European Policy-Making in Education and Training: Between Institutional Legitimization and Policy Privatization

Abstract

This volume is devoted to the analysis of the insides of European Commission policy-making in education. A central theme of the book is the governmentality of European educational policy-making and, specifically, the role of private organizations within it — that is, the role of private companies in supporting the European Commission in its ‘policy-creation’ processes through the provision of policy advice and evaluation services. Such policy-creation processes have, since 2000, been framed by the use of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), an intergovernmental form of European Union (EU) governance based on the voluntary cooperation of member states and the EU through the use of common indicators and benchmarks, reporting and the sharing of best practice. As a result of this, the OMC as a policy tool to steer national governments (Lange and Alexiadou, 2007; Souto-Otero et al., 2008) and ‘governing by data’ have recently received much attention in the literature (see Grek, 2009; Lawn and Grek, 2012).