Just as the industrial economy brought with it ideas and discourses on the industrial society, the idea of the knowledge economy brings with it new ideas of the knowledge society. Part of the notion of modernization, in contemporary politics just as in the politics of the past, is the idea that technological and economic change must be matched by a corresponding process of modernization of the social sphere. The idea of the knowledge society, as it has existed in social science and politics since the 1970s, is clearly an analogue of the idea of the network, just as the understanding of the industrial society was modeled on the ideas of the social hierarchy of the industrial factory.1 Ideas of information technology and network production lead to a social structure consisting of interconnected individuals. The idea of post-Fordist production as flat and ahierarchical is mirrored in notions of a society of stakeholders who are equals. As we have seen, the consequence of this is a breakdown of the idea of class and collective interests as the foundation for political action and, thus, a rethinking of the very role of social democracy in the process of change. Old ideas of social change as driven by “mechanistic” change, by the dialectics of interest mediation and class struggle, is replaced, in knowledge capitalism, by ideas of social change as evolutionary and harmonious, a process of organic growth and inclusion.
Social democracy is intimately involved in this reconceptualization of the social. The idea of the knowledge economy has important implications for its understanding of social needs and of the relationship between individual and collective advancement. The idea of poverty, in an era of knowledge, learning, and individual self-fulfilment and drive, becomes the New Labour notion of a poverty of aspirations, the individual lack of hope and ambition. Structural social inequalities, considered in relation to an organic idea of the social fabric, become a question of in-exclusion. Redistribution, in an economy driven by opportunity, is the redistribution of the opportunity that the new economy is presumed to produce. 2
These social articulations are all ambiguous. While they are overwhelmingly individualistic, focused on individual attributes, they also contain a certain structural, indeed, social emphasis. The notion of a poverty of aspiration, for instance, or the problematic concept of equality of opportunity focuses on individual dispositions and capacities, such as the capacity to seize opportunity. However, they also contain a certain emphasis on the structural constraints that determine opportunity—the social structures that “lock in potential.” The Third Way tends to translate these social problems in cultural terms, in line with its cultural approach to political economy. Social policies become cultural policies, aimed at the behavior and dispositions of individuals.3
Social democracy’s idea of the networked, learning society is clearly a reaction against neoliberalism in its emphasis on the interdependence of the social and the economic. As discussed in previous chapters, the Third Way embodies a rapprochement between social and economic policies. Learning and education, in Third Way discourse, are not “just” social issues; they are directly concerned with economic growth. On the one hand, this means that social democracy brings back, after decades of neoliberalism, a serious concern with social inequalities and social justice because it sees them as the core of a rational organization of society and economy. On the other, there is something in the Third Way’s social discourses that seems to turn the postulates of welfare capitalism on their heads.4 The conceptual invention of the social in the mid-nineteenth-century debate on the social question was linked to the rearticulation of social problems and poverty as processes beyond the control of the individual and as consequences of economic transformations. Competition, market liberalization, free competition, and the elusion of social responsibility in industrial capitalism had destroyed the social organization. Consequently, the relationship between the social and the economic was deeply antagonistic. Social policies that intervened into the organization of production were a means to restore efficiency. This is the meaning of the European notion of welfare capitalism: state-led intervention into capitalist structures to bring about a more efficient organization of economy and society. It is different, of course, from liberal notions of welfare capitalism. The latter are linked to philanthropy and corporate social responsibility, to notions of mutuality, self-help, and market liberalism. Indeed, the nineteenth-century European debate on a social economy was a reaction to the variant of laissez-faire politics, which was then termed Manchester liberalism because it was controlled by the market interests of British cotton manufacturers.5 New Labour is a child of these liberal legacies.6
New Labour’s notion of the social as “community” was a reaction to an “old Left” vision of society as something mechanistic and violent, created by a social struggle that it saw as historically specific to the industrial society. In Sweden, social policies seem to stand in continuity with legacies of the People’s Home and the SAP’s postwar ideas of a Strong Society. However, the notion of society—samhälle—has, arguably, been one of the very central points of change in Swedish political culture from the late 1970s onwards. While the SAP in the 1990s returned to rhetoric from its past ideologies, the relationship between society and market became a growing fissure below the surface.
The next chapter deals specifically with contemporary social democracy’s ideas of the welfare state. In this chapter, we are concerned with how the parties understand the social sphere and the relationship between the knowledge economy and the knowledge society. In short, what kind of a social vision is the idea of the knowledge society to contemporary social democracy?
Part of New Labour’s modernization project was the attempt to rethink the social sphere and domesticate or settle the chaos of social life into something more coherent and organized. The notion of community, which it placed at the heart of Labour ideology with the rewriting of the Labour Party constitution in 1994, captured this quest for social harmony.7
Community is a concept with complex historical legacies in British political culture, from the ethical socialism of Tawney to elements of liberalism, social democracy, and social conservatism. The concept might best be described, as other parts of New Labour ideology, as a number of subplots, ideologies, and counterideologies ranging from the socially authoritarian in discourses on crime and asocial behavior to radical and even utopian discourses on the transformative role of architecture in the city landscapes of Glasgow and Liverpool or increased citizen participation in politics and services through the use of ICT.8 However, while the notion of community has complex origins, New Labour’s communitarianism has drawn very selectively on some elements in the communitarian tradition, thus silencing others. As the philosopher Sarah Hale has pointed out, New Labour leaned on Tawney’s fraternal notion of community but silenced his critique of affluence and his call for socialism in favor of an approach to communitarianism that drew on governing individual behavior in the name of the common good.9
New Labour’s platform was the idea of a widespread social crisis. Its very first policies in office—the New Deals for the unemployed, working families and communities, and the creation of the Social Exclusion Unit in Downing Street—were attempts to counter social degeneration. New Labour framed this social crisis in specific terms, which departed from social democratic class analysis. From the outset, New Labour put in place a framing around social problems that was distinctly cultural and, in important parts, familiar to American discourses on poverty.10 As many critics of New Labour have argued, its ideas of the social came with a stereotypical dichotomization of individuals into deserving and undeserving and with pervasive notions of the poor as deviant, dependent, and dangerous. The cultural emphasis on breaking with vicious circles of exclusion by creating a culture of learning and aspiration carried with it a deeply disciplining approach to individual deviance and policies explicitly designed to change individual behavior and attitudes. To New Labour, social crisis was not only the result of economic decline, Thatcher’s attack on society, and decades of underinvestment into crucial public services but also the result of the erosion of fundamental social values. It was a crisis narrative explicitly concerned with social order and with a social fabric “tattered and torn.”11
Communitarianism made a direct appeal to the moral virtues of citizenship, defined by the duties and obligations we owe each other as morally and socially responsible individuals. Social virtues—such as the work ethic, a love of learning, and the sense of obligation—were seen as being fostered in reciprocity and recognition, in the trust relationships that create social order and that provide the basis for a prosperous economy. The central element of the notion of community was the rewriting of the social contract around the strengthening of the responsibility side of social citizenship, in order to break with the individualistic legacies of the late 1960s and the 1980s. New Labour’s individualism was thus not a vision of unfettered individuals—but of people enabled by the social web and the historical bonds of virtue. The process of civic renewal came from this revocation of the virtues of citizenship, and the freeing of individual potential stemmed from the realization of fundamental obligations to the community.12
At the core of the notion of community was a rethinking of the relationship between individual and collective advancement. In contrast to neoliberalism, New Labour saw individualism as a force for the common good. In this manner, individualism and competition became forces for the good of the community, forces that transcended individual utility (but nevertheless originated in the search for individual utility).13 The notion of solidarity that underpinned “community” was a solidarity based on the competitive instinct—the instinct that would lead to “prosperity for all.” Community became a vision of the social as driven by the quest for self-improvement while, at the same time, recognizing the role of social interdependence for that improvement. The market was at the core of the notion of community. The market, in communitarian terms, must be socially embedded—not so much to keep it from having disruptive effects on the social, nor to steer profit for social causes, but because it is considered crucial for the fostering of the virtues of competition and for the cultivation of aspiration and creativity and the “continuous drive for improvement.” Policies such as social entrepreneurship programs and public private partnerships create this culture of improvement by giving the market a social role.14
Community was a highly organic view of society. It was a curiously apolitical concept, reflecting New Labour’s rejection of conflict. Community was construed as a locus beyond politics, governed by consensus, harmony, and the inculcation of shared values.15 It saw social change as a quintessentially harmonious process of spontaneous evolution. Community was a self-correcting organism, made up of individuals in “self-help,” “self-government,” and “mutuality.” These bonds of reciprocity, liberated from the disruptive role of state intervention or public bureaucracies, constituted the common good.16 In the emphasis on mutuality, reciprocity, and interdependence, there was a clear analogy between the notion of community and the idea of the computer network. The American philosopher Amitai Etzioni, whose variant of communitarianism was an important influence on New Labour, frequently defines the social as a web. In his 1997 book Connexity, the Downing Street advisor Geoff Mulgan, who was the one to bring Etzioni to New Labour’s attention, defined community as individuals striving for self-expression but dependent on their inclusion into a social network for the full realization of their being. To Mulgan, “connexity” was a logical stage of the evolution of social life and a social structure similar to other organic systems, such as the Gaia, the biosphere or the electronic network, all systems built on complex interdependence and dependent on order for their survival.17 The New Labour frenzy around the Internet and information technology as means of governance was an expression of the desire to create new forms of interconnectedness and thus restore the social fabric.18 This was radically different from social democracy’s traditional notions of social struggle. A web, defined by inclusion or exclusion from the network, grows organically. Society, in New Labour ideology of the mid-1990s, was a mechanistic notion, driven by organized interests and labor–capital conflict, a sphere of strife and crippling class interests. Correspondingly, the public, in New Labour discourse, was a sphere controlled by the vested interests of the professions. In contrast, the idea of community represented an organic whole. Trust and mutual feelings of obligation were central social virtues but, and this is equally important, also virtues that had a direct role for the creation of a specific kind of (social) capital.
New Labour’s concern with social order was motivated not only by concerns of social cohesion but also by the understanding of economic dynamism as a process that begins in the social. Community, in New Labour thinking, is where aspiration and opportunity are founded. The role of community is to foster the “love of learning,” which, in New Labour discourse, is the primary driver of social mobility and economic dynamism. The opportunity economy, therefore, is dependent on intervention into the social to create and redistribute these goods. The preoccupation with the social fabric was a concern not only with social harmony but with the social fabric as the de facto fabricator of human and social capital.19 As such, there were strong links between the notion of community and the notion of capital.
The term social capital had a remarkable impact in political discourse in the 1990s, following the American political scientist Robert Putnam’s work.20 Putnam argued that the social networks of civil society were a crucial factor for the fostering of economic innovation, property rights, and collaboration. His argument that the United States was witnessing the rapid erosion of social capital had a strong influence on the Clinton administration and was an important impetus behind the rise of communitarianism. The concept of social capital has much deeper origins, however. It can be traced back to an American debate on public education in 1916, during which the importance of federal investment in the social capital was likened to the role of capital investment in factory production.21 Thus, social capital was about the economic interest in rational social organization.
The economic argument around social capital in contemporary economic and political discourse is that it provides the individual with access to a social network that determines the access to opportunity: “It is not what you know, but who you know.”22 It is in social institutions such as the family, the community, and the company, all consisting of mutual reciprocal trust relationships, that aspiration is founded and that the norms of the social contract, such as the sense of duty and the love of learning, are created. As a result, New Labour family policies have contained an emphasis on the role of parents to foster social capital and imbue children with the values of citizenship and commitment to the common good because the family is where the crucial, first, early steps of learning take place.23 Next to the two-parent family, the company was also seen as an institution crucial for the creation of social capital because it supposedly fosters cooperation and builds trust and loyalty.24
The notion of social capital fit in with the Third Way’s argument regarding the close relationship between social cohesion and economic efficiency. In many ways, the concept seemed to stand in continuity with a social democratic tradition of marrying the economic and the social and with social democracy’s historic notions of the waste generated by social inequality. For instance, the debate on social exclusion was quickly framed as a question of social capital. The notion of social capital was, however, also indicative of the tensions within the Third Way. It attempted to bring social issues into the sphere of economic reasoning. In this sense it contained a kind of social democratic critique of neoliberal economics, similar to the way in which Fabian economics once provided a critique of laissez-faire economics. It was even argued that social capital was a public good.25
Social capital discourse contained an important critique of the British class society, particularly the “old boys’ network” of public schools and Oxford and Cambridge. Still, the notion of social capital was oddly detached from notions of class or equality. Its emphasis on intervention into social networks tilted toward an authoritarian logic; if social capital is created in networks and social norms, there must be sanctions against those forms of social networks that create bad social capital or destroy social capital. This has led to new means of intervention such as the ASBOs (asocial behavior orders) and to the creation of a socially conservative Respect agenda, institutions that criminalize deviant behaviour.26 Market virtues were a central aspect of the notion of social capital. Policies such as asset-based welfare have played crucial role in social capital arguments because owning assets is seen as fostering virtues such as being financially literate, entrenching a culture of saving, and cultivating a feeling for property. ILAs and baby bonds, the latter of which are potentially a radical policy of redistribution, have thus been framed within the logic of building social capital.27 The notion of social capital also failed to provide a theory of public good. Social capital is a concept that falls back on notions of individual good and thus on an individual and economic utility preference. Ultimately, social capital is an individual resource, which provides for individual competitiveness in social hierarchies. In this manner, the notion of social capital illustrates the tension between social democracy’s contemporary strategies of socializing capital or capitalizing the social. The notion of social capital clearly contained an embryo for a social critique of capital. However, it was also a distinctly economistic approach to the social, one in which social relations effectively became forms of capital. Despite its socializing tendencies, social capital discourse has been less concerned with the creation of a more social form of capitalism than it has been with finding new ways of creating economic efficiency.28 The social capital debate also highlights New Labour’s unease with ideas of equality, redistribution, and social justice. The framing of social issues within the logic of community has clearly been a strategy for New Labour to address issues of redistribution without speaking of equality, and, indeed, without a critique of capitalism. The emphasis on community has meant that there has been less emphasis, in New Labour politics, on structural factors of society and social problems; rather, it has dismissed “structures” as part of its critique of public responsibility, described as destroying the spontaneous social organization of community.
Communitarianism has not wielded nearly the same influence in Sweden, where political discourse in the 1990s and 2000s was primarily be concerned with universalism and public responsibility. When Amitai Etzioni visited Stockholm in the 1990s, the reception was very different from the one that he had received in Downing Street. There was little understanding from Swedish perspectives of the good in philosophical abstractions around what, to a Swede, are obvious norms of behavior, particularly when these abstractions came from an American. The then–Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson was, says Etzioni, cold as a fish.29
Meanwhile, many similarities exist between the contemporary communitarianism of New Labour and the social philosophy of modern Swedish politics. There is in the Swedish social democratic tradition a reluctance toward more intellectual reasoning around the social contract, a phenomenon linked to the way that the values of the Swedish welfare state are seen as deeply rooted in tradition and history and as a kind of entrenched ethos in the Swedish psyche. This silent presumption of the naturalization of the values of the welfare state is in itself rather close to the postulates of contemporary communitarianism, and it shares many of its limitations, primarily, the appeal to history as common experience and shared identity. In their 2006 book, much discussed in Sweden, the historians Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh argue that the Swedish welfare state resides on a specific notion of Swedishness, a historically rooted sense of the values of solidarity, equality, and individualism as part of the national identity.30 Exactly such an outlook on the values of the welfare state as the natural values of the Swedish people is an important part of the ideological strategy of Swedish social democracy. Many of social democracy’s key ideological elements, first and foremost the notion of the People’s Home, were elements that it usurped, in the interwar period, from conservative discourses on national unity and social order.31 It was this “natural” social democratic order that was questioned in the turbulent and ideologically polarized decades of the 1980s and the 1990s, and the resurgence of the notions of Strong Society and People’s Home in social democratic discourse from the mid-1990s must be seen as a way of trying to recreate a kind of hegemony around its social philosophy as if it were truly the values of the people. The former Prime Minister Göran Persson has flirted with communitarian themes in his writings, echoing themes of duty and obligation to the common good and often citing Blair.32 The return of the notion of the People’s Home in the 1990s is also a clear a reaction to a growing debate on multiculturalism and a social and cultural diversity, which social democracy has tended to see as a threat to the overarching community of the welfare state.33
The notion of samhälle, as it was shaped in Swedish political history, was influenced by German institutionalism, the deeply conservative Kathedersozialismus. Historically, it stood for a highly organic relationship between market and society, in which social rationalization was understood as necessary for capitalist efficiency, an understanding that united thinkers as diverse as the conservative economist Gustaf Cassel and the socialist Gunnar Myrdal.34 This organic approach led, in history, to a sometimes far-going social interventionism in the name of the common good. Samhälle is also a concept of the social that theoretically makes no distinction between state and civil society. Rather, the notion of samhälle drew on the ambition, beginning in the late nineteenth century, to bring together market, state, and citizens into an organic whole.35 This is not dissimilar to communitarianism’s postulates of the constitution of community in a social context of tradition and historically defined virtues and to its understanding of the market as part of the common good. However, there are important differences between the historic meanings of samhälle and the contemporary communitarian notion of community, particularly in the role given to the market.
The idea of samhälle, from the late nineteenth century but particularly with the development of the Swedish model from the 1930s onward, was based on controlling the market and its forces of competition and profit in the name of the common good. As such, it was about disciplining market capitalism and keeping it from having devastating effects on the social. Social democracy’s idea of the Strong Society in the 1950s and 1960s drew on this notion that a sophisticated market society required increased social responsibility. Arguably, this was not so much a market ethos to society as a social ethos to the market, and as such it underpinned the development of the Swedish Model of labor market and welfare policy. Moreover, the notion of samhälle appeals to a fundamentally different notion of reciprocity than the one assumed in contemporary communitarianism. The Swedish notion of society does not draw on a contract metaphor, of the idea of a contract between state and citizen, or indeed, between rights and responsibilities; rather, it draws on a notion of reciprocity that is defined in terms of the mutual recognition of need. This is expressed in the metaphor of the People’s Home, as a source of inclusion and belonging. In the Swedish tradition, it is not the obligation side of social citizenship that constitutes the common good; instead, the constitution of the common good is dependent on the active exercise of fundamental democratic and social rights. Individual and collective advancement are fundamentally interrelated notions, and in the social democratic tradition the notion of advancement is closely linked to ideas of universalism. To that extent, the notion of samhälle draws on an idea of social change as a process driven by the rights side of citizenship.36
It is this conception that is mirrored in the SAP’s insistence on knowledge as a kind of democratic capital, a tool for protecting the values of the universal welfare state. The SAP’s 2001 Program defines the knowledge society:
Giving all access to knowledge is crucial to breaking down patterns of class. Knowledge and competence are more and more the means of production that determine the opportunities of the individual in working life. Differences in access to these means increase social differences and shape society. A high level of knowledge and competence breaks down barriers of class.... The new order of production that is currently emerging is built on information. Information flows have never been as important as they are today, and modern information technology brings with it a real democratization of knowledge. But the power that knowledge brings is not just about the access to information but also about the ability to independently interpret and evaluate information, see social contexts, and distinguish fact from values. Only through these abilities is a democratization of knowledge possible. The task of social democracy is to create a real knowledge society, built on knowledge and education, open and accessible to all on equal terms.37
In this way, knowledge is a tool for building a social democratic society made up of solidarity and universalism and based on people’s capacity to think critically. These virtues are understood as controls on the market. While New Labour makes strong links between the notions of community and the notion of capital, the SAP speaks of society as a sphere defined by democracy. This reflects in the notion of social capital. While the notion of social capital is rarely mentioned in Swedish discourse, when it is mentioned it is with reference to the self-education movements, folkbildning, as a means of creating a strategic social capital made up of democratically aware citizens.38 This is also the meaning of the Swedish notion of competence, kompetens, or indeed social kompetens , that is, the skills and knowledge necessary in the knowledge society.
The notion of competence became important in the early 1990s with the Bildt government’s economic strategy.39 However, as social democracy started to articulate a narrative around the knowledge society in the mid-1990s, the notion of competence became vested with ideas of democracy and individual empowerment. Upgrading and strengthening individual competence through lifelong learning and competence saving were articulated as rights of citizenship and as further steps in building the universal welfare state. In Sweden as well as in Britain, then, competence was framed as a crucial question of individual advancement and competitiveness in the new economy, with the difference that in Sweden this was linked to the risks of the new production order and to the importance of upgrading everyone so that no one would fall behind. Moreover, in social democracy’s interpretation, the notion of competence became a question of citizenship and individual awareness of the problems of information and technology. Hence, competence was capital in the sense of empowerment and political resources, including the individual capability to articulate a critique of the market.40 However, this is full of contradiction. Social competence, ultimately, is part of a labor market discourse in which it has become closely linked to the concept of employability; the individual possession of the skills in demand on post-Fordist labor markets. This reflects a gradual shift from notions of social competence as citizenship competence to market competence and a reconfiguration of the role of social democratic politics from that of fostering democratically aware citizens to that of making people competitive.
In addition, the notion of social competence has a very clear cultural component. Just as social capital in the United Kingdom is related to ideas of industriousness, duty, and fair play—all part of the definition of Britishness—the notion of social competence, in Sweden, draws on values presumed to be rooted in the common historical experience of the People’s Home. Social competence has thus tended to be defined as “Sweden-specific” knowledge that includes knowledge of the Swedish language, of Swedish habits, and particularly, of the culture and work practices of the Swedish model. Part of this Sweden-specific competence is the ability to “make one’s voice heard” and to be able to protest in the workplace and thus influence patterns of production. Immigrants seeking employment are often seen as lacking these skills. For this reason, the notion of social competence has been viewed as being part of the problem of structural discrimination in Swedish labor markets because it identifies noncompliance with the specific demands on competence as disabilities and shortcomings, not unlike the emphasis on deviance in the notion of social capital. Through its appeal to values as culturally specific, the term social competence becomes exclusive, dependent on references to a specific national and cultural community.41
New Labour’s notion of community is a vision of the social sphere where the cement of the social contract consists of responsibility and duty. The central virtue of citizenship is not the awareness of rights but the feeling of obligation and the attachment to a greater common good through prevailing notions of duty. Next to work, education is the primary means for fostering feelings of duty, for creating “competent and respectable citizens.”42 This process begins with children. Since the mid-1990s, English curricula have emphasized the teaching of obligation and duty to the surrounding community as part of citizenship education. This stands in contrast to how, after devolution, curricula have been adopted in Scotland and Wales that emphasize the role of education to foster individuals aware of their rights. In Scotland, responsible citizenship is defined as “the ability to examine matters critically and to develop informed views, including views that challenge established conventions and the status quo,” a phrasing clearly influenced by the curricula of the Scandinavian countries.43
The English emphasis on education as a way of forging a culture of obligation can be contrasted to the Swedish case in which education, beginning with preschools, is seen as a means of forging a culture of belonging through knowledge of the rights of citizenship and awareness of the needs of others. Citizenship, in Sweden, is about having the knowledge necessary to influence the structures that shape society, in the workplace, in politics, in the local community, and in schools. In that sense, the notion of education in Swedish social democratic discourse is traditionally closely coupled with the notion of equality and to citizenship as process of fostering equal individuals, as expressed, for instance, in Alva Myrdal’s Equality Program for preschools.44 Today, SAP programs on early learning see it as the strategic way to give children from different backgrounds and conditions an equal start in life, confront them with the awareness of the situation of others, and teach them the importance of working together.45 The National Curriculum for preschools says
Early learning is the foundation of democracy. Its task is to forge the democratic values of our society. The sanctity of human life, individual freedom and integrity, the equal worth of all individuals, equality between the sexes, and solidarity with the weakest are the values that preschools should teach children. The rights of myself and others are to be emphasized.46
This emphasis on early learning as a means of creating democratic and solidaristic citizens falls back on the long tradition in Swedish political culture of viewing learning and education as means of citizenship and as radical emancipatory tools for working-class rationality. We have seen how the idea of folkbildning gained new importance in ideas of the knowledge society. Folkbildning is also seen as a means of integration, creating solidarity with groups in society that fall outside the mainstream education system. While the notion of community emphasizes social change as evolutionary and harmonious, the notion of society sees change as driven by a quintessentially social process where interests are merged and balanced. Knowledge is a strategic tool, indeed, a kind of critical social capital that, just as in the history of the labor movement, is about using democracy and insights in society and economy to influence the very direction of change, samhällsutvecklingen.
Meanwhile, some developments in Sweden seem to challenge exactly this notion of knowledge as a good for equality and democracy; and, arguably, it is exactly this idea that has to take a backseat when knowledge and education become commodities in the growth policies of the Third Way.
There can be no doubt that democratizing access to knowledge and education was at the top of social democracy’s agenda in the 1990s. Both countries have made substantial investments in education in the last decade and drawn up ambitious political objectives, such as the Swedish objective to increase the number of PhDs to 10 percent of all students who begin a university education. 47 In a sense, this is the next step of those social democratic policies that, in the 1960s, sought to transform education from the privilege of a small elite to a comprehensive education for the working class.
Depending on the different institutional legacies in the education system, the scope for social democratic reform of education differs greatly in Sweden and the United Kingdom. The divide between grammar schools and comprehensives and the importance of elite “public” schools are defining characteristics of British class society. The issue of comprehensive education versus forms of selection by aptitude and ability is a standing debate in the history of the Labour Party, and it may also be one of the real limits of British Labourism. While the party has often questioned the existence of grammar schools, it has never managed to abolish them, due in part to their importance to the British middle class and in part to Labour’s own reluctance to challenge these middle-class privileges.48 Grammar schools were theoretically abolished under Wilson in 1965, but the implementation was vague and came to a halt under successive Conservative governments, with the result that, in reality, grammar schools and selection of students at eleven remain in parts of Britain. Blair’s emphasis on “education, education, education” to the party conference in 1996 was deeply symbolic, raising hopes on the Left for a thorough reform of the school system.49 Ten years later, it is clear that New Labour has continued many of the important themes of Thatcherism, above all the reverence for the role of the market in education and the celebration of choice and diversity, seen by the party’s Left as a badly disguised reinvention of selection by ability. In 2005, the party faced a revolt of backbenchers over its education bill.50
Sweden’s starting point for egalitarianism in education is a better one. Until the introduction of the voucher system under the Bildt government in 1992, private schools played a minor role in Sweden, limited to a few boarding schools that catered mainly to the children of foreign diplomats and of the small Swedish upper class. These schools did not play anywhere near the role in determining individual careers as do U.K. public schools. Since 1842 Sweden has had a system of basic schooling accessible to all, folkskolan, providing historically for exceptionally high levels of literacy in the Swedish population, and since 1962 Sweden has had a single system of comprehensive education. It was followed by reforms of higher education in the late 1960s that aimed at extending access to further education and providing the expanding welfare state with educated civil servants.51 A further step on the road to the abolition of the vocational–academic divide was taken by the SAP on its return to power in the 1990s, when it included theoretical elements in all vocational programs and created one unified baccalaureate with the idea of qualifying all pupils for higher education. This abolition of vocational training programs has been much criticized as leading to an erosion of standards. Many students fail to keep up with theoretical studies, but when it lost power in 2006 the SAP’s election campaign included promises to further strengthen the academic status of vocational education and apprenticeships.52
SAP policies reject meritocracy in favor of a highly egalitarian approach that stresses the collective boost of educational opportunity and rejects the idea that some should be allowed to rise above others. The SAP’s flagship reform in the 1990s was kunskapslyftet, the “knowledge lift,” designed to shift large numbers of people from unemployment benefits to adult education and provide them with the skills to succeed in the new economy. Other reforms included the creation of regional colleges in nonurban and suburban areas to recruit new groups to higher education and counteract segregation. These reforms were framed in the same egalitarian rhetoric of “the lift,” informed by the notion of alla ska med, of everyone coming along, which became the election slogan in 2006.53 This has a somewhat hollow ring in light of the dramatic changes that took place in the Swedish school system in the 1990s following the introduction of the voucher system, which has effectively opened the door for thoroughgoing specialization and competition among schools.54
Voucher schools were introduced by the Bildt government in 1992, influenced by Thatcher’s attempts to create a market for education in the United Kingdom and by ideas of diversity, parental choice, and market specialization. In opposition, social democracy promised to undo the reform on their return to power, but in government the party has chosen not to. The introduction of a voucher system has led to a plethora of semiprivate “free schools” that compete for students with public schools. Voucher schools are now a central feature of the Swedish school system, and the SAP is deeply split over the issue; indeed, this is one of its loudest silences.55 Meanwhile, voucher schools represent one of the few reforms that senior Social Democrats will refer to as an example of ideological change because they allow for middle-class parents to take their children out of public schools and entrench social and ethnic segregation in suburban areas.56 For party modernizers voucher schools are, rather, a necessary concession to more individualist times.57
Many “free” schools are schools with special pedagogy, such as Waldorf or Montessori, which appeal to many Social Democrats and also seem to be in tune with alternative notions of education in the history of social democracy; others are high schools that specialize in sports, dance, or music; others again are faith schools. The party opposes the latter because it is not comfortable with the idea of a religious component in education.58 Meanwhile, value-based components have gained in emphasis in national curricula. The 1980 curriculum stated that the role of education is to foster a “critical and active role in shaping society and working life,” and it also spoke of solidarity with the surrounding world. In the curriculum implemented by the Conservative government in 1994, this emphasis changed into a more individualistic one, that drew on a liberal concept of freedom and on a Christian ethic, “allow[ing] each pupil to find his or her own particular talent, so that they can participate in social life in responsible freedom.”59
The changes in the Swedish school system, from one based on comprehensive universalism to a system based on choice and vouchers, are dangerously at odds with principles of equality and solidarity. Specialization means that schools are allowed to compete for students, leaving municipal schools in tough areas with increased needs and fewer resources. This seems to go against the party’s idea of education as a meeting point and a celebration of different talents and abilities. These changes add up to a transition in Swedish notions of education from an old ideal of knowledge as a democratic resource and a fundamental public good to education as a market commodity. Just as in the United Kingdom, the prerequisite of the system is a process of standardization through national tests, which allow parents to follow the results of pupils and schools.60
Nevertheless, the SAP’s insistence on the knowledge society as a collective lift, whereby advancement must continuously be based on the values of universalism, stands in sharp contrast to the way New Labour sees change as a process of competitive strife. British metaphors of the knowledge society are, as already discussed, the “race” and the “ladder,” both reflecting a fiercely competitive idea of social change, where some rise and some fall behind. The ladder is a fundamentally meritocratic notion, where advancement depends on the successful nurturing of one’s innate talents and where differences in individual success are not the unfair outcomes of capitalist structures but the just rewards of these talents. The “ladder of opportunity” is a metaphor with origins in Fabianism. To Sydney Webb, the ladder of opportunity stood for the managerial division of social classes according to skill, where workers were shuttled into systems of vocational training and apprenticeships, while theoretical education provided pathways into the civil service for the best brains.61 This duality in the British education system between vocational training and academic study has endured, and New Labour has also continued the emphasis on vocational training and apprenticeships as routes into the labor market at the expense, many have argued, of the creation of a high-skill strategy. This is unfair because there has also been an important emphasis on increasing the standards and value of vocational studies, but the predominance of the notion of the “ladder of opportunity” reflects the central role of meritocracy in New Labour ideology.
Meritocracy is a deeply ambiguous concept in the history of social democracy. A meritocratic social order is one that promises individual advancement based on merit and not on inherited privilege and, thus, the breakdown of the class privileges that historically held the labor movement down. As such, it is a deeply radical notion, concerned with profound social transformations. However, as Michael Young warned in his book The Rise of the Meritocracy (which was initially published during the 1960s debate on comprehensive education), meritocracy is also a social order wherein differences in intelligence and talent are recognized as legitimate sources of inequalities and placed at the heart of societal hierarchies.62 From this perspective, meritocracy represents the threat of the rise of a knowledge-owning class that governs masses stripped of the tools to question and understand the power structures of capitalism. This is meritocracy as social order, not social change. The self-education movements of the early socialists, such as the Swedish folkbildning, were reactions against meritocratic education systems and their reproduction of a bourgeois elite.63 However, social democrat education policies in Sweden have also been informed by a kind of human capital argument that sprung from the historic growth orientation of the SAP. The Swedish debate on comprehensive education included a discussion of meritocracy and a fear that equality in schooling might hold back the best brains; “it could be unfortunate if the working class, in the name of equality, were robbed of its best talents and potential political leaders,” but the party solved this dilemma through its appeal to universalism as a strategy for making the most out of all available brains.64
New Labour has embraced and even praised the principle of meritocracy. Some of its arguments—the idea that the economy needs not a knowledge elite but the creativity of all the people or that the challenge is to create a culture of self-improvement for the many and not just the few—reflect an egalitarian aspiration that is motivated by human capital arguments, as it were, “finding the use of every child.”65 Since 1997, substantial investments have been made in educational allowances, in buildings and ICT, and in teacher’s wages. New Labour’s emphasis on standards has focused the spotlight on the quality of teaching and the democratization of outcomes and placed more importance on basic skills and literacy. But when it redefined the notion of “equality” to “equality of opportunity,” New Labour effectively replaced a vision of an egalitarian social order with a vision of a meritocracy. Education policies have contained a very strong meritocratic component, reflecting the idea that the route to competitiveness lies in encouraging the full realization of individual talent, which is understood as being at odds with the principle of equality. From the first Schools White Paper, prepared in opposition, education was framed in a language of excellence, where strict standards for monitoring progress were introduced and underachieving schools were faced with the prospect of being closed. The role of government shifted from steering education to control, including sanctions of underachievement and implementation of what was called a “zero tolerance for failure,” a notion that has primarily applied to schools and teachers but even to individual pupils.66
Zero tolerance of failure is a metaphor imported from the sphere of policing, and it put in place a highly authoritarian discourse of excellence where failure was to be punished in “inverse relation to success.” The language of excellence is firmly meritocratic in the way that it applauds differences in talents and closely monitors both schools’ and individuals’ performances. Former Downing Street education advisor Michael Barber says in an interview that standardization and the monitoring of excellence are prerequisites for creativity because they drive everyone’s progress up.67 Excellence is also directly related to marketization and competition. In the controversial Academies Programme, failing schools can be taken over by the market for injections of creativity and drive. Schools, in New Labour policy, have also been encouraged to specialize to become competitive on the education market, attract the best students, and pursue excellence. This has been praised as a “postcomprehensive principle,” a principle that allegedly brings the comprehensive ethos further by actively promoting the pursuit of different talents. Diversity, a keyword under Blair, is about making sure that no child falls behind—through extra support for underachieving students but also through special tracks for the brightest.68
Hence, meritocracy is an organizing principle of contemporary education policy. In fact, the appraisal of meritocracy is key to the Third Way’s renegotiation of the relationship between equality and individualism and to New Labour’s vision of social order. Meritocracy has become a defining characteristic of a new social democratic project, part of its new political space:
Our aim, explicitly, is to combine the drive for excellence, often associated with the right in politics, with the insistence that opportunity be open to all, the basic principle of the political left, in a public service system where the relationship between the government and people is one of partnership, not central control or laissez faire.69
In the history of social democracy, meritocracy was a notion that called for radical social change in the name of equality and that brought about a critique of the structures of capitalist society as being what held individuals back. Meritocracy was a vision of equality, one that recognized achievement—and not original talent—as a legitimate basis of social hierarchy. To contemporary social democracy, meritocracy is a vision of society as organized around individual talent. This is informed by a human capital argument wherein the differentiation of people according to talent is motivated by the economic desire to make the most of the “best brains.” Education policies under New Labour, despite their emphasis on access and spreading excellence, have been more concerned with social order than with social change, more with the social fabric than with mobility, more with “tapping potential” than with equality. While social democracy rejects inherited privileges as inefficient and wasteful (and has also attacked hereditary privilege with means such as asset-based welfare), it seems to praise the social order of talent that Crosland and Wigforss explicitly warned us against.70 Moreover, as Richard Sennett has argued, there is something inherently meritocratic in the very notion of potential as something that lies latent within us, waiting to be discovered and extracted because this approach disregards circumstance and presumes that with access to the right opportunities, individuals can cast off their chains and free the potential hidden within.71 This is a social vision defined by the economic. Indeed, New Labour speaks more of the knowledge economy than of the knowledge society.
In contrast, the SAP rhetorically seeks to promote a social vision of an egalitarian knowledge society where all groups have a real opportunity to influence the process of change and where key social values, above all the common good of solidarity, are protected by the social democratic state. Its vision of society is that of a social organization made up of classes and divergent interests, interests that are merged together through a democratic process wherein knowledge plays a crucial role. But in its proud proclamations of this social vision, social democracy speaks as if Swedish society were still the society of Per Albin Hansson and Tage Erlander and as if its own policies were still those of the 1950s. It is a discourse that is oddly detached from reality. The period from the 1970s, historian Francis Sejersted argues, can be seen as a process of disintegration of the notion of samhälle, a process in which the notions of civil society, market, and individual have entered Swedish discourse as autonomous and even rivaling spheres.72 Privatization policies in Sweden, such as the voucher schools, clearly draw on this conception, pitting individual choice against collective solutions. The institutional changes in the Swedish welfare state in the 1990s have put in place policies that appeal not to the solidaristic citizen projected by social democracy in speeches and pamphlets but to a utility-maximizing individual. The values reproduced by policy are not solidarity but choice and competition. Voucher schools are part of an emerging new concept of society that is at odds with the principles of the People’s Home.