Teresa Lynne Seddon

Collaborative working and contested practices: forming, developing and sustaining social partnerships in education

Despite a lack of applied research, social partnerships are increasingly being adopted by both government and non‐government agencies to meet localised needs in education and other fields. This article discusses the findings of an investigation of how social partnerships can best be formed, developed and sustained over time. Earlier work identified partnerships arising from community concerns, governmental enactment and negotiation between community and government agencies. However, across these distinct kinds of social partnerships, the partnership work that was central to their operation was particularly relevant. In the study reported here, researchers engaged with ten longstanding social partnerships to elicit, synthesise and verify the principles and practices underpinning their work. The principles and practices that are proposed as most likely to assist the effective formation, development and transformation of social partnerships over time comprise building and maintaining: (i) shared goals; (ii) relations with partners; (iii) capacity for partnership work; (iv) governance and leadership; and (v) trust and trustworthiness. These principles stand as ideals and goals to guide the development and continuity of social partnerships that can support important educational initiatives, and provide bases for evaluating partnership work. However, rather than being benign, this work and these practices are often underpinned by contested relations as much as collaborative work.

Politics of social partnerships: a framework for theorizing

This paper considers the politics of neo‐liberal reform of education and training in the specific context of social partnerships. Social partnerships are hybrid social spaces formed when a range of interests/partners work together for mutual benefit. Partnerships are one of a series of hybridized social spaces which have been formed as a consequence of the trend to neo‐liberal governance. The paper begins by situating the study of social partnerships in wider concerns about neo‐liberal reform and politics. It reviews literature on social partnerships as a way of identifying the different approaches to the conceptualization of conflict or practical politics. These are role conflict, interest conflict, and regime conflict. It also draws on a series of empirical research projects on social partnerships in Australia which have identified persistent points of tension within partnership formation and maintenance. Drawing these conceptualizations and persistent points of tension together provides a framework which can guide systematic inquiry of social partnerships. The paper suggests that this framework facilitates research by naming different types of political action. It encourages a multi‐dimensional analysis of partnership politics rather than presenting partnerships as either a celebratory or categorical expression of neo‐liberal political rationality.

Navigating Social Partnerships: Central Agencies--Local Networks.

This paper considers the way social partnerships tend to be represented as either horizontal localised networks or neo‐liberal policy instruments. Building on two empirical studies of partnerships, we argue that partnerships cannot be understood in either/or ways but are negotiated at the interface between central agencies and local networks. They are mediated by networks operating through the partnership and through government and community, and by the different organisational logics of agencies. These complexities challenge our ways of analysing and representing partnerships, and justify further research.

Social Partnerships: Practices, Paradoxes and Prospects of Local Learning Networks

This paper discusses the formation, character and contradictions of social partnerships. We report on a specific initiative, the Local Learning and Employment Networks (LLEN) established by the Victorian Government in Australia in 2001, documenting the nature of this initiative and how it is playing out. We draw attention to some of the tensions that exist between different agencies, including different agencies within government. Through this detailed case study it is possible to identify parallels between LLEN and other social partnership initiatives developing in other parts of the world. This process of situating a specific Australian partnership within the wider trend to social partnerships permits a more contextualised analysis. It shows the way social partnerships are developing as a consequence of education reform shaped by neo-liberal governance and various patterns of compliance and resistance to this political rationality.

Lifelong Learning in a Market Economy: Education, Training and the Citizen-Consumer

Australian public policy adopted the concept of lifelong learning in the 1980s and harnessed it to human capital theory to articulate a new policy emphasis on ‘up-skilling’ the Australian labour force. This paper addresses the question of how this conception of lifelong learning has fared in practice as Australian Commonwealth government policies, including those related to education and training, have shifted to embrace strong market orientations and priorities. Have the policy objectives of a more highly trained labour force been met or has the concept of lifelong learning become increasingly uncoupled from links with the nation-building exercise of preparing Australia for the ‘information age’?

Lifelong Learning and the Teaching Occupation: Tracking Policy Effects of Governing Ideas on Occupational(Re)Ordering

‘Lifelong learning’ is a theme that highlights ‘learning’ but the meaning of this term has shifted over time. In the 1970s, UNESCO advocated a humanist-democratic agenda around learning throughout life. Supporting lifelong education, by recognising informal, non-formal as well as formal learning across the life course, was endorsed as a means of building learning societies. By the 1990s, these themes had been reoriented to support economic and employment agenda that were advocated by business and governments. Learning societies would tap ‘learning’ as a contribution to economic development.

Coherence in the Changing Form of Schooling, State and Society: an analysis of Australian educational reform, 1901‐07

Abstract This paper queries the appropriateness of notions of ‘relative autonomy’. It argues that rather than autonomy, historical analyses show considerable coherence in both the qualitative character and rhythm of development of different facets of social life. The argument is developed through an examination of the relationship of schooling, state and society. A theoretical framework for conceptualising the relationship of schooling, state and society is outlined. This framework, and the argument for coherence, is then illustrated through an examination of the restructuring of the Australian State and New South Wales schooling at the turn of the twentieth century.