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It is well established that participation in formal adult education varies by individual background characteristics. However, less attention has been paid to examining inequality in participation as a consequence of policy changes, such as educational expansion. This paper examines the process of tremendous expansion in Swedish Higher Vocational Education (HVE), a vocationally oriented postsecondary educational segment driven by labor market needs. Using a demographic approach with a sociological lens on educational participation, we analyze administrative data from registers, uncovering who has been served by this expanding adult educational form. Our results indicate that expansion of HVE has led to growth in participation for policy-prioritized groups, although the rate of growth in enrollment between groups varies and corresponds to population changes. We also locate the extent of cumulative advantages in participation and discuss these results in relation to social (in)equality in formalized HVE.

Privatisation of public education is becoming more and more common across the world. As much current research presupposes causal links between the degree of privatisation and issues of competition and student's free choice, we see a need for research on other ways of organising the presence of private providers in public education. In this article, we study how two Swedish municipalities use public procurement to contract private providers and organise adult education. Interestingly, we find that competition is more heavily at play in the municipality that outsources half of its adult education, than in the municipality that outsources all adult education. We view these findings as vital for understanding how education is being outsourced to private providers and for furthering the discussion on the consequences of the ongoing privatisation of education.

In this article we report on findings from a large-scale bibliographic study conducted based on the citation practices within the field of research on adult learning. Our data consist of 151,261 citation links between more than 33,000 different authors whose papers were published in five leading international journals in the field of adult learning during the time period 2006-2014. By analysing the composition of the dominating citation clusters we are able to construct a telescopic view of the research field based on an accumulation of bibliographic citations. The results consist of two parts. First we go through the dominating players active in the field, their position and mutual relationship. Secondly, we derive two main structural oppositions inherent in the citation networks, one connected to the research object (studying education or work) and the second to the level of analysis (cognition or policy). We find that the most dominating tradition within adult learning the last few decades--sociocultural perspectives on learning--occupies a very central position in the space of citations, balancing between these opposing poles. We hope that this analysis will help foster reflexivity concerning our own research practices, and will reveal the relations of dominance currently prevailing within the field of adult learning.

In this piece, we argue that an economy of publication and citations has emerged that not only changes the notion of what is deemed quality in educational research but also changes the incentives of us as researchers. With pressure on publishing in "international" journals, education researchers are increasingly pushed to publish their research in the article format, and for many, in their second or third language (English). Additionally, we are to direct the research to an audience who might not at all be interested or knowledgeable about the context under scrutiny. With such pressure to publish in English-language journals, the question of who is allowed to publish and who is cited is of paramount significance. Based on our own empirical research on the adult educational research field as well as other bibliometric research, we propose that there is an "Anglophone" bias in educational research. We end with a discussion on the implications of the current trend to publish in indexed English-language journals and suggest that "Anglophone" as well as non-Anglophone scholars need to start citing other scholars than those from the dominating "Anglophone" countries in order to further enhance knowledge and debate within education. The ultimate irony of the developments described in this piece is that the researchers from non-Anglophone countries actively engage in a publication game that underscores their own subordination.

Research funding, promotions, and career trajectories are currently increasingly dependent on the emerging economy of publications and citations across the globe. Such an economy encourages scholars to publish in international journals that are indexed in databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. These developments place an increased emphasis on the question of who is allowed to publish in the journals listed there and whose research counts as valuable. Based on bibliographic data from articles submitted to three main journals in the field of adult education research between 2005 and 2012, we scrutinize the extent to which the emerging economy of publications and citations is dependent on national and regional boundaries. Our results show how four Anglophone countries dominate the field in relation to both published articles and the share of most cited articles and where the publication pattern of these authors are national and regional rather than international.

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