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In this chapter we draw on research from Canada to develop a framework for understanding the variety of forms of supplementary education and their position within broader organization fields of education. The chapter asks: What is the nature and organizing logic of supplementary education in Canada? and, How does supplementary education relate to public schools in Canada?

Data come from a variety of secondary sources.

Distributed between three relatively autonomous settings – state, market, and nonprofit – supplementary education exhibits tremendous variety in its use value to parents, instructional content, and organizational form. Supplementary education is popular among Canadian parents and appears to be growing, yet it has failed to fundamentally alter the technical core of Canadian schooling, processes that stratify students, and child and family usage of their time or income. Supplementary education’s inability to penetrate these processes reflects its peripheral position within the broader organizational field of Canadian schooling.

The adoption of an organizational field approach generates new ways of thinking about determinants, forming and organizing logics of supplementary education both nationally and comparatively.

Private tutoring is a worldwide phenomenon, long-popular in Europe and Asia (Baker & LeTendre, 2005; Bray, 2003; Stevenson & Baker, 1992), and increasingly so in North America (Aurini, 2004; Aurini & Davies, 2004; Davies, 2004). However, this K-12 “supplementary education” or “shadow education” sector is being transformed. Until recently it has been a cottage industry of individual tutors and test prep companies, but corporate bodies are revolutionizing it around the globe. For instance, Kumon has spread from Japan to now boast 26,000 franchises in 43 countries.¹ Educate, Inc., the umbrella company for industry giant Sylvan Learning Center, currently operates 950 centers in North America, and 900 in Europe under the Schülerhilfe brand. Several franchises have expanded from their original target market of math and reading tutoring to aggressively enter new niches, including SAT/ACT prep, high school credits, online tutoring, and post-secondary programs.² These corporations are thriving in niches with relatively little competition from established public schools or non-profit institutions. The largest corporations are publicly traded and rank among top companies in business circles.

A major line of argument in institutional theory, as applied to comparative education, has been that national educational arrangements, and changes in them, reflect models obtaining in world society. The models are transmitted by professionals, by all sorts of world governmental and non-governmental associations, and by the natural influences of prestige in the world's stratification system. So recent American reforms in science education, for instance, are built into the world's professional educational discourse, and policy organizations like UNESCO and the OECD and the World Bank, and flow into policy and sometimes practice in the most unlikely places.

The “micro” turn in institutional research is a welcome development in a field that has commonly adopted a macro approach to the study of institutions. Nevertheless, research in the emergent “microinstitutional” tradition often ignores a fundamental social form: social interaction. The goal of this chapter is to bring this form of society back into institutional analysis, as a key mesocomponent of an “inhabited institutional” approach. The authors argue that social interactions are vital to the understandings of institutions, how they operate, and their impact on society. The authors advance inhabited institutionalism as a mesosociological approach that is consistent with key premises of institutional theory.