European Policy-Making in Education and Policy-Making
This volume is devoted to the analysis of the insides of European
Commission policy-making in education. A central theme of the
book is the governmentality of European educational policy-making
and, specifically, the role of private organizations within it – that
is, the role of private companies in supporting the European Commission
in its ‘policy-creation’ processes through the provision of
policy advice and evaluation services. Such policy-creation processes
have, since 2000, been framed by the use of the Open
Method of Coordination (OMC), an intergovernmental form of
European Union (EU) governance based on the voluntary cooperation
of member states and the EU through the use of common
indicators and benchmarks, reporting and the sharing of
best practice. As a result of this, the OMC as a policy tool to
steer national governments (Lange and Alexiadou, 2007; Souto-
Otero et al., 2008) and ‘governing by data’ have recently received
much attention in the literature (see Grek, 2009; Lawn and Grek,
2012).
