Politically, qualifications frameworks that define what a learner should know, and is able to do on the basis of a certain degree, have become a dominant political respond to different imaginaries of globalisation.

In the Bologna process is argued that such qualifications frameworks are essential to creating a long term quality assurance the, that 1) respond to tomorrow’s need for competences, 2) create a necessary comparability for the global market, 3) facilitate movement of students and staff between different national education systems and labour markets, and 4) help the institutions to develop modules and study programmes based on standardized learning outcomes and credits.

In recent studies on the Bologna process (Fejes 2008, Ozga 2011) it is hence argued that qualifications frameworks can be seen as a key tool in an inevitable and univocal European standardization and marketisation of higher education.

This paper, however, takes a different stance. By comparing the Danish qualifications frameworks (2003, 2008) and the overarching Bologna framework (2005), I argue that the Danish and European frameworks bear on unlike imaginaries of globalization, and have led to promoting conflicting definitions of what a learner should know as respond to this unknown future.

The analysis draw on a post-structural approach to qualifications frameworks as discursively constituted and socially contested technologies for controlling and normalizing certain objectives. Qualifications frameworks are thus not neutral tools, responding to objective challenges of globalization, but at they same time shaping – or literally ‘framing’ – what is globalization

By focusing on qualification frameworks, the paper unveils some of key the struggles over the significance of globalization in a Danish context that is relative to the overarching European approach. On the basis of my PhD thesis (Sarauw 2011), I’ll pay a special attention to the competing ways in which the concept of employability is constructed and promoted within the different frameworks.


Attachment to network: Symposium on Higher Education Internationalized: globalization, marketization and new forms of citizenship, created by Gritt B. Nielsen