A popular contemporary narrative asserts that Sweden has become “the society of easily offended victims” (Eberhard, 2009; see also Berensten, 2014; Dahlstrand, 2012; Heberlein, 2005; Zaremba, 2008). Official statistics show how defamation of character claims have increased dramatically over time (The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, 2018). Such observations relates to developments in the school system where the number of complaints regarding degrading treatment (DT) have also increased (The Swedish Schools Inspectorate, 2018). Overall, schools’ work against DT is framed by increasing awareness of the role of formal obligations, trials, evidence, damages, individual rights and childrens’ subjective experiences of being offended. Plans, preventions, expanding forms of investigations and documentation are enacted in order to provide guarantees that DT do not occur; that is, that students are not exposed to any behaviour that violates their “dignity” (The Swedish Education Act SFS 2010:800, §6).

The increasing legal framing when it comes to schools’ work with problems of DT has been discussed in terms of juridification (Lindgren, Carlbaum, Hult & Segerholm, in press). The overall aim of this study is to explore how new judicial forms of work against DT in Swedish schools affect young people’s socialisation and identity. In a previous study, based on interviews with students, we could not confirm any radically new patterns of socialisation (Lindgren, Hult, Carlbaum & Segerholm, 2018). The present study then, is an attempt to validate these results by including the perspective of experienced school actors who have a different overview and relation to the issues at hand. We thus analyse interviews with both school actors and students from grade five and grade eight when reasoning about problems of DT and how such problems are understood and acted on in schools.

Our theoretical framework establishes a direct link between juridification and socialisation through Habermas’ ideas on the colonisation of the lifeworld by the instrumental rationality of bureaucracies and market-forces (Habermas, 1987). Juridification thus describe how intuitive forms of everyday communication, norms and values becomes reified by legal logic (Habermas, 1987). Drawing on these ideas Honneth (2014) has offered examples of social pathologies that significantly impairs the ability to take part in important forms of social cooperation.

We interviewed students, teachers, head teachers, school staff and responsible officials at the municipality level at five schools in two municipalities. Both students and school staff talk about the juridified significance of DT, that it is decided by the offended person, but have ambiguous ideas ofthe juridified way that the school handle incidents. Both school staff and students claim that the word DT (kränkning) mostly is used by students jokingly, e.g. when reprimanded. Students hesitate in informing teachers of incidents because it sets in motion disproportionate investigations, e.g. informing parents. Thus, students want the teachers to see and know of incidents, but not necessarily to act upon them according to formal standards. Overall, such preliminary results indicate that increasing regulation in school may cultivate juridified selves by stressing subjective feelings and formal investigations while muting dialogue.

Just as in other forms of government and areas of society, the role of the inspector is adjusting to new expectations and shifting accountability mechanisms. Acting as 'street-level bureaucrats' and enforcers of the law, inspectors collaborate with and depend on others in their quest to assemble information from multiple, complex sources. Their work is characterized by discretionary power where inspectors are entrusted to enact policy that is based on the principle of best judgment in addition to the demands put forward by legal norms and regulations. In sum, this information-seeking activity is utilized to collectively produce various documents, such as inspection reports. Furthermore, information seeking is considered a vital step in the development of their knowledge in order to make qualified judgments. Using 'visible' maps, e.g. inspection frameworks, and 'invisible' maps, e.g. inspectors' professional experiences, to navigate and execute discretionary tasks, school inspectors sometimes struggle to develop an adequate knowledge base that makes sense of the 'inspectees' worlds'. Drawing on the concepts of visible and invisible maps, this chapter examines the information-seeking practices of school inspectors based on previous comprehensive research on supervision systems in Germany (Lower Saxony), Norway and Sweden. This chapter addresses the following key questions: What type of information do inspectors look for?, How and where do they look for information?, How do inspectors handle different kinds of information, e.g., statistics, documents, and interview, observation- and survey data, and how do they decide what information is credible and useful? By studying inspectors as information-seekers, and more closely, school inspectors, this chapter demonstrates how these representatives of the state incorporate multiple visible and invisible maps, and how they make sense of the schools they are mandated to scrutinize using limited resources.

This Open Access book analyses the interplay between governing, evaluation and knowledge with an empirical focus on Swedish higher education. It investigates the origins, logics, and mechanisms of evaluation and quality assurance reforms and their dynamic interactions with institutional, national and European policy contexts. The chapters report findings from extensive empirical studies that offer detailed insight into the work of governing in higher education, by giving voice to actors at various levels and positions including the ministry, national agency and University employees. Central themes include the influence of European policy, changing system designs, media relations and quality assurance enactments in University institutions. The book also explores the ways in which an emerging professional cadre, labelled qualocrats, enacts and mediates evaluation and quality assurance policy and practice. Taken together, the expanding evaluation machinery in Swedish higher education highlights the pivotal role of knowledge as a governing resource, and points to special features of evaluation as a particular form of practice that makes knowledge work for governing.

In the Nordic countries and beyond, evaluation and quality assurance are becoming increasingly insitutionalised as means to govern the welfare state (Dahler-Larsen, 2011). Higher education is no exception (Leiber, Stensaker & Harvey, 2015; Jarvis, 2014). Since the 1990s, different national evaluation systems have been developed and implemented in Swedish Higher Education (HE) (Segerholm, 2016). Over time, these systems have displayed different political purposes and designs. One major component in the most recent system in operation from 2017 and onwards is national evaluation of the higher education institutions’ (HEIs) own internal quality assurance systems, carried out by the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education (SHEA) (Lindgren & Rönnberg, 2017).This paper aims to analyse a SHEA try-out evaluation in which HEIs internal quality assurance were evaluated. The following questions guide our study: What enactments do these try-out exercises entail and what actors are involved? What kind of knowledge is mobilized and used in these enactments? We focus on two cases where the work with and experiences from a) HEI actors, b) officials at the SHEA, and c) external review panels are analysed. We collected data as the national try-out evaluation was implemented. This include near 30 interviews with SHEA staff, HEI actors, and members in external review panels. Extensive documentary materials, such as self-evaluations from the HEIs, schedules, plans and SHEA decisions, were also analysed.This paper is part of a larger research project, “Governing by evaluation in higher education in Sweden”, analyzing how evaluative activities govern Swedish Higher Education policy and practice. We conceptualise governing as activities composed of assemblages of places, people, policies, practices and power (Clarke, 2015). Following this, we analyse the activities and the actual work connected to quality assurance and its policy-making, and how it is enacted and learned (Ball et. al, 2012). Drawing on Freeman and Sturdy (2014), we see knowledge in policy as taking different forms, i.e. as embodied, inscribed and enacted.

This article reports an investigation of new forms of work against degrading treatment in Swedish compulsory school. It focuses particularly on how four schools in one municipality enact the far-reaching reporting obligation. The study is theoretically informed by institutional theory and theories on teacher professionalism, and is empirically based on interviews with teachers, head teachers, school health staff, and municipal officials, as well as analysis of policy documents and local statistics. The results show that legal regulation produces institutional complexity that creates tensions between the logic of accountability and the logic of professional responsibility, balanced by school actors in their everyday work.

The aim of this study is to describe and analyse two recent quality assurance (QA) reforms in Swedish higher education (HE) and to discuss how shifts and continuities can be understood with a particular focus on the role of affects and emotions. Using conceptual devices from the literature on affects and emotions in the context of policy, official documents, media materials and interviews with stakeholders were analysed. In conclusion, the reforms were surrounded by distinctive affective atmospheres in which different emotional registers were circulated and articulated. The 2010 reform was criticised due to a lack of deliberation and produced a QA system described by HE actors in negative terms prior to its implementation. The second policy process after 2014 was emotionally reframed as being open for dialogue and collaboration in the creation of the reformed QA system. These affective atmospheres were framed by their particular policy histories and memories, but they also involved strategic attempts to create certain feelings, responses and actions.

One of many challenges that teachers face on a daily basis is related to problems with degrading treatment. Teachers work in order to establish a working environment where children can learn; both knowledge and norms and values, i.e how to live together and to understand, care for and respect each other in line with the “fundamental values” in the curriculum (The Swedish National Agency for Education, 2011). All schools are regulated by a policy of zero tolerance towards degrading treatment (The Child and School Student Representative, 2017). The challenge, however, is immense, if not abysmal: hundreds of children obligated to spend year after year in a cramped facility without ever troubling each other with derogatoriness, rumours, ridicule or shoving. Teachers take on this difficult challenge with a broad repertoire of pedagogical tools based on research, theory, experience and tacit knowledge. They deal with chaos and unpredictability in contexts where no single method, plan or manual apply (Cardell, 2017: 226).In this paper we draw attention to how this challenge has been transformed by recent legal regulation of teachers’ work. The School Act has expanded the regulations on degrading treatment and teachers and school staff are today responsible to report any degrading treatment to the principal who in turn has an obligation to report it further to the governing body. This regulation is added to the obligation to quickly investigate and take necessary measures to counteract such treatment (Prop. 2009/10:165; SFS 2010:800).Based on 35 interviews with municipal officials, school directors, school leaders, teachers and other school staff (n 60) in seven schools in two municipalities we describe and analyse how teachers handle issues related to degrading treatment as the pedagogical challenge has been converted into, or complemented by, a judicial challenge primarily oriented towards objective representation of past events. For instance, teachers have to determine, at every incident occurring during the school day, if it should be reported as degrading treatment or not. Reporting has certain consequences, for example time consuming activities of documentation including administration of evolving digital reporting systems, discussions with colleagues and students and communication with parents demanding careful balance and precision. Not reporting has other consequences, e.g. it involves risk taking in terms of accountability since every incident has the potential to later become part of a complaint on degrading treatment issued to The Swedish Schools Inspectorate or The Child and School Student Representative. Thus, to see or not to see incidents is not only a question of teachers’ attention and immediate subsequential action or mindful awaiting – it is a choice that involves a range of strategic and defensive considerations that in a profound way alters teachers’ professional gaze, understanding and practice.The paper is theoretically informed by ideas on policy enactment (Ball, Maguire & Braun, 2012) that provide an overall understanding of issues of policy implementation in times of juridification. In order to qualify the analysis of teachers’ challenges and conflicts between different logics we draw on theories on teacher professionalism (e.g. Englund & Solbrekke, 2015; Solbrekke & Englund, 2011).

This chapter focuses on the governing work of Swedish school inspectors with regards to the role and function of knowledge. As professionals, inspectors are situated as relays and brokers of policy standing in contact with both the political arena and practice arenas. School inspectors use and produce knowledge and they rely on, search for, accumulate and communicate different forms of knowledge. In this chapter, we seek to understand knowledge in the inspection context as existing in three phases, namely as embodied, inscribed and enacted (Freeman and Sturdy, 2014). The aim is to identify and discuss different phases of knowledge in inspectors' work by asking how the different forms of embodied, inscribed and enacted knowledge are manifested, incorporated and transformed in the course of inspection. The chapter illustrates how different forms of knowledge are intertwined with issues of legitimacy, accountability and control, which is argued to be importat for how inspection and the work of inspectors' are perceived and judged in different contexts and settings.