Conference Agenda

Scholars such as Grek (2009), Ozga (2008), and Ball (2018) have focused on the international organisations’ (IOs) greater propensity to employ soft law or ‘governance by numbers’ to exercise their governance at a distance. Central to these soft mechanisms has been the recognition of the IOs’ technocratic expertise and their role as knowledge producers (Zapp 2017). It is, however, not just the numbers that give the IOs the legitimacy to push forward particular agendas into and across the boundaries of nation-states but also how an agenda gets framed and then goes unchallenged should it gains political popularity. The frames that the IOs use to promote their mission involve the process of defining and calling attention to certain problems while obscuring others (Coleman, Thorson, & Wilkins, 2011; Entman, 1993). A plausible construction of a ‘causal story’, in particular, serves as a strong leverage for proposing a ‘good diagnosis’ and different alternative futures (Alaily-Mattar, Thierstein, & Förster, 2014; Verger, 2012). This paper focuses on how the IOs – in particular the OECD – discursively shifted away from their long-held logics of human capital approach by embracing a humanist vision of education and unpacks the different political rationale(s) behind the OECD’s recent ‘humanitarian turn’ in education (Li & Auld, 2020).

To date, an increasing interest has been observed in the OECD’s progressive shift towards (seemingly) ‘humanistic’ and less instrumental visions and initiatives of education, most notably the introduction of the ‘Creative Thinking’ assessment in PISA 2022 (Grey & Morris, 2022), the expansion of PISA to low- and middle-income countries through PISA for Development (Auld, Li, & Morris, 2022), and its efforts to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (Cobb & Couch, 2022). There is, however, a serious dearth of studies that situate the OECD’s happiness and, more generally, well-being initiatives within the framework of ‘humanitarian turn’, and this is where this paper aims to make its contribution. This paper fills in the void by tracing and examining how the concepts of happiness and well-being emerged and stood out as one of the key policy signifiers of the OECD’s education agenda over the past decade and for what purpose.

The guiding questions addressed in this paper include: (i) what were the core educational beliefs and priorities of the OECD, and how have they changed since its inception in the 1960s?; (ii) how do these changing beliefs and priorities explain the emergence of the happiness and well-being agendas both in the general works and in the education agenda of the OECD?; and, lastly, (iii) how, since their first emergence, did the meanings attributed to happiness and well-being change, and for what purpose?

Education policy research has for some time emphasised the increasing importance of intergovernmental organisations (IOs) in global education governance, not only through forms of ‘hard governance’ (e.g., instruments of funding), but also and especially through ‘soft governance’ (e.g., provision of epistemic knowledge or agenda setting) (Jakobi 2009; Zapp & Dahmen 2017). Scholars have shown that IOs exert great influence on national education policies by defining norms in various educational fields, such as Education for All (Chabbott 2003), lifelong learning (Jakobi 2009) or higher education (Zapp 2019; Zapp & Ramirez 2019). IOs use different media for agenda setting and dissemination of educational discourses, including more traditional forms such as reports, but also social media platforms such as Twitter for real-time communication (Bjola & Zaiotti 2021). While IO research often focuses on ex post forms of influence, that is, changes in education systems resulting from IO agendas, little attention has been paid on the emergence of education norms within IOs (Zapp 2019). In particular, previous research lacks information on the way in which norms and discourses move across different IOs. This study addresses this gap by examining education discourses in IOs based on Twitter data, and answers the following research question: How do educational discourses in IOs change over time and move across IOs?

The study draws on the concept of isomorphism, more specifically discursive isomorphism (Powell & DiMaggio 1983; Smith & Wiest 2012). According to the general idea of isomorphism, nation states tend to assimilate their educational discourses, policies, and structures over time (Meyer & Frank 2007). One reason for this process is the increasing influence of IOs: IOs disseminate specific educational norms and thereby lead nation states to adapt their education systems to these norms, at least in parts. This has been observed, for instance, in a stronger output orientation of German curricula due to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (Zapp & Powell 2016). However, these ideas neglect the inter-organisational relations between different IOs. IOs tend to align their discourses over time, especially in times of great challenges, as has been observed in recent years. I therefore argue that certain forms of isomorphism can be observed across education IOs as well. Smith & Wiest (2012) define this process as “discursive isomorphism” and describe the tendency for political actors to adopt similar discourses and norms. One way of representing the discursive similarity between political actors is discourse networks, that is, graphical representations of actors and their discourses (Leifeld 2016).

The aim of this study is to map the discursive relations between education IOs over a fifteen-year period and to highlight significant changes that lead to the alignment and adaptation of discourses. The study shows how these shifting education discourses within IOs reflect a growing recognition of the complex and interconnected nature of the challenges facing education systems around the world. As such, they underscore the need for a holistic and multi-faceted approach to these challenges that goes beyond simply improving access to education to focus on issues such as quality, equity, and lifelong learning.

In 2015, just over 163,000 people sought refuge in Sweden, most of them within a few months when more than 1 million people crossed the Mediterranean See to seek asylum in Europe. A comparison between the Nordic countries, calculated per 10,000 inhabitants, shows that during the years 2015-2016, Sweden approved 70 asylum applications, Norway 25, and Denmark and Finland about 12 (Örstadius, 2021). This situation became relevant again in connection with the report of the Swedish results of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey in 2018 which was published by the end of 2019 (NAE, 2019). At the same day as the results were published in Sweden, national newspapers and the then largest opposition party, the Moderates, noted that 11% of students were excluded from participation in the survey—the highest figure among the participating countries in the PISA survey—due to deficiencies in the Swedish language. The debate that followed revealed a deep gap between those who trusted the reliability of the PISA test for Sweden and those who distrusted the results. This paper focuses on how a transnational cooperation initiates national 'communicative discourses' in line with Schmidt’s (2008, 2015) understanding of the concept, with implications for national education policy efforts. The paper explores what ‘normative background ideas, ‘cognitive foreground ideas’ and main actors that becomes important in this communicative discourse, as well as the implications of the arguments that divided the actors into two groups: those who trusted the OECD and the Swedish National Agency for Education (NAE) and those who did not.

The purpose of this study is to explore the different actors, interests, and perspectives represented on different arenas in the debate on the implementation of the 2018 PISA survey and on the assessment of the result of the test. The guiding research questions are: ‘What normative ideas are at stake in the public deliberations on the 2018 PISA results? and ‘Who were the main actors involved in the communicative discourses on the 2018 PISA results and why did the question of percentage who were given permission to refrain from participating in the test became political charged in Sweden?’

The importance of numbers for policy discussions related to PISA has previously been emphasized by Grek (2009). The great importance that the OECD, as a transnational organization, has had for the education policy debate in Sweden has been noted by, for example, Grek (2017), Author (2020), and Author and Non-Author (2020). The transnational pressure of policy transfer from the PISA results has also been examined by Dobbins and Martens (2011) from a French perspective and from Chung (2019) from a Finnish perspective. Rautalin (2018) showed how critics of the Finnish school system used Finland’s lower ranking in 2012 to argue for the need for education policy changes. International large-scale assessments like PISA are used by national policy actors both for policy borrowing from “league winners” and for distancing themselves from “league losers (Steiner-Khamsi and Waldow, 2018). Countries that perform worse than expected often speak of the phenomenon of national “PISA shocks” as a result of their low position in the international rankings (Haugsbakk, 2013; Pons, 2012; Waldow, 2009). However, this paper shows that also improved PISA results may lead to polarizing debates, since the number-based PISA results fit well within a public debate.