The education entrepreneur – experiencing European funding policy

Abstract

Within the process of harmonizing and strengthening Europe as a competitive knowledge economy education is presented as a basic pillar of economic growth in a multitude of European policy papers. But how do individuals respond to incentives coming from European education politics? (How) are they appropriating given targets and how do they engage in making sense of them – or not? This paper addresses the difference between the programme and the experience of European education politics. Based on a selected case study of experiences with European Social Fund project work, the model of an ‘education entrepreneur’, situated in the context of the German education system, will serve to reconstruct what happens with the European policy programme when it meets concrete lived experiences and will provide an insight into the gap between programme and practice of European education politics.

Introduction

The building of the European education space can be considered as a social practice, situated in the tension field of continuity and change and of homogeneity and diversity. Doing Europe is doing education and vice versa. Within the process of harmonizing and strengthening Europe as a competitive knowledge economy, education is presented as a basic pillar of economic growth in a multitude of European policy papers (Europäische Kommission, 1993, 1994, 1995, 2000a, 2000b). Accordingly, national education systems are called upon to contribute to the building of human capital as a major investment in the knowledge market. Transferability of certificates, transparency of qualifications and mobility of both services and workers are considered basic conditions for a free labour market and a free Europe. The harmonization of titles, educational approaches and education systems is considered crucial for the union-wide recognition of acquired qualifications. However, the necessary learning is delivered by education systems which have been established and institutionalized alongside the process of nation-building in the 18^th and 19^th centuries and still mirror specific national and cultural patterns (Esping-Anderson, 1998; Greinert, 1995; Heikkinen and Niemeyer, 2005; Niemeyer, 2007). Any attempt at harmonization, convergence or adjustment may well be experienced as a disturbing interference with established customs, habits and regulations. It may call into question what once made sense and challenge social actors to re-negotiate meanings, competences and expertise (cf. e.g. Filander, 2010; Seddon et al., 2010).

Since Europeanization is an ongoing process of social practices, tensions arise between the necessary supranational, European generalizations and the likewise necessary national (or regional or local) specialisms (cf. Hummrich in this issue). Moreover, they are equally built in the games of power of a soft-law neoliberal governance. Research on policy transfer and policy implementation has critically analysed travelling ideas and innovative policy instruments targeted to create a common European education space (cf. e.g. Ball, 2015; Cort, 2010; Grek, 2009; Lawn and Novoa, 2002; Milana and Holford, 2014; Normand, 2010; Seddon et. al., 2010; Steiner-Khamsi, 2012; Zapp and Powell, 2016). Strongly relating to these critical studies of European governance, this paper investigates how professional educators perceive funding of the European Social Fund (ESF). It shifts the focus from policy implementation studies to the experience-oriented perspective of individual modes of appropriating the ideas, values and concepts of European education policy, as they are expressed in the ESF funding regulations and the relating policy papers. It looks at the ‘fabricating of Europe’ (Lawn and Novoa, 2002) as a lived-in education space. How are European citizens addressed by EU policy documents, and how are European subjects constituted by EU education policy and funding programmes? To formulate research questions in that way, easily steers investigations towards the familiar track of reconstructing cases of policy implementation as hierarchical power relations deploying soft-law governance, illustrating the mechanisms of governmentality. However, subjectivation is double-ended. According to Foucault a subject is constituted in two ways. It presents itself as ‘subjectum’, the one that is subjected, underlying and subduing, to specific rules while at the same time it exists as an acting, autonomous subject:

There are two meanings of the word ‘subject’: subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to. (Foucault 1982, p.781)

Within the construction of the European education space this double-ended process of the constitution of a subject can be identified with reference to the way European education policy conceptualises the subjects addressed and how it defines the target groups, goals and aims of policy intervention. The models of life-long learners, innovative self-entrepreneurs, mobile workers or those not in education, employment or training (NEET), which are inherent to policy documents and funding regulations, are one side of the coin; the accordance of funding and implementation of policy programmes may provide spaces of orientation for actors in the field (Niemeyer and Zick, 2016) and foster innovative practices of education inside and, even more so, outside of schools. On the other side individual agency comes into play. The question then is: How do individuals respond to incentives coming from European education politics? (How) are they appropriating given targets and how do they engage in making sense of them – or not? Hence, without questioning the critique of a governance by numbers (Lawn, 2013), this paper turns the perspective around and – based on the reconstruction of social practice evolving within an education space which is framed by numbers and other instruments of control and constraint – wants to explore the individual experience of becoming and creating subjects within a European policy frame. The focus is on the individual assigning meaning to the experience of being governed by numbers – or on their refusal to do so.

These questions have developed over years of critically reflecting on the transformation of adult education within a transnational research community. Theoretical concepts from various cultural and disciplinary backgrounds have left their marks in the discussions on transnational knowledge building, governance, and the politics of working and learning (Newman et. al., 2014; Seddon, Henriksson and Niemeyer, 2010). All approaches, however, are concentrated around the question of the individual making a difference, as well as the social and political spaces in which change is possible and where learning and political engagement occur. In the following case study, the perspective turns from political programmes and social conditions to individual experience, while acknowledging that both are entangled in the dialectics of structure and agency. As Levinson et al. (2009) expressed it, ‘traditional policy studies have focused on the process of implementation. We problematize this concept and foreground the social practice that goes into the formation, negotiation and appropriation of policy’ (Levinson, Sutton and Winstead 2009: 778). Another important point of reference is the German history of critical adult education theory, asking about the social fabric of Europe:

How are these government decisions, how are these measures, regulations and directions of the European Parliament and the EU Commission in Brussels included in the life-world of human beings, are they processed, accepted – in one word, as a resource of critical thinking? These are collective learning processes of a quite special kind. (Negt, 2010: 162. Translated by current author)

This paper will start with a case study of experiencing European education politics in practice. Based on the experiences with ESF funded project work as one instrument of European education policy. The model of an ‘education entrepreneur’, situated in the context of the German education system, will serve to reconstruct what happens with the European policy programme when it meets concrete lived experiences. In the second part, these individual experiences will be contrasted with the idea of a European subject, which is inherent to the frame of European politics. The concept of differing communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991) is one approach to theorizing the identified gap between programme and practice as worlds of meaning drifting apart, as used in the final section of the paper.

‘Crappy tenders’ in a ‘regime of fear’ – experiences within the European education space

The following case study is situated on the meso-level of educational planning. It reports on the experiences of the head of an education institute, a so-called production school, providing various programmes to support the school-to-work transition and to prevent youth unemployment in the north of Germany. The history of the institute dates back to the post-war period when the influx of large numbers of unaccompanied refugees from the former eastern parts of Germany challenged the German education system, especially in the Baltic region, so that support for learning and pre-vocational training had to be provided by the state of Schleswig-Holstein. During the last two decades, austerity politics drove the management of the institution to the usage of ESF funding and an increasing change towards project work, with various sources of financing. At the same time, a marketization of this sector of the educational system resulted in a transformation of the former public and state-funded pre-vocational training institutions into company-like organizations acting on a pseudo-market of school-to-work transition programmes.

In a recently completed research project, we have investigated how the ESF affected these transformations and the related reforms of school-to-work transitions. A document analysis of ESF funding regulations over the past 30 years was contrasted with the insights gained from a series of expert interviews, which have been conducted with key persons from the administration and management of transition programmes. Out of this sample, the following interview has been selected for an in-depth case study, as it is exemplary for the management perspective of this type of institute and covers the reconfigurations that occurred over a professional history of more than 30 years. This interview allows the reconstruction of the diverging logics of European funding and local educational engagement. It foregrounds a new (at least in a German logic) type of ‘education entrepreneur’, whose work practice has transformed from providing social support and vocational learning into selling basic employability competences as a service good through running a publicly owned education institute as if it were a company. The director of the institute acts as a CEO, he is employer and employee at the same time, responsible for ‘delivering’ qualification programmes for disadvantaged young people but likewise, the jobs of his colleagues depend on his successful management. It is not least because of European funding programmes treating these types of training institutes as companies that the heads of such institutes, who mostly have a professional background in education or social pedagogy, are pushed into management tasks. These changing demands in educational professions come with the introduction of new public management instruments and neoliberal reforms of labour market (or unemployment) politics. We suggest the model of the ‘education entrepreneur’ in order to capture the major shifts in the conceptualization of their educational tasks and the main features of their actual position. Their professional tasks and daily challenges are to reconcile work ethics of education with economic principles. They are committed to social support and to qualification and economic success. They are supposed to be creative and provide innovative approaches to education; they are responsible for economic and educational success; they need to cope with risky financing and to co-ordinate a mixture of financial resources from various and insecure funding sources, while they are addressed as contract partners trading educational services. In this perspective, they represent the central features of entrepreneurs (cf. Bröckling, 2007: 15). Unlike business partners, however, they are not entitled to certain funding but depend on the imponderables of politics and, unlike company managers, their ‘business’ does not include monetary profit. In this way, educational entrepreneurs are caught by the dilemma of managing an educational institute ‘as if’ it was a company. These developments refer to the whole sector of school-to-work transition programmes – social pedagogical support and pre-vocational training are to be offered as service goods on a pseudo-market of youth unemployment schemes, in a way that drives pedagogues to conceptualize their professional work as the service of building competences in disadvantaged apprentices-to-be and as a contribution to the social investment in human capital.

The following case study has been selected for its in-built historical perspective, exactly because the interviewee had experienced these changes of working condition, education concepts and financing modes in person during his working life. The career history of the expert we interviewed started in the early 1980s and reflects the subsequent introduction of economic concepts into pedagogical practice. After he completed his training as a social worker, he started to work with young unemployed people and soon became head of a regional training institute – which at that time still was publicly funded – providing workplace security and being recognised as an established partner in the educational system of the region. He points at the introduction of competitive bidding, the ‘acquisition’ of participants, the implementation of evaluation and the monitoring of quality indicators as the most significant changes in his work practice during the past 35 years. One part of the underlying organizational and administrative reforms goes back to a decision made by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), others are due to elaborate funding regulations of EU programmes concerning youth unemployment. All in all, these regulations and procedures have been initiated within a European framework of governance. Three examples may serve to illustrate the major reconfigurations marked in the interview: (a) the effects of introducing centralized bidding; (b) the critique of ‘crappy tenders’; and (c) the perception of administration in a ‘system of fear’.

Centralized bidding

Centralized bidding of specific training programmes was introduced in the mid-1990s and the expert explains that while until then training and learning programmes for young unemployed people in Germany were organized and issued in accordance with the regional labour agency in direct reaction to the local or regional shortcomings of the apprenticeship market, in the late 1990s a centralized competitive bidding procedure was implemented. The vocabulary changed, developing inclusive training programmes turned into ‘acquisition of participants’. Once the competition and procurement regulations had been introduced, the actors in charge of youth unemployment prevention at the regional labour agency would delegate their responsibility and engagement they had previously shown for the unemployed young people and the labour market in the region, and restrict themselves to the administration of the marketing of programmes. As the decisions about granting funding and contracting shifted to the federal level, established networks in the region lost cohesion. Personal relations and local expertise were overruled. A formal relation of anonymous partners, each acting in distant locales, replaced personal networks built around practical knowledge. Conceptualizing of programmes and decision taking on funding was no longer a collaborative process of the network partners in the region, but became separated both conceptually and geographically. The expert summarizes this shift of responsibilities as a re-scaling of the quality of educational work. He remembers the introduction of central competitive bidding as the beginning of the economization of education; costs became more important than concepts. ‘Once competitive bidding got centralised (…) the conditions applied now are exclusively dictated by price’. ¹ He underlines that a new rationality disturbed the established practices by de-valuing educational work. ‘What we had was an elaborated educational approach as a fundamental ground for our work, we still build on, but only to a small extent, because conditions don’t allow it anymore.’

The geographical distancing of the institutional actors in charge reinforced the replacement of educational rationales by economic calculations. Decision taking about the winning of bids had been transferred from the regional to the federal level and assigned to an administration agency. As there was no space to negotiate a common understanding, the differing logic of both actors were experienced as contradictory, as is revealed in the expert’s explanation of the tendering procedure: ‘These things they are asking, nobody can describe what he is really doing, his educational attitude or something. … These expressions are all empty and flat, in the end price is decisive.’ These expressions evidence a clear distinction between ‘them asking things’ and the ‘really doing’ as opposites. There is no space to describe the individual practice, the experienced reality is silenced within the formal process of tendering educational services. The demanded vocabulary of the calls for bids is referred to as being ‘all empty and flat’, it does not illustrate or describe the workplace reality of the institution and does not refer to the individual work ethic.

Critique of ‘crappy tenders’

With reference to ESF funded programmes the expert describes his experiences as an extension of the process which started with the centralizing of bidding. He points to the challenge of presenting his ‘company’ and his work in a funding application in a way that meets the demands of the ESF demands. In his story, a ‘we’ representing reality and ‘the real doing’ is confronted by a ‘them’ being unable to perceive this reality. The clash of logic plays out in the formulation of the tenders. As he says: ‘It’s not tenders in the proper sense, it’s rather competition of ideas and things, in which you may engage. And if you engage, it’s your own fault. That’s because the questions in the tenders are so crappy.’ In this quotation, engagement appears as ‘fault’; the ‘real doing’ includes an ethical educational attitude, which should be expressible in a ‘proper tender’, but obviously is not. Applying for an ESF funding programme rather resembles engaging in a ‘competition of ideas and things’, that is, in a competitive world of imaginations and projections, which is not experienced as being congruent with the actual pedagogical practice. Two differing horizons of meaning unfold their necessities. Yet, it is admitted that engaging in the tendering procedure is voluntary, based on a free decision. The terming of engagement as ‘own fault’ then marks the dilemma of acting within a market-like organized system of educational services, enjoying the ambiguous freedom of taking part in the risky business of competence building projects.

The ‘system of fear’

With reference to the administration of ESF funding the expert speaks about a ‘system of fear’, indicating that the persons who are responsible for the administration of the ESF funding in the region are afraid of coercive measures foreseen by funding regulations. They are subjected to the binding regulations which prescribe procedures and instruments for how the money must be administered and monitored if they don’t want to risk their funding.

While ‘in principle, institutions like ours are here to work with those young people with whom others can’t cope,’ the process of applying for ESF funding and the administration of ESF co-financed programmes is entangled in a bureaucratic ‘system of fear.’ ‘If I ask at my ministry… There is fear of some men and women in the EU-department. And those are hiding again out of fear of those in Brussels. It’s a system of fear.’ Identifying ‘a system of fear’ related to the administration of ESF funding points to the dominant hierarchy in power between the EU and the regional level. It clearly reveals that dependency and asymmetric capacities for agency create hard boundaries within the seemingly open space of opportunities, which ESF programmes propose. The handling of this limited openness turns into an additional work task for practitioners who are demanded to negotiate and reconcile work ethic with marketization, education and economy.

Within this context, another experience is influential, expressed in the following statement: ‘who exposes himself to the EU, is threatened by bankruptcy.’ As head of the training institute, the interviewed expert acts as entrepreneur. He is responsible for the budget that must be set to ensure that programmes are running, which includes ensuring that salaries for teachers and trainers can be paid. EU funding then, is part of the income he needs to calculate with, while – as he explains – he never really knows if and when the money he applied for will actually come in. Within the administrative system, which has been implemented to ensure a transparent and efficient use of EU funding, he has experienced that it is difficult to account for the exact time and amount of cash flow, even in cases when a bid has been won and contracts have been signed. As an ‘education entrepreneur’, he sees EU funding as an incalculable risk rather than a stable source of income. The following section will contrast this perspective with the intentions of EU education politics as they are expressed in the ESF funding regulations.

European education politics

Paving the pathway towards ‘smart, sustainable and inclusive growth’, which are the agreed aims of the latest EU2020 strategy (European Commission, 2010), includes the management of social inequalities and the further development of Europe as an education space. Alongside the common European education policy, the instruments to put them into practice have developed in an ever-refined way. Benchmarks provide targets for national action plans, regular reports give evidence to the state of performance in the intergovernmental learning competition, while, most effectively, funding programmes directed at the most pressing social needs and financial aid from the structural funds support national endeavours to adapt to the supranational concept of a prospering Europe.

Since its founding in 1957, the ESF has become a substantial element of the European structural policy. The fund has been growing continuously since its establishment from €420 million to €80 billion in the current funding period. Thus, it developed into one of the most important European policy instruments for employment promotion, with programmes directed to prevent youth unemployment being of outstanding significance. The funding principles were specified over time, and are currently strictly guided by the four principles of additionality, programme planning, concentration and partnership. Consequently, ESF funding must not replace national tasks but should only be applied within a programme of targeted policy action agreed among all social actors concerned. These framing principles leave their effects beyond an individually funded project or programme and impact on the embedding context, because they affect regional politics, planning and budgeting. Although ESF regulations do not provide detailed guidelines for how pedagogic practices should be enacted, they define the boundaries of the spaces for agency of local actors.

The ESF has had a major impact on shaping educational provision for the school-to-work transition system, in Germany. Content analyses of EU funding regulations over the last 30 years reveal that the capacity for individual agency has been narrowed over the years by introducing compulsory obligations for quality assurance, evaluation and output control (Niemeyer, 2017). They reveal how a targeted strategy which related the ESF funding to the European employment strategy (Bache, 2007) has been framing the in-between space of the transition system and opened the space for the governance of young unemployed people (Zick, 2017). The guiding concept of these transformations is one of a market of human services work, with the need to manage transitions with the focus being on the improvement of individual employability. The funding regulations conceptualize education and training institutes as private companies, and consequently address their staff as managers and entrepreneurs. The logic of human capital investment implicitly speaks through the funding regulations, which explicitly foster entrepreneurship even for the young unemployed. Youth unemployment or social inclusion policy is put into regional or local practice, translated into cultural contexts and applied to given conditions. Applying for ESF funding requires active agency – an enabling EU provides space and opportunities for individual engagement. Planning, negotiating, translating and programming are the activities by which the additional space for agency is appropriated. This includes engaging with a certain knowledge policy, as well as applying modes of governance, set out by funding conditions.

As the principle of subsidiarity is granting national sovereignty on education policy, supranational stimuli mainly have an impact on and in between the institutions of nationally established education systems (Becker and Primova, 2009; Lawn and Novoa, 2002). As the European education space therefore expands into the less governed zones of informal education, into spaces located between learning institutions, governancing of individual and collective transitions, and movements by soft-law politics is an important part of the process. Governance, however, depends on the insight and acceptance of the individual actors in the field, who are challenged (or disturbed) to make sense of political incentives, demands, regulations or guidelines of European education policy. Turning back to Negt’s question of how government decisions, measures, regulations and directions of the European Parliament and the EU commission are included in the life-world of human beings, the case study presented above allows reconstruction of a mode of such subjective policy appropriation. This process is not an affirmative one, rather it entails distancing irony, critique and a pragmatic usage of the financial opportunities.

The ‘education entrepreneur’ – a European subject?

With reference to the funding conditions and the economic framework they provide, the case study allows reconstruction of a type of ‘educational entrepreneur’. As any model, it aims to identify the general features of an individual case. Thus, the perspective of the professional educator on his ‘business’ of delivering ESF funded school-to-work transition programmes includes central features of entrepreneurship. ‘Producing a commodity’ which meets needs and offers income, ‘alertness’ or an innovative ‘attitude to see opportunities in a competitive environment’ (cf. Simons and Masschelein, 2008: 53) all present exactly the elements called for by the risky business of competence building in youth unemployment schemes. ‘The ongoing task of managing one’s learning process in order to produce the human capital’, which Simons and Masschelein brilliantly analysed with reference to the entrepreneurial self of the life-long learner (Simons and Masschelein, 2008: 53) likewise applies to the profession of education.

The mode of subjection of the entrepreneurial practice of freedom is the permanent economic tribunal: people should develop a managerial attitude of calculation towards this material or substance and should for example find out which competencies are required or could be(come) functional, which competencies they want/should invest in, etc. This substance and mode of subjection, thus, brings us to the work upon the self that is needed: one is asked to invest in human capital, to learn or to add value to the self and to find ways of productive inclusion. (Simons and Masschelein, 2008: 54)

In this case the adding of value is to be delivered as professional education and it is in conflict with the social/public need for inclusion. Thus, the model of the ‘education entrepreneur’ illustrates the two sides of subjectivity. The interview reflects how the figure of an education entrepreneur does not respond to the demands of EU policy, and it is in the retrospective of a career history that these dilemmas gain evidence. Within the narrated changes in the conditions for educational work EU regulations and everyday work context are repeatedly juxtaposed as a ‘here’ and a ‘there’, both being of quite different relevance. The individual practice is referred to as the ‘real world’, where things are done that should actually be done. Although allocating the funding and setting conditions to such an extent that it promotes a ‘system of fear’, ‘the EU’ is not referred to as part of this lived reality. The frame of reference, and the pedagogical interaction, are described as basically different issues. In this sense, the ‘education entrepreneur’ can be considered as a European subject, engendered by the regulations and procedures featuring the social context of the European education space, and struggling to avoid subjugation to the neoliberal spirit.

Yet the ‘education entrepreneur’ is under demands to fulfil his tasks like a private service delivered by a company. Consequently, he shows features of the entrepreneurial self. According to Bröckling (2007), entrepreneurial action is based on four principles: (a) it centres on the clever finding of chances for profit and (b) on innovation, (c) it includes carrying the insecurities of the economic process and (d) co-ordinating production and marketing (Bröckling, 2007: 110). And he underlines that competition is one of the most prominent means of turning the market from a space for exchanging equivalents into a ‘confusing, endless sequence of opening and re-closing gaps’ (Bröckling, 2007: 197. Translated by the current author). It is crucial for the entrepreneur to identify these gaps and make use of them (Bröckling, 2007).

The practice of tendering ESF funding for social and vocational inclusion programmes as bids imposes the model of competition – a central feature of economic markets. It turns social inclusion into a trading good, education institutes into companies, and demands economic action and entrepreneurial engagement. In this way, the public social task of constructing educational bridges is connected with the risk of economic failure and the fear of insolvency. The ‘educational entrepreneur’ then is in a constant search for funding opportunities. He carries the risks of unpredictable developments in this pseudo-market of ‘education services’ and he is quite innovative in conceptualizing programmes and projects for educational support. All this can be found in the interview, which also presents distinct ruptures with the entrepreneurial logic and points to the ‘inherent antinomies’ (Bröckling, 2007: 15) of the entrepreneurial self. Obviously, the rationale of the ESF does not meet the ideas and concepts of the educational practice. Responding to the call of ESF funding appears as a ‘fault’, as it involves entering the ‘system of fear’ and risking insolvency. Relating the funding procedures with fear marks an uneven power relation. In the pseudo-market of education it is not the exchange value of the delivered services which matters, but rather the appropriate conduct and proper application of the rules, which is valued or disciplined. The ‘education entrepreneur’ therefore can never really calculate his profit.

‘While social citizens submit themselves to the social tribunal [and its social laws] in order to be free, a submission to the “permanent economic tribunal” is a condition for entrepreneurial freedom or self-government’ (Simons and Masschelein, 2008: 53). The ‘educational entrepreneur’ as professional educator on the market of social and vocational inclusion programmes is challenged to do both at the same time. In the case analysed above, however, he refuses to do so and in contrast points to the paradoxes and dilemmas. He does not re-code social relations as results of entrepreneurship (cf. Simons and Masschelein, 2008: 54), but clearly distinguishes both concepts and elaborates on the ethical dilemmas resulting from it.

The interview tells an articulate story of how European education politics are experienced as inner contradictions; on the one hand, funding programmes and political incentives open up spaces for agency and engagement, for chances to provide and develop education work in fields which may not be covered financially or institutionally by the national education system and/or the related regional supply. They open up spaces of opportunities (Möglichkeitsräume) for educational professionals in this field while they call for entrepreneurial behaviour. They allow development of strategies and pedagogical approaches to support young people who do not participate in vocational training or regular education. Hence, by supporting transitions they construct and fill in the institutional gap between the education and employment systems. Yet on the other hand, the chances that come with the enabling (‘empowering’) incentives from a European stage are accompanied by fixed conditions regulating how they should be adapted. As is expressed in the interview, the perceived chances are thwarted by ‘a system of fear’ in which they are embedded, so that administration and financing dominate educational regards and compromise educators’ work ethic. The differences between ‘the real world’ and how it needs to be represented according to EU funding applications, between how actors are addressed by the EU calls for bids and how they are forced to respond are experienced as opposites.

Levinson, Sutton and Winstead (2009) suggest understanding this struggle with policy implementation as a process of appropriation, situated in a community of practice, where ‘educators in the field are in effect making new policy in situated locales and communities of practice’ (Levinson et al., 2009: 768). While ‘policy posits ideal behaviour in a model world, and attempts to mold such behaviour through a variety of carrots and sticks’ (Levinson et al., 2009: 770), ‘appropriation occurs when the policy that was formed within one community of practice meets the existential and institutional conditions that mark a different community of practice’ (Levinson et al., 2009: 782). It might be irritating to refer to communities of practice here, as the concept is mostly applied to workplace learning, explaining the engagement of newcomers by integrating the four elements of practice, community, identity and meaning. Belonging to a specific community of practice then involves an engagement in the common social practice of making meaning. Therefore, the concept can be transferred to communities of practice of any type, serving as a model to reconstruct the social practices of making meaning.

Read through this lens, the case study sharply evidences the two diverging communities of practice of actors within ESF administration and the ‘education entrepreneur’ reproducing differing horizons of meaning. It is not a surprise that the discursive calling for subjects in the European education space and subjective experiences gathered in the opened field of opportunities fall apart in some fairly crucial aspects. Alongside the opening of spaces for orientation by means of European education policy, the respective governance instruments are put into practice. Individual experiences are limited and controlled. These processes of simultaneously enabling and controlling the unpredictable movements of individuals in the insecure and uncertain field of education throughout Europe are implemented preferably in under-institutionalized corners, interspaces or gaps within established national systems of learning. It is inside these uncharted education territories where the dialectics of enabling and control play out and it is part of the dialectics that these interspaces are both defined and confined by the same instruments which serve to access them. The imperatives within the European education space are empowering and discouraging, and broadening and limiting at the same time. While the programme of European education policy is concerned with praising mobility, flexibility, creativity, innovativeness and an entrepreneurial approach it is left to the individual subject to cope with limits and boundaries, to create and maintain situated communities of practice and to construct belonging and meaning.

The concept of subjectivation opens an additional window in the continuous search for ways of theorizing the ongoing transformations in the multilevel process of constructing Europe through education and as a space for education. It offers an additional approach to analyse and understand the building of the European educational space and its social consequences. As the European agenda plays out in individual experiences – including the subjective level in researching the construction of the European education space which allows the unveiling of some of the mechanisms of power and control – it provides a window into techniques and modes of critique.

Focusing on the subjectivation of Europeanization shifts the perspective on to the practices of individuals, which altogether contribute to the construction and transformation of education in Europe, and – as Lawn and Novoa (2002) have highlighted – in doing so are inevitably involved in the construction and transformation of the cultural, social, political and economic space of Europe. Re-constructing the subjective perspective therefore allows a link from the critical analysis of European governance to the individual practice of making sense of it. Hence, it contributes to the project of building knowledge on transforming social relations in Europe – a core subject of educational research.