Education and Social Structure

Abstract

In this chapter Education and Social Structure, Jon P. Knudsen argues that the role and effect of education is strongly integrated with social and cultural structures. In order to understand how education works, one has to understand how it interrelates with the norms and structure of the cultural environment it plays into. The chapter calls for a balanced development strategy, where new initiatives are discussed in relation to the social and historical environment it is part of. The focus moves from the university to the region. Of course we cannot assume that all universities are seen as part of regions. Some draw on students and subject matter from a wider world. However, even the regional role of the university, and implications for sustainability, should be explored.

The writing of this article has been made possible by a grant from the Research Council of Norway to the project “Learning Regions”.

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

1 Introduction

This chapter deals with education and sustainability in a social structure perspective. The assumption is that, in order to reproduce itself as a viable society, a region has to maintain a balanced pattern of development through time. In doing this, education is thought to play a decisive role. How this is brought about highlights the need for a clarification of the ambiguous concept of sustainable development. The case presented, the county of Sogn og Fjordane, Norway, in this respect offers an illustrative case. The chapter shows how mutual competence building is related to social structure. It also demonstrates that there are different forms of modernity.

Almost rural in character, with demographic zero-growth, and with very high scores for quality of life and level of living indicators, the region at first glance appears as sustainable from an environmental perspective. But in a country with strong economic and demographic growth this means that the region is lagging behind in cultural, political and economic importance and impact. From a perspective concerned with the future viability of the region as a thriving society, this could be judged unsustainable. As a county that deliberately has chosen education and cultural markers as its preferred strategies of modernisation, Sogn og Fjordane has attained remarkable educational results, and also a large degree of cultural self-confidence. However, these results do not seem to become absorbed by the regional economy, thus the educational capital is being exported or drained from the region. Again, this should be considered unsustainable from a system perspective.

To what degree and in what respect a society can be labelled sustainable, is in itself rather confusing, different parameters lending themselves to contradictory interpretations. I will try to sort out some of these lines of contradictions, and I will do so by focusing on education as it relates to the social structure of the region in question. In doing this I will be more interested in education as a chain of institutions than in higher education as a specific step in this chain, because I see the mutual relationship between education in general and social structure as a more formative relationship than the isolated role that higher education may have on social structure. Dealing with education, I rely on an input- output-model. Using empirical material from the county in question, I argue that the educational profile of the region has been of paramount importance to its construction as a sustainable society, from a level of living and a quality of life perspective. On the other hand, by the way in which education has been crucial to these endeavours, it has also had the side effect of putting the region in a possible situation of regional lock-in, in which the further development of the region may be threatened.

The discussion points to the role of education in the construction of regional structure and identity, but it does not pursue this to its full length. Rather it questions some relations between knowledge, educational system and regional development, as we normally portray them. These relations can briefly be sketched as follows. Formalised knowledge, as it is developed and institutionalised through the educational system, will increasingly form social and working life, and function as a port of entry to professional qualification. Because working life, regardless of sector, will increase its requirements regarding education, countries and regions losing out in the educational race will eventually also be unable to compete as societies for future innovation, well-being and development. Thus they will not be able to reproduce themselves as sustainable social systems.

This view can be referred to as an overarching, international ideology strongly advocated by organisations like the OECD and monitored in detail through quality surveillance systems like PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) and TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), to mention only two. In Norway, this ideology has been made regionally explicit through a governmental green chapter on education and regional development (NOU 2011, p. 3). My discussion questions the justification of such a simplistic model by analysing a case where education seems to perform rather differently.

2 Description

2.1 Some Facts About Sogn og Fjordane

A brief overview of basic data for the county of Sogn og Fjordane offers a confusing picture. On the one side the county is a demographic and economic laggard. Taking the long time span perspective, the county’s share of the national population has dwindled from 6.0 % in 1801 to 2.1 % in 2001. No other county presents such catastrophic figures. Today, this trend continues, the county being rescued from further decline only by a substantial international migration surplus. The county has no urban structure by international standards. The three main towns, Florø, Førde and Sogndal are all small centres with fragile commuting catchment areas.

The county performs slightly above the national average for business innovation, mainly as a result of hosting a handful of globally controlled smelters, but the share of R&D activity in the private as well as in the public sector is very low (Gundersen 2002). The composite NHO (Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise) business performance index weighing together private sector profitability, company growth rate, business birth rates and business impact on the regional economy, portrays Sogn og Fjordane as the poorest performing county in Norway, together with Finnmark (Vareide 2011). The county has since the regional development policy scheme became national in 1961, been one of its main recipients (NOU 2004, p. 2).

On the other hand Sogn og Fjordane should be regarded as a successful region. Living conditions are among the best in the country, if we take its various aspects together. The county is blessed with national top scores for longevity and general health conditions. Unemployment is almost negligible, as is the number of social security clients and the crime rate. The county also seems to have absorbed the consequences of recent lay offs in the labour market (NOU 2011, p. 3). The housing market is affordable, and the rate of economic equality is high. Even in economic terms, the picture is mixed. The regional product is on the rise, as is the income level of the households.

Most remarkable, though, are the county’s excellent scores for anything related to education. School results are the best in the country, both regarding primary, secondary and upper secondary education (Steffensen and Ziade 2009). Transition rates from one educational level to the next are way above the national average. The county also takes the national lead in sending students to teacher training education, and Sogn og Fjordane is also where teachers to the largest degree experience common esteem for their profession (Knudsen 2014).

Such scores for various variables, as referred to above, do not normally go together, empirically as well as theoretically. We have a region at hand that has failed from a demographic perspective, and partly also from an economic perspective. From a living condition perspective, however, the picture is the opposite one. Those living here lead excellent lives.

We know of this apparent contradiction from previous research, namely that variables for quality of life fare better than should be expected from an economic point of view. Because this phenomenon appears in a westerly located band stretching from south of Stavanger through the coast and mountain regions all up to east of Trondheim, it is called The Western Paradox (Elstad 2011). As the other counties in this region are more urban in character, the phenomenon is especially visible in Sogn og Fjordane, with its rural structure.

A more specific paradox can be derived from the Western paradox, namely that there seems to be no apparent connection between the esteem for education in society and the concomitant socio-economic results generated in the same society. Nowhere is this mismatch more clearly detectable than in Sogn og Fjordane. Should the recommendations from OECD and the PISA-ideologists be taken seriously, Sogn og Fjordane would have been a national laboratory for the future and not, as today, a region lagging behind the rest of the nation.

The case thus offers the opportunity to investigate the role of education and knowledge in a regional context. We are able to discuss what the role of education has been in the development of this region, and we can look into why the socio-economic consequences have failed to comply with mainstream theory. As such, the discussion may add to our understanding of the role of education in the construction of a region, and as a practical critique of prevailing modernising theory and its related political programme.

2.2 The Various Spheres of Modernisation

In the contemporary debate knowledge is often presented as the main key to economic growth and development. The godfather of institutional economics, Douglass C. North (1994, p. 362) categorically states that “the speed of economic change is a function of learning.” More recent commentators add to this an understanding of the relationship as a local or regional symbiosis (Fritsch and Warwych 2014; Lorentzen 2007). This line of argument is most often, though, related to higher education and research (Florida 2002; Gertler 2004; NOU 2011, p. 3). The general knowledge base in society is more seldom taken into consideration, unless it fosters a general ability to creativity and learning behaviour (Florida 2002; Lundvall 1992; Mariussen and Virkkala 2013).

The above references rather directly link the level of knowledge development to an ability to create economic growth, as well as economic change and development. Tomorrow’s welfare is, so to speak, a function of our capacity to develop and put to use relevant knowledge. This knowledge is shaped and brought to us by institutions as schools, high schools, universities and institutions for research and development.

This idea of an almost linear connection between education and economic growth can be discussed in different ways. First there is a question whether all kinds of knowledge add equally to growth and wealth creation. Second there is reason to ask if such knowledge needs to be formalised. Third we can enquire into the relationship between education and economic growth as modernising strategies. Finally we should question whether these processes necessarily need to occur intertwined in a given regional setting.

I will return to the last question towards the end of the chapter. To take the third question first. There is a vast literature on what we label multiple modernities (Eisenstadt 2000). The debate related to the issue has many facets, but a common denominator could be that modernity as a historical phenomenon has occurred differently according to geographical context. Some authors single out three main paths in European modernisation: economic, political and cultural (Todd 1990; Østergaard 1992).

If we take modernisation to be a genuinely European undertaking, we can identify its economic axis to be the Western European city-belt stretching from Northern Italy to England until the definite breakthrough came with the industrial revolution at the English pole of the axis. This line of modernisation was then subsequently exported with British colonisation to overseas territories. Today we thus understand the global capitalist system as a legacy of Anglo-American culture and thinking (Albert 1993; Todd 1998).

Political modernisation was largely a French speciality through the project of Enlightenment. Among much more, this is where the thoughts of the constitutional division of powers were conceived. Political modernisation was nevertheless an undertaking with strong links to economic modernisation, and we may justly speak of the historical coining of the Western institutional system as a compromise between French political thinking and British pragmatism (Hirschmann 1976). Enlightenment did more than bring about new political ideas. From France we also got the secular critique of religion and a new fertility pattern, which marked the onset of the demographic transition so typical for modern societies (Todd 1990).

With Østergaard (1992) we can understand the German, and to a lesser extent the Nordic, cultural realm as the romantic path in modernisation. It was here that common literacy gained foothold through the general operation of early emerging national school systems nurtured by the concept of bildung as an ideal, even for the common man. It is well documented how literacy was an earlier and better distributed social phenomenon in Germanic-speaking parts of Europe than was the case in France and in Britain (Todd 1990, pp. 131–144). The roots of this tradition stretch all the way back to the Reformation, if not even longer.

The purpose of this brief sketch is to illustrate how modernity in different geographic contexts takes different points of departure, and touches upon quite different sectors of society. Modernity in England took off with little support from the educational sphere. The German variety of modernity shaped a vital school system, but no parallel industrial revolution. French modernity thematised political institutions and the existential condition of man, but, as regards knowledge, in an elitist way and with no concomitant economic revolution following the English model.

These are not the only recipes for reading the geography of European modernisation. Within the tradition that has come to be labelled Variety of Capitalism (VoC), grouping countries and regions according to how the economy is institutionalised and regulated has resulted in distinct categories, offering schemes for how the economy interact with other societal spheres in systematically varying patterns (Albert 1993; Amable 2003; Hall and Soskice 2001; Hancké et al. 2007; Todd 1998).

In the mainstream VoC terminology (Hall and Soskice 2001; Hancké et al. 2007), the Anglo-American societies are characterised as Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) marked by their liberalist institutional design whilst Germany and the Nordic countries are classified as Co-ordinated Market Economies (CME) by their economies being more strongly regulated by the state and the civil society, not the least by the labour market parties. One of the sectors thereby appearing differently in the two systems is the educational sector. LME societies tend to favour broad and general educational tracks for qualifying the labour force, whereas most CME countries to a larger degree tend to organise educational tracks, especially from the (upper) secondary level and onwards as a shared duty between private firms, enterprise confederations, unions and authorities (Friel 2005; Teague 1997). In broad terms education can thus be understood as institutionally more differentiated in the LME context, and institutionally more integrated in the CME context.

Lately scholars have asked if globalisation has made the LME model more hegemonic, and thus influenced CME countries to become more LME-like. Nordic countries, with Denmark as the foremost case, thus appear with markedly more LME-like institutional traits over the last few decades (Schneider and Paunescu 2012). These changes however do not annihilate historically established patterns. It can be argued that Denmark and the southeastern part of Norway, structurally and institutionally, have more in common with Anglo-American societies, whereas the rest of Norway displays similarities with Germany and Sweden (Todd 1990, p. 63; Knudsen 2011). Wicken (1997) argues that regional industrial development historically followed an English pattern of large scale structural and residential changes in the Southeast, while in the western part of the country it took a more incremental turn, based on organic patterns reflecting rurality, social equality and existing kinships.

These questions go to the heart of the theories on the structural impact of a regionally differentiated and historically reproduced family system in Europe, brought forward by the French historian and demographer, Emmanuel Todd (1987, 1990, 1998, 2011). However, before going into the details on Todd and his relevance to the subject, something has to be said about formalised knowledge as a cause of economic growth and development.

Immediately most of us think of knowledge, especially of relevance to economic and industrial growth and renewal, as formalised knowledge. This knowledge stems from universities and laboratories, and it is passed on to new generations through formalised procedures. It is written in particular styles and takes forms as patents, manuals and text-books. Possibly, most of the knowledge that shapes and underpins our economy is of a different kind. It is tacit, or rather it is mediated in the form of practical interaction between suppliers and producers, customers and workers. It is transmitted from place to place or across generations through practical learning and the social fabric of society.

Innovation research has advocated that this latter form of knowledge creation plays a crucial role in economic renewal, not the least in its incremental form (Isaksen and Nilsson 2013; Jensen et al. 2007). Nevertheless, national and international statisticians and policy makers mostly seem to be concerned with formalised knowledge and formalised innovation. That is why our understanding of how innovation takes place in society is still highly unreliable.

It is generally observed that LME societies have a mode of innovation that is more dominated by formalised knowledge and radical innovations than CME societies, which are more liable to pursue innovation through tacit knowledge and incremental innovations. There is no reason to believe that the latter strategy should be of a low road character. The economic results for Germany and the Nordic countries speak for themselves. Many scholars maintain that a combination of knowledge regimes will give the best overall outcome (Isaksen and Nilsson 2013; Isaksen and Karlsen 2012; Jensen et al. 2007). Neither is it the case that a high degree of non-formalised knowledge application and a largely incremental innovation profile is in opposition to sophistication in production and products.

2.3 Emmanuel Todd on Modernisation

The social and cultural structures of a given society can to some extent be compared with a geological structure, where practices add to practices in layers, so that older layers either are directly visible or condition the formation of newer layers (Massey 1984, p. 118). Sometimes the influences of older structures are particularly salient. Languages offer such a case in which the linguistic development cannot be duly understood apart from the history of the language in question. And even when languages borrow words and change pronunciations from decade to decade, from century to century, the basic grammar tends to be rooted in a history older than our collective memory. Much of the same holds true for religious systems and for other cultural forms as well. As such the European cultural mosaic still presents us with remnants of ancient structural variations (Hofstede 1991; Schultenover 1999).

Todd has laid the formation for analysing this mosaic in his book L’Invention de l’Europe (Todd 1990), supplemented with earlier and later works on European and global culture (Todd 1983, 1987, 1998, 2011). What he does is to offer a key to the analysis of the social configuration of culture, by starting out with how two basic values, authority and legality, are constituted in the making of the social fabric. He does this by looking at social reproduction in which the family structure becomes the systemic foundation as cultural norms and values are basically formed and mediated in primary socialisation. What is learned in micro, in the family, will largely be congruent with how we behave in macro, in the political and economic spheres.

By putting such emphasis on the family Todd should be placed in a rather recent tradition for reinterpreting the family as a highly diversified phenomenon in the European context (Fauvre-Chamoux 2009; Hajnal 1982; Laslett 1965; Ruggles 2010; Todd 1990; Solli 2003). In this tradition the widespread misunderstanding that some kind of common extended family used to dominate Europe, until it was replaced by an equally common nuclear family along with the advent of modernity, is done away with. Based on the works of Peter Laslett and Frédéric Le Play, as on his own research, he maintains that several, highly different, family types have had a largely stable geographical repartition through history, perhaps for millenia. What is typical European is this mosaic of regional and typological hegemonies and not any transition from an extended family type to the nuclear family (Todd 1990, 2011; Fauve-Chamoux and Ochiai 2009). This conclusion is however in opposition to those claiming that socio-economic factors represent the main factors in shaping past and present family patterns, globally as regionally (Ruggles 2010; Solli 2003).

Todd has in this regard much in common with Hofstede, but distinguishes himself from the latter by explicitly stating which mechanisms are in operation for moulding cultural behaviour. Todd furthermore chooses to present his cultural forms as composite typologies, whereas Hofstede (1991) presents them as single dimensions. Geographically he presents an empirical catalogue of the basic family types and some variations of these for 483 units of analysis, basically congruent with the EU NUTS 3 units (Todd 1990). For Norway this means the county level. Figure 3.1 illustrates how this pattern can be mapped in Western Europe.

Fig. 3.1

Emmanuel Todd’s (1990) map of family types in Western Europe [Source Adapted by Duranton et al. (2009)]

We normally conceive of the nuclear family as the modern family type. This is the same family type that we historically find as dominating most of England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Denmark and the overseas English-speaking territories. The reason for this, Todd (1990, 2011) claims, is that it was hegemonic in regions where the modern capitalist system had its breakthrough and where liberalism had its strongholds. We therefore conceive of it as equally modern as the economic system it once brought into being. Although this family type may be spread as an ideal along with modernity, there is no automatic link between the nuclear family and the economic modernisation per se. Germany and Japan are good examples of societies having run through modernisation based on a more hierarchic family pattern, but then consequently also with a more organic type of modernisation (Todd 1983, 2011). There is a parallel here between Todd’s cultural typology and classification of economic systems presented by the VoC-literature where the LME countries mainly go with the absolute nuclear family and the CME countries are dominated by the stem family (Hall and Soskice 2001; Todd 1998).

For Norway Todd (1990, pp. 62, 420–430) claims a dual pattern, The Southeast, comprising the Agder counties, Telemark, Vestfold, Buskerud, Oslo, Akershus and Østfold, belong to the terrain of the absolute nuclear family, whereas the rest of the country belong to the domain of the stem family. This division is then offered as the main factor accounting for the multitude of cultural cleavages between these two parts of the country.

While the cultural cleavage between east and west in Norway is well documented (Rokkan 1967; Øidne 1957), the postulate of a demographically divided country requires some discussion. Most observers agree that family patterns vary substantially within and across regions. The problem is that these variations often are of a very local nature thus offering confusion to the interpretation of them (Sogner 2009; Solli [2013] 1995, 2003; Østerud 1978). A prevailing view seems to be that such data should be aggregated geographically and analysed in long time spans to give meaning (Charles et al. 2008; Hajnal 1982; Janssens 1993; Lesthaeghe 2010; Moring 2003; Lundh 2013).

For our purpose what is important is to place Sogn og Fjordane into the family typology. We clearly see from Table 3.1 that this county is the one mostly dominated by the stem family. There is a distinct pattern where multiple family households, as an operationalisation of the stem family type, has its stronghold in Sogn og Fjordane. Even if the number of such households is dwindling, the relative position of Sogn og Fjordane is maintained over almost two centuries.

Table 3.1 Relative number of extended families by county

2.4 The Basic Family Typology

Todd (1990, pp. 29–68) identifies two basic factors that define the family types: The degree of equality within the family: the horisontal dimension, and the degree of authority within the family: the vertical dimension.

Where children are treated as equals, the family will socialise them to equality as a norm. The culture will then tend to pass this value on from one generation to the next. Alternatively, a family in a setting where children are treated unequally will be raised to accept inequality as a normal feature of culture. Todd points at institutions and rules pertaining to heritage as an empirical sign of how these values materialise. Where the family builds on authority, this will also be mirrored in the culture. Todd ties the dimension of authority to the relationship between generations. Wherever three generations live together, he takes it as a sign of authority. Wherever children leave home (early) to set up their own household, he takes this as a sign of a social system where vertical authority is downplayed as a norm. By combining these two variables Todd (1990, p. 33) establishes the basic European family matrix, as illustrated in Table 3.2.

Table 3.2 Todd’s family model

Todd is not the only author to point at the formative power of the mutually excluding dimensions of authority and equality on culture. Hofstede (1991) acknowledges the familiarity between Todds typology and his own dimensional system, while Mamadouh (1999) points at the resemblance between his model and the grid-group-model of Aaron Wildavsky. What distinguishes Todd is the ability to account for the mechanisms that create and uphold these dimensions.

In this context I will concentrate on the two family types found in Norway and on their characteristics:

• Absolute nuclear family. A couple form their own household. The family consists of two generations, thus excluding grandparents. Location of dwelling is based on pragmatism. Children are stimulated to develop their inequalities as an individual resource. Heritage is often institutionalised through a will. This is the most individualistic of the four family types, maximising freedom.

• Stem family: A couple forms a family, and one of the partners (normally the elder son) brings his spouse to the household of his parents. The family then consists of three generations. The elder son subsequently inherits the parent (landed) property, while the rest of the children are compensated otherwise. These (younger) children are free to start their own two generational families or to marry into other three generational households. This is the family type maximising authority.

But how dominant are these family types today? We must be aware that even in premodern time a regionally hegemonic family type never applied to all. For demographic, life span, social or economic reasons only a minority of families are able to practice a fully fledged three generational household. Solli [(1995) 2013] offers a threshold value below 20 % for his 1801 identification of the stem family core areas in Norway. Sogner (2009) draws similar conclusions from a more local, historical material in the northeastern part of the country. Moving to the census data for 1960 and 1970, we will have to set these values even lower than for older data.

We here encounter a well-known phenomenon. What is taken to be typical for a given social practice in a region is actually performed by a small and often dwindling minority. Grace Davie labels it vicarious practice when the few believe, practice or perform on behalf of the many (Berger et al. 2008). In this case we should see this phenomenon as something more than a mere consequence of demographic and economic change; it should be seen as an institutional trait of differentiation in its own right.

In a society undergoing specialisation, reproduction and maintenance of cultural forms represent no exception. Davie (Berger et al. 2008) makes her case from studying religion, which has passed from being a quasi-ubiquity to be something maintained by the fervent few, so that it can be in place when needed in times of hardship and rites of passage for the rest of us. In Norway a similar argument can be made about rural settlement patterns and regional policy spending. Their rationales could well be sought in a notion of upholding a diversified settlement structure in a sparsely populated and spatially speaking large country. The stem family ideal thus connects to Norwegian history, not least in its rural past, and the concomitant nation building project of the various Westerly based counter cultures (Knudsen 1986; Rokkan 1967; Øidne 1957). In this way the stem family practice could be labelled a form of vicarious living approved by the many, but performed by the few. As such it has its imprint of being a reminiscence, but it could also be seen as a model for sustainability, pointing at an alternative social model to which the county in question comes closest.

What is also clear from studies from various parts of Europe is that, although the number of three generational households is falling, the practical and symbolic interaction between generations, in its core regions does not seem to undergo the same erosion that hits the actual household formation. Thus, surprisingly much of it finds new social forms in urban environments (Charles et al. 2008; Janssens 1993). Duranton et al. (2009), to their own surprise, thus find that the Toddian historical family patterns offer more statistical explanation for contemporary interregional disparities in Europe than do other plausible variables.

3 Discussion

3.1 Hierarchy and Equality

Sogn og Fjordane is, as demonstrated, a core area for the stem family, by Todd labelled a family type tolerating hierarchy and inequality. This does seemingly not fit in with the general image of Sogn og Fjordane as a region of social and economic equality.

We then have to repeat that the institutional focus in Todd’s theory is the family and its structuring properties. Todd (1990) furthermore discusses how the family types interact with land ownership and reasons as follows: Within the stem family the ideal is that a farm should be passed on undivided from one generation to the next, so as to stay in the family line. In many stem family societies this is being institutionalised through legislation regulating heritage to landed properties. This is also the case in Norway. The results are nevertheless paradoxical, as this practice freezes the social structure. Where properties are in few hands and the society takes on feudal traits, such a structure will be reproduced. Where properties are many and small, and the social structure is marked by equality, such a structure will also be reproduced.

We can therefore assume that the authoritarian position is then either reserved for the micro level, the family father, or for the macro level as the state and the church. There is therefore a disposition for verticality in the value system that is hard to do away with without breaking the cultural codex. This need for verticality, which is met at the micro and the macro levels, is subsequently missing at the meso level where a striking structure of freedom and equality reigns the arenas. This local and regional free space, I suggest, is where the cultural, political and economic strive of the Western periphery find its loci. And to compensate for the missing link in the chain of verticality, a new figure is invented to form the personalised pivots of the mobilisations, the modern community chieftain (Høydal 1995).

The chieftain is an important person in stem family societies, because he is mandated by the social structure. Where the stem family reproduces equality, the role as chieftain may apply to all free men (and more rarely women). Each man is a potential chieftain. In the tradition following Rokkan, we can speak of the free role of chieftainship as a marker for Germanic societies (Flora 1981). This role is crucial to the political and cultural mobilisation taking place in Norway from the latter part of the nineteenth century. In Sogn og Fjordane, where ownership of land, except for Inner Sogn, is characterised by a fragmented structure displaying a multitude of small units, the institutional consequence is that cultural initiatives are carried through as mobilisation from below, more as in a web than as initiatives located in defined geographical and social centres.

Referring to the numerous popular movements so typical for this part of the country, we should speak of a socially ambulating chieftainship. This role can be given to anyone who is judged capable and trustworthy, it is individually accorded and unofficial in character. As such it bears the marks of being a leadership role of the Weberian charismatic type. There are few material rewards attached to the role, neither for the chieftain or for his family, other than a good reputation. The chieftain is primes inter pares, and assuming the role of chieftainship has no structural consequences for the person in question, for his family or for society. The chieftain rises out of the crowd for a role that is going to follow him in his lifetime. The role is accorded by the people and will return to the people.

I propose to label this structure hierarchic egalitarianism. This term mirrors the contradictory aspects of the structure and its propensities towards a vertically oriented value system framing an egalitarian economic and social structure, where the meso-level suddenly opens up a community-based space of freedom. The degrees of freedom accorded in such societies should however not be exaggerated. Within the family we must assume that the hierarchic structure follows the three generational pattern, so that the level of individual freedom may be lower than in societies where the absolute nuclear family prevails, and where the barriers to individual mobility and self-realisation are fewer.

These social peculiarities are crucial to the understanding of the western popular movements already referred to. It is also in this perspective that we will have to understand the school system and the role of the teachers in this system. The western teacher is a chieftain conveying bildung in the local community integrating an international universe of knowledge, a competing nation building project and a regionally based cultural mobilisation, and all of this with the school system as an institutional basis (Høydal 1995).

Often roles will be accumulated. The chieftain could then be a teacher, a parish clerk, a farmer and a mayor to take just one possible combination. He is then understood as a community chieftain. By cumulating roles, the organic aspect of society is underlined. Societies marked by hierarchic egalitarianism could well be understood as less differentiated by the intertwining of various spheres of practice. This is then not only a legacy of the past, but could also be seen as a strategy and resource for an alternative way of meeting with modernity. In rural Sogn og Fjordane, modernity is, so to speak, constituted through organic co-operation (Fløysand and Sjøholt 2007; Wicken 1997). In this the region in question marks a different course from other parts of the country.

We can assume that the generally accepted chieftainship has served as a model to develop and maintain the western social structure with its related cultural expressions. At the same time we should ask whether or not the lack of institutional differentiation, along with a low level of urbanisation, has had a negative effect on the diffusion of the western counter-cultures, especially for those cultures most strongly rooted in Sogn og Fjordane as there were no urban structure and no national institutions in place to handle them. Sogn og Fjordane is definitely a heartland for some of these cultures, but then a heartland where the heart, understood as an organisational pivot, is missing. In this the county for good or for ill reflects its uniqueness, with hierarchic egalitarianism.

This point affects the way in which the educational system operates in the county. First it is difficult to distinguish the school system as a separate institutional sphere or field, because it happens to be so strongly interwoven with the organic modernisation of the local communities and of the region. Education is not a specific function performed in secluded places and time slots. It is, together with the second national language, Nynorsk (literally: new Norwegian), the coat of arms for the regional construction of identity. The multitasking chieftains exemplify this point further. Second, when it comes to the university (college) level, this was simply missing for long periods of time. Despite being famous for its high educational achievements, its esteem for education and its propensity to feed the teacher training colleges of the country at disproportionally high rates, the county had a teacher training college in the small village of Balestrand only for the short period between 1863 and 1880. In 1972 a new teacher training college was opened in Sogndal. In 1994 it formed part of the Sogn og Fjordane University College, which today is a small university college having some 3,800 students. The heartland finally got its heart, but then a weak one. To stretch the metaphor, the county still seems more fed by its blood vessels than by its heart.

A common way to characterise institutional development, as found in Sogn og Fjordane, will be to label it underdeveloped or incomplete. It may however give more meaning to see it as a specific case of modernity within the perspective of multiple modernities (Eisenstadt 2000). If we then couple this notion to the debate on how institutional processes are shaped, we should first note a tendency to distinguish between formal and informal institutionalisation, and eventually also to see a trade off between the two ways of institutionalising. Formal institutions will typically be legally or politically based, whereas informal institutions operate within the frames of culture and trust. Formal institutions can to some extent compensate for lack of social capital in a society, while informal institutions by mobilising local culture can achieve results that otherwise would require formal institutions to materialise (Fukuyama 2000).

One advantage with informal institutions is that they are believed to operate at low transaction costs. Instead of putting up specific institutions to cater for societal needs, the same needs can be met by the use of trust where possible. Trust then functions as a social lubricator, securing cheap and efficient performance. A low degree of formal institutionalisation should then not be taken as a sign of lack of modernity, but rather as a sign of an alternative modernity at operation.

Trust is generally identified as raw material for building social capital (North 1994; Putnam 1995). According to World Value Survey data, Norway is on top globally when it comes to the general trust level (Inglehart 2000, p. 90). It could be argued that this national feature leads to lesser needs for formal institutionalisation. Consequently it could also be argued that we ideal typically could find more trust in a rural community dominated by hierarchic egalitarianism, than in an urban society within the realm of the absolute nuclear family. It would then be theoretically possible to explain the heartland without heart-model as upheld by trust and decentralised ideological maintenance.

Empirical data for trust as presented through Norwegian survey data do however fail to substantiate such an assumption. Both for regions and for a cross-regional, urban-rural gradient, there seems to be almost no geographical variation in the trust level. Some authors concentrating on social capital and third sector penetration find that trust seems to be slightly more present in rural than in urban areas, but do not find any variation in trust level across regions (Wollebæk and Sivesind 2010; Wollebæk and Selle 2007). An alternative interpretation of trust could thus be that it is more of a national resource than a property of some specific regions and family types.

3.2 Counter-Culture and Modernity

The presence of cultural markers for the opposition between Western and (South-)Eastern Norway is well documented by scholars (Rokkan 1967; Øidne 1957; Todd 1990; Knudsen 1986). The western cultures are commonly referred to as counter-cultures as they represent an oppositional stance towards dominating, Oslo-based cultures and because they tend to have their strongholds in western rurality. They are represented in all social classes and in all parts of the country, but typically overrepresented in the West and then again among what we somewhat academically incorrect could refer to as ordinary people. I then leave aside an interesting, but in this context too far-fetched, debate on elite aspects pertaining to some of these cultures (Hoel 2009).

Two remarks should be made. First, these movements should be understood as modern, in that they mobilise people and interpret ideologies to meet with modernity (Furre 1990; Hoel 2009; Todd 1990). Second, these cultures are unevenly distributed as geographical markers. When it comes to Sogn og Fjordane, the position of the Nynorsk language is the most salient feature. Both as an official, administrative language and as a language used and taught in school, we talk about almost full coverage.

We thus deal with a situation where the counter-cultures alternate geographically, and where the linguistic marker plays a specific role in our case. Language is a more basic formative category than other counter-cultures as it constitutes the framework for symbolic interaction among people and also serves as a vehicle for socialisation and learning. Language is thus intimately linked to schooling and education. Institutionally speaking a language is nurtured and cultivated by the most egalitarian of all institutions of modernisation, the local community schools with their teachers. It is therefore natural to argue that the school system will be the harbour for maintaining and developing language as the favoured cultural marker. We can thus postulate that the school system will have a stronghold, where a language is fought for and has its strength.

3.3 From Culture to Education

The school system is the foremost institutional tool for the dissemination of literacy and knowledge. At the same time, this system is in a double position between the input- and output-side of politics. On the one side it is formed by the values of the communities in which it operates, on the other it is formed by the national project that has mandated it. No wonder that education and schooling are crucial to any nation building project. As such schools become the foremost agents of modernisation, strategically placed between national ambitions and regional preconditions (Todd 1987, 1990). In the case of Sogn og Fjordane, it is impossible to imagine the school system without this regional input-dimension. The case is becoming even stronger because the region has few other formal institutions to make itself visible.

Todd (1987, 1990, p. 131ff) ties the emergence of literacy and educational systems to the stem family in its German and Nordic varieties. The Lutheran Catechism emphasises the family as the arena for education, and Todd points at the stem family as a structure for this task by giving the head of the family the authority needed to perform the duty, a duty that very soon becomes integrated with a community school system. Within the absolute nuclear family, this mission becomes weakened because the family structure fail to accord it the same degree of (religiously based) authority. This should thus be taken as the theoretical starting point to deal with the German/Nordic supremacy on the Anglo-American world for the cultural part of modernisation. Two different family types present two different images on schooling and on how the school system integrates with society.

Another observation here will be that the kind of modernisation that takes place through education is analysed with little reference to the historical role of universities and related research. Closing in on our Norwegian case, we will soon find the place for universities, but then with their scholars acting as partisans for opposing educational ideologies. Very early the Norwegian school system became prone to conflicts similar to those found within other parts of cultural and political life. Again we meet the phenomenon of one country with two opposing cultures, this time within the field of pedagogy. On the one side we find a nationally and idealistically oriented bildung-ideology. On the other side we have an Anglo-American oriented and explicitly modernising ideology emphasising empirical testing and verifiability (Dale 1999; Helsvig 2005). These two ideologies found different cultural and regional ground, and their contested issue was the national school system and its pedagogical content. The idealists counted as their combatants mostly representatives from the western counter-culture. Among these the most important was Erling Kristvik (Slagstad 1998; Vaage 2004). Slagstad sees him as one of Norway’s first important sociologists, while others (Dale 1999; Helsvig 2005) have a more negative evaluation of his importance. Dale (1999, p. 439) goes as far as denigrating his idealistic position as obsolete, harmful and anti-democratic.

Kristvik presided at the teacher training colleges in Volda and in Trondheim. Even geographically he thus stood aside from the pedagogical development that from the 1930s and onwards took place in Oslo, more specifically at the Pedagogical Research Institute (PFI). As far as we can find a geographical centre for Nynorsk in Norway, the semirural communities of Volda and Ørsta, just north of the Sogn og Fjordane county border, come closest. Kristvik’s analyses as his pedagogical thinking are directed towards rural living. His ambition is to grasp the essence of the rural community as a social configuration, especially as found in western Norway, and to use it as raw material for a national pedagogy. With Helsvig (2005, p. 102) we can identify this as a pedagogical programme rooted in

“the creed of christianity and national identification as an integrating and nation-building factor to overcome social and economic cleavages” (My translation). Confronted with an American-inspired research programme at PFI, “a confrontation [emerged] between the extension of two dominating traditions within the wide Norwegian left-/liberal movement that grew from the end of the nineteenth century: a popular national and a liberal-progressive” (Helsvig 2005, p. 103) (My translation).

Dale (1999) further criticises Kristvik for his emphasis on the input-side when analysing social and political factors, and his subsequent neglect of output-aspects, namely policies for school development. This criticism should be paradigmatically seen. In the organic tradition it will always be more crucial to qualify the nature of society than to specify the policy output. It is impossible to imagine the coining of policies detached from a thorough analysis of politics, since the input-side of politics is thought to decide its output-potential. In the more pragmatic and experimental PFI universe this was not necessarily so. Here it is presupposed that the output-side of politics can be detached from politics in its broad sense, as policies that can be implemented regardless of context. Kristvik emphasises the institutional context. This he does in line with the tradition from the classical political sociology. Todd follows suit. We easily see that these two opposing perspectives on politics also have bearing on the possible role of universities and research in dealing with educational questions, the PFI position lending itself to a far more instrumental take on education as a field of practice and policy-making than the Kristvik position.

A given political culture will always be decisive for the range of institutional solutions at hand. The lesson from Norway is clear. Here regionally anchored perspectives have given ammunition to a political battle on the shaping of institutions. This is well-documented for the school-system (Dale 1999; Hagemann 1992; Helsvig 2005), but the same holds through for other sectors of society as well (Wicken 2004). In this perspective culture precedes institutions, meaning that culture matters more to institutions than vice versa.

Kristvik was well acquainted with the scientific debate of his time (Slagstad 1998). Among his sources of inspiration we find the French demographer Frédéric Le Play and his works on family and kinship in European societies, and Kristvik draws on Le Play for his own theories (Vaage 2004). Here is common ground for Kristivik and Todd. They both process the insights from historical demography, and they conclude identically on the specificity of western Norway, Todd analytically, Kristvik in addition as an ideologue. In two short, popular articles published at the outbreak of World War II he offers in condensed from his vision of society, the child, the school system and cultural striving

Finally, the child is not first and foremost an ego, an isolated self, but a member of a household, a family-line, a rural community, a people. A higher, wider and stronger life makes the child a cell in a larger organism, and it is this organism that lives within the child’s mind and appears through superior contributions than those sparked from the individual itself. (My translation) (Kristvik 1940, p. 311)

Here we have it all, the organic view of society, the biological metaphors and the three generational family. The rural west has been codified by one of their own. The tool to take society into the future is the school system, but as he writes this seems: “…purposeless as long as the school has ceased to be an organ for a society in shape.” (Kristvik 1940, p. 312) (My translation).

3.4 Educational Output

So far I have argued that there can be a special nexus between the social structure found in Sogn og Fjordane and the position for schooling and education in the county. It is fair to assume that excellent school performance mainly derives from the school system being integrated with a social structure, of which it expresses and mediates the basic values. To which extent we can talk of a regionally conceived pedagogical paradigm or of a regional recognition in one of two national paradigms, is open to interpretation. I suggest that it can be useful to label one of the paradigms the embedded school to point at its resemblance with the CME-category in the VoC-scheme. The other paradigm could then be labelled the differentiated school and attached to the LME-category in VoC-terms. These categories should then again be linked to the two family types as proposed by Todd (1998) in his book on family types and the related forms of capitalisms.

The first paradigm then copes with the idealistic and Continental tradition in dealing with modernity, while the other goes along with Anglo-American liberal pragmatism (Helsvig 2005). The first one is in this context linked to hierarchic egalitarism as its social configuration, while the second presents itself as a pedagogical scheme for the realm of the urban Southeast. If we take what we know from regional school performance in light of such a scheme, it should only be logical that we find the best school results in the core areas of these paradigms, which means in the rural West and in middle class urban areas, especially in the capital region of Oslo and Akershus, as illustrated in Table 3.3. In both these cases parents, pupils and students should be able to recognise the school system as reflecting their own mores, values and ideas (Knudsen 2014).

Table 3.3 National test results

Outside these core regions, in an outer periphery of the East, in the South, in Northern Norway and in the low status urban areas, we should explain poor educational results as an effect of a double peripheral position. In such contexts parents, pupils and students will recognise none of the two school paradigms as theirs. In such contexts it could also be argued that it does not help much to allocate more resources to education as the main prerequisite for success is missing, a pedagogical programme built on a regionally acknowledged social order. It may be argued that such regions experience a kind of systemic colonisation where the legitimacy of the institutional order is sapped in the first place. It should be stressed, however, that this is a structural argument, and not one that should prevent us from allocating resources to individuals displaying specific needs.

The answer to the problem should then consequently be to reinvent the educational system in regional terms, and as integrated with other spheres of society. This is parallel to how a similar problem, that of enhancing advanced research and economic growth, has been dealt with through arrangements like Centres of Expertise and Centres of Excellence. After Porter (1990) it is generally accepted that world class excellence is best dealt with nationally by, through various policy measures, stimulating regional institutions and forces to mobilising regional co-operation as well as competition. Why should not the same hold true for all of the educational chain?

4 Conclusion

The initial observation sparking this chapter was the observation that Sogn og Fjordane performs poorly on indicators for regional economic development, while the county scores very high for the goals that the same economic development is supposed to generate, welfare and well-being. This could be analysed in several ways. One explanation could be that education both mirrors and affects level of living and quality of life, in ways which fail to be registered by our most commonly used indicators for how education relate to economic growth and innovation.

It is fair enough to argue that CME-related modes of innovation have their merits, and that these fail to appear in the statistics, but these modes of innovation should nevertheless produce economic results at an aggregated regional level. It would then have been possible to argue that the western mode of industrialisation based on organically learned innovation in a rural setting should bring about demographic and economic results. Then we could also defend an equation showing that an excellent educational system and a thriving system of innovative and growing firms go together (Lorentzen 2007). We can produce such a line of argument for smaller communities also in Sogn og Fjordane (Fløysand and Sjøholt 2007), and we can do it for minor subregions along other parts of the West Norwegian coast (Reve and Sasson 2012), but we cannot for Sogn og Fjordane as an aggregated regional entity.

If we change the question from one of economic to one of human capital, we can define Sogn og Fjordane in the role of a net contributor to national value creation. The negative domestic balance of migration could then be read as an export of human capital to the rest of the country. Thus an excellent educational system in place could be seen to fall victim to a low ability of regional competence absorption. This we again could substantiate by pointing to a low degree of urbanisation and to small regional markets. Thus the question of whether Sogn og Fjordane offers a case of sustainability, coupling education and hierarchical egalitarianism, or whether it offers a case of lock in by an obsolete coupling of these two factors, remains open for debate.

Duranton et al. (2009), who otherwise support the Toddian theses, find, contrary to Todd (1998) that educational success prevails in the LME-context on a regional level. There are many ways to interpret this finding. One could be to question the selection of educational variables. Another could be that a systematic shift has taken place over the decades in how education couples to society. The findings of Duranton et al. (2009) could then be an artefact of the fact that the educational paradigm today is Anglo-American and that the global language of knowledge and education is English.

It is tempting to prolong this line of thought with an observation of how New Public Management (NPM) and control mechanisms related to NPM, mechanisms that have been developed in the LME context, have penetrated educational thinking and practice in all of the OECD realm. These control mechanisms stem from countries showing medium trust levels and a low tradition of work place involvement (Inglehart 2000; Hall and Soskice 2001; Friel 2005). We should therefore suspect them of having a harmful side effect of eroding the high level of trust presently found in Norway, and thus also contributing to a less sustainable society from a social point of view.

It is symptomatic that we have a vast literature on how institutions affect society in general terms. At the same time we have surprisingly little knowledge of how to construct and design institutions for creating regional growth and development in the broader sense (North 1994; Rodríguez-Pose 2013). Taken to the educational sphere, it is not very plausible that we can decompose a thesis of the knowledge society, meaning a thesis that the competitive force of the future is conditioned by how we today instrumentally design the educational system, so as to predict its effect on the economy. All such attempts have at best been tentative and speculative.

Instead of pursuing such an effort, we should rather concentrate on observing and analysing how knowledge production and bildung take place as historical and geographical practices. Turning again to the Norwegian case, we will find two examples of successful educational systems. They both appear as regionally delimited, and they are fostered by two opposed ideological positions on modernity. What we also see is that regions failing to have a specific regionally based educational paradigm, perform poorly on most indicators. For the university sector the future task could then be to foster a spread of paradigms, each responding to the specific educational prerequisites and needs as they are found regionally. The possible outcome would then be to open up more robust and diversified educational pathways, with the hope of creating more sustainable social systems for the future.

Culture is structure. Structures are formed and passed on as cultural forms. When we enter into the understanding of these dynamics, we are also able to better understand how education and sustainable regional forms of development can condition each other.