Since the mid-2010s, an education policy agenda emerged in curricula across the world projecting the need to teach computer programming in schools. This chapter discusses the insertion of programming into the Swedish compulsory curriculum and argues that this change was shaped and promoted by an assemblage of external actors and their political configurations in municipal, national and international policy spaces. To frame the context of this study, an overview of the Swedish context and the emergence of the programming agenda is going to be presented. Through network ethnography analysis, actors are identified and their interpersonal links are mapped. This allows for a discussion of how the Swedish programming agenda was governed by a politico-administrative elite which features an assemblage of diverse actors. Programming was promoted by governmental and inter-governmental agencies, national and multinational corporations, as well as for-profit and non-profit organizations. These promotions occurred in schools serving their own aspirations and interests by, among other things, forming alliances, sharing their beliefs via public media and mobilizing a variety of resources. The findings demonstrate both the networks and relationships between the members of the political-administrative elite, as well as the discourses that shaped and justified the formulation of the programming agenda within the context of Sweden. These findings highlight the role of private actors in particular, and their influence in education policymaking processes, while illustrating the positions they hold within the policymaking field.

Ball, S. J. (2015). What is policy? 21 years later: reflections on the possibilities of policy research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(3), 306–313. Ball, S. J., & Junemann, C. (2012). Networks, new governance and education [Electronic resource]. Policy. Ball, S. J., & Youdell, D. (2008). Hidd Barnett, M., & Finnemore, M. (2004). Rules for the World: International Organizations in Global Politics. Cornell University Press; JSTOR.