“What is Fun for You, is What’s Important to Us!” : Image Work and Positional Games in Swedish Upper Secondary Education

Sammanfattning: How do upper secondary schools work with image to compete online? Through meso-discourse analysis we have analyzed the descriptions of 147 schools offering university preparatory programs in Stockholm County, at one of the larger online information portals for upper secondary education (gymnasium.se). Such information portals have lately seen a tremendous growth in traffic, yet received scant scholarly attention. Our findings suggest that schools work with image mainly by drawing from four distinct image archetypes, which we have metaphorized as The Springboard, The Democratic World Citizen, The Nanny, and The Pedagogical Peacekeeper. These images were tweaked and combined in various ways by schools to project an image to their desired student audience. We also found that different school types used the archetype images with slight variation. Further implications, such as the performative aspect of image work and possible future research on competition in upper secondary education, are discussed.