The European Sectoral Social Dialogue in Education and the strengthening of the European Union’s policy regime in education and employment

ABSTRACT

This paper traces the development of the European Sectoral Social Dialogue in Education since its launch in 2010 and situates it within the context of European Union (EU) governance. The paper adopts a public policy perspective and Ashley Jochim and Peter May’s framework for analysing boundary-spanning policy regimes. Based on critical discourse analysis of social dialogue documents and interviews, we argue that the European Sectoral Social Dialogue in Education, as a distinctive institution, has been profoundly shaped by EU’s boundary-spanning policy regime of education and employment and at the same time has contributed to its reinforcement. In particular, we demonstrate that the sectoral social dialogue committee since its creation has been embedded in wider institutional arrangements, that it seeks to mobilise education employers and workers on a large scale across Europe, and that it aligns with central issue framings and ideas of EU’s boundary-spanning policy regime of education and employment. Thereby, the paper contributes to understanding how institutions, by mobilising interests and channelling attention towards specific issues and ideas, play a central role in structuring and legitimising contemporary EU governance.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• social dialogue
• education
• employment
• boundary-spanning policy regime

Acknowledgments

This article has been prepared thanks to the support and funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 714641). The ERC StG Proposal 714641 research design has been fully approved by the European Research Council Ethics Committee. In addition, much of the analysis informing the paper was undertaken during Tore Bernt Sorensen’s research fellowship at the Taube Centre for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Jagiellonian University in Krakow. We wish to thank an anonymous peer reviewer for constructive and nuanced feedback. Any errors remain ours.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2023.2275767.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for making this point.

2. For readability, we use codes when referring to ESSDE joint texts. Please see codes provided in Appendix A.

3. See Appendix A for details and codes for interview data.

4. DECL9 is categorised as a Joint Opinion in the European Commission database. However, the document conforms to the Declaration text type. The reported numbers consider this point.

5. See website https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=521&langId=en

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the HORIZON EUROPE European Research Council [714641].

Notes on contributors

Tore Bernt Sorensen

Tore Bernt Sorensen is postdoctoral researcher at the Hertie School, Berlin, Germany. Tore’s work is characterised by three lines of research: Globalisation and education, public policy analysis, and teachers and teaching.

Xavier Dumay

Xavier Dumay is Professor of Education at UCLouvain, Belgium. His research interests include the globalisation of education and educational policies, new-institutional theory, global politics, and changing forms of education.