Much contemporary scholarship claims that competition has become a key characteristic of educational governance, and that competition occurs in educational governance as a consequence of the comparative turn in education. This article problematizes the widespread application of the concept of competition as a relevant term across (seemingly) all governance contexts, and seeks to overcome this problem by theorizing competition as an entangled phenomenon that takes on a different ontology according to the specific situations in which it occurs. This theorization highlights three dimensions of competition that may affect its ontology: the field of contestants, the rules of the game, and the competition objective. The result is an analytical framework that makes the concept of competition sensitive to different governance contexts across Europe and the Western world, including those with strong remnants of universalistic welfare state models. The analytical framework allows for a distinction between market-based competition and competition as a governance instrument that mediates managerial decision-making in which the contestants fight to avoid top-down reform rather than fighting against their peers. The analytical framework implies that we cannot characterize all European education systems as governed through competition-based mechanisms without caution and further specification.

许多当代学者声称，竞争已成为教育治理的关键特征，并且竞争是教育相对转向的结果，在教育治理中发生。本文对竞争概念作为（似乎）所有治理环境中的一个相关术语的广泛应用提出了质疑，并试图通过将竞争理论作为一种纠缠现象来克服这一问题，该纠缠现象根据竞争的具体情况采用不同的本体论。发生。该理论强调了可能影响其本体的竞争的三个维度：竞争者的领域，游戏规则和竞争目标。结果是建立了一个分析框架，使竞争概念对欧洲和西方世界（包括那些拥有普遍主义福利国家模型的残余部分）的不同治理环境敏感。分析框架允许区分基于市场的竞争与作为管理工具的中介的竞争，在管理决策中，竞争者为避免自上而下的改革而不是与同业进行斗争。分析框架意味着，我们不能在没有谨慎和进一步说明的情况下，将所有欧洲教育系统都归类为通过基于竞争的机制管理的欧洲教育系统。分析框架允许区分基于市场的竞争与作为管理工具的中介的竞争，在管理决策中，竞争者为避免自上而下的改革而不是与同业进行斗争。分析框架意味着，我们不能在没有谨慎和进一步说明的情况下，将所有欧洲教育系统都归类为通过基于竞争的机制管理的欧洲教育系统。分析框架允许区分基于市场的竞争与作为管理工具的中介的竞争，在管理决策中，竞争者为避免自上而下的改革而不是与同业进行斗争。分析框架意味着，我们不能在没有谨慎和进一步说明的情况下，将所有欧洲教育系统都归类为通过基于竞争的机制管理的欧洲教育系统。