‘How do we marry the two things together?’: a Swedish education company expanding its business to India

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on a Swedish school company and its operations in India, examining how setting up and operating schools in another national place forge particular spatial imaginaries. It contributes to literature on the Global Education Industry by focusing on international moves of commercial non-Anglo-Saxon actors. Drawing on interviews and extensive fieldwork in India, we show how the ‘marriage’ between the global (represented by the Swedish company) and local (the ‘Indian’) are manifested in the spatial imaginary of the ‘glocal school’, encompassing hierarchical otherings rooted in discourses of both globalisation and colonialism.

KEYWORDS:

• Private education
• globalisation
• for-profit actors
• education branding
• colonialism
• global education industry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This study is based on data acquired in the research project Going Global: Swedish school companies and their global operations, funded by the Swedish Research Council (grant number 2018-04897), focusing on companies operating free schools in Sweden and schools abroad, and how these corporate actors navigate and connect to the growing Global Education Industry.

2 The company name is anonymised and a pseudonym used instead.

3 The main difference between spatial and social imaginaries is, unsurprisingly, that ‘a spatial imaginarýs meanings are related to spatiality, while a social imaginary need not be’ (Watkins 2015, 110). However, they are often intertwined and, for instance, the notion of ‘a nation’ can be linked not only to spatial but also to sociological, cultural and historical relations, etc.

 

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Vetenskapsrådet [grant number 2018-04897].