Stewart Ranson

Public accountability in the age of neo‐liberal governance

The practices of accountability and the dispositions they have engendered have changed over time since the mid‐1970s. It will be argued that following the demise of the age of professional accountability a regime of neo‐liberal corporate accountability has dominated the governance of education. The distinctive dimensions of this regime – of consumer choice, of contract efficiency, quality, and capital ownership – have been introduced at different times since 1979. While it is possible to periodize their inception it is necessary to see them as, over time, extending and intensifying into a coherent regime of regulation. Thus understanding of the present modes can only be understood by clarifying the historical and political conditions which have shaped them. Nevertheless, possibilities of change may lie in the contradictions of accountability within the regime of governance.

Management in the public domain

One of the challenging questions which confronts both academics and practitioners is whether there is a generic concept of management. One way of discovering whether management in public sector organisations has unique features is to examine the ways in which those organisations differ from private sector companies.

Towards a Learning Profession: changing codes of occupational practice within the new management of education

Abstract Professionals were once considered to be the civic leaders, the deliverers of the good society. However, the old order has cracked under the pressure of social change, leaving a very different relation between professionals and their publics. This paper addresses some of the questions occasioned by these changes: Where does the altered power relation between parents, students and teachers leave the notion of teacher professionalism? What is the role of professionals within the emergent order? The paper is a product of the ESRC‐funded New Forms of Education Management Project (Local Governance Programme). It argues that, within the new management of education, the professional codes and practices point to a changing relation between teachers and what has traditionally been seen as their specialist knowledge. An outcome of this altered relation is the empowerment of parents and students in relation to teachers. However, the new relation depends upon new shared understandings and new sets of agreeme...

Reflexivity: towards a theory of lifelong learning

The idea that the present is a period of intense structural and destabilizing change has become central to establishing policy contexts, to which there needs to be a response. Change and adaptation to change have become watchwords of policy, including educational policy. One central area of response in the UK and internationally has been the emergence of lifelong learning as a focus of policy development and academic debate. While there has been much discussion about the nature, extent and significance of lifelong learning as a policy goal, there has been little theoretical discussion specifically of the nature of the learning required to engage with the change processes to which it is meant to be a response. It is the purpose of this article to open up that area of debate. It is suggested that while policies for lifelong learning focus on the accumulation of skills and qualifications as an adaptation to change and uncertainty, a less passive notion of learning requires the development of reflexivity. It is to an initial elaboration of a reflexive notion of lifelong learning that this article is aimed, as the authors believe that a more behavioural, adaptive version of lifelong learning dominating policy and practice is being developed, in which reflex rather than reflexivity is taken to be the locus of learning.

Management for the Public Domain: Enabling the Learning Society

Preface - PART I PUBLIC ORGANISATIONS IN QUESTION - Tranformations and Predicaments - Towards a Theory of Public Management - PART II THE PUBLIC DOMAIN: PURPOSES AND CONDITIONS - The Dualities of Citizenship - Organising Principles - Renewing Democracy - Interdependence and Cooperation - PART III THE CHANGING TASKS OF PUBLIC MANAGEMENT - Beyond Codes and Contracts - Public Learning - Judging Public Choice - Enabling Public Accountability - Empowering a Public Culture - Conclusion - References

Markets or democracy for education 1

Abstract This paper critically evaluates the effect of introducing markets into the institutional system of education and promotes the claim of a learning democracy to underpin a richer conception for developing the powers and capacities of all citizens.

Citizenship and Government: The Challenge for Management in the Public Domain

The domains of the public and private are different. Analysis of management which obscures their distinctive characteristics will miss the significance of each domain. This paper seeks to analyse the values, institutional conditions and management tasks which are unique to the public domain. It is argued that the distinctive challenge for the public domain derives from the duality of publicness: the need to enable citizens in their plurality to express their contribution to the life of the community and out of that plurality, to enable a process of collective choice and the government of action in the public interest to take place.

Power and Advantage in Organizations

This article examines the way in which recent critiques of the concept of power, notably by Clegg and Lukes, can be taken into account in the study of organizations. It is argued that this can best be done if we utilize the concepts of values and interests as well as the concept of power. Doing so allows us to consider the way in which advantage is distributed in an organization, and the contexts in which power is and is not used. Six patterns of organizational action are identified, using the concepts of values and interests, and their consequences for the exercise of power are examined. In conclusion it is argued that an understanding of power must utilize elements of both bureaucratic and political models of organizations.

The Changing Governance of Education

The 1988 Education Reform Act sought to deconstruct the framework of post-Second World War social democratic governance and replace the tacit rule of professional providers with mechanisms of choice and market competition, thus empowering parents and school leaders. Functions, powers and responsibilities were fundamentally reconstituted and have transformed the governance of education. New Labour, when it came to power in 1997, did not alter but extended the practices of this neo-liberal polity. Now, within the frame of this regime, a new re-constitution of the governance of education may be emerging: schools, colleges and agencies are encouraged not to compete, but to collaborate in creating a community of practice with families. Two modes of governance are developing in parallel. This article concludes that only a wider reconstituting of the public sphere, one that restricts the power that the advantaged are accruing from the education market place, can enable very different purposes of learning, and conditions necessary for a cosmopolitan civic society to emerge.

The contradictions of education policy:Disadvantage and achievement

In England, New Labours Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners is presented as the most radical for a generation, addressing systemic weaknesses and enabling a new social democratic settlement to secure education in the public sphere. In this article the authors test these claims against proposals in the Strategy that acknowledge and seek to address the failure of the polity to ‘break the link between class and achievement’. The article highlights a number of inherent contradictions in the Strategy and argues that the central proposals of choice and diversity are unlikely to reduce the gap between disadvantage and achievement. The article concludes that until the principles of justice and democracy are restored to a constitutive settlement of education as a public service then the bond of class and inequality will simply be reproduced rather than challenged by education policy.