, ash application to Swedish forests and Swedish regulations on sewage sludge application to farmland. Element concentrations were determined by ICP-AES complemented by analysis of spatial distribution with SEM-EDS and XRD analysis to determine crystalline compounds. The results show that most of the phosphorus was retained in the bottom ash, corresponding to 9–16 wt.% P2O5, while the concentration of cadmium, mercury, lead and zinc was below the limits of the regulations. However, copper, chromium and nickel concentrations exceeded these standards.

The aim of this article is to contribute to a deeper understanding of the internationalisation of the Swedish school, seen from a municipal level. The paper draws on an examination of local school policy in two Swedish municipalities between 1950-2000 from a historical curriculum theory perspective, taking into account the socio-historical context of schooling, including school politics, school administration and school practice. The international influences and exchange within the two municipality cases has been traced by searching for educational efforts that include international elements such as introducing new subjects, programmes, immigrant education, study trips abroad and/or conferences. The result shows that the Swedish school has been subject to transnational exchange long before entering the ‘era of globalisation’. It also shows that the extent and the forms of transnational exchange differ radically between municipalities, which in this paper are discussed in terms of ‘different worlds of internationalisation’.

The movement towards greater decentralisation is not seldom the obvious starting point for the study of school governance. In this article this assumption is analysed and problematised based on a reading of central education policy texts related to the last two curriculum reforms for the Swedish compulsory school ( Lpo 94, Lgr 11) and the EU’s overall growth policy from 2000 onwards. The result shows that although the school’s governance rightly can be described in terms of decentralisation, there are several parallel movements that point in the opposite direction. An increased influence from the EU over Swedish education policy, an increased central interest for school content issues, concentration of free schools to a few large corporations, and that teachers’ professional judgments are replaced by standardised and centrally-designed material are discussed as four such processes. The assumption of school decentralisation thus requires qualification and clarification in order to serve as a basis for the study of school governance.