Ledelse af engagementer: En undersøgelse af samarbejde mellem folkeskoler og virksomheder i Danmark

When public schools and private businesses collaborate on education, new paths for developing schools appear, but with these opportunities come challenges. The actors involved have different backgrounds, interests and considerations in such collaborations, but nevertheless join forces to establish a common ground on which to shape their collaboration and fulfil a common vision to develop and provide good education.
In Denmark, collaborations between public education and private industry operate according only to few general, formalized models for collaboration, and the individual projects are often managed locally. In practice it therefore falls to school managers to interact with teachers and business partners on how to shape the collaboration. However, it is neither given nor self-evident what form a collaboration should take. That said, knowing the various forms of collaboration that occur across the public and private sectors is crucial, as these set the conditions for how actors participate in collaborations and how education develops when it takes place as a collaborative effort between schools and other actors.
This thesis examines the forms of collaboration emerging between public schools and private businesses and the kind of management work connected to these forms of collaboration. To this end, the thesis looks to practice, analysing a series of interviews and documents from 11 Danish public schools and field observations made at two schools. To address the challenges that managers, teachers and business partners face as they seek to establish common ground for their work and integrate their collaboration in the everyday life of the school, the thesis evokes the sociological concept of ‘engagement’, which indicates cognitive formats that permit humans to coordinate with each other.