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This article examines the juridification of education in Sweden with a particular focus on changes in the legal regulation of schools' measures to combat degrading treatment. In Swedish schools, any degrading treatment must be reported to the head teacher who, in turn, has an obligation to report it to the governing body. Based on interviews with municipal officials, school leaders, teachers and other school staff in seven schools in two municipalities, we describe and analyse how expanding bureaucratic layers of formalisation and documentation, as well as insecurity and pressures from external accountability, have transformed pedagogical challenges in terms of what teachers see and how they act on what they see.

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.

This chapter offers an empirical illustration of the governing-evaluation-knowledge nexus by pinpointing a particular situation, a pause between two national evaluation and quality assurance (EQA) reforms, while a new national system was being planned and prepared, but its final design was not yet decided upon. This situation – unusual in the Swedish higher education policy context – adds uncertainty to the situation and opens a potential space for policymakers and higher education institutions (HEIs) to navigate. We draw on interviews and documents collected from four HEIs during this reform interval. We analyse and discuss how the four institutions navigate, coordinate, mobilise, copy, and learn in a situation without a formal national EQA system in place but in which the wider higher education policy context is deeply infused with contemporary trends and international policies and ideas on quality assurance (QA). We found that context and institutional preconditions set their mark on the work undertaken during this interval. We also discerned tendencies of homogenisation and isomorphism. Finally, we highlight the tendency of further expansion of EQA activities.

The increased importance given to European policy concerning evaluation and quality assurance in higher education in the Swedish national policy context is explored in this chapter. The description rests on interviews with what here is labelled policy brokers and on the material from the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA), as well as government bills, parliamentary minutes, national agency reports, and university teachers’ union journals. The results show that ENQA membership requirements played a significant role in the Swedish policy debate on the design of the 2016 national evaluation and quality assurance system. Dissemination channels between Europe and Sweden are populated by individuals with similar functions and positions, e.g. that ministers often meet ministers. Within Sweden, European policy is disseminated by and through individuals who move between different positions within the ministry of education, national agencies, and higher education institutions. Different organisations also communicate with each other within Sweden, ensuring European policies reaching into higher education institutions. Such European governing attempts are carried out in activities like networks, conferences, papers, guidelines, and by using different forms of knowledge, both inscribed, embodied, and enacted.

In this chapter we initially discuss the relation between governing, evaluation, and knowledge. Then we go back to the ideal typical notion of increasingly institutionalised evaluation machinery and locate the important work of what we label as qualocrats and what may be termed the burden of judgements within this overall frame. We finally discuss the expansion and the increasing complexity of evaluation and quality assurance work in higher education and point to some possible implications and problems.

This introductory chapter starts by outlining the aim of the book: to analyse and discuss the interplay between governing, evaluation and knowledge with an empirical focus on Swedish higher education. It then goes on to locate this aim and the intended contribution within the wider research context and in previous studies. The chapter also highlights some important national traits of the Swedish case and Swedish higher education policy development, before presenting the overall conceptual frame employed in the book and the project it builds on. Finally, an outline of the forthcoming chapters is provided.