Culture in talk: neoliberalism, welfare and school education in Sweden, the UK and Russia

Project Information

Cultureintalk

Grant agreement ID: 101022647

DOI

10.3030/101022647

Project terminated on 28 February 2023

EC signature date 12 March 2021

Start date 16 August 2021

End date 15 August 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 224 933,76

EU contribution

€ 224 933,76

Coordinated by

KING'S COLLEGE LONDON
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Cultureintalk (Culture in talk: neoliberalism, welfare and school education in Sweden, the UK and Russia)

Reporting period: 2021-08-16 to 2023-08-15

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The research project addressed an important social policy puzzle: why some policy cultures readily embrace neoliberal educational developments, while others resist and reject them. Building on a comparison of three contrasting cases: the UK, Sweden and Russia, the research examined grassroots interpretations of key neoliberal ideas in education, including, for example, ‘education as a commercial service’ and ‘standardisation in education’, explaining the crucial role of bottom-up policy reception in neoliberal policy. The research action contributed to facilitating a dialogue between different-level policy actors - teachers, parents, school administrators and policy makers at the local, national and international levels - by re-framing a long-standing social policy dilemma: ‘social change is hampered by public resistance’, in a new light: ‘public resistance is an organic part of social change’. The main contribution of the research action is in explaining, theorising and popularising the idea of social policy being ‘owned’ in equal measure by policy actors, as well as in promoting a feedback culture and a culture of policy negotiation among various policy actors. Another key contribution of the action lies in the re-shaping of the production of knowledge and expertise, both within the academic and public sectors, through promoting ergonomic research designs that utilise publicly available and secondary data, as opposed to generating new data, as well as in popularising digital data collection and the preservation and re-use of specifically qualitative data.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

As a result of the research action, the researcher has collected, annotated, analysed and published open access a comparative database containing instances of policy-making and public debate in the UK, Sweden and Russia. The database has been made available for reuse by the research and policy-making community, as well as members of the general public at https://osf.io/vy7w5/?view_only=1dea858e88da4f749b6e64793abc14ee.

As a result of the training programme in computational social sciences, critical policy analysis and public engagement the researcher has acquired state-of-the-art computational methodologies, including web harvesting, programming in Python and natural language processing. The researcher strengthened and solidified her key areas of expertise, including in applied linguistics, cultural sociology, comparative education and critical public policy, as well as established her as an independent thinker and practitioner within computational social sciences.

The researcher contributed her expertise to the host through the delivery of guest lectures across the host’s various Master’s programmes, supervision of Master’s students, participation in the host’s research seminars, co-convening the host’s ‘Corpus Linguistics and Beyond’ seminar series and teaching a self-designed ‘Computational Social Sciences: A beginner’s guide’ workshop. As a result, the researcher has scaled up and diversified public policy and computational research undertaken by the host, as well as strengthened its academic scope and global reputation as a European hub for comparative research.

As a result of the communication and dissemination programme, the researcher popularised computational methods and secondary qualitative data re-use across social sciences; enhanced a dialogue between different-level policy actors, e.g. between school teachers, parents and national policy makers; and increased the researcher’s visibility in the UK and internationally.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The overall socio-economic impact of the action focused on influencing the attitudes to social policy formation among the main groups of education stakeholders (international, national and local) moving away from the idea of ‘policy implementation’ towards the idea of ‘policy ownership’. As Europe’s most influential education policy actors – primarily the OECD and the European Commission – are increasingly recognising the impact of grassroots cultural meanings on national policies, establishing a feedback culture between different-level policy actors is gaining critical importance. In this respect, the main socio-economic contribution of the research action is in reframing the public and policy-makers’ attitudes to public resistance to education policy in terms of a cultural filter which helps crystallise shared societal visions for social institutions, as well as negotiate and reconcile contentious cultural frames. The key message conveyed to both the project beneficiaries and the broader society as a result of the research action is in learning to deal with long-standing policy dilemma of public resistance to policy change through a bottom-up open societal dialogue rather than top-down coercion and control. Another key socio-economic impact of the research action lies in promoting a data reuse culture, whereby not only statistical but also qualitative data is reused for research, consultancy and training purposes. The research action encouraged and promoted the use of second-hand data, e.g. open source datasets or social media data, thus contributing to building a digital ecosystem that maximises research investment, reduces the burden on research subjects associated with doing fieldwork, e.g. interviewing, and minimises the carbon footprint due to travelling for research purposes. While the research project focused on the field of education as an empirical ground for a cross-national comparison, its theoretical findings and practical applications bear relevance to other public policy sectors, including health, social care, housing and policing.

Screenshot of a MSCA information session delivered to King's applicants

Title page of an online workshop in Computational social sciences delivered at King's College London