The purpose of this volume is to contribute with conceptualization on how reforms change educational organizations and subjectivities, and how educational organizations change reforms (Cuban, 1998). Thereby we aim at giving an account of the power of conceptual endeavors with close readings of empirical material. Our intention is to elaborate this basic idea through empirical investigations of the intertwinement of different educational reforms, of policies, standards and everyday educational lives across the globe. As well as telling stories of reforms and how they transforms and are transformed by the educational organizations and subjects they engage, we highlight how a careful enactment of methodologies and critiques might assist us in tracing not only intended but also unintended effects of reforms and the ‘worlding’ they shape (Brøgger, 2014). In other words, engaging with performative research approaches allow us to follow and scrutinize what happens when reforms are borrowed, translated and taken up in a range of ways. Or as Robert Cowen (Cowen, 2009) poetically and with a jazz vibe in mind so beautifully has formulated it; how reforms morph as they move. This theme issue takes on the task of demonstrating how a wide range of performative effects are at stake at many different levels according to various dynamics in different countries and regions. By engaging with performative approaches the special issue attempts to nuance the idea of causality and linearity in the implementation of education reforms. Realist approaches tend to examine how reforms meet a world already structured and categorized in certain ways, whereas performative approaches tend to center on the ways in which reforms are involved with the creation and shaping of the world (Brøgger & Staunæs, 2016). The move towards performative alternatives to representationalism in the humanities and social sciences shifts the focus from correspondence between description and reality to practices and doings (Barad, 2007; Butler, 1993b, 2010; Coole & Frost, 2010; Gay, 2010).