Subjectivation through Structural Coupling – The Emergence of School Laggards and Deficient Pupils

This contribution explores how practices, concepts, and ideas about including and excluding pupils in schools are connected to different arenas of knowledge and how their inter-connectedness produced specific subject positions for pupils. By applying Niklas Luhmann’s concept of structural coupling as an analytical approach this article discusses the problem of non-promotion and the emergence of the “deficient child” to grasp the connections between the different social systems involved in these processes. Based on two case studies that deal with specific iterations of efforts to alleviate non-promotion, the contribution exemplifies how structural coupling can help to identify connections between and resulting activities in different social systems.