The Risks of Social Reproduction: the middle class and education markets

We live, as some theorists put it, in a 'risk society'. Risks are diverse and new forms are constantly arising. There is an 'over-production' of risk. We face the brittle uncertainties of individual self-management, as Beck sees it, alone and 'fragmented across (life) phases, space and time' (1997, p. 26). This is a bleak and elemental social world. This paper takes a rather different view of risk, as having both collective and divisive dynamics and effects. It offers not so much an alternative view as one that is re-socialised. Focusing on middle class families and the 'risks' of school choice some key features of the 'prudentialist' risk management regime extant in the UK are examined. That is, those 'definite social exertions' that middle class families must make on their own part or face the very real prospect of generational decline are considered. Risks are perceived to arise from the engagements between the family and the education marketplace, and are embedded in the paradox wherein society becomes structurally more meritocratic but processually less so, as the middle class work harder to maintain their advantages in the new conditions of choice and competition in education. The paper is peppered with extracts from interviews with middle-class parents. These serve for illustration and discussion

The making of a neoliberal academic

Drawing on his earlier work on performativity, Ball in this article critically reflects on what it means today to be an academic in higher education

Introduction. The final Foucault and Education

The emphasis of this collection of papers is on using Foucault for thinking differently about education. A distinctive feature of the contributions is to mobilise a foucauldian attitude towards the historicisation and denaturalisation of what it means to be educated, and the privileging of a critical ontology of the self as part of wider projects for the critical reconstruction of both education as a practice of government and our modes of being as educational subjects. In relation to that, it is possible to identify four distinctive issues around which the papers of this collection coalesce: a) the formulation of a distinctive foucauldian ethical standpoint for a post neoliberal education; b) the mobilisation of the foucauldian concept of self formation to outline a different ethics of education; c) the sketching of a politics of the care of the self as a tool to remake the school as heterotopy; d) the use of the foucauldian analysis of parrhesia to rethink professional practice in education as a practice of self

Performatividades e Fabricações na Economia Educacional: rumo a uma sociedade performativa.

Este artigo trata de uma discussão sobre a performance e a performatividade na educação e na política social. Parte de uma concepção de performance como medida de produtividade e desempenho e de performatividade como tecnologia, cultura e modo de regulação. Busca, então, realizar uma análise crítica das novas formas regulativas que derivam deste novo discurso de poder. Pretende, ainda, examinar a existência de uma atitude, de um posicionamento ético com o qual professores e pesquisadores, nos mais variados setores da educação, têm se deparado; atitude baseada na responsabilização e no empreendedorismo – termos que constituem, de um lado, parâmetros de trabalho e relação social e, de outro, que definem um modo de fazer e um modo de ser.

Global Education Policy: reform and profit

Increasingly, on a global scale, education policy is being done in new ways, in new spaces by new actors, and many of these new spaces are private. Here some examples of these changing arts of government - the politics of ‘not governing too much’ - that are intrinsic to competition state, are explored. The concomitant processes of the financialisation of education and particularly the role of equity investment are also addressed. That is, the activity of global corporations and private equity companies funding and investing in the provision of schooling and other educational services, both in competition with state services, or on contract to and funded by the state, to provide alternative forms of public education. The paper concludes by arguing for the need for researchers to change their focus and methods to attend to these new forms of provision and government

The social geography of childcare: 'making up' the middle class child

Childcare is a condensate of disparate social forces and social processes. It is gendered and classed. It is subject to an excess of policy and political discourse. It is increasingly a focus for commercial exploitation. This is a paper reporting on work in progress in an ESRC funded research project (R000239232) on the choice and provision of pre-school childcare by middle class (service class) families in two contrasting London locations. Drawing on recent work in class analysis the paper examines the relationships between childcare choice, middle class fractions and locality. It suggests that on the evidence of the findings to date, there is some evidence of systematic differences between fractions in terms of values, perspectives and preferences for childcare, but a more powerful case for intra-class similarities, particularly when it comes to putting preferences into practice in the 'making up of a middle class child' through care and education

The Legacy of ERA, Privatization and the Policy Ratchet

This article explores the ways in which the neo-liberal impetus toward the privatization of state schooling signalled in the Education Reform Act 1988 (ERA) has become embedded in the English school system. Four main points are made. First, that ERA itself was of huge strategic rather than substantive importance as far as privatization is concerned. Second, by tracing the lineage of privatization from ERA onwards a 'ratchet' effect of small and incremental policy moves can be identified, which have disseminated, embedded and naturalized privatization within public sector provision. Third, that while privatization has been taken up and taken much further by New Labour than it had been by the Conservatives there are differences between the two sets of governments in the role of privatization in education policy and the role of the state. Fourth, the participation of private providers in the planning and delivery of state services has put the private sector at the very heart of policy. At points the article draws upon interviews conducted with private sector providers. © 2008 Sage Publications