Convincing others that they are competing: the case of schools

Abstract

The past decades have seen numerous attempts to introduce competition into new sectors of society, but we still know little about the processes by which competition is realized in a new setting. We study three decades of organizational efforts of a Swedish municipality that sought to introduce competition for students among its upper secondary schools following a national reform in the early 1990s. Our study shows that declaring competition was far from sufficient for its realization; the path to competition was lined with hesitation, uncertainty, and a rich variety of organizational challenges to be overcome. One particularly vexing challenge was to convince the principals of the schools that they should view each other as competitors for students. Our findings contribute to previous literature by demonstrating that competition need not be a prerequisite for choice; that several organizers of competition may operate at once; and, more generally, that competition is introduced through stepwise, piecemeal processes.