This doctoral study examines economy as it is enacted in the mundane practices of everyday life in early childhood education and care (ECEC), with a particular focus on the work of centre directors in Finland. Drawing on feminist political economy (FPE), the study approaches ECEC as female-dominated work that is commonly framed as a burden on the public economy, thereby obscuring its socially and economically productive dimensions (Bakker, 2020). From this perspective, economy is not understood as a singular or abstract system but as multiple, relational, and embedded in everyday practices. It materializes through the entangled relations of human and non-human actors, emphasizing their interconnectedness and mutual constitution (Collard & Dempsey, 2020). Accordingly, social practices and material–affective phenomena—such as tears, facial expressions, or shivers on the skin—are conceptualized as integral to economic life rather than as peripheral or private experiences (Moura & Bispo, 2018).

The dissertation mobilizes the concept of economization to examine how economic logics are applied to areas of life typically considered non-economic, such as education and care (Çalişkan & Callon, 2009; Spring, 2015). Focusing on local-level public austerity policies in Finnish ECEC, the study explores what it means to live and work in an economy-dominated society where the authority to define and speak about economic matters is predominantly assigned to economists, who are largely men (Elomäki et al., 2019). This focus enables an analysis of how economic rationalities shape governance, leadership practices, and professional subjectivities in ECEC.

Methodologically and theoretically, the study draws on assemblage thinking (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988; DeLanda, 2006) to trace the rhizome-like nature of economization. Assemblage provides a conceptual tool for examining how economization emerges through shifting relations between human agency, political rationalities, governing techniques, and material elements. In this dissertation, economization is understood as constituted through the interplay of municipal policies, legislation, curricula, information technologies, administrative systems, and affective forces such as stress, joy, and exhaustion (Çalişkan & Callon, 2009).

The empirical analysis begins by identifying economization as a key phenomenon in ECEC through an examination of sociomaterial assemblages that take shape when centre directors speak about their work. The analyses focus on directors’ everyday doings, connecting their accounts to municipal policy documents, legislative frameworks, and ECEC governing tools. This approach sheds light on why economization has become a dominant feature of contemporary ECEC. The study then examines the materialities through which economic austerity is enacted and sustained in ECEC, demonstrating how these materialities become infrastructural over time as policies, governing tools, and human and non-human actors connect and interact.

Finally, the dissertation moves beyond policy and organizational analyses to explore the affective dimensions of economization. By analysing my own embodied and visceral experiences as ECEC centre director, the study investigates what economy does in and through the human body (Massumi, 2002). This analysis highlights how compliance with austerity policies is produced not only through rational calculation but also through affective, bodily, and relational processes.

The overall contribution of the dissertation lies in conceptualizing economization as a constitutive force in Finnish ECEC, explicating how it is assembled and examining what it produces at institutional, organizational, and embodied levels. In the integrative chapter, the three articles are brought together as an assemblage of economization, each representing a layer that moves from individual experience to institutional governance. Collectively, the studies deepen understanding of how economization unfolds in practice and why it is so difficult to identify ruptures that might enable alternative ways of acting within ECEC.

This study adopts a qualitative, theoretically informed methodological approach designed to engage with the complex and multi-layered nature of institutionalized early childhood education and care (ECEC) (Klevering & McNae, 2018). To capture how economization unfolds in everyday ECEC leadership, the research combines interviews, document analysis, and autoethnographic inquiry. The empirical material consists of semi-structured interviews with ECEC centre directors (N = 7) conducted in a Finnish municipality undergoing efficiency measures due to fiscal deficits. The interviews focused on directors’ everyday work and decision-making under conditions of economic intensification. These interviews were analysed as sites where arranging assemblages emerged through directors’ engagements with institutional documents, including budgets, financial accounts, board proceedings, curricula, and centre-level action plans. The analysis examined how directors connected these documents to their daily practices and how they positioned themselves in relation to economic rationalities. The interview analyses indicated that centre directors occupy a pivotal role in either promoting or contesting economic austerity measures, which directed the study toward a closer examination of the material and affective dimensions of these processes. To move beyond indirect or representational accounts of institutional reality, the study incorporates an autoethnographic approach. Autoethnographic data were generated during 2020–2021 and analytically connected to autobiographical memories from my earlier professional experience as an ECEC teacher. This approach enabled a systematic examination of lived, mundane encounters with economization in ECEC (Ellis et al., 2011; Adams et al., 2015). Autoethnography was particularly important for analysing affects produced through economization. Drawing on affect theory (Massumi, 2002), the study attends to embodied and pre-cognitive experiences that are difficult to capture through interviews or document analysis alone. Affects are analysed as materializing as emotions and as organizing forces within economic assemblages. This methodological approach enables an exploration of how economized subjectivities are constituted and how subject formation governs everyday practices in ECEC. Ethical considerations were addressed throughout the research process. Interview participants provided informed consent after receiving information about the aims of the study, data management, anonymity, and their right to withdraw. Research permission was obtained from the municipal administration, enabling access to internally restricted documents. Ethical practice in autoethnography followed the principle of process consent, whereby ethical decisions are continuously negotiated in situ (Ellis, 2007). All individuals mentioned in fieldnotes and publications were anonymized, and spoken consent was obtained when others’ actions were included in the autoethnographic material (Tullis, 2016).

The findings indicate that economy and austerity policies play a dominant role in the everyday governance of early childhood education and care (ECEC) at the local level in Finland. Although Finnish ECEC has undergone significant curricular and pedagogical development, the implementation of these reforms is persistently constrained by chronic resource scarcity. As a result, pedagogical ambitions are continuously negotiated against economic imperatives, positioning economization as a central organizing force in everyday ECEC practices. Finnish ECEC legislation regulating child-staff ratios emerges as a key driver of economization. While intended to safeguard pedagogical quality and children’s wellbeing, these ratios also function as mechanisms of economic governance. Local administrations closely monitor staffing levels in relation to children’s attendance, with the aim of operating as close as possible to legally defined minimums in order to reduce labour costs and enhance economic efficiency. This monitoring is increasingly mediated through digital management systems that produce real-time numerical data. These numbers and technologies form economic assemblages through which economization is enacted. When economic intensification is required, such assemblages expand, drawing in additional actors and demanding increased efficiency from centre directors and ECEC personnel. In this process, numbers do not merely represent economic conditions but actively participate in producing them. Austerity policies further interfere with everyday pedagogical work by granting digital monitoring devices overriding authority. ECEC personnel are positioned simultaneously as objects of economic governance and as agents responsible for implementing economic intensification, requiring them to balance pedagogical commitments with economic calculations. Children also become implicated in these processes, as their pedagogical and developmental needs are increasingly assessed through an economic lens. Overall, the analysis highlights austerity as a powerful governing mechanism that reshapes pedagogical practices, professional subjectivities, and institutional priorities in ECEC, while also opening space for critical reflection on and resistance to economic intensification in education.

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