International Journal of Comparative Education and Development
PurposeWith the advancement of novel forms of text mining techniques, new possibilities have open... more PurposeWith the advancement of novel forms of text mining techniques, new possibilities have opened up to conduct large-scale content analysis of educational research from an international and comparative perspective. Since educational research tends to convey great variation based on country-specific circumstances it constitutes a good testbed for context-rich depictions of the knowledge formation within a given research field.Design/methodology/approachIn this article, the authors compare the educational research that has been produced by scholars in Singapore and Sweden. The article begins by providing a rich overview of what has characterised the formation and institutionalization of educational research in public policy. After this background they map the knowledge formation of education by means of a comparative bibliometric approach using words from abstracts, titles and keywords published in 9017 peer-reviewed articles between 2000 and 2020. First, the authors describe the d...
It is well established that participation in formal adult education varies by individual backgrou... more It is well established that participation in formal adult education varies by individual background characteristics. However, less attention has been paid to examining inequality in participation as a consequence of policy changes, such as educational expansion. This paper examines the process of tremendous expansion in Swedish Higher Vocational Education (HVE), a vocationally oriented postsecondary educational segment driven by labor market needs. Using a demographic approach with a sociological lens on educational participation, we analyze administrative data from registers, uncovering who has been served by this expanding adult educational form. Our results indicate that expansion of HVE has led to growth in participation for policy-prioritized groups, although the rate of growth in enrollment between groups varies and corresponds to population changes. We also locate the extent of cumulative advantages in participation and discuss these results in relation to social (in)equality...
Doing Critical and Creative Research in Adult Education, 2020
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 License. ERIK NYLA... more This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 License. ERIK NYLANDER, LOVISA ÖSTERLUND AND ANDREAS FEJES 12. THE USE OF BIBLIOMETRICS IN ADULT EDUCATION RESEARCH To be, say, a formidable club player, I must be recognized as such by those I recognize as such. My recognitive attitudes can define a virtual community, but only the reciprocal recognition by those I recognize can make me actually a member of it, accord me the status for which I have implicitly petitioned by recognizing them.
Privatisation of public education is becoming more and more common across the world. As much curr... more Privatisation of public education is becoming more and more common across the world. As much current research presupposes causal links between the degree of privatisation and issues of competition and student’s free choice, we see a need for research on other ways of organising the presence of private providers in public education. In this article, we study how two Swedish municipalities use public procurement to contract private providers and organise adult education. Interestingly, we find that competition is more heavily at play in the municipality that outsources half of its adult education, than in the municipality that outsources all adult education. We view these findings as vital for understanding how education is being outsourced to private providers and for furthering the discussion on the consequences of the ongoing privatisation of education.
In this piece, we argue that an economy of publication and citations has emerged that not only ch... more In this piece, we argue that an economy of publication and citations has emerged that not only changes the notion of what is deemed quality in educational research, but also changes the incentives of us as researchers. With pressure on publishing in "international" journals, education researchers are increasingly pushed to publish their research in the article format, and for many, in their second or third language (English). Additionally, we are to direct the research to an audience that might not at all be interested or knowledgeable about the context under scrutiny. With such pressure to publish in English language journals, the question of who is allowed to publish and who is cited is of paramount significance. Based on our own empirical research on the adult educational research field as well as other bibliometric research, we propose that there is an "Anglophone" bias in educational research. We end with a discussion on the implications of the current trend to publish in indexed English language journals and suggest that "Anglophone" as well as non-Anglophone scholars need to start citing other scholars than those from the dominating "Anglophone" countries in order to further enhance knowledge and debate within education. The ultimate irony of the developments described in this piece is that the researchers from non-anglophone countries actively engage in a publication game that underscores their own subordination. Governing academia by numbers Today, we are witnessing major changes in academia within a framework of a neoliberal discourse on how to govern and shape the university, university managers, teachers and students (Fejes, 2016). New Public Management (NPM) is infiltrating academic life at all levels (cf. Schimank, 2005; Deem, 2004; Gogolon, Åström and Hansen, 2014), externally as well as internally, providing a new language and new techniques for governing. Through goal-oriented governance, universities in Europe and beyond are asked to deliver research and teaching of "high quality" but are left to decide themselves how to best deliver such "quality". An "audit society" (Power, 1997) emerges, where techniques are deployed externally as well as internally to assess if universities, departments, research groups and individual academics deliver the quality asked for. Techniques deployed for measurement and comparison often draw on quantified data, where things that might not be possible to quantify are nevertheless quantified, a development similar to what Rose (1991) once described as "governing by numbers".
A common dream among the youth is to become a successful musician. By surveying young aspiring mu... more A common dream among the youth is to become a successful musician. By surveying young aspiring musicians trying to enter a prestigious jazz audition, this paper examines assets and dispositions involved in the formation of a music field. In the study we build on Bourdieusian sociological theory and method in order to map out a space of jazz contesters and characterize the group(s) seeking to enter. Our findings, based on a specific multiple correspondence analysis performed on 211 applicants, suggest that the space of jazz contesters is structured by three important factors: (i) the total volume of music capital, (ii) commitment to the (professional) field of practice and (iii) the familiarity acquired through previous music socialization and training. Using clustering techniques, we further distinguish four groups among the applicants-the Insiders, Outsiders, Inheritors and Underdogs-and reveal the success rate of the groups. We find that the acquisition and enactment of field-specific symbolic assets is of particular importance for elite music admissions, while at the same time the sizeable number of musically affluent candidates competing for a small number of places turns the audition into an event underscored with considerable uncertainty.
Många ungdomar drömmer om en framtid som yrkesmusiker. Folkhögskolan utgör en betydande lärandear... more Många ungdomar drömmer om en framtid som yrkesmusiker. Folkhögskolan utgör en betydande lärandearena där en del av dem får hänge sig åt sina drömmar. Ändå vet vi förvånansvärt lite om hur musikens rum inom folkbildningen är konstituerade socialt, didaktiskt och genremässigt. Detta antologibidrag är ett försök att fylla några av dessa kunskapsluckor. I kapitlet kommer jag att analysera folkhögskolornas musiklinjer med avseende på genreutbredning och söktryck, liksom resonera om deras plats i det större utbildningslandskapet i musik, och dess relationen till musikfältet.
Research funding, promotions, and career trajectories are currently increasingly dependent on the... more Research funding, promotions, and career trajectories are currently increasingly dependent on the emerging economy of publications and citations across the globe. Such an economy encourages scholars to publish in international journals that are indexed in databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. These developments place an increased emphasis on the question of who is allowed to publish in the journals listed there and whose research counts as valuable. Based on bibliographic data from articles submitted to three main journals in the field of adult education research between 2005 and 2012, we scrutinize the extent to which the emerging economy of publications and citations is dependent on national and regional boundaries. Our results show how four Anglophone countries dominate the field in relation to both published articles and the share of most cited articles and where the publication pattern of these authors are national and regional rather than international.
Program analysis has been developing into a prolific research tradition illustrating the utility ... more Program analysis has been developing into a prolific research tradition illustrating the utility of adult education providers and program descriptions as heuristic objects for addressing larger questions of social scientific and humanistic inquiry. In this research tradition, attention has been directed to the way programs and educational offers of adult education providers reflect the changing labour market, educational systems and cultural zeitgeist. In this article, we interrogate the opportunities to deploy large-scale text analysis on the content of the national catalogues of Swedish folk high schools (1954–2007) to further enlarge the analytical depth and precision of how program analysis can address changing educational offerings. Based on an analysis of a comprehensive digital repository we identify the latent thematic structures of educational offers in Swedish folk high schools over time and discuss how these changing course descriptions reflect broader structural changes ...
In this article, we examine conceptualisations of luck evoked by a select group of elite students... more In this article, we examine conceptualisations of luck evoked by a select group of elite students studying in Oxbridge, when accounting for their academic success. The emphasis on luck in their narratives is categorised into three themes. The students linked their luckiness to deservedness, used luck as a way to express humbleness, and attributed their success to factors of chance. These themes are analysed against the backdrop of strong institutional support they receive as part of attending elite schools and being scholarship recipients. By being attentive to how luck is evoked in these narratives, we show that luck does not have an essential meaning and can produce different representations of legitimacy. The paper proposes the integration between critical and pragmatic sociological perspectives in order to advance our understandings of how elite groups qualify for the positions they obtain, how they define themselves and make sense of their educational merits.
The Palgrave International Handbook on Adult and Lifelong Education and Learning, 2017
In recent years, researchers throughout the world have come under increased pressure to publish i... more In recent years, researchers throughout the world have come under increased pressure to publish in English, direct their scholarly work to internationally acclaimed journals indexed in the dominating databases (i.e. Scopus and Web of Science) and render their work citable among peers in other countries. In this chapter, we summarize some recent bibliometric studies that have mapped out what kind of research that have been published and cited in three leading journals related to adult––lifelong education and learning––and which researchers that has been given recognition. We argue that the strong political waves of managerial reform have made academic career trajectories and promotions more dependent upon publications and citations, thus necessitating a discussion about the most effective publication strategies for submission. At the same time, we acknowledge the multiple professional demands of adult educational scholars and highlight the ways different definitions of scholarly impact might stand in conflict with one another.
Mapping out the Research Field of Adult Education and Learning, 2019
If the framing and composition of research fields are never fully fixed or saturated (Abbott 1995... more If the framing and composition of research fields are never fully fixed or saturated (Abbott 1995; Gieryn 1983), this is a particularly salient feature of the research field that deals with the edu ...
ABSTRACT The question of what the research of lifelong education is all about needs to be revisit... more ABSTRACT The question of what the research of lifelong education is all about needs to be revisited from time to time. Not only is this line of research approached from a multitude of academic disciplines – such as sociology, psychology or philosophy – the very concepts that are used to denote the field also undergo important changes over time, e.g. from lifelong education to lifelong learning. In this contribution, we will explore this rather elusive research territory using a large-scale text analysis of a specific scientific journal, International Journal of Lifelong Education, based on metadata (abstracts, keywords and titles) from 1,185 articles published between 1982 to 2021. Based on topic modelling techniques, we identify the main themes that have been prevalent within the journal, and how the journal’s content has changed character over time. We end the paper with a more critical examination of what kind of political and scientific currents might help explain what has led research practices to be more descriptive, micro-oriented and work-related over time.
Intersections of Art and Education : Vocational Identifications among Aesthetics Teachers in Folk... more Intersections of Art and Education : Vocational Identifications among Aesthetics Teachers in Folk High Schools
Mapping out the Research Field of Adult Education and Learning, 2019
Research funding, promotions, and career trajectories are currently increasingly dependent on the... more Research funding, promotions, and career trajectories are currently increasingly dependent on the emerging economy of publications and citations across the globe. Such an economy encourages scholars to publish in international journals that are indexed in databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. These developments place an increased emphasis on the question of who is allowed to publish in the journals listed there and whose research counts as valuable. Based on bibliographic data this chapter firstly focus on the politics of indexation, i.e. what is being indexed in the main database Web of Science in terms of country of origin of journals and in terms of publication language. Secondly, we focus on the politics of scholars gatekeeping, i.e. what is the institutional affiliation of the editors and editorial board members in some key adult education journals, and thirdly, who is publishing in these adult education journals and who is being picked up and cited. Our results show, e.g., how four Anglophone countries dominate the field in relation to both published articles and the share of most cited articles and where the publication pattern of these authors are national and regional rather than international. Anglophone countries also dominate in terms of indexation, as well as scholars gatekeeping.
International Journal of Comparative Education and Development
PurposeWith the advancement of novel forms of text mining techniques, new possibilities have open... more PurposeWith the advancement of novel forms of text mining techniques, new possibilities have opened up to conduct large-scale content analysis of educational research from an international and comparative perspective. Since educational research tends to convey great variation based on country-specific circumstances it constitutes a good testbed for context-rich depictions of the knowledge formation within a given research field.Design/methodology/approachIn this article, the authors compare the educational research that has been produced by scholars in Singapore and Sweden. The article begins by providing a rich overview of what has characterised the formation and institutionalization of educational research in public policy. After this background they map the knowledge formation of education by means of a comparative bibliometric approach using words from abstracts, titles and keywords published in 9017 peer-reviewed articles between 2000 and 2020. First, the authors describe the d...
It is well established that participation in formal adult education varies by individual backgrou... more It is well established that participation in formal adult education varies by individual background characteristics. However, less attention has been paid to examining inequality in participation as a consequence of policy changes, such as educational expansion. This paper examines the process of tremendous expansion in Swedish Higher Vocational Education (HVE), a vocationally oriented postsecondary educational segment driven by labor market needs. Using a demographic approach with a sociological lens on educational participation, we analyze administrative data from registers, uncovering who has been served by this expanding adult educational form. Our results indicate that expansion of HVE has led to growth in participation for policy-prioritized groups, although the rate of growth in enrollment between groups varies and corresponds to population changes. We also locate the extent of cumulative advantages in participation and discuss these results in relation to social (in)equality...
Doing Critical and Creative Research in Adult Education, 2020
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 License. ERIK NYLA... more This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 License. ERIK NYLANDER, LOVISA ÖSTERLUND AND ANDREAS FEJES 12. THE USE OF BIBLIOMETRICS IN ADULT EDUCATION RESEARCH To be, say, a formidable club player, I must be recognized as such by those I recognize as such. My recognitive attitudes can define a virtual community, but only the reciprocal recognition by those I recognize can make me actually a member of it, accord me the status for which I have implicitly petitioned by recognizing them.
Privatisation of public education is becoming more and more common across the world. As much curr... more Privatisation of public education is becoming more and more common across the world. As much current research presupposes causal links between the degree of privatisation and issues of competition and student’s free choice, we see a need for research on other ways of organising the presence of private providers in public education. In this article, we study how two Swedish municipalities use public procurement to contract private providers and organise adult education. Interestingly, we find that competition is more heavily at play in the municipality that outsources half of its adult education, than in the municipality that outsources all adult education. We view these findings as vital for understanding how education is being outsourced to private providers and for furthering the discussion on the consequences of the ongoing privatisation of education.
In this piece, we argue that an economy of publication and citations has emerged that not only ch... more In this piece, we argue that an economy of publication and citations has emerged that not only changes the notion of what is deemed quality in educational research, but also changes the incentives of us as researchers. With pressure on publishing in "international" journals, education researchers are increasingly pushed to publish their research in the article format, and for many, in their second or third language (English). Additionally, we are to direct the research to an audience that might not at all be interested or knowledgeable about the context under scrutiny. With such pressure to publish in English language journals, the question of who is allowed to publish and who is cited is of paramount significance. Based on our own empirical research on the adult educational research field as well as other bibliometric research, we propose that there is an "Anglophone" bias in educational research. We end with a discussion on the implications of the current trend to publish in indexed English language journals and suggest that "Anglophone" as well as non-Anglophone scholars need to start citing other scholars than those from the dominating "Anglophone" countries in order to further enhance knowledge and debate within education. The ultimate irony of the developments described in this piece is that the researchers from non-anglophone countries actively engage in a publication game that underscores their own subordination. Governing academia by numbers Today, we are witnessing major changes in academia within a framework of a neoliberal discourse on how to govern and shape the university, university managers, teachers and students (Fejes, 2016). New Public Management (NPM) is infiltrating academic life at all levels (cf. Schimank, 2005; Deem, 2004; Gogolon, Åström and Hansen, 2014), externally as well as internally, providing a new language and new techniques for governing. Through goal-oriented governance, universities in Europe and beyond are asked to deliver research and teaching of "high quality" but are left to decide themselves how to best deliver such "quality". An "audit society" (Power, 1997) emerges, where techniques are deployed externally as well as internally to assess if universities, departments, research groups and individual academics deliver the quality asked for. Techniques deployed for measurement and comparison often draw on quantified data, where things that might not be possible to quantify are nevertheless quantified, a development similar to what Rose (1991) once described as "governing by numbers".
A common dream among the youth is to become a successful musician. By surveying young aspiring mu... more A common dream among the youth is to become a successful musician. By surveying young aspiring musicians trying to enter a prestigious jazz audition, this paper examines assets and dispositions involved in the formation of a music field. In the study we build on Bourdieusian sociological theory and method in order to map out a space of jazz contesters and characterize the group(s) seeking to enter. Our findings, based on a specific multiple correspondence analysis performed on 211 applicants, suggest that the space of jazz contesters is structured by three important factors: (i) the total volume of music capital, (ii) commitment to the (professional) field of practice and (iii) the familiarity acquired through previous music socialization and training. Using clustering techniques, we further distinguish four groups among the applicants-the Insiders, Outsiders, Inheritors and Underdogs-and reveal the success rate of the groups. We find that the acquisition and enactment of field-specific symbolic assets is of particular importance for elite music admissions, while at the same time the sizeable number of musically affluent candidates competing for a small number of places turns the audition into an event underscored with considerable uncertainty.
Många ungdomar drömmer om en framtid som yrkesmusiker. Folkhögskolan utgör en betydande lärandear... more Många ungdomar drömmer om en framtid som yrkesmusiker. Folkhögskolan utgör en betydande lärandearena där en del av dem får hänge sig åt sina drömmar. Ändå vet vi förvånansvärt lite om hur musikens rum inom folkbildningen är konstituerade socialt, didaktiskt och genremässigt. Detta antologibidrag är ett försök att fylla några av dessa kunskapsluckor. I kapitlet kommer jag att analysera folkhögskolornas musiklinjer med avseende på genreutbredning och söktryck, liksom resonera om deras plats i det större utbildningslandskapet i musik, och dess relationen till musikfältet.
Research funding, promotions, and career trajectories are currently increasingly dependent on the... more Research funding, promotions, and career trajectories are currently increasingly dependent on the emerging economy of publications and citations across the globe. Such an economy encourages scholars to publish in international journals that are indexed in databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. These developments place an increased emphasis on the question of who is allowed to publish in the journals listed there and whose research counts as valuable. Based on bibliographic data from articles submitted to three main journals in the field of adult education research between 2005 and 2012, we scrutinize the extent to which the emerging economy of publications and citations is dependent on national and regional boundaries. Our results show how four Anglophone countries dominate the field in relation to both published articles and the share of most cited articles and where the publication pattern of these authors are national and regional rather than international.
Program analysis has been developing into a prolific research tradition illustrating the utility ... more Program analysis has been developing into a prolific research tradition illustrating the utility of adult education providers and program descriptions as heuristic objects for addressing larger questions of social scientific and humanistic inquiry. In this research tradition, attention has been directed to the way programs and educational offers of adult education providers reflect the changing labour market, educational systems and cultural zeitgeist. In this article, we interrogate the opportunities to deploy large-scale text analysis on the content of the national catalogues of Swedish folk high schools (1954–2007) to further enlarge the analytical depth and precision of how program analysis can address changing educational offerings. Based on an analysis of a comprehensive digital repository we identify the latent thematic structures of educational offers in Swedish folk high schools over time and discuss how these changing course descriptions reflect broader structural changes ...
In this article, we examine conceptualisations of luck evoked by a select group of elite students... more In this article, we examine conceptualisations of luck evoked by a select group of elite students studying in Oxbridge, when accounting for their academic success. The emphasis on luck in their narratives is categorised into three themes. The students linked their luckiness to deservedness, used luck as a way to express humbleness, and attributed their success to factors of chance. These themes are analysed against the backdrop of strong institutional support they receive as part of attending elite schools and being scholarship recipients. By being attentive to how luck is evoked in these narratives, we show that luck does not have an essential meaning and can produce different representations of legitimacy. The paper proposes the integration between critical and pragmatic sociological perspectives in order to advance our understandings of how elite groups qualify for the positions they obtain, how they define themselves and make sense of their educational merits.
The Palgrave International Handbook on Adult and Lifelong Education and Learning, 2017
In recent years, researchers throughout the world have come under increased pressure to publish i... more In recent years, researchers throughout the world have come under increased pressure to publish in English, direct their scholarly work to internationally acclaimed journals indexed in the dominating databases (i.e. Scopus and Web of Science) and render their work citable among peers in other countries. In this chapter, we summarize some recent bibliometric studies that have mapped out what kind of research that have been published and cited in three leading journals related to adult––lifelong education and learning––and which researchers that has been given recognition. We argue that the strong political waves of managerial reform have made academic career trajectories and promotions more dependent upon publications and citations, thus necessitating a discussion about the most effective publication strategies for submission. At the same time, we acknowledge the multiple professional demands of adult educational scholars and highlight the ways different definitions of scholarly impact might stand in conflict with one another.
Mapping out the Research Field of Adult Education and Learning, 2019
If the framing and composition of research fields are never fully fixed or saturated (Abbott 1995... more If the framing and composition of research fields are never fully fixed or saturated (Abbott 1995; Gieryn 1983), this is a particularly salient feature of the research field that deals with the edu ...
ABSTRACT The question of what the research of lifelong education is all about needs to be revisit... more ABSTRACT The question of what the research of lifelong education is all about needs to be revisited from time to time. Not only is this line of research approached from a multitude of academic disciplines – such as sociology, psychology or philosophy – the very concepts that are used to denote the field also undergo important changes over time, e.g. from lifelong education to lifelong learning. In this contribution, we will explore this rather elusive research territory using a large-scale text analysis of a specific scientific journal, International Journal of Lifelong Education, based on metadata (abstracts, keywords and titles) from 1,185 articles published between 1982 to 2021. Based on topic modelling techniques, we identify the main themes that have been prevalent within the journal, and how the journal’s content has changed character over time. We end the paper with a more critical examination of what kind of political and scientific currents might help explain what has led research practices to be more descriptive, micro-oriented and work-related over time.
Intersections of Art and Education : Vocational Identifications among Aesthetics Teachers in Folk... more Intersections of Art and Education : Vocational Identifications among Aesthetics Teachers in Folk High Schools
Mapping out the Research Field of Adult Education and Learning, 2019
Research funding, promotions, and career trajectories are currently increasingly dependent on the... more Research funding, promotions, and career trajectories are currently increasingly dependent on the emerging economy of publications and citations across the globe. Such an economy encourages scholars to publish in international journals that are indexed in databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. These developments place an increased emphasis on the question of who is allowed to publish in the journals listed there and whose research counts as valuable. Based on bibliographic data this chapter firstly focus on the politics of indexation, i.e. what is being indexed in the main database Web of Science in terms of country of origin of journals and in terms of publication language. Secondly, we focus on the politics of scholars gatekeeping, i.e. what is the institutional affiliation of the editors and editorial board members in some key adult education journals, and thirdly, who is publishing in these adult education journals and who is being picked up and cited. Our results show, e.g., how four Anglophone countries dominate the field in relation to both published articles and the share of most cited articles and where the publication pattern of these authors are national and regional rather than international. Anglophone countries also dominate in terms of indexation, as well as scholars gatekeeping.
Uploads
Papers by Erik Nylander