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National policies aiming at marketisation and privatisation in welfare sectors such as Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) require governance and organisation to be realised. In Sweden, the municipalities are key but largely under-researched organisers for preschool quasi-market infrastructures. This study explores the different ways in which Swedish municipalities act as quasi-market organisers in the preschool setting. Following organisational theory, we analyse their market shaping activities in translating national regulations in efforts to influence, support and control their local preschool quasi-market. Documents, websites, and interviews with public officials from 30 municipalities characterised as having either a large (N = 10), medium (N = 10), or small (N = 10) private ECEC sector are analysed. The analysis highlights large variations on how municipalities act as market makers, which is further discussed in the form of three ideal types: the Frontier, the Keeper, and the Endorser. We conclude that municipalities' varying and hybridised market shaping activities and local characteristics are important to understand the implications that emerge in terms of different rules of the game, stakeholder interdependencies and relationships, composition of market actors etc. Attentiveness to the sub-national/local actors are essential in understanding different welfare quasi-markets within national policy frameworks of marketisation and privatisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study targets hitherto largely understudied empirical processes and activities through which certain ideas and imaginaries are being commercialised and used by corporate actors in the global Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) industry. The aim is to analyse and critically discuss representations of the Scandinavian ECEC regime in the context of ECEC export. This is achieved empirically through a case study of a Swedish education company and its expansion in Germany, as well as by devoting analytical attention to the social, political and fantasmatic logics in the processes that constitute and characterise the "Scandinavian ECEC offer" as it is being exported. The analysis draws on corporate documents, websites and interviews with top-level company representatives. The analysis highlights how the Scandinavian ECEC regime is made up of four interlinked elements; equality, the autonomous child, integration of care and learning and outdoor pedagogy, aligned and sustained by "gripping" and "sticking" forces in fantasmatic logics that hide contingencies. In summary, the powerful imaginary of the Scandinavian ECEC regime, bringing accessibility, social justice, gender equality, nature, democracy, children's rights and autonomy, serves to conceal the political and ideological dimension of the economic logic of capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on an analysis of how school inspection in Sweden -- its aims, directions and procedures -- is portrayed in texts produced by the responsible national authorities. The study involves a textual analysis of official annual accounts and plans (texts directed to the government, municipalities, schools and the public) produced by the National Agency for Education and the Swedish Schools Inspectorate. The analysis concentrates on key concepts conveying the dominant ideas of inspection and education. The analysis is structured around four dimensions that are based on an understanding of inspection as education governance and on the characteristics of the Swedish education system. The results suggest that the rhetoric and dominant ideas of schools inspection changed when the responsibility for inspection was transferred to the Swedish School Inspectorate in the autumn of 2008. Key concepts before that time are more supportive of schools and municipalities, recognising local conditions. Later, a language with the intention of detecting shortcomings and supporting an ideology of individual rights and juridification is apparent.

This article focuses on the role of the state in the context of an increasing market orientation in Swedish education policy. It asks if and how a market orientation and privatisation can be reconciled with attempts to reestablish central output control. The controlling function of the state is emphasised in the form of efforts to inspect both public and private schools. Drawing on the literature on governance, dealing with the "hollowing-out" and "filling-in" of the state, two scenarios are distinguished asserting that a market orientation in the case of education policy could either reduce or intensify the need for state-led control. It is concluded that the characteristics of Swedish education policy conform to the "filling-in" line of argument, namely that central state control is strengthened at a point in time when a market orientation and greater choice and privatisation are gaining ground.