Competitive/comparative governance mechanisms beyond marketization: A refined concept of competition in education governance research

Abstract

Much contemporary scholarship claims that competition has become a key characteristic of educational governance, and that competition occurs in educational governance as a consequence of the comparative turn in education. This article problematizes the widespread application of the concept of competition as a relevant term across (seemingly) all governance contexts, and seeks to overcome this problem by theorizing competition as an entangled phenomenon that takes on a different ontology according to the specific situations in which it occurs. This theorization highlights three dimensions of competition that may affect its ontology: the field of contestants, the rules of the game, and the competition objective. The result is an analytical framework that makes the concept of competition sensitive to different governance contexts across Europe and the Western world, including those with strong remnants of universalistic welfare state models. The analytical framework allows for a distinction between market-based competition and competition as a governance instrument that mediates managerial decision-making in which the contestants fight to avoid top-down reform rather than fighting against their peers. The analytical framework implies that we cannot characterize all European education systems as governed through competition-based mechanisms without caution and further specification.

Keywords

Competition education governance performance measurement public administration entanglement affectivity

Introduction

The idea for this article originated from an itch—an itch of empirical findings that rubbed against prevailing conceptualizations of contemporary modes of educational governance. The itch concerned the concept of competition in education, across national, institutional, and individual contexts. Competition and its companion concepts of marketization, commodification, and privatization seem to occur or be staged everywhere in educational governance, and some scholars even claim that we are witnessing a competition fetish (Naidoo, 2016, 2018). Furthermore, in the wider literature, numerical comparisons are claimed to automatically imply social competition (Fourcade and Healy, 2017: 290; Mau, 2019: 6–7), indicating that comparability and competition are closely linked. However, what my empirical findings suggest is a need for a refined concept of competition which departs from our typical conceptions of competition as a game with winners and losers, or as a feature of the market affecting the profit or potential bankruptcy of businesses. The kind of competition present in my empirical work seems like a struggle to avoid a different kind of loss than missing out on a prize or going bankrupt. It seemed more like a struggle to avoid reform intervention from the state than a fight to “beat” one’s peers—a continuous struggle to maintain or improve institutional legitimacy.

Based on this itch, this article theorizes and refines the concept of competition in educational governance. I suggest three different dimensions of educational competition that may affect the ontology of competition in a particular context. These dimensions are the field of contestants, the rules of the game, and the competition objective. By introducing these dimensions, the theorization leads to a concept of competition that is sensitive to the different governance traditions found in European and Western educational governance. With this theorization, the ontology of competition shifts depending on its entanglement in state models, governance technologies, actors, and ideas. Competition becomes a dynamic concept that with each application requires further specification to become precise.

The article first draws on a range of literature from within the field of educational governance and the comparative turn in education in order to tease out some typical conceptualizations and applications of the concept of competition in educational research. Following from this mapping of the concept of competition within scholarly literature, the article will use the work of Karen Barad (2007) to philosophize competition as a concept with different ontologies, depending on its empirical entanglement with other phenomena. Three suggested dimensions of the empirical entanglement seem to be particularly important, and conjointly these dimensions allow for a different configuration of competition than the typical conceptualization of a market-based for-profit or for-status competition, namely a competition to remain legitimate and avoid being reformed. This configuration is illustrated with a Danish case study of graduate unemployment metrics, which might parallel more situations of competition in Nordic and continental European education systems than the market-based version of competition that is perhaps more often found in Anglophone countries.

The contribution of the article is thus the production of an empirically grounded framework for specifying the mode of competition present in particular state and governance contexts that may be characteristic of governance through performance measurement and comparability in (former) universalistic welfare states. The article does not provide an exhaustive typology of refined competition conceptualizations relevant for all European contexts, but calls for a more specified use of the term competition in the education governance literature. While the article does not provide comprehensive conceptualizations relevant in all European contexts, it provides a first theorization applicable to studies of the specific ontologies of competition in other parts of Europe where the type of marketization associated with New Public Management has not been fully implemented, as in parts of the Anglophone world. These areas could include what Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011: 12) name the Mediterranean countries, those with strong Napoleonic traditions, and states like Germany and Belgium, each with their own national histories and institutional setups.

The concept of competition in education research

Competition seems to be one of the important features of contemporary modes of educational governance. But competition is a complex phenomenon. In this section, I will outline how the concept of competition typically occurs in recent education governance literature, including literature on the comparative turn in education governance. In this literature, the concept of competition intersects various scholarly fields. First, the study of competition draws on the field of privatization and business economics in relation to education as a global (Blackmore, 2009; Tomlinson, 2018) or national (Gorur, 2013) market commodity, and in relation to for-profit education businesses (Robertson, 2017a; Sellar and Thompson, 2016). Second, it draws on the sociology of quantification in relation to transnational or national ranking systems (Berman and Hirschman, 2018; Espeland and Sauder, 2007, 2016; Merry, 2016; Naidoo, 2018) and on performance measurement literature in relation to inter- and intra-institutional performance management systems (Redden, 2019). Third, it draws on New Public Management literature and notions of the neoliberal in relation to market-making technologies introduced into the education sector to ensure efficiency and cost-effective use of public funding (Gorur, 2013; Komljenovic and Robertson, 2016; McCaig and Taylor, 2017; Naidoo, 2016). And fourth, it draws on socio-psychological perspectives in relation to the behavioral aspects of competition, including the ways competition induces motivation (Kousholt et al., 2019), for example through affective economies (Brøgger, 2016, 2019; Brøgger and Staunæs, 2016; Sellar and Lingard, 2018; Staunæs, 2018). These various scholarly fields all emphasize different aspects of the characteristics and workings of competition, and they each add meaning to the phenomenon in ways that may fuse into complex conceptualizations of competition, but also potentially allow us to distinguish between different conceptualizations for different empirical contexts and research purposes.

The concept of competition is furthermore applied to various levels or spaces of educational governance in the literature. It is widely acknowledged that educational governance is tied up with conceptions of a global knowledge economy in which education becomes an investment in the global competitiveness of nation states (Boden and Nedeva, 2010; Grek, 2009; Henry et al., 2001; Komljenovic and Robertson, 2016; Krejsler, 2018; McArthur, 2011; Naidoo, 2018; Sellar, 2015; Sellar and Lingard, 2018; Shore and Wright, 2015a). The idea of education as a factor in national competitiveness is often related to human capital theory (Becker, 1993; Henry et al., 2001: 103; Sellar and Zipin, 2019; Tomlinson, 2018: 714) and the dependency of the nation state on the skills and knowledge of the work force. Even though human capital theory has been widely questioned (see for example Morley, 2001: 132), some studies claim that education policies rely on a functionalist theoretical background associated with human capital theory (McArthur, 2011). Thereby, investments in national competitiveness have been seen as part of a battle to “win the education race” (Sellar and Lingard, 2018: 376), and as being driven by a concern for the future or a “fear of falling behind” in the global economy (Krejsler, 2018: 396). These serve as a backdrop for the literature on educational governance.

While this backdrop of the role of education in national competitiveness is widely recognized among education governance scholars, the phenomena that the concept of competition is deployed to describe become more varied when studied at state level in federal governance models, at institutional level, and at the individual level. There are a vast range of perspectives applied across these levels on competition available in education governance literature. First, federal unions of states create spaces of competition, for example through the use of accountability templates that spur competition among states (Grek, 2009: 24; Krejsler, 2018: 395). Second, educational institutions such as schools (Gorur, 2013) and universities (Robertson, 2017b) are engulfed in national or global fields of competition through market-making technologies. Established markets vary from business-like markets wherein institutions compete to accumulate money (Dale, 2017: 181), for example through the attraction of fee-paying students (Blackmore, 2009: 857; Tomlinson, 2018: 717), to market-like governance mechanisms wherein “controlled markets” of free school choice are set up to incentivize schools to become more attractive (Bunar, 2010), or where market measures are used to stratify institutions in order to allocate government funding to them accordingly (Naidoo, 2018: 605–606). Third, individuals are said to take part in a mutual competition, wherein education plays a major role. Education is perceived as a means of achieving positional advantage in the competition among individuals in the labor market (Tomlinson, 2012: 420, 2018: 719), which has been claimed to affect student identities even at primary school level (Keddie, 2016). The competition between individuals has also been claimed to be enforced by a strong meritocratic tradition of individual performance in the education system (Naidoo, 2018: 611).

In these contexts, the object of competition is not only the economic competitiveness, and thereby profit, of institutions or individuals in a direct market. States, institutions, and individuals also compete over measures of education performance, as these measures become an indicator or proxy for national competitiveness (Sellar, 2015) and measurement mechanisms for the distribution of regulatory changes (Komljenovic and Robertson, 2016: 622). In these processes, performance measures work as a technology for creating desires among various actors to reform themselves in order to achieve better performance (Brøgger, 2016). Thus, the role of education as an investment in national competitiveness is institutionalized into various modes of measurement-based, regulatory, and affectively charged governance.

While competition as a mechanism in education is strongly critiqued by most of the scholars discussed in this article (see for example Naidoo, 2018), the points of criticism are not the focus here. Instead, my primary concern is with competition as a governance phenomenon, which, even though it appears in different contexts and versions in the literature, is not sufficiently theorized. With this claim, I distinguish between competition as a social phenomenon, which is thoroughly theorized in the sociology of competition (see for example Simmel, 2008), and competition as a particular and popular governance model in contemporary education. It is the latter phenomenon, and thereby “competition” as a useful term in the analysis of educational governance, that I here address and refer to with my use of the word.

With this clarification in mind, the overview of the use of the concept of competition in education governance literature provided in this section poses several questions: Are all scholarly perspectives on competition in educational governance equally relevant in all empirical contexts? Do mechanisms of market making, of performance measurement, or of socio-psychological processes (or affective economies) of motivation work the same way in all educational governance contexts? Do certain contextual features critically change how competition plays out? And most importantly: How do we define competition-based governance, and how do different definitions allow us to distinguish empirically between competition and other phenomena that cannot be characterized as competition, or between different kinds of competition? The remainder of the article will propose a theorization that answers these questions by suggesting a range of dimensions that make up the context of competition, which are important to the specific ontology of competition-based governance in a specific empirical context. Thereby, the proposed theorization serves as an improved framework for the application of the concept of competition in educational governance analyses than what has previously been available. The theorization will allow for a precise distinction between different constellations of competition in education governance, outlined in the literature review above. This distinction is highly significant because marketization modes of governance and performance measurement and regulation modes of governance imply different ontologies of competition and involve different affective economies.

Competition as an entangled phenomenon

The present article’s theorization of competition draws primarily on the work of the philosophy of Karen Barad (2007). Barad’s philosophy, which she calls Agential Realism, builds on a radically different understanding of the world than the dominant individualizing discourse within research. Barad understands the world as fundamentally relational; rather than viewing the world as made up of discrete individual objects, she philosophizes the world as made up of entanglement. The entities in the world that we usually think of as individual emerge out of entanglements and become separate entities as a result of their entanglements. The relational is thereby not about individual entities coming together in entanglements or networks, as the opposite worldview would suggest, but is about the primary ontological entangled state of the world. Entities obtain their meaning from within entanglements, including from their boundaries and their relations to other entities (and they simultaneously add meaning to other entities in the entanglement). In fact, they obtain their very ontology from the particular entanglements they emerge from. Thus, entities cannot be analyzed without an analysis of the wider entanglement within which they appear (Barad, 2007: 135–148).

The entities that I refer to here include a variety of components, such as objects, people, states, technologies, ideas, and phenomena. All these entities acquire matter and meaning, or ontology, from particular and yet dynamic entanglements. Consequently, when I propose to theorize competition as an entangled phenomenon, this means that competition as a phenomenon can acquire different ontologies as it emerges from or appears within different entanglements. To theorize competition in a specific way, we need to unravel the entanglements in which it appears, and in particular the relations between entities that emerge out of the entanglement, including spaces, dynamics, and directions of the relations.

The philosophy of Agential Realism is post-realist. This means that reality does not simply exist out there. It is a central point in Agential Realism that the entanglements of the world do not exist separately from the research apparatuses, including empirical material, methods, literature, concepts, distinctions, writing styles, and so forth, that we deploy to analyze an entanglement. The research apparatus is thus a part of the entanglement itself and has an effect on how the studied phenomenon emerges. Barad names this property of the world “onto-epistemology.” Ontology is entangled with epistemology and vice versa. As Brøgger phrases it, “in onto-epistemological processes, the realizations of the world cannot be distinguished from the ontologies of the world” (Brøgger, 2018: 357). The consequence of this point is that the ontology of competition as a phenomenon will not only vary along with changes in state models, governance technologies, actors, and perspectives of the entanglement, or in other words with entities external to the boundaries of the research apparatus. It will also vary with changes in the concepts, methods, materials, literature, and so forth of the research apparatus used to study it.

The notion of the onto-epistemological means that my research apparatus affects how competition materializes in this article. As my research interest in competition is born out of a general interest in the governance and administration of public education in Denmark, particularly in relation to quantification and performance measurement, the article will make certain types of competition visible. The itch mentioned in the article introduction, and thereby the perspective and composition of the article, has emerged from a need for a concept of competition that can capture the forms of competition that appear in less marketized governance contexts where the remnants of a strong social-democratic universalistic welfare state model are still present in many ways (Esping-Andersen, 1990). The article thereby emerges as a discussion with a research field that is to some extent dominated by Anglophone scholarship developed in contexts where the marketization of education has a stronger tradition. It approaches the question of competition in educational governance from this discussion and research field, rather than from theorizations of competition as a general social phenomenon found in other fields of research.

In addition to the empirically founded need for a refined concept of competition in relation to educational governance, the article draws inspiration from a sense of a discord between the affectivities usually associated with competition and my empirical observations of the affectivities in the education sector. From my empirical work, I carried with me a visceral and tangible sense of an educational sector in an affective state of anxiety and misery about the possibilities of future prosperity. These affective tendencies are also pointed out in scholarship (Sellar and Zipin, 2019). It seems that the affectivities associated with governance contexts are more often loaded with worries, resignation, or outrage than with the motivation, spirit, and hope usually associated with competition. This discord poses another reason to refine the concept of competition. I propose three dimensions of competition in educational governance that to me serve as a relevant takeoff for the theorizing of competition.

Dimensions of competition in educational governance

In this section, I unfold the three dimensions of competition that I see as relevant to analyze the entanglements of competition in a given context. The dimensions were developed from a dialogue between my empirical material, the wider educational governance literature referred to above, and the theoretical points on the entangled state of the world with its ontological specificity as described by Agential Realism. The three dimensions serve as a means of analyzing the relationality within a situation of competition and the effects of this relationality on the ontology of competition in that situation. The first of the three dimensions concerns the field of contestants, which has already been touched upon in the general literature review above. The second dimension concerns the rules of the game, including competition design. The third dimension concerns competition objectives and their directionalities. All three dimensions are unfolded through examples from the field of educational governance and the comparative turn in education. The examples mainly concern competition between institutions, but also include individuals as the direct subjects of governance initiatives in education (for empirical examples, see for example Dixon-Román, 2017; Espeland and Sauder, 2016; Madsen, 2019a).

Field of contestants

The first dimension of the entanglement of competition is the field of contestants and the competitive space of relations between these contestants. As demonstrated in the section on the concept of competition in educational governance research, competition-based governance takes place among states, institutions, and individuals (and at levels in between), and these contestants conjointly make up the field in which competition takes place. An important characteristic of the field of contestants is its temporal and spatial features, including how the contestants have come to be exactly that, whether through formal or non-formal, recent or historical processes. At state level, most states not only compete on the global capitalist free market, but are also enmeshed in various transnational or federal organizations, associations, and agreements that may involve particular interests in establishing a competitive field among the participating states. For example, the OECD has installed a space of competition via PISA (Grek, 2009), through which some nation states are articulated as “comparable” and thereby in direct competition with each other. Similarly, intra-national regions or municipalities are sometimes enrolled in mutual competition by the state (Krejsler, 2018), from which new hierarchies and other relations among them emerge.

Institutions may also be enmeshed in various competitive spaces and thereby become contestants. These competitive spaces may be global and include all institutions of a particular kind, or they may be stratified and only include the top league or bottom of the field. Different competitive spaces may also intersect. For example, universities appear as simultaneously embedded in both the global competition installed by rankings and in national competition situations related to government funding (Naidoo, 2018; Robertson, 2017b). In addition, institutions may also cascade the competitive situation downward to other institutional levels, for example to faculties, departments, or degree programs (Madsen, 2019b). Thereby, the contestants may become nested in several layers of competition. These cascading and nesting processes may have contributed to the separation of faculties, departments, or degree programs into individual administrative entities in the first place.

At the individual level, pupils and students are embedded in various competitive communities, including the classroom (Knudsen and Christensen, 2018), special elite programs (Keddie, 2016), and the national space for allocating US students to colleges through the admission test called SAT¹ (Espeland and Sauder, 2016). However, especially at the individual level, there may be differences in the student population that affect the situations in which contestants compete (Dixon-Román, 2017), for example in relation to gender, race, ethnicity, migration history, socio-economic background, educational level of parents, and so forth. Similarly, the composition of students in schools may affect the attractiveness of these schools for parents, and thereby affect their possibilities to compete in a (more or less controlled) free market of school choice (Bunar, 2010; Gorur, 2013).

All these particularities of the competing entities make up the particular entanglement wherein competition takes place and from where competition obtains its ontology in a specific case. The formal and informal, more or less settled spaces of competition and the inherent differences that make competition an impossible game for some to win, as well as the relations of different competitive situations nested within each other, make a difference to how competition appears in educational governance. The layout of the specific competitive spaces and their effects on the emergence of separate measurable entities are important to include in an analysis of competition.

The rules of the game

As indicated above, the awareness of the field of contestants is already widespread across educational governance literature that discusses competition. A less emphasized dimension in this literature concerns the rules of the game of the particular competition in question. The rules of the game are determined by the particular competition design and determine the affective economies that this design allows for. Here, my use of the word “design” does not imply (nor reject) that one or more actors have intentionally laid out a great master plan for a competition arrangement. The word “design” merely refers to the materialized competition arrangement as it has evolved through specific processes. Different designs, whether these are a product of public policy instruments (Lascoumes and Le Gales, 2007), or of the capitalist model of free markets, affect the ontology of competition in a particular context. Both the competition criteria (Fourcade and Healy, 2017), the hierarchical organization of contestants (Madsen, 2019a), and the fabrication of particular temporalities (Decuypere and Vanden Broeck, 2020) play an important role here.

Let me illustrate this with an example. Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder (2007, 2016) have studied how US Law School rankings affect the schools.² In US Law School, the competition design involves an annual ranking, which hierarchically orders entities from 1 to n, regardless of the distances between the scores of the entities. The difference between position 43 and 44 may represent a huge difference in scores, or merely an insignificant difference. The criteria of the ranking are based on a composite measurement, where the reputation of the school is given a weighting of 40%, the selectivity of the students 25%, the placement success of the graduates 20%, and the faculty resources 15%. Espeland and Sauder’s studies show that the exact ranking position, even though this may reflect insignificant measurement differences, directly affects the choice of schools for potential students. As the number of well-qualified students selecting the school is a part of the ranking criteria, the specific position in one ranking affects consecutive rankings. Similarly, another part of the ranking criteria is calculated on the basis of a reputation survey that is highly affected by a school’s previous rank. Espeland and Sauder (2007) highlight this aspect of the measurement as a matter of how rankings can become “self-fulfilling prophecies.” The rankings of US Law Schools is thus an example of competition design that involves upward or downward multiplier effects. As Espeland and Sauder describe, Law Schools positioned in the top tier have a higher chance of scoring well in the next ranking and may be able to attract higher amounts of funding, which improves their chance of performing well on a range of other parameters in the ranking. These schools ride on a wave of prosperity. On the other hand, Law Schools at the bottom of the ranking list might find it difficult to attract well-performing students, high status academic staff, and funding. The competition design has built-in mechanisms that keep the hierarchy among Law Schools intact. These are the rules of this particular game.

Thus, the rules of the game can include dynamics that make some contestants more or less likely to win or lose. They can even include designs where there is no winner. While competition in a leisure context is usually focused upon the victorious winner and the prize, and in a market context is focused upon the profit of the competitive firms compared to the not-so-competitive firms, competition in an education governance context is in many cases primarily concerned with the losers (although there might also be cases where the competition is a “race to the top”; Robertson and Komljenovic, 2016: 598). In public education, competition often involves the identification of weak entities that “need” reform, as also pointed out in relation to PISA (Grek, 2009; Lingard et al., 2016). This is where we can begin to discuss the boundaries between competition and other phenomena. The attitudes of the contestants are affected differently in situations where the hierarchical organization does not involve sorting the contestants on a numerical continuum of performance but merely dichotomizes good and bad performance (Madsen, 2019a).

The rules of the game of competition enable affective economies to circulate through the field of competition. The affective here refers to pre-individual or collective affective states of being that circulate through individual bodies and subjectivities, and from where individual emotions are subtracted (Clough, 2007: 3; Whatmore, 2006: 604). When competition enables affective economies, this means that affectivity is exchanged and capitalized (Brøgger, 2016: 84) in order to motivate contestants to greater efforts. In a traditional capitalist market design, where businesses are competing for profit and only the sky is the limit, affective economies may mobilize actors to invest their time and resources in an entrepreneurial effort in order to achieve a prosperous future. A comparison of comparable but different schools may also invite lower-performing schools to self-improve by creating temporal desires for potential futures visualized in the image of the higher-performing schools (Lewis, 2018). But in competition designs where there is no real opportunity to stand out positively, only a risk of being identified as a problem case, affective economies seem to involve the distribution of guilt and a sense of crisis that can catalyze changes and open a window for reform (Lingard et al., 2016). Competition design or rules of the game and their entanglements with particular affective economies affect the behavior of the contestants and thereby the ontology of competition in a particular context.

The competition objective

The third and final dimension of competition that I propose for my analytical framework is the competition objective. The competition objective depends on the field of contestants and on the rules of the game, including the hierarchical organization of the contestants. It also depends on the stakes in the competitive situation and whether these are direct effects internal to the competitive space or indirect effects imposed by actors external to the competitive space. These mechanisms affect the directional orientation of the contestants.

We can distinguish between horizontal, vertical, and temporal directionalities. Horizontal orientation is typical for highly marketized modes of competition, where institutions such as universities compete against each other for a larger share of the (eventually) limited amount of international (and in some cases also national) fee-paying students, and where success or failure in the market has immediate effects on the university as a business (Blackmore, 2009: 857; Robertson, 2017b: 303). Significantly, horizontal orientation is also typical for other forms of competition deeply entrenched in traditions of education, including academic recognition (Naidoo, 2018). Vertical and temporal orientations are typical for competition situations installed by a government, or by the senior management of an education institution at lower hierarchical levels, or by a teacher in the classroom. The effects of success or failure at a lower hierarchical level are in these cases not immediate, but enforced by actors at the higher hierarchical level. An example of a competition situation entangled with vertical relations and orientation is the allocation of public funding based on performance measures (Naidoo, 2018: 607–608). An example where temporal orientation is strong is the performance measurement embedded in quality systems, where institutional units need to show progress compared to their own previous performance (see the example in the following section). These competitive orientations, whether horizontal, vertical, or temporal, or a complex entanglement of different orientations, critically affect what is at stake for the competing entities, and thereby how the affective economies of competition appear in a given context. For the competing entities, a vertically oriented type of competition is not so much about besting one’s peers, but rather about avoiding an externally imposed reform from above, such as a closure or take-over of a school (Krejsler, 2018: 400), or an externally imposed regulation (Madsen, 2019a). Thereby, vertically and temporally oriented competition will often result in a struggle to become “good enough” to ward off the ever-looming threat of reform, rather than a competition to achieve the highest possible result.

In educational governance literature, the different stakes and orientations, and thereby objectives, materialize as different vocabularies associated with the concept of competition. In competition with immediate internal effects and horizontal orientation, words like marketization, commodification, privatization, students as consumers, profit, investment, positional advantage, and elites are often used (Gorur, 2013; Keddie, 2016; Naidoo, 2018; Robertson, 2017b; Robertson and Dale, 2013; Shore and Wright, 2015a; Tomlinson, 2010, 2012). These concepts have obtained quite a settled role in characterizations of contemporary modes of educational governance, and indicate that the normal conception of a competitive situation is a zero-sum game where the objective is to be more successful than one’s competitors. However, in relation to competition with indirect effects imposed externally, a very different set of concepts is deployed. These include audit cultures with a purpose of management and control (Shore and Wright, 2015b: 24), performance standards and benchmarking imposed to identify weaknesses or problems (Henry et al., 2001: 92; Lawn, 2011: 264–265), and an orientation toward efficiency and risk management (Dale, 2017; Naidoo, 2018: 606). These concepts imply a vertically and temporally oriented competition context where the objective is to improve one’s own performance and satisfy the higher administrative levels. Here, the ontology of competition is altered from a situation of rivalry between actors of a particular kind (nation states, institutions, individuals) in the pursuit of profit, status, and prosperity, to a governance instrument of identifying entities in “need” of reform.

Competition as a governance instrument is used to improve efficiency and austerity in the use of public money (Bear and Mathur, 2015; Henry et al., 2001: 84). It sometimes involves the creation of new markets (Robertson, 2017b), and in these cases the vocabulary of marketization is relevant. But sometimes, it does not quite involve real marketization, but rather managerial competition. New Public Management scholars distinguish between marketization instruments in which sectors are marketized and the public sector is rolled back, and managerial instruments that can involve market-based performance measurement but do not reduce the role of bureaucracy (Andersen et al., 2017: 42; Pedersen and Löfgren, 2012: 437; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011: 10). Comparable measurements are one type of managerial instrument that involve competition. They are deployed to individualize the responsibility for a lack of efficiency and austerity to institutions, institutional units, or individuals downward in the (formal or informal) governance hierarchy (Miller, 2001: 381; Miller and Power, 2013: 583–584) via the use of performance contracts and service and quality management (Andersen et al., 2017: 42; Pedersen and Löfgren, 2012: 442–443). Their competition objectives are not immediately meaningful, nor high-stakes, but become so by virtue of the overall reform purpose of efficiency and austerity, and by virtue of the sanctions that may accompany a bad performance.

The deployment of different instruments varies across countries. According to Danish public administration scholars John Storm Pedersen and Karl Löfgren, managerial instruments of governance make up the governance instruments deployed in the Danish education sector in recent decades. This trend is typical for universalistic welfare models, where “the chief mechanism for allocation of resources is not the market” because the consumption of public goods and the payment for it are decoupled, and where the achievement of efficiency and quality is prioritized over the use of particular marketized modes of governance (Pedersen and Löfgren, 2012: 446). Thus, the ontology of competition emerges partly out of its entanglement with particular governance traditions and state forms. As these vary across Europe and the world (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011), the specificities of the objective of competition (which is sometimes defined by particular governance relations) are crucial for an analysis that draws on a concept of competition in education governance. A competitive situation may be composed of complex combinations of both marketization and managerial comparison relations, which make the objectives even more important to disentangle.

Competing to ward off top-down reform: The Danish case of graduate unemployment measurement

Out of the three proposed dimensions of competition entanglements, a configuration of competition emerges that is very different from entrepreneurial competition accompanied by optimistic dreams of winning and its rewards. In some instances of contemporary educational governance, competition is perceived as demotivating and an awkward benchmarking straitjacket, imposed on lower hierarchical layers in a competitive space constructed by senior managers, governments, or transnational actors. In this configuration, the purpose of competition is to identify the weakest entities in order to reform them, whereby competition becomes not a battle against peers, but a struggle to remain legitimate and evade reform imposed from above. It becomes a fight to remain autonomous from top-down intervention, and a fight that is won by adhering to the rules of the game set from above. Installing competition mechanisms as a way of dividing institutions or other entities that are legitimate from those that require reformation appears to be a new normal in current modes of educational governance. In my empirical material, this form of competition appears in different contexts, at both institutional and individual levels.

I will now illustrate how the theorization of competition suggested in this article allows this configuration of competition to become visible when applied to the Danish graduate unemployment rate, which is used as a comparative measure in Danish higher education governance. The example draws on ethnographic fieldwork on the interactions between performance measurement and the measured. The fieldwork was part of my PhD project (Madsen, 2019b) and included the observation of meetings in departments in schools of the humanities at three Danish universities over a period of 18 months. Specifically, the fieldwork included observations of meetings in various formal and informal bodies within these departments, including Study Board meetings, teacher meetings, Advisory Board meetings, Employability Project meetings, and so forth, as well as interviews with students, teachers, quality workers, managers, career counselors, and employer representatives. The fieldwork also included interviews with national bodies such as The Ministry of Higher Education and Science and The Danish Accreditation Institution. These engagements with the higher education sector allowed me to follow graduate employability metrics across various institutional contexts in order to study how they emerged in the governance and administration of education. In the example included in this article, I focus on one of these metrics, namely the graduate unemployment rate.

The graduate unemployment rate in national policy

The graduate unemployment rate was developed as part of a national policy from 2014 aimed at a reduction in graduate unemployment. The policy targeted degree programs from selected areas of study with a relatively high level of graduate unemployment and introduced a cap on the number of graduates that these programs were allowed to produce. Thereby, the policy interfered with the longstanding Danish tradition of delegating management decisions such as enrollment numbers to the universities and other higher education institutions themselves. The tradition of delegating decisions to higher education institutions was embodied in the 2003 University Law, where the institutions became organized as self-owning juridical and economic entities separate at “arm’s-length” from the ministerial organization and governed through contractual relations and financial incentives rather than direct orders (Wright and Ørberg, 2017). The policy on graduate unemployment relieved the institutional management bodies of their autonomy in this area and reassigned decisions regarding enrollment numbers to an algorithmic governance procedure, even though in practice this operation was supported by manual calculations and estimations. The graduate unemployment rate instantly became an important measure in the higher education sector with tangible consequences for the relative sizes of the student cohorts especially in humanities departments (as the humanities were particularly affected by the policy) and thereby also with consequences for national funding allocation.

More specifically, the unemployment rate was used to identify higher education areas of study (as defined in a list of groups of degree programs) with “systematic and striking excess unemployment” (Uddannelses- og Forskningsministeriet, 2014) and assign them a cap size of 90%, 80%, or 70% of previous enrollments. The unemployment rate works as a benchmark, where areas of study with more than two percentage points above the average unemployment rate across all Danish higher education institutions are assigned enrollment caps. Thereby, the policy instrument established a competitive field across the entire higher education sector in Denmark. Measurement against the national average across all higher education programs in the country enforces a strong field of competition across a very diverse group of programs that were not previously considered comparable. However, the market-based measure of the unemployment rate, which is interpreted politically as an indicator of the labor market supply-and-demand equilibrium of various areas of study, imposes commensurability across diverse programs.

The relative measurement implies particular dynamics. On the one hand, the dynamics of competition work like a quagmire, where lower unemployment rates from degree programs with high numbers will cause the average (and thereby the benchmark) to move downward, making it difficult to ever leave the morass of relatively high numbers. The trajectory of the competition design makes no promise of a fairer future in which the lower-performing programs can catch up. On the other hand, there is no real winner situation in this competition design, as the degree programs scoring better than the average do not obtain any benefits. The maximum score of 0% unemployment, which is implied in the construction of the unemployment rate, prevents degree programs from performing exceptionally well. As a result, the unemployment rate benchmark installs a competitive situation where only the losers stand out. Their chances of getting out of the quagmire are low, no matter how hard they try. The design thereby allows for an affective economy in which a negative affectivity is directed toward these areas of study, particularly in the humanities.

The graduate unemployment rate in institutional quality assurance

Besides being the object of a national policy that caps the enrollment numbers for degree programs with a “systematic and striking excess unemployment,” the unemployment rate has also been adopted as a key figure in the quality assurance systems of most Danish universities. The quality assurance systems of Danish universities are subject to accreditation by The Danish Accreditation Institution (2018). The Danish Accreditation Institution requires universities and other higher education institutions to monitor their degree programs via various key figures or performance indicators of which the unemployment rate has become one, in order to identify problems and take action to solve them (The Danish Accreditation Institution, 2013). This practice of accreditation is an important context of the competitive situation, as it makes certain program leaders keen to show that they are willing to solve problems, whereby the key figure raises the stakes for programs.

Quality assurance is a kind of audit process aimed at improving the quality of a public service (in this case education) in order to improve the efficiency of public investment in education, in other words to improve educational outcomes. Interestingly, in the context of quality assurance, degree programs (rather than the broader areas of study) are assigned the role of the contestants. The programs’ status as contestants implies that in this context, it is not the labor market demand for graduates that is being measured, but rather the performance of a particular educational design and content. The unemployment rate of a program is configured as a function of its design and content, and the unemployment rate as a performance measure. In this configuration of the unemployment rate, the horizontal orientation toward other degree programs becomes stronger, though not so much in the form of rivalry, but more in the form of an interest in best practice examples within and across Danish universities.

The design of the quality assurance systems and the use of key figures involve a threshold which marks the dichotomous difference between succeeding and failing. In the case of the graduate unemployment rate, the threshold at most universities is set at two percentage points above the national average, which is the same threshold as the one used to cap enrollment numbers in the national policy. This means that degree programs with a higher unemployment rate than the threshold are in fact competing against this average rather than against the other programs. As a result, this benchmarking mode of competition installs what I would call a comparative attitude oriented toward best practices, rather than a competitive attitude among the programs.

The threshold is used to divide key figures into green and red (and sometimes yellow), where green numbers represent normal performance and red numbers problematic performance. In the annual or bi-annual reports on the key figures, which are routine procedures in the quality assurance systems, red numbers require special attention, reporting, and action planning, while green numbers do not receive a lot of attention. Thereby, the dynamics of the quality assurance system involve a distinction between normal green key figures and extraordinary red key figures, and produce an affective economy of the distribution of urgency and risk among those programs that appear with red key figures. The green programs can be complacent and continue as normal, but do not receive any special reward for their performance. Thus, the competition design is merely about avoiding a particular situation—not about achieving something extraordinary.

Furthermore, besides the national average, the competition is oriented toward senior management and The Danish Accreditation Institution, as well as toward previous performances. During my fieldwork, I experienced the following situation where the vertical relation within the university and its intersections with temporal orientations played out:

Before a meeting at one of the universities I followed in my fieldwork, I met up with a Head of degree program. On our way to the meeting, he talked in an agitated manner about the disturbing events of the preceding week. What had happened was that the University Rector had been very close to closing down his and seven other programs due to their continuous red key figures. Only through an intense presentation of the latest statistics, which pointed toward an improvement in the key figures, were the head of program and his superior able to convince the Rector to maintain the program. The Head of program speculated that the Rector was forced to initiate such drastic moves because he needed to prove his decisiveness and capability to take action to The Accreditation Institution. He was quite relieved that the closure of the program had been warded off. (Observation notes from informal talk with Head of program, May 2017)

In this informal conversation, the entanglement of the quality assurance system with The Danish Accreditation Institution appears to matter in the competition in key figures, in that it installs a vertical relation of a need for consequences if a program does not meet the key figure threshold. The competitiveness of the program is not oriented horizontally toward other programs, not even primarily toward the national average, but temporally inward, toward an improvement of the program compared with previous performances. This vertical-temporal orientation implies that the competition is about satisfying senior management rather than beating the other programs. Obviously, the incidence provoked a temporary disturbance, but the incidence can also be seen as the condensed materialization of a general affective economy of urgency and risk that was imposed on degree programs as a result of red key figures. Even though the closure had been warded off for now, I had the impression that a general sense of urgency had been enforced by the situation. At other universities, the sense of urgency did not appear as strong, as the heads of program at these universities did not see an immediate threat of closure in their departments. Here, the affective state of resignation was more prevalent, due to the feeling that competition factors were beyond their control.

The graduate unemployment rate and students

The affective economy of the unemployment rate also affected the humanities students whom I encountered during my fieldwork. For these students, it seemed as if the high unemployment rates of their programs would affect their positional advantage in the labor market negatively. The negative impact on their positional advantage did not so much appear as an effect of the content and design of the programs, and thereby the skills and knowledge of the students. The negative impact rather appeared to be an effect of the graduate unemployment rate itself. In the media, which mediates the distribution of the graduate unemployment rate to the students, the fine calculative distinctions between programs are generally lost. Thus, the graduate unemployment rate here becomes a binary marker used to single out programs with a high unemployment rate. To the students, the unemployment rate had thus become a separator of programs into high and low utility programs, and thereby of students into graduates more or less worthy of employment. The high unemployment rate has become a negative label for most humanities programs and thereby for the students on them.

This binary separation of programs and students has imposed a competitive space on the students that does not induce humanities students to compete against their peers (neither within nor outside the humanities). Instead, it has installed a collective categorization of these students as at risk of unemployment. The use of the unemployment rate as a comparative measurement instrument that can identify weak entities and thereby allow for effective risk management is thus extended from program level to the disaggregated level of individual students. The categorization of some students as at risk of unemployment has distributed anxiety and pessimism among the students, and these affectivities seem to occupy a great deal of students’ time and attention—attention that could otherwise have been directed at their studies. Furthermore, it was quite common among these students, including several of the students that I interviewed, that they felt the need to counter the positional disadvantage associated with the humanities with a stressful amount of extra activities, such as job experience, internships and so forth. These activities have become a mode of self-reform to the students, and a way of getting out of the risk category.

Summary of the case study

In summary, the competitive struggle for better employment rates in this particular case acquires its ontology through the entanglements of accreditation, organizational hierarchies, key figures produced by particular calculative practices, thresholds and color coding, national averages, comparative attitudes, attention toward the problematic, best practices, a need to prove oneself decisive and prepared to take action, temporalities of improvement or decline, the loss of detail mediated by the media, and affectivities of risk and urgency, resignation, or anxiety and pessimism. The entanglements turn the ontology of competition into a governance instrument and the act of competing into a fight to avoid being reformed, which in the case described took the drastic form of threatened program closure. The affective economies of this configuration of competition involve a utilization of the sense of crisis at the bottom of the competitive field as it paradoxically mobilizes self-reform both at university, program, and student level.

Consequently, the comparable unemployment rate does not create a free market competition. The modes of governance embedded in both the national policy and the quality assurance systems imply an enforced bureaucratization of regulatory decisions and restrictions, rather than an unleashing of the programs onto a free market where they can freely attract students by flashing their low unemployment rates and other quality indicators. Hence, the government and the university management turns to the well-known command-and-control instruments (Pedersen and Löfgren, 2012: 445) that allow them to make political and managerial decisions. Therefore, even though comparable measures are deployed as part of the state and university governance of Danish degree programs, we can only roughly speak of a competitive field among them, and if so to refer to a competition to avoid the bottom of the field and the reform consequences that follow from ending up there.

Conclusion

In an attempt to theorize competition in educational governance more thoroughly than has been done in much of the literature within the field, this article has proposed three dimensions of competition that each make up part of the entanglement that determines the ontology of competition-based governance. The first of the three dimensions was the temporal and spatial properties of the field of contestants, including the processes that turned participants into contestants by making them comparable. The second dimension was the rules of the game, or more specifically the competition design, including its competition criteria and hierarchical organization of contestants, as well as the affective economies that this design allows for. The third dimension was the competition objective, including the horizontal or vertical and temporal orientations of the contestants, and thereby the governance model in which a competitive situation is embedded in a way that determines the stakes. These dimensions interact in complex ways that call for an analysis that is sensitive to the various governance traditions and histories of education systems in the European context. These three dimensions may not be exhaustive, but they are a starting point for an analytical framework.

The analytical framework has proven relevant in the analysis of the graduate unemployment rate used in Danish universities. This study illustrates an educational governance situation in which competition plays out in ways very far from the marketized higher education systems described in much of the Anglophone literature (Blackmore, 2009; Komljenovic and Robertson, 2016; Naidoo, 2018; Shore and Wright, 2015a). Instead, the situation in Denmark seems like a competition or fight (if you like) to avoid reform and remain in (relative) control of oneself. I suggest that this new concept of competition describes a distinct mode of competition, which plays out in competitive spaces installed by governments or institutional senior management in order to identify weak entities and thereby assign them an individualized responsibility for non-optimal efficiency of the public sector and distribute negative affectivities to them. These competitive spaces are perhaps better characterized with inspiration from the notions of audit culture (Shore and Wright, 2015b), performance standards and benchmarking (Lawn, 2011), efficiency and risk management (Dale, 2017; Naidoo, 2018), and managerial command-and-control governance instruments (Pedersen and Löfgren, 2012). The contestants in these spaces do not take on a competitive attitude toward their peers, but rather take on a comparative attitude and seek inspiration from their peers in order to improve their own performance and satisfy higher hierarchical levels. Perhaps the notion of the comparative might be more relevant to deploy in order to understand competitive situations in countries with (remnants of) a strong universalistic welfare state than the marketized concept of competition.

The distinction between different modes of competition seems overlooked in the educational governance literature, where scholars have not hesitated to use the concept of competition to characterize various modes of governance revolving around comparable measures. It seems to me that this literature would benefit from analyses of empirically specific modes of competition and their entangled state within relationalities of competitive spaces, dynamics, and directionalities. In this article, I have taken inspiration from the relational focus in Agential Realism (Barad, 2007) to propose a framework for such analyses and posed questions about the boundaries of competition that I hope will generate further conversations about the differences in modes of governance, including modes of competition across nation states with different historical trajectories. Further contributions to this conversation might involve new (or old) concepts and vocabularies that reflect the kinds of competition that differ from our normal conception of competition, either because they do not necessarily have any winners, because they primarily involve competition (or comparison) against previous versions of oneself, or because they distribute affectivities of anxiety rather than success. For my part, I will not have completely satisfied the analytical itch aggravated by the discrepancy between the empirical case and the previous conceptualizations of competition until our vocabulary has become more precise.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interest

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Miriam Madsen

Notes

Author biography

Miriam Madsen is a PhD in Education Studies and Assistant Professor in the administration of public education at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark.

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