Introduction: mapping commercial interests and imaginaries in Nordic education

Would it be possible to foster the development of a strong pedagogical industry that could be compared to the pharmaceutical industry in the health sector?’ (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 2007). Almost 15 years on, it is tempting to revisit the question posed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) with a touch of biblical irony: ‘We have the prophetic word confirmed’ (Peter 2, 1:19). Since 2007, the rise of markets for teaching and learning has turned education into one of the fastest growing markets worldwide, with recent prophecies suggesting a staggering $10 Trillion education industry in 2030 (HolonIQ, 2020). Spearheaded by massive infrastructural investments in digitization, Venture Capital investments in companies working in education are at a record high: Annual Venture Capital (VC) investments in European education start-ups grew from 140 million USD in 2014 to 2.5 billion USD in 2021 (Brighteye Ventures, 2022). The Nordic countries have not escaped this trend. Boosted by the Covid-19 pandemic, institutions, municipalities, and governments across the Nordic region have invested heavily in commercially driven infrastructures and services promising to create more diverse, modern, coherent, and data-based educational systems (Cone et al., 2021; Ljungqvist & Sonesson, 2021). Defined most broadly as ‘the opening up of schools and their practices to goods and services from commercial providers with the express purpose of leveraging profit from schools’ (Hogan & Thompson, 2017, p. 2), the large-scale commercialization of education in and beyond the Nordic countries affects more than just corporate bottom lines and stock markets. In classrooms across the Global North, the involvement of commercial actors is reconfiguring the very foundations of what teaching and learning is about, who should participate in it, and where it should occur: Teachers creating tasks in Google Classroom, students finishing their assignments on Seesaw, parents checking in on their students’ work on Aula, principals preparing Kahoot quizzes for the next staff meeting, schools rebuilding their pedagogical profiles based on partnerships with Lego Education. As the boundaries between public education and corporate interests continue to blur, it is more vital than ever to examine the political, social, and pedagogical implications of these reconfigurations. While there is a significant body of scholarship addressing private schools and non-state actors’ involvement in the pluralistic governance of Nordic education (Larsen et al., 2021; Wiborg & Larsen, 2017), questions of profit, branding, and capitalization within schools are relatively new topics in Nordic education research (Rönnberg, 2017; Seppänen et al., 2021). Building on recent scholarship examining the political economies underpinning contemporary forms of market-making and capital (Birch & Muniesa, 2020; Çalişkan & Callon, 2009; Sadowski, 2020; Srnicek, 2016), the present concern with commercialization in schools appears to involve at least three intertwined tendencies. Through different mechanisms and at varying rates, these tendencies constitute the backdrop for the commercial entanglements addressed in this special issue. First, it involves a movement towards privatization of educational functions, denoting a process by which private sector actors are either contracted or enticed via deregulation to manage services and infrastructures in education (Alexiadou, 2013; Starr, 1989). In the Nordic countries and Europe in particular, this process is commonly realized through mechanisms associated with soft privatization, in which private sector involvement emerges not as a direct replacement of or ideological alternative to public government and welfare state control, but rather as embedded within the regulatory frameworks of outcome-based governance (Cone & Brøgger, 2020; Moos, 2009). Second, it involves the increasing digitalization of educational governance, revolving around the use of algorithms, websites, and quantitative data to (re)present, reconfigure, and govern educational activities and relations (Cone et al., 2021; Gorur et al., 2019; Williamson, 2016). More recently, this tendency has