Public or Private – Does It Matter? How School Leaders in Public and Private Schools Perceive Their Roles

Authors

  • Jenny Madestam School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1567-1224
  • Göran Sundström Department of Political Science, Stockholm University
  • Göran Bergström Department of Political Science, Stockholm University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.58235/sjpa.v22i3.11416

Keywords:

School leaders, Core public values, Public-private, New public management, Welfarism

Abstract

This article takes its stand in an international discussion about how NPM reforms affect public servants’ notions about core public values. More specifically, it analyses how school leaders relate to the values of political control, rule of law, economic efficiency, professionalism and users’ influence. It raises the question whether it matters, in terms of how they embrace these values, their organisation is public or private. 975 school leaders (481 working for public schools and 472 for private schools) have completed a written questionnaire containing 15 postulations linked to the five core values. The study’s main finding is that the differences between the two categories of school leaders are quite small although differences exist. The similarities could reflect a development in recent decades where private schools have undergone politicisation and public schools companyisation. The study indicates that school leaders on both sides try to defend all values simultaneously, in some way. Furthermore, when trying to handle value conflicts they seem to avail themselves of other strategies than those connected to dominating models of rationality, which often conceptualise public actors’ response to value conflicts as a matter of balancing or striking trade-offs.

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Author Biographies

Jenny Madestam, School of Social Sciences, Södertörn University

Jenny Madestam, Ph.D. in Political Science, and associate professor in Public Administration at Södertörn University. Her area of interest is political parties, political leadership and public administration.

Göran Sundström, Department of Political Science, Stockholm University

Göran Sundström is professor in Political Science at Stockholm University. His research is on public administration and administrative reform, core executives, the role of civil servants in a transformed state, the Europeanization of nation states, governance and institutional theory. He is co- writer to the recent books En modern myndighet – Trafikverket som ett förvaltningspolitiskt mikrokosmos (Studentlitteratur, 2017) and Marknadsstaten. Om vad den svenska staten gör med marknaderna – och marknaderna med staten (Liber, 2017). He is also co-writer of the book Governing the Embedded State: The Organizational Dimension of Governance (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Göran Bergström, Department of Political Science, Stockholm University

Göran Bergström is assistant professor in Political Science at Stockholm University. Recent publications include articles analyzing how the relation between pedagogical content knowledge and content knowledge is developed in social science/civics research projects (with Linda Ekström, Nordidactica – Journal of Humanities and Social Science Education 2015). He has also studied how the core value equity has been interpreted among Swedish school leaders (with Linda Ekström, Utbildning & Demokrati 2016). Bergström has published Textens mening och makt (with Kristina Boréus, Studentlitteratur), different approaches for text analysis, 4th edition 2018. Also published in English (Sage 2017), Analyzing Text and Discourse. Eight Approaches for Social Sciences.

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Published

2018-09-15

How to Cite

Madestam, J., Sundström, G., & Bergström, G. (2018). Public or Private – Does It Matter? How School Leaders in Public and Private Schools Perceive Their Roles. Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 22(3), 129–152. https://doi.org/10.58235/sjpa.v22i3.11416

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