The Front and Back Stages of Swedish School Inspection: Opening the Black Box of Judgment

This article provides results from a study of the hidden processes of consensus formation that precede and make possible official judgments and decisions of the Swedish Schools Inspectorate (SI). The research question for the study was: How is knowledge negotiated on the back stage of school inspection and presented on the front stage? The article builds on in-depth case studies of school inspection in four schools. Data include internal and official material from SI, on-site observations of inspection in schools and internal quality assurance meetings at SI, and interviews with inspectors. The analysis is inspired by Goffman's usage of the concepts “front stage” and “back stage.” The results suggest that the SI front stage borrows legitimacy from an evidence-based model aiming at objective and “equivalent” judgments, while the back stage displays a complex mix of rigorous formalized guidance and uncertainty that requires inspectors’ brokering and deliberation.     

The economic microgeography of diversity and specialization externalities – firm-level evidence from Swedish cities

We employ finely geo-coded firm-level panel data to assess the long-standing question whether agglomeration economies derive from specialization (within-industry), diversity (between-industry) or overall density. Rather than treating the city as a single unit, we focus our analysis on how the inner industry structures of cities influence firm-level productivity. Our results illustrate the co-existence of several externalities that differ in their spatial distribution and attenuation within cities. First, we find robust positive effects of neighborhood-level specialization on TFP as well as a small effect of diversity at the same fine spatial level. These effects are highly localized and dissipate beyond the immediate within-city neighborhood level. Second, we also find that firms benefit from the overall density of the wider city. The results emphasize the relevance of “opening up” cities to study the workings of their inner organization and support the idea that location in a within-city industry cluster in a diversified and dense city boosts productivity.     

Aesthetic modernisation and international comparisons: learning about drawing instruction at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900

This article is concerned with an early phase in the history of educational comparisons in which international exhibitions played a major role as spaces for comparison. It looks at the educational exhibits at the Exposition Universelle in Paris 1900, and more specifically its exhibitions on drawing instruction. By following a central Swedish actor, Hjalmar Berg, and his ambition to modernise drawing instruction in Sweden based on his impressions at the exhibition, the article argues that the exhibition was a medium with the potential to promote aesthetic modernisation. Previous research has highlighted the world’s fairs as important arenas for the international comparison of education. This article is intended to contribute to this field by also exploring what these exhibitions meant on a national level.     

Transforming academia: The role of education

Scientific research is usually presented as the driver that provides progress and meaning to the academic ecosystem. Higher education on the other hand, is typically imagined as something that naturally follows scientific research. In the academic ecosystem, education often retains a more marginalized position than scientific research and in many of the predominant accounts of the academic ecosystem it is even neglected. As a result, higher education and teaching tends to be treated as duty work that retracts resources away from research. In response to such accounts the present article proposes an alternative perspective in which higher education can assume a proactive role that affects institutions’ research. The article presents a case that demonstrates how social scientists at the Technical University of Denmark, in response to new demands for autonomous economy within Danish universities, invented the controversial, yet successful, ‘Design and Innovation’ engineering program. Design and Innovation’s controversial curricular composition brought together: creativity, social awareness, and product innovation and heralded the salvation for the declining status of engineering in Danish higher education. The article contributes to contemporary discussions on transformations within the university system by illustrating educational development as a transformative practice whereby the value and purpose of scientific disciplines get rearticulated in conversation with contemporary understandings of social needs.     

Technology cross-fertilization and the business model: The case of integrating ICTs in mechanical engineering products

This paper investigates the increasing interdependency among different bodies of knowledge in products, from the technology opportunities arising from ‘cross-fertilizing’, and how firms try to appropriate economic value from their technical potential. The study is based on three multi-national corporations, and their integration of information and communication technologies into established mechanical engineering products. The case studies show how technology cross-fertilization needs to be accompanied by business model changes in order to achieve increased economic value. While much attention has been given to the input dimension of multi-technology products, the economic and commercial domains have been rather ignored in previous literature. This work contributes to the management literature by linking the input resources with the market output for creating and appropriating value from technology cross-fertilization.     

Lessons Learned from the First Year of E-Legal Deposit in Sweden: Ensuring Metadata Quality in an Ever-Changing Environment

The new Swedish Law on legal deposit of electronic documents went into full effect on January 1, 2015. The sheer volume of documents in a wide variety of media types delivered by thousands of publishers (suppliers), such as government agencies, online news media, and publishing houses, poses an exceptional challenge for the National Library of Sweden (NLS). This requires a high level of automation in the data processing, from ingest to validation, transformation, enrichment, and storage, while at the same time attaining metadata of the best possible quality. To meet the challenges encountered the NLS has developed new electronic systems and workflows that will be explained in this article. We will also touch on what we learned from our initial experiences with e-deposit and some of the issues that appear on the horizon.     

Challenging the “deficit model” of innovation: Framing policy issues under the innovation imperative

As innovation is increasingly becoming an imperative for policymakers around the globe, there is a growing tendency to frame policy problems as problems of innovation. This logic suggests that we are unable to address grand societal challenges and ensure economic competitiveness because our societies, institutions, scientific activities or individual predispositions are not sufficiently geared towards innovation. In this paper, we analyze this “deficit model” of innovation in which a lack of innovation is routinely invoked as the main obstacle to social progress. Drawing parallels to research on the deficit model of public understanding of science (PUS), we develop a theoretical framework that captures the dynamics and normative implications of deficit construction, highlighting five salient dimensions: problem diagnoses, proposed remedies, the role of expertise, implied social orders, and measures of success. We apply this framework to three empirical case studies of recent innovation strategies in Luxembourg, Singapore, and Denmark. Attention to this deficit framing around innovation is important, we argue, because it is an essential part of how innovation transforms societies in the 21st century: not only through new technological possibilities or economic growth, but also by shaping public discourse, narrowing policy options, and legitimizing major institutional interventions. The implied pro-innovation bias tends to marginalize other rationales, values, and social functions that do not explicitly support innovation. It further delegates decisions about sweeping social reconfigurations to innovation experts, which raises questions of accountability and democratic governance. Experiences from the history of PUS suggest that, without a dedicated effort to transform innovation policy into a more democratic, inclusive, and explicitly political field, the present deficit logic and its technocratic overtones risks significant social and political conflict.     

The boss is not always right: Norwegian preschoolers do not selectively endorse the testimony of a novel dominant agent

Theories of cultural evolution posit that cues of competence-based prestige, rather than formidability-based dominance, should guide culturally transmitted learning, but recent work suggested that French and Kaqchikel Guatamalan preschoolers place their epistemic trust in dominant others. In contrast, this study shows that 249 three- to six-year-olds (116 girls, tested between 2016 and 2018 across metropolitan locations with varying ethnic composition and socioeconomic status) randomly endorsed the word-labels of dominant and subordinate agents in the egalitarian culture of Norway, using stimuli which solicit dominance inferences among infants and manipulating anonymity across studies to control for egalitarian desirability bias. A meta-analysis estimated that 48% endorsed the dominant's testimony. This demonstrates that the tendency to endorse the epistemic claims of dominant individuals does not emerge reliably in early childhood.     

A piece of resistance: exploring behaviour assessment and political subjectification in a Swedish upper secondary school

In 2007, students at a Swedish Upper Secondary School engaged in a series of protests and demonstrations against the implementation of a written assessment of student conduct. This article explores the motivations and manifestations of this resistance, mainly by analysing debate articles and web material from the student union that organized the protests, but also by drawing on news articles, policy documents and interview material in order to grasp how this resistance was received by advocates of the conduct assessment. Making use of Mouffe’s and Rancière’s theories on political dissent, as well as Foucauldian power perspectives, the article discusses the students’ resistance in relation to political subjectification, concluding that it serves as an important manifestation of individual as well as collective engagement in school democracy, and personal student integrity.     

ICT as a Change Agent of Mathematics Teaching in Swedish Secondary School

There is a common assumption that computers will change the conditions for mathematics teaching. In this article the author discusses how the computer as a change-agent may influence the conditions, methods and results in everyday mathematics teaching. The empirical material is collected through interviews with eighteen teachers in lower secondary school. The author has also participated in all computer-aided lessons given by two teachers during one year. That means 700 possible computer-aided lessons. Teaching of mathematics seems to have such a strong tradition that the computer as a change-agent is relatively weak. The fact is that the computer is assimilated into an old tradition of methods and contents. A great deal of the computer-aided lessons give attention to drilling pupils with different types of drill-program where they can learn mathematical procedures. In some lessons laborative work is pursued with the intention that the pupils computer-aided learn mathematical concepts.