This work discusses how the complex relationship between welfare policies of equity and market efficiencies/deficiencies of education policies is handled in local practices. It offers contributions from the five Nordic countries - Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland - and pays special attention to questions about access and diversity in upper secondary education. The book draws on a wide range of theoretical frameworks and research projects and provides multiple perspectives of how upper secondary staff and students have experienced reforms of education governance during the last two or three decades. The research projects range from in-depth case studies to the analysis of large-scale data sets and inform practitioners, policy makers and researchers about practices of education policy that are highly influenced by market forces.

In Sweden a new 'third way' welfarist society has led to the education system being exposed to market forces and successive waves of privatisation and this new commercial education can be characterised as a commodity in the market place. The schools have been transformed from being amongst the most highly regulated education systems in the world to being amongst the least regulated. Education and the commodity problem uses ethnographic research to investigate and describe what is often termed a changed root-metaphor of schooling in Sweden. Here control over the curriculum has changed from the State to the individual in a situation where students are, with help and guidance from teachers, to look for their own knowledge, and to a degree, choose their own educational content and to develop a lust for life-long learning. This change is sometimes referred to as one from a transmission curriculum to a constructivist one. But the book shows that the change is neither straightforward nor unproblematic. Education and the commodity problem is based on a series of related ethnographic investigations carried out over a long period of time. It has suggested that educational institutions are places where knowledge and learning can appear with both 'use-value' and commoditised forms, as the accumulation of educational capital. It also describes the problems that can be associated with the commodity form of education value in practice and the meaning and significance of these developments as a characterisation of globalisation processes and the de-regulation of State intervention.