Abstract
Since the 1980s, the overwhelming majority of countries has gradually adopted school choice policies. School markets are thus a reality in full development. In order to gain a better understanding of this object, this chapter will draw on the contributions of the sociology of markets (François, P. (2008). Sociologie des marchés. Armand Colin.), on the economy of singularities (Karpik, L. (2007). L’économie des singularités. Gallimard.) and on the sociology of market arrangements (Callon, M. (2017). L’emprise des marchés: Comprendre leur fonctionnement pour pouvoir les changer. La découverte). For those authors, it is theoretically possible to design a market that actually produces the intended and defined objectives; it is all a question of market engineering. But knowledge of the concrete functioning of school markets is lacking in this literature. We will therefore also draw on the sociology of education to enrich the discussion about market regulation and pay particular attention to questions of inequality. In doing so, we will also insist on the need to (re)politicize the market.
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Notes
- 1.
Regulation here refers to the way in which the state attempts to guide the behavior of actors through its rule-making action and its educational policy.
- 2.
The passages quoted in the chapter, translated by us, come from the original French version (Karpik, 2007).
- 3.
We also give a place to our own research or to that carried out within our research center (Girsef, UCLouvain). See a.o. Deceuninck & Draelants, 2016; Deceuninck et al., 2020; Draelants & Dumay, 2011; Dupriez & Cornet, 2005; Maroy, 2006. Of course, the sociologists of markets and sociologists of education we rely on in this chapter are not representative of all views within these two fields, they represent views that we think are significant and relevant.
- 4.
As education is a public service, researchers often speak of “quasi-markets”. This imply that the financial allocation that schools receive from the state varies proportionally according to the number of students they manage to enroll.
- 5.
- 6.
It is why we formulated the title of this chapter in the interrogative form.
- 7.
Chamberlin was the first to give an account of a form of economic struggle that plays on both competition and monopoly in an already very old work: The Theory of Monopolistic Competition (1949). However, despite the new perspective provided by Chamberlin’s work, no major transformation of neo-classical economic theory has taken place (see Karpik on this subject).
- 8.
In the sociology of markets, another author of interest for further exploration of these issues is Joel Podolny (1993). The mechanics of the statutes, he describes, “tend to institute relatively watertight market segments, and to prevent the establishment of generalized competition” (François, 2008, p. 269).
- 9.
The reform only concerns the entrance to the first year of secondary school, which is certainly a decisive stage, but as the reform does not affect the rules of enrolment in the previous and subsequent years, the destabilization of the school market remains limited.
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Draelants, H. (2023). Understanding School Markets in Order to Transform Them?. In: Dupriez, V., Valenzuela, J.P., Verhoeven, M., Corvalán, J. (eds) Educational Markets and Segregation. Evaluating Education: Normative Systems and Institutional Practices. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36147-0_3
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