Around the globe and especially in Europe the polities in which education functions have faced waves of decentralisation, tinged with managerialism and privatisation, which have been spreading since the 1980s, changing policy coordination into a complex mass of interconnected levels and actor networks (e.g. de Boer et al. 2007; Maroy 2009). Administrative and political scientists have referred to the first ripples of this reform as New Public Management (Hood & Jackson 1991), and more recently as a “Neo-Weberian State”, “networked governance” (Goodin et al. 2008; Pollitt & Bouckaert 2011), and “metagovernance” (Rhodes 2011). These trends have been recognised as well in education research (e.g. Ball & Junemann 2012; Ferlie et al. 2008). The flows and use of knowledge in expert networks is of growing interest to the education research community (Fenwick et al. 2014; Carvalho 2013; Lawn & Segerholm 2011). While some systems have taken changes to the extreme, like England as a “systemless system” (Lawn 2013), the Nordic countries (however Sweden to lesser extent) have sustained the centrality of the state in education policy (Dovemark et a. 2018).

The state steering is however changing from within. Our analysis focuses on the case of Finland, where the government programme has become an increasingly important steering document since the 1990s (Tiili 2008). Governments in Finland are multi-party coalition governments, and the programme sets out the central aims for the four-year term. It is becoming the main instrument in steering also in education policy: There used to be more specific plans for education, which entailed a hearing procedure for stakeholders, but these are no longer drafted – the last was for the period 2011–2016 (see Tervasmäki, Okkolin & Kauppinen 2018). Even before the abandonment of these more specific education plans, researchers noted that it was the government programme that was dominant (Kauko 2011; Kallunki et al. 2015). While the government programme is the main instrument for deciding what are the general aims, its strategic nature leaves sector ministers and ministries room for interpretation and initiative inside their own policy area. In this respect, the role of what types of initiatives the Ministry of Education and Culture (MOE) takes inside the frames of the government programme and how the programme is interpreted and implemented, has become of increasingly important.

The transformation of the education policymaking process in Finland raises questions about the role of different stakeholders and the level of coordination between different projects. Therefore, our analysis develops an overall look on the social structure of the reforms in the 2010s. Specifically, the research aims at understanding the education policymaking in Finland from two perspectives:

1. What is the social structure behind educational projects in Finland?
2. To what extent did the social structure change from 2010 to 2018?

To answer these questions, we turn to the growing literature on the effect of interlocking corporate directorates (where local and global corporations share directorates). Scholars argue that structures such as the network of interlocking directorates – but also policy-planning networks – help to facilitate consensus and conformity and give direction for change (or stability). In this paper we apply this framework to study the social structure of education policymaking in Finland.

The main data source is a public database on projects at the MOE including information on all working groups, committees, projects, and decree reform groups during between January 2010 and November 2018 (total of 643 “policy events”). This database was further developed with public information on all members of these “policy events” and the duration of their terms. We applied social network analysis (SNA) techniques on the MOE dataset. We created a two-mode social network matrix that includes the complete list of members who have been involved in any event (in rows) and the complete list of events (in columns). This approach is common in the study of individuals and group/organizational affiliation (Pizmony-Levy, 2016). We then transformed the matrix to two distinct and symmetrical matrices. The first matrix includes all members; where each cell includes a numeric value that represents the number of events each pair has in common (i.e., co-membership). The second matrix includes all events; where each cell includes a numeric value that represents the number of members each pair of projects is sharing (i.e., membership overlap). We analysed the data using UCINET and visualized the networks using NetDraw (Borgatti, Everett, and Freeman, 2002). In the full paper, we present descriptive statistics for most common participants in the network, and the number of educational projects that share members. We also examine the network of interlocking members between 643 events. Specifically, we explore the extent to which members are connected through events and which of them are in advantage positions to bridge between sub-groups.

Due to the nature of data, we expect to find the centrality of MOE personnel in the network. Hypothesising on previous analysis, we expect to find Permanent Secretary as a central node and the different networks depending on the policy issue (Kauko 2011). We also expect some extent of changes at the points of changes in government in 2011 and 2015, however, it is unclear how radical and rapid these changes are. We expect to contribute to the European discussion on the role of networks and experts in policymaking in education as well as to the more specific question on how Finnish education policy is currently working as a social network.

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