Project Details
Projekt
Distinction in Institutional Settings in Early Childhood Education and Care
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Johanna Mierendorff
Subject Area
Education Systems and Educational Institutions
Term
from 2011 to 2018
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 184751107
Commercial highcost childcare providers in Germany are of central interest to the project Distinction in Early Childhood Education and Care, running since 2011. In science, politics, and media, this new type of provider has been linked to the (re-)production of social inequality in early childhood. The debates take place against the backdrop of a vertical differentiation of ECEC that increases competition among childcare providers and may lead to new forms of institutional amplification of inequalities. Thus, the project asks if and how processes of particularization and social distinction are taking place. In the first two years, the research concentrated on parental choice of childcare center, on the selection of clients by providers and on practices of social distinction. Besides a strong interdependence of choice and selection, one main result so far has been that practices of distinction point to specifics of the organizational culture of the childcare centers researched.The continuity of these centers frames the questions for further research. Based on the assumption that in order to stabilize organizational cultures, practices of distinction must be grounded in knowledge and experiences that are at least partially shared between parents and staff, we ask about respective habitual matches. The second question focusses on how institutional coherence is interactively being produced. We assume a plurality of organizational cultures and focus on interactions between different organizational milieus that consolidate coherence; a functioning and stable organizational culture is both founded and expressed in such practices. Finally, based on the cases in our sample, we develop profiles of institutional childcare. The findings on the structure and regulation of German institutional childcare, the structure of the researched centers, the pedagogical and supportive services offered at the centers, the local supply of childcare services and the findings on choice, selection, processes of coherence and practices of distinction all converge in these profiles. By analyzing the relative positions these profiles take up in the field of German ECEC, we aim for the identification of separations and closures in institutional childcare. To analyze the data we employ Bohnsacks documentary method that has proven to be both adequate and fruitful in the projects first two years.
DFG Programme
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