NB Papers P950, 951, 953, 954, 955, 956 should be considered together, for scheduling consecutively. Abstract for the entire symposia/combined sessions Governing and managing schools - constructing and negotiating educational realities In a three-year project "The governing and management of schools as discourse and discursive practice - the leading words" we have been exploring different discursive arenas. Our cases range from policy documents, superintendents negotiating with their heads about central issues, heads telling their stories to legitimate their way to headship, heads talking to parents hoping to make them chose their school as the prime alternative for their children to the process of awarding successful municipalities. In all these cases we find that language is a powerful way to govern and manage educational organizations through conceptualising school, its tasks and meaning by framing and categorizing. Discourse analysis is today a differentiated approach. In some of our papers we are just inspired by the approach and in others we adhere to more specific newly formed traditions connected to the linguistic turn in social sciences. Common for the different contributions is that we see schools, their governance and management as relaying on the impact of language, how meaning is negotiated and how people at different levels in educational organisations are interacting verbally. The implication of this is that power is not distributed from top to bottom - rather it is immanent in the naming, conceptualizing and framing arising out of interactive talk. Governing in a late modern time that is applauding democracy, communication, dialogue, decentralisation and trying to manage by objectives, evaluation and quality regimes will then not be located to a specific authority, nor to a specific person but is rather, like a spider's web, encompassing all and everyone, having a strong hold but being almost invisible. In Sweden the responsibility for all schools is more or less decentralised to local municipalities. This paper discusses Sweden's best educational municipality - an award granted by a Swedish teacher's trade union. Since this kind of award is a fairly new phenomenon in Sweden I want to analyze the motives, meanings and impacts of this prize. In connection to this I have attended an awarding ceremony and also interviewed three awarded superintendents. The purpose of this is not to establish what might be "successful" in an essentialist manner. It is rather to listen to how success is being constructed in the light of the award and what identities come out of the narratives told by the superintendents. Inspired by Potter my concern is with talk and texts as part of social practices. From this position language is not used to create realistic representations of the world, it is rather to achieve and accomplish something. Instead of thinking that theory is mirrored in language, it is created here. In this vein I regard organizations as discursive, they cannot be taken for granted - they are continuously constructed, negotiated and transformed in every day interactions. I will argue that the award represents a desired symbolic capital. Boundaries are established that separate top-ten municipalities from a bottom layer and the criteria that constitute the award construct categories that structure the educational field at a national level.