Market-driven school reforms strategies have been an increasing policy tool across the globe. They have been implemented not only in recognized (neo) liberal oriented countries as the UK and the US, but also in countries with a strong welfare statism tradition as Sweden and Finland. Still in a more intensive way, Chile has been over last 20 years an icon in the vast use of neoliberal policies to structure its educational system: vouchers, for-profit schools,  private state subsided schools, school selection, and open parental choice regime characterized the way in which Chile organized education. Overall, Chile has become an unique case to observe the impact of markets on the relationship between education and social class. The study of choice in Chile, with some notable exceptions (Raczynski et al., 2010), has mostly been covered using quantitative analyses, either through surveys or by using secondary information based on census data that contain information on families and schools.  Fundamentally, such studies face limits to account for the interactive nature of the behaviour of social agents with their social circumstances, both past and present, which mediate their actions.  Ethnographic exploration allows us to break away from the discretional, limited, deductive, ex-ante or pre-fabricated analyses specific to quantitative studies. Instead, it allows the exploration of the interaction between multiple variables, emotional, or economic dimensions, either past or present, which surround, affect, form and explain the decisions taken by families. Chile combines two critical aspects: an education system with policies and regulations that tend to differentiate schools (mixed provision, mixed funding, active selection) and a highly stratified society. Unlike Chile, international sociology literature has indicated that practices to choose schools are not uniform, being associated with cultural practices, capital, and resources that are specific to each social group (Lauder et al., 1999; Ball, 2003; Reay et al. 2011; Van Zanten, 2010). Studies suggest that the participation of families in social institutions is mediated by the unequal possession of economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital. However, this general framework can be applied in various ways in different contexts. As mentioned above, Chile has a particular complexity in its institutional design, but has nevertheless remained subsumed or unexplored regarding its interaction with the practices of school choice.

This study points out that the problem does not lie in maintaining (or not) the concept of the “market” to describe the configuration of the educational sector, but rather that a sufficiently robust sociological definition of the market has not been produced. There has been little concern in Chile about understanding how a choice is made in practice or, likewise, how an educational market is formed. Our fundamental proposition is that choice is a relational practice (not abstract, universal, or ahistorical), that is, it is done and exercised in respect of other agents, objects, values, present, past, or potential. The relational aspect is eminently social, local, and contingent upon prior social structures or the movement of networks. Two conceptual approaches inspired this ethnographic investigation. A theoretical eclecticism has been favoured, which has allowed the analysis of privileged families' experiences to be freely outlined: Bourdieu's practice theory and the Actor-Network theory of Latour/Callon. While some consider that these two approaches are irreconciliable (Schiwefil, 2007), this study focused on the use of theory as a tool of inquiry. In short, the formation of preferences is neither spontaneous nor self-limited, and nor is it explained by a discretional set of impulses or incentives. Rather than such reductionism, preferences are formed, employed, and act rationally, either via material or immaterial networks, or by relative positions of power in a hierarchically organised field.

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