Abstract
This chapter focuses on the governing work of Swedish school inspectors with regards to the role and function of knowledge. As professionals, inspectors are situated as relays and brokers of policy standing in contact with both the political arena and practice arenas. School inspectors use and produce knowledge and they rely on, search for, accumulate and communicate different forms of knowledge. In this chapter, we seek to understand knowledge in the inspection context as existing in three phases, namely as embodied, inscribed and enacted (Freeman and Sturdy in Knowledge in policy—embodied, inscribed, enacted, Policy Press, Bristol, pp. 1–17, 2014). The aim is to identify and discuss different phases of knowledge in inspectors’ work by asking how the different forms of embodied, inscribed and enacted knowledge are manifested, incorporated and transformed in the course of inspection. The chapter illustrates how different forms of knowledge are intertwined with issues of legitimacy, accountability and control, which is argued to be important for how inspection and the work of inspectors’ are perceived and judged in different contexts and settings.
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Notes
- 1.
The projects are: ‘Governing by Inspection. School Inspection and Education Governance in Sweden, England and Scotland’ (Swedish Research Council, no 2009-5770), ‘Swedish national school inspections: Introducing centralised instruments for governing in a decentralised context’ (Swedish Research Council, no 2007-3579) and ‘Inspecting the ‘Market’ (Umeå University, no 223-14-09).
- 2.
The Swedish Schools Inspectorates conducts regular supervision of all municipal and independent schools, from pre-school to adult education. Thus, regular inspection is the inspection activity that cyclical involve all Swedish schools.
- 3.
- 4.
There are 290 municipalities in Sweden and these are the local authorities responsible for, among other things, pre-schools and nine year compulsory schools, upper secondary schools, care of elderly and disabled, planning and building, emergency and rescue service. The Local Government Act regulates the responsibilities of the municipalities. Municipalities differs in size, the smallest has less than 3000 inhabitants and the largest over 700,000 inhabitants.
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Lindgren, J., Rönnberg, L. (2017). Knowing Inspectors’ Knowledge: Forms and Transformations. In: Baxter, J. (eds) School Inspectors. Accountability and Educational Improvement. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52536-5_8
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