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This article focuses on how local institutions in three rural areas in Sweden organised education and work to assist adult immigrants' integration. We particularly analyse how local officials in educational institutions, employment offices and local governments attempted to support adult immigrants' education-to-work transitions, using a theoretical framework rooted in the ecology of equity concepts. The results show that national policy is oriented towards areas that have larger populations than most rural areas. However, flexible solutions such as finding suitable workplace placements to assist specific immigrants' transitions and integration are sometimes easier in rural areas with closer interactions.

Enabled by market-oriented policies implemented in the early 1990s, a nation-wide for-profit education industry has emerged and flourished in Sweden. As a more recent expansion strategy, Swedish school companies have begun exporting their school and early childhood education and care services internationally. In this article, three such companies and a selection of the foreign operations they have set up are studied to analyse how they describe the education services they are establishing in the new national settings. The findings show that the companies have developed and followed different edu-business models, using and transforming particular pedagogical ideas and connecting them to different spatial imaginaries. These include the Swedish/Scandinavian as both places and idealized spaces, infused with borderless global transformative spatial imaginaries on the creation of autonomous learners and futuristic education visions for global futures. Educational profiles and concepts from the Swedish context are both adjusted and marketed to the foreign settings, and entail stories on spaces and mobilities, encompassing pedagogy, teachers and students.

Incorporation into the labour market is a key endeavour, of heightened importance in recent years due to high migration flows, for both immigrants and their recipient countries. Hence, activation and employability are major themes in both transnational and national policy discussions, which have generated various programmes and policy measures. This article focuses on one type of such initiatives: collaborative agreements intended to increase the effective establishment of newly arrived migrants through work-related educational tracks in Sweden. Drawing on post-structural policy analysis techniques and theorisation of place, the author analyses documents regarding associated policies, and views expressed by interviewed actors, in three rural municipalities. In efforts to identify hindrances and possibilities for immigrants' incorporation in rural settings, potential employers' perspectives are included. The analysis shows that a 'resource discourse' and a 'deficit discourse' are prevalent in the construction of the agreements and the employers' perspectives regarding immigrants in the municipalities, place and tracks. It also shows that the municipal strategies differ in terms of organisation and local goals of the tracks. The indications of how place is constructed in local rural settings highlight the importance of such a perspective in efforts to enhance immigrants' incorporation into the labour market, address deficits and harness resources.