Market-Making Practices of Private Tutoring in Finland: Commercialization of Exam Preparation for Admission to Higher Education

Abstract

<b>Purpose:</b> This study focuses on courses that prepare applicants for universities’ highly competitive<br />entrance examinations in Finland. The analysis clarifies the market-making practices and the<br />construction of this field.<br /><b>Design/Approach/Methods:</b> To understand these processes, we use C¸ alis¸kan and Callon’s five<br />framings for studying marketization as a heuristic framework. In our analysis, we combine different<br />data sets, including data on course provision, thematic interviews, documents, and ethnographic<br />notes.<br /><b>Findings:</b> In this article, we argue that the preparatory course markets in Finland are an example<br />of private tutoring which operates in the privacy of the university applicants’ exam preparation<br />process, thus commercializing this process. The market making of this type of private tutoring is an<br /><div>assemblage of a variety of agents that interact in parallel with each other.</div><div><b>Originality/Value:</b> This study aims to contribute to the systemic understanding of the assemblage<br />of private tutoring markets in an equality-focused Nordic country by providing new heuristic<br />lenses from economic sociology through which to view private tutoring.<br /></div>