‘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

Introduction and aim

The rise of the Global Education Industry (GEI) in terms of transnational markets, commercial opportunities, and new forms of private involvement in education has changed the educational landscape in various ways and provided lucrative opportunities for profitable investments (Verger, Lubienski, and Steiner-Khamsi 2016, 2017; Parreira do Amaral, Steiner-Khamsi, and Thompson 2019). Actors seizing these opportunities include commercial education businesses and international chains operating private schools in multiple nations (Moeller 2020). Their expansion and operation mirror certain imaginaries of not only future markets but also education, learning, students and teachers (Parreira do Amaral, Steiner-Khamsi, and Thompson 2019). However, we have limited knowledge of the operations, processes and rationales of different education delivery businesses in the GEI, and consequences of the companies’ operations (Ball 2019), especially those based in relatively small and non-Anglo-Saxon nations, such as Sweden. During the last decade, Swedish school companies have increasingly established preschool and compulsory school services abroad (Rönnberg et al. 2022). This has been enabled by a quite unique Swedish education policy set-up for private operators in education delivery. Privately owned ‘free schools’ are allowed to operate for profit while no parental fees are allowed and the schools are exclusively financed by public tax funding via student vouchers. This has prompted emergence of a national for-profit education industry in Sweden (Erixon Arreman and Holm 2011; Holm 2017; Sebhatu and Wennberg 2017; Rönnberg 2017; Billmeyer 2019; Rönnberg et al. 2021), but its international expansion has received little research attention.

To address this gap, we focus here¹ on the international expansion of one of the largest free school companies in Sweden – in the following named ‘LearnyComp’ (LC, pseudonym) – which is the company that has had the most expansive international export agenda.² We specifically explore LC’s schools in India, where the company has operated for a decade and opened four schools to date. Thus, it has experience of both establishing and operating schools, offering a rich empirical case to investigate. Moreover, LC’s operations in India provide an example of an international actor entering an emerging market of elite schools challenging the status of traditional elite schools in India, usually based on the image of British public schools (Rizvi 2014; cf. Bunnell 2019). Indian elites and middle-classes have increasing desire for internationalised education (Sancho 2016) and imaginaries of education for global citizenship (Marshall 2011) and cosmopolitan identities (Wright, Ma, and Auld 2022) open opportunities for private actors, including LC, in various ways (cf. Ball 2019; Gorur and Arnold 2022).

The aim is to analyse the establishment of a Swedish school company in India, focusing particularly on how setting up and operating schools in another nation forge particular spatial imaginaries (Watkins 2015). By studying spatial imaginaries through these commercial transnational moves, the study contributes empirical knowledge of how education as a commodified trade reproduces and modifies imaginaries of globalised education policy and desirable futures. It highlights private actors’ roles as mediators and circulators of these particular spatial imaginaries in the growth of international schools for host country elites. This, we argue, contributes conceptually to understanding of the wide range of actors in the GEI (cf. Ball 2019).

Theoretical framework

To establish and operate commercial schools in another national and geographical space an exportable pedagogical idea is needed (Bunnell 2019; Moeller 2020; Miglani and Burch 2021). This involves, for instance, curricular considerations and pedagogical framings, often connected to particular values such as social responsibility, justice or sustainability, etc. While such marketing and branding are elements of routine corporate business strategy, it may also be necessary to circulate, and transform particular imaginaries of, for instance, ‘Swedishness’ and ‘Indianness’ or ‘Westernised’ roots of education, learning and pedagogy to justify the organisation, operation and corporate mission (cf. Banet-Weiser 2012; Rönnberg et al. 2022). The specific processes and their consequences for education practices will depend on the place, time, and actors involved. In attempts to capture these empirically and conceptually, we draw on the notion of spatial imaginaries, referring to ‘stories and ways of talking about places and spaces that transcend language as embodied performances by people in the material world’ (Watkins 2015, 509).

Spatial imaginaries have varying scales, cross time and incorporate both historical characteristics and arguments regarding what the future may or should be like, and possibilities for shaping it. Thus, the notion is particularly useful for investigations in contexts where future learners and citizens are being constructed, e.g. for commercial education service purposes, as in the focal context. Watkins (2015) has identified three forms of spatial imaginaries that tell particular spatial stories. The first relates to distinct places with characteristics that distinguish them from other places, e.g. LC’s Swedish base and origin where the education services were developed. The second form tells stories of places that represent universal characteristics of idealised spaces in both positive and negative terms, such as ‘international’, ‘western-oriented’, ‘white’,‘developing’ or ‘colonised’. Stories about places, their people and culture are in the present constantly filled with historical perceptions and dimensions of binary oppositions that take on new forms (Said 2003; Bhabha 2004). Negative idealised spaces often include ideas about the need for these places to change from one idealised space to another more desired one leading to the third form. Spatial transformations are stories about ‘how places have, should or deterministically will evolve’ (Watkins 2015, 513), for example how narratives of globalisation and educational futures/skills are embedded in constructions of learners and pedagogies. Imaginaries of spatial transformations often include ideas of ‘inevitability of development’ that are common in stories of colonisation (cf. Said 2003). Drawing on post-colonial theory of the ambivalence of stories of colonisation, culture and identity, spatial imaginaries must be articulated and practiced, thereby forming hybrid stories that are neither representing the ‘original’ or an identical repetition but constructed in a particular present infused with history and future fantasies (Bhabha 2004). Spatial transformations also align with contemporary notions regarding the neoliberal ‘social imaginary³’ of globalisation (Rizvi and Lingard 2010), through which multi-national organisations such as the OECD, World Bank and WTO promote the global knowledge economy (Henry et al. 2001; Peet 2009). Development of human capital and creation of free markets and mobility manifest and promote a global hegemony encompassing, inter alia, international conventions or practices of international trade in education (Rizvi and Lingard 2010).

In a study on narratives of Europe as a spatial imaginary in the Higher Education context, Brooks (2021) argues that Watkins’ distinction between ‘place imaginaries’ and ‘idealised spaces’ is too complex and mutually reinforcing rather than analytically distinct. We agree that the relationship is complex, but also argue, like Watkins (2015), that the three kinds of spatial imaginaries should not be seen as mutually exclusive, but rather as acting in concert and inextricably linked. The linkages include expressions of othering that can be identified in these imaginaries and how ideas of hierarchy, ‘difference’ and other forms of value judgements are constructed and manifested in material practices, e.g. in what people do and how they act, as well as in representations in written texts, images and verbal communications. We see othering as processes in which people, places, or ideas are constructed as naturally different and hierarchically ranked, portraying some as more normal, correct, desirable and better than others (Said 2003; Watkins 2015). Otherings are not pre-given, there is no original or essential difference to simply be reproduced or imitated. It is in the meeting of articulations and practices, in the enunciation process that we come to know difference and power of today (Bhabha 2004). In line with Watkins (2015), we, therefore, view spatial imaginaries as performative, not because representations of spatial imaginaries cause people to act in particular ways but because people’s actions perform, reiterate, cite, repeat and hence mould certain imaginaries. As Watkins (2015, 518) puts it: ‘practice need not always temporally follow representation; spatial imaginaries can form in continuous, repeated, practices and then be circulated through representation’.

Data and methods

Our study of LearnyComp in India began with preparatory desk-based research in Sweden, including initial collection of written texts harvested from company websites, social media and news media, etc. In addition, we conducted preparatory digital and face-to-face interviews with high-level company representatives with experiences from LC and its operations in India, which provided additional contacts and names to approach in India. In February 2020, empirical fieldwork took place in India during two weeks. This included interviews and visits to three LC schools. Each school was visited for two days. This article is based on 23 formal, semi-structured interviews with 5 top-level LC managers, four principals (three current, one former), 11 teachers and 3 parents. Four interviews were done in Swedish and the rest in English. The interviews covered themes such as organisation of the school/company, processes of establishing LC in India, curriculum development priorities, and the nature and mode of education. Each interview, which lasted about an hour, was audio-recorded and transcribed.

In addition to these interviews, the fieldwork also included preparations in the form of expert interviews with five informants with extensive experience in and from the Indian education context in order to ensure that the approach and study were to be both ethically responsive and context-sensitive. Throughout the study, the ethical guidelines published by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet 2017) were carefully followed. Before each interview all informants were thoroughly informed about the research project and asked for their consent to participate, as well as the right to withdraw at any time, how data would be used, stored and reported, etc. In preparing the field studies, staff at the Indian schools were informed about the project prior to the visit (by the principal) and during the first day of the visit (by the researcher).

The data was analysed in several steps. First, the data was approached ‘bottom-up’ in order to identify broad themes and dominant stories when taking a Swedish edu-business to India and how this move was initiated, perceived and argued by different actors involved. This initial coding of the data was done to get a sense of both the main threads and themes in the data but also to identify disparities, inconsistencies and varying stories and perceptions. In this first stage of the analysis, it became clear that the move from Sweden to India entailed several stories that ranged from the cultural, geographical, and pedagogical and we found these stories interesting to explore further, and that the notion of spatial imaginaries could help us do so. After this initial exploration we thus turned to a more theoretically informed stage in the analysis. During this second stage we focused on how Sweden and India, their people, education, students and teachers were described and imaged in the analysed material. A major objective in this stage was to identify processes of othering that connect these elements to the three spatial imaginaries of past, present, change and future (Watkins 2015). From this second stage and more conceptually driven analysis, three overall themes emerged that are highlighting important aspects of these otherings and hierarchisations that the spatial imaginaries entailed. These are Structure and the ‘white international’ vs street smartness and bureaucracy in a developing country, Innovative progressive pedagogy vs Indian and British rote-learning traditions, and Child-centred egalitarian core values vs Indian conservative and authoritarian education.

From the second stage in the analysis and onwards, we were aware that the analytical intention to identify otherings risk to contribute to and/or reinforcing rather than to challenge and deconstruct otherings. Still, we have found it important to place these hierarchizations, visible in the three ‘vs’ themes, next to each other to highlight not only certain positionings but also interlinkages and to enable to approach these critically. The focus on spatial imaginaries and how different forms of such imaginaries are not in an ‘either or’ position in relation to each other but on the contrary are fluid and interlinked further aids in helping us refrain from reproducing binaries. In sum, we argue that the data provided a particularly suitable space for critical analysis of spatial imaginaries in which imaginaries of globalised education policy and desirable futures reveal hybrid forms of colonial stories in the GEI, and that this analysis can provide empirical insights to these important processes.

A Swedish edu-business in India

LearnyComp is one of the largest for-profit education companies in Sweden at compulsory level. It started in early 2000s and is owned by a family-run corporate group. LC has developed a teaching model, called the LC Programme. This involves a highly student-oriented and personalised approach with individual-based teaching where the students set and pursue goals for their studies. All teaching and learning materials are centrally provided via the web-based learning portal. After developing this programme and operating schools in Sweden for a decade, LC took their services to England in the early 2010s then turned to India, Saudi Arabia, the USA and The Netherlands. According to the LCs homepage, the LC Programme were used globally by more than 100 schools, 25,000 students and 2500 teachers in 2021.

In India, LearnyComp currently operates four schools (K-12) in joint ventures with local co-owners and partners. The activities stem from the LC Programme, which is adapted and revised by locally employ curriculum developers to suit the Indian national curriculum and examination methods (one of the schools also offers education tailored to the British examination system). The teachers, all Indians, continuously attend a company-organised teacher training programme to learn the LC Programme pedagogical approach. Parents of children attending these schools in India are mainly upper-middle-class as the fees are considered rather expensive, and many have international connections and experiences or ambitions to work abroad. As aspirations for middle-class lifestyles have burgeoned, the private sector has dramatically expanded, primarily in urban areas (Kingdon 2017). In particular, English medium private schools have flourished and spread in the country. There is generally a strong demand for private schools and international edu-business in India (Nambissian and Ball 2010; Mukherjee 2015; Ball 2019; Gorur and Arnold 2022) and, as shown here, LearnyComp has tried to carve a niche for itself within this Indian national policy context.

The marriage: ‘The glocal school’ and its otherings

The first contact between LearnyComp and its Indian partners came from the Indian side. The Indian top-level manager described learning about LC through news media and finding it interesting. The joint venture by the ‘global’ LC and ‘local’ Indian business partners, headed by an Indian entrepreneur, is recurrently described using the metaphor of a marriage:

So that's how we kind of decided that how do we marry the two things together and kind of create something that's global in outlook, but local in terms of other things (—) you have to get it to a large population in India, what you have to do is marry a global concept but kind of not ignore the local demand. I think Swedish companies do kind of appreciate these kind of things. (Top-level manager 5)

The idea of a marriage, features that attracted the parties to one another, what they bring to the marriage, and how they adapt to each other are discursive devices that LC representatives use to tell a story in the form of an idealised space imaginary of the ‘glocal school’. This expression is used in explicit branding, for instance in the following media report, where a LC representative describes the company’s ambition to expand to India:

You cannot run a school in India in the same way you run a school in Sweden (…) Our conclusion is to make ‘glocal’ schools. International in the sense that they are connected in a network … but extremely local in their content and adaptation to local cultures and habits. (Education Journal Middle East 2015)

The concepts ‘glocal’ and ‘glocalisation’ have been components of business jargon and used in marketing since the 1980s (Robertson 1994). LC’s use of the term ‘glocal schools’ has strong positive associations suggesting that their schools have both universal and particular features, including desirable global attributes and careful, context-sensitive adaptions.

It is in this materialised meeting of establishing LC schools in India, described as a ‘marriage’, spatial and cultural difference is performed and made intelligible (cf. Bhabha 2004). The metaphor of the marriage between the global and the local construct a set of otherings that, through actorś circulation, acceptance and embodiment, contribute to their naturalisation and come to be seen as true, real or common sense despite no such ‘true’ origin. These otherings are manifested in all three types of spatial imaginaries, but articulated in different ways and assembled in three overall themes that together show how past, present and future histories and cultures are enmeshed.

Structure and the ‘white international’ vs street smartness and bureaucracy in a developing country

The first theme of otherings concerns how Sweden as a place, with associated desired properties of innovation, structure and organisation, is contrasted with particular Indian alleged traits of dualism, bureaucracy and local street-smartness. The contrast is rooted in geographically and culturally embedded imaginaries of Sweden and India as distinct and unique places that characterise the relationship and what is brought together in this edu-business ‘marriage’. Swedish partners stress the importance of having the Indian partners: ‘You can’t just come in as a Swede in India and think you can start schools [on your own]’ (Top-level manager 1). A story of cultural, institutional and organisational ‘difference’ is constructed in imaginaries of Sweden and India that portray India as ‘one big bureaucracy’ (Principal 1) relating to its colonial past, ‘Indians usually say, with a smile, that the Brits invented bureaucracy but we perfected it’ (Principal 3). In Bhabha’s (2004) words the place imaginary of India as one big bureaucracy can be seen as an example of ‘mimicry’, practiced through the ambivalence in colonial discourse, in terms of both constructing difference from and equivalence to British culture and administration. This place imaginary of India encapsulates two factors with perceived necessity for a successful edu-business in India: local partners and their street-smartness regarding how to ‘manoeuvre around things’ in the Indian context.

Culturally perhaps I can say that Sweden or the Western world (—) is very, very organised. There are very clear structures. India is a developing country and not as structured I would say. And for them [the Swedes] I think perhaps has been a learning that it's possible to sail a ship in turbulent waters. (—) I think they've seen that there is possibly a way around and you should find good local partners (—) because they know how to manoeuvre their way around things. (Top-level manager 5)

This quotation articulates the representation of India in relation to a place imaginary of Sweden, its businesses and peoples’ characteristics as structured and organised, which can be seen as representing the idealised space of the ‘Western developed world’. This is opposed to the place imaginary of the ‘Indian way’ of doing things, representing the less desirable idealised space of the ‘developing world’ drawing on colonial discourse of the Orient being not only different but odd, strange and special (cf. Said 2003). One Indian principal interviewed was particularly attracted to work at LC because there was a system and structure in place:

The school is way ahead of other schools in India. So I think for me it was more about new processes, a different style of working, a more international way of working. (—) There's a system in place. There's a structure in place. The developmental discussions. (Principal 2)

This construction as structured, organised and having a system places the Swedish LC schools in a superior, more desirable position to that of Indian schools as unstructured and unorganised, although local street-smartness, including knowledge of ways to handle/get around the bureaucracy, is still valued and essential for establishment in India.

This reproduces a naturalised and desirable place imaginary of Sweden, othering that of India and its people, as one of the Indian top-level managers describes typical characteristics of Sweden and Swedes:

Sweden is a highly evolved society from what I've seen. For me, a Swede is very practical … . while they have a sense of community, everyone's reasonably individualistic as well. (—) So innovative, thinking out of the box mindset, at the same time being very self-assured. Not being very pompous and loud. So I think that these are things that appeal to us [Indians] and that's exactly what I'm trying to tell you in terms of our schools. We’ve tried to get together a community of people who are actually like-minded. Who believe in this sort of ethos, is how I see when I look at most of our parents. (Top-level manager 5)

These national features embodied in the ‘glocal school’ provide a strong selling point for the company and promote specific interpretations of the global as carried and mediated by ‘Swedes’, and thus seen as both ‘international’ and ‘Western’. Many interviewees stressed that being perceived as ‘a truly international’ school brings status in India, and some parents ‘show off’ by saying their child attends such a school. A manifestation of this reproduction and naturalisation of the international school is the company’s brand name: ‘Indian co-owners suggested that we keep the Swedish company name [in Swedish, not translated], so there’s no doubt that we’re not an Indian school. It was a marketing thing from their point of view’ (Principal 3).

The imaginary of a glocal school is further embodied by the presence of a Swede at the schools. Teacher 2 claims that: ‘The best thing is that you always have a person from Sweden here’. Similarly, a Swedish principal says:

Having a Swedish principal is like a guarantee that this school will live up to these principles and this way of working. In practice, not only that you have it on the website.(—) It definitely gives status that it is a Swedish school and has a Swedish principal: Sweden still has good status in India … Scandinavia as well. (Principal 4)

Nationality and ethnicity are accompanied by positive discourses of whiteness and foreignness, and give further substance to ‘Swedishness’ and the imaginary of the ‘glocal school’:

The fact that there is a white person in charge, or a ‘white face’ in charge of the school, is for lots of parents a really important reason to get the child admitted. Because they have the feeling then that that’s the guarantee that something will be different at the school. (–) Having a foreigner over here makes a difference. (Principal 1)

This embodiment and acceptance of whiteness as the naturalisation of ‘international’ seem to make the story and performance of the ‘glocal school’ rather than ‘Western’ even more important. In words of an Indian top-level manager:

A lot of people say that it's Swedish education. I wouldn't … in the sense obviously it’s guided by Swedish principles and stuff because it’s people of Sweden who kind of conceive this idea (…) [but parents] want to get their kids educated in a methodology that's kind of very internationally focused which is very broad, but they’re also very keen that you need to kind of follow your own national board because you want your kids to study your history, your way of things too. You don't want to kind of have kids growing here learning about just the Western … (Top-level manager 5)

The Indian element in the glocal school is expressed in similar ways by parents: ‘It is indeed good with the (Swedish) concept, but it may not be at the expense of the ‘Indian’ and its values and culture’ as one of the interviewed parents said. In this way, the imaginary of the ‘glocal school’ resolves this tension between the international and Indian and as opposed to colonialist structures and sanctioned ignorance (cf. Spivak 1999). However, as our analysis has shown and will show, the spatial imaginary of the glocal school is also infused with colonial relations.

Innovative progressive pedagogy vs Indian and British-rote learning traditions

The second main othering theme extracted from the empirical data concerns the performance and hierarchical positioning of a global, innovative, progressive pedagogy in relation to the local and/or colonial British rote learning traditions. The interviewees stressed that LC brings new pedagogical knowledge and progressive thinking to the Indian context, manifesting the spatial transformative imaginary of ‘globalisation’ and the need to change India, its education, students and citizens to become global world citizens and ‘leaders’. It is evident that the colonial discourses of modernity and development constantly is reproduced but at the same time moulded in new ways (cf. Said 2003; Bhabha 2004). In an article in the Business Standard (2012), a LC representative reportedly stated that:

Indian students need to master global challenges (…) Students at our schools will benefit from a truly global exposure in terms of teachers and interaction with their student counterparts in other global locations. Our students will be groomed as Leaders through a unique blend of personalised mentoring yet becoming independent and taking responsibility of their development from a very early stage, with a structured global curriculum that includes local CBSE requirements. Students will experience the allure of a learning system that facilitates the full blossoming of their innate potential. (Business Standard 2012)

In the idealised space of LC’s ‘glocal school’, the global stands for the international, Western, European, white and developed world’s understanding of teaching and learning, which is continuously glorified and contrasted with the perceived under-developed Indian way of teaching reproducing colonial discourses of enlightenment (cf. Said 2003).

The knowledge that we [Europeans] have about education is way more advanced, not even just the people from LC, but … anyone from Europe has come to a better understanding of what teaching and learning means. They [Indians] are just in their … . well … infancy … I couldn’t say, it´s too judgmental but, they don’t have much knowledge and understanding or experience of other ways of teaching or understanding of what learning really means. (Principal 1)

The Swedish/European educators are constructed as representatives of a correct and enlightened pedagogy manifested not only in LC’s digital learning platform but also in the specially designed school architecture described at the homepage as innovative and modern with open areas, high ceilings, bright colours, and technologically well-equipped rooms with large glass walls. This embodies the imaginary of a technological, modern and futuristic space for learning, starkly contrasted by representatives of LC to traditional, conventional school buildings in India with their bureaucratic rules on building regulations regarding for instance sizes and shapes of corridors and classrooms.

Despite abiding by Indian rules and curricula in their ‘glocal schools’, the story is that LC offers something more, adding ‘all these life skills that the students require later on, which other schools will hardly touch upon’ (Principal 1) and a ‘deeper understanding’ that goes ‘beyond memorisation’ (Top-level manager 4) to groom future leaders, unlike local Indian schools. The Indian school system and its way of teaching carries legacies of British colonialisation (Mukherjee 2015). The knowledge received and consumed during British colonial times generated diverse kinds of subjectivities within the Indian subcontinent. Indians were taught Western knowledge through rote memorisation for the instrumental materialistic purpose of Western knowledge-systems within colonial India, not acquiring the questioning and critical skills such knowledge was supposed to have ignited (Seth 2007 in Mukherjee 2015). The LC glocal schools are promoted as representing and embodying this questioning approach and development of critical faculties, aiming to prepare its Indian students for transformative global futures. One of the principals explicitly contrasted the LC Programme’s pedagogy to the traditional Indian way related to British colonialism and old-fashioned British educational ideas of a ‘whole rote learning system’, an education for the masses that:

… provided the British with cheap labourers who had basic understandings of things so they could at least follow orders, know what to do … but at the same time they also didn’t want these people to be very outspoken or … not too much knowledge and skills. (—) But now of course they struggle because they have embedded that rote learning system so rigidly into their whole structure … and being artist in bureaucracy any movement away from it … it is so difficult … (Principal 1)

The ‘paradigm shift’ (Top-level manager 5) from such an educational tradition was expressed as challenging by our informants, especially for recruiting appropriate teachers and educating/training them according to the LC Programme’s educational concept. The act of bringing something different, new and modern to the Indian society required people that embody this desired innovative progressive pedagogy: ‘They need people from outside to bring that understanding of what teaching and learning really is’ (Principal 1). One way to address this challenge was, as highlighted in discussion regarding the first theme, to send Swedish principals and teachers to India. In the words of a Swedish top-level manager: ‘An important element of what we provide is competence in the form of people who go to India’ (Top-level manager 1).

Representations of differences between the imaginary of an innovative progressive Swedish pedagogy for a global future, and a vaguely defined imaginary of Indian education traditions, dismissed with several negative associations of memorisation, standardisation and uniformity, were also seen in expressions regarding Indian parents. For example, according to Top-level manager 1, middle-class parents realise that preparation for exams through memorisation is not enough, as skills and abilities must be developed, so ‘one can manage/succeed in life outside school’. Similarly, Principal 4 stated that the most common reason for parents choosing LC schools is that they ‘want something different’: an education that is not solely about ‘pressure for higher grades, but something more sound’. ‘Sound’ here refers to an individualising concept of ‘seeing the whole person’, with a focus on children developing their individuality, at their own pace, and ‘not just being moulded from the same standard’.

Child-centred egalitarian core values vs conservative and authoritarian education

The third central othering theme concerns how particular child-centred values are cherished and contrasted with the perceived local traditions of authoritarian education. Certain core values and associated behaviour are promoted in the LC schools (through, for instance, student-made posters, paintings and poems on the walls), that are performative of place imaginaries of a democratic, egalitarian and trusting Sweden, in contrast to ‘conservative’ and authoritarian India, once again performative of a post-colonial discourse. As the Swedish top-level manager explained: ‘It’s about selling a vision and values to a conservative system (—) and of course it’s infused pretty much with how we in Sweden are and our culture naturally (—) we trust that people will do things’ (Top-level manager 1). Trust and egalitarian relations between teachers and students are articulated as Swedish traits, as expressed by an Indian top-level manager:

You know, trusting the students with their learning. Giving them ownership and giving them space to fail and redo things. It's a learning process, allowing them to make mistakes and not think that's a disaster. (—). And also, you know, the hierarchy between teacher and student. They're on the same level. (Top-level manager 4)

The Indian teachers expressed similar ideas in the interviews, particularly regarding the desirability of LC’s child-centred perspective and ‘progressive thinking’ for a successful school and the contrast with typical Indian schooling. They also highlighted LC’s communication style as a radical, transformative departure from Indian traditions:

I think the difference is the approach to communication with students. We [Indians] are as a culture a lot more … protective. And a lot more instructional in the way we interact, whereas the Swedish counterparts who are coming and working here with us, it's a lot more open and it's a lot more freedom being given to children than we do give. And I think that's something that we’ve learned … So there's a lot of work that we do with both our students and our teachers in how to communicate in a more transparent manner. (Top-level manager 2)

One informant from Sweden describes an attitude ‘that very many Indian adults have’:

… you should scold children, you should talk to them as if they don’t understand anything, you don’t have to listen to them, you should have respect for the elderly and so on. It’s very strong in the people, the traditions … (Principal 3)

While Swedish culture and mentality are represented as open, trusting, liberal and embracing egalitarian ‘child-centred progressive pedagogy’, the wider Indian pedagogical culture and mentality are portrayed as the opposite: protective, instructional, conservative and authoritarian. These imaginaries reinforce the need for transformations of Indian schools, in alignment with images of temporal post-colonial development (Said 2003) and subjectivities, including fostering of independence in children, as in ‘The LC soul, the LC backbone … by the end when they leave school they need to be self-regulated learners.’ (Top-level manager 4).

Imaginary places are also reproduced in expressions regarding if, and if so how, the LC Programme teaching model would work in the Indian context. This is vividly illustrated by an Indian top-level manager’s impression from a visit to Sweden and fascination with the young studentś independence, wondering if Indian children could match it:

I went and spent couple of weeks in Sweden, visiting some of the schools. And I kept watching those children and saw in them a great sense of independence in their learning. I saw a great sense of wanting to be somewhere and do something of their own without being guided and monitored and controlled by the teacher. And I remember … saying, ‘I don't know whether an Indian child can do that’, because in India you're so used to having people tell you what to do, how to do it, when to do it. And I realised within a month of us setting up this school [in India] that children are children anywhere in the world. They just need opportunities. (Top-level manager 2)

Finally, the LC Programme materialises perceived progressive global ideas about children, development and learning. The glocal school supposedly provides a universal, transferable pedagogy that is strongly related to imaginaries of spatial transformation associated with globalisation, which are performative in terms of formal and informal practices fostering and educating the [Indian] staff. One of the teachers describes ‘struggling’ to internalise the LC Programme concept as follows:

If it was not the Swedish influence, then I think it would be a different kind of a school altogether. Maybe a lot Indian in certain ways and I think their [LC foreign staff] presence really keeps us on track. (—) It's not the usual systematic, structured way that you have to follow but there’s something more to it that allows you to be flexible, more global and more of a thinker than just doer. (—) Indians are brought up in a different way, our education has been very different. So, when it comes to us teaching in a school like this (…) you have to embrace every single child as a different child, and you have to make sure to tailor the learning. (Teacher 1)

Concluding discussion

LearnyComp’s business is selling futures, with business strategies and branding that are arguably very similar to those applied in selling many products and services (Beckert 2016). However, the education delivery business has particular features as its core offering is to prepare children for a certain imagined future. Such selling stories not only represent and circulate the imaginary of a particular future, but also simultaneously legitimise the commercial edu-businesses and their educational offers. In these processes, certain imaginaries become accepted, circulated and reproduced while others are silenced. In the following, we want to highlight three important points emerging from the analysis.

First, the growth of international schools, such as LC, attracting host country elites, is performative of the middle and upper classes’ aspiration for a particular form of internationalised education (cf. Sancho 2016; Bunnell 2019). Our study of LC’s establishment in India shows how the selling of education tells the story of the ‘glocal school’ in the form of an idealised spatial imaginary. The glocal school draws on positive connotations of innovation, global skills and progress and is used in the company branding to represent both the ‘international’ and careful, context-sensitive adaptions in different ways, as opposed to colonialist structures and its sanctioned ignorance (cf. Spivak 1999). Thus, the imaginary of the glocal school works to resolve an inherent tension between efforts to be a ‘truly international’ school (cf. Bunnell, Fertig, and James 2016) and respond to local demands and needs to be legitimately anchored in local society.

A second point we want to make from the analysis of the interviews and documents provided concerns the illustrations of otherings, often rooted in simplified and stereotypical colonial spatial imaginaries of culture, development and modernity (cf. Said 2003) while other aspects and the complexities of India, Sweden and their schools tend to be ignored. In othering processes, India as a place is, by and large, reproduced as an idealised space of a developing country. Consequently, it is dismissed as conservative with negative associations of standardisation, uniformity and authoritarianism in education, stuck in the mire of traditional colonial history of British rote learning—the antithesis of what Swedish culture and LC is said to bring and practice. The place imaginary of Swedish schools as embodied by LC is structured, trusting, egalitarian and representing the idealised space of the developed world offering global skills in the form of modern and innovative pedagogy for the future, through a progressive child-centred approach of personalisation and individualisation. It is in the ‘marriage’, the meeting between the ‘global’ as represented by LC and the ‘local’ as represented by India, that difference is constructed and made knowledgeable (cf. Bhabha 2004).

In fact, the analysis points to a particular form of post-colonial ‘hybridisation’ (Bhabha 2004) embedded in these stories, shadowed by the place imaginary of Sweden as a liberal, democratic and egalitarian society with a supposedly non-colonial history (although Sweden ruled Saint Barthélemy for around a century, and scholars describe the Swedish state’s treatment of its indigenous people, the Sami, as a form of colonisation, cf. Allard, Reimerson, and Sandström 2017). This positioning of Sweden as a ‘non-colonial’ national space performs otherings towards old elite schools in India, often with British public school traditions, and away from imaginaries of colonial rule, conservativism and tradition in favour of Swedish non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian relations, individualisation and personalisation for a global modernity (cf. Rizvi 2014).

The Indian colonial past is particularly present in the post-colonial hybridisation that construct the idealised space imaginary of LC schools as ‘glocal’, offering education that performs other subjectivities for a new imagined global world. In this imagined world, independent, critically thinking, self-disciplined, goal-setting, responsible world citizens and global leaders are needed for capitalist enterprises and the future economic success of nations, rather than British rote learning for the masses to create cheap, submissive labourers. As our final point, we want to highlight that these processes and practices entail important material effects, in the form of for instance constructing and enacting particular forms of ideal students, teachers, pedagogies and citizenship. As a provider of ‘glocal schools’, LC promotes itself as embodying and introducing a questioning approach and development of critical faculties to Indian education (cf. Song and McCarthy 2018), aiming to prepare its students for transformative global futures. Our findings show how the commercial practice of international chains of non-Anglo-Saxon private schools in the GEI, such as LC, are circulating and performing post-colonial stories that speak to imaginaries of desired transformations through innovative pedagogy and the creation of desired future global citizens. The global is represented by the white, international, Western, well-organised, scientific and technologically innovative. This both builds on and furthers stories of spatial transformations of inevitable globalisation and the need to (‘help’) bring local, in this case Indian, education to the future. It shows the ambivalence in colonial stories of both fixing difference and the effort to change the colonised subjects (Bhabha 2004). Re-using the metaphor of a ‘marriage’, we could also describe this hierarchal othering as resembling that of the patriarchal marriage tradition.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

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

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.