In many countries, the public school is increasingly intertwined with the market that give rise to a struggle over the values that underlie education. Quasi-marketisation of public education blurs the distinction between public and private and bring about a competition of egalitarian values and market values. To explore conflicting values in education and the market, this paper takes the Swedish case of quasi-marketisation as an example. The introduction of a voucher as part of the Swedish school choice system in 1991/1992, contributed to both competition, price-setting in education and the establishment of for-profit educational firms (Lundahl et al, 2013). Today, a few large educational firms dominate the upper secondary school-market in Sweden and they recently adopt an expansion strategy to export their schools internationally (Rönnberg et al, 2022). AcadeMedia, the example in our study, is among the largest educational firms that export education.
Privatisation in public education are societally contested (Ball, 2012). A recent national survey in Sweden, the majority of Swedes believe that for-profit schools should be banned (Lindblad et al, 2021).  Despite that, the parliamentary finance committee voted against a proposal in 2018 of limiting profit-making in the welfare sector (Finance committee report, 2017/2018) and large corporations' share of newly started schools is growing.  Furthermore, 30 percent of pupils chose independent upper-secondary schools, which is a sector dominated by large educational corporations (Swedish Schools Inspectorate, 2022).  
Marketizations of formerly non-marketized areas generate tensions between antagonistic values in business and education. In contrast to market values and conventions, egalitarian education is based on moral values and norms and this contradiction prompts contests, compromises, and justifications over the issue of worth in a context of the school market. Through the behavior of actors in markets and the use of practices, conventions arise within the system. When actors encounter criticisms or competing justifications for the market’s products, they use tests and justifications to determine what is valuable and by which measure (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006).
The aim of this study is to examine through which discourses and coordinative devices educational firms gain and maintain legitimacy within the arrangement of the Swedish education system. The empirical example is the large educational firm AcadeMedia. We interpret and analyse AcadeMedia’s annual reports that contain disclosed information, mandatory by law and descriptions of the firm's viewpoints and actions concerning crucial educational matters. Annual reports communicate fulfillment of societal and business expectations and in that sense, they can be regarded as devices of control of legitimacy.  
We pose the questions: Which conventions does AcadeMedia mobilise to justify its actions in the education system? Which discourses and devices does the firm mobilise to manage and influence education policy?
Focus in the analysis is on the rationalisation the firm uses for their actions through which they manage the arrangement of the education system and influence the decision making of educational policy. The theoretical approach is inspired by the French pragmatic sociologists Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (2006) and their theoretical framework of plural ‘orders of worth’ in different worlds of reality. Boltanski and Thévenot offer a model for analyzing different ways of combining competing orders of worth to justify actions in the education system. An analysis of actions demonstrates the gathering of devices and discursive resources and show how compromises are situated in specific arrangements of the educational system.

Actors orienting their behavior to various sets of values that exist in so-called worlds of justification in society. The present study, focusing on conventions, considers the typology of orders of worth enacted in specific worlds as an analytical tool in order to analyse the behavior of the educational firm (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Thévenot, 2011). Our data consist of AcadeMedia’s annual reports, collected from the time period 1994-2021. Annual reports communicate fulfillment of societal and business expectations and in that sense, they can be regarded as devices of control of legitimacy. In this material we can identify the relationship between rationalities in business, policy and the public sphere. The annual reports contain disclosed information, mandatory by law and descriptions of the firm's viewpoints and actions concerning critical educational matters. It allows us to examine how the firm interpret and respond to critical events and trace the ways it combines conventions in different worlds to test what can be justified in education. Testing may for example occur by questioning application of generally accepted procedures (e.g. price-setting of school-vouchers). At a deeper level, test may challenge organizing principles in practice as an attempt to promote different principles (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Thévenot, 2000).

In the context of this study, we expect that AcadeMedia’s actions for agreement and critique in debates on education interact with the shift in the way education is provided and financed, new practices of valuation and added values in education. Identifying specific controversies, we expect to show the firm’s act on and decide on their significance and worth. In reality tests, each situation is specific, for example in the test of digital education the object is digitisation, which is a technologic development that is framed in both societal and economic terms. In this regard, we could expect a compromise of the industrial worth of efficiency, the market worth of access to a new technology and the civic worth of equal access to education. The analytic tool allows us to detect both relations of conventions in various worth, their type and variation, for example interaction, trust and formal and informal networks. In this way, the expected findings concern the relationship between how orders of worth operate as coordinative devices within the system and the ways the educational firm manages conflicting orders of worth.

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