The Swedish Long-Term Survey (LTS) on economical development presents an ambitious plan for how to streamline educational choices in relation to a knowledge economy and global comparative advantages (SOU 2008a; 2008b). It proposes a generic relation of governance based on the premises that provisions of institutional and organizational resources by the State should be followed by an active policy of shaping individual disposition, our habitus, and consequently our educational wants (cf. Bourdieu 2005; Warren & Webb 2007). The political challenge is discerned as an issue of how political and economic regulation could also be shouldered by individual learning processes and self-regulation based on information of future incomes and opportunities in employment. In essence, individuals should learn the meaning of making the right choice in education for the benefit of, above all, new conditions for economic growth and his or her employability (cf. Beach 2008).

However LTS also raises questions as to how we can understand educational choices as a process of an active agency that is being subordinated to normative claims about economic structures in transition. This paper does not have the ambition of providing a full and fair explanation of this complex field. The ambition is more modest, and the aim of the paper is to apply a semiotic analysis of how economic objects (structures and actors) are presented and interrelated to the subjectification of individual choices in LTS. Theoretically, this concern is addressed by underlining that educational choices, like all social practices, require semiotic mediation (Keane 2008). This semiotic mediation in educational choices is seen in perspective of being constituted by signifying practices that are intrinsically material, (assumed conditions of the knowledge economy): assumptions inherently related to causalities framed by a global policy context on how and why individual choices are subjectifications for economic growth. 

By approaching educational choices in LTS as a dialectic relationship between semiotic and non-semiotic entities of economic objects and subjects, a consequence is argued to be that cognitive dimensions of subjects' self-realization and understanding of possible life-trajectories are mediated through signs and traces of economic exchange. How we analytically make use of these signifiers, based on economic objectification, are as a result argued to be an important contribution to how we can understand a policy-designed regulatory framework of choices. This has partly to do with the institutional and organizational settings that condition education and career paths, employment opportunities and normative principles of employability. Partly, it is vital for how people shape educational choices based on cognitive recognition within a personal horizon of action concerned with what we perceive is possible to achieve (Hodkins & Sparkes 1997). On a policy level, the meaning of making right choices is defined by agents' ability to interpret signs according to their hierarchical privileges of the economy. This righteousness is here argued to be rather problematic since it narrowly defines agents' choices as a single handed subjectification to social and economic structures, giving little space for our perceptual ability and cognition.

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