UW–Madison’s Kathryn Moeller is the author of an article published in the journal Educational Researcher, titled “Accounting for the Corporate: An Analytic Framework for Understanding Corporations in Education.”
“Corporations have become one of the dominant institutions of our time with extensive power and influence over educational systems around the world,” writes Moeller.
“In size and profit, many corporations are larger, wealthier, and more influential than nation-states and global governance institutions. Drawing on an integrative review of the literature on the privatization of education and an empirical case study of technology corporations like Microsoft and Apple, this article examines the corporate within the political economy of education. It argues that by analytically conceiving of corporations under the banner of the private sphere and, correspondingly, by subsuming the processes of corporatization within the processes of privatization, the literature on privatization conceals the very specific role and influence of corporations as for-profit actors.”
The article “puts forward an analytic framework for researching and theorizing corporations in education. How the field of education conceives of corporate actors and their related practices, processes, and power relations is analytically and empirically significant for ensuring equitable, transparent, and accountable educational systems in the United States and globally.”
Moeller is an assistant professor with the School of Education’s Department of Educational Policy Studies.
Learn more about this important study and access the article, here.