Rethinking NPM in education: a historical study of management by objectives in Swedish media discourse

While late-twentieth-century educational policy shifts have been widely studied, research has often relied on selective empirical material, privileging policy documents—the stories of the victors—while obscuring messier political processes and broader developments. This study broadens educational policy research by analyzing public discourse, specifically newspapers. It examines the historical emergence and meaning of the Swedish term målstyrning, commonly associated with the introduction of New Public Management in Swedish education. Drawing on conceptual history and corpus linguistics, the study analyses 1,470 newspaper articles using the term. The findings show that målstyrning emerged in Swedish newspaper discourse from the 1960s, coinciding with longer-term shifts towards instrumental and outcome-oriented logics in education and public administration. We argue that målstyrning filled a conceptual void by providing a linguistic and ideological framework for these changes, and that NPM reforms in Swedish education should be understood as part of much longer historical developments. The study highlights the risks of overreliance on policy texts, which may exaggerate the novelty and radicalism of policy change.