Erasures and Equivalences: Negotiating the Politics of Culture in the OECD's Global Competence Project

In 2014, the OECD-PISA’s Governing Board approved the addition of a set of global competence measures to its Programme of Student Assessment. In our paper, we explore whether and how there are discursive shifts between the two framing papers (2016/2018) and what the outcomes are for policy-shaping. To this end, we employ Network Text Analysis to map shifting semantic configurations. We show that (i) the concept of ‘global competence’ is radically redefined through the simplification and polarisation of the semantic universe surrounding it, (ii) that the concept ‘global’ becomes a shifting signifier which enables the establishment of an equivalence between the two studied documents, and that (iii) in this process, concepts such as ‘culture’ are now erased in the 2018 text. Our findings show the dramatic change of approach between the two documents reinforces a narrative that is familiar to the OECD around knowledge economy proxies.