https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904121993251
European Educational Research Journal
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DOI: 10.1177/1474904121993251
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Patterns of actorship in legitimation
of educational changes: The role of
transnational and local knowledge
Jitka Wirthová
Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Czech Republic
Abstract
This paper examines how different meanings of knowledge (transnational, comparative, statistical,
local, and personal) relationally stabilise the agential position for the legitimation of educational
reform across state and non-state actors. Analysing the materiality and systems of reason of
proposals to reform education in the pre-election debates in the Czech Republic, the focus is
placed on different patterns of legitimate and legitimating actorship, assembled from global and local
relations. Through an ecological conceptualisation the research identifies the problematisation and
decomposition of actorship into contradictory assemblages of both traditional actors (teachers
and politicians) and relatively new ones (NGOs). The relationship of the civil sector and the
state structures allowed the emergence of new non-state, non-professional actors (NGOs) who
aggregate their expertise from transnational data and legitimate both their position as experts
and the particular educational change. This has consequences for non-experts as politicians
and teachers. The transnational and European context penetrated into the Czech educational
sphere not through an elite class of system actors but through the representatives of NGOs.
Rhetorically saving education from degradation, NGOs engage in spreading the transnational data
and externalise the legitimation of educational reform and thus become the bearers (although
agentially limited) of the European space.
Keywords
Actorship, educational reform, legitimation ecology, transnational knowledge, expert
knowledge, destatisation, expertise loss
Introduction
For almost two decades scholars have been inquiring into the new Europeanisation of education
policies, focusing on new spaces and new actors. Although scholars have identified the idea of the
knowledge economy as a major aspect of the new Europeanisation and transnational statistical
Corresponding author:
Jitka Wirthová, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Pekařská 16, Praha 5, 158 00,
Czech Republic.
Email: jitka.wirthova@fsv.cuni.cz
General submission
993251EER0010.1177/1474904121993251European Educational Research JournalWirthová
research-article2021
2	 European Educational Research Journal 00(0)
comparative data as its main device (Lawn and Lingard, 2002), the actual channels of transnational
knowledge transaction and relations to other kinds of knowledge need to be studied with regard to
the rapid changes in the institution of education (Davies and Mehta, 2018). There are many studies
on the influence of transnational knowledge in national or local contexts (Hultqvist et al., 2018; for
the Central European context see Koucký and Černohorský, 1996; for the post-Soviet context see
Silova, 2002; Silova and Niyozov, 2020). However, these studies focus on the path of transnational
comparative data as one object, and not so often on its relations to other local knowledge and positions.
This means that the focus on the relations among transnational knowledge, local agential
patterns, the role of local knowledge, and the role of the state structures is rather neglected (Hartong
and Piattoeva, 2019).
The current debate about actors participating in defining desirable education refers to many new
and not very transparent actors (Ball, 2010a; Fumasoli et al., 2018; Robertson et al., 2012) and the
very divergent requirements placed on more traditional ones, such as teachers (Anagnostopoulos
et al., 2016; Erss, 2018; Priestley et al., 2020; Robertson and Sorensen, 2018). We should not
neglect the fact that every time new actors become involved, the roles and positions of the others
involved re-change. Actorship in policy legitimating and influencing is characterised as multilayered,
while actors represent various roles and loyalties. For a decade researchers have observed
that it is not useful to focus only on actorship within formal policy responsibilities (jurisdiction) to
seek the sources of actorship in legitimating educational change (Ball, 2010b). The agency in
legitimation is no longer self-evident; various sources are needed to stabilise an agential position
in a given social ecology, especially the different kinds of knowledge (transnational, situational,
‘expert’). It is the given ecology in which actorship is achieved (Biesta and Tedder, 2006) in different
possible positions.
Contemporary literature links many ambiguities in actorship to the increasingly generalising
context of the European space of the production, transfer, and evaluation of knowledge (Ball,
2010b; Carvalho, 2012; Fenwick et al., 2014; Lawn, 2011; Ozga, 2008). These studies revealed the
decisive role of comparative and standardised knowledge usage in achieving agency (Grek and
Ozga, 2010). Studies on statistical calculations in education policy indicate very clearly that transnational
aggregated datasets are pushing out much of the local knowledge, whether that of teachers,
parents, or local politicians, in defining their own problems and solutions (Anagnostopoulos
et al., 2016; Klees and Edwards Jr., 2016; Tveit and Lundahl, 2018). Thus it is important to study
the different paths of knowledge-legitimacy dynamic that different European contexts undergo.
The statistical calculation of transnational data as a main feature of the new Europeanisation of
education policy (Lawn, 2011) is entangled simultaneously in political, semantic, and social processes
and creates a relatively new meaning of the expert in legitimating educational change
(Gorur, 2015). Nevertheless, the rise of measuring expertise in the sense of statistics, comparativeness,
and standardisation in managing education systems has been taking place since the beginning
of the 20th century (Lawn, 2013). Therefore, the position of expertise conceived of as statistical
comparative data has a longer history and touches on many other ‘non-education’ social policies
(for example, health). Hacking (1991, 1992) and others (Porter, 1995) have shown how the collection
of statistics created the bureaucratic machinery of the technology of power in a modern state
and questioned statistics’ self-portrait as apolitical, neutral, and objective descriptive information.
In recent decades many studies have documented the performativity of statistics on the transnational
level as well in construing the Europeanised space of education policy (Landri, 2018; Lawn,
2011). Nevertheless, what is important here is the consequences of this kind of knowledge for
agential positions in the legitimation of reform. In her influential paper, Gorur (2015) demonstrated
how politics intervene even in the epistemology of such statistical tools (OECD indicators), which
are not merely tools any longer and are highly productive in the educational world. Further, such
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data renders the position of science and scientists as measurement experts less important in such an
educational world and shifts the expertise to non-scientific experts – the policymakers using these
data. Therefore, it is possible to say that a particular type of knowledge mobilises a particular kind
of expert and these are not necessarily its producers, as we will see in the empirical sections below.
The focus of this study is the Czech Republic; nevertheless, avoiding methodological nationalism
and statism, it will describe the similarities and differences between European knowledge
flows in achieving agency. In many respects, the Czech case illustrates the complicated way in
which transnational knowledge influences agential structure because of the different positions of
the state and the non-state domain in comparison with other European countries.
In this study I make use of relational sociology (Dépelteau, 2018), researching an ecology of
agential patterns, relationally interconnected, within which the positions of diverse actors to participate
(or not) in public debate over educational reform have stabilised. The reason is that many
studies which focus on issues relating to knowledge – legitimation – agency are often designed as
case studies of only one type of actor (e.g. only teachers, NGOs, consultants, or formal policymakers),
or a case study of a group of actors (e.g. Global Partnership for Education). The focus on the
relations among various agential positions, relationally patterned, within a given ecology is not
sufficiently developed (Persson, 2018). It would be misleading to focus only on formal system
actors and on one kind of knowledge. From this conceptualisation follow the research questions:
(a) How were different positions for legitimating practice stabilised; by which knowledge, systems
of reasoning, and relations to audiences? (b) How does the particular meaning of proper knowledge
(transnational comparative knowledge, expertise, or ‘comprehensive situational knowledge’)
intervene in stabilising these agential positions? (c) How were non-state structures mobilised by
transnational data in a situation characterised by the increasing weakening of the state structures?
The paper answers the questions via an analysis of the discourse and materiality of a Czech
case. It considers the extensive educational reform debate before the parliamentary elections in the
autumn of 2017 and the ongoing debates before the appointment of a new Minister of Education in
2018, and includes various material and textual sources. The aim of this article is to demonstrate
translation, interconnection, and diverse meaning and the use of knowledge in a national case
which intervene in stabilising agential positions – patterned actorship in legitimating educational
change. On the theoretical level, the paper contributes to the studies on actorship in legitimation of
education by a specific decomposition of the notion of actorship/agential positions into various
relationally interlinked instances. It allows us to understand actorship in the plural, in its many
emerging patterns and interdependent forms. Thus, this paper provides a detailed elaboration of the
social patterns of agential positions and the ambiguities among them. However local the case may
be, it contributes to an understanding of contemporary changes in policy actorship and the way
knowledge travels in interlinked legitimation ecologies in Europe.
The Czech case in the European context – different paths of
transnational knowledge flows
Decentralised education reforms based on transnational comparisons have been taking place in the
Czech environment since 2004, with several similar results to those observed in other Western
countries (Hartong, 2018; Robinson, 2015), such as the emergence of many new ‘non-educational’
actors and a loss of professionalism and expertise from formal organisations. However, the Czech
environment has its specific features, as a result of which it can be assumed that the dynamics and
impacts of the spread of transnational knowledge will be different from those described in other
studies, especially those from the Anglo-Saxon environment (Hartong and Piattoeva, 2019;
Piattoeva et al., 2018). In order to understand the position of the legitimation of Czech educational
4	 European Educational Research Journal 00(0)
policy, it is necessary to take into account the legacy of the Communist regime before 1989 and its
impact on trust in the state. It would be misleading to perceive the changes in the area of   Central
and Eastern Europe only as catching up with the developments in the West (Silova, 2002).
The Czech state structures have principally been weakened on the ideational level, as the state
was perceived as a repository of totalitarian force, which is documented in post-Communist countries
generally (Lavalette and Ferguson, 2007: 450; Meyer and Boyd, 2001: 1, 3). Mistrust of the
state had various consequences for the position of civil society and the state structures in the legitimation
of educational change and reform. While many scholars describe the situation of the fragmentation
of political initiatives as resulting from the intended political project of the central
government in the field of education (Kauko et al., 2018), in the Czech context the picture of a
chaotic and thoughtless education system is due to insufficient capacity and the overall inefficiency
of the state (Dvořák et al., 2014). While Western civil structures criticise the state as being too neoliberal
(Wilkins, 2012), in the Czech context these civil structures rather criticise the state as ineffective
and lacking managerial leadership, outcome standards, and evidence-based policies
(Wirthová, 2019). Education is among the items on the agenda with the least state investment,
political battles over education are rare, and the main bearer of this agenda is the civil sector, with
many NGOs trying to ‘save and rescue’ education from degradation and chaos (EDUin, 2018).
The dynamic of the influence of European transnational data traveling in the legitimation of
policy is rather specific within the Czech context. In the 1990s, a relatively strong interchange
between OECD experts and Czech authorities planning educational reform before joining the
European Union in 2004 was followed by a process of increasing weakening of state structures and
a decrease in the influence of this data in legitimating and planning education. A good illustration
is the state-funded publishing of a translation of OECD reports, which started with an extensive
volume using this data and accompanied by an original study worked out by Czech researchers,
followed by reports that were more and more limited, and ending with a short overview published
on the Ministry website by an ordinary official in 2016.
This situation has motivated the selection of the case. The Czech pre-election period in 2017
was a rather unusual period with regard to debates about education, because it was the first time
since the general curricular reform in 2004 that such an extensive public debate about education
had taken place. On the one hand, the main topic of these discussions respected the trajectory of a
specific Czech debate about education – the issue of the urgent need to revise the elementary
school curricula – as the 2004 reform was generally deemed to have been unsuccessful (Štech,
2013). On the other hand, the newly opened space of legitimation attracted new actors and kinds of
knowledge which, up to that time, had been used occasionally in general public debates, mainly
transnational comparisons. This opened a channel through which transnational data exercised its
influence, however, mainly through non-state actors who then become its main translators into the
Czech context. Many traditional but also relatively new actors (politicians, inter-ministerial working
groups, industry and employers’ representatives, teachers’ unions, NGOs, and public figures)
tried to take part in these debates and to promote their own educational claims, which took the form
of very divergent desired curriculum content, such as inclusive education, lifelong learning, multicultural
education, education for national pride, civil defence education, financial literacy, manual
work and gardening education, and many others.
Although the topic followed on from the specific history of Czech educational reform (Porubský
and Pešková, 2018), the general pre-election public educational debates were triggered significantly
by the publication of comparative data displaying that the Czech Republic invested the lowest
share of GDP into basic and secondary education, and teachers’ salaries were the lowest when
compared with all the OECD countries (OECD, 2016). This also raised the issue of teachers’ roles
in defining desirable education. Being an example of what is elaborated as the dynamics of
Wirthová	 5
scandalisation or shock (Carvalho, 2012; Nordin, 2018; Pons, 2012), this data also legitimated not
only the organisation of the public debate itself, but also several parliamentary initiatives, specific
governmental budget packages, and other steps. In many media interviews, politicians were confronted
directly with the OECD graphs and asked to remedy the situation (e.g. ČT24, 2017a).
However, it must be stressed that the situation was far from the realisation of an ‘evidence-based’
policy decision. On the contrary, the governmental measures were enforced to a significant degree
by criticism from NGOs, which seemed to possess the most extensive overview of these datasets
and demanded evidence-based policymaking, which was lacking. In an extended temporal focus
on the Czech context, these are the NGOs which criticise the government for lacking rationality,
management, and logically linked measures, for ad hoc and chaotic decisions, and so forth (SKAV
et al., 2010). As we will see further, governmental actors, especially organisations authorised
directly by policymaking in education (the National Institute for Education), lacked a position in
these debates as actors. In that sense their presence in these debates was minor.
However, the consensus over need for reform was apparent only on the surface of the debates in
the period. Because of the very different systems of reasoning underlying legitimation on the side
of politicians, NGOs, and associations’ representatives, greater confusion and tensions opened up,
which led to the very problematic nature of the formation of the positions of the actors involved.
From the sociological point of view, the research question relates to the form of actorship and how
agency is achieved (Biesta et al., 2017). In the following passages, I provide conceptualisation,
description of empirical material, and research method
The educational legitimation ecology – actors and knowledge
within relations
To answer the research questions, I have pursued the perspective of relational sociology (Abbott,
2016; Biesta and Tedder, 2006; Decuypere and Simons, 2016; Dépelteau, 2018; Emirbayer, 1997),
together with developments of non-self-evident actorship, particularly Boltanski’s model of critical
action (Boltanski, 2011). This conceptual interlinkage, embedded in a broader ‘ecological’
strand (Biesta and Tedder, 2006), is able to consider the actor as a non-essentialist category (for an
exhaustive systematisation of many sources and approaches of the relational sociology, see
Vandenberghe, 2018). Therefore, I do not consider the notions of actor, competence, and qualification
in a formal legal way as administrative competences, legal responsibilities, or professional
qualifications (Boltanski, 2011: 69). Such a conceptualisation very often narrows many possible
social actions and processes which influence the forming of position for legitimating an educational
claim.
In his linked ecologies, Andrew Abbott suggests that ‘it is the process of constructing the relations
between actors and locations that in fact constitutes and delimits both actors and locations’
(Abbott, 2016: 39). He called these interlinkages and specific arrangements of actors and other
instances a ligation. Similarly, Boltanski intends to cover the materiality of such ligations: ‘construction
of assemblies of objects, arrangements that hold together, the fitness of which can be
demonstrated’ (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2000: 212–213). Therefore the ecology of educational
legitimation is analytically constituted by public situations and events involving practices of ‘making
sense’ of the qualifications and disqualifications (Popkewitz, 2000) of appropriate actors,
knowledge, ligations, and tasks (Abbott, 2016: 39).
These notions (in italics in the text below) refer to non-self-evident actorship, which does not
precede the event. The competence of anyone to be an actor does not lie in his/her transcendental
subjectivity, but in social settings – in the affirmation that he/she can be an actor. However, these
affirmations are not embedded in a solid social structure, but rather in concatenations of events and
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in the discursive and material arrangements of situations (Abbott, 2016: 40, 45, 73–74; Boltanski
and Thévenot, 2000: 209).
To be an actor, nonetheless, is not enough. To be able to provide an argument publicly, to speak
for or against a claim, in the terms of being a critical actor, one needs to possess a qualification
which is accessible in the agora where one is allowed by means of different forms of qualification
to be present in the position of an addressor (Boltanski, 2011: 69). This qualification involves both
material and semantic forms. Other actors (without a qualification) are allowed to be present in the
debate as well, but they find themselves in the position of the audience. If they want to speak, they
become qualification-value candidates – a voice which cannot yet confirm or disconfirm or argue
for or against (Hacking, 2004), a candidate to whom it may one day become appropriate to listen.
It means that through the process of qualifying operations in the public space there also take place
neutralisations that make any critical action – an action that qualifies as part of the reform debate
– impossible. These neutralisations take part precisely in the process of arranging situations in
which some actors or objects are present, but not visible, or are subsumed under a particular category,
so that in the end they are within a category which does not allow them to act. They are left
in the ambivalent situation of a qualification-value candidate, either as a mere audience or a relatively
less important actor with a weaker voice and ability to act. This non-stabilised nature of
actorship is the backdrop against which many public representations try to create legitimacy for
particular actors and claims (Lindberg and Knutsson, 2019).
Affirming that critical action or justifying, legitimating action is not self-evident raises an
important question related to the public nature of such situations. For Boltanski, the notion of the
public is crucial in setting the situation for critical action (Boltanski, 2011: 69). Individual, private
criticism, which is not connected to common notions of what is just, appropriate, and good, is not
a critical action in a sociological sense of legitimation (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999). Such a
public situation stems from specific public disruption of affairs that were taken for granted, which
involves a kind of reflexive move (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999). This reflexive move can be
triggered by any public scandal or shock, whether it is a transnational comparison or some other
matter. The problem in the realm of education is that in contemporary European societies, the
external comparative way of triggering public indignation is becoming prevalent (Tveit and
Lundahl, 2018).
Therefore, it is appropriate to tackle the ambiguous phenomena of position and action with an
analysis of the arrangements (material and discursive) of instances in situations where practices of
‘making reasonability’ of educational reform take place – situations of the legitimation of educational
claims. These situations form the educational legitimation ecology, from which follows the
aim of the study, which is to understand the ways in which actorship was established in the Czech
pre-election educational legitimation ecology, with the public debates and public documents as its
empirical sites.
Empirical material and method – relational analytical work
There were several significant organisations that ran the main educational debates, but the main
organisers were NGOs. The oldest one is SKAV (Permanent Conference of Associations in
Education), founded in 2003; a younger one is EDUin (founded in 2010), and they are interconnected
both personally and through their infrastructure. Together, they organise what are termed
round tables (RT) devoted to various educational issues. In the period covered by this study, they
prepared 10 RTs with various panellists, one with politicians only, and one with teachers’ representatives
only. Student NGOs took part in organising public debate too: the Czech High School
Students’ Union (ČSU) held the first public educational debate with politicians in that period, with
Wirthová	 7
the personal cooperation of EDUin (as the moderator). This debate, called ‘Education vs. Politics’,
also established the discourse of the contrast between politics and education, which prevailed in
many other events (BLESK, 2017; ČSU, 2017; SKAV and EDUin, 2017). A student NGO dedicated
to the preparation of future teachers Otevřeno! (Opened!) organised an ‘Education Night’
(annually from 2016) with many workshops, discussions, and lectures (Otevřeno, 2017).
Additionally, more traditional actors, such as the Faculty of Education of Charles University (PedF
UK, 2017), the Czech Chamber of Deputies (PSP ČR, 2017), and the Employers’ Union (UZS,
2017), held several public debates or conferences, although they were not so numerous.
I have chosen the events which enabled the tracing of various formations of the position to
enforce educational claims publicly. The data collection covers all the public events (the period
from the end of 2016 to January 2018) about education on the general national level, while local
and individual debating was not included: public debates (14 in total, 10 video records); interviews
and discussions devoted to education on the general level broadcast on TV (private and public)
with nationwide coverage (six in total); selected press releases regarding the main events described
above (four in total); educational policy documents intended for various audiences (politicians, the
general public) (seven in total) published by the main actors present during the period covered by
the study: NGOs (three in total), governmental organisations charged with acting (three in total),
and an academic research centre (one in total); texts from social media events and (or) web invitations
set together with the main public events (17 in total), and observation notes taken at many
events (10 in total). Taken together, there were 31 events and 58 items to analyse. In this way, I
manage to capture different ways of forming positions together with the actors’ framings of their
own role and that of others. For collecting the data, I made use of Newton Media Archive via
Charles University licence, public media resources, and research observation.
I have used a qualitative analysis based on post-foundational and relational ontology
(Macgilchrist, 2016), which employs categories in a non-essential manner (Knutsson and Lindberg,
2017); categories do not determine the content in advance, on the contrary, the particular content is
a research question. This relational methodological perspective is not primarily concerned with
texts but primarily tracks the relations within a situation (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2000) and is first
and foremost attentive to systems and patterns of references and ‘indexicality’ of language, which
configure social shapes which are highly consequential for social action (Fontdevila and White,
2013; Prior, 2003: 11–23). Specifically, I have traced the references to the normative content of
‘should be’ in education; this means legitimating practices and strategies in both their material and
semantic dimensions in order to capture the formation and colliding of agential positions – different
patterns of actorship. The basic analytical unit was a public expression of a demand for a
change in education with regard to the justification of the type of actor, audience, knowledge, and
relevance. I have traced the relations among the practices of occupying these categories to identify
an actor’s position, together with the consequences for possibilities for actors’ action.
I coded the data in several iterative steps (Saldana, 2009). First, structural coding with nonessentialist
categories was employed and led to the division of several analytical layers: the
competence of an actor, audience, reasonability (knowledge), relevance (problems to solve,
solutions to problems). Then I applied versus codes to each of these levels by the sub-code of
‘neutralisation’. All the layers were gradually divided into ‘actor-action’ subcategories through
taxonomic coding in order to uncover ‘who can do what and how’. Subsequently, a patterned
content emerged and the identification of agential position was divided into ‘qualification to be
present at a public debate’, ‘responsibility for outcomes and action’, and ‘competence for an
agenda and a problem being solved’. I suggest these three analytical dimensions as points of
interpretation of the findings introduced below; these are the results of the analysis, together
with the literature study, as they came to the fore as borders that made visible both the
8	 European Educational Research Journal 00(0)
advantageous and the disadvantageous relations among the actors. Theming the data and pattern
coding indicated the meaning of the differences, which made it possible to detect particular patterns
of actorship and contradiction among them. The analysis was processed via CAQDA.
In the following section, reporting the main findings, I provide an elaboration of the social patterns
of three agential positions and the ambiguities among them. First, I will focus on material
formation of an actor’s competence to be part of the education reform debate. Second, I will demonstrate
constraints and possibilities for action of politicians’, teachers’, and NGOs’ agential
positions.
Who can debate? Materiality and knowledge
The process of building and maintaining or neutralising the competence takes place on one level in
different material choices made on the basis of different knowledge systems. It is obvious that in
the case of public debates devoted to education, only some people were invited by the debate
organisers. What is more important is that for the organisers the key, the criterion for making
choices like this, was different kinds of knowledge. In all the cases of debates with politicians it
was pre-election survey data (BLESK, 2017; ČSU, 2017; SKAV and EDUin, 2017). In the case of
the discussion about teachers, the key fact was being a representative who was knowledgeable
about teachers’ complex and hard situation, which serves as a marker of being an expert on teachers
(SKAV and EDUin, 2018). In all the public debates invited individuals acknowledged as actors
became, according to these knowledges, either panellists, less important semi-panellists, or part of
the audience.
The material dimensions of the arrangements of these debates were very important for forming
the actor’s ability to act. In every debate with politicians, the panellists (with the highest score in
the pre-election survey) sat on chairs placed on the upper stage, and semi-panellists (with the lowest
score needed for entrance to the Chamber) were placed underneath, in the front row of the
audience (ČSU, 2017), or stood at the edge of the panel (BLESK, 2017; SKAV and EDUin, 2017).
The schedule of the interactions was also arranged according to these qualifications – each panellist
had a head microphone, while the semi-panellists had one shared hand-held microphone. The
panellists were allowed to voice their ‘ideas’ for a predetermined length of time, while the semipanellists
were allowed to ‘react’ after them in a few sentences. Thus, the formal qualifications of
both types of actors (panellists and semi-panellists) were the same (politicians), but their qualification
to be a partner in the debate relied on the quantitative comparative data, not on formal
responsibility.
Mr [xxx], thank you for your question. Pre-election surveys served as a key in the selection of parties. We
invited the parties with the highest preferences directly to the panel of the debate, while the parties whose
surveys predict lower success but still have something to say about education from our point of view are
invited to the front row, where they will be introduced as participants in the debate and involved in the
moments when it will be relevant. [xxx], 1st Vice-Chairman (ČSU, 2017: Facebook answer)
In the only debate with (about) teachers – ‘How should teachers be involved in formulating
education policy?’ (SKAV and EDUin, 2018) – the material and temporal arrangements represented
many ambiguities of teachers’ competence to be part of the public debate. This debate was
organised by SKAV and EDUin, whose ‘round tables’ usually attract high attendances, but in this
particular case, the turnout was meagre. This debate took place at 2 p.m. on a regular working day,
which prevented many teachers from being physically part of the discussion. The invited panellists
were not teachers only through the merit of being a teacher. That was not a sufficient condition.
Wirthová	 9
Additional characteristics were needed in order to receive an invitation. Teachers (if there were
any) were in the position of being members of the audience.
We are experiencing a kind of crisis of representation. I am already a professional, but the ordinary teachers
are basically our members, but they are ordinary teachers, yes. (SKAV and EDUin, 2018: a teachers’
representative)
The panellists were from different types of competing teachers’ unions and associations, trying
to represent teachers’ voices in the public and policy domains. The panel was composed of the
president of the traditional Czech and Moravian Trade Union of Workers in Education, the chairman
of the newly established Association of Teachers of Civic Education and Social Sciences, the
vice-president of the Chamber of Pedagogues, and the chairwoman of Teachers’ Platform. The
latter two organisations were established in 2017 through the dispute over the new Ministry document
Teachers’ Career Framework. It was the Chamber of Pedagogues who organised a petition
against this document, with over 22,000 teachers’ signatures, which led afterwards to the cancellation
of the Ministry initiative. The consequences of this petition for the formation of teachers’
competence will be discussed in more detail below.
In the debate, all four organisations’ representatives were called upon to present the main aims
of their organisations and their main activities in acting as ‘voices’ for teachers. Although their
main activities, as stated, were organising different kinds of ‘fora’ for teachers to debate their
teaching problems and opinions on policy (petitions and social media questionnaires), the representatives
still disqualified the teachers by framing the lack of engagement as teachers’ own
decision:
We will not lie to ourselves that teachers are active. (SKAV and EDUin, 2018: a teachers’ representative)
So, our effort is to bring together active teachers who care about that communication, because it is, of
course, straightforward and fair to say that a lot of teachers don’t care about that communication. Build on
the former and continue. (SKAV and EDUin, 2018: a teachers’ representative)
Moreover, although the representatives endeavoured to establish their authority to represent the
teachers by ‘understanding their hard work’ and their problems, and by possessing ‘knowledge
about teachers’ complex situation’, it was mainly the lack of such knowledge (according to the
representatives) which prevented teachers from being part of the policy debate. This ‘hard situation’
prevented ordinary teachers, according to their representatives, from understanding it.
In such a meaning, a representative was more knowledgeable, not necessarily about a particular
teaching problem (this was an inviolable teacher competence) but about a complex situation. The
reasonable knowledge needed for a teacher to act as part of the public debate about teachers does
not reside in teaching knowledge. Because of the implicit consideration about the appropriate type
of knowledge, it was reasonable to invite teachers’ representatives, not teachers themselves, to
discuss teachers’ agendas. Knowledge considerations have material consequences, together with
possibilities for action. This debate was temporarily and materially arranged, together with the
kind of reasonable knowledge used, in such a way that the implicit answer to the question in the
title of this debate was: ‘In no way.’
On that account, becoming a panellist in the public debates was the significant qualification
process through which different kinds of knowledge (pre-election surveys, comprehensive
knowledge of teachers’ complex situation) was decisive for taking part in an educational
debate – not the formal responsibilities. These observations correspond with many studies
10	 European Educational Research Journal 00(0)
devoted to expert knowledge in policymaking, which focus on the specific process of becoming
an expert through public presence (for a general view see Turner, 2015; for a specific
Czech case see Štech, 2019). In other words, it is a process in which the knowledge used, in a
particular system of reason, has real consequences for possibilities of action (Popkewitz,
2000). Nevertheless, the category of qualification for public justification or criticism was not
directly connected with the category of competence for agenda. As we will see in the following
sections, responsibility, competence, and qualification were assembled and combined differently
with different actors.
The patterns of educational reform actors – politicians, teachers,
and NGOs
In the settings described above, only certain types of action are possible. But the competence and
qualification to be part of the debate are not embedded exclusively in the public debates themselves.
Rather, they are part of a broader space of semantics which is also shaped by other legitimating
events, practices, and strategies. Producing strategic educational policy documents, press
releases, and social media events is a crucial practice in the production of constraints and possibilities.
In this textual data, as well as in the materiality of public debates, competence in the
cases of politicians, teachers, and NGOs was built in a somewhat contradictory way. The research
uncovers the difference between responsibility for the outcomes, competence to be an actor in
the agenda, and being qualified to be part of the public debate. These categories (responsibility,
competence, and qualification) were not synonyms and were not necessarily allies. The research
reveals many tensions between responsibility – competence – qualification in participating in
educational reform.
Responsible, qualified, but non-competent politicians
Politicians were generally deemed very important actors, worthy of being addressed, invited to
public debates, and asked for answers. Because of the fact that they were predominantly in the
position of panellists, they were acknowledged as being qualified to voice justification or criticism
of educational reform publicly. Their voices were validated as being qualified both materially and
within the discourse. On the other hand, politicians’ competence to be actors in the agenda – to be
competent with regard to the problem being solved – did not automatically go together with their
public qualification. Rather, the politicians themselves, as well as the debate organisers who invited
them, ‘neutralised’ or limited their competence.
An illustration of this mismatch of qualification and competence was provided by the framing
of a debate organised by a Czech NGO devoted to promoting progressive changes in secondary
education. This debate was called ‘Politics vs. Education’and the panel was formed of invited politicians
according to the criterion of the pre-election vote survey, with the material arrangements
mentioned above. To interpret the framing of the Facebook and web invitations, it was the politicians
who had to prove that there was no opposition between politics and education, and that they
were serious about education.
How do political parties want to reflect this reality after the elections to the Chamber of Deputies? Is
education again just a proclaimed pre-election priority, or do we pay the salaries of the teachers with
dignity according to the importance of their role? What is the substance of truly quality education? Will
the newly-elected politicians only act as brakes on schooling and education again? Or will we, in the
Czech Republic, move further? (ČSU, 2017: web and Facebook invitation).
Wirthová	 11
In this text we see that it is reasonable to address the politicians; they are responsible. But simultaneously
it is not reasonable to address them; they do not reflect the reality; they are not competent – it
may be that the politicians are the brakes! Why did the NGO invite the politicians to the debate
while simultaneously disqualifying them? Such a paradoxical assembling of categories of (in-)competence
and qualification and responsibility was present in many debates with invited politicians. In
that sense their competence in the agenda was neutralised – negatively fixed to their responsibility.
On the other hand, politicians often disqualified themselves as well. In many cases, it is possible to
see that politicians define their competence in contrast to their political profession: ‘I as a parent. . .’;
‘in my judgement as a lawyer and legislator, I must say’(ČT24, 2017b).
I’m in a slightly different role here because, unlike my colleagues, I’m not a Member of Parliament. So I
can look at it from the point of view of the principal of a grammar school, so I do not fully understand my
colleague, that she did not have finance for lighting; it is a matter of the organising body of a particular
school and not the Ministry. (ČSU, 2017: a politician, panellist)
Such references to other, non-actual-role competences were not present in other actors, for example
representatives of NGOs; they did not make references to other competences than to their
expert position. And teachers’ representatives did not advertise themselves as not being teachers
but parents, lawyers, or school directors.
It seems to be competence defined as non-competence: competence to present that one’s competence
is limited – and so one cannot do everything one should, or that is needed. For example, as
a former Minister of Education commented on resistance to the idea of inclusive education: ‘there
are other interest groups and they can formulate it more convincingly’ (ČT24, 2017a). Such (self-)
neutralisation of competence points to a broader issue: the problematisation of the state and nonstate
divide in the production of expertise, which will be discussed later. It may also be interpreted
simply as ‘evading responsibility’. However, considering the relational approach here, such problematisation
of responsibility is not a moral issue of individuals; it is an issue of patterns of references,
practices, and operations, which are created through social processes.
Responsible but not qualified teachers
A very different assemblage of actorship was present in the case of teachers (considered mainly as
K12 teachers in the debates). On the one hand, they were presented as an important factor and
therefore needed to be carefully monitored: ‘There has to be a clear criterion for teachers’ quality’
(DVTV, 2018).
Well, that’s, that’s just an absolutely crucial thing. The crucial and unquestionable thing is that we want
teachers to be of good quality. And, of course, monitoring their quality is something that is extremely
important [. . .]. (ČT24, 2017b: a politician)
These ambiguous justifications of teachers’ importance are well described, e.g. in a special issue
on how teachers matter (Alvunger et al., 2017; Biesta, 2017). Indeed, in the document called
‘Audit’produced annually by EDUin, the demand to raise teachers’salaries was balanced by ‘pressure
on the quality’ of teachers and the outcomes of teaching. One point concerning the defined
weaknesses of Czech education was the ‘absence of systemic quality management of teachers and
school principals [and] poor support for directors, especially in the field of pedagogical management’(EDUin,
2016: 7). Governmental policy documents framed the quality of teaching for clients
of the educational system similarly (ČŠI, 2017; NÚV, 2017). However, quality teaching was not
linked to the teachers as being necessary actors in educational debates and policy.
12	 European Educational Research Journal 00(0)
On the other hand, teachers’ qualification for participating in public debates was paradoxically
problematised by excusing them. While the competence was attached only to teaching, not to being
an actor in the agenda – being competent in the problem being solved – it was justified by their
‘hard work’, which prevented them from being a fully proper participant in the debate. Other actors
did not consider the teachers to be experts on policymaking and experts on teachers. Teachers were
necessary to a degree – as the audience, as a workforce to be cared for and regulated – but not as
expert individuals. It was agreed that they were competent to teach, and responsible for the outcomes
of teaching, but, because it is ‘hard work’ and ‘they are tired’ (ČT24, 2017a; EDUin, 2017;
UZS, 2017), they cannot be a partner in debates over educational policy.
Teachers can’t handle everything. On the basis of proven quality, the Ministry of Education, Youth, and
Sports should recommend to schools programmes, projects, and activities that can support civic education,
and thus make the work easier for teachers (EDUin, 2016: 25).
Teachers and principals are tired, overburdened with administration, and unpaid (EDUin, 2017: 2).
In other words, I fully understand this and say to myself that working in these conditions for teachers is
actually not an easy task at all in public, municipal, regional, and county schools (ČT24, 2017a: 3).
Their competence as teachers neutralises their relevance to the reform debate and the reasonableness
of their claims or actions. In that sense, they were not addressors in utterances about educational
change (Lyotard, 1988). The words of a former Minister of Education, when talking about
teachers’ petition against the document Teachers’ Career Framework, are illustrative. It was his
apologetic reaction to his previous impetuous statement that teachers ‘are illiterates’:
So, I’ve said it a few times, if . . . I was in a situation where I have to constantly see what I have to change
in my job or what must be somehow submitted in some way to present or report, and then somebody comes
and says to me, ‘Here is something that will mean only paperwork, a burden.’And he comes to me before
the end of the school year, when I am mainly dealing with how to test some pupils, how to talk with some
parents, how to prepare the end of the year. And if I look at those, don’t know, this petition, which is short
and relatively satisfactory, I would probably sign it too . . . that it is a great shame that at the last minute
such an action actually breaks down or disrupts the work that has also been carried out with the great
participation of teachers and directors. (ČT24, 2017a: 3)
Teachers did not manage to be proper policy actors when signing a petition against a prepared
policy document.
What was missing entirely in comparison with the competence of politicians was the teachers’
own voices – there was no track of teachers alone, as teachers without other distinguishing markers
(as an expert, a politician, or a representative of a teachers’ association). Not only were they not
physically present among the panellists in the debates under research, but in many cases, teachers
were simply overlooked, and no particular justification for omitting them was explicitly present. In
the case of strategic documents, both governmental and those produced by NGOs, they were usually
in the last position in the lists of important actors for participation in discussions and policymaking.
Recommendations:
•• Efforts to create action plans with the awareness that the education system must respond to societal change.
•• Greater attention from the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports to the way in which action plans
are created, pointing to examples of inspiring practice.
•• The involvement of actors not only from schools, but also from non-formal education, parents,
businesses, and the civic sector.
•• Promoting the link between local and regional action plans. (EDUin, 2016: 21)
Wirthová	 13
It seems that Czech teachers are trapped in a circle of cultural causation: a good teacher cannot
have the energy and time to acquire comprehensive knowledge about his/her complicated situation
and therefore cannot be a good policy actor. Teachers are less important legitimating actors (audience)
just because they are teachers who do not possess the proper complex knowledge.
Qualified, competent, non-responsible NGOs
The actorship regarding the representatives of NGOs was also distinctive. Since they were the
main organisers of public debates about education in the pre-election period (11 debates out of the
total of 14) and their representatives were also mediators or moderators of these debates (ČSU,
2017), they entered the interactions in a decisive way.
Regarding the channels of influence of transnational knowledge in the contemporary European
context (Carvalho, 2012; Fenwick et al., 2014; Seddon, 2014b), these were mainly the two NGOs
involved in pre-election debates (SKAV, EDUin), which were translators of this type of expert
knowledge into the Czech context. They have built their competence on the fact that they possess
expert knowledge (in their words, contrary to politicians and teachers) such as the newest data of
transnational organisations (Education at a Glance, PISA results), data from expert groups (semiacademic
Czech research centres), and the opinions of other experts (Czech and foreign) (EDUin,
2016, 2017, 2018). In the period, EDUin published three strategic documents in which it justified
its own expertise by being able to understand the situation (reality) thanks to its possession of
expert knowledge. A part of one of these influential documents, Audit 2017, reads thus:
To limit unpredictability is possible if we can best assess the current state of the education system, evaluate
the importance and impact of the processes that are under way, and point out those phenomena that deserve
increased attention, the problems that need to be addressed first, and the challenges with which we need to
cope. The annual audit of the education system in the Czech Republic has the ambition to provide such an
insight in a form that respects expert judgement and is also understandable to the media and the general
public. By describing the strengths and weaknesses of the education system and the opportunities and
risks, the audit attempts to capture the current state of affairs. (EDUin, 2018: 1)
In this account, the rights to be part of the debate, to organise debates, and to ask the responsible
actors questions go together. The NGO experts had the qualifications to justify or criticise a proposed
reform publicly: ‘In the following expert report, we describe the current state and design
possible solutions’ (EDUin, 2016: 1). On the other hand, they were struggling with the fact that
although they were listened to, they were not allowed to realise their expert knowledge (put their
expert knowledge into practice). The strategic document titled Problems of Czech Education and
Suggestions for its Solution 2017 states:
Our story: we are people who firmly believe that education is a fundamental value of society, and therefore
we strive to preserve healthy principles in our education system, and we also strive for effective changes
in the current system: we are the initiative EDUCATION PRE-EMINENTLY and we are ready to help
toward systematic changes with our professional expertise. (EDUin, 2017: 7)
They were not responsible for the outcomes of the policy reform, although they wished to
change it. They were ‘ready to help’. The more dissatisfied they were with the results, the more
they built their competence on knowing reality, reinforced by data expressing reality (‘our professional
expertise’).
14	 European Educational Research Journal 00(0)
We want the education policies developed by the Minister of Education to be based on real data and
research that will ensure its progressive development. [. . .] In terms of the popularity of schools with
children, we are at the bottom of international comparisons, along with drill-focused South Korea.
According to surveys, the parents of children are rather satisfied with the form of education. Where did the
mistake happen and how can we fix it? The world in the 21st century is changing at a dizzying rate. The
labour market will look completely different in 20 years than it does today. 50% of today’s professions will
disappear and be replaced by others, the form of which is difficult to predict. How will schools face this
trend? Only 58% of high school students believe in democracy 27 years after the Velvet Revolution. The
average term of office of the Minister of Education is 1.5 years. There is talk of the complete absence of a
long-term conception of development. While we are talking about education, do we not miss the very
essence of education between our fingers? (ČSU, 2017: web invitation)
By referring to, and displaying, the comparative transnational data these NGOs established their
competence contrary to the competence of politicians. The source of ‘delegitimating the role of
national politicians’ (Nordin, 2018) was not the OECD representatives, but rather the local actors
attached to the transnational data, for whom the reality and the data were the same thing.
Although they were acknowledged as competent with regard to the agenda and problems being
solved, they were still not allowed to act directly in the realisation of policy, except for some cases
where they were present as formal advisers. The competence of being an expert on a particular
educational reality did not immediately go together with the possibility of acting on that particular
known educational reality. In that sense, this situation established separation of the knowledge of
from the direct acting on, and indicates the new roles within the process of intensifying tensions
between centralised and decentralised levels of governance (Piattoeva et al., 2018), the roles of
translating, mediating, and brokering (Fenwick et al., 2014: 5).
Discussion: the Czech educational legitimisation ecology and the
role of the European context
The aim of this article was to demonstrate the translation, interconnection, and diverse meaning
and the use of knowledge which intervenes in stabilising agential positions – patterned actorship in
legitimating educational change. I have posed three questions. First, how were different positions
for legitimating practice stabilised, and by which knowledge, systems of reasoning, and relations
to audiences?
The above analysis of the pre-election period suggests that internally ambiguous assemblages
of actorship do not stand alone. They are interlinked and are stabilised with the relation of one to
another and to a particular meaning of proper knowledge. The paper demonstrated that the agential
position – a particular pattern of actorship – is not defined only in positive terms; the legitimation
of position is also based on elements which are missing. The elimination or neutralisation of some
instances (audience, relevance) is constitutive for other positions and it heavily depends on the
knowledge meaning, aggregation, and use. In this, we can see the important relational aspect of
actorship in legitimating educational change, while the type of knowledge and the way it is used
have both material and agential consequences. A kind of knowledge mobilises particular actors,
and actors engage in it.
On the one hand, the specific non-qualification of teachers was a condition of the qualification
of the representatives. The qualification of the representatives was enabled and confirmed by the
situation in which teachers were not confirmed as qualified actors for public judgement of policymaking,
although they were referred to as being important factors of policy. Moreover, without
claiming and presenting the possession of comprehensive knowledge (which teachers lack), the
Wirthová	 15
representatives could not be partners to other qualified actors such as NGOs and politicians. Such
an interrelation points in one respect to the contemporary ambiguous process of teachers’ professionalisation
(Robertson and Sorensen, 2018). As described above, many objections posed by
NGOs and others see teacher agency as a weakness within the operation of the system and seek to
replace it with evidence-based and data-driven approaches. Hereby, the Czech case does not point
to much in the way of the return of teachers’agency as an important dimension of teachers’professionalism
(Biesta et al., 2015).
The paper demonstrates a new trend in the weakening of teachers’ position. From the very
beginning of thinking about educational reform in the 1990s, the idea was that the role of the
teacher is an autonomous actor in curriculum-making, similarly to that in other European curricular
reforms in the same period (Priestley et al., 2020). However, the general dissatisfaction and
disappointment at the weakness of the process of implementation and poor support of schools created
a space for the retreat of the agency of teachers and entrance of other actors – experts on
education (not necessarily educational experts). The introduction of expert knowledge in the sense
of non-local, objective, fast, clear, and comparative transnational data reduced the legitimacy of
professional knowledge (that of teachers). In the present case, it is demonstrated in a kind of deexpertisation
of teachers in terms of knowledge important for policy formulation. The role of the
meaning of the expertise was decisive for teachers’agency since the knowledge of teachers was not
confirmed in the ecology as expert. This de-expertisation indicates the creation of boundaries
between categories as teacher, expert, and professional (Seddon, 2014a), which could create various
disadvantegous positions.
On the other hand, politicians, although situated as qualified, but non-competent, went together
with their competent reality-knower – the NGOs. The competence for an agenda and problems
being solved, the expert competence of NGOs, stems from the disunity and fragmentation of governmental
policymaking as illustrated by the absence of national organisations’voice in the debates.
The demands for evidence-based and expert policy decisions came more from the side of the
NGOs than from the governmental organisations. Without non-competent politicians, the NGOs
would not have built their public qualification as reality-knowers, but without responsible politicians
and teachers, they would not have had any reason to address them. In the period described,
the Czech politicians, as formal representatives of governmental activities, were not neutralised in
their competence in agenda by transnational knowledge directly, but by the non-affirmation of
NGOs and by themselves as well, both of which non-affirmations were made possible by the meaning
of the expert knowledge.
This leads us to the second question: how does the particular meaning of proper knowledge
(transnational comparative knowledge, expertise, or ‘comprehensive situational knowledge’)
intervene in stabilising these agential positions? The transnational and European context travels
into the Czech educational context via a transnational comparative kind of knowledge, through
actors who legitimate a particular educational reform externally (Tveit and Lundahl, 2018) and
simultaneously legitimate their position as key policy actors – as reality-knowers. Calculative
rationality, as founded and maintained by educational experts (Lawn, 2018), or by measurement
experts (Gorur, 2015), which enabled the process of Europeanisation in education, is traveling into
the Czech context via the self-legitimation of non-state actors. It means that the agential position
of the producers of such knowledge is less important in this context than their role as knowledge
‘aggregators’in the legitimation of policy in education. My argument here is that this triple process
of stabilising (legitimating) a problem, a solution, and positions creates an educational legitimation
ecology that is neither purely local nor purely transnational.
Transnational data influences not only policy practice but the agentic positions of those who
legitimate their own position by this knowledge. In other words, this knowledge creates both
16	 European Educational Research Journal 00(0)
positions and discourse – relationally both. Therefore, the main agents of the European knowledge
economy in the period of justifying educational reform were not an elite class of system actors:
‘national and regional politicians and system administrators, people having responsibility for
aspects of the educational system’ (Lawn and Lingard, 2002: 294). They were the representatives
of NGOs who legitimated their own position by expert knowledge and were the main bearers and
translators of this knowledge into the Czech context. By rhetorically saving and rescuing education
from degradation and chaos, the NGOs engaged in spreading the transnational data and externalised
the legitimation of educational reform and thus become the bearers, although agentially limited,
of the European space in the Czech environment.
The relationship of NGOs and formal organisational structures indicates the answer to the
third research question, how non-state structures were mobilised by transnational data, in a
situation characterised by the increasing weakening of the state structures. Historically, from
the above context descriptions and empirical findings, we can observe a development in the
positions of local and transnational knowledge in the legitimation of policy. The institutionalised
disappointment of the functioning of the state in the 1990s weakened the role of the state
and local and professional expertise, and around 2010 allowed the emergence of new non-state,
non-professional experts who aggregate their expertise from transnational data and legitimate
both their position as experts and the particular educational change. The relations between the
agential patterns of politicians and NGOs are linked to what is described as the ‘destatisation
of politics’ (Ball, 2010a; Jessop, 2016). Destatisation, as a process of ‘redrawing boundaries
between state and non-state apparatuses and activities’, in which many issues are removed from
the purview of a state (Jessop, 2016: 203), is apparent here. This has consequences for the flow
of transnational data, as it was not system actors as ‘significant managers, officials, and politicians
who were the main carriers of Europeanisation’, as described by, for example, Lawn and
Lingard (2002). Thus it was not the state structures that engaged in transnational data, as, for
example, was described in Scotland (Lingard and Sellar, 2014). The NGO representative ‘circulated
explicit language of comparison, evaluation, new generic skills, and learning’ (Lawn
and Lingard, 2002: 304).
The research outcomes point to trends towards the contemporary problematisation of actorship
in the broader changes of the relationship between the state, non-state actors, and types of knowledge
in legitimating educational change in broader global and European transformation processes.
The Czech legitimation processes, as we have seen, are connected directly with the shift to the
externalisation of the justification of educational change (Holmwood and Balon, 2018; Tveit and
Lundahl, 2018), PISA shock dynamics included, or with non-state-based shifts towards non-transparent
ways of being a legitimate and legitimating actor (Ball, 2010b).
However, what the Czech case demonstrates is how translation of transnational knowledge can
influence local patterns of actorship relationally by creating positions or neutralising them. It indicates
the new roles within the process of intensifying tensions between centralised and decentralised
levels of governance (Piattoeva et al., 2018), and the roles of translating, mediating, and
brokering (Fenwick et al., 2014: 5). The above analysis sheds light on an ecology of the legitimation
of education which is formed on the glocal ‘absent’ ground (Lindberg and Knutsson, 2019) of
several limited positions: (a) an undifferentiated mass of teachers without qualification for justificatory
action with their knowledge rendered non-expert, (b) non-competent politicians with their
knowledge rendered irrelevant, and (c) non-responsible reality-knowing NGO experts, with their
statistical knowledge rendered being the reality itself (Grek, 2013).
Wirthová	 17
Conclusions
Drawing on relational sociology and empirical research into the formation of actorship in the context
of the Czech reform debates, this paper indicates that legitimating action (critical and justifying)
is possible only in particularly arranged situations and does not stem above all from the formal
responsibilities of actors in the authorised policy. The contradiction between position and action
rather arises from the problematic assembling and arranging of qualifications in relation to knowledge
within the situations. We have seen that the possession of expert knowledge provides justification
but a limited basis for action. I have understood these contradictions through a particular
analytical decomposition – a decomposition of the common category of actorship into more sensitive
instances of competence, qualification, responsibility, knowledge, and audience. It was the
specific arrangements (material and discursive) of these instances in a situation which formed
opportunities for the public justificatory action.
In their study on the relation between experts and the state, Rinne et al. (2018: 92) asked:
‘Who are the main experts in Brazil, China, and Russia recognised as responsible and legitimate
actors to collect and interpret data in the QAE of school education policies?’ From the above
empirical evidence we can observe that in the Czech case, such expertise is fragmented among
various positions. NGOs are recognised and legitimated to interpret, politicians and teachers as
responsible for deciding and implementing. Although these scholars identified a different ‘division
of labour’ between policymakers and experts in the three countries and, to a degree, similar
limitations on the experts’ agency, in the Czech case the legitimation of educational changes is
led by non-state actors. What is essential is that, via this decomposition of actorship, it is possible
to track the phenomenon of actorship in its many facets, and to understand forming of various
actorship in different contexts. This, when conceived independently of formal national
borders, would allow general trends in actorship and the various spaces in which it may occur to
be seen.
The ecological perspective proved useful in detecting the relations of affirmations and neutralisations
with its consequences for agency, described above as the parts of processes of the expertise
loss and stabilising disadvantageous positions. The discussion indicated that these processes are
substantially linked to contemporary destatisation of the legitimation of educational reforms, and
absence of fundamental or essential ground for actorship. The case demonstrates that tensions
among state and non-state actorship, as a process, are in a mutual relation to the redrawing of the
meaning of expertise. This redrawing is intertwined with new roles of translators and mediators of
transnational comparative data, with a loss of expertise of teachers and politicians, and simultaneously,
with the absence of the policy executive voice from the debates during the period. An epistemological
principle that leads to the production of a kind of knowledge has consequences for the
definition of its proper bearer. As I have described above, in the case of Gorur’s work (Gorur,
2015), the findings are an example of the contemporary transformation of the meaning of an expert
from a producer of transnational comparative data to the knower of this data, which has consequences
for the exclusion of those who are non-expert. It is the local political developments that
shape these transnational influences, since these local developments determine the important policymakers
or the lack thereof. In the Czech case it is predominantly destatisation which influences
who the possessor of expert knowledge will be.
Nevertheless, the assemblages and patterns of actorship are not stable, solid, or essential; relations
transform and are transformed. Identified contradictions between competence, qualification,
responsibility, and action are relationally interlocked and it is a matter for further research to understand
how agency in legitimating educational change will evolve and with what consequences.
18	 European Educational Research Journal 00(0)
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to two anonymous referees for valuable and stimulating comments on this article. The
author would also like to thank participants of the European Conference on Educational Research 2019 in
Hamburg.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article: This work was supported by the Charles University Grant Agency [grant number 624218]; and
the Specific Academic Research Projects of Charles University [grant number 260462].
Data availability statement
The data that supports the findings of this study was derived from resources available in the public domain.
ORCID iD
Jitka Wirthová https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2152-9803
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Author biography
Jitka Wirthová is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Charles University, Prague. She works in the field of the
sociology of education, knowledge, and ideas. In her research, she focuses on the formation and legitimisation
of educational norms, their performance in society, and the current transformations of educational and expert
knowledge. She has published papers elaborating the post-foundational approach in the sociology of education
and reflecting the Czech educational reform with regard to transnationalisation of educational knowledge,
destatisation of educational policy, and the meaning of expertise.