Education, Policy and Ethics

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Education, Policy and Ethics

Related titles: John Blase and Garry Anderson: The Micropolitics of Educational Leadership: From Control to Empowerment Michael Fullan: The New Meaning of Educational Change Gary McCulloch, Gill Helsby and Peter Knight: The Politics of Professionalism Maureen O'Connor, Elizabeth Hales, Jeff Davies and Sally Tomlinson: Hackney Downs: The School that Dared to Fight James Tooley: Reclaiming Education Geoffrey Walford: Choice and Equity in Education

Education, Policy and Ethics Mike Bottery

Continuum London and New York

Continuum Wellington House 125 Strand London WC2R OBB

370 Lexington Avenue New York NY 10017-6503

© 2000 Mike Bottery All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. First published 2000 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-8264-4838-0 (HB) 0-8264-4837-2 (PB) Typeset by Paston PrePress Ltd, Beccles, Suffolk Printed and hound in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Educational Policies: The Global Context

vi vii 1

2 Educational Policies: The National Context

27

3 Managerialism, Leadership and the Assault on Educational Values

57

4 Uses and Abuses of Quality: The Need for a Civic Version

81

5 The School Effectiveness Movement - Educational Research as an Agent of Policy Direction

105

6 Education as Surveillance: The Development of Instruments of Control

131

7 Fragmentation and the Loss of Meaning

157

8 Getting the Balance Right: Duty as a Core Ethic in the Life of Educators

175

9 Education and the Discourse of Civil Society

195

10 Empowering an Ecology of Change

215

References and bibliography

237

Index

251

Acknowledgements

Many people have contributed to this book in all sorts of ways, but some I would like to single out. First, Nigel Wright, who has been a constant help, sounding board and loyal friend, and for his illuminating thoughts on Chapter 3. Second, Derek Webster, who has read materials not necessarily in his field of study or interest, and has still managed to be engaged, thought-provoking and added the vital 'yes, but . . .'. Third, Janet Ouston, for her friendship and helpful comments on Chapter 5. Fourth, Graham Chesters, for his support for the time to write this book. Fifth, the Oxford Review of Education, the Cambridge Review of Education and Educational Management and Administration for using some materials originally published in those journals. And finally, and as always, Jill, Christopher and Sarah, for making it all worthwhile.

Introduction

As this book was being written, the World Trade Organization talks were being held in Seattle, accompanied by 150,000 very noisy protesters. This event is symptomatic of a new ideological divide which looks to be quite as deep and entrenched as the capitalist-communist split previously. This time, however, instead of what looked to be two fairly evenly matched contenders, the power seems be heavily on one side. What the 150,000 individuals were doing was expressing not just their hostility to the aims of the WTO, but frustration at their own powerlessness. The WTO message is one proclaimed with almost evangelical zeal that a better world will be created through global markets and an unrestricted capitalism. However, and more than this, they claim that there is no alternative: all they are doing is describing an inexorable sequence of events to which nations must sign up or be left behind. Yet both claims are subjects of intense dispute. There is, for instance, plenty of evidence to suggest that as markets expand, global and national inequalities are increasing, and that many of the world's population are becoming poorer as a very few are becoming more obscenely rich. There is also plenty of evidence of environmental damage on a global scale as a direct consequence of the unrestrained exploitation of natural resources following from the liberalization of international trade policies. Moreover, if the fundamental legitimation behind the policies of the WTO is that more wealth will lead to greater overall happiness, why is it that the World Health Organization claims that, because of the social dislocation caused by such attempts at wealth generation, the treatment of mental ill-health worldwide will consume more

viii

Introduction

resources than heart disease by the year 2020? Finally, the suggestion that there is no alternative to such market liberalization policies may actually be more correctly described as the desire by certain powerful people to ensure that this happens because of the profits such policies generate for them and their companies. Globalization may then be not so much a description of what is the case, and what inexorably will be the case, as what some interested parties would like to be the case. And what of nation states: where do they fit into all of this? While many of the 134 national representatives gathered in Seattle were sent there by democratically elected governments, the reality was that many of the decisions were decided by particular power groups behind closed doors, remote from public scrutiny. In particular, the needs and demands of the poorer countries were largely ignored. Furthermore, and on the global stage, individual nation states are well aware of their difficulties in curbing the powers of multinational giants like Monsanto, Exxon or Mitsubishi, for there is always the threat of product and job relocation by them to other more acquiescent countries. In the process of buying into WTO policies, and accommodating to multinational corporations, either because they believe that these serve their own interests, or because they believe there really are no viable alternatives, nation states are transforming their national institutions to conform or to cope with these pressures. Education is a current example. As nations see the development of global markets, and of the increased power of multinationals, so they attempt to shore up their own legitimacy, at the same time as adapting their education systems to resource these giants. The result is the production of education systems more than ever geared to economic and technical imperatives, which lead, ever more, to the disappearance of debates about the creation of the 'good society', and the place of education in such a project. Nation states are in danger of becoming the servants of global markets, their education systems providing the human resources to feed them. Yet such policies are desperately short-sighted. If nations think that by pleasing the WTO and multinationals they can preserve their stability and legitimacy, they are sadly mistaken, for the

Introduction

ix

marketization of their resources leads inevitably to the privatization of these, and then to the destruction of their national integrity. This is true and has been apparent for natural resources for decades; it is becoming increasingly true for other national assets as well. Though few realize it yet, it is particularly pointed with regard to education. As the sole international body mandated to establish the rules governing trade between countries, the WTO has in place legally binding principles which apply to both commodities and services (with education coming under the latter). The second of these principles in effect stipulates that foreign companies which are present in the market of a country must be given the same kind of treatment by the government of that country as national companies operating in the same market. What this means is that, because education is hardly ever completely financed or administered by the state of a country, and is therefore classed by the WTO as a commercially competitive activity, in effect the provision of public education becomes a restraint of trade on companies who would like to exploit this market. It is increasingly clear that there are huge potential and massive profits to be made in providing educational services beyond the tertiary level, and into the primary and secondary levels as well. This then raises the prospect of the enforced abolition of public funding for national education systems because this, under WTO principles, undermines free trade between countries. Public education is then classified as a restraint of trade within a global market place. In such legal and semantic ways is a pivotal national institution dismantled. This is not science fiction. It is a real possibility based upon an appreciation of current legal agreements, and of global trends towards the liberalization of trade, the marketization of national cultures and values and the privatization of public institutions. The ramifications for national systems of education are mindboggling, not only for the generation of inequalities within and between countries, but also for their ability to commit to any form of education beyond that of market requirements. This example indicates that educational policy can no longer be discussed solely within a national context. Of course, there

x

Introduction

are plenty of policies that national governments are making which impact ever more keenly than previously upon the practice of educational professionals. Many of these are a consequence of or response by nation states to pressures beyond their own borders, and therefore to understand their policies, the larger picture is essential. This book, therefore, sets national policies within a global framework, and shows that while their responses may seem different, due to different political and cultural histories, they are in many respects remarkably similar. It also examines the ways in which such policies are translated into practice, most notably through the use of centralizing, marketizing and managerialist strategies, and then interrogates the manner in which these approaches attempt to 'capture the discourse' of education, to suggest that there is only one way of looking at a problem, that it is through particular eyes and with particular values. From there, it moves to examine the paradoxical but equally damaging effects upon educational professionals of current policies; policies which produce both greater control and greater fragmentation. Finally, it suggests a number of strategies, both within education and beyond it, which are needed for a return to a vision of a richer, more humane and more democratic view of the role of education, and of how this movement might contribute not only to national but also to global changes. While some may suggest that there is no alternative to current views of the world and of education's place within it, this book disagrees and argues how vitally important it is that something very different is envisaged. So, if some thought that with the demise of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe the threat of authoritarian rule had disappeared, and that history itself had come to an end, the reality is very different. We are living at a time when enormous changes are taking place over which not only the average voter but also even the average nation has diminishing control. This is due in part to the fact that these changes are not sufficiently recognized or understood, yet the consequence of these changes may be just as momentous as the fears of Communist takeovers a few decades ago, and just as unpleasant. Policy-makers must not only take greater note of these changes, but they must retain

Introduction

xi

wider visions of a future good, and of the role of key institutions in helping to develop these visions within the wider population. Education is the paramount institution for doing this; its policy and ethics could not be more closely intertwined.

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Chapter 1

Educational policies: the global context

Introduction It was not so long ago that you would have been hard-pressed to find many educationalists who thought that their world extended much beyond that of the classroom or their institution, or indeed needed to. Education was for many a cosy, rather insular activity, where individual practice was on occasions challenged by national pronouncements and advice, but fairly quickly returned to normality once these new ideas were absorbed and modified to conform to the beliefs of the predominant culture. Events over the last couple of decades have, however, profoundly changed this educational culture from one of its selective response and assimilation, to that of an increased acceptance of its subordination to policy imperatives. At first, these pressures seemed purely national in nature, driven in many cases by the beliefs of particular politicians. Increasingly, though, it has become clear that they derive from a much larger, more global picture, and that to understand the real forces at play, this global picture has to form the context within which national policies are defined. This chapter, then, performs that function. It examines the effects of global trends upon nation-state policies, and in particular upon those policies which affect education. This makes it wide-ranging, because many of the effects upon education are not legislated but are indirect, mediated by things like national cultures. Yet such mediations do not make such effects negligible. Indeed, as Dale (1999, p. 8) points out, if we limit ourselves to examining only those policies and practices that are of direct and immediate relevance to education policy or practice, we run the

2

Education, policy and ethics

real risk of neglecting the level at which the agenda for education policy is actually set. This chapter then suggests ways of conceptualizing these global influences and examines how they affect education. It argues that these global forces are having damaging effects upon rich, humane conceptions of education, because they are being used to produce policy initiatives which see education largely as part of a project concerned with human resource development and economic competitiveness, underpinned by business management practice. Now, certainly, education can and should make a major contribution to the wealth-creating sectors of society, and to a nation's international competitive status. Yet it also needs to be argued that policy-makers must recognize that public institutions like education have commitments beyond those of economy and efficiency and the profit and loss ledger; that it must help students develop constructive and critical voices; that it must empower a level of participation greater than that required purely for economic purposes; that it must help the next adult generation to vocalize and search for ways of creating the good society; that it must be concerned with issues of equality and justice; and that it must ensure that those who work in educational organizations are good role models for this younger generation, for if they are not allowed to, or do not show an interest in these matters themselves, how can a new generation be expected to understand the need or the practice? As Henry el al. (1999, p. 95) argue, there is therefore a clear imperative upon educationalists to produce alternative arguments and visions to those now occupying the global mainstream, as a means of informing education policy and politics.

This is a primary intention of this chapter.

The rise of the nation state The values and educational organization of a society unsurprisingly have tended to mirror its stage of development. In pre-

The global context

3

industrial societies, education was informal, small-scale and practical, and normally consisted of sexually differentiated forms of apprenticeship, accompanied by a grounding in the norms and beliefs of that society. Present western systems are the product of a number of connected, if not always coherent, events: the rise of the nation state, the expansion of democratic ideals, the movement from agrarian to industrial economies and the need for international economic competitiveness. The first of these, the creation of the nation state, underpinned the formation of many of the education systems we know today. Thus education systems like those of Germany, France, Italy and the United States, were designed, as Green (1997, p. 35) argues to spread the dominant cultures and inculcate popular ideologies of nationhood, to forge the political and cultural unity for the burgeoning nation states, and to cement the ideological hegemony of their dominant classes.

In Asia, Green argues (p. 64), the emphasis was little different, the major priority of education systems being to cultivate the kinds of social attitudes and personal skills which would lead to a cohesive and orderly citizenship, and to the creation of a labour force which was both disciplined and co-operative. In England, this quest for the legitimacy of the nation state, given its greater political stability and relatively fixed cultural identity, was not as pressing a concern, and so it developed an educational system rather later than most other major nations. Yet for all of them, the effect of creating such systems tended to move - and was intended to move - the focus of norms, values and beliefs beyond the individual and the local community, and fix them, and the concept of citizenship, at the level of the nation state. The sometimes contradictory combination of values derived from such changes has formed the basis of most educational systems ever since. However, such frameworks and values are increasingly inadequate, even dangerous to the abilities of their recipients to cope with the changes of the third millennium. Living in increasingly transnational, even global times, radically alters the way societies and educational institutions must respond

4


to challenges. A narrow, nationalistic and economic agenda fails to address adequately the issues raised.

Global catalysts There are catalysts aiding this reappraisal. A first occurred comparatively recently, when, in the middle of this century, the Earth was seen from space for the first time, and it was realized that here was: a small and fragile ball dominated, not by human activity and edifice, but a pattern of clouds, oceans, greenery and soils. (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987, pp. 1-4)

This was a catalyst for realizing the fragility of existence, of species interdependency, for understanding that we are all inhabitants of one small planet making our way through a vast cosmos. More mundanely, a second catalyst has been the impact on everyday life. Individuals switch on their televisions and see financial, political and cultural events on other continents affecting them, or they go to work and find that their jobs have been relocated to the other side of the world. These kinds of events lead rapidly to the realization that we live in a time of forces and organizations which transcend the nation state, and that issues beyond the location of the nation state need to be incorporated into individual and institutional consciousness. Yet while global events produce global effects, they may also, paradoxically, produce situations where organizations and associations smaller than the nation state proliferate. Such things as regional assemblies, local action groups and community associations provide individuals with a much greater sense of meaning than the nation state can provide. As Daniel Bell once observed, the nation state may be becoming too small for the big things of life, and yet too big for the small things of life. As political and economic forces get both bigger and smaller, the nation state seems to be involved in an increasingly urgent task of maintaining not only its legitimacy but its very existence. Some, linking this to

The global context

5

flows of money around the globe, and beyond the reach of governments, have seen this as nation-state capitulation, and the divesting of responsibilities to the private sector. Rhodes (1994), for instance, has described this as the 'hollowing out' of the nation state, whilst Ohmae (1995) simply describes it as 'The End of the Nation State'. There are others (e.g. Clarke and Newman, 1996), however, who think this too simple or too overstated, and that more likely is a strategy of survival by 'dispersal': spreading the load of policy implementation, but attempting to maintain control of policy direction. This book will suggest that there is truth in both accounts. Whatever the truth, there is little doubt that global forces have an impact upon organizations, individuals and values, which is both greater and smaller than the nation state, and that there is considerable need to be proactive in understanding these changes. Only then will it be possible to be sufficiently informed to resist inappropriate change, yet be flexible enough to adapt to the appropriate or the inevitable. A good place to begin is with consideration of what the term 'globalization' might mean.

Meanings of 'globalization' Globalization is a much-debated term. Green (1999, p. 55) argues that at its most full-blown, globalization predicts three developments - the end of the power of the nation state, the movement of power upwards and downwards from the nation state ('glocalization') and the consequent demise of national education systems. Robert Reich, President Clinton's former adviser, took the same approach when he argued (1991, p. 112) that the global economic reality is one where a sports car which is financed in Japan, yet could be designed in Italy, assembled in Indiana, Mexico and France, will then use advanced electronic components invented in New Jersey and will finally actually be constructed back in Japan. He therefore describes an inevitable future where: there will be no more national products and technologies, no national corporations, no national industries. There will no longer

6

Education, policy and ethics be national economies . . . All that will remain rooted within national borders are the people who comprise the nation. Each nation's primary assets will be its citizens' skills and insights. (Ibid., p. 1)

Yet this is still in the future. As Simon Marginson (1999, p. 24) argues, any empirical investigation of such effects suggests that 'globalization is radically incomplete'; and he moves (p. 26) to describe 'an impressive range of portfolios' which the nation state still commands, which include things like national economic restructuring, taxation, industrial relations, transport, police and security, social programmes, health, children's services, care for the aged, much research and development, as well as education and training and environmental regulation. As Mark Twain said of his own, then, the death of the nation state is greatly exaggerated. Globalization is neither complete, nor inevitable, though, as will be argued, there are vested interests intent on arguing both. So what is globalization? Certainly there are things that a proper conception of globalization would exclude. It is not, for example, 'internationalization', which is concerned with bilateral or multilateral relations between individual nations. Nor is it the same as 'colonialism' or 'imperialism' for much the same kinds of reasons: it is not the economic exploitation of a weak nation by a more powerful one, nor the extension of a country's influence through physical conquest, trade or diplomacy. Here, however, there is room for real misunderstanding, and the need for considered reflection. The development of 'globalization' has been associated with these things, as it has with the spread of Western languages (notably English), economic practices (notably liberal free-market relations), and cultural forms (notably American) which have led some to see globalization as another means to economic and political dominance by already privileged parties. Dale (1999) argues that while many countries have been driven to the same orthodox response to global pressures (with the adoption of strategies like markets, individualization, reductions in welfare state spending, privatization, and the principle of user pays), these have in reality been 'the preferred ideological filters' (p. 4) adopted by these privileged nations as a means of

The global context

7

maintaining that privilege. An alternative scenario, developed by Elliot and Atkinson (1999), is that globalization amounts to global free markets, the major beneficiaries not being nation states, but international finance and transnational companies. Both of these theses are very important because they suggest that globalization is not a value-free, purely descriptive term, but may be used as a cover for the prosecution of financial and political interests. 'Globalization' effects, then, vary enormously across different countries, and can be associated with large-scale economic exploitation. Yet while its effects may be 'radically incomplete', it also transcends these uses, and describes a set offerees which are not the property of any group of nations or business conglomerates, but which impinge upon the practices of all. Thus, Malcolm Waters (1995, p. 124) derives his preferred set of global forces by this kind of route - by investigating in what forms these effects are most felt, and suggests that 'globalization proceeds most rapidly in contexts in which relationships are mediated through symbols.' He argues that because these relationships are symbolic - words and arguments on a page, financial records, mathematical formulae - they are both the most transferable and the most assimilable across national and cultural contexts, and they are therefore more able to facilitate change than are other forms of relationships which normally require a physical presence to take place. From this basis, then, Waters suggests that there are essentially three forms of globalization - economic, political and cultural. The first form of globalization, Economic Globalization, he sees as a long-term trend. This is driven by trade, imperialist ambitions and, more recently, also by the aims and scope of multinational enterprises, and whose end point would seem to be a system of global free trade, where markets and laissez-faire economics ruled supreme. Indeed, Marginson (1999, p. 26) argues that not only is national economic management 'abbreviated', it has reached a position where the nation state 'is now partner to global economic players'. Economic agendas are particularly suited to globalization, and are well advanced through financial markets which are mediated by monetary tokens. Indeed, as hotly contested debates in the UK concerning

8


the adoption of a single European currency testify, there is increasing pressure for the standardization of the tokens themselves. So far, then, this is essentially descriptive. Yet it is also important to recognize that the development of global markets is no natural occurrence, but the policy aim and result of particular national and transnational forces. This is a form of globalization which has important effects upon education for a number of reasons. First, economic imperatives dominate much thinking and infiltrate much everyday language. It then becomes a form of 'discourse capture', where radically different conceptual agendas such as those of education are reinterpreted through its language and values. Second, it affects the financial probity of nation states, and of their ability to maintain adequate provision of welfare services, including that of education. It can then be a major contributor to a perceived need for financial austerity - and hence for tightened control of educational content and practice. Finally, and if Martin and Schumann (1997) are right, and globalization is leading to a 20/ 80 split between a globally connected elite (the 20 per cent) and a less privileged national majority (the 80 per cent), it raises major difficulties for some national policies. This is firstly because as Lasch (1995, p. 6) points out, 'the new elites are at home only in transit . . . Theirs is essentially a tourist's class view of the world not a perspective likely to encourage a passionate devotion to democracy.' Furthermore, if elites are able to opt out of one national policy approach and locate themselves and their earnings within a more favourable regime, egalitarian policies are going to be very difficult to pursue. Economic globalization is one form of the phenomenon which will have important ramifications throughout this book. The second of Waters's forms, Political Globalization, is best described as the drive to political organization above and beyond that of the nation state, which is impelled not only by political considerations but by economic, environmental and cultural forces as well. It reduces many areas of traditional nation-state responsibility, and results in the formation of transnational governmental organizations. These may be predominantly politico-economic in nature (such as the European Community (EC),

The global context

9

or the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA)), or have other wide aims which necessarily transcend national boundaries (such as the World Health Organization). In some cases these organizations have power ceded to them, in other cases they work by attempting to persuade and steer national policies. A good example of one which can have potential effects upon national educational systems is that of the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), which works largely through a strategy of setting educational agendas and developing international performance indicators for educational systems. These are intended to steer both the processes and the goals of national policies, and transcend its stated function of supplying information about educational quality. Political globalization raises the question of whether the concept of citizenship should be primarily located at the level of the nation state, or at a higher level. To some this may seem very attractive, for, as the conceptual field is widened, so is the moral circle, as people (and peoples) who were previously merely numbers on a world population score now become objects of personal concern. Not only, then, does one aim for a more just society, but a more just world as well — surely a worthy aspiration for any educational system? Yet this asks policy-makers and educators to reconceptualize the focus of their work and of their institutions from the national to the transnational, which would involve the jettisoning of many (national) practices, and the acceptance of some new ones (honouring the United Nations flag?). For global financial interests, globally oriented citizens might develop perspectives which called for greater control of their own power. For policy-makers of the nation state, this could be equally threatening, for after all citizenship is not just a granting of certain rights, but the extraction of responsibilities, and the relocation of citizenship may be perceived as a direct threat to the nation state's - and their - legimitacy. Little wonder then perhaps why educational policies can appear so Janus-like. On the one hand, some policies may call for greater international understanding, and others seem inwardly nationalistic. Little wonder then why educators seem to face contradictory demands.

10


The development of political globalization may therefore be perceived as a direct threat to nation-state legitimacy, and as Parsons (1995, p. 243) suggests, the realization of developing globalization can have the effect of polarizing rather than of producing global responses, for 'the more nations are compelled to accept the global forces which shape policy options, the more they may seek to retain their capacity to be different.' This may help to explain why the larger become those organizations which control people's lives, the more these same individuals may cling to deeper, local, values in order to define themselves, resulting in nation-state legitimacy being threatened from below as well as from above. Naisbett and Aburdene (1988) suggest that, as globalization proceeds, people will come increasingly to value and hold on to the small and the local: they will 'treasure the traditions that spring from within' (p. 133). Political globalization, then, will continue to develop, but because it is mediated by national contexts, it will never be quite the same in different situations. The third of Waters's forms of globalization, Cultural Globalization, has been very influential in its effects upon societies, and therefore upon schools. Cultural globalization is in many ways the most symbolic of the forms, is probably the most observable, has its influence through a variety of media and therefore proceeds the most rapidly. Yet it is also problematic. It is more diffuse, and it is therefore difficult to specify precisely the ways it impacts upon educational institutions. Furthermore, its effects can be confusing, being both homogeneous and heterogeneous. Thus, while it has introduced a standardization of taste in some areas (the McDonald's/Coca-Cola syndrome), it has also made available a much greater variety of styles, tastes and fashions. Does the ability to sample any number of different national foods within one small city mean greater diversity or standardization, if one can go to any other similar-sized city around the world and experience the same diversity? Cultural globalization has led for many people to a chaos of cultural relativity, for where so many different cultures and beliefs brush shoulders, this makes for a heightened comparison and choice, but it is not one that all want, or feel able, to compare

The global context

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and evaluate. This helps to explain its influence in the development of postmodernist thinking in western societies, which has impacted at the deepest levels of epistemology, and in the justification (or believed impossibility of justification) of value judgements. Individuals are led to believe that experience is so contextualized that judgement beyond one's context is impossible. These kinds of movements can then have profound effects upon political ideologies. They question the possibility of developing overall theories of human good, undermine approaches to social restructuring and thereby leave the door open for marketbased approaches, which seem at first glance to be more valuefree. These then cascade down to education, not only in governmental use of quasi-markets, but also in more subjectivist approaches to the curriculum - which are then usually followed by the inevitable conservative, nationalistic and authoritarian backlash. Yet there are at least three other forms of globalization of which educators need to be aware. A fourth form of globalization is Demographic Globalization. This is the clear trend throughout the developed world - including the Asian Tigers - for an increasing proportion of the populations to be elderly. This means that not only will a decreasing percentage of a population be paying taxes to keep core welfare institutions going, but the cost may actually increase, since as people age, so they develop chronic medical conditions which require expensive remediation. In educational terms, a series of challenges is presented. First, following the arguments by Reich (1991), Clinton's former adviser, education is yet again seen as the principal means by which national economic competitiveness is increased. For developed countries, this particularly means a heavy investment in hitech. Second, ageing populations and workforces create new challenges for education and training systems, from employees whose skills have become outdated and need retraining, to the expansion of post-compulsory education. Finally, and problematically, it creates an expanding number of elderly voters. These latter, even with increasing trends towards lifelong learning, may be less keen to see money spent on welfare areas such as education, traditionally the prerogative of the young, and may

12


prefer instead to see it spent in areas more immediately beneficial to themselves. In the developing world, while the long-term downward trend is the same, populations here are still expanding. There are real differences of opinion as to the benefit and disadvantages of this. An expanding population can mean that a country draws on a larger workforce with more gifted people, but this is only if there is the finance to provide the educational infrastructure for their development. Furthermore, both developed and undeveloped worlds may face the problem of a decline in job availability. As Kennedy (1993, p. 27) pointed out, while the labour force in developing countries totals around 1.8 billion, it will rise to more than 3.1 billion in 2025, implying the need for about 40 million new jobs each year. A fifth form of globalization is Managerial Globalization. It shares many of the features of political globalization, in that while many concepts in management are global in nature, its actual practice is mediated by national cultures, and the beliefs and values of the managers and the managed. In the last two or three decades, educational managers in the developed world have been urged to look at management literature along two separate dimensions. The first dimension is that of the public/private/ voluntary sectoral divide. Here, the message has been that there are practices from other sectors - and particularly the private sector - of which those in the public education sector would do well to take note. This has manifested itself in a number of ways. One is through the use of a pervasive managerialism, of what Hood (1991) calls 'New Public Management', characterized by a more directive and assertive management, and the use of more private sector practices. Another is seen in the exhortations by politicians and business people for educators to read the work of the likes of Handy, Drucker, Peters and Waterman, and Moss Kanter. There needs to be considerable caution at a too quick embrace of the concepts and practice of different sectors, for the very purposes of educational management may be different from those of the business sector, and to translate unthinkingly may be to damage irreparably this mission. Nevertheless, there is an increasing convergence of these different codes (Bottery, 1994).

The global context

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As this happens, terms derived from another literature - 'quality', 'competence', 'empowerment' and 'target setting' infiltrate educational language and begin to spin their conceptual webs. These will be particular concerns of a number of chapters following. Educators, however, are also urged to examine a second dimension: to look beyond their own shores and see what happens in other countries. Undoubtedly, the first port of call continues to be the United States, but increased interest has been seen in Japanese management, initially by Americans themselves (Ouchi, Pascale and Athos), but then from Japanese themselves (Ohmae, Morita); and now the hunger transcends the traditional borders to look for best practice wherever it finds it - in Spain (Estrin), Brazil (Semler) or Sweden (Carlzon). As writers feed off one another's experience, as multinationals get into bed with one another and borrow each other's practices, so they begin to define what looks increasingly like a global picture of management practice. A final form of globalization is Environmental Globalization. The symbolic understanding of the world's environmental unity is as wide-ranging in its effects as any of the other globalization forces. The pollution of one country does not stop at its borders, but uses the rain, the rivers and the air to carry itself into others. The 'dirty' power stations of the North of England wreak their havoc on the forests of Sweden in the form of acid rain; the effects of Chernobyl continue to be felt by the Lapps and their herds of reindeer. Environmental globalization then is a form of globalization whose understanding is as urgent as any of the previous five. Yet in terms of the direct effects upon education, political, economic, demographic and managerial globalizations have been the most influential, because they more immediately affect the financial viability and political stability of nation states.

Normative and descriptive globalizations One further point needs to be made before this chapter turns to an examination of the effects and extent of national mediations of globalization forms. This has been alluded to already, and suggests that some forms of globalization are descriptions of

14


what is the case, while others are more value-based, in essence expressing the preferences of particular power groups. Environmental and demographic globalization seem to be examples of the first descriptive kind, though why they were allowed to develop, and how nations respond to them now that they do exist, are clearly matters of ideological debate. However, economic globalization is not so much a descriptive statement as a desired end state by those who would benefit from the existence of a global system of unfettered markets. Political globalization, particularly national absorption into bodies like the EU, might be implicated in the same kind of economic agenda. Finally, both managerial and cultural globalization have descriptive and normative elements in their present make-up. This is an important point, because if a population can be persuaded that a category is descriptive, there is the genuine possibility of this being accepted as inevitable, and therefore of the development of policies of acquiescence. If, on the other hand, a value-laden agenda can be recognized as such, it is possible to ask who benefits from such globalization, and then to judge whether this is desirable or undesirable. The argument of this book is that there are many pressures, smuggled into apparently descriptive forms of economic and political globalization, which are in fact deeply value-based, and which are politically and educationally undesirable. It is time to examine some of these.

Pressures on education from a globalized world Pressures on financing the welfare state There are four major reasons given to explain why welfare state finances continue to come under pressure. One reason, as noted above, is that throughout the developed world an increasing proportion of populations is aged 65 and over. This, it is argued, will have serious consequences for the financing of the core institutions of the welfare state, because a decreasing percentage of the population will provide taxes to support an increasingly large non-contributory number. A second reason advanced is that, because western democracies are experiencing intensified

The global context

15

economic competition from Asia and markets and jobs are being lost, national incomes will decline, due to a declining export base, and from the costs of supporting the unemployed. It is then argued that policies need to be directed at creating more competitive economies, with more people in work, and this has direct implications for the form that education systems must take. Allied to this is a third reason, the suggestion that the Asian Tigers have done so well economically because they spend a smaller proportion of their wealth on welfare than the West, investing it instead in their economies. Western governments, it is argued, need to take the same road, or, at the very least, only spend extra amounts on welfare if these are produced through greater productivity. Yet such a road may pose grave problems for social stability and cohesion if pursued: again, education may be used to handle this problem. Many national governments are coming to accept these arguments, and are developing policies in response to them. Policymakers are increasingly seeing education as having a key role in dealing with many of society's problems, and are therefore intensifying their control of this vital sector. Yet, while policy control is increased, it is claimed that, because of competitive pressures from the Far East and consequent unemployment, there are continued problems in financing increased expenditure. In the broadest sense, then, even if governments claim to be ideologically inclined to the notion of universal welfare provision, this will not be a viable option, and the reality of a limited affordable welfare state will be accepted. Furthermore, with the influence of New Right and public choice writings over the last twenty years, and with the widespread use of markets still being seen as either desirable or inevitable, even the very idea of universal welfare may not be seen as a desired target. Politicians may then prefer something closer to residual welfare provision, or a 'workfare state' (Jessop, 1994), in which benefit is only granted on the performance of state-specified work paid at subsistence income levels. The implications of such arguments are clear. States will want to keep tight policy control, be more cost-efficient and do so through strategies of greater quality and performance evaluation.

16


Welfare spending will continue to be curtailed by whatever kind of party is in power. Spending on state education will be seen as vital for economic competitiveness, yet will be targeted on desired policies: there will be little prospect of a general rise in spending. So far there is an air of inevitability about all of this: demographics, competition and consequent unemployment are described as factors beyond the immediate control of either western governments or businesses, and, in the circumstances, the policies outlined above seem eminently sensible, even if rather unpleasant. Yet, given that less than 5 per cent of the West's trade comes from beyond the OECD, this is hardly strong evidence that unemployment is stemming from these areas. There is a fourth explanation for financial pressures which locates the responsibility rather nearer home. Rifkin (1996) argues that we live in an age characterized by the philosophy of're-engineering' (Hammer and Champy, 1993), in which the workforce is reduced through automation, and that the employment reality for most people is one of insecurity and low-paid jobs. Even Adair Turner, directorgeneral of the CBI, admitted that the main reason for increased unemployment and companies 'downsizing' in the West was that technology was making it possible for companies to increase profitability by a 'downsizing' process in which computerization replaced human operatives (Elliot and Atkinson, 1999, p. 226). If this is the case, then at least part of the problem in financing the welfare state is generated by the actions of the private sector within western nation states themselves. This makes the situation much less inevitable, and suggests that at least some of the problem could be remediated by policies other than those being suggested. Multinationals, legitimation crises and 'Singaporean' solutions While national governments continue to mediate the effects of global and not-so global changes, the drain of power away from them is still apparent. As argued above, transnational organizations like NAFTA and the EC require the ceding of powers to them from the nation state, while there are also increased calls for

The global context

17

the ceding of power downwards as people relocate the meaning of their lives at a more local level. Furthermore, there are increasing movements to cede power not up or down, but outwards, as neighbouring national regions enter into agreements which suit the region involved rather than that of their national governments - such as with the Pacific States of the USA and Canada. So at these levels the nation state finds its legitimacy threatened. There are, however, other threats to nation-state power and legitimacy. Another is that from multi and transnational companies, whose operations seem increasingly beyond the control of individual states, and yet exert an increasingly powerful influence upon national policies. In terms of sheer size, the statistics are impressive. According to Korten (1995), 500 companies control 42 per cent of the world's wealth, and only 27 nation states have a turnover greater than that of Shell and Exxon combined. Further, as he argues (p. 223), if a monopoly exists when the top four firms account for more than 40 per cent of sales in any particular market (and this is a standard economic assumption), then globally that situation exists in consumer durables, where the top five firms control nearly 70 per cent of the entire market; in the automobile, airline, aerospace, electronic components, electrical, electronics and steel industries, the top five firms control more than 50 per cent of the global market; and in the oil, personal computer and media industries, the top five firms control more than 40 per cent of sales. Furthermore, over the last few decades there has been an increased facilitation of the operation of such companies in global markets through the generation of free-trade agreements such as those by the EC and NAFTA. These divest states of their legislative powers and encourage companies to relocate their sites of production to countries which offer the most advantageous 'sweeteners' and tax breaks. In 1993, Mercedes-Benz invited US states to bid for a new car factory, and Alabama won with a sweetener of $300 million. At about the same time, the South Korean manufacturer LG accepted £200 million from the British government for investing in Wales. While some writers like Ohmae (1991) talk in terms of inevitability, and of having to secure one's best advantage within this kind of game, others are

18


both less sanguine and less determinist. Brown and Lauder (1997, p. 172) argue that this works like a global auction, where corporate investors, in order to increase their profit margins, have the power to play off nation states, communities and workers against one another, and are thus able to force concessions on things like wages and taxes in exchange for the multinational's investment in local jobs. One outcome is, as Brecher (1993) argues, 'a race to the bottom', where the wages which will be accepted and the social conditions which will be endured fall 'to the level of the most desperate', and this results in the kind of advertisement which the Philippine government placed in the business magazine Fortune: To attract companies like yours . . . we have felled mountains, razed jungles, filled swamps, moved rivers, relocated towns ... all to make it easier for you and your business to do business here. A number of commentators have begun to argue that a global free market is neither inevitable nor acceptable, and is basically in few people's interests apart from the multinational company and international financiers. Handy (1997, p. 77) argues that it is increasingly urgent that nation states begin to curb the power of these 'free-roving alternative states', who have such extensive power and yet so little responsibility. Henry et al. (1999, p. 86) also argue that such dysfunctional consequences of globalization require a reassertion of democracy and the public sector at the intra-state level, and that education must be given the task of creating a citizenry who have the capacity to be more than globalized economic resources or product consumers. In the short term, however, the reaction of national governments in the developed world has been more pragmatic, even short-sighted. They have accepted that the loss of manual labour to cheaper markets is inevitable, and have realized that the only alternative is to head for the hi-tech end of the market, and engage in expensive education programmes which provide a flexible, adaptable and high-skilled workforce with which poorer countries cannot compete. Both Jessop (1994) and Hay (1996) see the ultimate failure of

The global context

19

Thatcherite strategies in the UK in these terms - as an acceptance of the ultimate sanction of the market, and of a race to the bottom. Hay argues that the Major government continued many Thatcherite aims, but that educational redirection did begin to take place, in which something more like a 'Singaporean approach' (Ashton and Sung, 1997) was increasingly accepted, involving greater governmental intervention to enhance national competitiveness, and the subordination of welfare policies to the needs of a competitive economy - a path now taken by New Labour. In this, the UK is following the example of other countries. If Japan is one of the clearest examples of a nation state treating its education system as a tool for national and economic development, an example which younger Asian Tigers have copied, it is also now vigorously pursued in the UK. This is illustrated by the foreword by David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Education to the UK government's Green Paper The Learning Age (1998). This stated that Learning is the key to prosperity - for each of us as individuals, as well as for the nation as a whole. Investment in human capital will be the foundation of success in the knowledge-based global economy of the twenty-first century. This is why the Government has put learning at the heart of its ambition. The rationale for learning is openly technical-rationalist, economic and reductionist, and provides no reasons why learning might be a good other than its economic usefulness. It is also a strong example of the nationally mediated use of education, driven by global influences, but which is not itself global in conception. This approach essentially entails national governments attempting to steer global forces in directions which benefit them, and has four features which have been mentioned already, but which are here worth noting as they form the basis for deliberate national policy strategy: 1

the belief that, while global markets are a given in the formulation of government strategies, national markets pro-

20

2

3

4

Education, policy and ethics vide insufficient incentives to employers to invest in skills for their workers, and that therefore, governments have to play a central role in this area; the belief that in an open global market place, there is little point in advanced industrialized nations like the UK attempting to be a cheap source of labour, for there are always much cheaper alternatives for multinationals to use; the belief then that such advanced nations must nichemarket: they must decide where their competitive advantage lies, and must build towards this market accordingly; the belief that, returning to (1), governments must play a central role in the generation of skilled workers, and this means the use of government policies to attract particular kinds of companies to a country and discourage others, while at the same time gearing up the workforce, both in terms of work and social skills, to service such companies.

The implications of this for educators are clear. First, the social is subordinated to the economic. In particular, issues of economic competitiveness are prioritized while issues of justice and equality are given a back seat. Second, the state increases its control of policy steerage, and educational institutions must accept their subordinate role. Finally, while educators will still find themselves within a market situation, these are directed markets, in which their fundamental role is as implementers of government policies.

National mediations, policy determination and internal markets In North America, the UK, Australasia and elsewhere, then, governments are distancing themselves from the anti-governmentalism of the 1980s and early 1990s, and are increasingly attempting to channel the influence of global markets upon their own territories, though they are not, it must be noted, attempting to control the extent of such markets. Global free markets continue to be seen as an inevitable, a given, of nation-state policies, even though there is serious reason to doubt this.

The global context

21

Further, the role of markets does not end there. Internal quasimarkets are currently viewed in a more subordinate and controlled role than formerly, but their use is not dead, and this may derive from three different reasons. A first may be that successive governments have observed that, despite professional protestations at their use and effects, quasi-markets do seem to stimulate more intense efforts by 'producers'. The second reason stems from the belief in governmental inability to finance welfare provision, that it must therefore reduce the scope of its actions - the state must be 'hollowed' out (Rhodes, 1994) - and the market and the private sector left to make provision. This clearly falls within 'an end of the nation state' scenario. Yet a third reason for the use of quasi-markets is possible. Clarke and Newman (1996) argue that while governments may believe that they need to divest themselves of policy 'rowing', they will not want to devolve policy 'steering' to the private sector. Markets then become the primary means of implementation, but no more than that. This fits well with the experience of educational institutions over the last decade, and explains the orientation of some educational management literature. When Caldwell and Spinks wrote initially of the self-managing school in 1988, this reflected a belief in a financially devolved sector, set in a market-driven context, and (uncritically) described how this might be accomplished. Reading their latest offering (1998), one is struck by how (uncritically) they now accept how management agendas will be much more centrally directed, in terms of curriculum, assessment and professional development. Table 1.1 describes this kind of movement in the UK, through a description of the change in the role of the school principal, although the movement from the 'Social Democratic Principal' to the 'Market Principal' and on to the 'Outcomes Principal' is an increasingly international one. It is also one which has seen a managerialist 'discourse capture' (see Chapter 3), and which accepts a business terminology of standards, value-added targets, performance management, outcomes and benchmarking, all set within a competitive framework. In such a scenario, a school principal becomes a strategist for implementing external directives, a professional manager rather than a senior teacher, and the

Table 1.1 The changing role of the head teacher in England and Wales 1850-2000 Key words

Function

Power

Constraints I Issues

c. Nineteenthcentury principal

Hierarchy; Moral and cultural transmission; Control

Transmission of upper and middle-class moral and cultural hegemony, through school managers and governors. Social control.

Internally strong, but power set within strong framework, set and monitored by others.

What are the degrees of: - Hierarchy and democracy - Social control? - Professionalism?

Social democratic principal 1940s1980s

Cultural autonomy; Professional empowerment; Innovative potential

Patriarchal leadership. Professional domination - for either liberal or conservative (not radical) rule.

Ideological and professional with possible curricular or organizational innovation - within contemporary value structure.

How does principal's personality affect change? How do contemporary values circumscribe change? Where are financial and resource decisions located?

Market principal 1980s- 1990s

Service competition; Entrepreneurialism responsiveness; Financial flexibility

'Outcomes' principal

Standards; Value-added targets; Outcomes; Benchmarking

The CEO of the institution: he/she determines aims and strategies; building on cultures to service the wants and needs of customers, all within a competitive framework. A strategist for implementing external directives. A professional manager rather than senior teacher. A monitor, evaluator and manager of teacher and pupil standards.

Determined by the ability to service clients' needs; the selling of the school's 'product' and by maintaining a competitive edge.

Are clients consumers or citizens? How do institutions contribute to a public good? Are equality issues addressed?

Directive leadership is key factor with collegiality to be coopted by head for such purposes. Greater pressure and power to dismiss Tailing' teachers.

Wrhat is childcentredness on this vision? What is major driving force? What is the role of the professional educator? What is Bentham's Panopticon?

24


monitor and evaluator of teachers' and pupils' standards. Such a role is then determined by policies which in turn are driven by state mediation of global forces - attempts at greater legitimation, control and international economic competitiveness. All of these attempt to devolve work and responsibility down to the lowest institutional level, an approach classically post-Fordist in manner. If this is the case, educators will come under three different kinds of pressures. Economic pressure will derive from policymakers attempting to target particular issues, and extract more efficiencies, usually within static or declining budgets; ideological pressure will come from politicians who see schools as key areas for promoting notions of community and social stability as supports for their economic objectives; and finally curricular pressure will stem from governments aiming to provide future workforces with the skills and attitudes seen as necessary for economic competition in the next millennium. Using a military analogy, educators will be foot soldiers in an army of the nation state, in which the drummer will be the economy, the uniforms will be post-Fordist in design and the tunes will be market and central direction favourites.

Conclusion: globalization convergences and divergences While this chapter has argued that the existence of a number of globalized forces are producing convergences of policy and behaviour at both national and educational levels, it has also begun to develop the argument that these global forces are contextualized. One should not therefore be too surprised if there are not only convergences, but divergences as well. This chapter will then conclude by examining this issue, before examining specific examples of this phenomenon in the next. Thus, it will be clear that there have been a number of educational convergences, particularly in the developed Asian and Western nations, driven by the global forces of demography, economics and culture. These include:

The global context

• • • • • • •

25

the perception of the need to reduce the role of the traditional welfare state; the belief in the need for greater cost management, and the development of strategies to help in this; the conviction that greater hi-tech niche-marketing is needed; increased post-compulsory participation; a greater emphasis upon lifelong learning; greater centralization of policy control, with a simultaneous decentralization of implementation; the need for a greater surveillance of those at the periphery in order to ensure that central policy control is effective.

Now, it is important to note, as Green (1999, p. 60) points out, that while there has been a clear tendency towards convergence in the broad objectives of educational policy, there is less evidence of convergence in the details of policy and in the actual structures and processes of different countries.

This can be explained by noting that while national education systems may be broadly facing - or driven - in the same policy directions by global pressures, there are other forces at work. These include a nation's own economic and political position in the world, and systemic values and structures which are the result of a unique national history. Thus, global forces will be mediated in the first place by the positioning of a nation in terms of its economic standing. As noted earlier, those which are already economically privileged will adopt approaches which they believe will help to maintain that privilege: free trade will be adopted rather than protectionism, hi-tech solutions rather than cheap labour. Moreover, the value orientation of a system - its individual versus communal ethos - will have a large input into the definition of what kind of students the system wishes to produce, and the extent to which it can change. Third, in any particular country, current educational structures will act as mediating agents. Selective systems will need to go through very different (and probably more extensive) kinds of restructuring when compared with non-selective systems; systems which are more

26


school than work-oriented (France for instance, as against Germany) will respond in a different manner to the same kinds of pressures, and undergo different kinds of structural re-engineering. Fourth, the degree of power centralization will have a large effect on the cohesiveness and depth of the impact of reforms. This will make the responses of heavily centralized systems - such as those in Asia, France and the UK - different from ones where regional control predominates - such as in the USA, Canada, Australia and Germany. Even then, the experimentation in many of these systems with devolved implementational powers impacts upon the centre in unanticipated ways, and so the picture is never static, never totally clear. Finally, the personalities of those in power in a particular country will be a powerful mediating factor in the determination of how a general policy stance will be approached and implemented. Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the USA, for instance, had the impact they did partly because of the situation they found in their own countries, but partly because of the kinds of people they were. Because of these profound divergences, then, countries necessarily start from different points, and change at different rates. In such circumstances, it would in fact be surprising if national systems showed greater structural convergence. Rather what might be expected - and this chapter has indicated that this is indeed the case — is a situation where global forces are mediated in educational systems by a number of factors. The next chapter will examine a particular example of this, that of the UK, though it will be immediately apparent that this is not possible without considerable reference to the influence of other countries and their educational systems, and in particular to the United States.

Chapter 2

Educational policies: the national context

Introduction We are probably more globally aware that at any stage in history. We see the almost instantaneous report of news from places we might otherwise never have known existed. We see how our own country is but one player in the production of cars, videos and other items of consumption. As we travel around the world to an extent never dreamed of by previous generations, we see that the same multinational companies have advertisements and bases wherever we go. What we thought was a national company is actually a subsidiary of something much larger, and with little allegiance to our own country. There can be little doubt, then, that global forces are producing a widening of personal vision, just as they are producing a convergence of national policies, though some forms, particularly economic and political, may be neither inevitable nor desirable. As argued above, nations need to be able to distinguish between descriptive and normative forms of globalization if they are not to be driven into actions which in the long run are profoundly damaging to them. Yet, while important policy convergences exist, there are also strong divergences, as nations mediate these forces. This happens because nations are underpinned by different philosophical, political and social values, by long and individual political and social histories and by the very different personalities and beliefs of those pushing through the legislation. Together, these factors produce very different mediations of such global trends. This chapter describes one such national and educational

28


mediation. It examines changes occurring at economic, philosophic, social and political levels in the UK, and argues that, while a new agenda for educational policy is having considerable effect here, much of it actually originated in the USA. One of the reasons for choosing the UK is that, in 1997, its major political parties experienced a dramatic reversal in fortunes, with two decades of Conservative rule being swept aside in a landslide victory by New Labour. The very different historical and ideological bases of these two parties suggest that there would be genuine differences in the two parties' election manifestos. Yet the rhetoric on the majority of key policies was remarkably similar. Even after New Labour took office, there was still puzzlement over what the new government stood for. A year after Tony Blair became Prime Minister, David Marquand (1998, p. 19) was still saying that the purpose, nature and significance of the famous Blair project are as mysterious as they were on that magic May morning when the last government was sent packing.

There are a number of possible explanations for this mystification. One, heard frequently during the election, was that New Labour was so confident that the Conservatives were losing the election that all they needed to do was to keep their heads down and avoid saying anything that might reinvigorate the Conservative election challenge. This being the case, New Labour then simply mimicked Conservative policies and presented no target. This of course does not explain why they appeared to continue this course once they gained power. Another explanation addresses this problem: that New Labour had come to believe that it had done so badly in previous elections because the middle-class electorate would only vote for them if they believed New Labour would do nothing too extremist, too left-wing. A set of policies was then deliberately chosen, the argument went, which would not cause alarm, and this strategy has been continued in order to secure two elections in a row - something never achieved by Labour in its parliamentary history. This meant, however, that its traditional commitments to social justice

The national context

29

and redistribution would have to be taken very slowly in order not to scare these critically important voters. This argument, then, accounts for the disillusion of those New Labour voters who expected egalitarian commitments to be vigorously pursued once New Labour got into its stride, only to find little divergence from previous Conservative policies. Thus, for example, not only did New Labour commit itself to the same cash limits on expenditure for the next two years after the 1997 election as did the previous Conservative government, there was also a similar attempt (in the rhetoric at least) to target welfare expenditure more effectively at the really needy and deserving. In education, there was the same use of managerial rhetoric to pursue change, the same or even increased stress upon the use of external assessment, the same backtracking from an overloaded National Curriculum to one more manageable by teachers, but which simultaneously allowed for a greater concentration on the literacy and numeracy 'basics', and finally a noticeable reduction in antipathy to the contribution of the private sector to educational provision. Both of these explanations - the 'shadowing' and the 'don't frighten the horses' arguments - could be at least partially right. However, a third explanation almost certainly needs to be brought into play. This is the argument that both Conservative and New Labour policies are increasingly circumscribed by supranational realities, with the kind of policy convergence at the international level being driven by the kinds of global forces described above. So rather than suggesting either that New Labour is the inheritor of Thatcherite Conservative policies, or that New Labour remains as dramatically different from the Conservatives as previously, but they are simply more cautious, a third explanation is needed to supplement these, that Conservative policies began to change prior to the election for supranational reasons, and New Labour has had to follow much the same - largely externally determined course. It is to an examination of these three explanations, and of future educational policy in the UK, that this chapter now turns.

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Education, the western nation state and changing ideologies There is little doubt that educators and their institutions are embedded within wider policy and ideological frameworks which provide the legislative and conceptual parameters within which they work. In the western world, since the Second World War, the two dominant frameworks have been those of Social Democracy and New Right Liberalism. The first of these might be characterized by its belief in the moral and economic need for welfare states, strong legislative frameworks, public suppliers of services and a commitment to advancing equality of opportunity and enhanced social mobility through government legislation and structures. This period, from the middle 1940s to the middle 1970s, was the golden age of teachers' professional autonomy and public regard. Governments provided the legislative framework for education and public sector teachers were the dominant suppliers. In such a system, there were few if any governmentspecified outputs: these were for professionals to define. Thus, Osborne and Gaebler (1993) describe social democracy as a system where government performed the 'steering' of the education sector, the 'rowing' largely determined and monopolized by its servants (see Table 2.1). Times however changed, and in the 1970s western countries suffered rapidly escalating oil prices and stagflation, and Keynesian economic solutions came under increasing attack. Rightwing critics like Friedrich Hayek (1944) in Europe, and Milton Friedman (1962) in the USA argued that such state direction of the life of individual and community was both economically and ethically unacceptable. Professionals also came to be seen in a less trusting light, as New Right ideology was also driven by a general determination to increase personal responsibility and marketbased entrepreneurialism. Market forces rather than the interventionist state were suggested as the major determinants of life chances and educators in the public sector were made to compete with other 'suppliers', and market standards were used in determining their success or failure. If social democracy had favoured steering and rowing, this new ideology dramatically


31

Table 2.1 Steering and rowing - policy change since the Second World War Phase 1

Approach Social Democracy

Phase 2

Phase 3

New Right

New Modernizers

Steering? Steering and rowing No steering Rowing? No rowing

Steering Limited rowing

Strategy

Government framework, state suppliers, no government standards

Government framework, mixed suppliers, government standards

The role of markets

Markets seen as Markets seen as the detrimental; the natural, moral and development of economic way of educational deciding preferences, collaboration, civic allocating resources and development and achieving efficiencies enhancement of 'public good'

Market framework, market suppliers, market standards

Markets seen as useful means for gingering up implementation of centrally designed policies; who implements what is immaterial as long as output controls, access and standards are all defined and monitored

Source: Bottery, M. and Wright, N. (2000), p. 12.

reduced government steering, and used institutional competition to decide who 'rowed'. This, of course, is not the whole story. While there was a general movement towards free-market policies, the manner and degree of adoption differed from country to country. This was partly because of the kinds of historic differences described above, and partly because of the outlook of those who were leading reforms in a particular country. In the UK, for instance, a key piece of educational legislation, the 1988 Reform Act, was a blend of radical New Right individualism and strong centralization. While commentators such as Gamble (1988) have argued that a strong, even autocratic state was seen as essential to enable a market consciousness to take root, this still does not fully explain the generation of a centralizing, statist and bureaucratic National Curriculum. For that, one has to invoke other explanations. One of these might be the deeply ingrained bureaucratic attitudes in Western societies (see Chapter 6). A second explanation would lie in taking note of the personalities of the Act's chief architects -

32


Margaret Thatcher, a Prime Minister of radically liberal economic views but moral authoritarian tendencies, and Kenneth Baker, a Secretary of State for Education with conservative, almost nineteenth-century, views of a school curriculum.

The failure of the New Right Movement from the 1980s into the 1990s saw an increased suspicion in the western world that New Right policies, rather than solving problems, were not only making them worse, but causing new ones as well. Global trends may have led to the greater mobility of labour, more insecurity and less stability in social life, but libertarian policies exacerbated them, eroding wider social and ethical norms. Concentration upon the self and the pursuit of personal fulfilment meant that social structures became means to these ends, and when they failed to do this, they were seen as dispensable. The result was, it was argued, a neglect of social responsibility, the decline of the extended family, the weakening of the institution of marriage and a diminished regard for the plight of the elderly, the chronically sick, the impoverished and the incapable. This threat of societal breakdown — the problem the New Right was elected to solve - led to the necessary but ironic expansion of the public sector. As Charles Taylor said so presciently in 1985: In spite of the aggressive rhetoric, no government of the New Right will really be able to undo the welfare state, because it will be in effect increasing the needs which 'welfare' measures are designed to meet. (p. 208)

New Modernizers, while not wishing to return to the old politics of State Welfarism, recognized some of the truth in this. The market could easily become part of the problem rather than part of the solution, and Thatcher and Reagan had made the situation worse, not better. In global times, it was increasingly believed that what was needed was the creation of a high-skill, high-wage economy by governments with a much more directive role than under a market system.


33

New Modernizers and the Third Way' As the 1990s proceeded, then, the western world saw a reordering of political agendas. Politicians like Clinton and Blair, very different political animals from Reagan and Thatcher, largely accepted the inevitability of global markets. They then sought to accommodate to them by devising policies which went with their free-market drift while attempting to modify their excesses through providing citizens with the skills to deal with this brave new world. Thus the 'Third Way', a term originally used to describe the political middle ground which Sweden's SocialDemocratic governments attempted to hold between capitalism and Communism, came to have, as Reich (1999, p. 14) noted, a different agenda, one which sought 'to liberate market forces while easing the transition of those who'd otherwise fall behind'. New Right policies of deregulation and privatization, free trade, flexible labour markets, smaller safety nets and fiscal austerity, then, were all embraced by parties of a very different political hue. Just as Clinton had attempted to position himself between Reagan and the old Democrats in the USA, so Blair attempted to position himself between Thatcher and old Labour. If the first part of the Third Way agenda meant accepting the reality of the market, the second part of this agenda meant devising policies which would bring the losers along. Thus, the phrase the 'inclusive society' came to be a popular term, even though it would not mean a return to the old redistributivist politics. Rather, and as Anthony Giddens (1998, p. 117), close academic adviser to Tony Blair, argued, what was required was a 'Social Investment State' to replace the old welfare state, one which subscribed to 'investment in human capital wherever possible, rather than the direct provision of economic maintenance'. This has a number of important implications. First, government money and strategy is predicated on reducing unemployment and poverty through worker education and training. However, it goes no further in terms of worker protection and social equity, and it does not subscribe to large increases in welfare state expenditure to help victims of market flexibility.

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This explains Blair's announcement at the 1997 election that his major priority was 'Education, Education, Education', but it entails an act of faith - that there would be sufficient economic growth generated by the embrace of the market for the government to spend, and continue to spend heavily, upon targeted areas of education and training, and thus enable market casualties to be made 'adaptable'. What would then become of social justice? What of the traditional role of socialist and social democratic parties in opening up opportunities, and of reversing inequalities within society? Perhaps unsurprisingly, the same strategy applies. As Brown and Lauder (1997, p. 180) put it: social justice inheres in providing all individuals with the opportunity to gain access to an education that qualifies them for a job.

Second, it meant that whilst these 'New Modernizers' would embrace the freedom of the global market, there could be no great freedom for educational providers, no return to the golden days of professional autonomy. If this strategy was to work, money would have to be spent carefully, agendas very clearly specified and assessment/surveillance of providers would have to be very strong. There could be no room for educators 'doing their own thing'. The public sector in general would be subjected to intensified control and direction; and educational agendas in particular would need to be directed from the centre in terms of curriculum specification, assessment of results and in the monitoring, surveillance and development of professionals. Finally, the Third Way clearly needs more than acts of faith in the virtues of the market, and enhanced policy control of professional agendas. To be really successful, it requires the development of a workforce with the right kinds of attitudes for this dynamic, flexible and unpredictable environment. Thus, as will be seen, there is an increased control of social agendas as well, exerted not just by political and legislative frameworks, but also by attempts at the development of a more communal, co-operative, social and moral climate. Just as the New Right tried to change the social democratic consciousness of a nation, so


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there is strong evidence that a similar movement is happening again. This third ideology is different from the previous two because it allies a more intrusive government framework than under social democracy with the use of a competitive mix of suppliers to raise institutional standards. It then underpins all of this by a clear specification of how these supplier 'outputs' will be deemed acceptable. Using Osborne and Gaebler's metaphor again (1993), then, while it accepts that there can be more limited rowing by the state and its employees, it vigorously reasserts the steering characteristics of social democracy and then extends them. This new approach - the New Modernizers' approach - is a departure from New Right theories, but does not mean a return to the principles of social democracy. New Modernizer thinking advocates a greater entrepreneurialism while being committed to its employment within the public sector. This fits well with the increased use of New Public Management techniques (Hood, 1991), which aimed to create a managerial revolution within the public sector, rather than simply moving entire projects out into the private. So while the New Right opened up the debate about the legitimate role of the state, and argued that it should be as residual as possible, New Modernizers have come to different conclusions. For them, government, and the public sector generally, should certainly be efficient, entrepreneurial and accountable, but they should not be marginal. They are seen as having a key role to play: only it must be done better. As Guy Peters (1995, p. 313) put it: The assumption is that the public interest would be better served by a more active and interventionist public sector, and that collective action is part of the solution and not part of the problem.

The changing educational agenda So while some may say that New Labour policies are indistinguishable from those of previous Conservative administrations, there are good grounds for believing that the agenda has changed, and that not just New Labour, but western economic

36


policies in general, are moving to a new consensus, and that this involves a movement towards the right in politics. Thus, as Elliot and Atkinson (1999, p. xiv) argue, if the 'Third Way' was traditionally described as a middle way between capitalism and communism, it is now being used to describe a middle way between capitalism and social democracy. It is also significant that Madsen Pirie, one-time director of the Adam Smith Institute, a right-wing UK think-tank, should express the view that Gordon Brown, the New Labour chancellor, was 'definitely to the right of Kenneth Clarke' (his Conservative counterpart) (Guardian, 21 July 1997). Much of this movement is based upon the New Modernists' belief that nations are unable to insulate themselves from the effects of global change, and in particular free-market pressures. Massive loans to South Korea and Indonesia in the late 1990s, for instance, were not made out of charity or goodwill, but from the hard-nosed belief that what happens to the economies of the Asian Tigers, or any other major economies, will have significant effects upon other economies around the world. Policy-makers of whatever political hue, then, feel they have little choice but to frame their national strategies within such apparent global economic determinism. Yet as noted above, markets not only shape national policies: they are instruments of them as well. Thus, while global markets are now accepted as a policy reality, internal markets are used as instruments of educational policy, as part of a strategy of devolving problems of implementation down to the institutional level, where competition between schools is used to ginger up professional service. Indeed, the introduction into the UK in 1999 of teachers' performance-related pay underlines this continued commitment to market instruments, for it devolves the market down past the institutional to the personal level: teachers must now compete against one another in the same school for increased pay and promotion. Similarly, New Labour has rejected the use of internal markets as the principal means of equipping a workforce for international and global competition, the reasoning being that the market provides no incentive to employers to invest in their workers' skills, but instead provides in the short run an easier and more


37

certain means to make profits through the 'downsizing' of staff. The savings on wages generate the profits, but the lack of investment in the workforce necessarily leads to a low-wage, lowskill economy (see Brown and Lauder, 1997). Yet this is an age when multinational companies are well placed to shop around the world, and to relocate their premises in countries which offer the best conditions, the most suitable workers and the most competitive wages. In this situation, any Western low-wage economy is going to seem expensive when compared with most other parts of the world, and it would also produce social problems which even the better off might find hard to tolerate. The strategy of New Labour, and New Modernizers in general, then, is for government to find the money, either public or private, to invest in education in order to produce the kind of high-tech skills which will give western nations an advantage over other nation states. As Reich noted (1991, p. 1), 'each nation's primary assets will be its citizens' skills and insights', and for the UK, as the National Commission on Education (1993, p. 33) suggested, knowledge and skills will be central. In an era of worldwide competition and low-cost global communications, no country like ours will be able to maintain its standard of living, let alone improve it, on the basis of cheap labour and low-tech products and services.

The New Modernizers' stance is then composed of three items: an economic niche, a societal vision and a governmental role. The economic niche is one which others (particularly low-wage, lowskill economies) are not capable of filling, but which suits the particular skills and historical and cultural advantages of the society in question. Following from this, the societal vision is one which is permeated by a culture of learning; for it is the knowledge, skills, and insights of the population that is the key to future prosperity. (Brown and Lauder, 1997, p. 179)

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The governmental role is both accommodating and directive: externally accommodating to a global market, yet internally directive in framing and implementing a human resource policy for society as a whole, but also in using its powers to determine the type of business which will be attracted to its markets. Low skill, low wage are discouraged; high wage, high skill are encouraged.

The social and moral agenda Economic agendas not only have their mirror images in social and moral agendas: this is an age when the economic agenda largely determines the rest. This is no Marxist argument, for many societies have historically placed their priorities elsewhere, as in the Ancient Greece of Plato and Aristotle. However, societies at the turn of the second millennium are directed so strongly into economic and consumerist mindsets that it is sometimes difficult to conceive of different societal priorities. Indicative of this are books like that by Francis Fukuyama (1996), which argues that a certain social and moral societal order needs to be in place to achieve maximum economic output; which clearly downgrades the social and moral to handmaiden status in service to the economic. Some of this concern with economics is understandable. As Taylor (1985, p. 187) argues with respect to western economies with relative de-industrialization and higher unemployment, slower growth, relative impoverishment, and all that goes with this . . . contemporary societies cannot afford not to take production seriously - or, rather, the costs of not doing so can be very high.

Yet, from another continent, Ashton and Sung (1997) argue that the Singaporean government's preoccupation with economic growth and change was inspired by something other than a desire for simple material improvement. As they say (p. 209): In a small island state . . . the Singaporean leaders were acutely conscious of the need to secure and maintain the country's political


39

independence. For this they required a strong economy and an equally strong sense of national identity.

Here is an example of political objectives fuelling economic prioritization; yet when either economic or political policy takes priority, governmental social and moral agendas tend take their cue from these. So, for example, a market-based economic agenda will depict an image of humanity which is predominantly rational, analytic, autonomous, self-interested and pleasure and profit-maximizing. This image, rather than being the effect of economics, then becomes the image to be achieved. Yet now that the defects of the New Right project have been recognized, what will balance the brightness of this star? There seem at least three movements - philosophic, socio-political and educational - which suit New Modernizers very well, recommending a social and moral agenda which supports the new economic one, but which is also more controlled, more serious, more directed. Each will be dealt with in turn.

The philosophic movement There are both negative and positive movements within philosophy which are contributing to New Modernizer themes. The negative, alluded to above, suggests that philosophical and political liberalism have led to the too aggressive assertion of rights in society, to the promotion of moral relativism and to the neglect of duties and responsibilities. The positive suggests that philosophy, and society in general, needs a new concept of morality, basically Aristotelian in nature, which emphasizes, as Carr (1996, p. 362) puts it, 'the acquisition of practical dispositions [rather] than the mastery of propositions' - people need to be given the right attitudes, rather than simply being given the ability to think about moral issues. The negative movement argues that the history of modern western political philosophy has been excessively concerned with the pursuit of rights, and has neglected the reverse side of this coin, that of duties and responsibilities. Even Kant, with whom the word duty is most often associated, continued this tradition by

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placing the concept of the autonomous, rational agent at the centre of the western philosophic universe. By doing this, the individual is seen as the proper focus of development rather than the society within which he or she lived. It also suggests the decontextualization of humanity, in that it asserts that men and women can be understood and develop their full flourishing without the support of the society within which they live. This philosophic background then suggests that human beings are too preoccupied with the pursuit of their own rights, and fail to see that such rights entail reciprocal obligations to the society which provides the support for these rights. Add to this the New Right portrait of humanity as self-interested egoists, and it is hardly surprising if some critics feel that New Right policies led to the infrastructure of society being neglected. New Modernizers, then, look at the philosophic roots of New Right liberalism and argue that while the pursuit of rights is a necessary constituent of the just society, it has been overstressed and unbalanced by a lack of concern for its mirror image, societal obligations. This criticism links in with the second, positive movement. One of the central debates in twentieth-century philosophy has been the concern over its relevance and applicability to modern life. This is not only in terms of whether dominant forms like linguistic analysis have helped to make a difference in the affairs of life, but, more importantly, whether the inherited traditions of thought the clutter in the philosophic attic - prevent a clear view of the real problems which confront humanity. Elizabeth Anscombe voiced such concerns in 1958, when she argued that theories detached from the world-views which anchor them are not only meaningless today, but may actually be damaging. Alistair Maclntyre developed this further when he argued (1981) that modern Western philosophy has lost its way when it comes to morality, for it has separated such talk from the contexts in which it makes sense. By making the key terms of moral discourse the logical ones of rules, consistency and universalizability, modern philosophy has limited the role of affectivity, as well as the understanding of a moral life that comes from experiencing it. Moral life comes not from sitting and theorizing, then, but from living in it and caring for it. The danger with the former, as


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Bennet (1974) points out, is that it becomes perfectly possible to have a consistent code of morality and then use it for the prosecution of the most horrendous acts. Thus, Heinrich Himmler could warn his SS that they would be tempted to give in to the softer sentiment of sympathy, yet could counsel them to conquer such personal failings and to do their duty, to ensure the success of the Holocaust. A set of moral principles, decontextualized and distanced from the realities of living, had thus led to one of the greatest of moral obscenities of this or any other century. A different vision of morality is then required, one which Carr (1996, p. 356) puts succinctly: rather than evaluating moral judgements and responses in terms of their conformity or otherwise to certain rational canons of universal prescriptivity, one might seek to assess them by reference to their success in promoting the aims and purposes of a range of dispositions - the virtues - construed as constitutive of some ethically defensible conception of human well-being or flourishing.

Maclntyre (1981) suggests that we must go back to Aristotle for our conception of morality, for he argues that the acquisition of true moral knowledge requires not only knowledge, but experience as well. This knowledge, this moral education, is to be given, not by argumentation over decontextualized principles, but by the initiation of individuals into the 'best moral picture' (Taylor, 1989), which is the 'practice' of that society. It is only by knowing the best thought and practice available that one can sensibly engage in further thought. Why then ask the youth of a society to reinvent the moral wheel, when the history of any society provides all the examples one would need? Thus, as Maclntyre (1981, p. 258) suggests: If the conception of a good has to be expounded in terms of such notions as those of a practice, of the narrative unity of a human life, and of a moral tradition, then goods . . . can only be discovered by entering into those relationships which constitute communities whose central bond is a shared vision and understanding of goods.

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And here is the crunch: to fail to initiate the youth of society into this moral tradition to cut oneself off from shared activity in which one has initially to learn obediently as an apprentice learns . . . will be to debar oneself from finding any good outside of oneself, (ibid.)

Creating the virtuous individual, the good citizen, can only be done through a society's narrative and norms, and the youth of society need their thought bedded within a set of principled dispositions. Only when these dispositions are firmly in place should they engage in the principled interrogation of life's problems and dilemmas. Moral wisdom may come from the interaction between the theoretical and the practical, but it is not the first stage of the process by any means. As will be seen, this allows for the criticism of the premature use of 'rational' approaches in moral education (e.g. the moral dilemma method of Lawrence Kohlberg) because students need to be given a grounding in the values themselves before they attempt to prioritize them in particular contexts.

The socio-political movement The implications of such 'virtue theory' are not hard to see. If it is believed that society is approaching breakdown, then a philosophical theory which advocates the adoption of a set of commonly held values (which can be interpreted as those held in some pinktinted bygone time) is going to sound very congenial. Such depictions of present societal crises are common on both sides of the Atlantic. To take but a few: everyone is concerned about the breakdown of the family; everyone is concerned about the negative impact of television on children; everyone is concerned about the growing self-centredness, materialism and delinquency they see among their young. (Lickona, 1991, p. 19)


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after the forces of modernity rolled back the forces of traditionalism, these forces did not come to a halt; instead . . . they pushed ahead relentlessly, eroding the much weakened foundations of social virtue and order. (Etzioni, 1997, p. xvii) what is the prior or most urgent 'social question' of the day: in our time . . . the question of how to protect and maintain the civic order itself, and not . . . the question of how to alleviate or end the inequalities and injustices to be found within the civic order. (Selbourne, 1997, p. 108)

Before this time, as Oakley (1986, p. 435) says: It was a time when the Cold War was still seen as an unambiguous battle between good and evil. It was a time when people were proud to be Americans, trusted their leaders, and shared a consensus on basic beliefs and values.

Oakley was speaking particularly of the 1950s, and of the USA, but the same belief in earlier communal values is present in the UK as well. Take for instance the former British Prime Minister, John Major's (1993) waxing on Britishness: Britain will still be the country of long shadows on country greens, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pool fillers, and - as George Orwell said — 'old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist'.

Moreover, there is also a strong belief that what people put into their community will be paid back at some stage. This was never better illustrated than in Frank Capra's film It's a Wonderful Life, in which James Stewart's character, through no fault of his own, faces ruin because a large sum of money has gone missing. Two crucial things then happen. First, his guardian angel, to prevent him from committing suicide, shows him how much effect his life has had on others and how badly damaged they would be without his existence. This is a crucial insight of those who would argue that a human being is defined by and helps define the community within which he lives and must not be viewed, as

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liberals have a tendency to, as self-defining social isolates. Second, we already know that throughout his life, Stewart's character has performed good deeds - saving his brother's life, sacrificing his own aspirations for the benefit of others, preventing a druggist from accidentally poisoning someone, using his own honeymoon money to bail his community out in a time of financial crisis - and it is this same group who repay him, by coming to his rescue and freely donating the lost money. The sense of unity, of trust, of shared values, is quite palpable and symbolizes the sort of community that New Modernizers would like to see resurrected, illustrating the paradox in their embrace of new technology while retaining a desire for golden age values. So a philosophical movement which argues both that liberalism has gone too far and that the youth of society need to be inducted into its dominant values, is going to be very acceptable to current New Modernist thinking. While writers like Selbourne (1997) explicitly reject the label of communitarianism ('more of an American folk movement than a serious political doctrine'; ibid., p. xii), there seems to be a convergence of ideas at the sociopolitical level on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, explicitly communitarian organizations can be found not only in the USA, where the communitarian network is based in Washington, DC, but also in Canada, the UK and New Zealand. These ideas converge into a set of five distinct communitarian propositions: 1

2

That rights have been overemphasized and responsibility and duty have been underemphasized. This is why Etzioni (1993, p. 4) for instance calls for 'a moratorium in the minting of most, if not all, rights'. That the enactment of responsibility and duty are necessarily prior to that of rights, for it is only through the creation of a healthy and flourishing community that rights can be given and then exercised. As Selbourne (1997, p. 23) puts it: while the exercise of the individual's rights as the members of a civic order permits that individual to express his purposes and (hopefully) his rationality as a human being, such an individual is a prior bearer of obligation to the civic order in which he expresses such rights.

The national context 3

4

5

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That it is possible to specify these responsibilities and obligations by reference to the existing moral tradition, the practice and narrative of that society. As Etzioni (1997, p. 93) says 'in a communitarian society . . . values are handed down from generation to generation rather than invented or negotiated.' It then becomes apparent why the virtues approach by Aristotle, Maclntyre and others is appropriated. Furthermore, the essence of communitarian society lies in the use of normative rather than legal, coercive or utilitarian means and therefore these means will consist of things like education, leadership, role models, peer pressure and exhortation, rather than the use of legal or other kinds of force or the calculation of material consequences. Finally, and logically from what has gone before, the way to restore order to such a society is to cherish and proclaim these (traditional) values. The family is one crucial area, and there will be increasing exhortation and pressure on parents to take a more 'responsible' role. The other prime area for such cherishing and proclamation is within a society's educational institutions. Schools are then to be places where the youth of society are inducted into these values. It is to this context then that we now move.

The educational movement If the term to describe the socio-political thrust of the New Modernizers is 'communitarian' , its educational thrust is 'character education'. Furthermore, and just as communitarianism's roots can be traced to the USA, but then transferred to the UK, the same thing is the case with character education. Now it should be noted, as Lockwood (1997) does in an overview of the movement, that there is a wide variety of approaches which go under the label 'character education'. Indeed, it is something of an ideological battlefield, with a spectrum of opinion that ranges from the simplistically patriotic and indoctrinatory through to a more liberal developmental and critical strain. Having said that,

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there does seem a general consensus on what the movement is against and what it is for. Firstly, its advocates strongly oppose previous moral education systems of the 1970s and 1980s, which they tend to lump (unfairly) together. Two of the most commonly vilified approaches are the Values Clarification Approaches of Raths et al. (1966) and the Moral Dilemmas approach of Lawrence Kohlberg (1981). Kilpatrick (1992, p. 93) describes this amalgam as encouraging students: to develop their own values and value systems . . . The ground rule for discussion is that there are no right or wrong answers. Each student must decide from himself/herself what is right or wrong. Students are encouraged to be non-judgmental about values that differ from their own.

Implicit here, then, is the belief that presenting students at a relatively early age with a variety of moral codes is damaging, and that allowing them to decide on the prioritization of values suggests to them that values are situation specific, even relativistic. Secondly, and as with communitarianism, there is the same suggestion that society has lost its way and that a return to the values and practices of more consensual, less fragmented times is a good, and attainable, object. In so doing, they implicitly reject the idea that these problems are attributable to poverty, social hardship, injustice and inequality in society, and suggest instead they are the unwanted inheritance of the too liberal times of the 1960s and 1970s. As Kilpatrick (1992, p. 163) puts it: If anger is called for in the schools, it should not be misdirected at forms of political oppression visible only to the eagle eyes of the politically radicalised; rather it should be directed at the culture of self-gratification, sexual permissiveness, and irresponsibility visible everywhere.

Having described the claims of character educators, it has to be said that they have remarkably little empirical evidence to back


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them up. In particular, the claim by character educators that it is possible to instil in individuals value characteristics that transfer across situations is, as Cunningham (1998) points out, a quite remarkable replay of American educational history. Character education was the dominant form of moral education in the USA in the early twentieth century for much the same reasons of social dislocation and fragmentation as today. However, when the massive Hartshorne and May (1928) study indicated that there was no evidence for such transferral of behaviour across situations, character education rapidly went out of favour, only to reappear half a century later when the political climate was again propitious. At the present time, then, the arguments of its major proponents (e.g. Kilpatrick (1992), Ryan, Leming (in Lockwood, 1997) and DeRoche and Williams (1998)) are more located within a field of rhetoric than in a research tradition. This rhetoric in effect restates the belief that society is going to the dogs, that this is due to too much individual freedom, and it then provides a variety of classroom strategies to deal with this problem. While there are clearly things the character education movement is against, there are also things of which it is resoundingly in favour. Just as it is opposed to presenting students with a relativistic view of values, it is equally committed, as are communitarians, to presenting a societal consensus of values as an objective list. Of course, as with communitarianism, there then comes the problem of which values are seen as consensual. While most of them are of a conservative nature, there is still room for a variety of opinions on this: •

• • •

disagreeing respectfully, moral problem-solving, choosing wisely, empathy development, saying 'no' (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1988); respect and responsibility (Lickona, 1991); practical wisdom, justice, fortitude and self-control (Kilpatrick, 1992); the judgement to evaluate events and phenomena as good or evil; a commitment to truth and values, the ability to use values in determining choices; moral integrity, an

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• • • •

•


understanding of the necessity for moral conduct; a desire to strengthen the moral fabric of society (Goodlad, 1994, p. 51); honesty, fairness and respect for truth and justice (Office for Standards in Education, 1995); responsibility, effort, solving problems, perseverance, empathy, confidence and teamwork (Linden, in Lockwood, 1997); honesty, kindness, consideration, responsibility, respect, duty, compassion and obedience (NZ Cornerstone Values, 1998); human individuality, dignity and worth, fairness and equity, honesty, courage, freedom and autonomy, personal and social responsibility, community and the common good, justice, equality of opportunity (California Code of Education, quoted in DeRoche and Williams, 1998, p. 20); and honesty, integrity and trust, respect for self and others, responsibility for personal actions and commitments, selfdiscipline and moderation, diligence and a positive work ethic, respect for law and authority, healthy and positive behaviour, family as the basis of society (Washington Basic Education Act, quoted in DeRoche and Williams, 1998, p. 21).

Not only is there a consensus that a core of accepted values be taught as objectively true, there is also agreement that these have to be taught in a much more comprehensive manner. If in the past implementation had been largely by a mixture of exhortation and punishment, the focus nowadays is much more inclusive. It now suggests that, besides direct instruction, attention should be given to the ethos of the school, which would include emphasis upon providing real-life or literary exemplars of desired behaviour, managing a consistency of such throughout the school and allowing students to practise these values in realistic settings. Again, there is considerable variation here, from Kilpatrick's (1992) suggestions of the benefits of authoritarian army discipline to Lickona's (1991) notion of a development beyond this to reasoned discussion of problematic situations. Potential linkages between character educators and communitarians and virtue theorists are easy to see. The virtue theorists provide the philosophical grounding, the communitarians pro-


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vide the politico-social theory, while the character educators provide the strategies for inducting the youth. New Modernizers would seem well served by all three, allowing them as policymakers to have a centrally directing role in social and moral agendas which, as argued above, can be used as a support for their economic agendas. On this approach, a particular workforce will be trained in not only the requisite economic skills but in the desired social skills and attitudes as well. Schools, on this analysis, may then feel even more constrained and directed by this agenda than under the New Right - unless of course educators in schools support a form of character education which matches that of the New Modernizers. There is certainly good reason to believe that a sizeable proportion of the teaching force do support some form, though not necessarily one which stresses New Modernizer virtues. If the New Right had an agenda focused upon the economic, with the social and moral environment little more than a spin-off created by the economic, New Modernizers see the social and moral agenda as crucial to the success of its economic policies. As a result of this, schools can expect to have rather less room for manoeuvre and choice, both in their academic and pastoral curricula.

Some problems with the New Modernizers' agenda The last two chapters have argued that global issues are having important effects upon the nation state, in part because of threats to its power and legitimacy, in part because of problems of economic well-being and competitiveness. These global issues have generated a variety of national mediation strategies of which 'the Third Way' - the embrace by governments of global markets while providing workers with the technical and social skills to help them ride the waves of global economic change appears to be the most popular. Such strategies are understandable when much global change is seen as inevitable. Yet there are prices to be paid for the kinds of strategies being adopted at the present time. For a start, such policies are inward-looking. They are, after all, nation-state agendas - they concentrate on strategies which

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alleviate the economic and legitimatory pressures felt by nation states. Yet in doing so, they have significant weaknesses. Thus, they tend to view citizens as instruments, as human resources, who must be provided with the skills to work within the policy context set for them, but little more. In so doing, they provide their citizens with limited understanding of these global forces themselves. Such policies therefore reduce the political vision of what is possible to that which nation-state policy-makers desire their people to see. Yet, as argued above, where this vision involves assuming the inevitability of global market forces, this is at the least challengeable, for it is an ideological position which may be extremely damaging, since it reduces the meaning of education to one which fits the needs of the nation state, with an overriding emphasis upon the need for economic prosperity and for individuals to acquire the skills for this task. Furthermore, the signs are that the subordination of other educational purposes to the economic will intensify. The disappearance of child-centred rhetoric from official publications is plain to see. Similarly, the notion of education for its own sake or for an individual's personal good and development is defined as precisely that: a luxury consumption which the state cannot be expected to subsidize. The UK is not alone in joining into one ministry Education and Employment: the trend is strong and unmistakable, and while this strategy might improve a nation state's international competitiveness and economic prosperity, there are heavy prices to be paid. Thus, another problem is an increase in the degree of insecurity and fragmentation which a workforce will feel under Third Way policies. If the main thrust is to provide individuals with the skills to adapt to the demands of global or national markets, a consequence is the loss of continuity and meaning in an individual's career. This is not to argue for a return to the days of lifelong employment in one job, but rather to point up the need to curb the excesses of change. The consequences are seen in Hutton's (1996) description of the '40/30/30' society, in which only 40 per cent of the workforce have secure employment, 30 per cent are constantly insecure in the constant change of jobs and a final 30 per cent are disadvantaged or unemployed. Now while


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Third Way governments appear to see their crucial role as ensuring that the bottom 30 per cent have access to jobs training, they will still leave 60 per cent of a population in a constant state of insecurity, with no solid base from which to plan for their home, their family, their career or their retirement. Nye Bevan (quoted in Elliot and Atkinson, 1999, p. 30) put this point beautifully in his aptly named In Place of Fear, when he argued that The assertion of anti-socialists that private economic adventure is a desirable condition stamps them out as profoundly unscientific. You can make your home the base of your adventures, but it is absurd to make the base itself an adventure.

This is then a warning about the weakening of the foundations of society itself. The scenario of two-thirds of a population in positions of permanent employment instability is no recipe for societal stability. Nor is it likely that individuals would adopt a communitarian perspective in helping one another to create the 'good society'. As Sennett states (1998, p. 148) as the final comment to his book on the consequences of such instability to the inner needs in a population What political programs follow from those inner needs, I simply don't know. But I do know a regime which provides human beings with no deep reason to care about one another cannot long preserve its legitimacy.

Further, such policies also downgrade the value of individual liberty, for the good of the nation is defined as the co-ordinated pursuance of centrally dictated policy through education and other pathways, and not as the uncoordinated accumulation of goods derived from individual self-chosen career paths. The increased centralization of policy, educational and otherwise, thus decreases individual autonomy and creates a culture of technical-rational professionals. Moreover, it poses the real danger of a move towards an illiberal society, for if individual

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choice is seen as an expensive luxury, it may well be sacrificed to national policy when the need arises. Yet individual liberty may also be threatened by other New Modernizer policies, in particular the adoption of communitarian/character education approaches to social and moral issues. If New Modernizer policies are predicated upon a virtue approach, and communities educate to a desired set of such virtues, a whole series of questions must be asked: • • • •

What extra-communal justification is there for the particular selection to be made? How will minorities who have a different list be valued? In order for such a set to be agreeable to the vast majority, will these values be so abstract as to be useless in application? Are moral reformers who are in a minority necessarily wrong? How, apart from convincing the majority, do they become right?

Etzioni (1997) made a brave, but ultimately unsatisfactory attempt at answering these kinds of problems, arguing that community values need to be based and justified within societal values, but that ultimately, as he puts it (p. 241) 'certain concepts present themselves to us as morally compelling in and of themselves.' This, however, is little more than an appeal to moral intuitionism, the problems with which are so obvious as not to need developing here. Gommunitarianism, whilst raising necessary questions about the obligations of the individual to society, all too easily becomes majoritarian, authoritarian and illiberal. And the more centralized economic policies become, the more likely the social and moral agenda will go down the same path. Further, if New Modernizers believe that many problems in society can be dealt with by increasing employment and employability, then a second effect is the marginalization of debates about issues of inequality. Yet the argument that when people are given the right skills, jobs will come, and when the jobs come, the money will come, and then inequality will diminish or even disappear, seems highly questionable. Experience with New Right policies and markets under Reagan and Thatcher indicates


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quite clearly that markets do not reduce inequality, but instead significantly increase the gap between rich and poor. The reasons for this are simple. First, markets are designed to be unequal, to produce winners and losers, and those who 'win' increase their earnings over those who 'lose', and then utilize such gain to develop an advantage in the next 'round'. Second, even at the very beginning of an exchange, markets are never level playing fields. Those who start off with advantages of social background, wealth, sex or whatever, normally exploit these advantages to improve their comparative situation even more. New Modernizers' policies are in danger of committing the same mistakes: giving people the skills does not make them or keep them equally employable, for besides the operation of'normal' market inequalities, there remain problems of childhood disadvantage, discrimination and inequality. Putting all or most of your eggs into a skills-for-employability basket in the belief that this will address societal injustice is then seriously mistaken. Even if the hope is that a healthier GNP will provide the resources to address these issues at some stage in the future, it is hardly of comfort to those suffering now. Swapping a New Right market of business competition for a New Modernizers' market of employability would not seem to be the solution. Issues of disadvantage and inequality need to be kept firmly on the agenda; action beyond the creation of employability then needs to be a major thrust of government policy. A further problem is that debate is structured through an account of society which may be inadequate or even incorrect. The present view of New Modernizers is clearly functionalist in perspective, not only at the economic level, with its attempt to harmonize the interests of workers, business and government, but also in the attempted celebration of a core of communal values. Elliot and Atkinson (1999, p. 123) suggest that the reason for this is the pressure put on national governments to capitulate to supranational demands, and describe the new order as one in which 'unfettered financial activity reduces political activity to a non-dogmatic "management" of the population' and where (p. 77) 'ideology is as welcome as smallpox'. Indeed, a fairly constant complaint against New Modernizers is their importation of

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'managerialist' techniques into areas which were previously seen as arenas for debate about key issues in the public arena. Now, with an overriding emphasis upon the value of teamwork and cooperation, there seems to be an attempt to smooth out such issues, to eliminate the need or value of dissent. Yet what if a conflict view of society is a more accurate depiction? There are many who would argue, for instance, that capitalism by its very nature creates crises and tensions: for workers by its constant need to accumulate and make profits, and for states through its increasingly transnational character, by which it can play one state off against another. If this is true, then a functionalist account is not only incorrect but may actually hinder a proper handing of current problems. Indeed when pro-business writers like Handy (1997) begin to speculate on how the power of the multinational can be curtailed by national governments because of their divisive and damaging effects, one really must wonder whether a functionalist account is little more than a rhetoric to cloak more conflictual policies. A final - and clearly related - effect is the location of problems at the level of the individual rather than at the level of society. Thus, whilst there is some justification in the claim that western societies have concentrated too much on the rights of individuals and neglected responsibilities, yet the character education movement also fails to suggest that some of the malaise within societies may be due to a failure to tackle questions of injustice, inequality and discrimination within them, as well as the effects of global markets beyond them. To focus upon the behaviour of individuals in order to deflect attention away from deeper societal problems is a favourite trick of politicians of many hues, but particularly of those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Until character education incorporates more clearly within its agenda these wider problems, there must always be the worry that it is being used as a cover and excuse for not dealing with more sensitive political problems, and as an attempt to prevent debate on these issues by introducing increasing numbers of non-rational and indoctrinatory procedures into school. The jury is still out on these, but they do provide a litmus for determining the nature and direction of the movement in the next few years.


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Conclusion Even though much of the origins of this communitarian approach of the New Modernizers can be traced to the USA, it may well have as much if not more effect in the UK, for the signs here are propitious for something comprehensively centralizing. People in the UK are generally more deferential to those in positions of power than in the USA; they do not have the same fear of the abuse of power deriving from a combination of a legislature and an executive; they live under a non-federal system of government which facilitates centralization; and they re-elected on three occasions Margaret Thatcher, one of the most authoritarian prime ministers in UK history. Finally, their education system has experienced a continuous and intensified centralization for the last 30 years, and while New Labour was vehemently opposed to the hugely increased powers which the 1988 Education Act gave the then Secretary of State for Education, since coming to power none of these have been repealed: indeed the 1998 Education Act intensified them. If one adds to this research which suggests that the teaching culture in the UK is one which, generally speaking, does not seem to mind losing its autonomy in exchange for a clarity of (directed) purpose (Bottery and Wright, 2000), one then has most of the ingredients for a centralization and illiberalism in education which the UK has not experienced since the inception of state education in the nineteenth century. Finally, one needs to add that within the public sector there has been constructed a managerial system and a conception of leadership which perform precisely the kinds of roles for professionals and the general public which the agendas described in these first two chapters require for their successful realization. It is to an examination of these - and the effects that they have upon educational systems - that the next chapter turns.


Chapter 3

Manager ialism, leadership and the assault on educational values

Managerialism has filled the discursive space in which change is conceived. It defines the terrain and direction of change. It expresses the imagined futures and the ways of getting there. It establishes the limits of the possible, the imaginable, and above all, the sayable. (Clarke and Newman, 1996, p. 52)

Introduction-controlling agendas, limiting debate So far, it has been argued that we live in increasingly globalized, fragmented and chaotic times. Social stability is increasingly threatened. State legitimacy is undermined by power moving upwards, downwards and away from national governments, who largely accept that they must work within a global free-market system. At the same time, they have also come to believe that they cannot afford to leave national economic prosperity to the vagaries of the market, and they now believe that they need to create niche-marketed workforces in order to fulfil multinational and global market demands. Part of the attempt by national governments to deal with these issues has been a reinvigorated attempt to co-ordinate and control educational processes. In the process, the language of policy has changed. If the key words of the New Right under Reagan and Thatcher were those of competition, entrepreneurialism and institutional survival, under the New Modernizers have been added those of outcomes, standards and benchmarking. While educational performance was formerly evaluated primarily in terms of success or failure in the market place, educators now face an increasingly detailed and prescribed set of policies,

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created by government and assessed in terms of performance outcomes. Finally, if educational 'producers' have been sensitive over the last couple of decades to the threats of practice provided by marketization, they have realized that while they are still required to be educational entrepreneurs, they must do this within an increasingly centralized and controlling framework of educational activities. One of the key forces behind these changes has been the enhanced role of the 'evaluative state' (Neave, 1988). By this is meant the increased move by governments to classify, monitor, inspect and judge the work of those in institutions both public and private. This is normally accomplished by a very precise specification of standards which have to be attained and which then are measured by officials, or even better by the producers themselves. In the process, the monitoring and surveillance of educational activities by the state is pursued with a knowledge, technology and infrastructure which makes it considerably more effective than at any time previously. Such governmental strategies and activities are in one sense very 'rational'. They are, after all, the consequence of considerable thought given to dealing with genuine threats to things as crucial as the existence of the nation state, and to a country's standard of living. Yet, as noted at the end of the last chapter, this rationality is questionable for a number of reasons, and it produces effects which make its pursuit in a wider sense really quite irrational. Thus it tends to be limited and inward-looking; it produces considerable insecurity and a fragmentation of meaning in the workforce; it has a tendency to view citizens as human resources rather than resourceful humans, and in so doing tends to downgrade issues of personal liberty; it prioritizes economic reasons for education systems above other reasons, and thereby marginalizes other issues like those of inequality and social justice; its functionalist orientation may cloak the reality of a much more conflictual world, and thereby hinder the development of strategies to deal with such conflict; and finally, it has a tendency to locate problems at the level of the individual rather than accepting that many problems may only be solved by looking for societal causes.

The assault on educational values

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This limited rationality is also harmful to the development of a genuine democracy and to the development of an involved and critical citizenry, because it affects the mindsets of both policymakers and recipients. It provides 'good' reasons for policymakers to limit the democratic process in favour of economic and legitimatory agendas, and while this may be for the best of reasons (and that has to be very doubtful in some cases), the effect of this is to limit the ability of citizens to think in terms other than those which policy-makers wish to prioritize. One important example of this is the way in which it reduces the ability of members of a democracy to ask what emphasis should be given, in the provision of services, by the public and private sectors, simply because present policy-makers see no problem here. As indicated above, as long as 'producers' generate output which conforms to government standards, then New Modernizers see this as largely irrelevant. Yet this is dangerous for a number of reasons. Firstly, the overuse of market mechanisms produces a market consciousness which limits the ability of individuals to think of the community and society within which they live. Ranson and Stewart (1989), for instance, argue that the private and public institutions differ from each other, because they address their work differently. As they say (p. 5) 'a concept of organisation that encompasses citizens differs from an organisation that knows only customers.' Employees in the private sector, it is argued, need concern themselves with little more than the viability of their organization and the quality of their practice. Yet the role of public sector workers requires (even though this is not always recognized) that there needs to be consideration not only of the good of the organization, but of society as well. On this argument, then, the public domain has a very different focus from the private, for while the public is a necessary focus for the promotion of collective life, the latter is concerned essentially with little more than the prosecution of private interests. Thus, as Barber (1998, p. 70) argues, while many market advocates believe that privatization is the same thing as democratization and empowerment, the results are actually quite different, for they produce:

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Education, policy and ethics an eclipse of the public, a one-dimensional culture of privatism and greed, and an addictive materialism that turns autonomous citizens into dependent consumers.

The result of this marginalization of a debate about the respective roles of the public and private sector is part of a vicious antidemocratic circle, as policy-makers find good reason for reducing the democratic process, and this reduction prevents recipients from challenging them. The way is open for other, much less democratic, forms of government, to worm their way into the political process. Two key questions, then, which provide the direction and content for the centre of this book, spring from such an analysis. The first is ''How has this situation come about?' This question is only partially explained by the first two chapters, for while these examinations of global and national contexts help explicate how current governments can believe that such a degree of control is necessary, they fail to explain the comparative ease with which such control has taken place. They also fail to describe precisely how such control has occurred. The second question then is 'What are the mechanisms by which such control is exerted?' If utilized properly, the answers to this second question can help towards a fuller understanding of the first, because they can provide specific instances of such mechanisms of control, which can be used to clarify the larger picture. Indeed, these mechanisms, it will be argued, are in large part exerted through the redirection of professional activities, and this is also in large part through the 'capture' of particular 'discourses' related to education. This is the topic of the next three chapters. This chapter will examine the role that managerialism - and a particular version of 'leadership' within this managerialist approach - has played in the redirecting of professional activities, and more generally in the state being able to develop a greater control of the workings of the educational system. It begins by examining the rise and character of managerialism, a phenomenon which is one of the defining changes in the organization of educational and public sector working over the last thirty years or so, and which also contains many of the elements of control which have been alluded to so far.


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Perhaps the most crucial element of the use of managerialism in schools is through the creation of a particular type of leadership, which, it will be argued, is designed to perform a pivotal role in a redesigned public sector, one which, in a post-Fordist manner, leaves policy direction to the centre, but responsibility for implementation to the periphery. In so doing, it extracts the ethical core of leadership, and reduces it to an essentially technical-rational function. In this respect then, manager/leaders in schools have had their respective roles changed since the advent of welfare states after the Second World War. They are no longer to perform the task of being reflective counsels on both the purposes and strategies for implementation of education in their institutions, as well as being supportive and facilitative of professional decisions. Instead, they are now there to direct and control these professionals and their practice, to ensure that professional actions follow the dictates of external policy agendas. This chapter argues that while these managers are therefore being trained to perform a crucial role in Third-Way policies designed to respond to global times, they are being deprofessionalized quite as much as their counterparts in the classroom. It is to managerialism and its effects upon their functions, then, that this chapter now turns.

Defining managerialism In the history of Western societies, there have been a variety of forces, the Church, the aristocracy, the state, which have, at one time or another, held centre stage and, not unimportantly, constrained the development of democracy and an active citizenry. The state has acted both to constrain and facilitate such developments through its ability to control and direct the policy and actions of its subjects. In like manner, in present times, the market, through its ability to disperse wealth and power, can facilitate greater democracy, but can also be an impediment to the development of the democratic society. This can be through its disposition to form monopolies, and thereby concentrate power and wealth in the hands of the few. However, it can also be through its tendency to commodify activities, and thereby for

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individuals to think in terms of individual consumption, and not in terms of what is necessary for the common good. Both state and market also have their impact upon educational institutions in promoting democracy. The state can act not only to steer educational institutions to take a greater or lesser interest in matters of citizenship, but also to take an interest in a particular kind of citizenship, one which might, for instance, prioritize responsibilities over rights, or vice versa. Markets, on the other hand, if used as a means of raising performance among educators, can constrain their vision to the necessity of surviving within a competitive paradigm, and to the apparently necessary - and then monopolistic - use of business language. Yet there is now good evidence, both from the earlier chapters of this book and also from a variety of literature, to suggest that these are not the only factors influential in the thinking and practice of educational institutions at the present time. A third factor, the practice and discourse of managerialism, is an independent force, and is particularly powerful because it is operational not only within the sphere of education itself, but within both of these other spheres as well (Bottery, 1998; Clarke and Newman, 1996; Simpkins, 1999). So while some may think that the influence of managerialist language and practice is small compared to the deeper structural issues of the state and market sectors, this chapter will argue that its influence is both pervasive and systemic, and that any adequate conceptualization of the forces acting upon educational institutions needs to take it very seriously. What, then, is 'managerialism'? It is more than just 'the work of managers', for managers can and do work in a variety of ways, depending upon what they are asked to do, as well as the value and political framework within which they operate. Their changing role has been alluded to already. In the early days of the welfare state, school 'managers' were, among other things, administrators, facilitators and wise counsels on the purposes of education. Their role is very different nowadays and, paraphrasing Pollitt (1992, p. 2), 'managerialism' - the present work of managers - is taken to mean an approach to managing and leading underpinned by a policy which believes that


• • •

•

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social progress lies in the achievement of continuing increases in economically defined productivity; management is a distinct organizational function which plays the crucial role in planning, implementing and measuring the necessary improvements in productivity; such productivity increases will come about through the creation of a labour force instilled with this productivity ideal, who are vigorously tied into such corporate aims; to perform this crucial role managers must be granted the right to manage proactively available resources, both material and human.

It is important to note the value - the ideological - orientation of this approach. It is economistic, it is directive, it is controlling, it sees human beings as resources for its defined ends. Its main orthodoxies, as Clarke and Newman (1996, p. 147) argue, tend to be: decentralisation, devolution, internal purchasing and charging, divisions between strategic and operational management, and the re-engineering of organisations around notions of'core business', with the outsourcing of activities defined as non-core. Internal management processes are dominated by the twin rubrics of business planning, linked to target setting and performance management, and the building of corporate commitment to a specific organisational 'mission' and purpose, linked to survival in a competitive environment.

It will be clear from this that it uses the language and ideas of the private business organization, and in so doing facilitates their assimilation of public and educational sector concepts.

The claims of managerialism Managerialism does not see itself as without glamour. Pollitt (1992, p. 8) points out that in the managerialist picture, 'Managers themselves are the heroes . . .', and the villains are the kind

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of assorted bunch one might expect on New Right/market descriptions of where problems have come from: They include . . . trade unions (with their restrictive work practices), professionals (ditto), politicians (who meddle and fudge) and bureaucrats (who slow everything down and are usually inefficient.

Other writers, who specifically advocate a managerial approach, are not shy in proclaiming its virtues. Koontz and O'Donnell (1978, p. 1) for instance argue that 'perhaps there is no more important area of human activity than managing.' The 'perhaps' suggests a degree of modesty, but one might still be tempted to laugh at this statement. Out go philosophy, art, music, scientific discoveries, the quests of the human spirit and in, as the most important area of human activity comes . . . management? As John McEnroe said in another context, you cannot be serious. Yet three things should caution restraint. The first reason is that, as one reads further into the book, it is clear that these authors are deadly serious. They believe what they write. A second reason is that they are not alone. Drucker, for instance, adopts a world-saving discourse to eulogize about management: Performing responsible management is the alternative to tyranny and our only protection against it ... For management is the organ, the life-giving, acting, dynamic organ of the institution it manages. (Drucker, 1974, p. ix)

The third and final reason is that we live in an increasingly managerially and organizationally controlled world, and managerialism has the power to direct the behaviour of populations by controlling the organizations within which people work and, just as importantly, through the control of the language - the discourse - in which they think. This being the case, the following statement by a leading UK politician is, in consequence, understandable, even reasonable:


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Efficient management is the key to the [national] revival . . . the management ethos must run right through our national life private and public companies, civil service, nationalized industries, local government, the National Health Service. (Heseltine, 1980, quoted in Pollitt, 1992, p. 3)

It is important to note that such an assertion excludes from consideration other possible keys to national revival - such as appeals to greater equality, justice or community. Heseltine's statement then is not factual but ideological, just as are the two other quotations above. They all express values and beliefs about the world; they are designed to justify the authority of particular groups within society; and once justified, they lead to a particular social and political framework. Management, and its discourse, managerialism, then, are not value-free, but constitute an ideology which needs to be interrogated like any other. It is therefore important to understand the history of managerialist discourse because this not only provides a better grasp of its effects upon democratic developments, but also explains why neither the state nor the market can be relied upon to provide the antidote to its effects, and why the solution may need to be found in the nurturing of other forces, other sectors.

The rise and rise of managerialism The rise of managerialism must be understood against a background of the social and economic history of most Western societies over the last fifty years. As we have seen, these were initially characterized by the embrace of extensive welfare state systems, funded primarily through taxation. In UK schools, for instance, professionals' decisions were financed by the state, and their practice facilitated by a primus inter pares - a principal who, in many cases, was a reluctant manager at best. The curriculum was the teachers' secret garden, and the politician's job was merely to finance their self-defined directions. When, however, reassessment took place in the late 1960s and 1970s, politicians moved from broad concerns of providing services and infrastructures to investigating and legislating upon the quality of provision

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and upon the nature of professional practice. From a political point of view, this critique of welfare was largely seen as a response to uneconomic, inefficient, unresponsive and ineffective services, dominated by an assertive group of public sector professionals, and it led to vigorous attempts, usually by right-wing governments, at controlling expenditure, and at an enthusiastic embrace for market-inspired legislation to generate greater responsiveness by these professional 'producers' to their client 'consumers'. This approach was translated into the school sector through the use of a variety of legislation which disempowered teachers, and at the same time empowered the centre and other stakeholders. In the UK, the power of teachers was reduced by the Teachers Pay and Conditions of Service Act of 1987, a centralizing National Curriculum and the introduction of the spectacularly more intrusive inspectorial regime of Ofsted. It also empowered other stakeholders by the introduction of the semiindependent grant-maintained schools; by the ability of parents and governors to opt out of local authority control; by the policy of open enrolment, where children had to be granted a school place if there was physical space for them; and by the dramatically increased devolution of finance to the institutional level. All of these new pieces of legislation provided new pressures and gave new curricular and financial responsibilities to the management of a school, and in many ways required a new kind of head teacher/principal. The kind of managerialism described above - what Hood (1991) called the 'New Public Management' - became the talismanic ideology by governments of both left and right in creating this new kind of manager. It was in reality a distillation of many (mostly US) practices from the private sector, and while differing in specification depending upon country and public sector, it was characterized by two underpinning values. The first turned managers into proactive rather than facilitatory or reactive administrators; the second argued that such managers should have the freedom to innovate within tightly defined quality parameters. In education in particular, it was seen in many countries in


• • • • •

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the greater emphasis upon site-based management; greater financial discretion at the institutional level; an increased marketization of activities, set within increasingly state-defined parameters; an increased emphasis upon the role of principals as the charismatic and empowering 'leaders' of their troops; an increased emphasis upon the need for senior professionals to be trained in such managerial techniques.

NPM, then, was adopted because it was believed to have a number of positive qualities. Its economistic orientation was justified by the argument that a sophisticated and differentiated modern society needs to be underpinned by a healthy economic sector in order to provide an acceptable level of personal and social goods and services. Its institutionally focused and coordinating/directive qualities reduced the possibility that individuals within the organization would pull in different directions and negate each other's efforts, and therefore were seen as important in the reduction of resource wastage. The practice of managerialism also normally permitted, within clearly defined parameters, a degree of creativity, flexibility and independent judgement, which allowed for the possibility of adapting decisionmaking to local conditions. Finally, and crucially, it was believed that this kind of managerialism provided governments with the organizational systems by which their policies would be implemented without the mediating subversion of professionals.

Managerialism and the assault on values Yet there is little doubt that managerialism is increasingly exerted in ways and in domains other than those for which it was intended. In so doing, it has the potential to exert considerable damage upon these, and thence upon the society within which it exists. A notable example of this is the manner in which it influences the actions of the state, in that it acts as an ideological conduit through which decisions are made. Clarke and Newman (1996, p. 148) describe this superbly:

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Education, policy and ethics Managerialist discourse offers particular representations of the relationship between social problems and solutions. It is linear and oriented to 'single goal' thought patterns. It is concerned with goals and plans rather than with intentions and judgements. It is about action rather than reflection. It draws on analysis (breaking problems down) rather than synthesis. It sets up boundaries between 'policy' and 'delivery', 'strategy' and 'implementation', thought and action. It offers a technicist discourse which strips debate of its political underpinnings, so that debate about means supplants debate about ends.

But managerialism does not only feed back into the workings of the state to influence the actions and thought of policy-makers: it also has wider, more pervasive and therefore probably more damaging effects on society at large. In particular, in the pursuit of management objectives, it reduces first-order social and moral values to second-order values. By doing so, managerialism not only achieves a hegemony within organizations; it also parasitizes and weakens those values upon which the wider society - but also its own existence — depend. Non-managerial relationships, structures and values are then increasingly defined through a managerial conceptual discourse. Now it is accepted that wherever managerial and non-managerial relationships and values exist side by side, there will always be a tension between them. Yet wherever managerial values achieve hegemony, these wider values are cheapened and debased, and the deep value structure of society upon which managerialism and organization functioning are dependent is weakened. Seven examples of first-order social and moral values reduced to second-order managerial values - autonomy, criticality, care, tolerance, equality, respect and trust - are given below as illustrations of this thesis. Autonomy and criticality Autonomy and criticality are essential features of any society claiming to have a democratic form of government, and of any organization claiming to have as part of its mission the development of citizens. We have already seen that Ranson and Stewart (1989) believed that organizations that deal with citizens differ


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from those which deal with customers, and this is because one that encompasses citizens has activities and concerns 'implicitly defined as outside the concern of (private sector) management: protest, politics, . . . public debate' (p. 5). Yet within the current managerial lexicon, genuinely critical individual judgements are seen as, at best, a luxury, at worst an obstruction, to corporatist decision-making. Notions of organizational efficiency and effectiveness are predicated upon the notion of managerial hegemony, in which various degrees of consultation, but not participation, are utilized for maximum managerial effect. The idea that individuals might sing their own tunes is so fundamentally contrary to current thinking that it may be hard for some to take seriously. Yet if society is increasingly dominated by corporatist and managerialist solutions, then there must be a genuine danger that autonomy and criticality as societal values will be increasingly seen as no more than annoyances or impediments instead of as core values. This can be seen in the manner in which MPs are treated in the UK Parliament, as less and less representatives of their constituents, but rather as instruments of their party policies, to be whipped through the voting lobbies as and when required. One sees it within schools and other public sector institutions, where collegiality increasingly means 'contrived' collegiality (Hargreaves, 1994), the individualist being seen as the problem rather than the archetype of good practice. Corporatist decisions increasingly take precedence over the individual critical voice. Care The financial problems of the public sector institutions of Western democracies is well documented. With such problems, understandably, comes a greater concern for financial considerations, for a greater degree of control of how money is spent, for a greater degree of policy steering. In the process, as we have seen, the key words in the managerial mantra have been those of economy (curbing the amount being spent), efficiency (getting the most out for the money put in) and effectiveness (achieving as near as possible the aims designated at the beginning of the process). Yet

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effectiveness involves a degree of value specification which the other two do not have; and because of the difficulty of this value specificity, and because the first two of these are more easy to measure and control, effectiveness has normally been relegated to a back seat. In the process, the quantifiable has taken precedence over the qualitative: the more complex, more individual and more affective values, such as care, have tended to be sidelined in the pursuit of monetary considerations. Yet, perhaps even more importantly, where care is espoused, it tends to be regarded as a value-added component to a service, rather than as an integral and primary feature of any human relationship. In other words, because it is assigned this second-order status, it is conditional upon managerial calculation rather than being an unconditional ethic, and this leads to all human relationships being treated as means to ends rather than as ends in themselves. Tolerance Tolerance is another central democratic concept. At its centre lies the notion of the need for time to listen to others' points of view because they have the right as human beings to be respected in that way. Beyond the personal, tolerance implies that differing views should be represented in the political structures and organization of the country, because each has a right to be heard. While this may weaken the power of the executive arm of government, it nevertheless leads not only to an ethically more acceptable, but also to a politically healthier and more stable environment. In the organization and managerial thinking of today, by contrast, tolerance of other opinions is seen as desirable only if listening to the opinions of others can contribute to a (managerially defined) objective. The result is that tolerance, like autonomy and care, becomes a second-order value: if it serves management purposes, then it should be used and manipulated to serve these. Because this conceptual universe is limited to what is good for the organization, and this is conceptualized as being delivered through its management, tolerance can be taken up or dropped depending upon its usefulness, not upon its first-order ethical status.


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Equality and respect Equality as a concept has a variety of meanings. It could for instance be defined as Ontological equality, the desire to ensure that all individuals are granted equal, fundamental respect as individuals; Equality of opportunity: the attempt to ensure that everyone begins from the same starting point in the race of life; Equality of outcome or result: the attempt to ensure that everyone ends up with approximately the same rewards in life, regardless of starting point. However, because present-day managerialism works within and through a market scenario, both at global level and in national post-Fordist strategies, which of their natures lead to unequal outcomes, the concept of equality cannot be utilized in the last of these ways. Furthermore, neither of the other definitions is essential to managerial thinking: if it suits managerial aims for individuals to be treated differently, then any notion of equality may simply be omitted. Historically, both scientific management and classic bureaucratic practice have been predicated upon the assumption of the treatment of dehumanized units fulfilling roles assigned to them. Such practice relies upon predictability and manipulation, not equality or respect. Furthermore, the successor to scientific management, human relations theory, employed notions of respect for individuals primarily on the basis that this was a better (i.e. more efficient) means of motivating a workforce, rather than upon the conception of respect as a first-order ethical value. Both equality and respect then are good examples of how a conceptual domain can be dominated by thinking from another. Trust Trust is the cement of human relationships. It can be a pragmatic value, involving the unwritten, unspoken assumption that an individual will carry out a promise, an assumption based upon a combination of inductive reasoning and the prospect of future

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interaction: the individual has always carried out promises before, and therefore can be relied upon to do the same in the future, particularly if the relationship is such that one can be sure of continued interaction. Yet it is also something much deeper. It implies an attitude towards people and the world in general: a belief that things in the end turn out for the good, that people are at bottom basically good as well. Some might see this as simple optimism, but however one views it, it has effects because of its spontaneity. It has the ability to create a similar trust in others, to foster friendship and love, simply to make life worth living. It cannot be artificially produced. Its absence - distrust - leads at the extreme to enmity and hate, and in organizations, to detailed accountability, exhaustive legal agreements and extensive litigation. The consequences of this at the personal level are reduced job satisfaction through high degrees of interpersonal conflict and suspicion. At the business level, it can mean vastly increased transaction costs, which have important implications for the efficient use of time and money. Trust is a concept largely lacking from the vocabulary of the enthusiastic market advocate (and consequently from management literature of this orientation). Relationships in the market place are predicated, in theory at least, upon self-interested individuals making rationally based choices upon a critical evaluation of the market information available, rather than a particular attitude to other human beings. One does not trust another in a market relationship: caveat emptor is the caution. Yet the high tide of free-market theory has gone. The damage to the social fabric of society, in terms of greater inequality, strains on family and social relationships and the breakdown of trust, through the consequences of unbridled markets, is apparent. This has led to appeals for the return of individual and social responsibility and duty through the revival of the influence of community. As interesting has been the greater awareness of the inefficiencies of the market: that heightened transaction costs cast doubt upon the role of the market as the overarching wealthgenerating mechanism. It is here that the concept of trust, as a crucial social and ethical prop, is utilized for economic terms, the argument being that countries should invest in the development


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of greater trust to advance their economic competitiveness. Fukuyama (1996) has argued that the most economically competitive societies are those which have social structures generating a high degree of trust beyond the level of the family. This kind of argument continues through to the present day (Leadbeater, 1999). Trust, then, is a 'good thing', but 'good' from a secondorder, economic, rather than a first-order ethical point of view. The appropriation of this term for political/managerial/economic use could not be clearer.

Managerial ism and leadership An initial conclusion might then be that, while the complexion of governments has moved from New Right to New Modernizer, the practice and impact of a managerialist ideology have intensified. Part of the reason for this lies, as we have seen, in the belief that governments need, in order to compete in global markets, to be more interventionist than they have been previously. Another reason lies in the fact that western governments generally now seem agreed that the divide between the public and private sectors is no longer an ideological barrier. As long as an organization can deliver a curriculum and associated students' results to defined standards, it increasingly does not seem to matter from which side of the public/private divide they come, though it also seems clear that it is the private sector which is seen as that most likely to provide desirable solutions. Thus, buoyed by the vigorous promotion of private sector managerial texts, the rhetoric of managerialism has spread to influence the language and thought, and then the practice, of politicians and professionals alike. In specifying what the education system must do, this rhetoric is very clear. If the New Right devised league tables so that 'consumers' could judge between 'products', New Modernizers have continued this, but have also added an extra demand of professionals. Targets are now set for future performance, and thus performance management, performance appraisal and performance-related pay mesh with other factors of this quantitative calculative approach to limit massively the focus of the professional. They are driven to concentrate ever more upon means

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rather than the ends of their work. As Clarke and Newman (1996, p. xii) argue moving forward has become more important than understanding where you have been, and practical action more important than reflection and analysis . . . The 'can do' culture of management has a strong preference for practical prescriptions over mere academic analysis.

Further, this concentration of means to ends is set within the kind of business framework remarkably - and disturbingly - similar to that described by Richard Sennett (1998, p. 56) of the new form of American capitalism: Control can be exercised by setting production or profit targets for a wide variety of groups in the organisation, which each unit is free to meet in any way that seems fit. This freedom is however, specious. It's rare for flexible organisations to set easily met goals; usually the units are pressed to produce or to earn far more than lies within their immediate capacities. The realities of supply and demand are seldom in sync with these targets; the effort is to push units harder and harder despite the realities, a push which comes from the institution's top management.

Sennett's book is an urgent plea to take note of the personal consequences of work in this new capitalism, what he calls 'the corrosion of character'. This has already been seen in the managerial assault on first-order values: it is increasingly seen in the amount of stress-related illnesses and early retirements in the teaching profession. Yet what becomes of those schools which fail in this task? How will they be dealt with? Ofsted (1997, p. 6) makes it clear that this will be remedied by a managerialist definition of leadership, for they assert that a common characteristic of improving schools is that they have made sure that strong leadership is provided. Many schools subject to special measures have appointed a new headteacher just before or soon after the inspection of the school.


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A particular kind of leader is being described, but what is his/her specific task? Two years later, this was made clear in the description of the key objective in Teachers: Meeting the Challenge of Change (DfEE, 1999, p. 6), which is to put into place performance management arrangements to help raise schools' performance, including the systematic assessment of teacher performance to a suitable level of reward.

As Wright (2000) points out, it is easy to spot the key indications of a classic managerialist discourse in this: systematic assessment (i.e. scientific or quantitative measurement), and the overall emphasis on performance (i.e. doing or action) reflect central tenets of managerialism.

This work will be facilitated, as Clarke and Newman (1996, p. 66) argue, by 'the calculative technologies of managerialism ...' which thus 'provide a foundation for enacting the new logics of rationing, targeting and priority setting'. These techniques then give the actions of such leaders the scientific aura of neutrality and impersonality. In so doing, such quantitative and evaluative technologies provide the means, it is claimed of coping with the complexities and uncertainties of the modern world — the chaos of the new . . . managerialism promises to organise the irrational within a rational framework. (Clarke and Newman, 1996, p. 67)

So these leaders are being cast as scientific experts, directing and monitoring their teams in the use of managerial techniques to design the most effective and efficient ways of mastering the problems set for them elsewhere. Little wonder, then, that such leaders are being cast in the heroic mould in which Pollitt (1992) described them above. They will provide not only the techniques to solve these technical problems - they will provide the vision for their team to follow. Here, then, is the leader of the future: director, scientist and hero.

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Yet such heroic figures, like other superheroes, end up wearing their underpants outside their tights. If it is clear what they are, it also clear what they are not. First, these leaders are designed to be practical rather than contemplative. The word 'designed' is used here deliberately, because this is precisely what current managerialist policy intends to do: to design a leader who knows how to do things, rather than to think about the wider arena within which such execution is desired. As an example, take the prospectus for the UK National College for School Leadership, an institution at which government agendas are to be translated into training grounds for future head teachers. It begins The Green Paper envisages a coherent national training framework for headship so that all heads have access to high quality, practical and professional training at every stage of their careers. The framework will cover preparation for headship, induction to consolidate and reinforce the skills of new heads, and an extension programme to give experienced heads the opportunity to stretch and develop their skills. (DfEE, 1999, para 1)

As Wright (2000) points out, this paragraph, and succeeding pages as well, make it clear that the emphasis will be on training (as opposed to education), on a practical (rather than a reflective) approach and it being a skill-based occupation (rather than one which looks at developing qualities). In so doing, it clearly specifies that this is an action-oriented leadership course, where missions and purposes will be given, and the training is in the doing. Second, and following from this, such leadership will be focused on means, not on ultimate ends. It will be clear why this is the case: when ultimate ends are decided beyond the school, there is no need for manager/leaders who engage too deeply with such issues. Instead, what is required is the best of technical-rationalism, but nothing further. This kind of leadership is therefore, perhaps surprising in an age of flexible capitalism, located within a classic bureaucratic framework. Individuals need to know their task, but they do not need, nor is it desired that they debate, the purposes beyond the level at which they are asked to work. Yet by


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doing so their leadership is reduced to a level of implementation which does not require, indeed lacks, any sense of moral purpose. Third, it means that such 'leaders' can be misled into believing that their activities are value-neutral. This is certainly what managerialism would like to suggest. As Clarke and Newman (1996, p. 66) suggest The rationalism of managerialism provides a non-partisan (and depoliticised) framework within which choices can be made. Competing values are reduced to alternative sets of options and costs and assessed against their contribution to the organisation's performance. Yet a true leader would be value-conscious, for education is an inherently value-laden and ultimately moral activity. It requires that educators (and especially those who would call themselves leaders) constantly reflect upon ultimate purposes, upon the wider social and political context within which their actions take place, and for them to consider how this context will impact upon their practice and upon the lives and education of those within the institution. Finally, and following from this, managerial leadership is clearly a job of controlling and directing others, rather than for liberating their creativity and enthusiasm. It is a job for empowering others to perform well on tasks designed elsewhere, not for emancipating others to develop or discover their own meanings within the educational process. As Murgatroyd and Morgan (1993, p. 121) said (uncritically) of their (managerialist) version of Total Quality Management Basic empowerment begins when the vision and goals have already been set by the school leaders. What a team or an individual is empowered to do is to turn the vision and strategy into reality through achieving those challenging goals set for them by the leadership of the school. The only mistake here is the belief that this vision, these goals, have been set by the school leaders. Any vision or goal of

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importance has been set beyond the confines of the schools. The leader's job, like that of team or individual, is to turn that vision and strategy into reality.

Conclusions: the effects of managerialism The use of managerial discourse then has had a number of effects. Some of its positive claims have already been noted: the need for a healthy economy to finance personal and social aims, the need to prevent resource wastage, the closer co-ordination of an organization's activities and the making of more appropriate decisions by locating them at the local level. It has, however, a large number of much less positive attributes. First, while it is supposed to improve effectiveness, because it is goal driven, its actual focus tends to be on the short term and the quantitative, at the expense of broader, more qualitative and long-term goals. Because of this short-term focus, it also tends to be poor at dealing with complexity and uncertainty. While managerialism was adopted such that educational systems might be designed to produce the flexible hi-tech worker of the future, it is highly likely that such a system, because it is so directive, actually closes off the kinds of investigative avenues which are the seedcorn of economic creativity. The ultimate paradox is that a stifling and demotivating educational bureaucratic system has been created which is supposed to produce a creative and flexible workforce. Second, and following from the above, it is anti-humanitarian, both to teachers and pupils. Just as in much modern business, where targets are set beyond the reachable, so they are increasingly set in education, and (of course) by those who do not have to reach them. Stress is then caused, not only by the pressure this puts on the teacher to try to achieve them; it also causes untold stress in that they have to reach these targets with children who have no hope of attaining them, and for whom they are equally stressful and anti-educational. What on earth has happened to the mechanics and the ethics of an education system where this is the end result? Third, it creates an amoral leadership which has the genuine


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potential to become immoral. It is amoral because it is designed to see education in technical, value-free terms, and this is terribly dangerous because education cannot be value-free, but is set within certain ideological parameters which must be questioned if it is not to have immoral results. Any practice of management which omits its moral element is therefore likely to be immoral by omission - and the practice of education which leads to unnecessary stress in teachers and children is surely an example of this. Fourth, this approach deprofessionalizes educators. It does this, firstly, by stripping out that which is probably most central to the practice of leadership - its concern with the ethical. Yet it also deprofessionalizes the classroom teacher, for it focuses their minds on the short-term, the practical and the immediate, and distracts or turns their minds away from the long term, just as with principals, and from the ethical purposes of their profession. Furthermore, because of the way in which it focuses the minds of both principals and staff, it prevents the kind of debate with which public sector professionals need to be engaged - the promotion of a caring, collective life in a democracy. Finally, then, through this process it creates huge potential for the destruction of democratic thought, and for a critical citizenry, for it designs educational systems in which critical participation and dissent are not only seen as undesirable, but it goes further, for by means of league tables, targets, outcomes, performance appraisal, managerial surveillance and external Ofsted inspections, it designs them out of the system. It becomes a system for delivering government policy, not for discussion of what the aims of education might be; and when governmental policies are so clearly predicated upon economistic ends, managerialism is doubly controlling. The reality in the UK has been that while teachers have fought rearguard actions to maintain their power and autonomy, and as much of the craft of teaching has taken place behind closed doors, there has been a degree of success in this. Nevertheless, there has been a noticeable culture change. The philosophy of'collegiality' has justified the increased surveillance of individuals' work; the trauma and consequences of failed Ofsted inspections have reinforced teachers' judgements that they cannot afford to

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'carry' or even support poor colleagues; the practice of devolving finance to the institutional level, open enrolment and other managerial strategies have all led to teachers practizing and thinking more about financial matters and more like managers; and finally, major drives by government to upgrade the importance of management training within the profession have increased the number taking on managerial responsibilities. The result has been that teachers, through living the lives of managers, have begun to think and become more like them. In the process, the professional-manager boundary has been blurred, and managerialism has begun to infect the lives of the professional (see Exworthy and Halford, 1999). Managerialism, then, acts to change the nature of the language that professionals use to discuss such change, so that principals and senior teachers are encouraged to, and increasingly use and accept, the discourse of management, rather than that of teaching and learning. Increasingly by 'controlling the discourse', it affects the way professionals think about their relationships with others and then how they actually talk to and treat them. So, as managerialist discourse influences language and practice, it increasingly sets limits on what is thinkable. In so doing, it can lead to effects which undermine the very basis upon which society is founded, and thereby further reduce any ability to act as generators of a critical democratic spirit. The next chapter - on the managerial use of'quality' - develops this argument further.

Chapter 4

Uses and abuses of quality: the need for a civic version

Introduction 'Quality' is one of the buzzwords of the last decade. It is a term which has infiltrated most official publications and management agendas, and the suggested need to achieve 'better quality' has been used to underpin many of the major policy moves in education over the last few years. Yet it is not a neutral term. There are different meanings to it besides 'officially' favoured conceptions, and an understanding of its uses by those in power says a great deal about the extent of policy inheritance from the Reagan and Thatcher era. It also says a great deal about the colonization of educational concepts and practice by the private sector. It is therefore a very important area and word to examine. 'Quality' is a word with both 'external' and 'internal' meanings. Its 'external' meaning is normally derived from other people, organizations or legislation, when individuals are persuaded by them to adopt an interpretation of the term not personally held. An internal meaning of quality, however, is adopted when it stems from a personal value belief system, or when an individual's own value system coheres with external recommendations. With an external location, then, people create quality things because they are told to do so. With an internal location, however, people create quality things or perform quality acts because, basically, this is the way they approach the world. Thus, in the USA, people know that Amish furniture is quality furniture because the world-view of these furniture creators ensures that they could not, would not, create inferior products. This chapter will argue that while there may be a need for some

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form of external quality, the best kinds of quality initiatives are internally generated, and in the public sector should be a natural outgrowth of a civic culture value system. A second way of looking at these policy inheritances is through the distinctions that Feigenbaum et al. (1999) make between different types of privatization, for these distinctions suggest that a particular external version of quality has entered consciousness at a systemic level. These versions are 1 2

3

pragmatic privatization - technical solutions to immediate social problems, but lacking a political thrust; tactical privatization - used by policy-makers to achieve shortterm political goals, essentially expedient rather than political in origin; and finally systemic privatisation - intended to reshape an entire society by altering the practices and thence the consciousness and values of those within it.

This tripartite division suggests that 'privatization' is more than the sale of public assets to the private sector, and raises the possibility that the most far-reaching of Feigenbaum's categories, systemic privatization, may have led to the infiltration of private sector concepts into thinking about public policy-making. A key test of this is the extent to which public sector values have been marginalized, the public sector having first been infiltrated then dominated and finally absorbed by the private. The concept of'quality' fits this 'systemic privatization' agenda very well, for the concept of 'quality' is being widely used to pursue particular (privatized) agendas in education, and in other areas of the public sector as well. By using 'quality' in this way, an attempt is being made, once again, to 'capture the discourse' - to suggest that there is only one way of looking at this issue, and that therefore education must, logically, be carried out in accordance with such precepts. There is a pressing need, then, to be aware of the different meanings, the different origins and the different implications of the concept, not only to have a clearer understanding of the wider political context of educational changes, but also to be in a better position to choose the most appropriate

Uses and abuses of quality

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meaning, or combination of meanings, for the work of an education system devoted to more than wealth production and nation-state legitimacy.

Quality, politics and the public sector Because changes in the meaning and uses of the concept of quality in the provision of state education are historically bound up with changes in attitude to the role and function of the welfare state, it is important to mention some of these changes once more. Thus, as welfare states in advanced western industrial democracies came under increasing pressure and criticism, and as governments of all political hues adopted policies in response to the belief that there were genuine problems with financing the welfare state, this was perceived by some as primarily an economic matter. These approaches have been underpinned by a combination of different arguments: • • • • •

that, due to an ageing population, there are fewer tax contributors, and so there is less taxation coming in; that the proportion of those requiring benefits is increasing (again, particularly the elderly); that there continues to be an increased demand for such services; that increased competition from overseas means that there is not the economic growth to sustain demand; that the globalization of capital and labour mean that states no longer have the power or legislative reach to supply such services.

(See, for instance, McRae, 1994; Kennedy, 1993; Klein, 1996; Korten, 1995.) Some, however, see such issues as more a matter of ideological debate: •

that the rapprochement between capital and labour, when capital drew in sufficient profits for it to be tactically

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•

• •


worthwhile to buy off labour unrest with welfare benefits (called the welfare state), has, with the decline of such profits, come to a close, and the true face of capitalism can be seen once more; that the welfare state has led citizens down a road to serfdom, in which a 'big brother' bureaucracy has made them dependent and subservient; that the welfare state actually hindered the development of a fully socialist state; that welfare states have existed by being underpinned by inequalities of sex (as women did unpaid housework while men earned wages), or of race and class (as those who were white and middle class actually took most of the benefits).

(See, for instance, Braverman, 1974; Hayek, 1944; Pierson, 1998.) There was then a strong consensus that welfare states were in major difficulties. There was also general agreement that, because the political running and legislative impetus came from the political right, the problem was largely one caused by an inefficient and unresponsive public sector dominated by selfserving professionals. Unsurprisingly, in retrospect, the model solution was sought in the private sector, and competition and markets were seen as a large part of the answer. This approach was translated by Thatcherite governments into an education system underpinned by league tables for consumer comparison, by formula funding to allocate finance to schools on the basis of their success or failure in this market and by an expanded parental choice to support such moves. While this was happening, public sector agendas concerned with questions of inequality were downplayed or even dropped. Moreover, and as described above, a concern to push through these reforms at the institutional level, as well as a desire to counter the power of'Dionysian' self-serving professionals (Handy, 1978), led to the creation of a more dominant, strategic and directive breed of manager/head teacher/principal, one who was to assert the primacy of the corporate over the individual perspective. This became the educational version of the 'New Public Management' (Hood, 1991.


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Finally, while in the Reagan/Thatcher heyday it might have seemed as if governments were intent on devolving not only implementation, but also, through marketization, dissolving policy and strategy, it has become clear that subsequent New Modernist governments have actually tightened their control of policy. This has increasingly been through a greater use of evaluative strategies, and by governmental use of 'fewer but more precise policy levers' (Neave, 1988, p. 11) for the specification of desired outputs, all of which have meant the increased importance of a directive and supervisory managerialism, underpinned by a particular definition of 'quality'. From the private sector, into the public, then, came versions of the concept of 'quality'.

Seven versions of quality It is important to note that the use of the term 'quality' has always been extremely varied. Morrison (1998), for instance, provides 34 uses, though he does suggest that these cohere around single-figure themes. This chapter will argue for seven different conceptions of the term, which are: a b c d e f g

Traditional quality; Expert quality; Bureaucratic quality; 'Gold' management quality; 'Hot' management quality; Consumer quality; Civic quality.

It will be important to examine not only these versions of quality, but who recommends which versions.

Traditional quality While this chapter is concerned with the uses of quality in public sector education, and with the infiltration of private sector uses, it is nevertheless important to recognize that the concept of quality

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has long had an existence and meaning which lies beyond either of these two sectors. 'Quality' has always existed in a loose 'traditional' sense which conveys notions of high standards, high prices, high status and exclusivity, and this is probably how most members of the general public would describe 'quality' if so asked. Private sector schools certainly use this meaning, trading on notions of status, exclusivity and high standards (while attempting to charge high prices!). In the public sector, the elitist aspects of traditional quality have understandably never been really espoused, for welfare state institutions, with an underlying principle of free to all who need their services, could not identify with such an inegalitarian approach. Rather the status has been attached more to the service provided, and in this sense professionals could claim that they have given the best to their client, irrespective of cost. Indeed, cost was originally not seen as a professional problem - though of course, cost was a dominant theme of concern from the welfare state's inception. In the first, traditional sense, then, 'quality' was the kind of service that professionals aspired to provide.

Expert quality Added to this concept, though, was another, which might be called the 'expert' sense of quality. Professionals would argue that, historically, expert quality in the public sector has been driven by a set of professional ethics which those within a particular profession should not only work to but also internalize. This set of ethics then justified the assertion that professionals should be able to lay down standards of acceptability, which are monitored by these same experts. Indeed, Pollitt (1990, p. 435) described professionalism as in part characterized by the 'selfcontrol of quality'. Professional standards are therefore, at their best, located internally. This is true of much educational practice for a number of decades after the Second World War, as it asks for the opinions and judgements of those who should know, and who have the interests of their clients at heart, and in specifying ethical standards, it thus allows practices and products to be evaluated.


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In theory at least, then, there seems much to commend such an approach. This, however, is not the whole picture, for while it might be called the 'expert' approach, such expert opinion may not be very well supported evidentially. The practice and judgements of welfare state professionals - and teachers in particular - have not always been fully supported by research, measurement and evidence, but instead based upon personal opinion, inductive experience, professional culture and unevaluated past practice. Furthermore, professional versions of quality have not always been undergirded by a code of ethics, but have instead been used more to serve narrow professional self-interest. In addition, even where such expert opinion is 'scientific', it is not necessarily inconstestable: expert judgements are often wrong, professional bodies of knowledge being full of provisional and debated findings and theories. Moreover, 'expert' data is not value-free: what evidence is found may depend upon what evidence is looked for, and where it is sought. Finally, an 'expert' approach to quality can too easily assume that there is only one voice worth hearing, yet parents, pupils and business may have equally valid claims. While professionals may feel they are the experts on input, recipients can justifiably claim to be the experts on the effects of output. Clients' perceptions then need to be a crucial criterion in many definitions of quality. An important point, therefore, is that any notion of quality needs to take into account a variety of perspectives. Even were the 'expert' version of quality to be underpinned by an ethical code, and were it to incorporate a much more research-based element, it would still be insufficient, failing as it does to incorporate other views of quality standards.

Bureaucratic quality It would be wrong to describe the disillusion with welfare states as solely to do with professional practice. An equal degree of disillusionment has been vented at its traditional practice. Hoggett (1991) described traditional welfare state practice as 'bureau-professionalism', and the bureaucratic aspect should not be understressed. Yet bureaucracy has merits which qualify it as

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both a 'quality' procedure, and as an important tool in the quest for equality. Bureaucratic quality is seen in the clarity of decisionmaking through the predictability generated; it also makes clear lines of communication and responsibility, and therefore has the potential to provide a more effective service. Finally, it can facilitate equity because decisions are made which are open to scrutiny and challenge. However, it is perhaps unsurprising that bureaucracy has gained so many pejorative overtones over the years, and in particular in its use in welfare states. It can produce a 'ritualism' towards rules (Merton, 1952) which leads to a loss of personal initiative, and to treating people in a routinized and dehumanized manner. In an environment which is rapidly changing, the strengths of bureaucratic predictability may become major weaknesses. Bureaucracies also generate empire-building which weakens claims to clearer communication and equity. Finally, when empire-building is controlled, it is normally done by adding another layer of (supervisory) bureaucracy, and so becomes selfgenerating. Bureaucratic quality, then, is a very strong example of quality with an external locus, and such externality may well be the reason for such dysfunctional effects, for it has no value base other than a restricted organizational rationality. Despite some modifications, the use of bureaucratic approaches within either the public or private sectors has not ceased. While reactions to 'bureau-professionalism' have resulted in both more 'liberated' and aggressive management approaches being imported from the private sector, nevertheless the bureaucratic paradigm is still much in evidence. Indeed, some would argue (e.g. Ritzer, 1993) that with the uncertainties of political, cultural and economic globalization, it is gaining a renascent attraction for many (politicians included), for its predictability gives a sense of security in an increasingly insecure and unpredictable world. Indeed, in the UK, the imposition of a National Curriculum on schools could be seen as an example of this kind of response. Yet it is also clear that governments around the world have been, for both economic and ideological reasons, disaffected with the running of welfare states based upon 'bureau-professional' delivery. In response to such criticisms, new forms of quality, which


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might be encompassed under the umbrella terms 'Cold' and 'Hot' managerial quality, came to the fore in the early 1980s. 'Cold' managerial quality Managerial quality is generally predicated upon the belief in the centrality of management in organizational functioning, and as Pollitt (1992) argues, is governed by the overriding conviction that management ... [is] the guardian of the overall purposes of the organization, and therefore it is wrong that another group of staff should be able to work to a different set of priorities, (p. 131)

It is sometimes necessary to remind oneself that this is not a natural or given of organizational functioning, so unquestioned is this value, and its attendant practices, at the present time. This is particularly true for the USA, where the modern heroes are the leaders of industry and commerce, and from where there is a plethora of literature, some very scholarly but some quite puerile, which proclaims the undisputed need for their advice and their leadership, and not just with respect to the running of large corporations. In such a climate, the translation of such beliefs into the public sector may be accomplished almost effortlessly. One therefore has to be careful, for just as bureau-professionalism is made up of a number of different concepts and practices, so is the concept of management. For the purposes of this chapter, it is divided into two different kinds: (a) cold management. This is the kind of organizational practice which aims at compliance, at the capture and utilization of the time, the motion and the body of the individual. It is not too bothered about employees' enthusiasm. This form of managerial quality is then essentially externally located. The attempt to locate this kind of managerial quality internally is to be seen in: (b) hot management. This kind of organizational approach argues that in the long run it is more efficient and effective to capture the mind, the motivation and the commitment of the individual, for from these will follow the time, the

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FROM 'COLD' MANAGEMENT • • • • • • • • • • •

QUALITY ASSURANCE TARGETS OUTCOMES PERFORMANCE INDICATORS MERIT PAY PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT THE MARKET MANAGERIAL FREEDOM SMALLER ORGANIZATIONAL UNITS CULTURAL MANAGEMENT TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT TO 'HOT' MANAGEMENT

Figure 4.1 A spectrum of managerial approaches

motion and the body. However, while it expends considerable effort in convincing employees to locate quality internally, it is necessarily driven by a managerialist value-base. Figure 4.1 demonstrates that management approaches can be located along a spectrum, from the obviously 'cold' approaches of targets, outcomes and performance indicators, to the transparently 'hot' cultural and TQM (Total Quality Management) approaches. Pollitt (1992) described the move from the 'cold' to 'hot' approaches during the 1980s and 1990s, arguing that, beginning with a cold neo-Taylorian form, managerialism's central thrust was to set clear targets, to develop performance indicators, to measure the achievement of those targets, and to single out, by means of merit awards, promotion or other rewards, those individuals who get 'results', (p. 56) In the UK, Hoggett (1996) argues that this movement has now been reversed, and that after some flirtation with 'warm' and 'hot' approaches, governments have embarked upon what he calls 'high output/low commitment' management - another way


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of describing a return to more glacial, neo-Taylorian managerial times, predicated upon efficiency and effectiveness, economy and resource containment. Definitions of managerial quality are driven by concerns for the value for money which a service provides, and to what extent it conforms with rigorously specified standards. Professionals, in this scenario, are, in Pollitt's (1992) words, 'on tap' and not 'on top'. This 'managerial' version of quality is then employed by the increased emphasis on 'quality assurance' measures, which eventually lead into management by outcomes through 'performance management'. The UK Green Paper on pay and performance management (DfEE, 1999), for example, followed this approach in the declaration of how it aimed to achieve its end. Teacher unions in the UK have responded in much the same way as the American Federation of Teachers in 1987 when it suggested that merit pay does not suggest an incentive plan to improve knowledge and skills or to reward superior performance. It suggests instead . . . using bogus, one-shot evaluation checklists to standardize teacher behaviour, rewarding some teachers and demoralizing others on the basis of favouritism or politics. (quoted in Pollitt, 1992, p. 132) It might also be added that performance management and merit pay, because they focus upon the individual, necessarily differentiate between individuals, and further the degree of inequality of pay between them. This is a major reason why businesses use them and unions oppose them: they destroy feelings of solidarity, and those shared aims and co-operation between individuals which oppose management decisions. What neo-Taylorism clearly lacks is an internal locus for quality - an understanding of what makes people commit to their work and to the organization which employs them. As Frederick Taylor failed to appreciate at the beginning of the century, so do policy-makers at the beginning of the next: for many people performance measurement linked to merit pay is not an effective motivator. Indeed, while such procedures are aimed at securing greater professional compliance to managerial aims,

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they not only fail to tackle the crucial question of staff motivation, but they may also exacerbate the problems to be found in the other side of bureau-professionalism. As Reed (1988, pp. 35-6) pointed out managerial interventions in support of more disciplined bureaucratic control directly reinforce the perceived problem of commitment and collaboration which they were originally meant to solve.

Furthermore, neo-Taylorism disciplines the time, the motion and the body of the individual, but it does not discipline the mind, which can leave a large subversive gap: Once the process of adaptation has been complete, what really happens is that the brain of the individual, far from being mummified, reaches a state of complete freedom. The only thing that is completely mechanised is the physical gesture . . . not only does the individual think, but the fact that he gets no immediate satisfaction from his work and realises that they are trying to reduce him to a trained gorilla, can lead him into a train of thought that is far from conformist. (Gramsci, 1971, pp. 309-10)

Now this is more than a little optimistic. There is good evidence to suggest that, at least in part, values follow practice (Bottery, 1998). If things have to be done a certain way, in the end the values underpinning those practices become those through which the work, and then wider practice and thought, are internalized. Yet as this process is not deterministic, and there remains room for reflection and disagreement, Gramsci had a point which has not been lost on those he criticized: winning the minds as well as the bodies is an important task for management. 'Hot' managerial quality This 'cold' managerial quality, then, largely because of its external locus, its failure to engage the commitment of staff, was increasingly supplanted in the UK (but not entirely replaced) in


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the late 1980s by 'hot' managerial quality, which sought to capture the motivation of the individual. It is largely composed of a combination of two different elements intent on generating a greater internal locus for quality: 'culture' approaches to management and Total Quality Management. The 'cultural' approach to the management of organizations assumes that not only is there a pattern of basic assumptions - invented, discovered or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration. (Schein, 1985)

but that it is possible for desirable cultures to be created by determined and charismatic managements. The approach was given a tremendous boost with the phenomenal success of Peters and Waterman's In Search of Excellence (1982), which suggested that not only was it possible to define the attributes which characterize excellent American commercial companies, but that it was possible to change an employee's values to contribute to the kind of (managerially defined) organizational culture necessary for the cultivation of such attributes. Peters and Waterman's book became required reading on virtually every educational management leadership course in the 1980s, and governments continue to see visionary leadership as the key to excellence in schools, the provision of visionary meaning by such a leader to his or her followers being the means to employees' self-regulation. This attempt at internal location, then, is one of the key characteristics of 'hot' quality, as the attempt is made to move the employee from compliance to commitment. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that an evangelical flavour is found in this kind of writing. Peters and Waterman, for instance, quote (p. 16) one commentator on 3M's commitment to one of their key attributes 'simultaneous loose-tight properties' - who extols the fact that 'the brainwashed members of an extremist political sect are no more conformist in their central beliefs.' Peters and Waterman were apparently not disturbed by such non-rational quasireligious thought and behaviour, a stance which is also seen in some of the TQM literature, to which we now turn.

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Total Quality Management had fairly 'cold' management origins, when in 1950 J. Edwards Deming accepted an invitation to give a series of lectures in Japan on his approach to statistical quality control. Yet through the transmission of his ideas, and through the writings of others like Juran and Ishikawa, TQM principles have moved from a hard industrial base into recommendations for the service industries. It is difficult to give TQM a precise name, as it has so many variations, but major characteristics include: • • •

•

the responsibility and commitment of all within the organization continually to generate the highest quality; the search for, and implementation of, better methods of achieving this; the recognition that anyone with whom one has dealings, whether within or without the organization, is a customer, and should be treated with the same service quality; the development of things such as quality improvement teams, quality circles, methods of statistical process control and the cost of non-conformance.

TQM appears to provide individuals with more motivation, more involvement, more control over their work. Furthermore, the concept of the internal customer indicates that internal hierarchies should where necessary be turned upside down in order to empower front-line individuals, or at the very least to permit them to work out the best way of serving their 'customers'. Certainly, the notion of quality circles is predicated upon the absence of hierarchy and the empowerment of those closest to the location of the problem. There is much to applaud in TQM, in terms of its insistence on the high standard of any service, and in the increased enjoyment felt by many individuals in their work. Furthermore, there is potential within TQM for greater individuation of approach within schools, through teachers' increased participation in satisfying their 'customers'. Of course, to any government which does not trust its teachers, TQM and other 'hot' management approaches could look very unappealing, and may well be why,


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in the UK at least, one has heard so little of it in official publications in the last few years. Nevertheless, TQM would seem to be an improvement on 'cold' management approaches. Philip Crosby, author of Quality is Free (1979), invites managers (p. 8) to engage in an act of conversion of 'cold' managers, to embark upon an evangelical crusade, in order to expose others to this set of true beliefs. Crosby (pp. 26-30) thus describes individuals as needing to go through stages of conversion - from Uncertainty, to Awakening, to Enlightenment, to Wisdom and Certainty. It is clear then that as Wilkinson and Wilmott (1995, p. 9) argue, TQM's concern to increase employee involvement echoes the aspiration of neo-human relations thinking to replace a reliance upon 'external control' favoured by scientific management with a concern to tap intrinsic forms of motivation.

They point out, however, that an important difference is that whilst Human Relations thinking identified 'self-realization' as the key to motivation, TQM's mission is to get the employee to identify with the organization's mission of producing better quality. TQM, then, might be interpreted as a strategy to gain organizational commitment which had little to do with individual welfare. Tuckman (1995) develops this critical point when he argues that TQM is in reality a brilliant late-capitalist strategy conceived to: •

• •

•

institute the relations, the thinking and the values of the market into every relationship (hence the use of the concept of'internal customers'); to control individuals through winning their minds, controlling their subjectivities and thence their hearts; to reinterpret the meaning of liberationist words like 'empowerment' and 'participation', in Orwellian fashion, to mean no more than the right of the individual to participate and be empowered in the delivery of managerially defined agendas; to attempt, through TQM's call for evangelical commitment,

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to silence the doubters, to prevent the vocalization or even realization of the possibility of other approaches; • finally, through such strategies, to induct the individual into working harder, in line with managerial policies, to create and regulate an internal order - internal not only to the organization but to the individual. As Power (1997, p. 128) says: 'the ideal form of surveillance is the totally observed and known individual who ends up as a self-observing and selfdisciplining agent.' TQM, then, despite its focus upon internal quality location, was conceived, and continues to act, as an aspect of management quality: it attempts to 'capture the discourse', to interpret quality in managerialist terms. Therefore, and like other forms of quality, the purposes for which it is used need to be carefully scrutinized. Quality is not a value-neutral term, and one needs to be particularly suspicious of those who would argue that theirs is the true version, or worse, the only one. Consumer quality There are then close ties between 'hot' and 'cold' managerial quality, for they are, after all, different strategies for achieving the same objectives. Nevertheless, the development of 'hot' managerialist approaches suggests a greater need for consumer responsiveness, and this underlies a fourth kind of quality, consumer quality. If much of managerialist quality is underpinned by quality assurance principles of value for money and specified standards, the 'consumer' form of quality is underpinned by the perception that service culture has to be altered from top and bottom. On this account, consumers as well as government and management need a greater voice in the running of services. This is clearly behind the official approbation given to Total Quality Management. As already argued, it (purportedly) suggests a bottom-up movement in which service is improved through providers becoming more responsive to those they are serving. Yet while TQM is dictated by a managerialist vision of the use of quality, consumer quality is dictated by consumers' prefer-


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ences. It could of course be argued that both are concerned with the provision of good service, but their complementarity is highly debatable, for there is room for conflict between customers' desires and managerialist agendas. While top-down policies are concerned with making professionals more responsive and customer-oriented, they have in practice been as concerned with the three 'es' of economy, efficiency and effectiveness, and the first two of these have normally had priority. Customers/parents, on the other hand, usually want the best service for themselves or their loved ones, regardless of cost. Expert quality may then in many cases be more in keeping with consumer quality, for both tend to think of economy and efficiency as secondary to questions of high standards and effectiveness - which may be only possible through the provision of large amounts of time and money. Where managerial quality is tied to an agenda of cost-cutting, or at best of no-cost-increase - and in the present climate these are unlikely to disappear - managerial quality may strongly conflict with consumer quality. This may be another reason why TQM approaches have slowed down in recent times: they may promise rather more than management is prepared to deliver. Another reason may be, as already suggested, that TQM is potentially much more subversive than Quality Assurance, for whilst QA fits well with top-down and managerialist agendas, in that standards can be, and are normally, controlled and defined from this direction, TQM implies that quality comes, not from conformance to external standards, but from conformance to requirements, the requirements of the customer. Now, whether these 'customers' are those individuals next in line in the reception of a particular service, and hence probably internal to the organization, or are external to it, the implication is clear. Those who are at the point of delivery - the teachers - are those who will understand these needs best, and therefore should have considerably more latitude, be given greater empowerment, in 'product delivery' and quality determination. Such empowerment does not cohere with current 'cold' managerial objectives of control and cost-cutting. If there are problems with consumer quality from a managerial point of view, there are other problems which also must be noted.

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In managerial and political eyes, the need for consumer quality has been driven by a lack of professional responsiveness to educational 'consumers'. Yet it does not follow that the function of the professional is simply to respond to, and to fulfil, a consumer's preferences. For while it is problematical just who in education is the consumer (student? parent? local community? business? government?), it can also very plausibly be argued that one of the purposes of education is precisely not to satisfy the consumer's preferences but to encourage and guide a change in them. It is at this juncture that one needs to be particularly wary of the uses of consumer quality, for there is a real danger that government and policy-makers will define themselves as the consumers, or spokespeople for consumers. In doing this, they begin to claim that they are both consumer and expert. Indeed they may actually wrap into one definition three very different forms of quality and claim hegemony over all three - consumers, experts and management, all in one go. In so doing, they obliterate important distinctions between the terms, eliminate some of the values behind these versions and in effect 'capture' the entire discourse. Moreover, governmental and managerial espousal of consumer quality over the last decade has been predicated upon the notion of a consumerism which is private sector and free market in origin and orientation. On this scenario, educational 'consumers" principal power is that of exit, and governments in the UK in particular have attempted to facilitate the use of this power by setting up internal markets and enhancing parental choice by facilitating movement from one 'product' supplier to another. Pupils and their parents are then encouraged to be active in a market sense, but there are problems here. It is not always possible to move between schools: mobility tends to favour those who have the finance and time to do so, and hence has produced considerable inequities of access. Further, while competition in the educational sector has allowed 'producers' to market and differentiate their products to some extent, they have in many cases been hamstrung by tightening government guidelines on content and practice, which has depressed the ability of suppliers to respond to 'consumers'. Finally, these 'consumers', precisely


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because a free-market model is being employed, have not been given a major voice in the determination of a public service product or its quality, no more than they are in the design of the goods they buy in their local supermarket. This has been made clear in the UK in the construction of'Citizens' Charters', and in the increasingly circumscribed roles of school governing bodies in the UK. These have not introduced a more active and participative role for such citizens/consumers: they remain consumers of 'wares' designed, accredited, and quality controlled by government agencies. A simple test of this is seen in government quality inspections of schools, the 'Ofsted' inspection: if the parents of a school strongly supported the school and its practices, yet Ofsted gave it a negative report, there is no doubt as to which advice the school would have to follow. Yet while the previous descriptions of quality either ignore, gloss over or deliberately conflate the missions of the private and public sector, there is good reason to believe that there remains a fundamental difference between these missions, the conflation of which may be very damaging to the public sector. This difference stems from the fact that citizenship, communal good and participation are public sector concepts which are essential for the creation and sustenance of a healthy political community. This is an issue current in both the USA and the UK with the rise in debate over issues of a 'civic culture' and in the renaissance of 'communitarian' writing. So while efficiency, effectiveness and economy are certainly values which need to be shared with the private sector, there are other values, such as justice, care, equity and democracy, which need to be added to the kind of list which a healthy public sector should pursue, and which should be central to the mission of the education system, and central to the internal value-orientation of citizens. These values may run counter to those values esteemed by the private sector, yet they may need to be given priority if a 'good' society is to be sought. The conflation of the missions of the private and public sectors at present, then, prioritizes the values of the private sector, and downgrades those public and democratic values without which society, schools and the individual citizen may be profoundly damaged.

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Civic quality This then leads to the suggestion that there is a seventh and final definition of quality, unique to the public sector, which needs to be core to the citizen's internal value system: that of civic quality. It begins from different premisses from quality concepts deriving from the private sector. As Pfeffer and Coote (1991, p. 23) suggest: the key to a just and flourishing society is that everyone should have an equal chance in life. From this perspective, welfare services become a common project, shared by all, devoted to the well-being of all; their purpose is to ensure that as far as possible, everyone has an equal chance to participate in society, to enjoy its fruits, and to realise their own potential.

From this perspective, neither allowing experts/authorities to define standards (expert quality), nor making services more responsive to consumer demand (consumer quality), nor making these services more economic and efficient (managerial quality), is the best means of ensuring civic quality. This is because in the first case, a vibrant citizenry is one which feels empowered by an internal value system, rather than one that is grateful for handouts. Quality based upon privileges granted by professionals and politicians is then no basis for a just and flourishing society. Secondly, research strongly suggests that in the UK at least the customers who are most likely and able to make demands upon a public service are those who probably need it the least - the articulate middle class (Le Grand and Robinson, 1992). Precisely those who are in greatest need, on a definition of civic quality, are likely to be those least served by the criterion of consumer quality. An undue emphasis on 'consumer quality' inevitably leads to inequality. Finally, where in cold managerial quality, economy and efficiency are the key criteria, it is again precisely the underprivileged, the marginalized and the inarticulate who are the ones who will find it hardest to secure their share of the decreasing communal cake; where in hot managerial quality, consumer responsiveness conflicts with managerial and cold


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quality agendas, it will be redefined to become part of a cold management definition. Without the additional criterion of equity central to a concept of quality, current forms of the term - and those who practise these forms - create an increasingly divided society. The evidence is also plain to see. Criticism of the pre-Thatcher and Reagan era by liberal radicals like Hayek (1944) stems from criticisms with expert quality, in particular with the creation of a dependency culture by a big-brother bureaucracy. Yet in the era of Thatcher and Reagan, when managerial and consumer forms of quality began their dominance of current agendas, disparities between rich and poor increased dramatically (Pierson, 1998), and as Wilkinson (1996) has shown, this has implications for both rich and poor in a society, as increased inequalities in a society lead to depressed life expectancies for both rich and poor. Now for many in the private sector, such concerns over managerial and consumer quality are peripheral: prestige cars and hotels are available to all, provided you can afford them, and as long as there are enough people who can afford them, there is little cause for concern. However, from a public sector point of view, such views of quality create a society whose institutions of education, health and welfare are based on ability to pay, rather than on need. Civic quality, then, does not dispense with the other forms of quality, but takes the best from other systems to build a set of values which leads to an empowered citizenry. If traditional quality implies high standards and exclusivity, civic quality implies high standards, but as a standard for all. If expert quality is underpinned by the authority of the expert, civic quality embraces the need for research-based evidence, but looks for this beyond the providers of the service. If cold managerial quality implies economy, efficiency and effectiveness, civic quality similarly requires evidence of effectiveness (for a lack of effectiveness means a waste of precious resources), and also accepts the need for regard to economy and efficiency, but does not see these as necessarily the primary values by which a service or product is evaluated, for other values such as equity and justice have to be incorporated as well. Finally, if both hot managerial quality and consumer quality imply consumer responsiveness,

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civic quality accepts the need for this, but adds three caveats. First, public service provision must be informed by the recognition that those who are the most demanding of clients are not necessarily those most in need. Second, the right and need in a democracy for more participation by its citizenry means that decisions between different demands need to lie less at the point of delivery and more in the policy-making process. Third, civic quality sees the self-interested consumerism of the market as needing to be supplemented and on occasions transcended by a vision of the interest of the community. Civic quality, then, reasserts the importance of public sector values. From such a resurgence is created within each individual a richer, civic orientation from which this quality may be generated. This is a topic which will be returned to later in the book when a list of principles underlying such a civic orientation is spelled out.

Conclusions - the triumph of systemic privatization? This chapter has suggested that there has been a glossing over of the differences between the public and private sectors, and through the pursuit of almost exclusively private sector agendas, managerialist and consumer uses of quality have produced a reduced professional autonomy, increased political and managerial control over the workings of the education system and the strengthening of an 'evaluative' state. Crucially, they lead to the loss of personal visions concerning what a public good might mean, and of how education might contribute to the development of an internal locus for a concept of quality, based upon the notion of a civic culture. Judging from the way in which debate about the importance of public sector values has been downgraded in education, or has simply ceased to make it onto policy agendas in recent times, it would seem that the approach of New Labour in the UK is good evidence for the triumph of those Thatcherite policies orientated to a more marketized society, in which private sector concerns have so infiltrated current educational policies that public sector


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issues are seen as no more than a subset of the private. Systemic privatization has blurred the policy vision. There is therefore great need for a continued critique by those in education and the public sector in general which highlights the effects of the loss or prevention of an internal locus of public sector values. Areas to concentrate upon in the development of such a value orientation would be • •

•

damage to notions of equality, as market mechanisms widen income difference, and exacerbate inequalities generally; the effects upon notions of community, as the model of the self-interested individual weakens communal ties and responsibilities; the implications of the blurring of the public and private upon conceptions of democracy, as private sector thinking transforms the citizen with the power of voice into a consumer with the power of exit.

This debate will be enhanced by a continued distinction between concepts of quality, an awareness of'discourse capture', a sustained critique of the effects of private sector concepts in the public sector and by the need to promote an internal concept of civic quality. These themes will be utilized throughout this book in the move to establish a different vision of the purposes of education from those currently held.


Chapter 5

The School Effectiveness Movement — educational research as an agent of policy direction

Introduction - policy control in the public services This book has so far made the argument that a number of forces, both national and global, have joined together to facilitate a number of international trends, one of which has been the increased policy direction of the public sector. This has unsurprisingly included the education sector, resulting in attempts at the increased control of educational processes and of the work of professionals. The influence of private sector interests has been strongly implicated in these policies. Unsurprisingly, in the process of implementing these, the management of publicly provided education has taken on the characteristics of some private sector institutions. Yet one of the most interesting aspects of the adoption of private sector practices in the tighter control of the public sector is that the private sector characteristics adopted have altered considerably. Thus, as noted above, Pollitt in 1992 suggested that Conservative governments moved in the 1980s from predominantly 'cold' neo-Taylorian forms of external control to the espousal of 'warmer' more 'cultural' forms of control designed to elicit commitment from the workforce. Yet by 1996 Hoggett was arguing that in the continued desire to get 'more for less', UK governments had returned to a form of control which had many of the hallmarks of the earlier era - a top-down, directive and corporatist approach to the creation of a high output/low commitment public sector workforce. It had done this, he argued, by means of an increased use of four different strategies:

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a b c d


the introduction of markets and competition; the centralizing of policy at the same time as the decentralization of responsibility for implementation; the development of performance management techniques; the continued standardization and deskilling of workforces.

Hoggett was writing before the advent of New Labour, but there is a broad continuity of these strategies, for while markets and competition may have been roped back from some of the excesses of ultra-right Conservative ideology, they still exist at the level of implementation. Indeed, through the continued blurring of public and private sector provision, they appear to be even further entrenched in the practice and thinking of governmental life. Similarly, the centralizing of policy with a consequent decentralization of responsibility for implementation has, if anything, been extended. Furthermore, the publication of New Labour's Green Paper on teacher appraisal in 1999 made it clear that performance management techniques would provide the major framework for changing the practice and perceptions of the teaching profession. Finally, moves to standardize and deskill teachers have not disappeared with the arrival of a New Labour government, for a predominant theme of policy is the categorization and standardization of work through the specification of desired outputs. Hoggett's analysis of 1996 is then still extremely useful. It is particularly useful in helping one to understand the intertwining of educational research and government policy direction, and how such research may be utilized by policymakers to become its agent, its Trojan horse into the workings of public sector organizations. If Hoggett's description of the four strategies by governments to produce a high output/low commitment workforce is valid, then the School Effectiveness Movement (SEM) has fitted the demands of these four strategies nearly perfectly: i

in terms of markets and competition, it has provided policymakers with the kind of data from which league tables can be

The School Effectiveness Movement

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compiled, and by which 'consumers' can be urged to compare one school with another; ii in terms of centralization/decentralization, it has provided policy-makers with the key factors apparently existent within successful schools, which they can then demand be transported and implemented by a vigorous managerialism into those schools apparently less successful; iii in terms of performance management and monitoring, by describing context-free key factors it has provided the kinds of objective output criteria required by policy-makers, and against which teachers' performance may be monitored and appraised; iv in terms of standardization and deskilling of work, it has, through the production of these key factors, provided policymakers with the arguments to suggest that teachers' work is essentially concerned with the implementation of such context-free factors, and thereby permitted the implication that teachers' work (and training) should be standardized to the achievement of these factors. This chapter then will be concerned with tracing the development and claims of the School Effectiveness Movement, of its use by policy-makers and of the issues that have arisen from this. It will be argued that its success has been as much because it has fitted the demands of policy-makers in the pursuance of the four strategies described above, as because it has of itself provided the solution to major ongoing educational problems.

The genesis of the School Effectiveness Movement Educational policies and an attendant educational management both need the description of an educational process upon which to work. In an ideal world, one might expect the description of an educational process to come first, and the policy and an appropriate educational management to follow after. However, given the kinds of changes at global and national levels described earlier, it should come as little surprise if governments feel the need to go in search of an educational process - and a group of

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educational researchers - which fit the kind of political agenda felt necessary to deal with these other issues. If it believed that it needs to be directive, it would tend to favour research which concentrated upon and suggested remedies at the institution level. By then utilizing this research, and directing educational improvements coming primarily through institutional mechanisms, it would also bolster the legitimacy of its own actions. Clearly, it would have greater problems achieving an effect - or gaining legitimacy in the eyes of practitioners and the general public - if improvement were to be seen as being primarily effected at the level of the classroom or through unique teacher/ pupil interactions. In these cases, because the educational process occurs in personal, even idiosyncratic, encounters between pupil and teacher, and where the meaning of the process is not one given to the pupil, but seen as constructed between teacher and pupil, policy and management cannot be nearly as directive. Because the locus of effect is not at the institutional level, it would have much greater problems justifying a more directive and controlling approach. This was clearly one of the problems for those troubled by the child-centred approaches of the late 1960s and early 1970s. While there is still debate about the precise meaning of 'child-centredness', the approach did suggest that - practically and morally decisions had to be made at class and teacher level, for this was the level at which children engage in the construction of a learning experience, and at which level this engagement can be understood. It can be of little surprise that child-centredness was not an ideology espoused by policy-makers concerned with gaining greater control of the education system, nor in the highly directive, low-trust/commitment era of today. Similarly, it would be equally damaging for those arguing for the centralization of education policy, and a consequent managerialism, if it could be shown that schools made little difference to the life chances of pupils. Thus the very influential work by Coleman (Coleman et al., 1966) and Jencks (Jencks 1972), which appeared to demonstrate that individual schools had little influence on the educational outcomes of pupils when compared with the massive influence of things such as social and family back-


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ground, located the cause of pupils' underachievement beyond that of the school. Furthermore, writers like Bourdieu (1977), Bernstein (1977) and Bowles and Gintis (1976) suggested that, in one form or another, schools institutionalized and then reproduced societal inequalities rather than ameliorating them. In so doing they seemed to suggest two things. First, the problems in schools were in reality a consequence of wealth and power distribution within society. This located the blame uncomfortably close to those making policy, indicating that any fundamental changes had to made at the societal level before they could have an effect at the school level. Second, it meant that if schools, at best, made little real difference, and at worst were part of the problem, those in positions of power had little justification for changing the culture of schools, and installing a directive managerialism, until they got their own house in order. However, it was not only policy-makers who were dismayed by the Coleman and Jencks findings. Such views are understandably objectionable to the many teachers and researchers committed to making a difference to the life-chances of pupils. Furthermore, it does little for the self-image or influence of educators if it can be shown either that their effect is minimal in the larger picture, or that they are little more than unconscious stooges in a process of orchestrated social stratification and inequality. Many in the educational community were then hostile to the Coleman/Jencks findings, and uncomfortable with the theories of critical educational sociology. Now one possible response by educational researchers to the work of critical sociologists like Bowles and Gintis has been to suggest that their argument for a direct correspondence between the work of schools and external society is too simplistic. Those within schools do have a degree of flexibility, but there is a need to examine how schooling may - unconsciously - transmit social, cultural and political values. This has led to a rich tradition of qualitative, particularly ethnographic, work, underpinned by a variety of socially critical theoretic perspectives, as researchers have tried to understand better the processes of schooling, and the environment and society within which they are embedded. This has provided no quick fixes, no universal solutions, and has

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suggested that each institution must be investigated in its own particular political and social context if the process is to be properly understood and improvements are to be made. In so doing, it stipulates the need for an understanding of the interplay between the classroom, school and macrosocial levels, and these through a variety of theoretical approaches. Like child-centred perspectives, however, it has not been an approach which some policy-makers have wanted to hear. It provides no simple directive 'handle': it suggests a need for deep and time-consuming understanding, it provides few wide-ranging recommendations, it is theoretically critical. Moreover, while policy control, and its implementation through educational managerialism, both depend for their legitimacy upon the acceptance of a school/ institutional level focus, and the consequent downplaying of both classroom level and macrosocial level interactions, neither the child-centred nor the qualitative, ethnographic approaches necessarily do this. If power is to be vested at the policy level, and then used through the mechanisms of evaluation and managerialism to direct and control, if accountability and blame are to be located at the school level, neither perspective aids in this endeavour. A different response - that provided by the School Effectiveness Movement (SEM) - has been much more congenial. As Grace (1998, p. 119) argues Governments . . . are not prepared to pay for research which shows that their own social and economic policies have contributed significantly to crises in the schools. They would rather pay for research which shows that some schools have been able to overcome these created impediments more successfully and 'effectively' than other schools. Thus the ideological and political focus is shifted from analysis of the policies themselves to analysis of the differential ability of schools to cope with these policies.

The SEM fulfilled the needs of, and legitimized, a policy of directive control. By providing content for Hoggett's four strategies described above, its findings underpinned the creation of a largely unanticipated alliance between educational policy-makers


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intent on control and direction from the centre, and Social Democrat and Liberal educators intent on furthering equity and social justice. Both these parties, for different reasons, wanted to 'make a difference' educationally, and hoped to find a 'rational' foundation for educational reforms to improve the effectiveness of schools. Both were hostile, if for different reasons, to the implications of Coleman and Jencks that schools had little influence on educational outcomes. Both, then, but for different reasons, saw the need for a body of incremental, empirical evidence which identified techniques and procedures that 'worked' in any educational or management situation. And finally, both, but again for different reasons, were happy to sideline the particularism of qualitative research, and the 'distractions' of critical theory construction. The result, according to Reynolds (1995, p. 53, quoted in Grace, 1998, p. 117) has been an approach which has helped to combat pessimism about the importance of the school system, to build professional self-esteem and to provide a knowledge base that can act as a foundation for the development of improved practice. Indeed, the school effectiveness research paradigm has had an enormous impact upon both educational policy and the educational research community in the UK, the USA and Australasia, and has begun to make a real impact on educational communities and policy-makers in developing countries. Its importance has been such that at times it has almost seemed heretical to challenge the approach. What are its main characteristics?

The school effectiveness research model Lauder et al. (1998) suggest that there are a set of five propositions underlying this standard model of school effectiveness: 1 2

Schools as organizations have effects upon student outcomes independent of teacher or contextual variation; These effects are not caused by chance and can be engineered;

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3 4

5


This engineering can be effected by the appropriate use of management systems, rewards and sanctions; Schools are part of a set of 'nested' organizational relationships, from classroom to department to school to LEA to central government; Nevertheless, there is a degree of autonomy between these levels, and between the school and society as a whole, which means that schools can have effects on pupil achievement independent of external factors.

These propositions underpin an approach to educational research the purpose of which, as Angus (1993, p. 341) says, is concerned with: identifying factors that are associated with student learning outcomes which exceed statistical expectations given a student's family background . . . family background, social class, any notion of context, are typically regarded as 'noise' - as 'outside' background factors which must be controlled for and then stripped away so that the researcher can concentrate on the important domain of school factors.

School effectiveness studies have then attempted to identify those factors which would be expected to produce better schools, irrespective of particular context. In the USA, Edmunds' (1979) research led to the suggestion that there are seven factors which may be identified as key variables in a school's success: • • • • • •

Strong administrative leadership; A climate of high expectations; An orderly yet non-oppressive atmosphere; The prioritization of the acquisition of basic skills over other activities; The ability to divert school energy and resources into pursuing fundamental objectives when necessary; The frequent monitoring of pupils' achievements.


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In the UK, Mortimore et al. (1988) suggested the following twelve factors as key variables in this process: • • • • • • • • • • • •

Purposeful leadership of the staff by the head teacher; The involvement of the deputy head; The involvement of teachers; Consistency among teachers; Structured sessions; Intellectually challenging teaching; Work-centred environment; Limited focus within sessions; Maximum communication between teachers and pupils; Record keeping; Parental involvement; Positive climate.

Similarly, Reynolds (1994, pp. 20-1) has argued that there is a list of common elements in effective secondary schools which amount to: • • • • • • •

A positive attitude towards the pupils by teachers and the principal; Strong and competent leadership; Highly committed teaching staff; High expectations and standards; An emphasis upon high achievement in academic subjects; Intensive and personal support services for at-risk students; Stable leadership and public support in the catchment area of the school for the period of years sufficient to implement new policies.

While by no means exhaustive, these lists are fairly typical of the general approach. It abstracts from particular contexts a list of factors which seem to be the essential cause of pupil achievement. These factors, it is suggested, can and should, via a battery of managerial techniques, be engineered into other school contexts. The model is appealing to policy-makers in its apparent simplicity and linearity, and with the necessary external direction

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it seems to suggest. While it is likely that no SEM researcher would agree with the following description, there must be a strong suspicion that some policy-makers have taken the model to mean nothing more than taking a set of factors from 'good schools', the planting of them in other less-good schools, and thus obtaining a rise in pupil achievement. Yet while this last description is oversimplistic, there is a simplicity and directiveness to the model which has led critics like Perrone (1989) to suggest that the values underpinning early school effectiveness studies have been those of orderliness, uniformity, adherence and hierarchy - what Elliot (1998, p. 86) describes as constituent of a 'social control ideology'. Indeed, there does seem here to be a close linkage between the aims of a research paradigm and the uses to which policy-makers have put them. Similarly, when the SEM belief in the school as being one site in a set of 'nested relationships' is taken by Elliot (ibid.) to mean that 'effective classrooms' would be even more effective in situations where they are nested within systems of managerial control, this seems to be both a natural extension of SEM logic and an extension of the research paradigm by policy-makers for their own particular ends. These comments, then, point up the issue of an intertwining - even appropriation - of SEM objectives by others less concerned with their intellectual integrity than with their political convenience. It is to such problems that this chapter now turns.

Problems with the approach There are a number of areas of concern with SEM, and there is a considerable overlap between them. This chapter will suggest that there are five particular problems: a b c d

Its apparent value neutrality; The stripping out of contextualization through the misdescription of causation; Problems of epistemology, particularly those concerning the nature of the educational process; The policy manipulation of research agendas;


e

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The emasculation of academic thought, and the creation of the academic entrepreneur.

Its apparent value neutrality White (1997) argues that 'effectiveness' is normally taken to be a neutral term, a word to describe a relationship between means and ends. Taken this way, it simply means that when something is effective, it is good at producing a particular outcome. As White says, a hammer is an effective tool for banging in nails; a screwdriver is not. It could, of course, be argued that precisely because the hammer is 'good' at driving in nails, effectiveness is not neutral: it is acting as an 'hurrah' word, with which one disagrees at one's peril, it being so self-evidently a 'good' thing. Whichever way one takes it, the term facilitates the thought that there is nothing problematic here, and it therefore allows researchers to think of the study as simply - and solely - a matter of empirical investigation (if there are no values involved, or if it is so evidently good, then all we need to do is get on and investigate it). In acting in these ways, 'effectiveness' becomes a semantic means of excluding from consideration issues which may call into doubt either its neutrality or its self-evident goodness. This becomes clear if, again using an example supplied by White (p. 30), we ask what the nails are to be used for. Are they for repairing a garden fence or for a crucifixion? Suddenly, it becomes apparent that questions about effectiveness in education — a value-laden exercise involving human beings — can never escape these further questions, because those in education inevitably must ask ultimate questions about the acceptability of its ends. As Ball (1990b) asks of efficiency 'efficiency for whom?', so one can ask of effectiveness: 'for what purposes and for whose benefit is something effective?' If the principal purpose of such effectiveness is (for example) to further the control of a centralizing agenda, and to devolve blame unfairly down to schools, then one would have to be very concerned about any 'effectiveness' research. Indeed, researchers should be concerned about the purposes of effectiveness agendas whatever the purposes to which they are put. The fact that SER has been so resolutely apolitical in its approach and

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its findings, apparently unaware or uncaring of the purposes to which they have been put by successive governments, should be a real cause for concern. As Chitty (1997, p. 57) argues It is precisely its apolitical approach and lack of engagement with sociological and political theory that enables school effectiveness work to be appropriated into the hegemonic project of the Right.

The stripping out of contextualization through the misdescription of causation Perhaps the fundamental assumption of SEM is that it is both necessary and possible to extract key factors from situations. It is necessary because only through extracting key factors, it is claimed, can recommendations be produced which other schools can take up and implement in an unambiguous manner. Key factor extraction is possible, it is argued, through an extensive use of sophisticated statistical techniques. These factors then provide the evidence from which policy recommendations can be made. Yet there is doubt about both necessity and possibility. Such an approach is necessary only if one is convinced of the need for such policy outcomes, and this should not be based, for academics at least, on their political or administrative desirability, but upon the validity of the approach. Yet this is a matter of some contention, as a number of commentators argue that the approach is radically misconceived. Angus (1993, p. 342), in particular, argues that the problem with the approach lies in the assumption of a linearity of causation which underpins the stripping away of contextual factors. Thus, it is assumed that a straightforward cause leads to a straightforward effect, and that the context of schooling is always prior to the effect of schooling. Certainly, it is clear from numerous publications that Ofsted and successive governments hold this view, and it is understandable why they do. If it is possible (a) to strip away contexts, and thus (b) outcomes can be linked unambiguously to inputs, then it is politically possible (c) to suggest that the problem lies with the schools and (d) to locate the blame for failure to remediate this


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situation with those in these schools, and (e) of the legitimacy for external intervention in these Tailing' schools. Yet, as Angus (ibid.} suggests, the relation between context and school is seldom linear: context is 'relational, dynamic and interactive', and schools influence as well as are influenced by their situations. Take, for example, the renowned study by Rutter et al. (1979) in which they found that schools can make a significant difference to student outcomes, but in which they also found that examination success tended to be better in those schools where there was a significant number of children of at least 'average' ability: once this number dropped below a certain level, the writing was on the wall. In this situation, one has to ask whether good schools produce good students, or whether good students produce good schools. Which way is the arrow of causation? Hence, any approach which reduces such causation to 'the dynamics of a billiard ball' (Hamilton, 1998, p. 15) is going to misunderstand what is going on. As Fullan (1999, p. 4) argues the link between cause and effect is difficult to trace, . . . change (planned and otherwise) unfolds in non-linear ways, . . . paradoxes and contradictions abound and . . . creative solutions arise out of interaction under conditions of uncertainty, diversity and instability.

If this is the case, the linearity of simplistic accounts of SEM, such as those utilized by Ofsted, are going to misdescribe the situation, and almost inevitably wrongly ascribe praise and blame. As Fullan says (ibid., p. 14), the non-linearity of causation and the necessity of contextualization lead one to a much more complex view of improvement: It is one thing to see an innovation 'up and running'; it is entirely another matter to figure out the pathways of how to get there in your own organisation.

It is also why Ouston (1999, pp. 166-77) is able to argue that many guides to school improvement have what she calls 'a

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conceptual hole' at their centre: 'They never seem to offer help in answering three key questions, what will you do to improve? how? and why?' Her point is a simple but powerful one. Change is hugely complex, and these kinds of issues require answers which recognize non-linearity, which use a variety of theories from the societal through the organizational to the psychological, and which examine the links between these levels. Any approach which does not take account of the (rapidly changing) context of today's schools simply fails to understand them - and too often, she suggests, this is what SEM approaches do. Problems of epistemology, particularly those concerning the nature of the educational process This misrepresentation of the nature of causality is a good reason for being concerned about any too simplistic generation of policy implications from SEM findings. Another cause for concern derives from asking questions about the very nature of the educational process, and whether SEM findings adequately represent them. In a telling piece of analysis, Silcock (1993) asks whether SEM is in reality a blind alley amounting to little more than a series of platitudes. While this paradigm suggests, for example, that key factors in school effectiveness may be things such as head teacher involvement, sustained interest and motivation of pupils, he asks : so what? 'No teacher-educator' (he argues, p. 14) 'has ever proposed lack of involvement, low interest and poor motivation as guides to the development of skills.' White (1997, p. 32) makes a similar point when he argues that we do not need empirical investigations to tell us that orderly classrooms, structured lessons or whatever help to produce high academic results. 'We can' he argues, 'work this out from the understanding we already have of what it is to be a successful teacher.' Their argument is one of logical entailment: that these factors are what we actually mean by 'good teaching', 'successful teacher', etc. The important thing, suggests Silcock (ibid., p. 15) is this: To advocate the involvement of heads, the use of challenging questions, and the organisation of high-quality interactions is


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meaningless until we step beyond the criteria to look at how to do these things.

It is here that the situation becomes really interesting, he argues, because the key factor in pupil effectiveness is not teaching but pupil learning, and as any teacher (or parent) knows, learning happens, or indeed fails to happen, independently of any teaching that takes place. This means that learners are the agents of their own learning, and that while teachers must do their best to make learning possible, they can never guarantee it. Indeed, Silcock argues, controversially in the present climate, that once teachers have done their best to facilitate learning, their responsibilities end and the learner's responsibilities take over. The best that teachers can do is to provide the right context, the best facilitatory conditions within which pupils can learn. Crucially then, he argues (p. 18) If what guarantees learning is the state of mind of the learner, to a significant degree determined independently of the behaviour of the teachers, then providing an opportunity to learn requires particularly sensible and flexible ways of dealing with the widely differing circumstances learners introduce into classrooms, rather than the consistent use of specialised pegagogic skills.

This insight points away from the orientation of SEM and school-focused research. If 'effectiveness' depends as much or more upon the independent actions and responsibilities of the learner, a much more reflective, contextualized, non-linear and dynamic approach will be required. In this case, the front line of school improvement will not be that of a directive management, for it will be too distant to see what needs to be done in each non-standard situation. The front line will be that in classrooms, as teachers must in each situation ask what the conditions are with which they are dealing. As Elliot argues (1998, pp. 88-9) the search for the pedagogical conditions which effect worthwhile learning, without predetermining its precise outcomes, is shaped by

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Education, policy and ethics a concern to respect pupils' capacities for constructing personal meanings, for critical and imaginative thinking, and for selfdirected and self-evaluating their learning.

Elliot's 'concern to respect pupils' capacities' is both an epistemological and a moral concern. As this is the very nature of the educational process, it is an epistemological concern to recognize the necessity of working with this nature if any improvement is to be brought about. But it is also a moral concern in that this process describes what students need to do the freedom they must be given - in order to make sense of the learning situation. To adopt a disseminatory, control-oriented approach is to deny them the opportunity to employ the most appropriate methods to satisfy this need. If this is the very nature of the teaching situation, the methodological approach of SEM is inappropriate, because it is too generalized, and dangerous, because it systematically strips out precisely those factors which determine how each teaching and learning encounter should be constructed. There must be concern that Silcock and Elliot overplay their hand. While SEM has in the past been too keen to locate the locus of change at the school level, this is not to deny the importance of action at school management level in facilitating change processes at the classroom, nor of those beyond the school in providing the impetus for school managements to begin the process of comparing the practices in their classrooms with those at other schools. As Fullan (1999) has pointed out, change is required from the bottom, in order for those there to engage in and make sense of the process for themselves and their students, but it is also required from the top, as it is all too easy for classrooms and institutions to become complacent and inward-looking. Nevertheless, their points are profoundly damaging to an approach like SEM which, by fixating at the institutional level, fails to recognize the responsibilities and needs of the learner and which fails to recognize the crucial idiosyncratic nature of each learning encounter between teacher and pupil.


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The policy manipulation of research agendas Academics cannot be blamed for trumpeting their research agenda, and for suggesting that governments should take most note of it. There are, however, occasions when either i

the former seem to claim more than is there, and the latter do not press them,

or

ii

the former leave issues and perspectives out of their agendas, and the latter do not redress the balance.

Thus, Ouston (1999), in reflecting on her involvement in classic research in the 1970s (Rutter et al., 1979) argues that present suggested commonalities between it and a recent study by Sammons et al. (1997) are overdone: in 1979, shared vision, leadership or parental involvement were not even mentioned. The most surprising exclusion in 1979 was probably the factor of leadership. One suggestion for this is that it did not have the political profile then that it does now. Is its current prominence less because it is a genuine factor than because it now fits a particular policy agenda - that of the interventionist managerialism so espoused of present governments? If there is truth in this, then rather than research leading policy, policy is appropriating and dictating research. Similarly, when David Reynolds, a prominent SEM exponent, and adviser to government, admitted in (1995, pp. 54—9) that we have been instrumental in creating a quite widespread view that schools do not just make a difference, but that they make all the difference.

this might be interpreted as a natural enthusiasm rather than some calculated ploy. Yet, there are plenty of other research agendas besides that of SEM, and one would expect governments to be aware of academic enthusiasms and to be able to balance

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the claims of one set of enthusiasts against another. However, important findings from other approaches seem to have been ignored. Take for example the remarks by Lingard et al. (1998, p. 92) who argue that The one finding that has been most central in the development of sociological studies of school effects came from the finding that it was not differences between schools that affects achievement most significantly, but differences within schools, (my italics)

This suggests an area of research with potentially greater academic promise and educational potential than that of SEM, yet which seems to have been sidelined by successive governments. Likewise, Creemers (1994, p. 20), a prominent school effectiveness researcher, acknowledges that: An important conclusion that can be derived from research is that the margins for schools and classrooms are small. About 12 to 18% of the variance in student outcomes can be explained by classroom and school factors.

Creemer's conclusion means that something like 85 per cent of variance must be sought elsewhere, and must lead one to ask why such a huge amount of variance seems to have been so largely disregarded by policy-makers. Why have they displayed such a lack of interest in these findings? The conclusion again would suggest the triumph of political convenience over the inconvenience of a more balanced assessment of the evidence. One final example of this problem is argued by Hamilton (1998), who in an examination of the utilization of a crucial UK research document, Key Characteristics of Effective Schools (Sammons, Hillman and Mortimore, 1995), argues that very different lines were taken by the researchers and policy-makers. This study, commissioned for Ofsted, begins with words of caution by the authors about the kinds of issues about multivariance and non-linearity mentioned above, yet these cautions are not maintained through the document, and were subsequently disregarded by Ofsted and government ministers. Within a


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paradigm where it is candidly admitted that there are more reviews than cases of actual empirical research (Hamilton, 1998, p. 1), it is possible that it was easier to remember the broad brush strokes rather than the points of detail. Nevertheless, given the other examples above, the manipulation of research findings for a different policy agenda seems once again a possible - even probable - interpretation.

Academic emasculation However, the implications of the utilization of research agendas for policy purposes extend beyond its effects on schools to effects upon the academic community itself. Both Fay (1975) and Grace (1995) argue that the kind of approach employed within the SEM is likely to reduce the vision of the research community from that of policy scholarship - the contextualization of factors and the critical questioning of ends as well as means - to that of policy science - the attempt to produce a set of standardized procedures which allows researchers to recommend to policy makers the technically best course of action in order to achieve any particular goal. Yet, as Ball (1998, p. 73) suggests, this reduction to policy science can turn out to be a Faustian bargain for researchers, for it almost certainly will involve a 'taming of the academy', an emasculation of their critical capacities, as they buy into a paradigm which asks of them nothing more than a technical expertise. Ball argues that policy-makers will actively encourage educationalists to pursue such uncritical courses by steering research grants in the direction of school effectiveness proposals, and by providing the kudos to researchers by inviting them to advise governments on the best way forward within this paradigm. However, Ball suggests that as this increasingly develops as governments seek out the 'right' kind of academics, and academics see future promotion and prestige dependent on policy-makers' patronage - one needs to recognize the development of a new category of academic activity - so appropriate for an area invaded by ideas from the private sector - which he terms policy entrepreneurship:

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Education, policy and ethics the proselytizing and in some cases the sale, of'technically correct answers' . . . The entrepreneur's interests, in terms of identity and career, are bound up directly and immediately, rather than once removed . . . with the success of their dissemination, (ibid.)

Other models for effectiveness The result of the SEM, Angus (1993, p. 343) argues, is an isolationist, apolitical approach to education in which it is assumed that educational problems can be fixed by technical means and inequality can be managed within the walls of schools and classrooms provided that teachers and pupils follow 'correct' effective school procedures. There is evidence that some of the writers in the SEM are beginning to recognize some of the problems with a too certain and too exclusive approach. Reynolds and Packer (1992, p. 173) for instance acknowledge that 'early certainties of the British research paradigm have eroded' and that many of the 'early simplistic assumptions' — such as size and cause of school effects, and their consistency over time - 'are no longer tenable'. Certainly, there are other ways of tackling the very legitimate research question of generating school effectiveness, and Lauder et al. (1998) suggest two other possible models. A radically opposed model to the received one is what Lauder calls the 'Heretical Model', which is based around the work of Stephen Ball (1992) and possesses a very different set of assumptions: 1

schools are not mechanistic in operation: there is a necessary degree of indeterminacy built into their functioning because i ii

they are loosely coupled by their complex nature; they have been allowed to be loosely coupled as a managerial response to the ideological diversity within them; iii they should be loosely coupled because of the moral


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complexity and the variety of values which have to be balanced within their functioning; 2 3 4

5

This indeterminacy necessarily means that they will always have a tendency to vary in their performance; This is not pathological, as the received model would suggest, but a statement of the nature of the organization; Those most knowledgeable of their structural and moral complexity - the teachers - should have the key role in their running and functioning; The organization of the school, then, instead of being predicated upon a directive managerialism, should be based upon an open, democratic and flexible stakeholder management.

The danger with this model, as Lauder et al. point out, is that, if taken to extreme, it would mean that there could be no points of comparison, no means of utilizing ideas elsewhere: each school would be a world to itself, incapable of learning from any other, and as Green (1997) and Fullan (1999) both argue, there is good reason to believe that systems can be too decentralized - that change is best generated when ideas come from top and bottom. As Fullan (p. 58) argues: since new ideas are crucial, and since the education system is traditionally weak at accepting and spreading new knowledge and practices, a deliberate system of stimulating innovation is required.

which leads to the highly significant policy requirement that 'Instead of attempting first to control and then educate, governments need to reverse the strategy' (ibid., p. 59). What is needed in such circumstances is the kind of'Contextual Model' described by Lauder et al. This possesses the following features: 1

The need to recognize the contributions and limitations of all research methods in generating improvement. At the moment

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2 3

4

5 6

Education, policy and ethics this means increasing the input of qualitative and theoretical contributions; Case studies should be seen as 'sites of critical reflection' not as lists or recipes; There is then a need to recognize that schools in different contexts have 'different capacities, different potentials, different limits'; There is a need to reinvestigate how schools can best and most equitably be held accountable - and this means something much more complex than league tables, even when they are value-added; Research needs to be longitudinal in order to investigate why results remain stable over time, or why they do not; 'Good practice' for teachers, instead of being the engineering by managerialist techniques of standard factors into particular schools, becomes the use of sites of critical reflection in the making of intelligent contextual judgements.

Evidence that the cause of school effects has as much, if not more, to do with the perceptions and judgements of particular students and teachers as with generalized school factors, has been part of the reason for an attempted rapprochement between school effectiveness research and other research paradigms, particularly that of school improvement (see, for example, Gray et a/., 1996). The school improvement paradigm is characterized by Reynolds (1994) as having the following set of core beliefs: 1 2 3

a focus on teachers' perceptions and beliefs rather than on quantifiable organizational and behavioural variables; the belief in the strength of 'bottom-up' rather than 'topdown' approaches; the use of qualitative and naturalistic rather than quantitative approaches.

This sounds very much like the Lauder's 'Contextual' model described above. It suggests a recognition of the need for these kinds of insights, for a contextualization of effectiveness factors in order to make them useful. But it also suggests something much


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more interesting. It suggests that, necessarily, school effectiveness findings cannot be programmed into the school through a directive and top-down management. Their usefulness needs to be determined by teachers in a reflective and iterative manner. At best, as Elliot (1998, p. 98) argues 'they may constitute an important resource for helping teachers to reflect about the relationship between factors in the organisational context and the teacher-learning process.' At worst, if school effectiveness findings do not conceptualize education as the morally complex process it is, which constantly requires situationally determined judgements, then they may simply not be found useful by teachers. If this is the case, then school effectiveness researchers may have wasted years of time and policy-makers may have similarly wasted years of support on unattainable educational goals.

Conclusions - SEM and the eradication of democracy The School Effectiveness Movement began, at least in part, as a social-democratic riposte to those who argued that schools made little difference to the life chances of children. It is now accused of being in the pocket of governments of a very different ideological persuasion, and of its findings being used and abused by those who have seen political advantage in the adoption of its approach, because its approach discounts the importance of social and political context. Perhaps the turning point in the UK was Rutter el a/.'s 1979 study when it was argued that schools could make a difference, but that the academic mix of the school made a telling difference to that school's ability to raise standards. Here seemed a potential middle way - the balance of optimism in school effects tempered by the realities of family background and academic ability. The route taken, however, was the less balanced one of an almost exclusive emphasis upon school factors. The utilization by right-wing governments of its socialdemocratic aspirations is now history. Yet times change, and despite the fact that New Labour in the UK has continued some of the policies of previous Tory

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administrations, there are increasing signs of divergence on others. One apparent policy divergence, which bears directly on the future of SEM, is that based on the assumption that poverty can make a difference to the life chances of individuals, irrespective of what schools and other institutions can do. This is not to say that schools do not have an effect, but that the scale of intervention is limited by these extra social factors. If New Labour has accepted this argument, then any research project which does not share this assumption but harks back to the bad old times of Tory governments is going to find it much harder to gain the ear of ministers. It would then make both theoretical and political good sense for SEM researchers to re-engage with the broader issues of educational purpose and the contextualization of school effects. This seems to be happening with the links between School Improvement and School Effectiveness literatures. For SI to be truly relevant, however, it needs to transcend questions of'how can we deliver SE findings?', and also to engage in the larger and prior question of'what should we be attempting to deliver/improve?' In so doing, it may drag both literatures away from an apolitical, technicist approach and help the recognition that this is insufficient for a scholarly endeavour, and engage SEM once more with its social democratic roots and with a wider debate. This wider debate then has a number of layers. At the macrosociological level, SEM must surrender the assumption of the possibility of institutional detachment, and re-engage with the impact of factors like poverty and social class: it must accept the necessary contextualization of school effects. It must also surrender the assumption that it need not engage in the politics of research, and must recognize that it needs to shepherd and protect its insights and findings, in all their subtlety, all the way into and through the policy-making arena. At the mesosociological level, it must surrender the assumption of the primacy of inter-institutional effects and re-engage with debates on intra-institutional effects. At the microsociological level, it must surrender positivist assumptions about the mediation of change, and recognize that practitioners' assumptions and understandings upon these are vital for their successful implementation.


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Further, it must surrender the assumption that teaching and therefore teacher responsibility are pivotal to the learning process, and re-engage with debates about the importance of learning and of consequent student rights and responsibilities. Finally, at the philosophical level, it must surrender its assumption of the possibility -or indeed the virtues - of value neutrality and reengage with the debate about the purposes of education. Asking what education is for is crucial not only to the initial construction of research agendas but also to the protection of their findings once they reach the policy arena. If SEM has taught educationalists anything it is that they dismiss the philosophical at their peril. Down that road lies not only political and professional emasculation, but the excision of debate about the purposes of education and the good society. Down that road lies the eradication of democracy.


Chapter 6

Education as surveillance: the development of instruments of control

Introduction This book has suggested that we live in both more controlled and more fragmented times. Current emphases upon greater control, it has been argued, stem largely from attempts by government to control policy more closely in order to create globally competitive workforces. Fragmentation stems from private sector policies of downsizing and flexibility, allied to governments reducing their educational policy orbit largely to that of providing workers with employability skills. Such fragmentation results for the majority in a life of job change, with the reduced possibility of stability for financial, career, family or retirement concerns. Current policies then have two sides: control is one side of the equation, which this chapter examines; fragmentation and the loss of meaning is the other, which is the subject of the next. This chapter argues that, not only are there a variety of causes underpinning governmental desires for greater control, but that in order to have a fuller understanding of their genesis, and therefore of better interrogating their acceptability, we need to go further back in time. Now while surveillance and control within a society are not in themselves bad, yet there is reason to question whether they are present in the right degree. Sometimes it is simple incidents which raise this issue. One such occurred in 1996, when an armed robber entered a Burger King restaurant in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and demanded money from the person at the till. When the Burger King employee said that the money was in the till, and that this could not be opened without an order being placed, the robber ordered onion rings, only to be

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told that onion rings were not available at that time of the day. The robber then walked out without receiving any money. The behaviour of the till operator is clearly worrying, in that he was apparently so conditioned that he could not break the restaurant rules of Burger King even at the price of being shot. What is perhaps even more disconcerting is that the robber should accept the 'rationality' of such an explanation and leave empty-handed! This incident at least ended with little harm done. Overconformity seems to have led to a peaceful solution. However, not all conformist behaviours have such desirable effects. Probably the most dramatic description of injurious effects is to be found in the work of Stanley Milgram (1974), who found that two-thirds of a 'normal' population would, in a university experiment, administer electric shocks to innocent participants to a maximum of 450 volts, if given orders to do so by an apparently senior academic. Milgram suggested that individuals' willingness to inflict pain on others stemmed not from any innate wickedness, but from a societal conditioning to obey those in positions of authority. His experiments, replicated in a variety of locations (see Miller, 1986), indicate that there is a considerable degree of overconformity in even the most liberal societies, which should give genuine cause for concern from those interested in developing a more participative and critical citizenry, particularly if the ratchet of control is being tightened rather than loosened. Other effects of overcompliance and overcontrol are seen in studies of bureaucracy. Merton (1952) argued that those working within such organizations, realizing that their job security and advancement rest upon adherence to the rules, follow these rules slavishly, regardless of whether such conformity is functional in the long term. This situation encapsulates the difference between restricted and extended rationality. Bureaucratic logic dictates a limited rationality which extends no further than this unthinking devotion, while an extended rationality asks wider questions about the purpose of the organization and of the functions of individuals within it. Hiding behind bureaucratic rules, argues Merton, creates an ethos within which individuals develop a ritualism (p. 306), a trained incapacity to behave in an intelli-

The development of instruments of control

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gent and adaptive manner. In applying this to education, Anderson (1968) argues that, because rules specify the minimum standard to be attained, their vision is then limited to this level. Thus where a particular curriculum is mandated, or where there is precise specification of how teachers will be evaluated, individuals conform to these external mandates and 'teach to the test'. There is then a dramatic reduction in the attempt to think creatively and constructively about novel situations. As Anderson says (p. 23) the vast reservoir of experience, skills and knowledge is left untapped. The originality, initiative, or the insight that comes with experience is wasted.

Overcontrol and overcompliance may then produce harmful effects for others, result in an inability to think flexibly, creatively and critically and prevent experience and talent being utilized. The implications of such effects for the creation of a society which is democratic, flexible, creative and caring - surely major hallmarks of the desirable society of the third millennium - could not be clearer. Overcontrol and surveillance will be immensely damaging to such a project. It is therefore crucial to understand how we have reached a position where this can happen. It is time to look at why and how this has occurred.

Causes and instruments of surveillance and control The causes and instruments of surveillance and control, it will be argued, have occurred and are occurring in at least five different arenas: a

In the public arena. As mentioned above, it is sometimes assumed, particularly in western societies with their cultural stress on individual freedom, that control and surveillance are necessarily pejorative terms. This is clearly not the case. Instruments for societal control and surveillance have important and defensible roles. These include:

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Education, policy and ethics • • • • • •

b

c

d

the prevention of anarchy and lawlessness through surveillance and information gathering on potential threats; the prevention of external aggression and subversion through a similar outward-looking vigilance; the collection of information for taxation purposes to ensure fairness and effectiveness; the collection of information in the redistribution of this taxation in the pursuit of egalitarian policies; the collection of information in order to assess how those who receive public money spend it; the collection of information to determine whether those charged with executing democratic policies are doing so.

Public instruments for control and surveillance, then, are those which are deliberate and intended, and which are seen by their creators as either desirable, acceptable or inevitable, and which they are prepared to debate and defend publicly. In the assumed arena. While individuals or groups may 'invent' new instruments and policies for control and surveillance, and be happy to defend these publicly, much decision-making is underpinned by unquestioned assumptions. These are usually unquestioned because they are seen as so normal, so sensible, so ubiquitous, that no need is felt to vocalize and defend them. Yet normality, sense and ubiquity are invariably culturally implicit assumptions, and they may act as spurs to surveillance and control just like the more public ones. They therefore need to be interrogated just as much - perhaps even more - than the more novel and daring. In the manipulative arena. While there are defensible reasons for control and surveillance instruments, there are also less acceptable reasons. Manipulative instruments for surveillance and control are those which are deliberate and intended, but which are not regarded as publicly defensible, and are therefore hidden from public gaze. It can be a very short distance between the assumed and the manipulative, and one person's assumed is another's manipulative instrument. In the forgotten arena. While many former policies were underpinned by very clear assumptions, and many instruments


e

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were then deliberately created to realize these, some of the original purposes for policies and instruments are simply forgotten. Forgotten causes and instruments of control and surveillance now have their effects because they are taken for granted and are practised in an unthinking way: they are part of the weft and woof of present practice. Because of their forgotten nature, they may be neither noticed nor recognized, but they may continue to have strong effects, In the accidental arena. Public, assumed, manipulative and forgotten causes were at one time the recognized assumptions for a particular purpose, and the instruments of surveillance and control were deliberate creations for an intended effect. Accidental causes and instruments of control and surveillance are those which were designed for something entirely different, and yet came to be utilized for surveillance and control reasons. Of course, once their accidental usage was recognized, they may then have entered the public or manipulative arenas, or ultimately have been forgotten.

These five arenas resemble an iceberg: the first two, the public and the assumed, are those most visible and most open to debate, challenge and avoidance, while the last three, the manipulative, forgotten and accidental, are much less visible, much harder to identify, yet may have as much effect, and cause as much damage. Part of the reason for the difficulty in identifying them lies in their accidental, manipulative or forgotten natures. However, part of the reason is that they are creations of earlier historical periods which by accident or design feed into current arenas. Thus, in order to present a developmental account, their descriptions need to be taken in reverse order.

Surveillance and control in western societies The accidental arena - the Enlightenment project, modernity and its blooms Two World Wars, the Holocaust and a growing disbelief in the power of science to answer the fundamental questions of the

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human condition, have produced a scepticism of 'grand narratives'. Nevertheless, much of western society still implicitly subscribes to the Enlightenment project - that mankind through a universal reason can transcend the particularities of time and culture to fashion a concept of progress suitable for all humanity. This project, however, has not been without its price. Through a corrosive or illuminating reason (whichever view you care to take), it has gradually undermined belief in the mystery of life, in a caring deity, the location of humanity at the centre of a theistic universe, and the givenness of communal and hierarchical relations. Instead, individuals have had to confront existential, social and political freedoms, indulge in acts of self-creation and fashion, control and direct the earth's resources to their liking. As Nietzsche's madman in the market place so eloquently put it (1977, pp. 202-3) when asking who had killed God, it had been the spectators - 'they had done it themselves!' - but they would not yet admit to it. Western civilization had embarked upon a new form of thinking almost by accident, a reason which divided, analysed and classified. Dissection, not synthesis, nor faith, it was implied (though seldom consciously articulated), was the road to understanding, and understanding was taken to mean the ability to calculate, to quantify, to predict - a description of the scientific urge. From here it is a short step to a desire to control, rather than to live in harmony with one's surroundings. Comte's dictum that to know is to control precisely articulates a commitment to a rationality that focuses ultimately upon control. This focus would at first be fixed upon the natural world. For Freud (1930, p. 30), the human ideal was combining with the rest of the human community and taking up the attack on nature, thus forcing it to obey human will, under the guidance of science.

For Marx (1971, p. 94) as well 'nature becomes . . . simply an object for mankind, purely a matter of utility.' This gaze would move, however, to other suitable arenas, and the act of dissection and analysis, as much through habit as design, would fasten upon


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the social. The control of the social world was in part, then, an accident of the Enlightenment project, but it still produced four distinct flowers of modernity. A first was the establishment by nation states of their legitimacy to the control of the means of violence within their borders. They used rationality to develop an administrative bureaucracy which collected and stored information about their subjects, and by utilizing this information, developed the capacity to supervise, and then to control their subjects' activities. These activities, as we shall see, would be turned outwards into militaristic modernization and bureaucratization, and inwards to an extension of the surveillance of the civilian population through an extended police and penal system. Capitalism was the second independent bloom of the Enlightenment project to increase the surveillance of the individual. It did this in three ways. First, by creating a class-divided society, capitalism created the potentiality for class conflict and the need for surveillance of those elements likely to be 'disruptive' to the process. Second, capitalism created sufficient wealth so that permanent officials could be employed within businesses to develop further the bureaucracy systems to increase this surveillance. Finally, by undermining a social structure based upon the personal, the patrimonial and the communal, the capitalist system furthered the creation of a 'society of strangers', and of the need for increased forms of surveillance in society in general. The third bloom was the development of industrialism - the use of machinery and a directed workforce in the mechanized production and distribution of commodities. While in the West, industrialism was accomplished through the capitalist system, it should not be reduced to it, for its technical and organizational attributes have been used in very different political and economic contexts, as the Communist states of the twentieth century attest. Using the latest scientific advances, then, industrial organizations generated greater efficiency by overcoming problems of space and time, and in the process increased the surveillance of workers, other businesses and then of customers. Bureaucratic surveillance was both inevitable and accidental, a consequence of the response to problems which stemmed from the size and complexity of

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industrial and business administrative tasks. It was a rational response to a particular set of problems. The fourth and final bloom, the establishment of bureaucracratic structures, is usually seen as an outcome of the first three. This is understandable, given that nation states, industrialism and capitalism all used forms of bureaucratic administration to develop their effectiveness. Nevertheless, the causation is not as linear as might appear. Certainly, some aspects of administrative bureaucracy were discovered during the application of systems and rules to organizations. Yet it was as much a cause as something caused, for bureaucratic thinking became the general approach to dealing with problems of organizational functioning, and thus the logic of bureaucracy caused change to be considered as much as simply being the mode used. There is then no good reason to reduce bureaucracy to a bit player in the production of modernity. There can be little doubt that some developments in surveillance in the nation state and in capitalist enterprises were deliberate. Nevertheless, control of the social world was in part an accident of the Enlightenment project. Furthermore, the full extent of surveillance within modernity can never have been fully appreciated, and to that extent its depth of penetration in the modern world has been largely accidental. The forgotten arena - military, penal and professional bureaucratization A fairly standard assumption in the development of bureaucracy is that it was a technique invented by employers to control labour in industrial capitalist enterprises. Yet there is good evidence, as Dandeker (1990, p. 192) argues, that this process had been developed centuries beforehand and that employers were simply adopting and modifying principles which had been learnt by those in similar positions of responsibility in the military organisations of an earlier period.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, military organization


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had been based upon personal and patronage systems. Allegiance was feudal or mercenary, and the line of command and loyalty back to the nation state was tenuous at best. In order to change this state of affairs, and to establish the state's legitimacy to the control of the monopoly of violence, the bureaucratization of the armed forces was seen as essential in transforming the relationship between the state, the military elite and the other ranks. This involved a variety of changes, the most important of which were: •

•

•

•

•

•

a movement from the use of mercenary to standing national armies, which provided regular salaried employment, food, arms and clothing for its members, thus creating their greater dependency, identity and allegiance; the development of a more 'rational' organization for the armed forces, with the gradual elimination of arbitrary discipline, and promotion by patronage, and in their place the development of an explicit hierarchy of command, aided by the introduction of uniforms, which all helped to subsume individual identities within the military organization; officers increasingly became 'bureaucratic servants instead of powerful independent patrons' (Dandeker, 1990, p. 71), their job now being to evaluate those under their command; the development of an increasingly complex pattern of organization which required a co-ordination of units making armies resemble an intricately constructed organism rather than a simple massed body; the establishment of drills based upon the breaking down of actions such as loading and firing a gun, and the learning of these in a manner laid down in detail by a higher authority, and of their continuous repetition - a system which foreshadowed that of F.W. Taylor in the industrial sphere some 250 years later; the training of men to obey orders unquestioningly, in order to deploy them for the greater good of the whole; reducing them to automatons made battle tactics more efficient, quantifiable, calculable and controllable - the essence of bureaucratic organization.

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As this bureaucratization of armies, and then navies, led to greater success in warfare, the practice was copied by other nations. Furthermore, as the armed forces assumed a more bureaucratic form, so the process increased the surveillance and control of those within. Moreover, the Napoleonic wars began the gradual 'democratization' of warfare, with the conscription of a much larger proportion of the civil population than previously. In order to ascertain what were the resources upon which the state could call, much greater information on the civilian population was required. Thus the democratization, and then the development of total warfare, increased the bureaucratic surveillance and control of society, a process which reached its peak by the end of the Second World War. Indeed, according tojefferey and Hennessy (1983), by 1945 Britain was not just a disciplined, but a self-disciplined nation. By then war had left no citizen untouched by its rigours whether in the form of the siege economy on the home front or by military service abroad. The population was used to receiving orders and to strict regulation in the face of shared dangers.

The forgotten legacy of military bureaucratization then is a rationality, surveillance and control, which penetrated not just the military but the society within which it was located. This is important because so often the military is seen as that branch of legitimated violence that faces outwards to other nation states. Yet its inward effects are just as important. If this is the case, how much more so would be/is the effect of that source of state control which is designed to face inwards: the policing of society and its penal system? For Foucault (1979) at least, the prison and the asylum were the perfection of surveillance techniques developed in the seventeenth century. The development of these institutions certainly followed the same kind of logic as that of military bureaucratization. The previous universal use of extreme punishments, repression and absolutism was symptomatic of the state's response to the uncertainty of criminal conviction, and to the weakness of state administration. To increase their efficiency and effectiveness, a more 'rational' approach was adopted, one which


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dispensed with a system based upon little more than personal discretionary terror. A greater certainty of conviction was then generated by a more organized, systematic and bureaucratic organization of police and prison services. Both organizations, like the military, had explicit rules and regulations, and systematic penalties for legal infringements. Their officers similarly had uniforms, clear career structures and became direct functionaries of the state. Internal control of them and their behaviour was thus achieved through more explicit regulation, more surveillance by senior officials, more knowledge of what they were doing. Control - and ultimately self-control - of the population they were administering was similarly exercised through increased information gathering, which necessarily meant greater surveillance. The ideal, Bentham's Panopticon prison, was seen as so effective precisely because the prisoners knew they were being observed, and so did not attempt anything - they disciplined themselves. For Foucault (1979), this is the ultimate stage of control, and the metaphor for the end point of the state's surveillance and discipline of its civilian population. Each individual is 'totally seen without ever seeing, while the agents of discipline see everything without every being seen' (p. 202). Not that sections of the civilian population itself did not aid in this surveillance. The military had had within its ranks those who saw the personal and military advantages of bureaucratization, and thus aided the process. These individuals were the prototypes of lay professionals, for by systematizing a knowledge base, and by classifying and 'disenchanting' professional practice, they furthered the effects of the age of science and technical rationality, producing a more rational but also more controllable society. Though gaining professional status and legitimacy, they in effect transformed themselves into state bureaucrats. This forgotten (and perhaps accidental) Faustian bargain is still with professionals today. While the state may have granted them an exclusivity in terms of practice and hence given them an increased status and financial remuneration, the price has been their subordination to the discipline of bureaucracy, and thereby the long-term prospect of the reduction of their work to technicalrational status. Importantly, professionals also provided the state

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with a powerful opportunity to control its population further by gathering information about their clients. A final point should be made here. While military, penal and professional bureaucratization have been named as the forgotten causes and instruments of surveillance and control, bureaucracy has a role to play independent of any of its specific translations. This is because it is a strong example of values following practice. It is highly likely that the actual process of the bureaucratization of these professions was as important in forming the technicalrational consciousness of society as was the end result of the bureaucratization of these professions. To the extent then that bureaucratization in and of itself is a powerful if forgotten inheritance for present mindsets, it deserves to be recognized as an autonomous force once again.

The manipulative arena - capitalism, state security and discourse capture Present generations may have largely forgotten the impact of the bureaucratization of important areas of activity within nationstate boundaries, but the purpose of such policies was understood, not just by their creators but by those inheriting them. They proceeded to extend and refine them for their own particular and sometimes less than acceptable - ends. If manipulative instruments are those which creators do not wish the public to see or recognize, then there are plenty of manipulative instruments from which to choose in the history of western society. A first candidate is the Marxist account of the role of bureaucracy in the capitalist system of economic accumulation. On this account, the functions of bureaucracy are twofold: to impose upon society the kind of order which perpetuates its domination, and then to conceal this domination through an unending flow of administrative detail, form filling and supervision. In so doing, it prevents an understanding of the economic exploitation of the majority by the minority, while incorporating them into it. Thus, it is argued, industrial capitalism requires the creation of the right consciousness in its workers. Yet before industrialism, workers were largely non-accumulative, regulated only by the seasons,


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sunrise and sunset, and used to producing materials in their own way and at their own pace. Industrialism and the factory system, partly by intent and partly by accident, shaped the creation of workers who were consumption-oriented, amenable to control by the clock and disciplined to an external standardization. In this process, education was a vital instrument, for, as Toffler (1970, pp. 354—5) pointed out, Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed . . . the solution was an educational system that, in its very structure, simulated this new world . . . the regimentation, lack of individualisation, the rigid systems of seating, grouping, grading and marking, the authoritarian style of the teacher - are precisely those that made mass public education so effective an instrument of adaptation for its time and place.

These processes were supplemented as time went on. Thus, the scientific management of F.W. Taylor (1911), a copy of earlier military bureaucratization, was utilized in the first half of the twentieth century to transform the traditional way of working. It measured, monitored and specified workplace tasks, and in so doing separated workers off from the process of planning, reducing them to drones, planning and control now being the prerogative of management. This, and its educational translations (see Callahan, 1962), continues to be used to this day. Furthermore, because in most cases the object of managerial control is the self-control of subjects, the 'cold' managerial techniques of scientific management were then supplemented or supplanted by the extension of surveillance powers into the social and psychological context of workers' lives, and by the use of the 'warmer' techniques of Cultural Change and Total Quality Management, in the attempt to elicit personal commitment more than control and compliance. In these ways, suggest Marxian writers, the capitalist process has manipulated workers to respond to its desires while preventing them from understanding it. The capitalism system is not the only potential manipulative

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instrument. Whenever the state has felt threatened, or its legitimacy undermined, it has responded by attempting greater surveillance and control over the supposed perpetrators. Some of this is perfectly legitimate, and would be the object of public defence, but other aspects have been more clandestine and much less defensible. Thus in issues of industrial conflict, and political subversion, governments worldwide have stepped over the line and broken their own laws. Much of this can be traced in this century to the effects of two World Wars in which whole societies, not just armed forces, were at war, and of the subsequent breakdown of any distinction between the military and the civilian. Because of this, surveillance by the military and security forces extended to any activities which might lead to the subversion of national security. By the end of the First World War, the security services were more concerned about supposed domestic subversion than any German espionage. The systematic monitoring of trade unionists, and others of suspect political viewpoints, became a regular feature of state surveillance. Margaret Thatcher's graphic description of trade unionists as the 'enemy within' being but a late twentieth-century example of an attitude which has been around for a long time, and which has justified the use of the illegal surveillance of civilian populations. A final area of manipulation is one in which capitalism and state security are subsets. This is the ability to control the way in which individuals think about matters. Lukes (1974), for instance, argues that power may be described in three different ways: a b c

as the ability to impose one's wishes upon another; as the ability to exclude other interests from deliberation; as the ability to prevent individuals from recognizing that their real interests are threatened.

This third view is illustrated by Foucault's argument that 'the independent self is a fiction, that we are all created within the play of language, and language itself is never neutral. People live their lives through the socially constructed meanings that are available to them, and these meanings - these 'discourses' - are


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provided by those in positions of power, and they construct the 'realities' within which we live. As Ball (1990a, p. 2) says 'Discourses are about what can be said and thought, but also about who can speak, when, and with what authority.' Thus, the discourse of medicine is normally taken to be a neutral language which expresses the current medical view on matters of human health. The knowledge which the doctor displays - through a partly technical, partly specialized terminology (or 'discourse') excludes the patient from participation in the medical process, and enables the doctor to exert control over the patient. This discourse is usual seen as scientific and authoritative, and therefore the power asserted by doctors (in terms of their judgements and commands) is usually taken to be legitimate. Yet because a power relationship between doctor and patient is established, it provides the opportunity - which the medical profession has on occasions utilized - for the exercise of power for less than altruistic purposes. This, for instance, has been done to advance 'occupational closure', and to enhance status and income. Lawyers, teachers, social workers, psychiatrists and many other professions have all been guilty of attempting to do the same kind of thing. Discourses, then, are never neutral, and their purposes need to be investigated, for they construct a version of knowledge, and through this create a position of power for those who use it. Further, and as Foucault realized, there is a symbiotic relationship between knowledge and power. Knowledge is power, for those who do not have it can be excluded from participation, but power also facilitates the deployment of particular and favoured kinds of knowledge, in order to legitimate further or disguise desired ends. This kind of action was seen earlier in the selective usage of versions of quality, not only in claiming a monopoly for the private sector usage of the term, but also in the insistence on managerial rights to determine and advance such conceptions through the control of the workforce. The power engendered by particular discourses, then, is capable of defining and controlling others, and it is precisely the professions', the state's or the capitalist system's ability to construct, employ and convince a population of their authority which allows these power bases to manipulate the consciousness and actions of others.

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The assumed arena - rationality, the private sector and managerialism Rationality was originally a clear, unequivocal, transparent good for society, yet it is also a strong example of an assumed cause and instrument of surveillance. The Enlightenment project was the first step towards the creation of the perfect society, the embrace of the scientific method was the means to attain this perfection and rationality was the basis of the manner of thought underpinning both. And yet from it have sprung some strange children: • • • • • • •

the destruction of existential meaning, of an understanding of humanity's place in the universe; the destruction of community, and the consequent anomie; the control and partial destruction of the natural; the creation of the bureaucratic organization, and the 'iron cage'; insecurity, the fear of freedom and the return to the embrace of the managed and the predictable — the addiction to a 'McDonaldized' society (Ritzer, 1996); the commercialization of society; the extension of control and surveillance to all civilian populations.

If the transparent goodness of rationality was the first assumed instrument on the road to the surveillance society, another of its children - the primacy of free market relations - became, with the advent of the Thatcher/Reagan nexus, another assumed instrument. This surveillance was required not only by those in business and industry, but by the state itself, in order to support laissezfaire capitalism. In order to provide a legal framework within which the market can operate, to provide it with infrastructural services like transport and communications and to protect it from its own self-destructive effects, it needed to know more about its own resources, its own civilian population. This adherence to the primacy of free-market operations still exerts its control over the minds of policy-makers around the world, not only in the manner in which economic issues take priority over other kinds on the


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policy agenda, but in the manner in which economic language invades and usurps the conceptual universe of other areas. This can be illustrated by taking a couple of examples. For Friedman (1962, p. 13), the family is nothing more than 'a collection of Robinson Crusoes', using its resources to produce goods which it can exchange with other households, with the breadwinner taking pride of place. A second example is the startling description of children: children are at one and the same time consumer goods and potentially responsible members of society. The freedom of individuals to use their economic resources as they want includes the freedom to use them to have children - to buy, as it were, the services of children as a particular form of consumption, (ibid., p. 33)

It is important to note that these are atomistic visions of society, characteristic of the reductionist trend in western rationality. Moreover, this reductionism is a narrow, economistic version, and is a good example of an attempt at 'discourse capture' - the reinterpretation of events within a particular conceptual arena, in this case a free-market one. It limits the ability of individuals to think in other terms, and by cloaking events in a particular kind of language, privileges those who would benefit from such re-description. Whether this is manipulative or assumed is, of course, down to one's point of view, but what is clear is that the discourse is used in a manner assuming no elaboration, no justification is needed, though they could be provided if challenged. A final example of an assumed mechanism is that of managerialism, and the managerial discourse which accompanies it. As described above, 'managerialism' has the following set of beliefs: •

•

social progress is achieved by increasing economic productivity (which links it very closely with the economistic assumptions of the free market); management plays a crucial and distinct role in organizations

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•

•


in the planning, implementation and measurement of the necessary productivity improvements; such productivity increases come about with the creation of a labour force imbued with this productivity ideal, whose commitment to such corporate aims is accomplished by the use of managerial strategies; to be successful in this endeavour, managers must have the freedom to manage flexibly and proactively all available resources, material and human.

Once again, this discourse could, depending upon context and purpose, be located within the manipulative domain. This is why Ball (1990b, p. 157) argues that the employment of educational managerial discourse is imperialistic and exclusionary, claiming crucial tasks as the privilege of management: the selection of appropriate courses of actions rests upon and is limited to the expertise of those, the managers, who possess appropriate scientific knowledge and training. It ... separates policy from execution, and reserves policymaking to those designated and trained in its techniques . . . Management theory views the social world as locked into irrational chaos, as needing to be brought into its redeeming order.

It is described here as an assumed mechanism because Ball's description does not make it necessarily wrong: it may be perfectly justifiable to separate out managerial functions and allocate the domain of policy and decision-making to an elite. The acceptability of this depends upon further political, social and moral arguments which are addressed in other sections of this book. Certainly, many management writers (normally from the private sector) believe wholeheartedly that the central and directive role of management is something to be proclaimed from the rooftops: for, them, managers are the saviours of present-day society. One person's manipulative instrument really is another person's assumed.


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The public arena - five kinds of policy steers, four stages of bureaucratic control As this chapter has moved from the accidental to the forgotten, to the manipulative and then to the assumed, there has been an increasingly direct reference to surveillance and control in education. This is because the flow of this chapter has been primarily historical, and deeper and more lasting influences transcend not only education, but any particular nation state, and have conditioned the development of western society in general. The public arena is therefore the most educationally oriented, though its debt to other arenas will be apparent. Public causes are those which underpin many present western governmental policies and which policy-makers, if asked, are prepared to defend. Most have already been covered in this book. Five major policy steers are: •

•

global economic competition - the belief that for a country to maintain its standard of living and to be able to afford the finer things of a civilized country, it needs to maintain its economic competitiveness. This involves the belief that a large part of the educational process needs to be devoted to equipping the present generation as well as future generations with the skills, knowledge, attitudes and habits which will be valued in the service of knowledge-based economies of the future; as has been seen, the development of such capacity has increasingly moved from the workings of the free market to a more interventionist governmental role; social stability and nation-state legitimacy - the belief that this is an age of increased fragmentation and turbulence, and that cherished values are being undermined. The location for this instability varies with the commentator, some conservative writers blaming this on the 'swinging sixties', others seeing it as a direct consequence of a too enthusiastic embrace of freemarket principles a couple of decades later. This lack of social stability is also linked closely with the belief that there is a power dispersal from the nation state to bodies both larger and smaller. This, it is argued, needs to be counteracted, for

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•

•

•

Education, policy and ethics both the state's and its citizens' benefit, as power dispersal can lead to power vacuums and social instability. Finally, it is believed that social and value stability are crucial for economic competitiveness, as this not only provides the constancy and predictability of encounters necessary for economic transactions to take place, but also because certain kinds of values actually produce more economically competitive national systems. For all these reasons, a crucial function of the education system is to inculcate a respect for a nation state's laws and values, to ensure that while its citizens are economically entrepreneurial, they are not value entrepreneurial; inter-institutional competition - the belief that while governments need to be much more policy directive in order to produce a globally competitive workforce, and to ensure a level of value and social stability, this nevertheless does not rule out the use of markets altogether. At the institution level, the market is seen by many policy-makers as possessing a number of useful functions. It generates competition between institutional providers, creating incentives for good performance and for successful innovation, as well as punishing those producers who underperform; if the right structures are put in place, it can provide the kind of information which 'consumers' need in order make adequate comparison between the 'products' on offer; finally, it locates praise and blame at the institutional level and thereby diverts political censure. As long, then, as policy direction is firmly located at the centre, the market continues to be a favoured mechanism for institutional performance; democratic accountability - the belief that if an institution and its members are using public money, then the public has a right to know how efficiently and effectively that money is being spent. This has been a long-standing criticism of public sector 'producers', and continues to be utilized as an argument for control and surveillance of those individuals or institutions utilizing public money; stakeholder participation - the belief, stemming either from market or democratic assumptions, that 'producers' should


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not be the sole or even the major determinants of content and practice in educational institutions. On the contrary, on both democratic and market scenarios, all those affected by such practice should be entitled to some input into both policy and practice. What is clear from the description of all of these five causes is that their achievement involves an increasing amount of control and direction of the work of'producers', or at the very least in an increasing amount of surveillance of their activities in order to establish whether they are working in conformance with policy aims and directives. Now this does not necessarily mean constant work surveillance, for while this has been the standard response, and classic bureaucratic - 'Fordist' - structures have been the mechanism used to achieve this, 'post-Fordist' structures are increasingly visible (see Smyth, 1993), as these decentralize responsibility for implementation, but keep a tight rein on policy boundaries. It might then be thought that this is a radical departure with the past. However, and as Rowe (1986, p. 100) argues: it should not be thought that a decentralised structure implies a weak centre; it is simply an alternative mechanism for maintaining control, only it operates on terms laid down by the centre and is still control. It is maintained not by centralising tasks, rules and procedures within which people can operate. This less visible form of power sets limits on what subordinates might do, and provides a kind of freedom of manoeuvre within bounds; but it is still bureaucratic control.

Thus post-Fordist structures do not reduce central control, but rather because of the enhanced technological capacity to collect, store, retrieve and utilize information in a speedy and efficient manner, is simply more effective than before. This increased effectiveness has been taking place in a number of stages. It is seen particularly well in the education system, and occurs in three stages. A first stage is the recognition that external inspection of educational establishments, such as the UK schools Ofsted

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inspections, where teams of inspectors exhaustively investigate the planning, working and performance of the school, can now be drastically reduced, and the responsibility for inspection be devolved to the schools themselves. As New Labour government publications (e.g DfEE, 1999) assert, if a school performs at an acceptable standard, it can expect to receive less detailed inspection and surveillance, the time between inspections beings increased. However, if it does not come up to the mark, it can expect the same degree of external inspection as previously, or perhaps even more. Thus, the ideal is for inspection, surveillance and control by outsiders to become inspection, surveillance and control by school managers. Much of this makes considerable sense from the teacher's point of view: it is less stressful, it takes place over a lengthier period of time and is therefore likely to be more accurate, and it is more understanding, for those doing it are much more aware of the contextual nature of teachers' practice. From a governmental point of view, it also makes sense, for those entrusted with this role are much more likely to do it in line with policy directives, as part of the reorientation of the management of the system includes the induction of this managerialist cadre into governmental philosophy through, in England and Wales, the National Professional Qualification for Headteachers and the National Leadership College. In this way, policy steers can be transmitted to school managements, for them to implement. In the second stage in post-Fordist developments in schools, the previous pattern is replicated. Here, however, the schools' managers keep control of policy, but day-to-day managerial practice and decisions are increasingly devolved to class and subject teachers themselves, through a discourse of 'collegiality'. This discourse - again very sensibly - argues that isolationist classroom teachers who do not share practice with colleagues are unlikely to develop and help their pupils as well as those who do work and share ideas with fellow professionals. Individual and organizational improvement then comes about when teachers become used to the idea of working in the same classroom, having the courage to expose their practice to others, and are prepared to explain and defend how and why they do what they do. So far all


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well and good: these seem excellent arguments for a greater collaboration between professionals. However, and as Hargreaves (1994) argues, there is evidence to suggest that what is happening is a 'contrived collegiality', one which does not acknowledge and work from the needs of teachers but from the needs of management. Thus, meetings may be scheduled to fit in with school needs rather than those of teachers themselves. Hargreaves argues that most meetings are best when convened if they are needed, and this can be occasionally or every day, depending on the problem. This, however, is a decision to be made by those involved, and not by managers scheduling meetings for (say) once every week, for this fails to catch the momentum of the problem. Similarly, and as teachers watch and compare each other's practice, they increasingly come to inspect it as well, particularly if they are inducted into a system which sees only one (managerially defined) way of defining 'best practice'. As this happens, so inspection, surveillance and control are carried out by a teacher's colleagues, and they then become much more pervasive, much more frequent and so much more certain. Further, as teachers are encouraged to watch, compare and judge others' practice, and to utilize the principles and tools provided by their managements, so not only do they come to practise such surveillance upon their colleagues, but they also come to inhabit and live and think in terms of this discourse of a surveilled universe, to accept it as nonproblematic, until it becomes difficult to think in any other terms. The third and final stage of this occurs when, because they now think in such terms, they move from practising it upon others to practising it upon themselves. Once this occurs, the Benthamite/ Foucauldian Panopticon is achieved: teachers do not need external discipline and surveillance: they can only think in terms of this particular discourse, and therefore they apply it to themselves as they apply it to everyone else. The public arena becomes the assumed, and is then that much harder to see and to challenge. From there it is only a short step to the forgotten arena, and then it is hard to see how it could be challenged. Now, again, the issue here is not that inspection and surveillance occur. After all, if they are required, then it better for them to be accurate; and pervasiveness, frequency and certainty are all

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qualities likely to help this process. However, this process sets up a system of surveillance and control which can be abused in the future by those less ethically minded, or which may simply come to be accepted because the discourse of surveillance and control has become so dominant. Governments, then, may be creating iron cages from which it is increasingly difficult to escape, and which they, in a more reflective moment, might be uneasy about creating. Such unease may stem from the realization that, while inspection may be a good thing, it is only good in degree. There is, I would argue, a desirability, both practically and ethically, for an educational inspection system which is slightly less than totally effective. Practically, a 95 per cent system is more desirable than 100 per cent system because total control necessarily assumes perfection in the system, and any deviance automatically has to be classed as 'wrong'. In the self-surveilled systems increasingly being developed, the very possibility of considering alternatives is curtailed. Deviance is not only unacceptable - it cannot even be thought. Yet in all human endeavour, and particularly in the educational field, there is a degree of imperfection and error which such a system instantiates. Experimentation, trial and error and guesswork are the genesis of creativity, and while most do not work, a few are the mainspring of evolution. Practically, then, such a system would exclude the creative, the innovative mutation. It would stifle the evolution of the educational system. Further, while democratic accountability is at bottom an ethical demand, requiring evidence of proper conformity to the policy of democratically elected governments, it is a systemic demand, and needs to be balanced by individual value demands. These would include the need for freedom for creativity and judgement within an unpredictable context, for the need for selfexpression and for the requirement of exploring different meanings and understandings. Surveillance and control systems in education which move to the excision of whole areas of debate over the meaning of education, so firm is the urge to pursue one vision of improvement, provide no one - neither, governments, businesses, users or practitioners - with long-term benefits. They go too far.


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Conclusions - governments and educators as collaborators and casualties? There are then a variety of causes for the development of instruments of surveillance and control, and some are recent and obvious, while others are culturally deeper, but no less influential. Furthermore, because these forces are so culturally embedded, it may be wrong to simply blame overcontrol and overcompliance upon particular groups or individuals, for while present governments are currently impelled to ever more centralizing approaches, they may be as much the victims of cultural inheritance as perpetrators of control. Part of the remediation of present centralizing approaches may then be a process of consciousness-raising of all those so influenced, for if the genesis of such effects is not recognized, it may go largely unnoticed and the effects unchallenged. One could also apply the same analysis to the apparent complicity of educators in this project of control. Thus, Chapter 4 illustrated how school effectiveness researchers may have been insufficiently vocal in preventing the appropriation of their research by policy-makers with other control-minded strategies in mind. Moreover, Bottery and Wright (2000) suggest that educators may be complicit in the meshing of a primarily technical-rational and implementational professional culture with a set of centralizing government priorities. This, they argue, has produced a monolithic approach to education which has silenced alternative voices, and contributed to a greater corporatism and a reduced form of democracy. They suggest that professional-friendly legislation will only make sense if allied to at least two other strategies for remediation. A first would be to change the bureaucratic and hierarchical structures and functioning of educational institutions to ones which are flatter, more collegial and more democratic. The second would be for educators to prioritize, as part of their continuing professional development, a much greater understanding of the 'ecological' context within which their work takes place, and thus not only for them to be experts in their subjects or children's learning, but also to have a sufficiently broad overview of education to be able to argue for its contribution to a 'good society'. This chapter then extends

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these suggestions by arguing that a further crucial element in the re-professionalization of teachers lies in their understanding of the forces and discourses which discipline and direct them, and that a central one of these is the genesis of their control and surveillance. This discourse has made both governments and educators collaborators in, and casualties of, a process which does not benefit educators, and which, if policy-makers pay more than lip-service to the kind of democratic and empowering values described in this book, does not in the long run facilitate their efforts either.

Chapter 7

Fragmentation and the loss of meaning

The World Health Organisation claims that treatment of mental ill health such as depression will consume more resources than heart disease by 2020 as the world copes with unprecedented social dislocation. (M. Bunting, 1999, p. 17)

Introduction Previous chapters have argued that global forces are impelling nation-state governments to focus upon the greater direction of policy in those areas in which they retain influence, while the last chapter demonstrated that such movements are reinforced by a cultural inheritance which stems at least from Enlightenment times. The present period might then be simply characterized as a period of greater control and greater direction, because not just educators, but most of those working within the public sector, have all felt such control and direction, as governments have set targets for employees which attempt to squeeze more output from smaller workforces with reduced budgets, and which also increase the measurement of that effort. Ritzer (1993) has described the same process in the private sector, through a modern twist to bureaucratization which he calls 'McDonaldization', suggesting that the fast-food chain constitutes a contemporary model of the process of rationalization, its success stemming from its use of four classic characteristics of bureaucracy - efficiency, calculability, predictability and control. The novel turn of 'McDonaldization' is that, whereas classical bureaucratic procedures were applied mainly to industrial processes, this concentrates upon the rationalization of social

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interactions, and not just upon low-grade fast-food interactions, but of higher-level skills and practices as well, in order to produce a set of standardized, predictable, efficient and controllable procedures which conform to policy dictates. Educators will recognize much of what Ritzer describes, as education is increasingly subjected to the twin demands of rationalization and commodification. Rationalization occurs through the attempt to deproblematize curriculum and teaching methods, presenting only a limited number for offer, their selection being described as 'best practice', but in reality largely determined by a 'rational analysis' of what a particular government and its economy requires. Commodification occurs through the attempt to turn education into a product, its 'consumers' adopting market attitudes, its 'producers' being judged by their performance in this market. For many, then, McDonaldization may be seen as but the latest attempt to devalue, debase and destroy a rich and value-laden educational enterprise. Yet there is another side to Ritzer's critique which it is essential to understand, for it suggests the existence of a more complex world, in which, rather than McDonaldization being imposed upon a protesting and critical public, the reverse is the case people actually welcome the phenomenon. Ritzer suggests that part of the appeal of McDonaldization stems from the fact that while some may complain of control and direction, many others are overwhelmed by a feeling of fragmentation and a loss of meaning in the world, and that McDonald offers a degree of predictability and security in this chaotic and relativized world. Thus, instead of Weber's belief that the process of bureaucratic rationalization would result in an 'iron cage', Ritzer suggests instead that what has come to pass is a 'velvet' cage, one that many find rather agreeeable. Individuals, then, like, prefer, even crave McDonaldization, for as Ritzer says (pp. 160-1) this is the world they know, it represents their standard of good taste and high quality, and they can think of nothing better than an increasingly rationalized world. They prefer a world that is not cluttered by choices and options. They like the fact that many aspects of their lives are highly predictable.


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Ritzer's argument then suggests that while the bureaucratization and generally increased control of life is in part the cause of a disempowered society, it is also in part an effect because the risks and fragmentation of society drive the individual into a greater search for security. If this is the case, then the current situation is doubly worrying, for it describes a world which, while increasingly controlled, is also increasingly fragmented, and this fragmentation then drives people into seeking even greater control and direction. On this scenario, the prognosis for a society capable of developing democratic, participative and caring institutions begins to look extremely problematic. It is then imperative to examine this side of the societal equation.

Control v. risk: are they contradictory? It would be easy to think that greater control eliminated risk, that direction reduced fragmentation, and that an acceptance of the reality of one side of this equation cannot be correct if the opposite interpretation makes sense. Yet we have seen that there is good reason to believe that both phenomena are in play. There is also good reason to believe that they are largely different facets of the same process, the workings of current forms of capitalism. Turner (1999), for instance, contrasts two very different descriptions of the effects of this form of economic organization by Marx and Weber. As he says (p. 84), whereas Marx viewed capitalism in terms of a series of metaphors of organic change and turbulence, Weber pictured capitalism as an iron cage in which everything is subject to exact calculation.

Turner argues that these two contrasting views of capitalism, one emphasizing the importance of risk and change, the other that of regulation, routine and rationalization, have continued to be dominant metaphors in the descriptions of relations under capitalism. Thus, writers from the Frankfurt school, as well as Foucault, and now Ritzer, have all ploughed the Weberian furrow, while the Marxian emphasis is represented by the sociological literature on risk, in particular Beck's Risk Society (1992),

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as well as by those authors writing of fragmented societies, and the effects of consequent insecurity upon those within them, such as Hutton (1996), Rifkin (1996) and Sennett (1998). Now it has been suggested that these contrasting views of capitalism are in reality descriptions of different historical periods of the process. Thus, with Weberian bureaucratization/ McDonaldization, the key terms of 'deskilling' and 'rationalization' are associated with early Fordist manufacturing strategies of mass production in large industrial concerns. On the other hand, the key term of the Marxist/risk side of the equation, 'flexible specialization', is undoubtedly post-Fordian, indicating, as Castells (1996, p. 14) suggests that when demand became unpredictable in quantity and quality, when markets were diversified worldwide and thereby difficult to control, and when the pace of technological change made obsolete singlepurpose production equipment, the mass-production system became too rigid and costly for the characteristics of the new economy. A tentative answer to overcome such rigidity was the flexible production system.

Yet many public sector workers, and educators in particular, would argue that these are not characteristics of different historical periods, but different aspects of the same current period and process. This can be understood if one reflects on the changing role of teachers in the UK over the last 40 years. To simplify, but hopefully not distort the argument, 40 years ago, policy-makers believed that the curriculum was the teachers' 'secret garden', and were interested less in the management of the system than in ensuring that it was adequately financed and resourced. In such a situation, teachers not only had major input on the implementation of curriculum, teaching methods, assessment and school management, but, by default, had major input into the policies on these as well, largely because these did not exist elsewhere. Forty years on, they feel cold winds from two different directions. The first is Weberian, one which systematizes, rationalizes, centralizes and controls, locating policy-making functions elsewhere, and specifying what will be taught, where, when and how.


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It is the iron cage of bureaucracy. The second, however, is Marxist, one which focuses on educational markets and school finance, and, by tying finance to pupil numbers, makes teachers' jobs less secure, forcing school managements to consider casualizing part of the workforce, increasing workloads and devolving greater responsibilities. Both of these forces have extensive effects upon educators' professionalism, as both of them de-professionalize and re-professionalize educators' work. Weberian control and direction reprofessionalizes, for it provides a new educational terminology, which only those trained in it can hope to understand and implement. However, it undoubtedly leads to feelings of deprofessionalization as well, firstly because such re-professionalization denigrates the skills of those teachers acquired under different approaches using different terminologies, and secondly because it increasingly limits the role of educators to that of directed implementation. However, Marxist change and turbulence also has similar contradictory effects. Firstly, it re-professionalizes teachers by demanding greater flexibility - by changing their primary responsibilities, and by changing their job demarcations. However, it also de-professionalizes, through the way in which limited finance and the use of market operations both corrode professional career structures. We need to recognize therefore that there is a confluence of these two effects at the same moment in time, and that, to appreciate fully educational reality, both must be considered. Once again, the broader picture needs to be painted to understand the effects at lower levels.

The end of secure work? Any discussion of the effects of flexibility and increased risk at organizational and personal level needs to be located within a global and national picture, for where connections between these and global economics and national policies are not fully explored, strategies for dealing with causes and effects are likely to be inadequate. Thus, any consideration of current causes of flexibility, risk and insecurity needs to take serious account of Rifkin's (1996) description of the present worldwide phenomenon of the

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increased automation and computerization of work, which permits companies to offload and casualize staff, or which demands of them that they be willing to be 'flexible' in the way they are used at work. The bottom line, he suggests (p. 11) is simply that 'the global economy can produce more and more goods and services employing an ever smaller percentage of the available workforce.' His description of numbers involved in the coming changes (p. 5) is sobering: In the United States alone . . . in the years ahead more than 90 million jobs in a labor force of 124 million are potentially vulnerable to replacement by machines. With current surveys showing that less than 5 per cent of companies around the world have even begun to make the transition to the new machine culture, massive unemployment of a kind never before experienced seems all but inevitable in the coming decades.

This strategy places efficiency and the pursuit of profit above other considerations. Once more it is a strategy, the practice and effects of which have affected other sectors of society, including education. Now while flexibility has to be appreciated within a global and national context, it must also be realized that it has a number of possible characteristics. It can, for instance, be a numerical flexibility, where employee numbers are varied to fit demand. It can also be a temporal flexibility, where hours worked by employees - and wages paid - also vary with demand. Further, it can be a. functional flexibility, where type of work performed varies with external demand. Finally, it can be a locational flexibility, where workers are moved to sites where their work is more likely to be required. These forms of flexibility have been portrayed as golden opportunities for certain sections of the community (particularly women) to re-enter the workforce, as well as being an opportunity for workers to increase the amount of participation that they have in the running of the organization. In addition, the extra flexibility required may also result in an increased autonomy in the performance of these duties. So flexibility does have a very positive side. Yet there is an expanding literature which suggests


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that such flexibility has considerable problems, and in particular in its contribution to personal and social insecurity. Flexibility leads to insecurity in a number of ways. One key aspect is a reduced feeling of control. Thus Burchell et al. (1999) found that those who felt they had less choice in the way they did their job also felt more insecure than those who felt they had more control. They argue that flexibility leads to insecurity because, as individuals are asked to take on an increasing number of varied jobs, so they begin to feel that they lack the expertise to take control of the job rather than the job controlling them. To this one should add that greater insecurity is also caused by the other - control - side of the modern work equation, for though one might think that greater control and direction would produce greater security, the opposite seems to be the case. Indeed, the insecurity arising from the greater flexibility of work and greater external control both seem to stem from the fact that real feelings of personal security come from an internal or personal locus of control, and neither flexibility nor an external locus may provide this. Increased flexibility also exacerbates the problem of insecurity when communication over new work requirements is not sufficiently clear for employees to know what is necessary to maintain satisfactory performance. However, once again, such insecurity also stems from increased external control, which reduces any personal mastery of the job. This combination of flexibility and control is particularly relevant to teachers, as new legislation, and changes to previous legislation, leave them not only unsure about how this co-ordinates with their own conceptions of good practice, but also what is required to do the job satisfactorily, how much time needs to be devoted to its implementation, and how strictly they need to adhere to 'recommendations' if they are not to fall foul of external inspections. Yet again, both Weberian and Marxist sides of the equation combine to cause greater insecurity. A final cause of insecurity lies in the increase in work expected of employees in a flexible work environment. Now by this is meant two separate things. First is the amount of time that individuals spend on the job, and there is strong evidence that on both sides of the Atlantic people are now working longer

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hours. In the USA, Schor (1992) found that Americans were working on average nearly an extra month per year more than they had twenty years earlier; while a 1997 poll in USA Today (quoted in Barber, 1998, p. 155) showed that a third of the work force worked more than 45 hours a week, 28 per cent up from six years earlier. In the UK, a 1998 TUG report showed that the proportion of full-time male employees working more than 48 hours increased by 9 per cent from 1984 to 1996 (quoted in Burchell et al., 1999, p. 29). More than the sheer amount of time spent on the job, however, is the intensification of the work: there is not only more work to be done, but due largely to financial stringencies, there is also generally a reduced level of staffing to cope with it. This was succinctly expressed by Handy (1989) who described the flexible workforce of the future as being one which would be half the size of previous ones, might be paid twice the salary but would be given three times the work. Handy's figures may not be entirely accurate, but their direction certainly is, and they indicate the stress and insecurity placed on those both within and without work. This also spills over into ill-health, decreased feelings of well-being and poorer quality of life at home. In the UK, Lampard (1994), for instance, has shown that being insecurely employed when getting married is correlated with a higher risk of subsequent divorce, while Bailyn et al. (1996) suggest that these deleterious effects impact not just upon individuals and home life, but also upon company productivity as well. Finally, in the USA, Merva and Fowles (1992) (quoted in Rifkin, 1996, p. 178) found that a 1 per cent rise in unemployment was correlated with a 5.6 per cent increase in death by heart attack, and a 3.1 per cent increase in death from strokes. Their estimate was that in the 1990-2 period, over thirty-five thousand extra deaths could be attributed to higher unemployment. High levels of insecurity, it is clear, are not good for you.

Institutional effects A major problem, then, with flexibility in a market situation is that in generating greater risk, it breeds greater insecurity. This may be unpleasant, threatening, even personally damaging, yet it


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is made doubly bad when the system works to direct risk and its effects onto only one section of the population. As Elliot and Atkinson (1999, p. x) argue the unloading of risk on to ordinary people is inherently objectionable. It requires them to live their lives in a permanent, all-pervasive atmosphere of insecurity. This insecurity is not an accidental, regrettable by-product of the functioning of the freemarket system. It is central to the system's successful operation.

One particularly strong example of the disproportionate unloading of risk is given by Burchell et al. (1999), who in a study of the effects of flexibility on jobs, found that the organizations they studied made largely unconditional demands on workers' loyalty, while their own promises on job security were conditional not only on economic uncertainty, but also on the strategically avoidable - managerial search for greater efficiencies. As they say (p. 65) redundancy is no longer a last resort in the face of economic downturns, but a tool which is increasingly used, at any point in the economic cycle, by managers who are constantly searching for cost savings.

It is little wonder then that this unloading of risk leads not only to employee insecurity, but to a deep distrust of the management of the organization, for as they point out (p. 61) employees are only too well aware that the unconditionality of demands and the conditionality of promises mean that workers are required to be totally committed to organisational objectives, yet are readily disposable.

When this happens, principles of trust, loyalty and mutual commitment become difficult to sustain. Indeed, Sennett (1998, p. 25) quotes John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor, as arguing against employees becoming committed to an organization, for, as he says, organizational loyalty becomes a trap when

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we live in an economy where 'business concepts, product designs, competitor intelligence, capital equipment, and all kinds of knowledge have shorter credible life spans.' Yet, while the effects of flexibility arrangements may still favour the organization, the consequences for it can still be very damaging. Ignoring for the moment the lack of any ethical perspective in the following, Burchell et al. (1999) argue that the human resources of a company can be 'exhausted', in much the same way as farmers cause soil erosion and exhaustion when they press too hard for increased productivity. There is only so much, then, that can be expected from a resource, so much that can be extracted, before diminishing returns begin to set in. As they ask (p. 62) if managers in the manufacturing and service sectors continue to exhaust their human resources - through job insecurity and work intensification - how long will it be before such practices cease to yield further increases in productivity?

They continue the analogy by urging that, just as environmental scientists must point out the damage done to the natural environment through its overexploitation, so social scientists must point out how insecurity and intensification damage the social environment. Furthermore, because such injurious effects rarely appear on a company's balance sheet, there is the real risk of an occurrence of what economists refer to as 'The Tragedy of the Commons', where organizations attempt to externalize costs by offloading burnt-out workers and taking on fresher and less damaged recruits. Yet this is terribly short-sighted. Even omitting the immorality of such actions for a moment, the long-term effects of this to a society's workforce are extremely harmful, and will eventually affect the organization's productivity. As Burchell et al. say (ibid., p. 63), the consequence of this is a form of Gresham's Law - 'as bad labour practices drive out good'. This is the long term; the short term may be not much better. Burchell et al. (p. 55) describe how job insecurity actually hits productivity in two different ways. First, and perhaps expectedly, it has depressing effects on morale and motivation. But second, it also means that, as one senior manager told them


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Line managers are spending an awful lot of time trying to improve worker morale; holding staff meetings, listening to the fears and worries of the workers and trying to reassure them. If worker morale could be improved, then the line managers' time could be more profitably spent in improving the provision of the company's services.

Ethical effects upon the person The above is largely a description of the pragmatic consequences of flexible working. However, a striking and original ethical analysis has been made by Sennett (1998), who argues that the consequences of work in 'the new capitalism' corrode the characters of those who have to live with it. He identifies a number of ways in which this occurs. A first concern is the reduction in the stability of either one's character or in the system of ethics one holds. This is driven, Sennett suggests, by the constant need for change in society, and in particular by 'impatient capital' - the desire for a rapid return on money. This kind of demand leads to the creation of human beings whose overriding characteristic is their ability to adjust and change to suit current conditions. However, this has dangerous consequences for society. One in particular is that it prevents the parent from offering the 'substance of his work life as an example to his children of how they should conduct themselves ethically.' (p. 21). How, asks Sennett, can husband and wife protect family relations from succumbing to the same kind of short-term behaviour required in business, the 'meeting mindset', the same weak loyalty and commitment found in a world of work composed of episodes and fragments. In the world of work, loyalty itself is a weakness. Yet its absence in the social world corrodes the essential values of trust and commitment, and its effects upon family life can therefore be profound. This new capitalist world, then, demands the elevation of flexibility, risk and novelty above routine and above stability. In this kind of world, previous experience at work becomes not only valueless but an actual impediment to success. Similarly,

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demands for complex skills are more likely to require the acquisition of new theoretical bases rather than any addition to previously learned ones. In this situation, the new is prized, the old is devalued and practice for the long term, for reflection on, and refinement of, previous values and behaviours, is less and less required. When this happens, the long-term values upon which personal and social ethics need to be based are corroded. So while flexibility normally implies freedom, in its incarnation under present forms of capitalism it instead produces instability. It does this, firstly, because it is based upon discontinuous reinvention, preventing any building out from past experience. Moreover, because it relies upon flexible specialization, it means that the outside world determines what is required, reducing still further any personal input into the work process. Finally, because it devolves responsibility, it also devolves blame when things go wrong. For those at the apex of the organization, disorder and fragmentation are the motors of change which generate their power and profit. For those at the bottom, however, these corrode their character, leaving them unable to build a life narrative which provides either a personal stability, or which can be utilized as an example to the next generation. This life narrative is also corroded by the new forms of work experienced. Where these are largely automated and computerized, people are distanced from the work itself, for they push buttons, they call up charts and figures but they do not understand the work, for it is not part of them. As one baker said of his computerized, automated ovens (p. 70) 'I go home, I really bake bread, I'm a baker. Here I punch buttons.' And what is doubly worrying is that, counter to what Marx may have said, these workers (at least those who have no experience of real baking, real work) are not alienated: they are simply indifferent. Not only then is stability of a life narrative and a personal ethic undermined, but so also is any richness, any depth of experience. Now work is easy, immediate and superficial. Little effort is required, one does not have to try, and as this becomes part of the warp and woof of character, so the ability to deal with the hard things of life becomes atrophied.


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As the life narrative is corroded, so also is the work ethic, for this depends at least in part upon the existence of organizations which are stable enough for people to practise delayed gratification. Yet just as loyalty makes no sense in a world where it would be a career weakness, the same goes for delayed gratification. As Sennett argues 'it becomes absurd to work long and hard for an employer who thinks only about selling up and moving on.' What is then created is the postmodern individual - 'a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved' (S. Rushdie, quoted in Sennett, 1998, p. 133). This is an individual who has no base, no meaning, no continuous personal narrative, no possible attachment to long-term ethical values, for such a person never becomes, but must always change to suit the conditions. The result of this, inevitably, is Rorty's (1989) ironic man. Such people are, he says (pp. 73-4) never quite able to take themselves seriously because [they are] always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies, and thus of their selves. Now while objectivity is a desirable attribute in any rational and fair determination of problems, such acute detachment goes too far. It provides no motivation, no authority, no reason to do or create anything. It anaesthetizes the individual to society's problems, it destroys the bonds of community, it creates a society of moral apathy. As Sennett says (ibid., p. 146) The system radiates indifference. It does so in terms of the outcomes of human striving, as in winner-take-all markets, where there is little connection between risk and reward. It radiates indifference in the organisation of absence of trust, where there is no reason to be needed. And it does so through re-engineering of institutions in which people are treated as disposable. Such practices obviously and brutally diminish the sense of mattering as a person, of being necessary to others.

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Societal effects Sennett's analysis makes the connection between personal and societal effects only too apparent - and also produces a bleak prognosis if such organizational arrangements continue, for these dramatically weaken the structure and stability of contemporary societies. Perhaps the most remarkable way in which they translate lies in the manner in which these changes have attacked a major stabilizing force in society - an optimistic, hard-working, career-oriented middle class. Now, until quite recently, bluecollar workers were the group most threatened by major occupational changes, and national attempts to niche-market at the hitech end of the market continue to leave them exposed. However, current exercises in company 'downsizing' through automation and computerization have made redundant much of the traditional work of the middle class as well. Furthermore, flexible specialization has increased to cope with the vagaries of changing consumer demands, traditional bureaucracies have therefore largely disappeared and with them has also gone the career path, a distinguishing middle-class characteristic. As Rifkin (1996, p. 41) says of American workers 'for the first time, it is dawning on them that productivity gains often lead not to more leisure, but to unemployment lines.' It is not surprising, then, if many middle class feel betrayed by these changes. After all, they were the loyal citizens, the loyal consumers, the loyal workers who voted Reagan and Thatcher into power, and then Blair and Clinton, only to see the market order espoused by both sets of politicians destroy their most prized possession, the career path. One should not underestimate how dramatic this has been upon people's lives, and how much this threatens the very order and stability of society itself. Elliot and Atkinson (1999, p. 128) do not exaggerate when they suggest that an outsider might be forgiven for imagining the country has been under the tutelage of a fundamentalist-Marxist junta determined to 'smash the kulaks'.

Once again, this points up that the free market has no loyalties, privileges no group of workers and consumes and destroys that


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which it needs to consume and destroy in the pursuit of profits. It is why one finds a surprising confluence of opinion over the years on the dangers of a vision of life which concentrates on the economic and the monetary. This ranges from Keynes (1929) (quoted in Elliot and Atkinson, 1999, p. 230) who hoped that the day would come when the pursuit of money for itself could be viewed as a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semipathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

all the way through to George Soros (1998), the multibillionaire, arguing that capitalism needs to be controlled by a wider democratic and political spirit, global community and legislative framework, if it is not to eat its own children and destroy the stability within society which it needs for its own continuance. Thus not only do current market forces fracture the middle class: they create rising inequalities in society, as those in meaningful and well-paid work are increasingly divided off from those who are casualized, reduced to low-pay, low-skill occupations and are increasingly insecure and unhappy. The consequences, as mentioned above, may well be Mutton's (1996) '40/30/30' society, where only 40 per cent of the workforce have secure employment. The result of this may be exacerbation of the current situation in the USA, where eight million people live in gated communities, one in five live in developments protected by security guards, with the remainder faced with the prospect of increased crime, family breakdown and a social authoritarian state. Such pessimistic conclusions are not just for the USA: a Mori poll in 1995 in the UK found that by a majority of five to one people expected life to be worse for their offspring than for themselves.

Conclusions - revisiting history In 1991, Fukuyama declared with The End of History that history was indeed over. He was stating what many probably felt but had not vocalized in quite such triumphalist and parochial fashion:

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that liberal democracy as a form of government, and free-market capitalism as a form of economic organization, were now supreme. Certainly, Communism as a form of political and social organization was no longer a contender. It was easy, then, in the same moment, to think that any left-wing criticisms of liberal-democratic capitalism must also be fundamentally flawed and fundamentally rejectable. Indeed, this may help to explain why not only has little subsequently contradicted Fukuyama's description, but his ideological thesis of the inevitability and the acceptability of such events also seems to have gone largely unchallenged in policy circles. In its wake, global free trade has been pursued with almost missionary zeal by organizations like the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the IMF, and nation-state loans are premised upon the dismantling of protectionist policies and the embrace of the global market. When the opposition has been so resoundingly crushed, the extremes of the victor's claims can be practised unopposed. We have seen that these global developments have major implications for the provision of welfare, and for education in particular. Governments are not there to deliver welfare services directly: instead, they are there to direct and monitor them, internal markets being used to impel 'producers' to improve their 'products' in order to attract new 'customers', and to retain the old ones. Indeed, governments should not really be in these 'businesses' at all: the private sector should provide them, and government should merely set benchmarks and quality standards, and monitor the achievement of these standards. In such a way is the 'hollowing out' or 'dispersal' of state functions achieved, as governments spend their time attempting to ride the waves of the global free market. Yet we have also seen the results of such policies: on the one hand, a dramatically increased policy control, on the other an increasingly insecure and vulnerable workforce, with all the social problems that ensue from this. The result, particularly in the USA, but increasingly elsewhere, begins to resemble a powder keg. Rifkin (1996, p. 209) quotes the words of George Dismukes, serving a sixteen-year sentence for murder, who expresses this anger and resentment:


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Millions of people in this land languish wasted, underachieving . . . society has no use for them outside, so it pays to lock them out of sight, without opportunity or spiritual rehabilitation . . . I say to you, the smug and contented: watch o u t . . . our numbers are enlarging . . . building bigger and better prisons does not begin to [resolve] the reasons behind the problems and madness.

This could be dismissed as simply the bitterness of the convicted, but the same message of the corrosive effects of unmediated markets, of the triumph of the private sector over the public, comes from more authoritative voices. Thurow (1996, pp. 24650), for instance, looking back at American history, draws two conclusions from his study. One is that a capitalism restrained by a vigorous democratic government worked: 'The potential conflict between capitalistic power and democratic power did not explode.' A second is that the use of 'survival-of-the-fittest' versions of capitalism do not work. The extreme versions that existed in the 1920s led to the Great Depression of the 1930s, and governments had to intervene to save both society and the market itself. National stability and quality of life have then not been created by the embrace of bigger and more aggressive markets, but by the existence of democratic governments with teeth. Stability is provided by the reassurance that democratic government will be employed to reduce excessive economic inequalities created by capitalism. Any society which is fixated upon a vision of the future which extends to no more than a concern for money and profit is in danger of destroying those qualities and those structures which are necessary for the creation of such wealth. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Roosevelt, describing in his inaugural address how a society might be restored which had this larger vision, argued that 'The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit' (quoted in Elliot and Atkinson, 1999, p. 230). It is just surprising how much of this seems to have been forgotten. It seems, then, that history may be repeating itself, with nation states signing on for a form of unrestrained economic organization which brings in its train the problems of previous generations, as

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well as those described in the last two chapters. Part of the remedy to Fukuyama's suggestion that history has come to an end lies precisely in returning to that history, and examining the lessons that were learned, only to be forgotten. A first must be to replace the combination of control and fragmentation at the present time, with a reconsideration of the role in society of not only rights, but duties as well. The next chapter will propose a symbiotic blend of rights and duties which points towards a form of community, but which does not possess the incipient authoritarianism of some communitarian suggestions. Another project must be built upon the recognition that, in an age of the dominating forces of state, market and managerialism, the nurturing of concepts and structures which would balance their excesses must be given some distance from them. Chapter 9 will then interrogate a concept which has a long history in Western society, but has been neglected until quite recently. This is the concept of'civil society'. One particular conception of it will be proposed as a site for the development of the kinds of values proposed in this book. A conclusion of this chapter on civil society will, however, be that while education is potentially an ideal site for this, it has been contaminated by precisely those forces which it needs to counter. This being the case, the final chapter of the book will propose a number of changes, both in education and society as a whole, which are necessary for the realization of its role.

Chapter 8

Getting the balance right: duty as a core ethic in the life of educators

Introduction - the call for community and duty So far then this book has described the respective roles of the state, the market and managerialism in directing educational agendas within a global context, and has suggested a paradoxical world of increased control and increased fragmentation. The confluence of these forces has led to the need for a greater sense of meaning, and as part of this, of increased demands for expanded notions of community and duty. The current emphasis has a number of different roots, though, as argued above, it is expressed most forcefully in the arguments of virtue theorists, communitarians and character educators. This chapter will suggest that there are genuine dangers in adopting the concept from these perspectives. Instead of a democratic inclusivity, they may generate an initially comforting but ultimately authoritarian exclusivity. Furthermore, they may fail to appreciate the symbiotic relationship which, within any community, duty has with the concept of rights. Nevertheless, there are still strong arguments at both theoretical and practical levels for a concept of duty as a core ethic transcending parochial issues, which nests the concept within different levels of concern and community and which points ultimately to global conceptions of ethics. This chapter, then, will describe the problems to be encountered in this area, but also describes a concept of duty which articulates with a wider democratic conception of'society'.

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Rights and duties The last three hundred years, with the movement described by Marshall (1950) from civil and political to social rights, has probably seen greater access to rights and freedom than in any other period. Yet the exercise of such rights has its consequences. As Boulding (1989) suggested, we do not live on a cowboy world, where we may act and consume without thought of the effects. The freer we are, the more we exercise rights, the more we need to be concerned about the effects of these upon others. We live, not on a cowboy world, but on a spaceship world, where our actions affect the rights and needs of others, human and non-human, living and still to come. Inevitably, then, the exercise of rights points to the need to recognize potential duties as well. Such awareness is apparent on both sides of the Atlantic. When Etzioni declared (1993, p. 4) that there needed to be 'a moratorium on the minting of most, if not all, rights', he based this call upon the belief that (1997, p. xvii) 'societies have lost their equilibrium, and are heavily burdened with antisocial consequences of excessive liberty.' This concern with communal health, and of the individual's contribution to it, has become increasingly important over the last two decades. In what is for many an age of increasing societal breakdown, calls for greater civic responsibility appeal to politicians and electorate alike. In the UK, Selbourne (1997, p. 108) suggested that the most urgent question of our time is not what it was a century ago, for then it was concerned with how to 'alleviate or end the inequalities and injustices to be found within the civic order'. Now, by contrast, it is the question of 'how to protect and maintain the civic order itself. Selbourne's readiness to downgrade questions of inequalities and injustice has echoes in Etzioni's call for a moratorium on the 'minting of rights', and many of Etzioni's ideas have become popular with New Labour in the UK. Some of this has emerged, through policy statements by a variety of ministers, as a call for greater responsibility by individuals to their communities, and is also expressed by government advisers like Barber (1996), in his

Getting the balance right

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call for school-parent contractual agreements on their joint responsibilities. There is then a real need to draw out the implications of adopting any particular concept of duty, not only because what is adopted largely defines the ethical and managerial parameters within which educators work, but also because an understanding of the symbiotic relationship between rights and duties makes it clear that a society and its contributing institutions like schools both need to function properly. Further, the concept of duty transcends individual and society, and points once more towards a concept of ethics and responsibility at a global level. This chapter, then, will argue that current forms of the concept of duty are problematic, and suggest the kinds of questions which need to be asked to resolve this issue.

Defining 'duty' 'Duty' is derived from a number of different ethical and political theories, yet those raised upon a social-democrat platform of legislative improvement may simply balk at this debate, it being so strongly linked with theories of social and political conservatism. Even a cursory examination of UK educational history reveals a system shot through with working-class values of submission and deference, and upper-class values of superiority and noblesse oblige, allied to a version of Christianity tied into the societal hierarchy described above. Theistic obligation then became a cover and an excuse for secular, class-based domination. Perhaps, though, another reason why appeals to duty and personal responsibility are regarded with suspicion is the perception that they may be no more than one strategic element by one middle-sized nation state in a larger policy of competing in a global market place, and the moral fabric of society would then be a manipulable item in the quest for better economic performance. Now, while financial prosperity is a precondition for funding citizens' rights and privileges, it is not hard to see why people might be suspicious of politicians who seem to be appro-

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priating the term for purposes very different from the reinvigoration of social and political life. So, for those who do not accept that duty stems from social hierarchies, religious obedience or economic necessity, the concept might be rejected before it is properly considered, and attention paid instead to the more congenial questions of individual autonomy and struggles within society for greater freedom.1 In educational terms, the participative rights of parents, children and teachers in the process of schooling might then seem more attractive than those to do with their duties (e.g. Bottery, 1992). Yet the concept of duty need not be the preserve of the economic pragmatist, nor the political conservative. Marshall (1950), for example, was adamant that the development of the concept of citizenship implied not only rights but duties and responsibilities as well, while Etzioni (1993) states that one of the explicit purposes of his book is to retrieve notions of duty and responsibility from being (p. 13) 'the political slogans of archconservatives and the right wing'. Furthermore, contract theorists have long seen duty as a core element in the conceptualization of any healthy society, the acceptance of a contract necessarily implying both rights and duties (see Kymlicka, 1993). Finally, Kantian notions of duty are founded not upon tradition but reason, duty deriving from a moral law we give to ourselves as autonomous beings, founded upon the principle of universalization. There is no reason then to believe that duty is conceptually linked to conservatism. Why then does it tend to be seen in this light?

Liberal failures To understand present difficulties with the concept of duty one must look beyond conservative accounts, because it is largely the jettisoning of this concept by other viewpoints - particularly liberal thinkers - that has allowed it to be appropriated by the political Right. For some radical liberals (e.g. Nozick, 1974) duty amounts to little more than the preservation of an 'umpire state' in which individuals pursue personal life projects, without aggression from either individuals, organizations or the state itself, for


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'any more extensive state will violate a person's rights not to be forced to do certain things, and is unjustified' (p. x). Yet the pursuit of the good society, argues Etzioni (1993), is rather like riding a bicycle. To keep moving forward, you have to veer a little to one side, a little to the other: progress can only be maintained by constantly adjusted bilateral movement. Yet because Western societies have been captivated by liberal ideology for so long, Etzioni argues, society's bike has veered dangerously to one side and is in danger of overbalancing. Liberalism, then, presents only half of the picture; and for a society to embrace it as a full account of the path to societal health is damagingly misconceived. One then needs to ask what liberalism offers, and what it omits from its picture of society and the individual. A first misconception, then, in much liberal thinking is a reductionist picture of social relations. We have already seen how Milton Friedman (1962, p. 13) talked of society consisting of nothing more than households - 'a collection of Robinson Grusoes', and of how (p. 33) children could be thought of as consumer goods, consumers having the freedom 'to buy . . . the services of children'. His model of humanity, like that of other radical liberals, is that of the self-interested egoist, social existence being one of barter and exchange. Yet by viewing humanity in this way, he fails to consider, or interprets in reductionist terms, richer areas of human activity such as commitment, caring and friendship, and the damage to society, if such a view is enacted, is incalculable. Both reductionism and egoism are implicated in the liberal's assumption of the possibility of individual self-formation. They are also implicated in the liberal espousal of negative liberty, where freedom is defined as independence of the individual from interference by others. This suggests that individual isolation, autonomy and project creation are the key criteria and ingredients of the 'good society'. Yet by viewing people in these terms, liberalism fails to refer to the social relations within which they are formed, and through which they enjoy their rights and freedoms. In so doing, it fails to describe the real life - and formation - of individuals. As Sullivan (1982, p. 173) argues

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Education, policy and ethics Outside a linguistic community of shared practices, there would be biological homo sapiens as logical abstraction, but there could not be human beings. This is the meaning of the Greek and medieval dictum that the political community is ontologically prior to the individual. The polis is, literally, that which makes man, as human being, possible.

No man or woman, then, is an island, or a Robinson Crusoe. Individuality and autonomy cannot be enjoyed without reference to, and bedded within, social relations and particular social contexts, and while society cannot exist without its individuals, it is just as clear that individuals cannot exist without their society. As Etzioni (1997, p. 26) remarks Social thinking has to cease viewing communal attachments as cannonballs chained to inmates' legs, needed to maintain their stability but 'encumbering'. The social fabric sustains, nourishes, and enables individuality rather than diminishes it. Liberals, then, who fail to conceptualize adequately personal and social interdependence, fail to realize that individual rights are sustained by reciprocal duties to the community. In so doing, while they may feel that they are advancing the cause of rights, they in fact damage their cause (and their society), for they fail to describe the conditions of duty needed to support these rights.

Fifty years of getting the balance wrong Rights and duties, then, should not be seen as in opposition. The question for societies should rather be: '/$• there a correct balance of emphasis between rights and duties, such that rights are sustained and enjoyed, but duties are also emphasized and accepted?" While this is a complex and difficult question, societal health depends upon its correct determination. Furthermore, this conceptualization of duty - as part of a necessary and symbiotic relationship with rights - makes it clear that the major ethical and political arguments over the last 50


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years in western societies between social democrats and freemarket liberals need to be cast in a new light. Both, it can be argued, have led to an unbalanced assertion of rights, with consequent damage to the concept of duty, and to the stability of society. Thus, free-market liberals have criticized social democrats for creating welfare states which have reduced people's personal initiative and responsibility, yet which have led to claims for greater rights. In so doing, they have claimed, welfare states have actually created dependency cultures within which 'big-brother' state bureaucracies have usurped both the rights and the duties of individuals. In response, social democrats have accused free-market liberals of reducing the citizen to a caricatured 'rational economic man' whose motivation stems purely from aggrandizing self-interest. In so doing they have provided a one-dimensional portrait of humanity (which some have come to accept and act out), and which has inevitably damaged the social fabric of society because it does not see a need to sustain such fabric. The free-market liberal is then accused of creating individuals who pursue individual rights, yet who do little to sustain the society which grants such rights. Both social democrat and free-market liberal may then be guilty of the crime of which they accuse the other. Social democrats are accused of creating a state which robs individuals of their rights by its legal demands, and which robs them of their duties by seducing them into surrendering such duties to the state. Free-market liberals are similarly accused of leading to demands for greater rights, while damaging the realization of such rights through the failure to recognize the need for reciprocal duties to sustain them. Thus, not only have they damaged rights, but duties as well, by failing to recognize their necessity. The result has been the creation of a society which has lost the conception of a proper role for duties, and at the same time has seen the continued demand for greater rights in a variety of areas. This has produced a protracted societal malaise, in which feelings of alienation, anomie and disillusionment have been joined by higher crime rates, more legal and punitive measures and a continued absence of communal feeling. The reaction has been a resurgence of movements at philosophical, political and educa-

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tional levels which are having considerable impact upon conceptions of duty. It is time to revisit these three levels again. Philosophical - the resurgence of virtue theory This loss of a proper conception of duty has combined in philosophical circles with a number of other issues to prompt a resurgence of Aristotelian visions of the moral life. Thus, postmodernist doubts that there are objectively existing decontextualized values, combined with a continued antipathy to the idea that ethical statements are merely covers for personal preferences, have both in their own ways suggested the need for a firmer grounding for following particular moral rules. Further, the attempt by John Rawls (1971) to ground an ethics within a decontextualized 'original position' has unleashed a body of writing suggesting its impossibility (see for instance Sandel, 1982; Taylor, 1990; and Maclntyre, 1981). Such attacks attempt to point up the incoherence of the concept of a person separated from any societal and cultural groundedness, which they claim underlies Rawls's conception of the person. Maclntyre, as we have seen, stresses the importance of the community in the moral life of the individual, and this prompts him, drawing heavily on the writings of Aristotle, to suggest that the only way to understand how a person becomes moral is to realize the need to understand a life as a contextualized narrative within a moral tradition, and if this is the case, then particular conceptions of the good will only be discovered when we enter into community relationships whose central bond is 'a shared vision and understanding of goods' (p. 258). Lives, then, are pursued within societal and cultural contexts and are conducted by reference to the history of what virtues that society has promoted, and how that culture has historically grappled with and resolved particular problems. The virtues espoused by that society then act as signposts for individuals in their decision-making, though wisdom garnered from the everyday experience of living must be used to make best sense of them. This is not simple, it is even messy, but it is the reality of the moral life, and by providing such a description, Maclntyre is providing a philosophical underpinning for the


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importance of the community in moral life, and in which duty is a core concept. It is not surprising that one political development is communitarianism. Political - the resurgence of communitarianism Communitarianism not only argues that individuals can only achieve full personal realization through the community, and that they have a duty to contribute to its flourishing: it indicates something much deeper as well. As Taylor (1989) suggests, the community provides the context within which the individual is actually formed. The self, on this account, is created in interaction with others: one cannot be a self on one's own. I am a self only in relation to certain interlocutors . . . a self exists only in ... webs of interlocution, (p. 36)

Such reformulation of social, political and moral life then suggests that the good life is to be defined in and by those central values of a particular society, and that social policy should aim to promote these widely held communal values, while accepting that these have to be intelligently applied in particular contexts. Yet while virtue theorists like Maclntyre, and communitarian writers like Taylor, describe with care the subtleties and nuances of such a position, some populist communitarianism fails this test. Etzioni's moratorium on the minting of rights seems an unnecessary hostage to the illiberal camp; and it is perhaps unsurprising that liberals have suggested that it is the vanguard of a new moral authoritarianism. In an overview of communitarianism Kymlicka (1990) develops such concerns by suggesting that there are three key assumptions to this approach: a b c

that the 'good', and therefore the conception of duty, is defined by what the community takes to be its core values; that these goods and duties should be prioritized over individually chosen goods and duties; that the state should take an active role in implementing such priori tization.

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While Etzioni (1993) explicitly rejects the view that the state should take an active role in developing a concept of duty, suggesting instead that this needs to be the function of civil society, this does not resolve the issue of whether a community should have the right to define certain core values and duties as absolutes for its citizens. It also needs to be asked whether all members of a community will be allowed to define its core values. As Barber (1998, p. 70) argues, the desire for the restoration of lost values encourages the imposition of values on others: 'In the resulting solidaristic community, insiders favor identity over equality as the most precious of all social values and everyone else is left feeling like outsiders.' When, in western societies, many core values have been constructed by white, politically powerful males, while others have been excluded from the process, what is the justification, save historical accident, for the continued prioritization of these values? What if this community is multicultural? Will all be invited to help define the values? Can an accommodation be reached? If not, whose values should be prioritized? Is then the communitarian call for a focus on duty and responsibility simple authoritarianism, and the school just one more link in a chain of state enforcement? Of course, highlighting a concern does not entail its enforcement, nor does asserting a necessary connection and balance between rights and duties necessarily imply authoritarianism. Indeed, it is possible to argue both that rights are valuable because they allow the pursuance of individual projects, and also that a community needs to be actively supported by its members if the pursuance of individual goods is to be possible. If some communitarians overplay the 'duty' hand, this may be a fault with their argumentation, not with the notion of duty itself. Educational - the resurgence of character education Now both virtue theory and communitarianism have important implications for education. Maclntyre (1981, p. 258) clearly spells out how education should impart values: societies must initiate its youth into its moral tradition in the same manner as


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one would teach an apprentice. The consequences for society of not doing this, on this argument, could be catastrophic. Etzioni develops this approach by attempting to spell out the list of values which educators should transmit. Presenting his homely list of preferred values (1993), he suggests (p. 99) The challenge 'Whose values will you teach?' can be readily answered by starting with the myriad values we all share . . . Nobody considers it moral to abuse children, rape, steal (not to mention commit murder), be disrespectful of others, discriminate, and so on.

This level of generality makes it hard to argue with Etzioni's list, yet when he moves to specifics - as he must do to give his list any real substance - the problems arise. For instance, when he recommends for the youth of communities 'A Year of National Service' after high school, one of the places for this being in the armed forces, one wonders what Quakers will make of it. Other problems arise when one examines the very nature of the approach, for as Carr (1996) points out, it in effect suggests that the most prevalent view of moral development for the last two decades is fundamentally flawed. This, the Kohlbergian paradigm (Kohlberg, 1981), suggests that moral development is achieved by individuals acquiring universalizable moral canons. However, Aristotle - and Maclntyre and Etzioni - suggest that moral development is to be achieved by specifying and inculcating particular virtues needed to achieve a 'good' life, and the intelligent application of these to particular contexts. Moral education in schools should then not be based upon teaching a process of thinking for autonomy and choice, but instead upon an apprenticeship system, within a strong conception of society's values, through the promotion and practice of the virtues which achieve these. So, once again, authoritarianism does seem to raise its head.

Application in practice In the USA, where character education is most popular, it has already been noted that there is a wide variety of approaches to

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implementation, ranging from the critical to the unabashed indoctrinatory. One moves from the developmental strain of organizations such as the ASGD (1988), who suggest that the list of character virtues should be 'Disagreeing respectfully, moral problem solving, choosing wisely, empathy development, saying "no"', to the more traditional approach of Washington, who advocate Honesty, integrity and trust, respect for self and others, responsibility for personal actions and commitments, self-discipline and moderation, diligence and a positive work ethic, respect for law and authority, healthy and positive behaviour, family as the basis for society. (Washington Basic Education Act, 1998, quoted in DeRoche and Williams, 1998, p. 21) through to Kilpatrick's approach (1992), which argues that schools have much to learn from the army, and this is in part because of the army 'being a hierarchical, authoritarian, and undemocratic institution, which believes in its mission, and is unapologetic about its training programmes' (p. 228). There are character educators like Lickona (1991) who argue for a rational element to character education, but the movement still seems prey to the non-rational and indoctrinatory, precisely because the rational seems an extra, optional element. In the UK, the movement has been slower, more guarded, but seems to have moved in the same direction. When the SCAA held a conference in 1996 on Education for Adult Life, delegates to the conference agreed that a Forum should be set up and given a remit with two aims: - to discover whether there are any values upon which there is agreement across society; - to decide how best society in general, and SCAA in particular, might support schools in the task of promoting pupils' spiritual, moral, social and cultural development. (Talbot and Tate, 1997, p. 2) They continue:


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It did not take long for the 150 members of the Forum to decide that the idea that there are no shared values is nonsense. Almost as soon as they considered the question, they came up with a number of values to which they believed everyone would subscribe, irrespective of their race, ethnic group, religion, age, gender or class. These values included friendship, justice, freedom, truth, self-respect, and respect for the environment, amongst many others, (ibid., pp. 2-3)

How are these values to be used? It is important to note the very strong caveats that are stated on p. 5 of the same article: The Forum agreed firstly, that there is no agreement on the source of value . . . Secondly, the Forum agreed that there is no agreement on the way in which the values should be applied in behaviour . . . and because the Forum did not even attempt to determine any ordering among the values they identified . . . the Forum's work has not solved the problems of moral conflict.

What we have then, is an agreement about the existence of agreed values, but no agreement on the source of these values, on how they should be applied in behaviour nor in how they should be ordered. Some might say that these last three are precisely the issues that any moral education worthy of the name needs to tackle. Yet, Talbot and Tate go on to state (p. 8) that 'the Forum recommended that SGAA produce for schools guidance on the promotion of pupils' spiritual, moral, social and cultural development.' While they state that the guidance should be 'flexible enough for schools to adapt it to their own circumstances' they also note that 'it should encourage rigour and a whole school approach, and it should encourage partnership between schools, parents, and the local community.' The problem is that with no guidance on source, application or order, the central questions and concerns of moral education seem to be excluded, and what will eventuate are a series of either extremely bland - and hence pretty useless - guidelines such as that 'honesty is a good thing'; or that the particular ordering, application and source of values will be left to each school and its community - with all the inherent dangers of a non-rational

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communitarianism, an approach which locates the problems to be dealt with largely or exclusively at this level, instead of dealing with many of the wider issues addressed in this book, or one 'guided' by a government with other - economic - agendas on its mind. If liberalism then has difficulties giving due emphasis to the importance of community in general, and duty in particular, there are other philosophies and political ideologies happy to reestablish these; Etzioni's bike may, at least ridden by the likes of Kilpatrick, and potentially by New Labour in the UK, veer dangerously to one side. A balanced concept of duty needs to be sought elsewhere.

Reasserting duty-the philosophic argument This chapter does not argue for a strengthened concept of duty either as a simple reaction to an overemphasis on rights, nor for their curtailment or withdrawal, but rather for a necessary symbiosis between rights and duties, because a society which provides rights will not last for long if duties are not practised as well. There is then a good practical argument for the reassertion of duties. However, there is also a strong philosophic argument for their reassertion, based upon the idea that the assertion of particular rights logically and necessarily entails the acceptance and practice of particular duties as well. This does not necessarily mean, however, that there is just one duty for each right: there may be a series of different kinds of duties entailed by the recognition of the moral validity of just one kind of right. Shue (1980), for example, argues that accepting that a right is valid entails not one but three different kinds of duties, viz.: 1 2 3

the duty to avoid personally depriving someone of that right; the duty to protect an individual from being deprived of that right by someone else, or some set of social arrangements; the duty to aid individuals who are deprived of access to that right.


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Now duty (1) may be more compelling than duties (2) and (3), because breaking duty (1) means directly breaking commitment to the right in question. Breaking (2) or (3) may seem less compelling, being sins of omission rather than sins of commission. Nevertheless, a firm commitment to a right still seems morally to entail that everything reasonable is done to ensure the realization of that right. Where legal, personal, professional and political commitments cohere together, the strength of duties (2) and (3) may be very compelling indeed. Thus, taking an educational example, assume that as an educator I believe that everyone within this society should have access to a good education. If I do believe in this right, then the argument suggests that I must: a b

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ensure that as an educator I do the best job possible in providing individuals in my charge with a good education; do my best to protect individuals from those who would deprive them of a good education (and that would mean supporting attempts at improvement, criticizing poor educational practices, protecting students from the consequences of practices by guardians which may damage their chances of a good education and expressing criticism of poor policy by government); where necessary take action - legal, personal, professional and political - to help those deprived of such a right to enjoy it.

Now clearly there are limits to such duties, for if taken too literally, this argument could imply that one's life is spent in protecting the needy and oppressed; yet there are other demands, there is only so much that one person can do. Where the line is drawn is largely a matter of individual conscience and judgement: there can be no hard and fast rules. Having said that, this argument still has a number of important implications. It suggests that educators have both rights and responsibilities, and their responsibilities are more extensive than normally conceived. It suggests a form of society which is light years away from one in which individuals need do little more than pursue individual

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projects and rights, or one devoted to the enlargement of a country's share of a global market. Instead, it suggests an interdependent society in which the recognition of any rights entails acceptance of corresponding duties. And this, unpleasantly for some, means that once general rights are acknowledged, and their concomitant duties accepted, then noninterference is not an option: we have a duty to become involved, to expand our circle of concern. The acceptance of duties to others also implies a duty to exercise one's own rights. Take, for example, the assertion that educators have a right to participate in educational decisionmaking. This assertion may be made, not for reasons of management expediency (it is easier to get a decision implemented if people feel they have been party to it), but because people affected by a process should have the right to participate in determining what goes into and what results from that process (see Bottery, 1992). Educators, then, have a right to participate in management, and other stakeholders must ensure that this is possible. However, it must be argued that educators not only have participatory rights but participatory duties as well, and that these derive from another set of stakeholders' rights - those of children. Thus, if children have the right to an education which equips them for participation as future citizens, then educators (and other stakeholders) have a duty to ensure that this occurs, and this entails that educators must not fail to work towards a more inclusive society, or to participate in action which leads to this, because by failing to do so they deprive children of the right to an appropriate civic education. Both their action in participation, and the example they provide to their students in this participation, are therefore essential parts of this. This argument suggests that educators cannot avoid some level of personal, institutional and political involvement in the realization of others' rights. Educators' duties, then, necessarily entail a much wider conception of their role than either they - or many in society - might want to conceive. But it means a wider conception for other stakeholders as well. We have no option, when we see rights being withheld or abrogated, but to become involved in their realization or restitution. So, despite the caveat that there


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are practical limits to such duties, they impose a burden of obligation - and potential conflicts between duties - which is also light years away from present conceptions of the educator. If a characteristic of many professionals is their focus upon the individual, personal and the here-and-now (see Bottery, 1998; Bottery and Wright, 2000), this conception demands a real expansion in their personal view of how far their obligations of care should extend.

Global conceptions of duty This is precisely the kind of argument to give real impetus to Peter Singer's (1981) notion of an expanding circle of ethics, for an argument which begins from a premiss of personal rights and duties, and moves to conceptualize the effecting of these rights and duties at communal and societal levels cannot stop there, but requires one to consider the rights of others, and one's duties to others, beyond the confines of the nation state. It is perhaps unsurprising that debates about duty and responsibility are located primarily at personal, communal and societal levels: we do, after all, still live largely in a world dominated by nation states who attempt to define political, social, even moral existence, in their own terms. Yet times are changing. Earlier chapters have indicated that the globalization of economic, political and cultural processes means that nation states increasingly find themselves, and their definitions of political, social and ethical reality, threatened from below as smaller communities strive for greater self-determination, and from above as supranational bodies make decisions which constrain individual national agendas. We begin to move from a world constituted simply of nation states, to a more global political order, in which the former are encompassed by, rather than define, the parameters of agendas. And while some of these supranational bodies are predicated upon a value-free market order, ethical concepts are increasingly conceptualized not only at personal, communal and national, but at global levels as well. It might be suggested that by doing this, concepts like duty are exploded beyond comprehension or control. This parallels

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debates regarding the location of democratic concepts, which Held (1993) describes as moving from the notion of democracy as situated within the small community and city state, conducted through direct participation, to its location within the nation state, undergirded by notions of representative democracy, and on (he suggests) to global conceptions which transcend the primacy of statist ideas. Such development, however, is not simple: the concept of democracy changes, as do its attendant institutions. Yet, as with global conceptions of duty, this should not prevent one from wrestling with the implications for its realization. 'Duty', like 'democracy', becomes a difficult concept to locate. At which level is duty to be given? At the interpersonal, communal, societal or global? And which duties are to be paramount? The answer to the first question is almost certainly one which sees human beings having different layers of loyalty, which ultimately must articulate with one another, though at present humanity struggles to describe and agree to layered loyalties which finish at the level of the state. The answer to the second will not be answered until a vision of the future is clear. Nevertheless, the promise is considerable: for it suggests the development of agreed universal human rights, and an ethical dimension finally linked to economic, political and cultural global interdependence, which begins to redress present market excesses. There are then both pragmatic and ethical reasons for invoking the concept of duty, which initially locate the notion with the community to which the individual belongs, but suggest movement beyond it. Indeed, 'community' then becomes defined as the level at which individuals locate the ultimate meaning and validation of their views. At the philosophical level, duty and rights are not polar opposites, but inextricably intertwined, the existence of particular rights necessarily entailing the acceptance of particular duties. Pragmatically, individuals cannot enjoy rights unless the community and the world within which they live are sufficiently healthy to be able to provide them; and it cannot be healthy unless those who comprise the community and the world see it as a duty to ensure that these remain healthy. Finally, and importantly, then, political participation is not an option: it is logically entailed by the acceptance and enjoyment of


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any rights, and it is pragmatically necessary if that society is to survive. When Pericles (quoted in Heater, 1990, p. 4) said that We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business: we say that he has no business here at all.

he may have taken it as self-evident that human beings could only flourish by such close identification with the life of the community. However, the argument can be undergirded by rather more than a simple view of the good life: it is philosophically and pragmatically essential, even if it points to a conception of community many times larger than Pericles' own. Similarly, when Heater (1990, p. 4) tells us that there was a special word reserved for those in Ancient Greece who neglected their duties to the community, and that this word was 'idiot', we can again underpin such a view with both philosophic and pragmatic reasons. Such a person is an idiot, has no business in the human community, precisely because communities cannot survive without those within them recognizing and fulfilling their duties. Duty then truly becomes a core ethic not only in the life of educators but of all those within a community as well.

Notes 1. A quick glance at the index of books in this area tends to bear this out. Most have plenty of references to rights: few have references to duty or responsibility. For example, Kelly's (1995) book, Education and Democracy, has 34 references to rights, but none to duties or responsibilities. It is of interest that when Gaden wrote on the topic of responsibility in 1990, he encountered much the same problem: in his first footnote he points out that Kleinig's (1982) book contains 41 entries on 'autonomy', none on responsibility.


Chapter 9

Education and the discourse of civil society

Introduction Global forces have created contexts within which national governments feel constrained to act in particular ways, and which have led to both the greater control and fragmentation of society. This being the case, it would be unwise to locate any sites for developments which might counter such forces too close to the centre of state apparatus. Similarly, with a rampant global capitalism, and with the continued embrace by the state of private sector ideas like the market and managerialism, the resurgence of a concept of a 'public good' which transcended a consumerist orientation is unlikely to be properly developed if too closely linked to the purposes of either the state or the market. This being the case, this chapter will examine the possibility of developing the principles of a 'civil society', an area which has received increased attention over the last decade, at first by Eastern Europeans as an antidote to Communist authoritarianism, but more recently as a possible means for generating approaches and perspectives for the kind of democratic aspirations described in this book. 'Civil society' has a long and varied history, and this chapter will begin by describing some of that history, before enquiring whether a formulation which links it closely with the educational endeavour can help in countering some of the more negative global and national trends at the present time.

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Six variations of 'civil society' Historically, civil society has been invoked in a variety of contexts, and in terms of present relevance the following six variations seem to be the most important. Civil society as participative citizenry The origins of civil society in Ancient Greek belief (and particularly through the writings of Aristotle) were predicated upon the notion of a civil society coterminous with the state. Teleologically speaking, the end point of individual development was in and through a realization of political life. Family life existed for the sake of necessary human existence: the 'polis' was the end point of human development. Civil society and the state were therefore fused in a common goal and understanding of the end point of human existence. Yet such a conception of civil society would have evoked little enthusiasm, particularly in the United States, over the last twenty to thirty years. From a modern libertarian point of view, such intrusion and interference into the life of the individual would be nothing short of an assault on the right of individuals to decide their own destinies. Moreover, the call - the demand — for an engaged and vigorous participative citizenry met with little enthusiasm after the Second World War in the writings of a political science dominated by the Schumpeterian (1942) vision of the necessary apathy of electorates. It is only recently, with the limitations of other 'thinner' views of society becoming more apparent, that this view has received renewed interest. Civil society as contractual partner Hobbes and Locke in their different ways introduced the notion of a contract between individuals in civil society and their rulers into the political thinking of western societies, and thus clarified to post-medieval minds the possibility of a division of a society into elements, of which a population could award - and therefore take back - the sovereignty it bestowed upon its rulers. Civil

The discourse of civil society

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society here was that element of society which contracted into agreements with rulers; and whether this contract was a pessimistic Hobbesian punitive arrangement, or a more conditional Lockean version, the fact is that this conceptually established a separation of ruler and ruled, established limitations on these rulers and provided a conception of civil society as that which had the right to resist. This site of resistance, the needed counterbalance to other oppressive sectors of society, was to become a central theme of many western versions of civil society. Yet, because, after the Second World War, both the UK and the USA enjoyed a lengthy period of economic prosperity and stability, this probably reduced the perceived need for such a sector. Present problems suggest that it might have more common use once more.

Civil society as the free market Neither of the two previous versions is too concerned with matters of economics and commerce. It was Adam Smith, taking the idea from Adam Ferguson of optimistic results from unanticipated consequences, who developed the argument that the market should be seen as the core mechanism of civil society, where the 'invisible hand' of self-interest provided the 'wealth of nations'. In so doing, Smith suggested that a self-regulating market was the necessary means to both economic progress and social prosperity, and that therefore civil society should be described as a 'marketorganized sphere of private advantage' (Ehrenberg, 1999, p. 97). In so doing, Smith laid the foundations for a theory of civil society which would have four major inheritances for the present day. First, it would, for some, define the range of permissible actions of the state, reducing it to that which facilitated the functioning of the market. Second, it would reinforce the idea that society was constituted of individuals, whose essence was in the manner in which they defined their own goals in life. Third, it would begin the move, so obvious today, in which the discourse of economics has come to take such a centre stage, and at times monopolistic place, in the way western societies evaluate their actions. Last, and perhaps most importantly, it created a powerful moral

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argument that the pursuit of self-interest was actually good for society as a whole. Not only would this return in the late twentieth century with the Reagan-Thatcher era: it would rule out of consideration for a time the very idea that there are such things as 'goods' which transcend individual wishes. Civil society as voluntary parochialism If Adam Smith saw the market as the core of civil society, Tocqueville saw the importance of the market in the way it dissipated power and made people self-reliant and interested and committed to those things which concerned their locality. Tocqueville based his reflections on the positive qualities of the young America as compared with the centralized and statist European powers. He believed that the health of this America was due to its large numbers of voluntary associations, its focus on the local and its dispersion of power. This picture of small-town America is one that most Americans like because it provides a positive self-image of sturdy, self-reliant pioneers, and it is one which confirms libertarian beliefs in the need for a restricted state. It is also appealing to those looking for spaces within society which can counter authoritarian tendencies of the state. It is a perspective which fed into much of the pluralist political science literature after the Second World War. Yet its parochialism may be a real weakness in a globalized age, just as its emphasis on self-reliance may leave societal inequalities untreated. Civil society as deficiency While Adam Smith was not unaware of the dangers of placing the free market at the core of civil society, and Tocqueville underrated them, it was Hegel who took Smith's insights and, accepting that the market makes people behave selfishly and instrumentally towards one another, suggested that the market inevitably produces inequalities. He therefore identified the poverty he saw around him as the inevitable consequence of civil society. Civil society was therefore deficient. This led to the formulation of a theory in which the three spheres of social life as he saw them -


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the family, civil society and the state - were constitutive of different structures of ethical development. If civil society was deficient because it was based on self-interest rather than a higher feeling for humanity, then the state would perform this function. Hegel, then, stands the traditional relationship between the state and civil society on its head. Civil society is now the problem, the state is the solution. It is easy to see how such a line of thought can lead, beyond Hegel, to welfare states, to paternalism and thence on to the one-party state. Hegel takes the same assumptions as Adam Smith, but where Smith can lead to libertarianism, Hegel can lead to authoritarianism.

Civil society as hegemony If Hegel saw the state as the end point of human moral advance, it clearly does not have to be seen like this. He did not see the increase in global monopoly capital, the dramatically increased industrialization of society, the destruction of the craftsman, the conflation of state power with industrial power. But others did. Marx would advance the theory that the state was no more than the tool of the capitalist class and, on this account, civil society was that element of society upon which the state was based. Civil society was then pernicious. It was these kinds of arguments which led neo-Marxist writers like Gramsci (1971) to see civil society as that sector of society within which the dominant (capitalist) class organizes its hegemony - its ability so to control the social and cultural life of a nation that they are unable to see the chains with which they are bound. This last quality of civil society - as hegemonic - is an aspiration of all authoritarian governments, and one which need not be limited to capitalist varieties. As mentioned above, its recent reappearance in the mainstream political discourse of western societies can be traced to its resurgent use in the political discourse of Eastern Europe. As Taylor (1997, p. 66) argues, a central feature of the Communist system was the 'satellization of all aspects of social life to the party', through which all areas of individual and social life would be mobilized in the realization of the party goals. 'Civil society' resulted then from the perceived

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need for dissident movements to counter the hegemonic aspirations and smothering effects of the Communist state. Now this is important, because it highlights a central theme in civil society thought - that 'society is not identical with its political organization' (Taylor, 1997, p. 70), and that there is a need for a counterbalance to other sectors in society, whether this be state, Church, big business or whatever. Taylor further argues that to understand this theme and its power involves an understanding of how different western traditions of thought, such as those described above, have fed into it. These traditions, as Resnick (1997) points out, do not hold nearly so strongly in Eastern Europe, and this he believes is the reason why the notion of civil society was a useful battle-cry before the fall of Communism, but did not have the deep cultural support to sustain it once this was gone.

Three possible models of civil society Such Eastern European concerns mirror those of this chapter though here the concerns are the expanded influence of the state, the commodification of culture, the power of big business and the increase in managerial discourse, and for the need for a reconceptualized education to act as a focal point for an energized civil society. For a western society, at least, these traditions do exist, and because of this the nurturing of such a sector seems a genuine possibility. What form, then, might such a civil society take? Barber (1998) suggests that there are three possible alternatives, the libertarian, the communitarian and the strong democratic, and it is worth spending some time on the examination of each of these, as they lead us to a better understanding of the kind of model of civil society required. The libertarian model This model, initially based upon the market insights of Adam Smith, though also drawing from Tocqueville, polarizes life into the public and the private, the public meaning 'big government' and being 'them', the private being 'us' - 'a domain of free


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individuals who associate voluntarily in various economic and social groupings that are contractual in nature' (Barber, 1998, p. 16). Individual liberty is then the core value, while government is seen as the enemy, the coercer. Now, while this model has the undoubted strength of emphasizing the need for choice and autonomy in any viable conception of civil society, yet there are still profound weaknesses with this account. First, this libertarian model is too 'thin'. In other words, this perspective fails to recognize that individuals are not desert islands, but are at least in part defined by the communities from which they spring. Because of this, it fails to recognize the need for a significant personal commitment to an area of collective or 'public' concern and, in so doing, it fails to understand that a significant level of rights can only be enjoyed if there is countervailing acceptance of responsibility to the society within which such rights are nurtured. Moreover, in a postmodern global age, when certainty and security are that much harder to achieve, the libertarian ideal fails to recognize the yearning for solidarity and community which many people feel. Second, and because this division of life into 'us' and 'them' is so simplistic, too much is poured into the libertarian 'us', and thus permits the inclusion of many forces which clearly have very different agendas from that of the ordinary citizen. Thus, it includes not only the family and social life, but also the realm of economic exchanges as well. This final inclusion, originating when economic exchanges were on a more personal basis, now includes 'big business' as well, and has - and is - used as a sleight of hand, in which the multinational uses the small-scale and nonmonopolistic ideal market situation to cloak its own monopolistic intentions. Thus, when Robert Dole offered Americans a choice of 'trusting the government or trusting the people' (quoted in Barber, 1998, p. 17), by providing only these two alternatives, Dole's 'the people' necessarily included organizations like 'big business'. Yet the history of industries like tobacco, asbestos and the motor car is so riddled with self-interested policies, and actions damaging to the general public, such as to require just as healthy a suspicion of their motives as that of government. This being the case, the libertarian model may act as no real area of

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civic concern, but simply as another avenue by such corporations for generating more consumption of their products. As Barber (p. 72) says Markets are simply not designed to do the things democratic polities or free civil societies do. Markets give us private, not public, modes of discourse: we pay as consumers in currencies of consumption to producers of material goods, but we cannot use this currency when we deal with one another as citizens or neighbors about the social consequences of our private market choices. Third, the libertarian model emphasizes principles of personal liberty to the detriment of a necessary degree of equality. Thus, the libertarian model, linked so closely to the use of markets, necessarily produces unequal outcomes, because in any education market some institutions will be more successful than others, and those students in the less successful institutions will have a poorer education than those in the more successful. Now while market logic dictates that consumers should simply shop around to find the better 'producers', practical logic contradicts this. At the school level, for instance, not all parents have access to the resources, or have the time, to transport their children to the school of their ideal choice. The geography of an area, but, more importantly, the wealth of a 'consumer', generates inequality of opportunity which simply must be seen as unacceptable in any society where it is believed that society has an obligation to its members to ensure as far as possible that there exists a genuine equality of opportunity for each child entering the educational system. Finally, the result of such inequality is the exacerbation of society's 'thinness', for a market mechanism pushes society towards an increasing ghettoization, as children of different classes, cultures or faiths end up going to different schools, with no understanding or empathy for the situation of others. Through failing to recognize the educational and societal benefits of maintaining a policy of equality of opportunity for individuals to mix with different cultures, different racial perspectives, different


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viewpoints, the libertarian/market model lays the foundation for all manner of future social problems. The libertarian model, then, may flag up the need for a concern for individual liberty, but it fails on most other counts.

The communitarian model While the libertarian sees the individual as a rights-bearing rebel who is defined by his or her ability to choose, the communitarian thinks this totally wrong-headed. The human being is rather defined by a given set of social relationships over which we have no choice: we are born Protestant, Jew, Muslim, into communities we had no hand in fashioning. Even the libertarian view of freedom is, they would argue, a product of western thinking: individuality is conditioned by and preceded by these social relations. These communities provide us with identity, sustenance and support: we could not be human beings without them. Furthermore, because such communities supply us with rights, they need our help and our protection: if we wish to enjoy rights, we need to recognize the demands of duty and responsibility as well. This being the case, the libertarian and communitarian have very different concerns. As Barber (1998, p. 26) says Where libertarians worry that state bureaucrats might impose substantive values on free individuals and groups, communitarians fear that the state may be corrosively agnostic and have no guiding values at all.

The communitarian position then consists of a number of interrelated propositions: that there exists a sector beyond the state, informing its practice, where the fundamental values of a society are created and which needs to be nurtured; that it is possible to specify these values by reference to the moral traditions of that society; that in recent times, the rights tradition has been overemphasized, while the responsibility and duty tradition has been de-emphasized; that the enactment of duty and responsibility is necessarily prior to that of rights; and that the essence of such a society should be by normative rather than coercive means.

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As we have seen, there is much to warm to here: without some source of communal identity, the individual is isolated, alienated and without bearings. To this extent, a civil society must have a strong communal element. But there are also dangers, which must lead one to ask whether, while being a necessary condition of civil society, it is sufficient. There would seem to be a number of major weaknesses with the communitarian model. Thus, while the optimistic view sees communitarianism as nurturing and inclusive, it is as easily defined as nurturing through its exclusivity. While this may offer 'a glue' for communities in a fragmented world, it does so by defining others as outside of itself. However, it is all too easy (and for some all too attractive) to define oneself and one's group through such exclusivity. For the democrat, this poses real problems, as democracy is based upon ideas of tolerance, of a celebration of difference, of inclusivity. This communitarian exclusivity, however, may not be necessary. It is, after all, possible to think of a 'nesting' of different levels of community, from the small social group to the global society. There is, then, a real potential antipathy between communitarianism and democracy. While the former may move down a road to parochialism, conformity, paternalism and exclusion, which are all attributes of a movement attempting to define a set of values and inculcate them, democracy has a tendency to undermine these in its pursuit of equality, difference and inclusion. The two are certainly possible, but not easy, bedfellows. Related to this difficulty is the observation by Sennett (1998, p. 143) who suggests that, just as true community should be defined by inciusivity rather than exclusivity, so people are bound together within such communities, not so much by verbal agreement as by verbal conflict, because the scene of conflict becomes a community [where] people learn how to listen and respond to one another even as they more keenly feel their differences.

There can then be no community until differences are acknowledged within. This is why Sennett is so suspicious of some 'managerial' approaches to teamwork. As he argues, because this


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kind of teamwork works from the assumption that all members share a common set of values and a common motivation, and impose this upon the team, in reality it undermines real communication, for it prevents the acknowledgement of differences in power and privilege of team members. Any raising of such differences is then interpreted as disloyalty, as not being the sort of thing a team member does. It is the tyranny of 'Groupthink' (Janis, 1982). As Sennett argues, 'strong bonding between people means engaging over time their differences', and both teamwork and communitarianism may simply fail to see that this is either necessary or even acceptable. The message of necessary disagreement is also the argument of Gutmann and Thompson (1996), who suggest that such disagreement, and its working out, is fundamental to democracy, for only in this way can people with diverse views, beliefs and ways of working learn to live together in the long term. Yet again, communitarianism and democracy can make uneasy bedfellows. Finally, it is important to point out that if much of the impetus for this book has been concern about the attempt by some sectors of society and some ideological discourses to monopolize all societal space, a civil society founded on an extreme communitarianism fits this perfectly. Fundamentalism of any description abhors spaces within society which run counter to its values, and it therefore invariably attempts to monopolize, control and direct these to its aims. If libertarianism has no glue with which to keep society together, the glue of communitarianism can bond a society so tightly that its members are suffocated. A spirit of community may be an essential for a healthy society, but it is a community which must be founded as much upon argumentation, difference and tolerance of others, as it is upon seeking for that which all have in common.

The strong democracy model The two models described so far offer pictures of civil society with very different merits. The libertarian model offers that of voluntarism and non-coercion, but tends to individualism and parochialism; the communitarian model believes in the need for a public

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realm, but has a tendency to define this 'public space' in terms of exclusion or superficial agreement. Both these approaches, then, have their virtues, but neither will suffice in itself. What is required is something that is different from both, though sharing some of their strengths, one which has what Barber (1998, pp. 34— 5) calls a 'strong democratic' perspective. This model would then begin by distinguishing between the public and private realms, the state sector being occupied by government and its institutions, the private sector by individuals and their activities in the market. However, it would also require the existence of a third sector, that of civil society, which was tied explicitly to the functions of citizenship, and which celebrated the exercise of both rights and responsibilities through open, critical and plural debate. Furthermore, by examining once more the six historic variations of the concept of civil society described above, it is possible to see that each contributes to the set of conditions upon which a viable civil society must rest: —

from the ancient Greeks can be derived the principle of the need for citizens to participate; - from Hobbes and Locke can be derived the principle of the right to participate; - from Smith can be derived the principle of the need for a dispersal of power; - from Tocqueville can be derived the principle of the need for an initial location of action in the familiar; - from Hegel can be derived the principle of the need for a vision of the public good; - from Gramsci can be derived the principle of the need for a critical view of dominant powers. Combining these historic principles with Barber's analysis begins to provide a picture of the kind of foundation principles the discourse - which such a civil society would require. Crucially, however, a viable conception of civil society must also be able to cope with the demands - and threats - of the present day. These have been described above as comprising a nexus of state interventionism, marketization and commodification of society,


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and the rise of a managerial ideology and its discourse. A viable civil society discourse would then have to be one with the following attributes. It would need to be one i

ii

iii

iv v

vi vii viii

ix x

which recognized the need for a discursive public 'space' in which people could formulate, consider and debate the issues of the day; which saw this 'public discourse' as divorced from governmental aims (this is state discourse), as more than a collection of individuals (this is private discourse) and certainly not as the market (this is commercial discourse), but as a discursive space which sat between the three; that saw the discourse of civil society as the nurturance of a critical language, a prime function of which was to make clear the assumptions, agency and power base of other discourses, whether they be party political, economistic, managerial or whatever; which therefore not only recognized the existence of a diversity of opinion but actually celebrated this; which saw it as essential that people develop this 'public good' perspective, and took views on issues which transcended their own parochial concerns to include both national and global concerns; which therefore recognized that there was an interdependency in society between responsibilities to maintain this interest, and the liberties which derive from it; which was neither controlled nor directed by governmental agencies, nor any other powerful sector within society; which saw it as healthy that citizens should not only be informed, but be given sufficient self-confidence that they felt willing and able to take contrary positions to those of other powerful sectors; which therefore was capable of acting as a 'gadfly' to the intentions of these other sectors; finally, and because of this, which allowed citizens to think of themselves as having plural identities and multiple purposes rather than being defined by the state, the community or the market.

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Locating civil society It is one thing to suggest the conditions and principles underpinning an acceptable discourse for civil society: it is another thing to specify where these might be located. A well-rehearsed place to begin is the local, and a variety of institutions have been suggested as being necessary to a healthy civil society. The family, the Church, local associations of all kinds have entered the list on the assumption that civil society is a bottom-up concept, which starts at the local and communal level, and provides people with the skills at participation, as well as providing them with the expertise to understand more fully the larger political level. Almond and Verba, for instance, in their authoritative study of the foundations of a civic culture (1965), argued that Citizens who are members of a non-political organisation are more likely to feel subjectively competent than are those who belong to no organisation. This, then, appears to confirm the fact that latent political functions are performed by voluntary associations, whether those organisations are political or not. Those who are members of some organisation, even if they report that it has no political role, have more political competence than those who have no such membership. There can be little doubt that the exercise of some kind of local participation within a form of local pluralism has considerable merit. Nevertheless, it fails to provide the full answer on at least two counts. First, and as argued already, interest exercised at the local level may well be insufficient to deal with the concerns at the larger level. As Ehrenberg (1999, p. 234) points out with regard to Tocqueville, categories derived from the face-to-face democracy of early nineteenth-century New England towns cannot furnish a credible model for public life in a highly commodified mass society marked by unprecedented levels of economic inequality.


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Of course, one can go further than this: the kinds of problems described in earlier chapters suggest that humanity faces problems on a global, never mind a national, level. An interest in many local institutions may simply be not enough to raise sufficient consciousness or thought in this direction. Second, local involvement can impede rather than generate democratic involvement. McConnell (1966, p. 6) argued from an American perspective that Far from providing guarantees of liberty, equality, and concern for the public interest, organisation of political life by small constituencies tends to enforce conformity, to discriminate in favor of elites, and to eliminate public values from effective political consideration.

McConnell argued that compulsion is easier to organize when members know one another than in a larger, more diverse and impersonal environment. More than that, McConnell found that the more local was a group, the more homogeneous it tended to be, and the more it reflected local power distributions - which meant that inequalities tended to be exacerbated by localization rather than reduced. One might also add to this the findings of Mansbridge (1983) who in an examination of town meetings and workplaces, also found that small did not mean democratic. Sometimes for the best of intentions, influential individuals (and this usually meant the more affluent) exerted considerable influence over meetings through prior meetings and agreements: to preserve an atmosphere of agreement, the more powerful participants are likely to withhold information and to exert subtle pressures that often work ultimately to the disadvantage of the least powerful, (p. 70)

This kind of research suggests a number of things. To begin with, while there can be little doubt that in some situations, following Tocqueville, the local has served to restrain the arbitrary use of power by the state, it can be just as authoritarian. It may be,

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then, that it is not possible simply to proclaim any one particular institution as a proper site for civil society. Two things may have to be done instead. A first is to examine the uses to which particular examples of that institution are put at any particular time. On this examination, it may be found that some local situations are ideal for the development of a civic culture, while others would need substantial change. A second action may need to be an examination of the current place of any institution within the ecology of power relations within a society. Thus, market conditions have acted in the past to disperse power and constrain the powers of the state. Yet, given the transition in this century to monopoly capitalism and transnational corporations, it can also undermine democratic institutions (Korten, 1999). This then suggests a wider principle - that institutions and locations which have previously been considered to be cornerstones of civil society have the potential, given the 'right' conditions, to work against it. In the same way, organizations which historically have needed other forces to restrain them, can, given the 'right conditions', serve the democratizing functions of civil society. The Catholic Church is a good example: a despotic authoritarian power in medieval times, it served as a major focal point for civil society in the resistance in Poland against the Communist state in the 1970s and 1980s. However, none of this implies a simplistic distinction - either that an organization/sector/power is pro-democracy or that it is anti-democratic. While it is perfectly possible for it to be just that, nevertheless, and because, for example, the 'state' or the market are both composed of a wide variety of smaller institutions and actors, it is quite possible - indeed probable - that there will be considerable tensions within them. It may then simply be wrongheaded to attempt to define, by means of some historical analysis, those organizations or locations within society which can fulfil the principles of a civil society for any extended period of time. Rather, what may be more fruitful would be to examine a present societal context, identify both those sectors or powers constraining democratic potential and then identify, both within and without them, those forces which could act as moderating agents. 'Civil society' then becomes, rather than simply a description of a group


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of institutions, or of a sector within society, instead a discourse, a set of principles, which needs a 'home' in which it may be enacted.

The potential of education as a site for civil society It should be clear that there is much within educational theory and practice which would make it a pivotal site for the development of the kinds of principles described above, and which would in many ways make it a natural home for both their articulation and enactment. i

ii

iii

iv v

vi vii

viii ix

Thus, education fulfils the need for a discursive public 'space' in which people can formulate, consider and debate the issues of the day; it can be a space for 'public discourse', the function of which is other than the promotion of governmental aims, the pursuit of private interests or consumption; it can be the site for the nurturance of a critical language, a prime function of which is to make clear the assumptions, agency and power bases of other discourses; it is an ideal site for the celebration of the diversity of opinions; it can help people develop a 'public good' perspective, and help them interrogate issues transcending their own parochial concerns; it can help people to recognize a necessary interdependency between responsibilities and liberties; it could help citizens not only to be informed, but to be given sufficient self-confidence to feel willing and able to take positions critical of those in other powerful sectors; it could therefore act as a 'gadfly' to the intentions of these other sectors; finally, it could help people to think of themselves as having plural identities and multiple purposes rather than singular destinies.

With all these potential and actual attributes, it would be nice and certainly convenient - for a book on education and policy to

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be able to name it as a clear, powerful and uncontaminated site for the development of a more effective civil society. However, it has been argued at length that the major sectors constraining democratic development are those of an overweening state, of global and national markets, and of a managerialist philosophy and discourse, and that educational institutions have not been immune from these influences. Thus, education has been used by many states as the sector for developing a globally competitive workforce, and as the site where it can attempt to sustain its claims to legitimacy when power and allegiances are increasingly located elsewhere. At the same time, education has also been one of the major sites for market experimentation, as governments, in the attempt to introduce greater efficiency, have dispersed their tasks to the private sector to carry them out, while still retaining a control on content and quality. Further, as private sector influence has increased, so markets have reoriented the education sector to a greater customer focus and producer responsiveness. Indeed, not only has education been subject to the increased use of private sector practices and competitive pressures, but it has also been increasingly seen by the private sector as a major vehicle for commercial infiltration. In the USA, nearly 40 per cent of children in schools begin their day with news and advertisements provided by Channel 1. In Colorado Springs, the superintendent of schools there has argued that 'our taxpayers have challenged us to be more creative and businesslike in how we finance the schools . . . I realised we could sell for cash something we already had, but never knew we had - access to students' (Guardian, 22 November 1999). Moreover, Barber (1998) describes how the K-III Corporation exploits the needs of poor schools for equipment they cannot afford by loaning equipment, in more than 12,000 classrooms in most states, in exchange for the pupils' subjection to a period of the corporation's advertising. Yet Harty (1994, p. 96) argues that the central focus for those looking at commercial sponsorship should not be that of a better equipped school system, but rather concern about 'propaganda of commercial values and industrial goals, which runs counter to the democratic principle of education as a free market place of ideas'.


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Finally, as regards the effects of managerialism, it is worth repeating that as education is increasingly informed and directed by the policies of the state and the mechanisms of the market, and as they are underpinned by this discourse, education is as heavily influenced by managerialism as any other sector. Moreover, the process of managerialism is a subtle one: by living and practising the discourse, the danger is that one comes to identify with it. This was certainly seen in recent research by the present author (Bottery, 1998), and it is well described by Fergusson (1994, p. 113): As sceptical teachers . . . comply with the National Curriculum programmes of study, test their pupils, accept appraisal, as reluctant heads sit on sub-committees of governing bodies to apportion the school's budget . . . they come gradually to live and be imbued by the logic of the new roles, new tasks, new functions, and in the end to absorb partial redefinitions of their professional selves, first inhabiting them, eventually becoming them.

Conclusions There are, then, genuine constraints on education being a site for civil society. If education is to fulfil these functions, it — and a civil society perspective — would need help in doing so. Governments, and other powerful forces, will not cease in their attempts to control and direct the activities of educational institutions. In the real world, states will continue to want to maintain their power in this sector; they will want to utilize markets as means of dispersing some functions, as well as 'gingering' up the provision; and the influences of managerialism are unlikely to disappear. The principles of civil society are only viable if a number of conditions are fulfilled. This, then, is the subject of the final chapter.


Chapter 10

Empowering an ecology of change

Introduction This book has argued that educational policies need to be viewed in more than a national context. There are global forces at work which constrain and direct the nation state, and which have profound effects upon the type and quality of education it provides for its citizens. Yet not only educational structures and practices are affected: the very discourse, the way in which education and conceptions of the good life can be expressed, are being squeezed, and then perverted to ends which are ultimately harmful to citizens, their societies and the world within which they live. These effects are seen in the paradoxical combination of the increased control and fragmentation of individuals' lives. To counter these trends, an entire ecology of change needs to be considered. One measure already suggested is the reintroduction of a reconceptualized notion of duty to balance and work with one of individual rights. Another was the need for a site for a questioning, a critical, at times even a subversive approach to some of the dominant trends in society, one which establishes a conceptual distance from the state and the market, and which is based upon 'civil society' principles. This however is not a simple matter, for those in government and other positions of power need to believe that their positions exist primarily for the pursuit of democratic purposes and the creation of a more just and equitable world. These must be kept to the fore, in spite of the pressures upon them for concentrating upon other necessary aims - developing a greater global competitiveness, a more skilled workforce, a greater legitimation for state activities. These same

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policy-makers must then believe that the principles of civil society need to be treasured, and that they have a core responsibility to develop the kinds of structures and frameworks which these espouse. At the same time, those within education - and in society as a whole - must not only ensure that such principles are noticed by those in positions of power, but must take an active part in their development. They must pursue these in spite of the existence of central direction, market competition and the inculcation of a managerialist discourse, all pressures which prevent time or interest needed for their development. These conditions, however, are interdependent. Those in power will only be motivated to pursue such ideals if those in education and the population at large show sufficient desire to defend them. At the same time, a citizenry will only be able to activate such principles if those in positions of power provide the space and the support for their practice, even when the results of such practice look likely to provoke criticism of them. Civil society principles, then, are not independent of the society in which they grow. Their soil needs nourishing - and by those who have the power to destroy them. If, then, such principles are to be realized, the conditions for such change need to be described. These will not only be within education itself, but within society as a whole, for while an education system needs to be concerned with its ethical foundations, so clearly does the society within which it is located. An ecology of change needs to be created. This being the case, this chapter will argue that there are currently two principal changes which need to be made with regard to the policy management of education. One of these is the introduction of a fundamentally more critical and self-reflective curriculum. The second is the development of a teaching profession which has both the ability and the desire to embrace such a curriculum. However, valuable as these changes would be, they are insufficient without societal changes as well, and two crucial ones at this level will also be discussed. A first is a needed counter to the privatization of society, through a re-embracing of the notion of 'public good'. This would help to provide the conceptual tools needed for thinking beyond markets, managerialism and economic produc-


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tivity, and for thinking once more of education as having a liberating, creative and ethical potential. The second change is the development of a set of principles which recognizes the symbiosis between rights and duties, and takes such symbiosis beyond the needs of the nation state to set it within a global vision.

Educational changes Developing a politically robust citizenship education curriculum A first development must be the development of a school curriculum which sees it as one designed for citizens. This, then, is very different from, and much more extensive than, a curriculum which either has an allotted time for citizenship lessons, or has a cross-curricular citizenship theme embedded within it. It would be a curriculum whose creators understood that it could only be properly implemented if it were underpinned by a debate about the meaning of citizenship (rather than one which defines for its recipients this meaning), and which then moves on to ask what such citizens need and what they must contribute. This then would be a curriculum not about citizenship, but rather for a citizenship of a world peopled not just by nation states, but by global forces which at the present time seem largely immune to many forms of democratic accountability. Citizenship education would have a harder and more developed edge than at present, and would not be reduced to a simple rote learning of the forms and structures of democratic institutions within any particular nation state, or to discussions of the implementation of a form of citizenship already decided elsewhere. It must, then, have central to its conception three core elements: a b c

that students should see citizenship as much about duties as about rights; that they should see citizenship as much about questioning current practices as obeying them; and that the nature of the curriculum and of schooling in

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general should be about the beginnings of practice in citizenship, for preparation for their future roles in a democratic society and world. This citizenship curriculum must be underpinned by a thorough grounding of the history of this idea, and of its interpretation and translation within a particular nation state. It must also grapple with Marshall's (1950) tripartite distinction between civil, political and social rights, and through this, an understanding that citizenship is more than just about rights, freedoms and participation (the subject of Marshall's first two distinctions), but must support the notion that the third element - social citizenship - is an essential feature if citizenship is to be conceptualized in non-market terms, and if citizens are to be protected from the excesses of these. This understanding will also help individuals to realize that others within their society may well not have the kinds of access to citizenship which they may enjoy, and which may be the basis for much social discord. These kinds of foundations can then begin to equip citizens of the future with an understanding of national and global forces, knowledge of how these forces are altering the world and the belief that they can make a positive difference in any changes for the better. One hopeful example of the development of a critical citizenship education is to be seen in England and Wales. Citizenship in many countries has been seen as a sensitive subject, being linked in many people's minds with notions of political education (and indoctrination). When a National Curriculum was introduced in England and Wales in 1988, citizenship education was not given the same status as other curricular areas, being positioned as a cross-curricular subject, and thus lacking the statutory basis of many other areas. There have subsequently been a variety of views upon such positioning. Some have seen this as an oversight by government, and because it was based upon notions of an 'active citizenship', as a real opportunity missed. Others have been rather more sceptical, suggesting that it was deliberately located in such a cross-curricular limbo precisely because it would have been so challenging to the status quo. It might then have produced a future citizenry who would ask all kinds of awkward


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questions, and who genuinely wanted to participate and change things for the better. Whichever is true, the result was that its location had support from educators already committed to such an approach, and who used the relative freedom to develop a genuinely challenging curricular area. However, because it lacked the legislative impetus of other statutory areas, it was also neglected by those who felt they lacked the expertise, or who, for ideological reasons, did not wish to support it quite so strongly. This piecemeal approach was only strengthened by the Dearing Report (1994) on the National Curriculum, which recommended a slimming down of statutory provision. Citizenship education received barely a mention, and provision became even more idiosyncratic, as those who were originally committed used the extra space to pursue it even more enthusiastically, while those who had never been keen saw even less pressure for them to take it seriously now. One should add to this picture the influence of neo-liberalism, which as it reached its zenith, particularly under John Major's premiership, translated 'citizenship' into something which increasingly came to resemble 'consumership'. Major's ill-fated 'Citizen's Charter', for instance, was in reality little more than a model for how consumers might complain about the services they were receiving. It certainly did not envisage such citizens having a central role in participating on policy formation or in active engagement in the running of various public services. With the advent of New Labour, the renewed interest in citizenship is fairly understandable. This book has dealt at some length with current concerns about community, duty and responsibility, and a political party with such egalitarian roots is going to have to pay lip-service at least to such a concept. Finally, with David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Education, being a long-term supporter of citizenship education, it was unsurprising that early official publications announced its importance (e.g. the 1997 White Paper, Excellence in Schools], and that Blunkett should appoint his former tutor at university, Bernard Crick, to chair an advisory group on the subject. The result was a final report in September 1998 (DfEE, 1998). Very much a document of its time, it adopts Third Way ideas of

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the greater reciprocity between rights and duties, and of the welfare state as a safety net rather than a blanket, yet it is fairly daring in suggesting that, while civic spirit and community activity are important, nevertheless citizens must 'shape the terms of such engagements by political understanding and action' (p. 10). What results is an education for citizenship which has 'three heads on one body' - the need for social and moral responsibility, for greater community involvement, and for a genuine and proactive political literacy. It is then the last of these - about developing students in 'learning about and how to make themselves effective in public life' (ibid., p. 64) - which is perhaps the most innovative and most exciting part of the report, for not only does it make it clear that this citizenship education should be for rather than about citizenship, but that this should be based on an outcomes model, and, perhaps crucially, should be a student's statutory entitlement. The government body, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, has modified this somewhat, and what is now in place is, in the early years, an entitlement at Key Stages 1 and 2, which is non-statutory (which suggests the same idiosyncratic implementation as before), but later on, at Key Stages 3 and 4 is a statutory entitlement. This then raises grounds for optimism of a genuine attempt at implementation. Nevertheless, there are worrying issues here which preclude one from believing that this curriculum will be really revolutionary. For a start, its non-statutory nature in the early stages does not provide pupils in their early years with the kind of empowered grounding with which one might have hoped they would then approach their secondary schools. Second, with only 5 per cent of curriculum time supposedly being devoted to this area, it is going to be problematic as to how and whether it is properly covered; and with a teaching force which at present lacks expertise, it may simply not be very well done. Finally, and probably most crucially, teacher commitment will not be high if the principal motivation derives from the fact that its statutory position means that it will be subject to rigorous external inspection - and is there not something profoundly undemocratic in telling teachers that they will teach about democracy - or else?


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Citizenship education - or better, an education for citizenship - then has some considerable way to go, not only in terms of its espousal by government and others in power, but also by those given the job of implementing it. Indeed, the concern over teachers' commitment to this area leads directly into the second condition which needs to be fulfilled if education is to act as a centre for civil society principles. This area is the very nature of how teachers, and others in society, conceive of teachers' roles and of what constitutes their professionalism at the present time. As Wilkins (forthcoming) argues, and as this book has documented, this citizenship curriculum runs counter to much of what is happening in education at the present time. While the current attention given to citizenship education in England and Wales suggests an acknowledgement of the need for the kind of critically reflective curriculum put forward in this book, yet other measures, such as the highly prescriptive National Curriculum for Initial Teacher Training, head in precisely the opposite direction. The picture is of course worse than this; increased control, centralization and prescriptivity are characteristic of the functioning of most Western education systems at the present time, never mind just the training of teachers. Yet the conclusion that Wilkins makes is one which applies to more than just training, for he argues that : Perhaps the major implication of the QCA's proposals is that it gives weight to the view that teacher training is not enough; that teacher education is still of central importance in producing critically reflective teachers willing and able to educate tomorrow's critically reflective citizens, (ibid.)

It is this concern - the nature of the teaching profession itselfwhich must now be examined.

Reconceptualizing the role of the professional educator Any chance of education being a site for a vigorous civil society response to the forces impacting upon and operating within many societies is going to depend largely upon the attitude of educa-

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tional professionals to this issue. If they do not support such a move, or fail to see its relevance and importance, it will be fatally undermined. Yet the history of the literature on professionalism in the UK and the USA does not provide much comfort. Much of such literature in the early part of this century was very uncritical, using biographies of great men of a profession, usually the medical (see Carr-Saunders, 1933), to suggest that they were essentially good men (this was after all almost exclusively a male preserve) whose personal code of ethics legitimated their autonomy and justified the public's trust in their practice, and very largely omitted any wider conception of their role. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this was a picture which professionals were happy to support, and was one continued by the creation of welfare states which granted technical, managerial and financial autonomy to professionals in the servicing of its institutions. This perception of professionalism continued until an increasingly unstable and financially challenged world was reflected in an increasingly sceptical literature, initially by doubts about the very meaning of the word 'professional', with writers like Etzioni (1969) concluding from their analyses that teachers, for instance, only qualified as 'semi-professionals'. This kind of demotion was soon added to by sociological writers like Collins (1990), who argued that professionals, like all other occupations, were in the business of controlling and monopolizing the particular 'market' in which they worked; only that through a smokescreen of professional ethics and altruism, they happened to be rather good at fooling the general public when playing this game. When one adds to this the free-market messages of people like Friedman (1962) and Hayek (1973), which pointed to the abrogation of societal freedoms which developed from professional practices, then the external picture developed of one more self-serving set of occupations trying to get their snouts in the trough. This of course suited very nicely those in power who wished to curb and direct the work of professionals, and permitted in education the imposition of centralist legislation like the National Curriculum, as well as the creation of much more intrusive inspectoral bodies like Ofsted. All of these helped to prevent educators from taking a wider view of their role.


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However, so also did the marketization of education, for this increasingly limited their view of education to what was good for their 'customers' and their institution. It is then not unfair to say that most public sector professionals - and particularly those in education - are constrained in what they must do and how they must think to a much greater extent than at any time in the last 40 years. Now it would be easy to blame this situation on governments too keen on control, and insufficiently reflective upon the ultimate effects of such control. Yet the reactions of teachers to this legislation have been both interesting and very cautionary. In a series of detailed qualitative interviews with professionals in both Health and Education, the current author (Bottery, 1998) found that they exhibited a potentially dangerous mixture of overwork and indifference towards an understanding of why these changes had come about, and what they as professionals should do in reaction to them. Many, because of urgent issues of implementation, caused by a flood of legislation, felt that they did not have the energy to tackle these weightier issues. They also felt relatively powerless to do much about such trends anyway. Finally, many felt so demoralized by their negative political and media portrayal that it sapped their will to do anything other than their conception of'the job'. This conception, however, combined with the effects of such legislation, actually exacerbated the situation. The vast majority saw their 'job' as centrally concerned with either 'the kids' or 'the subject' (in the case of teachers), or 'the patients' or in 'treating the illness' (in the case of nurses and doctors). Other issues, then, were intrusions upon their 'proper work'. This is a well-worn theme with teachers in particular. Most were uncomfortable about taking anything like a political stance, particularly in the light of the damaging strikes of the 1980s, which most thought had provided the Thatcher government with the excuse to take subsequent draconian measures against them, such as suspending their pay negotiating rights. Perhaps more importantly, many simply did not see a wider view of the 'ecology' of forces within society, and of education's part within this ecology, as part of their job. Many of these

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'restricted professionals' (Hoyle, 1986) saw their job, both before and after the 1988 Act, as being to teach pupils their subject matter as well as they could. Objections by such teachers about the effects of such legislation were primarily concerned with its manner of implementation, in particular its speed, the lack of consultation, the lack of co-ordination between different parts and the manner in which some aspects were poorly thought through. Very little was said about the actual nature or function of the legislation, or of the effect it had upon them and their role within the larger community. Furthermore, as the case studies in education and health moved from the public sector into the private, the notion of 'professionalism' itself changed noticeably. In the public sector, it was one based upon a sharing of expertise and understanding between all involved in the process of education or healing. In the private sector, on the other hand, it was based much more upon professionals doing a good job, but a job situated within and for a particular institution, in order to maintain that institution's 'competitive advantage'. This movement in the conception of the term, driven by market and competitive considerations, had the effect of reducing the professionals' view of activity and loyalty to the institutional level, and of decreasing even further the possibility of these professionals taking a wider perspective of their role for any reason beyond that of institutional gain. This is, then, not a positive position from which to begin if one is looking for a profession supporting civil society principles, or of a more critical and participative education for citizenship. Yet the situation may actually be worse than this, for the teaching profession may have set itself up for such demotion well before these events. In research which spanned most of the 1990s, Bottery and Wright (2000) uncovered evidence which strongly indicates that not only do teachers have little understanding or interest in these wider 'ecological' areas; more than this, schools do little in terms of their staffs continuing professional development to facilitate a wider conception of their role. Little evidence was found of attempts at generating an understanding of the 'public' nature of their job, such as how being a member of a public sector organization might place special responsibilities and


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obligations on them with respect to the development of citizens and a more participative democracy. Nor was there much to suggest any attempt at developing an 'ecological' understanding of their situation, one which would enable them to place their own situation within a wider societal and global context. Instead, what strongly emerged from this research was a preoccupation with the mechanics of implementation, a concentration upon inservice training and development which enabled teachers to do a better classroom job, or which facilitated the management of school. Of course, nothing is wrong with these per se - indeed, there is an awful lot to commend them. Yet the evidence that was gathered in LEA, Grant-maintained and Independent schools all points to the conclusion that this was all that was happening, all that had happened prior to legislation and indeed all that was planned for the future. Moreover, in a further piece of research in the same book, strong evidence was produced to suggest that the mentors of new and trainee teachers viewed their role in much the same technical-rational way, and did very little to induct their mentees into either a more 'public' or 'ecological' orientation to their role. Yet again, the issues they concentrated upon were those of subject planning, discipline and implementation, and while these are clearly praiseworthy in themselves, they do not pick up the themes which are needed to generate a more extended professional consciousness. The worrying conclusion then was that it was not just government legislation that was leading to professional neglect of these wider issues, but rather that there was and continues to be — a deficit in educational culture which leads teaching as a profession to neglect them. There was clearly a degree of cultural specificity in these findings, yet given the need felt by many nation states for appropriate human capital to sustain the requirements of TNCs, there is evidence for such an orientation elsewhere (see for example Levin and Riffel (1997), and Hargreaves (1994)). So while conditions differ from country to country, the same direction of policy and implementation is present elsewhere. A picture has then emerged in this book of a degree of reprofessionalization of teachers, but of much greater degree of de-

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professionalization. Even recent efforts to transform the teaching profession into one founding their practice on a research and evidence base, can, paradoxically, be seen as part of this dual process. Thus, while the basing of educational expertise upon research and solid evidence would raise the status and practice of the profession, nevertheless the caveat must be made that such reprofessionalization might well, given present government concerns and professional culture, be devoted to the work of teachers in their classrooms. Yet a key concern of this book has been to argue that issues beyond the implementational and the technicalrational need just as much attention by educators. In Carr and Kemmis' (1987) description of three levels of action research - the technical-rational, the interpretive and the critical - it is clear that only the first of these is seen as appropriate for teachers. In the UK it is clear that the Teacher Training Agency's idea of an evidence and research-based teaching profession extends no further than one devoted to the improvement of teaching methods, school organization and assessment. It would not welcome the development of a profession participating in the formation of education policy and direction beyond current economic and skill-based concerns. In the light of such restricted definitions of 'useful' research, the claims in 1998 by Chris Woodhead, Chief Inspector of Schools in the UK, that the academic community was responsible for a vast waste of public money on educational research because it was not directed at issues in the classroom, take on a slightly sinister turn. On this approach, the only good research, and the only proper role for educators, is then technicalrational and non-critical. Critiques of current policy by independent academics, or research which might cast light upon the effects of educational policy, would be viewed as at best 'not useful', at worst obstructionist and damaging. Yet it is vital that educators recognize that the existence of independent, informed professionals, whose opinions are based on solid evidence and valid research, would be good not only for society and the world, but for professionals themselves. Not only would they be pivotal in the reinvigoration of an informed, critical and participative citizenry, they would also regain some of the respect lost by the public over the last few decades.


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However, while their own culture remains predominantly technical-rational and implementational, they play into the hands of governments happy to see them remain as such. It is easy for professionals to blame governments for the state they find themselves in, but the full truth is stronger and less pleasant. Educators must heal themselves if they are to heal others.

Societal changes Revitalizing a sense of 'public good' Both the curricular and professional changes in the education sector are vital to the development of the nurturance of the principles of civil society. However, they also need to be backed by changes at the societal level, ones that address influences from the private sector and from a too interventionist state sector. A first crucial one, then, stems from concerns about the effects of a privatization and marketization of the public sector. It has already been demonstrated that this influence has moved from the importation of private sector practices, to the capture of the discourse of the public sector, during which the normative sense for the term 'public good' has largely been lost. This is dangerous and damaging for an educational sector which needs to act as a site for a civil discourse, and which needs to raise a citizenry's consciousness not only of state but global trends at the present time. There is then a crucial need for a sense of'public good' to be central to social and political discourse once more. Initially, it should be noted that there has been some debate on the actual meaning of the term 'public good' (see, for instance, Grace, 1994; and Tooley, 1994). There seems little doubt, for instance, that the term has strong economic origins, and in this form it means any service for which the state is required to ensure provision, and which cannot be withheld from non-payers. The provision of defence or street lighting are good examples of this, as it is unlikely that either could be provided other than by the state, and those who have not contributed still enjoy the benefits of their provision. On this basis, then, it seems fair to say, as Tooley does, that education is not a public good.

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Yet, there is another normative sense to the word which Grace (1994) proposes. He argues that when education develops in citizens 'a moral sense, a sense of social and fraternal responsibility for others' (p. 214), and when it provides the basic conditions for making democracy possible, then it should be accorded the status of being a public good. Now the concerns that Grace voices are clearly central to this book, just as it will also be clear that privatization fails in many respects to advance these concerns. This is made clear if one looks at the core arguments made for the privatization of educational provision. These might be summarized as 1

2

3

4

the choice argument - that privatization reduces the need for large bureaucracy, and by allowing the expression of individual initiative, generates a greater choice for individuals than do other more centralizing forms of provision; the autonomy argument — that privatization, precisely because it allows individuals to use their initiative, also generates a greater degree of personal freedom; statist intervention, no matter how well intentioned necessarily depresses the exercise of individual autonomy; the epistemic argument - that because information required to make decisions in a market place is diverse, disparate and complex, central authorities are not capable of marshalling it as advantageously as those who are close to such information; the incentive argument - that no matter how well intentioned central authorities may be, they, by their act of central planning, depress the initiative and creativity of those at the periphery.

Now while there are important values raised here, all of the arguments are based - unsurprisingly - upon the assumption that choice, autonomy and personal freedom are overriding personal, social and political value. However, such freedoms are not possible unless sustained by a society healthy and stable enough to grant them - and this requires the nurturance of the kinds of social and fraternal responsibilities which Grace advocates, and which are qualities normally omitted from the neo-liberal lexicon.


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Fraternal responsibilities, then, are required in equal measure to those of personal autonomy, if individual freedoms themselves are to be sustained. Similarly, social responsibilities are required in order to provide a genuine equality of opportunity. Without these, individuals will not believe that the conditions exist within which their own individual freedoms can be genuinely exercised, and they will fail fully to support their society's laws and values, and instability will be the consequence. Finally, the belief in, and reality of, such equality of opportunity will only be realized if there are not enormous differences in the living conditions of the rich and the poor. This does not require an equality of condition, but it does require a measure of state intervention and fiscal redistribution, if a society is to be stable, cohesive and promote genuine freedom for all. By marginalizing such values, privatization effectively prevents the realization of conditions within which a normative public good can exist. However, privatization does not just downgrade crucial personal and social values. It also creates a market consciousness which prevents such aspirations from being developed or, if in existence, it damages or destroys them. It does this by reducing personal and social activity to an economic, market-based agenda, and in so doing, it colonizes language, and reinterprets activities and ideas to conform with its own limited view of the world. As it does so, it impoverishes the purposes of activities, and reduces conceptions of how lives and communities might be celebrated. In such a way does it fashion the self-interested consumer, the individual whose only real obligation is to ensure that personal desires are fulfilled. In so doing, it atrophies personal and social responsibility. Moreover, the market approach assumes that the aggregation of individual wants and needs is equivalent to the needs of the community, and thus it not only fails to raise questions about whether what satisfies me is also good for the community: it actively prevents their consideration. Yet the aggregation of individual wants is no guarantee of assuring a community's needs. I may buy a car because it satisfies my wants of speed, pleasure and convenience; yet each additional car on the road causes greater congestion, reduces personal pleasure and increases pollution. This is a realization difficult from the consumer

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perspective, virtually impossible to solve without a belief in fraternal and social responsibility. How much more dangerous is this perspective when the market is global, and those consuming resources do not have to live in the resource location, and do not have to see, nor have to be concerned with the effects of their actions? Who will intervene if, in a global market place, the forests of Indonesia or Brazil are burnt down in the pursuit of profit and consumption, when the people affected are too poor or too powerless to have any effect upon the actions of the market? Market consciousness has the same kinds of effects upon education and contains the same dangers. Bridges (1994) for instance points out that the effect of private provision upon clients is for these people to see themselves as consumers of governmentled education, rather than as partners in 'the collectivist ethos of collaboration in the interests of general welfare' (p. 73), and because of this the richer, educative and universally beneficial purposes of schooling will become subordinate to the narrower self-interested function which can benefit some only at the expense of others, (p. 77)

Markets, and the practice and language of privatization, then, are forces which are deeply damaging not only to a wider vision of responsibilities within the wider society, but also to the conception of education as being a crucial base for furthering this vision, and for its location as a centre for the values of civil society. It therefore becomes crucial that those within education are not overwhelmed by market practices, financial imperatives and competitive deadlines, to the extent that they lose sight of the nature of education as a normative 'public good'. If they do this, they lose sight of education's very soul. A more important ethical imperative is hard to imagine.

Developing a principled balance between rights and duties Privatization is then a genuine threat to a rich and equitable society, a fair and prosperous world. When people take extreme


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individualist positions and suggest that 'there is no such thing as society . . . there are individual men and women and there are families' (Thatcher, 1987), they fail to comprehend the damage they do to the social fabric of society, and then to the world in which they live. However, this book has also been at pains to point out that another threat to national and global concerns comes from the opposite direction. Nation states are keen not only to impose a system geared essentially to economic and technicist demands, but also to develop among their citizens a strong communal orientation, in part as a counter to the effects of the markets which they continue to support. The danger here is the specification of a common form of life which is seen as 'a supremely important good' (Taylor, 1986, p. 213), whereas, as this book has argued, a true community is one which, rather than stressing exclusivity, attempts greater inclusivity, and which sees community as a concept dynamic enough to embrace a global population. On this account, difference is then recognized and worked through, rather than attempts being made to provide a veneer of agreement which, rather than resolving such differences, simply tries to cover them up. It has further argued that a healthy community needs to be based upon a symbiosis between rights and duties, for there is genuine need for the creation of a sense of duty which effectively balances, and in some cases modifies, the counterposing demand for freedom and rights. Both rights and duties need to be nurtured for either to survive. If this is the case, then, the final section of this chapter needs to produce an account which consists of two sets of principles, one for duties and one for rights. These principles for duty must be strong enough to sustain a community, yet must be balanced by a set of principles which preserves the values of individual rights. The first set then must stipulate the following four principles: la The acceptance of such duties must be seen as a necessary fulcrum of communal health. Citizens, and citizens-in-training, must be left in no doubt that the very existence of their society and their world depends upon their acceptance of the demands of these duties. Society cannot function properly, and the enjoyment of rights cannot be guaranteed, without the proper exercise

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by individuals of such duties. This casts strong doubt upon any society which takes too strong a free-market or statist conception of politics. This message cannot start too early, and should form part of the formal and informal curriculum of schools. 1 b Duties as a fulcrum of societal health have, for a variety of reasons, been neglected for a number of decades, and must be given new emphasis. This does not suggest that rights need to be withheld, or new ones not minted, but it does point out that duties need to be given greater emphasis than they have been for some considerable time. If Etzioni's bike has not been travelling in a straight line for some time, its balance needs to be corrected. Ic Duties must be individually internalized. It must be clear to those given the responsibility of imparting this message, that such duties will only be effective when citizens have internalized these duties, and act on them, not because it suits them, or because they are afraid of the punishments consequent upon their infringement, but because they have accepted as valid the argument for such duties. Again, the role of an educational system in communicating their importance, and aiding such internalization, is crucial. Id Citizens must come to believe, not just in the pragmatic, but in the moral importance, of duty to society. In so doing, by accepting their validity, people come to perform them because they feel ethically bound by them: because they would feel it wrong to do otherwise. These four principles on their own could amount to no more than an authoritarian inculcation of morality. Certainly, their (unbalanced) stress has led to the critical reception of some communitarian literature. They need, instead, to be balanced by a set of principles which preserve the value of individual rights. This account must then stipulate the following five principles: 2a Any framework for duties must be based upon democratic principles. Duty must be seen as equally beneficial to all within society, not to some privileged few. It must be based upon equality of


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participation, and cannot be avoided through accident of birth or personal wealth. It will not do, then, for advocates of such a society to suggest that the drive for the good society, for the reduction of inequalities within it, should be put on hold, while greater emphasis is placed on notions of duty, or on the pursuit of greater economic competitiveness. The best way for a bike to travel is to steer as near a middle course as possible, not to veer violently from one side to the other. 2b Any framework for duties must be communicated by rational argument, and not by indoctrinatory means. While it may be quicker to use non-rational means, the ultimate health of a democratic society and of its institutions depends upon people understanding the need for the performance of duty, for only through such understanding can full acceptance be realized. It also makes Karl Popper's point that the use of rationality is an ethical commitment, because down other roads lie tyranny and the rule of the irrational. 2c // must be accepted that while there are many values that seem unproblematic, many judgements about the world are provisional. As humanity has a limited perception of the totality of this world, and views it through a variety of different lenses, it must be remembered that what is seen is necessarily interpreted, and is therefore subject to error. This does not freeze action, or prevent the formation of'general goods', but it does prevent the tyranny of 'Groupthink'; it does allow us to say 'nevertheless . . .'. 2d Those who will not listen to others have no place in the community. This is a tough one; if principles of reason, of democracy, of provisionality, are accepted, then listening to others, putting oneself in their shoes, is a core principle. Tolerance, on this account, does not entail a supermarket of values; it means tolerance and respect for those who adhere to the principles above. It does not mean that all must reach the same position, or all must abide by the majority, but it does mean that a modus vivendi is much more likely to be reached when principled tolerance is adopted; and this implies principled nontolerance as well. 2e The reality of structural inequality and discrimination for many

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Education, policy and ethics minority groups must be accepted. Many of the principles of rights and duties described above may be rejected by minorities, not because of any inherent disagreement with them, but because they are seen as little more than expressions of the disingenuity of majority cultures. Where there exists inequality and discrimination, and where this is not acknowledged by the majority culture, then attitude change and agreement does not occur, simply because minority groups, and individuals within them, see no reason to trust the motives of those in the majority. Without a continued pressure for minority rights, an acceptance of the concept of communal duties is simply not realizable.

Conclusions The balance of these principles does not resolve the problem facing both the virtue philosopher (Maclntyre) and the communitarian sociologist/political theorist (Etzioni) which I believe neither satisfactorily resolves: how is a community to define and justify the values to which its members will adhere? What extrasocietal criteria can they use? Ultimately, it seems, one accepts authoritative (authoritarian?) communal definitions, moral realist objectivist definitions or the messiness of the balancing act and the Aristotelian application of principles in particular contexts through the exercise of practical wisdom. The formulation above tends to support the last of these, but it does two other things. First, it stipulates the conditions necessary for the process to begin, for without a continued debate about rights, and without a recognition of the historical situation, the need to rejuvenate real concern about duties might never get off the ground. Second, it stipulates the ground rules for such a process, in which rights are not neglected, but the concept of duty also becomes an integral part of communal life, promising the creation of a society in which its members come to care for each other (and those beyond it) much more than they do at present, and in which its members seek to aid others when they are in distress. In this society and this world, then, the four conditions of this chapter come together to produce a formidable combination. The


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development of a principled balance between rights and duties provides a mechanism for the widespread realization of individual and societal rights, because now even the stranger's needs are heeded, as acknowledged rights demand a response. Further, the emergence of a global conception of a 'public good' aids the movement towards a more just and equitable world, as it creates a consciousness within which people can envision an interdependent world beyond their own private wants and needs. If one adds to these societal conditions, an educational curriculum for citizenship, which empowers individuals to believe that they can make a difference, and an educational profession which believes that part of the core definition of its role is to achieve these other conditions, then the forces for positive change are powerful indeed. These, then, seem worthy projects, core ethics, for educators and others to pursue.



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Index

Aburdene, P. 10 action research 226 Adam Smith Institute 36 Almond, G. 208 Anderson, J. 133 Angus, L. 112,116,117 Anscombe, E. 40 Aristotle 39, 196 Ashton, D. 19, 38 Asian Tigers 19, 36 Autonomy 68-9 Bailyn, L. 164 Baker, K. 32 Ball, S. 115, 123, 145, 145 Barber, B. 59-60, 184, 200, 201, 202,212 Barber, M. 176 Beck, U. 159 Bell, D. 4 Bennet,J. 41 Bernstein, B. 109 Bevan, N. 51 Blair, Tony 28, 33, 34 blue collar workers 170 Blunkett, D. 19,219 Bottery, M. 19, 55, 62, 75, 76, 92, 155, 178, 190,224-5 Boulding,J. 176 Bourdieu, P. 109 Bowles, S. 109 Brecher.J. 18 Bridges, D. 230

Brown, G. 36 Brown, P. 18, 37 Burchell, B. 163, 164, 165 Burger King 131 bureaucratic structures 138 bureaucratization of the military 138-40 of the penal system 140-2 of the police 140-2 Caldwell, B. 21 capitalism 137, 142-3, 172-3, 210 capitalist-communist split vii Capra, F. 43 Care 69 Carr, D. 39,41, 185 Carr, W. 226 Carr-Saunders, A.M. 222 Castells, M. 160 Catholic Church 210 Champy, J. 16 character education 45-9,184—8 Chernobyl 13 child-centredness 110 Chitty, C. 116 Citizen's Charter 219 citizenship, levels of 19 citizenship education 217-221 civil society 174 communitarian model 203—5 as contractual partner 196 as deficiency 198 education 211-13

252

Index

civil society (continued) as the free market 1197-8 as hegemony 199 libertarian model 200-3 located at local level 208-210 as participative citizenry 196 strong democracy model 205-7 as voluntary parochialism 198 Clarke, J. 5,21,57, 62, 63, 67, 74, 75,77 Clinton, Bill 33 Coca-Cola 10 Coleman,J. 108 Collins, R. 222 colonialism 6 Colorado Springs 212 communitarianism 44—5, 51, 183-4 contrived collegiality 153 control in the accidental arena 135-8 in the assumed arena 134, 146-8 in the forgotten arena 134-5, 138-42 in the manipulative arena 134, 142-5 in the public arena 134, 149-51 Coote, A. 99 cowboy world 176 Creemers,J. 122 Crick, B. 219 criticality 663-9 Crosby, P. 95 cultural approaches to management 93 Cunningham, J. 47 Dale, R. 1,6 Dandeker, C. 138 Bearing Report 219 democracy, notions of 191 Dionysian professionals 84 discourses 144-5 medical discourse 144 Dole, R. 201

downsizing 18 Drucker, P. 64 duty definitions 177-8 global conceptions 191-3 principles 231-4 Shue's argument 188-90 EhrenbergJ. 197,208 Elliot, J. 114,119-20 Elliot, L. and Atkinson, D. 7, 16, 36,53, 165, 170, 173 equality 71 ethics, expanding circle 191 Etzioni, A. 43, 44, 45, 51, 52, 176, 178-80, 184-5 European Community (EC) 16, 17

evaluative state 58 Exworthy, M. 80

Fay, B. 123 Feigenbaum, H. 82 Fergusson, R. 213 finance and welfare states 14—15 flexibility and control 163 forms of 162 and insecurity 163—4 and institutional effects 164-7 and personal effects 1167-9 and societal effects 170-1 and work intensification 164 Fordism 151 Foucault, M. 140, 141, 144 Freud, S. 136 Friedman, M. 30, 147, 179, 222 Fukuyama, F. 38,73,171-2 Fullan, M. 117, 120, 125 functionalist perspectives 53 Gaeblcr, E. 30, 35 Gamble, A. 31 Giddens, A. 33

Index Gintis, A. 109 global marketplace 5 catalysts 4—5 elites 8 globalization cultural 10-11 demographic 11-12 economic 7-8 environmental 13 managerial 12 meanings of 5-13 normative and descriptive forms 13-14 8 political 8-10 'glocalization' 5 Grace, G. 110,123,227-8 Gramsci, A. 92, 199 Green, A. 3,25,124 Gresham's Law 166 Groupthink 205 Gutmann, A. 205 Halford, S. 80 Hamilton, D. 117,122 Hammer, M. 16 Handy, C. 18, 54, 84, 164 Hargreaves, A. 153,225 Hartshorne, H. M. 47 Harty, S. 212 Hay, C. 18 Hayek, F. 30,84,101,222 Heater, D. 193 Hegel, F. 198-9 Held, D. 192 Henry, M. 2, 18 Heseltine, M. 65 Himmler, H. 41 Hobbes, T. 196 Hoggett, P. 87, 90, 105, 106 hollowing out 5, 21 Hood, d 12, 35, 66 Hutton, W. 50,171 imperialism 6 industrialism 137-8

253

internationalization 6 e 43 It's a Wonderful Life Janis, I. 205 Jencks, C. 108 Jessop, B. 15, 18 job availability 12 Kemmis, S. 226 Kennedy, P. 12 Keynes, M. 171 Kilpatrick, W. 46, 47, 186 Kohlberg, L. 42, 46, 185 Koontz, H. and O'Donnell, C. 64 Korten, D. 17,210 Kymlicka, W. 178,183 Lampard, R. 164 Lasch, C. 8 Lauder, H. 111,124 Leadbeater, C. 73 leadership and managerialism 73-8 Legrand,J. 100 Levin, B. 225 liberty 51 Lickona, T. 42, 47, 186 Lingard, B. 122 Locke, J. 196 Lockwood, A. 45 1 loyalty 165-6 Lukes, S. 144 McConnell, G. 209 McDonald's 10 McDonalidization 157-9 Maclntyre, A. 40,41,182,184 Major, J. 43 managerialism and control 148 definition of 61-3 discourse 68 MansbridgeJ. 204 Marginson, S. 6 markets 53, 229-30

254

Index

Marquand, D. 28 Marshall, T.H. 178,218 Martin, H-P. 8 Marx, K. 135,194,199 and alienation 168 May, M. 47 mental illness vii, 157 Mercedes-Benz 17 Merton, R. 88, 132 Merva, M. and Fowles, R. 164 middle-class instability 170 Milgram, S. 132 monopolies 17 Morgan, C. 77 Morrison, K. 85 multinationals viii, 17 Murgatroyd, S. 77 Naisbett,J. 10 National Commission on Education 37 National Curriculum 218 nation states Asian 3 England 3 and fear of subversion 144 and legitimate violence 137 rise of 2-4

Neave, G.58,85 New Labour 28-9 New Modernizers 32-5, 37, 44, 49-54 New Public Management (NPM) 12,35,66-7,84 New Right policies 32, 40, 52-3 Newman, J. 5,21,57,62,63,67, 74, 75, 77 Nietzche, F. 136 North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) 9, 17 Nozick, R. 178 NZ Cornerstone Values 48 Oakley, J.R. 43 OECD 9, 16

Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) 99, 122-3, 151-2, 222 Ohmae, K. 5 , 1 7 Osborne, D. 30, 35 OustonJ. 117-18,121 Panopticon prison 141, 153 Parsons, W. 10 performance management t 106, 107 performance-related pay 36 Pericles 193 Perrone, V. 114 Peters, G. 35 Peters, R. 93 Pfeffer, N. 99 Phillipine government 18 Pierson, C. 100 policy dispersal 5 divergences 24—6 rowing 21 steers 149-51 Pollitt, C. 62, 63, 89, 90, 105 post-Fordism 151 postmodernism 11 power, three versions 144 private sector relations 146—7 privatization of education 229-30 results of 59-60 three versions of 82 professionalism, conceptions of 221-3 public good 227-30 quality

bureaucratic 87-8 civic 100-102 cold managerial 89-92 consumer 96-9 expert 86-7 external and internal meanings 81 hot managerial 92-6

Index quality (continued) seven versions of 85 traditional 85-6 race to the bottom 18 Ranson, S. 59 rationality 146 RawlsJ. 182 Reed, M. 92 re-engineering 16 Reich, R. 5 , 1 1 , 3 3 , 3 7 Resnick, P. 200 respect 71 restraint of trade ix Reynolds, D. 121,126 Rhodes, R. 5,21 Riffel,J. 225 RifkinJ. 16, 160, 170, 172 rights 232-4 Ritzer, G. 88, 157-9 Robinson Crusoe 179-80 Roosevelt,?. 173 Rorty, R. 169 Rowe, C. 151 Rushdie, S. 169 Rutter, M. 1 1 7 , 1 2 1 , 1 2 7 Sammons, P. 121 Schein, E. 93 School Effectiveness Movement (SEM) and academic emasculation 123-4 and decontextualization 116-18 and Edmunds key factors 112-13 and Mortimore's key factors 113 and research agenda manipulation 121-3 and Reynold's key factors 113 and value neutrality 115-16 school principal, roles of 21-4 Schor,J. 164 Schumann, H. 8 Seattle vii, viii sectoral convergence 12

255

Selbourne, D. 43,44,176 Sennet, R. 51, 74, 165, 167-9, 204 SCAA conference 186-8 semi-professionals 222 Shue, H. 188 Silcock, P. 118-20 Simpkin, T. 62 Singapore 16, 39-40 Singer, P. 191 Smith, A. 197 social stability 50-1,149-50,171 Soros, G. 171 spaceship world 176 SpinkJ. 21 steering and rowing 30—1 Stewart, T. 59 Sullivan, W. 179-80 SungJ. 19,38 Taylor, C. 32, 38, 43, 183, 199, 231 Taylor, F.W. 91,139,143 Thatcher, M. 32,231 Thatcherite governments 84 Third Way 33-5,51 Thompson, D. 205 Thurow, L. 173 Tocqueville, A. de 198 Toffler, A. 143 tolerance 70 TooleyJ. 227-8 Total Quality Management (TQM) 94-7 'Tragedy of the Commons' 166 trust 71-3 Tuckman, A. 95 Turner, B. 159 Twain, M. 6 United Nations

9

values, managerialist assault on 67-73 values clarification 46 Verba, S. 208 virtue theory 42, 182-3

256

Index

Waterman, R. 93 Waters, M. 7 Weber, M. 159-61 welfare state developments White, J. 115,118 Wilkins, C. 221 Wilkinson, A. 95 Wilkinson, R. 101 Wilmot, H. 95

84

Woodhead, C. 226 'workfare state' 15 World Health Organization vii, 9 World Trade Organization vii, viii, ix Wright, N. 55,75,76,155,224-5 Ypsilanti, M.

131

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