Between Equality and Competition: The Organisational Consequences of Imagined Competition

Abstract Marketization research typically takes competition as a present condition and asks what follows. We ask what precedes it. University School, a Swedish municipal upper-secondary school, was established in 2005 against private competitors that did not arrive for 16 years. Drawing on Beckert’s fictional expectations, we distinguish the imaginary of competition – the cultural material available in a field – from imagined competition, the anticipation particular actors construct from it. The school, built to meet imagined private rivals, instead generated competition with the municipal schools whose students it had been designed to attract; building for a contest that had not arrived effectively brought one into being. Competition, once produced, did not stay between organisations but migrated into the relations among teachers, students, and parents, with consequences the founders neither intended nor controlled. This paper theorises the organisational work of preparing for competition that does not yet exist, and the competition that work can itself create.