The aim of this thesis is to examine compulsory schools' material conditions in relation to students' learning opportunities and schools staffs’ opportunities to educate. The thesis consists of four published peer-reviewed articles. The empirical data was collected through extensive fieldwork during 2010-2011 in three Swedish schools (ages 14-15), characterized by different social demographics. The material is primarily classroom observations, semi-structured interviews and policy documents. Analysis in the thesis draws mainly on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, but also on contemporary developments institutional habitus by Diane Reay and positional capital by Jacques Lévy. Also, materiality as an educational concept is used to reflect and discuss schools’ prerequisites as institutions of education. The first article investigates how school practice emerges for pupils and the importance it has on their perceptions of their own lives in the school, it also considers and discusses the utility of the theoretical tool school habitus. The study was furthermore a critical examination of the reproductive and/or social levelling effects that school practice could have on pupils. The second article explores and compares the schools' access to ICT and classroom teaching. The third article examines the role of the family and its importance for school staff and pupils in the daily operations of the school. In addition, it scrutinizes how socioeconomic conditions affect the middle- and working-class schools' abilities to navigate in relation to families. The fourth article examines material conditions in all three schools with a focus on pupils and school staffs’ perceptions and actions in school practices, and how materiality shapes schools' institutional habitus. The analysis displays that schools’ materiality has major significance for the forms of institutional habitus and which ideals and values about education are developed in the different schools. It also displays that schools’ material conditions are closely interwoven with pupils’ educational backgrounds and the socioeconomic structure of the local neighbourhood. Schools’ material preconditions affect the pedagogical work of the teachers in classrooms and principals’ acting space to follow and implement the schools’ missions according to steering documents. Viewed as preworld, the local area and resources in the schools shape pupils’ sense of worthiness and thus their visions of a possible future in regard to educational and- workinglife carriers. The thesis discusses and concludes that the title The Subtle Inequality illustrate a process where phenomenon such as school choice, teacher shortage or schools’ abilities to compete are taken for granted. They are seen as “natural” and given, thus they hide the existing, objective material preconditions as the sources that shape differences in the educational system. To overcome these differences, the thesis reflects on the need to give all schools in Sweden equal material starting points.

Since the 1990s in Australia, education policies have created an environment in which competition among schools has increased and parental choice of school has been encouraged. This has been coupled with practices of corporatisation, marketisation and performativity, which have led to the proliferation of a new type of independent school, which operate in the outer suburbs of large cities, target a specific niche market, and charge low cost fees. This study examines the reasons parents are making the choice to send their children to a new, non-government schools in preference to other alternatives and the role of promotional material produced by the school in that choice. The case study of one such school, The Shelbyville College, involved in-depth interviewing of parents at the College as well as a Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough) of the College's prospectus and website which act as performative tools to measure the school's effectiveness in the market. Using Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and cultural capital, the study showed that parents interviewed were choosing this type of school to increase the educational and social status and career prospects of their children as 'extraordinary children'. Through such discourses, parents as consumers of particular schooling products and their engagement with the promotional activities of the College are produced as 'good parents'. Seeking and engaging with promotional material helped remove any dissonance that may occur from a long and expensive relationship with the institution. In choosing this particular school, parents were seeking 'good Christian values' and the freedom to actively engage in their children's education. The College, through its promotional efforts, promises to build on familial habitus and inculcate valued cultural capital in order to make students more successful academically and socially than their parents. The promotional materials of the website and prospectus emphasised the co-curricular involvement in music, speech and drama and invite parents into a discourse of success through the College's educational offering which creates 'extraordinary children'. The uniform mandated by the College is another 'text' in the production of extraordinary children as outlined in the prospectus and website and is an important site for identity production. The uniform demonstrates, not only the disciplinary regime and preparation for professional dress, but also the prestige and esteem derived from the consumption of high status products such as non-government schooling. It is expected that the findings of this study will have relevance for government schools that are the primary competition for new, non-government schools and will lose funding if they continue to lose students. The study will have some implications for CEO (Catholic Education Office) schools that have traditionally provided a low-cost alternative to the government sector. Parents in the study reported choosing the new, non-government school because of differences in values, and perceptions of safety and status improvement offered by these schools. The continued success of the new, non-government schools is also likely to have broader effects on social and educational inequality in Australia through their effects on the government school sector.

This dissertation interrogates the deficit assumptions about English proficiency of skilled immigrants who were recruited by Canadian governments between the late 1990s and early 2000s. Through the lens of literacy as social practice, the eighteen-month ethnographic qualitative research explores the sequential experiences of settlement and economic integration of seven well-educated Chinese immigrant professionals. The analytical framework is built on sociocultural approaches to literacy and learning, as well as the theories of discourses and language reproduction. Using multiple data sources (observations, conversational interviews, journal and diary entries, photographs, documents, and artifacts collected in everyday lives), I document many different ways that well-educated Chinese immigrants take advantage of their language and literacy skills in English across several social domains of home, school, job market, and workplace. Examining the trans-contextual patterning of the participants’ language and literacy activities reveals that immigrant professionals use literacy as assistance in seeking, negotiating, and taking hold of resources and opportunities within certain social settings. However, my data show that their language and literacy engagements might not always generate positive consequences for social networks, job opportunities, and upward economic mobility. Close analyses of processes and outcomes of the participants’ engagements across these discursive discourses make it very clear that the monolithic assumptions of the dominant language shape and reinforce structural barriers by constraining their social participation, decision making, and learning practice, and thereby make literacy’s consequences unpredictable. The deficit model of language proficiency serves the grounds for linguistic stereotypes and economic marginalization, which produces profoundly consequential effects on immigrants’ pathways as they strive for having access to resources and opportunities in the new society. My analyses illuminate the ways that language and literacy create the complex web of discursive spaces wherein institutional agendas and personal desires are intertwined and collide in complex ways that constitute conditions and processes of social and economic mobility of immigrant populations. Based on these analyses, I argue that immigrants’ successful integration into a host country is not about the mastery of the technical skills in the dominant language. Rather, it is largely about the recognition and acceptance of the value of their language use and literacy practice as they attempt to partake in the globalized new economy.

This dissertation interrogates the deficit assumptions about English proficiency of skilled immigrants who were recruited by Canadian governments between the late 1990s and early 2000s. Through the lens of literacy as social practice, the eighteen-month ethnographic qualitative research explores the sequential experiences of settlement and economic integration of seven well-educated Chinese immigrant professionals. The analytical framework is built on sociocultural approaches to literacy and learning, as well as the theories of discourses and language reproduction. Using multiple data sources (observations, conversational interviews, journal and diary entries, photographs, documents, and artifacts collected in everyday lives), I document many different ways that well-educated Chinese immigrants take advantage of their language and literacy skills in English across several social domains of home, school, job market, and workplace. Examining the trans-contextual patterning of the participants’ language and literacy activities reveals that immigrant professionals use literacy as assistance in seeking, negotiating, and taking hold of resources and opportunities within certain social settings. However, my data show that their language and literacy engagements might not always generate positive consequences for social networks, job opportunities, and upward economic mobility. Close analyses of processes and outcomes of the participants’ engagements across these discursive discourses make it very clear that the monolithic assumptions of the dominant language shape and reinforce structural barriers by constraining their social participation, decision making, and learning practice, and thereby make literacy’s consequences unpredictable. The deficit model of language proficiency serves the grounds for linguistic stereotypes and economic marginalization, which produces profoundly consequential effects on immigrants’ pathways as they strive for having access to resources and opportunities in the new society. My analyses illuminate the ways that language and literacy create the complex web of discursive spaces wherein institutional agendas and personal desires are intertwined and collide in complex ways that constitute conditions and processes of social and economic mobility of immigrant populations. Based on these analyses, I argue that immigrants’ successful integration into a host country is not about the mastery of the technical skills in the dominant language. Rather, it is largely about the recognition and acceptance of the value of their language use and literacy practice as they attempt to partake in the globalized new economy.