Education Policy and Social Class

The Selected Works of Stephen J. Ball

Stephen J. Ball

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134225927
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Bringing together twenty years of research and writing, this book provides an overview of Stephen Ball's career and shows not only the development of his most important ideas but also the long-lasting contributions he has made to the field of educational policy analysis. This volume contains sixteen key essays divided into three sections:

• perspectives on policy research
• policy technologies and policy analysis
• social class and education policy.

Each chapter presents innovative ways of thinking about public policy, asking probing questions about what policy is, how policy is influenced and what effects intentional and unintentional policies have. As a body of work, this collection raises issues of ethics and social justice which are often neglected in the mass of policies that now affect every aspect of our education systems.

PART 1
PERSPECTIVES ON POLICY RESEARCH

These papers address some general and basic theoretical and methodological issues involved in what I call, following Ozga, ‘policy sociology’. The papers outline a form of analysis which involves the deployment of different kinds of theory to address different levels of analysis. This approach was first presented in my 1990 book, Politics and Policy Making in Education and one chapter from that book (Chapter 2 in this book) is included here, it serves to indicate the ‘beginnings’ of education reform and some of those diverse elements and force-relations that accumulated to give it its logic, and the beginnings of my method of analysis. Some of the analytical issues adumbrated here are further developed in the 1992 book Reforming Education and Changing Schools: Case Studies in Policy Sociology, written with Richard Bowe, and the paper What is Policy? Texts, Trajectories and Toolboxes (Chapter 3), which also introduces the ‘policy cycle’ as an heuristic device for analysing policies, and differentiates between discourse and text, stressing respectively the limits and possibilities of ‘thinking’ policy from the perspective of each. The Policy Entrepreneurship paper (Chapter 4) makes an explicit case for the role of theory as a form of intellectual violence and argues for a particular form of theoretically informed work in policy analysis. It also addresses the increasingly restrictive ‘steering’ of educational research by the state and the development of a hegemony of ‘state relevance’. Policy Sociology and Critical Social Research (Chapter 1) lays out a framework for critical policy sociology, an aesthetics of critique, set over and against the dominant ‘scientific’ paradigm of public policy research. Finally, in this part, the Big Policies/Small World (Chapter 5) puts policy sociology into the context of globalisation and in relation to the global flow of policies, via the notion of ‘policyscapes’, a new global, policy commonsense, and a generic and ‘magical’ agenda of policy solutions is identified. Together the papers offer an overview of my approach to ‘policy sociology’ and of the main theoretical and conceptual tools which I employ in the practical analysis of policies and policy-making and the effects and consequences of policy.

CHAPTER 1
POLICY SOCIOLOGY AND CRITICAL SOCIAL RESEARCH

A personal review of recent education policy and policy research

British Education Research Journal, 1997, 23(3): 257–74

If our task is understanding both how domination works and the possibilities of interrupting it, then one of the things we can do is learn from each other, to combine our critical efforts.

(M. Apple (2003) The State and the Politics of Knowledge,
New York, RoutledgeFalmer, p. 24)

Introduction

This paper expounds a personal and perhaps idiosyncratic view of education policy and education policy research in the UK during the past 15–20 years. The first part of the paper is concerned with the former and I discuss the transformation of public sector provision and civil society and the introduction of new forms of social regulation. The second part considers the latter and involves reflection on ‘progress’ in an emergent sub-field of educational studies – education policy research.¹ I am not using hard and fast boundaries or definitions of the field in my discussion which may introduce some imprecision and vagueness but that is probably inevitable. I will explore my concerns using a meta-analytical template and I will range across theoretical, epistemological and methodological issues.

The tone of the second part of the paper is generally critical, but is intended to be constructive and reflexive. I am rehearsing some of the weaknesses embedded in my own research practice and airing some ambivalences about the project of critical policy research. This is not an exercise in ‘deep epistemology’ – realism, essentialism, forms of explanation and all that – rather it is concerned with ‘surface epistemology’ – the relationships between conceptualisation, research conduct and design and interpretation. The discussion is framed to allow for at least some recognition of the social and personal aspects and agendas of research. Policy research is always in some degree both reactive and parasitic. Careers and reputations are made as our research flourishes upon the rotting remains of the Keynsian Welfare State (KWS). Both those inside the policy discourse and those whose professional identities are established through antagonism towards the discourse benefit from the uncertainties and tragedies of reform. Critical researchers, apparently safely ensconced in the moral high ground, nonetheless make a livelihood trading in the artefacts of misery and broken dreams of practitioners. None of us remain untainted by the incentives and disciplines of the new moral economy.

Transformations

I want to present the argument that during the last 15 years we have witnessed in the UK, and indeed in most other western and many developing societies, a major transformation (see below) in the organising principles of social provision right across the public sector. Forms of employment, organisational structures, cultures and values, systems of funding, management roles and styles, social relationships, pay and conditions, have all undergone change in similar directions. Heuristically these changes may be situated as a part of the transformation which Jessop represents as from the KWS to the Schumpeterian Workfare State (SWS) (Jessop, 1994). According to Jessop this transformation replaced the Fordist discourse of productivity and planning with a post-Fordist rhetoric of flexibility and entrepreneurialism. The SWS ‘goes beyond the mere retrenchment of social welfare to restructure and subordinate it to market forces’ (pp. 27–28). In the UK this restructuring process both as an economic strategy and a hegemonic project for the re-invigoration of civil society was articulated in the ideological politics of Thatcherite neo-liberalism.

In narrow economic terms, the neo-liberal strategy demands changes in the regulation (governance) of both the public and private sectors. For the public sector, it involves privatisation, liberalisation, and an imposition of commercial criteria in any residual state sector.

(Jessop, 1994, p. 30)

Pursuing a similar analysis of restructuring Hoggett suggests three points of emphasis in the UK case. They are:

1. the development of time and pay flexibilities (but not skill flexibilities);
2. the promotion of forms of external rather than internal decentralisation; and
3. the weakening and residualising of local government and the rudimentary democratic structures residing at district level within the NHS, by concentrating strategic control within central government or dissipating it into a myriad disaggregated local agencies and service units.
   (Hoggett, 1994, p. 44)

All of this is embedded within and contributes to changes in the technology of state control, what Hoggett calls ‘remote control’, or what is also called ‘steering at a distance’ (Kikert, 1991). I shall return to this later.

As above, most accounts of the transformation of the public sector concentrate on the processes of change, the new structures and new technologies of control. Less attention has been given to the transformation of the values and cultures of the public sector (Heelas and Morris, 1992) and the formation of new subjectivities (Rose, 1992). The key points of linkage between the restructuring and re-valuing (or ethical re-tooling) of the public sector are the discourses excellence, effectiveness and quality and the logics and culture of new managerialism in which they are embedded. Taking the latter first: Where neo-Taylorism focuses on intensifying systems of direct control, the new managerialism offers a ‘people-centred’ model of the organisation which views bureaucratic control systems as unwieldy, counterproductive for efficiency and repressive of the ‘enterprising spirit’ of all employees. Competitive success will be achieved by loosening formal systems of control (within what is tellingly termed a ‘loose-tight structure’) and instead motivating people to produce ‘quality’ and strive for ‘excellence’ themselves. Managers become leaders rather than controllers, providing the visions and inspirations which generate a collective corporate commitment to ‘being the best’. This ‘new’ managerialism stresses a constant attention to ‘quality’, being close to the customer and the value of innovation (Newman and Clarke, 1994, p. 15). In the education sector the headteacher is the main ‘carrier’ and embodiment of new managerialism and is crucial to the transformation of the organisational regimes of schools (Grace, 1995). That is, the dismantling of bureau-professional organisational regimes and their replacement with market-entrepreneurial regimes (Clarke and Newman, 1992). In changing the conception, relationships and practices of headship the process of reform also effects a profound change in the subjectivity and values of leadership in schools. It is important however not to see these changes simply as located ‘in’ heads and ‘in’ schools. They should be seen as primarily located within the policy framework created by the 1988 and subsequent Education Acts which put into place the infra-structure and incentives of the market form.

A new moral economy

The critique of state planning and provision and advocacy of the market form, which are fundamental to the politics of public sector reform, draw directly upon the philosophy and economics of neo-liberalism and in particular the work of Hayek. From the neo-liberal perspective, both unionism, and bureau-professionalism are seen as contributory factors to the ‘failures’ of systems of planned public provision and as major obstacles in the way of the development of ‘effective’ social markets. In a variety of ways the deregulation, devolution and autonomy which are central to public sector reform have changed the possibilities for and meaning of union and professional activity. In education:

The attempted fragmentation of the education service under LMS [Local Management of Schools] was accompanied by measures to introduce competition among schools and to fund them according to their success in attracting pupils . . . HRM [Human Resources Management] techniques are targeted at gaining the commitment of employees to the aims of the organisation. The new climate necessitates new mechanisms for controlling costs and teacher autonomy through a range of practices emphasising more casualised conditions of employment, flexibility, and controls on performance related not only to pay but to promotion and redundancy.

(Sinclair et al., 1995, pp. 266–7)

Education, like all other aspects of the public sector, is subject of and part of what Oakland calls ‘the quality revolution’, a rhetoric of quality improvement has been a key feature of government reforms in the UK (and many elsewhere) since the early 1980s and the concept of quality forms ‘part of a wider Conservative government-led ideological narrative and organisational strategy of “the enterprise culture” ’ (Kirkpatrick and Martinez-Lucio, 1995). Much of the paraphernalia of quality is borrowed from the private sector – the public sector it was argued would benefit from exposure to market forces, commercial models of management and of quality improvement. The disciplines and effects of the market are rooted in a social psychology of ‘self-interest, that great engine of material progress, [that] teaches us to respect results, not principles’ (Newman, 1984, p. 158). Hence the new social markets are framed by a mix of incentives and rewards aimed at stimulating self-interested responses.

These incentives and rewards are intended to displace the ‘out-dated’ niceties of professional ethics. Ethical reflection is rendered obsolete in the process for goal attainment, performance improvement and budget maximisation. Value replaces values, except where it can be shown that values add value. More generally the disciplines and dynamics of the market form work to edge public sector organisations into a closer convergence with the private sector inasmuch that, paradoxically, performativity requires of public sector organisations as much attention to symbolic change and manipulation as it does to substantive change. It encourages organisations to become more and more concerned with their style, their image, their semiotics, with the way things are presented rather than with the way they actually work. The project of transparency through performativity indeed produces greater complexity and opacity as public sector organisations spend time, money and energy on impression management, marketing and promotion.

In all of this work on and in organisations performativity renders many professionals unrecognisable to themselves.² Corporatised, performative organisations, offer new ‘possibilities’ of quality and excellence, they provide ‘the possibility for every member of an organisation to express “individual initiative” and to develop fully their “potential” in the service of the corporation’ (Du Gay, 1996, p. 62). It also renders them dispensable, to be replaced by others trained according to different principles, unencumbered by the rigours of moral reflection – public sector technicians. Such technicians owe their allegiance to policy and to institutional survival rather than to any abstract value systems or ethical commitments. The notion of ‘service’, the investment of the self within practice, and professional judgement related to ‘right’ decisions, are devalorised. Ultimately, in these ways ‘subjectivity and spirit’ are ‘plundered by capital itself as rage and desire’ (De Lissovoy and McLaren, 2003, p. 141).

What is achieved in the introduction of the market form into public provision, is not simply a new mechanism of resource allocation and distribution but also the creation of a new moral environment for both consumers and producers (see Chapters 6 and 9).

Autonomy and discipline

In their various effects, I suggest, the ‘practical autonomy’ of LMS and GMS (Grant Maintained Status), and the ‘borrowing’ of techniques of HRM and TQM (Total Quality Management) by the ‘new managers’ of the public services, achieve the purposes of state policy without the presence of the state. The practice of teachers are overwhelmed by the inevitabilities and obviousness of these ‘micro-disciplinary practices’. They play upon the insecurity of the disciplined subject. They are both feminised (Blackmore, 1995) and masculinist (Limerick and Lingard, 1995).³

These practices change that which they ‘indicates’, they changes meaning, they deliver re-design and ensure the ‘alignment’ of actors with the rigours of efficiency. They objectify and commodify public sector work, the knowledge-work of educational institutions is rendered into ‘outputs’, ‘levels of performance’, ‘forms of quality’. The discourses of accountability, improvement, quality and effectiveness which surround and accompany these objectifications render existing practice fragile and indefensible. ‘Teaching and learning, as a result are reduced to processes of production and provision that must meet market goals of transfer efficiency and quality control’ (Boyles, 2000, p. 120).

This process of objectification contributes more generally to the possibility of thinking about social services like education as forms of production, as ‘just like’ services of other kinds and other kinds of production. The ‘soft’ services like teaching which require ‘human interaction’ are necessarily made just like the ‘hard’ services (book supply, transport, catering, instructional media) which can be standardised, calculated, qualified and compared. This involves the ‘flattening’ into ‘crude representations’ of complex human and social processes, it is as De Lissovoy and McLaren (2003, p. 133) represent it, a form of violence. The ‘imperative of exchangeability depends upon the violence in the principle of identity’ as when ‘the student’s knowledge is made identical to the test score that stands for it’. Within all of this the specificities of those human interactions involved in teaching and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction The problem of policy
• Part 1 Perspectives on Policy Research
• Part 2 Policy Technologies and Policy Analysis
• Part 3 Social Class and Education Policy
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index