Conference Agenda

The expanding global education industry (Verger et al., 2017) has become increasingly embedded in educational contexts and practices through diverse public-private arrangements. In this refiguration of the educational field, private education actors not only enter educational spaces but also co-construct relations of the actors involved, such as students, teachers, and parents, as well as pedagogical content, curricula, assessments, and organization (Jones & Ball, 2023). These developments have been conceptualised under interlinked processes of marketisation, privatisation and commercialisation of education (Hogan & Thompson, 2020; Zancajo et al., 2025) and substantial body of research has documented these processes from various perspectives. However, there is a tendency that English-speaking countries, larger global companies and intermediaries have received the bulk of scholarly attention, and smaller actors with a non-anglosaxon origin have been far less explored (Ball, 2019; Rönnberg, 2025). Similarly, this body of literature seems to pay relatively less attention to the vocational education and training sector, even though public-private arrangements are inherently present in this field (Down et al., 2019; Honingh & Karsten, 2007, Wheelahan et al., 2022).

Taking this as a starting point, this paper contributes empirical insights on how private education actors from two smaller European states seek to position their services, interests, and perspectives in, to, and of commercialisation (Hogan, 2025) in education, with an empirical focus on Vocational Education and Training (VET). The aim is to explore positioning practices in the form of self-representations of private VET providers in Switzerland and Sweden. Drawing on Bourdieu’s field theory (Bourdieu, 1971), we ask: How do private VET actors position themselves within the educational system in Switzerland and Sweden and how do these positioning practices relate to and reflect the current relations, structures, and power dynamics within the respective educational field?

In Switzerland, private vocational schools appear to be gaining significance within the VET system (Preite et al., 2025). In Sweden, private for-profit actors have gained increasing ground within the upper-secondary school system, as a result of extensive reforms in the 1990s. While these developments are framed, historically shaped, and institutionally embedded in markedly different national contexts and VET systems, they nonetheless share an important commonality; the growing presence of private providers challenges central assumptions and organising principles of the respective education systems. In Switzerland, this concerns the longstanding dominance of firm-based training within a collective skill formation system. In Sweden, it calls into question the public character of schooling and the role of for-profits in education delivery (Carlbaum & Rönnberg, 2024), as the broader market logic of the Swedish system, including provider competition and differentiation by programme attractiveness, shape the upper secondary VET field.

Building on Bourdieu’s (1971) field theory, we conceptualise these dynamics in terms of a socio-symbolic homology between modes of self-presentation and the relational positions private providers occupy vis-à-vis the state, other educational actors, and the education system as a whole. From this perspective, the ways in which private providers position themselves do not only reveal characteristics of these actors, but also illuminate the broader configurations that structure the field in which they operate. By linking private actor involvement to promises of improved quality, choice, efficiency and innovation (Allais, 2012; Jones & Ball, 2023; Rönnberg et al., 2025), these narratives also operate as symbolic capital through which private providers strive for the monopoly of authority and legitimacy within the educational field. Thereby, private providers engage in symbolic labour that helps frame their activities as publicly valuable rather than commercially oriented, strategically positioned in relation to broader policy agendas emphasising quality, equity, competitiveness, and - forcefully so in the VET domain - future skills (c.f. Allais & Marock, 2026).

Neoliberalism in global education reform emphasizes competition, efficiency, consumer choice, deregulation, and privatization to enhance school performance, using audits, inspections, and standardized testing for accountability (Ball & Olmedo, 2023; Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). This economic paradigm reshapes schools, leaders, teachers, and students into rationalized entities (Ball et al., 2012). Policy actors (e.g., leaders, teachers, and students) enact these ideologies within specific contexts. Hong Kong as an entrepreneurial Chinese city, has embraced neoliberalism for over two decades, making it ideal for studying how actors redefine 'good schools' (Chiang et al., 2023). Policies decentralize management, finance, and accountability, ranking schools in three Bands by student performance, and enforcing school-based management with public quality reviews every six years to heighten competition (Lee et al., 2020; Ho & Lu, 2019). While uniform standards are imposed, educators adapt to local realities, and students, often overlooked, actively participate as policy enactors rather than mere objects. Focusing on an 'underperforming' school, this study explores how leaders, teachers, and students interpret and respond to performative policy. This paper addresses two main research questions: (1) How do school leaders, teachers, and students in an 'underperforming' school make sense of performative policy? (2) What do they do in response to this understanding?

Policy enactment views policy as technologies and practices realized and contested locally (Ball, 1994), shaping discourse on what can be said/thought and who holds authority. It is a social, cultural, emotional process of 'becoming,' involving interpretation, revision, or abandonment amid competing discourses and subjectivities (Maguire et al., 2015). Based on this, this study integrates policy enactment, context, and performativity to analyze neoliberal influences. in the Hong Kong education context. Policy enactment is complex, messy, and contingent, with actors creatively interpreting policies in diverse roles and contexts (Ball et al., 2012). Educators employ strategies from conformity to rejection, with adaptation/innovation in between; high-stakes policies narrow creativity, prioritizing competing interests. Recontextualization (Bernstein, 2000) enables innovation and contestation, granting autonomy influenced by experiences, values, and dynamics (Lyle & Peurach, 2024). This yields 'recontextualized neoliberalism' bridging ideologies and contexts (Chiang et al., 2023) or co-opting policies for local priorities (Bryant et al., 2018). Actors include narrators (interpreting policy), entrepreneurs (advocating change), and enthusiasts (implementing ideas), crafting narratives for continuity or breaks. Context shapes enactment institutionally, blending objective conditions and subjective interpretations (Ball et al., 2012). Four interconnected dimensions (Braun et al., 2011): situated (locales, histories, intakes, parental expectations); professional (staff commitments, experiences, norms, potential incoherence); material (staffing, finance, infrastructure); external (rankings, laws, pressures). Relational, material, structural interplay informs action. Performativity within the neoliberal discourse pressures actors to meet benchmarks, narrowing focus to scores over holistic education (Keddie, 2013). Students internalize academic success as the sole goal, limiting broader views on the meaning of education to students themselves. Gowlett (2015) posits 'performative resignification' to maneuver regimes unexpectedly, unfolding in dominance, resistance, and chaos/freedom (Ball, 1994).