Markedsretting i en urban norsk skolekontekst - Et sosialt rettferdighetsperspektiv

The topic of the dissertation is marketization in education in light of social justice and the school as a socially integrating institution. This is related to recent developments where market-oriented policies have been introduced in public education, challenging socialdemocratic principles and ideals. In this study, I examine the consequences of this development on the micro-level in primary and lower secondary schools in the Oslo area. For many years, Oslo had a conservative city council, and since the early 1990s the local authority has gone to great lengths to introduce political initiatives that incite competition between schools and stimulate parents to navigate their choice of schools in the same way consumers act in a market. This has become evident through the introduction of various initiatives, such as parental choice, publication of test results, per-capita funding and performance management. I have studied how these initiatives are realized and experienced on the local level by school leaders in Oslo. Taking as my point of departure Ball, Maguire and Braun’s (2012) theory of policy enactment, and Fraser’s (1997, 2003, 2009) theory of social justice, I have studied three constituent aspects of policy work: The material, the interpretive, and the discursive. Bearing these aspects in mind, I have studied which perspectives of justice serve as the foundation for internal marketization in Oslo. I have studied how policy initiatives that can be understood as an expression of internal marketization materialize in local contexts, and I have studied what characterizes school leaders’ interpretation and translation of policies in local contexts. The analysis of perspectives of justice in political documents shows that internal marketization is justified by emphasizing that it takes democratic participation and institutional autonomy into consideration. This can be described as a political concept of social justice. The analysis also shows that the education policy authorities in Oslo have clear strategies to promote social mobility through school. This strategy is characterized by the fact that it is largely defined according to a socio-economic concept of injustice, that it explicitly relates to the school's ability to close the performance gap between students with different social backgrounds and that there are few references to justice as a matter of social recognition or cultural and institutional patterns of interaction. This is expressed through