Conference Agenda

This doctoral study examines economy as it is enacted in the mundane practices of everyday life in early childhood education and care (ECEC), with a particular focus on the work of centre directors in Finland. Drawing on feminist political economy (FPE), the study approaches ECEC as female-dominated work that is commonly framed as a burden on the public economy, thereby obscuring its socially and economically productive dimensions (Bakker, 2020). From this perspective, economy is not understood as a singular or abstract system but as multiple, relational, and embedded in everyday practices. It materializes through the entangled relations of human and non-human actors, emphasizing their interconnectedness and mutual constitution (Collard & Dempsey, 2020). Accordingly, social practices and material–affective phenomena—such as tears, facial expressions, or shivers on the skin—are conceptualized as integral to economic life rather than as peripheral or private experiences (Moura & Bispo, 2018).

The dissertation mobilizes the concept of economization to examine how economic logics are applied to areas of life typically considered non-economic, such as education and care (Çalişkan & Callon, 2009; Spring, 2015). Focusing on local-level public austerity policies in Finnish ECEC, the study explores what it means to live and work in an economy-dominated society where the authority to define and speak about economic matters is predominantly assigned to economists, who are largely men (Elomäki et al., 2019). This focus enables an analysis of how economic rationalities shape governance, leadership practices, and professional subjectivities in ECEC.

Methodologically and theoretically, the study draws on assemblage thinking (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988; DeLanda, 2006) to trace the rhizome-like nature of economization. Assemblage provides a conceptual tool for examining how economization emerges through shifting relations between human agency, political rationalities, governing techniques, and material elements. In this dissertation, economization is understood as constituted through the interplay of municipal policies, legislation, curricula, information technologies, administrative systems, and affective forces such as stress, joy, and exhaustion (Çalişkan & Callon, 2009).

The empirical analysis begins by identifying economization as a key phenomenon in ECEC through an examination of sociomaterial assemblages that take shape when centre directors speak about their work. The analyses focus on directors’ everyday doings, connecting their accounts to municipal policy documents, legislative frameworks, and ECEC governing tools. This approach sheds light on why economization has become a dominant feature of contemporary ECEC. The study then examines the materialities through which economic austerity is enacted and sustained in ECEC, demonstrating how these materialities become infrastructural over time as policies, governing tools, and human and non-human actors connect and interact.

Finally, the dissertation moves beyond policy and organizational analyses to explore the affective dimensions of economization. By analysing my own embodied and visceral experiences as ECEC centre director, the study investigates what economy does in and through the human body (Massumi, 2002). This analysis highlights how compliance with austerity policies is produced not only through rational calculation but also through affective, bodily, and relational processes.

The overall contribution of the dissertation lies in conceptualizing economization as a constitutive force in Finnish ECEC, explicating how it is assembled and examining what it produces at institutional, organizational, and embodied levels. In the integrative chapter, the three articles are brought together as an assemblage of economization, each representing a layer that moves from individual experience to institutional governance. Collectively, the studies deepen understanding of how economization unfolds in practice and why it is so difficult to identify ruptures that might enable alternative ways of acting within ECEC.

This study is situated within research on the platformisation of education and examines how everyday work practices of teachers in a Swedish upper-secondary school are reconfigured over time following the procurement and implementation of a uniform, municipality-wide learning management system (LMS). The study is located within a period of ongoing change in the digital infrastructure of Swedish education. Over the past decade, digitalisation has unfolded through shifting national strategies, the incorporation of GDPR into everyday administration, and the COVID-19 pandemic as a systemic stress test. More recently, curriculum revisions, public debates on screen use, and rapid introduction of generative AI (GenAI) into classrooms have added further pressure to established digital arrangements. GenAI, in particular, constitutes a key domain where tensions between professional-pedagogical judgement and managerial or data-driven logics become visible. Together, these developments underscore digitalisation as an ongoing and everchanging process.

Against this backdrop, the study focuses on what happens after a platform has moved beyond initial implementation and become a taken-for-granted part of everyday school practice. While much research on educational platforms concentrates on moments of introduction or policy design, less attention has been paid to how platform infrastructures are stabilised, adjusted, or contested over time as they become embedded in teachers’ professional routines. The study therefore directs attention to how earlier sociotechnical configurations, involving both platform arrangements and teachers’ work practices, are reworked as the LMS becomes part of the school’s infrastructural landscape.

The empirical setting is the Swedish education system, which can be described as highly decentralised, with responsibility for organising and governing education being distributed across municipalities and independent organisers. This governance structure affords considerable autonomy at school and teacher level and has historically allowed substantial freedom in shaping educational practice. Against this background, the municipal introduction of a shared, municipality-wide digital platform represents a new form of coordination, making Sweden an analytically productive context for examining how platform infrastructures intersect with professional judgement and institutional expectations over time.

Aim of the study

The aim of the study is to examine how teachers’ everyday work practices are reconfigured over time in relation to the continued use of a municipality-wide LMS, focusing on how the platform becomes embedded in daily work and how established pedagogical, administrative, and communicative practices are stabilised, adjusted, or challenged.

Research questions

The study is guided by the overarching research question: How does platformisation meet institutional logics in educational contexts?

This is operationalised through three research questions:

1. How does platformisation reconfigure institutional logics in everyday educational practice over time?
2. How do teachers and other school staff navigate competing institutional logics as the LMS has become taken for granted and generative AI tools are introduced into existing platform infrastructures?
3. How are institutional logics renegotiated over time through changes in platform use, data practices, and policy expectations related to digitalisation and education?

Theoretical framing

The theoretical framework combines infrastructure studies with an institutional logics perspective (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Thornton et al., 2012). Adopting an STS-informed platformisation lens, the study examines how platforms organise everyday educational activities and how institutional expectations are enacted in practice (Latour, 2005). This enables attention to how platform features shape practical reasoning, responsibility, and forms of visibility (Bowker & Star, 2008; Hartong & Decuypere, 2023).

The institutional logics perspective provides a complementary account of how historically embedded norms, values, and accountability arrangements shape organisational practices and professional legitimacy (Thornton et al., 2012). In platformised education, institutional logics are translated and hybridised through sociotechnical arrangements, particularly in tensions between professional-pedagogical judgement (Freidson, 2001) and managerial or data-oriented logics emphasising standardisation and comparability (Williamson, 2017).

Early career teachers face significant challenges as they transition from pre-service to in-service teaching (Johnson et al. 2014). Many experience ‘practice shock’ (Kelchtermans. 2019, p. 89), involving high levels of stress and burnout. Across education systems worldwide, induction programs are recognised as vital for supporting early career teachers through this ‘critical phase’ (Kearney, 2014, p. 5). Induction supports early career teacher resilience, effectiveness and retention (Mansfield & Gu, 2019), which is particularly important when considering how high levels of early career teacher attrition are contributing to the current context of widespread teacher shortages (Sullivan et al., 2019).

In countries such as Australia, national induction guidelines aim to provide consistent induction support to early career teachers within a federated education system. The Guidelines for the Induction of Early Career Teachers into the Profession (AITSL, 2023) can be used to ‘underpin the development of programs and practices to support early career teachers’ (p. 4). They focus on the retention of early career teachers, with a strong focus on wellbeing (Rowe et al., 2025). The guidelines outline a range of different supports, such as workplace and community orientation, professional practices, and relationships, which are intended to increase early career teacher retention due to the growing challenge of global teacher shortages (AITSL, 2023).

However, these guidelines are interpreted differently across states and territories, as jurisdictions develop their own policies in response to local priorities and workforce challenges. Policy is often reshaped as it moves between national and local systems (Ball et al., 2012), through a process of recontextualisation during which, as Bowe et al. (2017) note, policies are removed from their original context and reassembled within new settings where they are influenced by local priorities. As a result, national policy designed to support early career teachers can produce diverse ideas of what induction support should entail, who is eligible to receive it, and ultimately, which early career teachers are included or excluded.

Using critical policy analysis, we consider the effectiveness of local policy documents by drawing on the Conceptual Framework for Early Career Teacher Induction (Sullivan et al., 2025, under review). This framework, informed by a critical human resource development perspective, has reconceptualised the structure of teacher induction by identifying three key elements: induction, onboarding, and professional learning. In contrast to current approaches, this framework provides a critical view on what kind of support should be offered and what inequalities currently exist around induction.

Previous research has shown that the national guidelines assume stable, continuous employment in a single school, benefitting teachers with secure positions while marginalising those employed casually or on short-term contracts (Rowe et al., 2025). For teachers employed insecurely, induction is largely reduced to onboarding, with limited access to ongoing socialisation or professional learning. In our study, we use the conceptual framework to critically examine how policies adhere to or depart from the three key elements of induction and how this affects which early career teachers are supported.

Therefore, this study investigates how early career teacher induction is conceptualised within state-level education policy in four Australian states and territories: New South Wales, the Northern Territory, South Australia and Victoria. We critically examine how national induction policy is recontextualised across different levels of governance, and in doing so, we show how induction policy can change within a devolved education system, with relevance for other countries which organise induction policy across federal and state levels.

The research is guided by the following questions:

1. In what ways do local policy documents define the induction of early career teachers?
2. How are national induction policy guidelines recontextualised within these local policy documents?

Human Cultural Evolution Theory (HCET) has developed during the past 50 years. By explaining how people form and manage groups (Boyer, 2020), HCET provides a biological, evolutionary basis for the conservative and adaptive patterns of political and sociological understandings relating to the field of education.

This paper will introduce HCET, then address the following research questions (RQ).

RQ1. How does HCET inform the work of Anyon, Beck and Durkheim?

RQ2. What are the implications of HCET for curriculum innovation, inquiry and transmissive pedagogies?

RQ3. What are the consequences for failing to consider human attributes based on cultural evolution in education governance structures?

In complex social species, such as primates, cetaceans and several families of birds, innovations by individuals are occasionally transferred to others, a phenomenon that requires a capacity for observational learning. However, adding a variation to a learnt behaviour pattern is much less common than its maintenance, explaining why cumulative cultural evolution is a rare phenomenon (Boyd & Richerson, 1996). Among living complex, social species, humans are extreme outliers in their capacity for cooperation and communication (Tomasello, 2014). These attributes have resulted in the complete dependence of every human society on its culture (Henrich, 2017, p. 318).

Natural selection operates on ideas (memes) as much as on genes (Richerson & Boyd, 2008). In humans, cultural factors are hypothesised to have acted as important synergistic drivers for a range of physical traits, particularly those associated with communication. An important example are eyes with visible whites (sclera), a feature that enables gaze to be tracked and the mental states of others to be deduced (Boyer, 2020, p. 22; Rozov, 2025; Skoyles, 2023); a skill that is evident from infancy (Butterworth, 2004; Messer, 2004; Woodward, 2003).

The speed of cultural accumulation in humans, particularly during the past 150 years, has provoked attention to the role of culturally inherited cognitive mechanisms in social learning. A suggested progression, acting over millions of years, is imitation, language, mindreading (or theory-of-mind) for teaching, metacognition and normative cognition (Birch & Heyes, 2021, p. 1). These mechanisms are cultural because they recruit learners and therefore bypass genetic selection. They are all processes that are familiar to educational and psychological contexts.

Cultures are maintained by ‘in-group’ biases towards shared perspectives (e.g., moral, economic, political) signalled to others (e.g., by dress, accent or gesture) and reenforced by ‘coalitional recruitment’, which can be as subtle as a look (gaze) (Boyer, 2020, p. 54). These group traits, like the phenotype of an individual, also confer evolutionary ‘fitness’. In HCET, the social dynamics of human societies (Turchin, 2016) is explained by ‘multi-level selection’ (Kendal et al., 2009; Turchin, 2016; Walker et al., 2021), which involve separate (often conflicting) advantages of complying with ‘group norms’ or acting individually.

Social learning, evident in transmissive pedagogies, conserves the status quo of group norms, but does not contribute to cumulative cultural knowledge. Like the genetically analogous concept of asexual reproduction, which does not contribute to variation, but is a ‘low cost’, efficient means of reproduction in stable environments. Asocial learning (i.e., individual learning), generally promoted in education by using inquiry pedagogies, risks being irrelevant, so is generally ‘high cost’, although asocial learners may experience an ‘exclusive pay-off’ in a changed environment (Kendal et al., 2009, p. 210).

Multi-level selection explains the challenges of introducing innovation to schooling, from radical curriculums (Lingard & McGregor, 2014), subject integration (Termaat, 2023; Venville et al., 2008; Wallace et al., 2007), or frameworks that foster thinking, (Dickson et al., 2020a, 2020b; Johnson & Boon, 2023; Leat, 1999; Millar, 2022). Each example is likely to oppose the cultural ‘norm’ of +past practice.