Educational marketization the Swedish way

Sweden has commonly been regarded as a striking example of a social democratic welfare-stateregime (Esping-Andersen 1996), characterized by strong state governance and active involvementin welfare matters. In the last two decades, however, the Swedish public sector and educationsystem have been radically and extensively transformed in a neo-liberal direction, a move that waspreceded by extensive decentralization of decision-making from the state to municipalities andschools. In this article the scope, character and some of the consequences of internal and externalmarketization of Swedish education in the early 2000s are summarized, and the impact ofcompetition on the internal workings of upper secondary schools is highlighted in particular.We conclude that the external marketization of education has proceeded a long way and Swedenalso fully embraces new public management, i.e. ‘inner marketization’, of education in mostrespects. However, aspects of the older social democratic policy paradigm are still visible withregard to the assigned functions, values and governance of education