News Management in the Swedish School Sector.

Within the school sector, the development towards market orientation, privatisation, managerialism and mediatisation has put issues of measurement of performance and accountability in a new context. Such reforms have placed an increased stress on performance in school. During the last two decades, this development has been especially apparent in Sweden where substantial reforms have transformed the entire school system. Within a few years, Sweden transitioned from one of the most centralised to one of the most decentralised systems in the Western World and opened up the educational market for profit-maximising organisations and competition between schools. Based on such premises, it might be argued that impression management strategies -- i.e. creating an appealing image to consumers on the educational market -- become an important dimension of the management of educational organisations. To the best of our knowledge, empirical research that in detail investigates news management in the school sector has not been carried out before. Therefore, we consider this paper as an important contribution to the global literature on marketisation and public sector communication. The empirical data on which this study is based consists of survey-based interviews with persons responsible for communication/public relations in upper secondary school at the municipal/administrative level and constitutes a national representative sample of local school authorities (n=91) (attrition rate=9%). Topics covered in the interviews were the purpose regarding education in media relations, problems associated with the work of news management, potential conflicts between organisational self-interest and the information displayed to the public, and future concerns regarding news management (5-10 years). The interviews were written down in a narrative form and coded according to the similarities/differences-technique. Based on the results, we point out some inherent paradoxes associated with news management in the Swedish school sector. Firstly, there is an overarching paradox related to the ideal of openness in Swedish public sector organisations and the increasing necessity of providing a positive image of the organisation. Secondly, social media is considered an important tool to use in the future for communicating directly with clients on the educational market, but also seems to encompass the same dilemmas and problems associated with traditional news management. We conclude the paper by arguing that the introduction of market principles within the public sector in Sweden has had a great impact on the need for information control and we point to the necessity of further discussions and explorations of the relation between the marketisation and the question and ideal of organisational transparency in a democratic society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]