Founders’ trajectories, capital and market-oriented framings of education in the French EdTech market

This article examines the French EdTech market through the social properties of its founders, shifting attention from technologies and policy agendas to the actors shaping legitimate forms of technological intervention in education. Drawing on a Bourdieusian framework combined with science and technology studies, it analyses how founders’ trajectories, resources, and dispositions structure access to the EdTech field and influence the ways educational issues are framed through technology. The study combines a quantitative mapping of 327 EdTech companies and founders, based on a professional association database and LinkedIn profiles, with 14 semi-structured interviews. Findings show that access to EdTech entrepreneurship is socially selective and depends on the accumulation of valuable forms of capital, including prestigious academic credentials, professional networks, and economic resources. They further indicate that legitimacy within the field relies less on pedagogical expertise than on entrepreneurial and commercial capital. Consequently, founders who are often weakly socialised within educational settings tend to frame educational issues through market-oriented categories such as efficiency, optimisation, and scalability. The article highlights how educational technologies are shaped by socially situated actors whose dispositions influence both the definition of educational problems and the forms of intervention considered legitimate.