The play of education and market: A literature review on the roles commercial actors play for K-12 education

There has been an abundance of research on commercial actors in education. However, there has hardly been any attempt to streamline the existing ways of thinking about their presence and activity in the field of education. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to do a comprehensive literature review on the involvement of commercial actors in K-12 education. A total of 157 articles published between 2000 and 2023 were reviewed and “involvement of commercial actors in education” was operationalized as the roles they play in education. The research questions answered in this review were as follows: (i) What are the key perspectives that are addressed by researchers regarding the involvement of commercial actors in K-12 education? (ii) Which roles do commercial actors play in K-12 education and what are the issues being raised by researchers regarding each role? Three perspectives when it comes to research on involvement of commercial actors in education were identified: how commercial actors are changing the organization and functioning of K-12 education; how commercial actors are changing the organization and functioning of the education market; and the interaction between school actors and commercial actors. Under each perspective, various roles played by commercial actors were identified. The article demonstrated the multiplicity and diversity in the identified roles and also delved into the need to go beyond any reductionist understanding of commercial actors’ involvement in education. The multiple roles outlined in this review show how commercial actors’ involvement requires disentangling through novel approaches and how their inter-action with education creates the need to ask other important questions about the role of education itself and its key values and principles.