Stephen J. Ball

The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity

This paper is the latest in a short series on the origins, processes and effects of performativity in the public sector. Performativity, it is argued, is a new mode of state regulation which makes it possible to govern in an ‘advanced liberal’ way. It requires individual practitioners to organize themselves as a response to targets, indicators and evaluations. To set aside personal beliefs and commitments and live an existence of calculation. The new performative worker is a promiscuous self, an enterprising self, with a passion for excellence. For some, this is an opportunity to make a success of themselves, for others it portends inner conflicts, inauthenticity and resistance. It is also suggested that performativity produces opacity rather than transparency as individuals and organizations take ever greater care in the construction and maintenance of fabrications.

Education Markets, Choice and Social Class: the market as a class strategy in the UK and the USA

The market alternative in education is gaining ground in policy‐making circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Parental choice and school competition are seen as ways of achieving reform and raising standards while at the same time reducing State intervention into education planning. This paper interrogates the arguments made for markets and against public monopoly schooling; and it is argued that on both counts the claims of advocates are partial and flawed. The failure to address the bases and effects of inequalities of the market are given particular attention. It is argued that markets in education provide the possibility for the pursuit of class advantage and generate a differentiated and stratified system of schooling. 1I am indebted to my colleagues Sharon Gewirtz, Richard Bowe and Alan Cribb, and Barry Troyna, Manfred Weiss and two referees for their contributions to the arguments in this paper. The paper also benefited from ongoing discussions with Richard Bowe and Sharon Gewirtz related to two re...

How Schools do Policy: Policy Enactments in Secondary Schools

Foreword or Introduction 1. Beyond implementation -Towards a Theory of Policy Enactment 2. Taking Context Seriously 3. Doing Enactment: People, Culture and Policy Work 4. Policy into Practice 5. Whatever happened to... 6. Policy Enactments - In Theory and Practice

Foucault and education : disciplines and knowledge

Introducing Monsieur Foucault, Stephen J. Ball. FOUCAULT AND EDUCATION: Foucault and Educational Research, James D. Marshall Foucault Under Examination - The Crypto-Educationalist Unmasked, Keith Hoskin. HISTORY, POWER AND KNOWLEDGE: The Genealogy of the Urban Schoolteacher, Dave Jones Educational Practices and Scientific Knowledge - A Genealogical Reinterpretation of the Emergence of Physiology in Post-Revolutionary France, Richard Jones Docile Bodies - Commoralities in the History of Psychiatry and Schooling, Ian Dowbiggin and Ivor Goodson. DISCOURSE AND POLITICS: De/Constructing Hegemony - Multicultural Policy and a Populist Response, John Knight et al Management as Moral Technology - A Luddite Analysis, Stephen J. Ball Education and the Rights Discursive Politics - Private Versus State Schooling, Jane Kenway.

'I Heard It on the Grapevine': 'Hot' Knowledge and School Choice.

Abstract This paper is one of a number of related pieces which address the issue of parental choice through a careful Straussian analysis of interview data. The focus here is upon the structures and processes underlying the use of grapevine’ knowledge, which parents elicit and disseminate in choosing a school. It is argued that this immediate or ‘hot’ knowledge is of particular importance to many parents and is set over and against the ‘cold’ formal knowledge produced by schools themsebes or published as examination results or league tables. Grapevine knowledge is socially embedded in networks and localities and is distributed unevenly across and used differently by different social‐class groups. The paper concludes by suggesting that the stress and anxiety involved in choice for many parents is a product of unstable cultural values, and the slippery signs systems now surrounding ‘school’ at a time of increased economic uncertainty.

Policy Sociology and Critical Social Research: a personal review of recent education policy and policy research

Abstract The paper undertakes two related exercises; one substantive and one meta‐analytical. The first concerns changes in public sector provision. It is argued that the public sector has been ‘transformed’, in Jessops terms, from a Keynsian Welfare State to a Schumpeterian Workfare State. This transformation involves fundamental changes to forms of provision, patterns of access, forms of work, client — worker relations, inter‐institutional relations and values and ethics. The constitution of citizenship has also been affected. The second concerns the conception of and engagement with social policy by educational researchers. A template for examination of the ‘surface epistemology’ of education policy research is presented — that is the relationships between conceptualisation, research design and conduct and the interpretation of data. It is argued that there is a basic tension at the heart of education policy research, between a commitment to the pursuit of efficiency and a commitment to the pursuit of...

Privatising education, privatising education policy, privatising educational research: network governance and the ‘competition state’

This paper explores some particular aspects of the privatisation of public sector education, mapping and analysing the participation of education businesses in a whole range of public sector education services both in the UK and overseas. It addresses some of the types of privatisation(s) which are taking place ‘of’, ‘in’ and ‘through’ education and education policy, ‘in’ and ‘through’ the work of education businesses. This entails a traversal of some of the multi‐level and multi‐layered fields of policy: institutional, national and international. Such an approach is important in demonstrating the increasing diversity and reach of some of the education businesses and their different kinds of involvements with different institutions and sectors of education. It also makes it possible to set local rhetorics, such as ‘partnership’, within the context of corporate logics of expansion, diversification, integration and profit.

School choice, social class and distinction: the realization of social advantage in education

Parental choice is one of the keystones of current education policy in the UK. A combination of open enrolment, per‐capita funding and deregulated admission procedures is encouraging competition between schools for student enrolments (at least in areas where there are surplus places). Parents are encouraged to see themselves as consumers of education, and ‘good parenting’ is defined, at least in part, in relation to the ‘responsibilities’ of choice (The Parents Charter, Department of Education 1992). Within education policy choice is taken to be both neutral and individualistic. In this paper, we attempt to challenge that neutrality and to argue that choice in education is systematically related to social class differences and the reproduction of class inequalities.

Intellectuals or technicians? The urgent role of theory in educational studies 1

Abstract This paper discusses some problems with the field of educational studies and considers the role of post‐structuralist theory in shifting the study of education away from a ‘technical rationalist’ approach (as evidenced in the case of much research on educational management and school effectiveness) towards an ‘intellectual intelligence’ stance that stresses contingency, disidentification and risk‐taking.

Performativity, Commodification and Commitment: An I-Spy Guide to the Neoliberal University

Reflection is a dangerous thing; it is all too easy to slip from careful re-assessment and analysis into nostalgia and ‘golden ageism’, although in a period of austerity that slippage might be very understandable. Let us get to the nub of things. I was a student in two ‘plate glass’, welfare state universities, Essex (founded 1964) and Sussex (founded 1961), although they were very different. Essex was very small, socially very diverse and politically ‘exciting’, to say the least – a sort of comprehensive university. My sociology teachers there profoundly influenced me intellectually and they taught me to think. Sussex, ‘Balliol by the Sea’ as it was dubbed, had a very different social profile and institutional habitus but was pedagogically very adventurous. When I started teaching at Sussex in the School of Education we recruited 24 full-time, fully funded Masters students every year, many of them from the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) and we worked closely with the various innovative comprehensive schools which had been created in East and West Sussex. My aim as a researcher and a teacher became to provide tools for others to think with. I was produced and formed as a welfare state academic subject in these contexts. Over the past 20 years, I have been re-formed as a neoliberal academic subject. This is the move, as Stefan Collini refers to it in his essay review of the 2011 Higher Education White Paper, ‘From Robbins to McKinsey’ (Collini, 2011, p. 9). Fred Inglis (Inglis, 2011) portrays this move in dramatic and emotive terms: