Accounting for a sociological life: influences and experiences on the road from welfarism to neoliberalism

This is an attempt to review what I am now. To give some coherence to an incoherent academic life, written against the background of profound changes is what it means to be an academic. The paper begins in a welfare state primary school and ends in a global neoliberal university

Neoliberal education? Confronting the slouching beast

A major aim of this paper is to draw attention to the insidious manner in which the deficit discourse and practices associated with neoliberal reform are de- or re-professionalising educationists through an acculturation process. In the context of Ireland, as elsewhere, the author identifies how the three 'technologies' of Market, Management and Performance have inconspicuously but harmfully changed the subjective experience of education at all levels. It is argued that the power of privatisation in service delivery gives rise to change in education as part of a slow burn; how management is altering social connections and power relations to less democratic and caring forms, and how performativity and accountability agendas are radically undermining the professionalism of teachers in the hunt for measures, targets, benchmarks, tests, tables, audits to feed the system in the name of improvement. The paper adopts a personal tenor exhorting all educationists to become increasingly critically reflexive, politically aware and urging them to reawaken to their real educational work - the ethical and moral project that most signed up to but which has since become lost

Following policy: networks, network ethnography and education policy mobilities

Based on the ‘case’ of educational reform in India, this paper explores the emergence of both new trans-national spaces of policy and new intra-national spaces of policy and how they are related together, and how policies move across and between these spaces and the relationships that enable and facilitate such movement. The paper is an attempt to think outside and beyond the framework of the nation state to make sense of what is going on inside the nation state. In particular, it takes seriously the need to rethink the frame within and scales at which the new policy actors, discourses, connections, agendas, resources, and solutions of governance are addressed – and the need to move beyond what Beck calls ‘methodological nationalism’. In other words, the paper argues that thinking about the spaces of policy means extending the limits of our geographical imagination. To address this argument, it combines the presentation and discussion of data with some more general discussion of policy networks and mobilities

Laboring to Relate: Neoliberalism, Embodied Policy, and Network Dynamics

Bourdieu (1986 Bourdieu, P. (1986). Forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). New York, NY: Greenwood Press. ) observes that the existence of a network of connections is not given, rather it is “the product of endless effort” required “in order to produce and reproduce lasting, useful relationships that can secure material or symbolic profits” (p. 90). This paper builds on previous research (Ball, 2012 Ball, S. J. (2012). Global Education Inc.: New policy networks and the neoliberal imaginary. London, England: Routledge., Ball & Junemann, 2012 Ball, S. J., & Junemann, C. (2012). Networks, new governance and education. Bristol, England: Policy Press.) to explore some aspects of the embodiment of policy. I draw on Larner and Laurie's (2010 Larner, W., & Laurie, N. (2010). Travelling technocrats, embodied knowledges: Globalising privatisation in telecoms and water. Geoforum, 41, 218–226.) work on technocratic expertise and how, as she puts it, “privatisation ideas and practices are transferred in embodied forms,” and in particular her argument “that this has significant implications for how privatisation is globalized” (p. 218). Concomitantly, I respond to McFarlane's (2009 McFarlane, C. (2009). Translocal assemblages: Space, power and social movements. Geoforum, 40, 561–567.) assertion that we need to pay much greater attention to the labor of policy work (Gale, 2003 Gale, T. (2003). “Realising policy: The who and the how of policy production.” Discourse, 24(1), 51–65.). From these starting points, the paper focuses on the “multiple actors, multiple geographies and multiple translations involved in the processes of policy transfer” (Larner & Laurie, 2010 Larner, W., & Laurie, N. (2010). Travelling technocrats, embodied knowledges: Globalising privatisation in telecoms and water. Geoforum, 41, 218–226., p. 225) and, more generally, how these actors play a part in the neoliberalization of education or, to paraphrase Rankin (2003 Rankin, K. (2003). Anthropologies and geographies of globalization. Progress in Human Geography, 27(6), 708–734.), in “anchoring neoliberalism” (p. 709). I begin and end with discussions of research concepts, research method, and their interrelation: that is, policy networks, policy ethnography, and policy mobility. The central section is mainly devoted to a presentation of various data to adumbrate one part of a global education policy network with a focus on India (and the Indian Education Reform Movement [IERM]) and on one network participant

‘Toned habitus’, self-emancipation and the contingency of reflexivity: a life story study of working-class students at elite universities in China

Studies in relation to working-class students at elite universities document on the one hand the role of ‘mundane reflexivity’ in dealing with class domination while on the other indicate a new form of domination and disadvantages working on these working-class ‘exceptions’ – they may achieve academically at university but experience various exclusions and self-exclusions in areas of social life. By drawing on a very small sample of ‘counter-evidence’ and ‘exceptions within exceptions’ – working-class students who achieve great social accomplishments at elite universities – this paper further explores the role of ‘mundane reflexivity’ in negotiating class domination and the possibilities of transcendence. We demonstrate the creative and transformative ways in which class domination is dealt with and document the prevalence of high-level reflexivity. Furthermore, we distinguish different forms and degrees of reflexivity, which then indicate the ‘contingency’ of reflexivity – the relation of the possibilities of reflexivity to the unequal distribution of social, cultural and economic capitals. We further argue that what appears to be a form of self-emancipation achieved by the ‘transcending group’ in our study also involves the discrete and insidious reproduction of social inequality

The blended learner: digitalisation and regulated freedom-neoliberalism in the classroom

The digital revolution in education is sustained by the belief that digital technologies carry with them the potential for an ethical renewal of learning according to the neoliberal principle of freedom. In this article we problematise the ethical effects of the encounter between Blended Learning as a techno-educational form and neoliberalism, focusing as an exemplary case on the introduction of an innovative Blended Learning model in a US Charter School funded by the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. Connecting the literatures on the neoliberalisation and digitalisation of education, we show how in this case it is possible to observe a paradoxical kind of ethical renewal, emerging from the intertwining between the individualizing possibilities opened up by digital technologies, freedom production as a neoliberal project of world-making and the related search for new and specific mechanisms of security. We argue that digital technologies are in a paradoxical relationship with neoliberalism, crystallising the conditions of possibility for a neoliberalisation of education, but also having the potential to betray the promise of educational freedom and differentiation. Far from making any claim of determination, we outline the need for future research that explores the enactment of Blended Learning and questions its effects on education

Meritocracy, social mobility and a new form of class domination

Meritocracy is used by governments in many societies as an ‘effective’ way to represent social justice and legitimise – explain away – class inequality. By focusing on a small number of working-class students who achieve academic ‘success’ and have reached elite universities in an ideal meritocratic environment – Chinese schooling – this paper aims to discuss the relation of meritocracy to upward social mobility and class domination. Our analysis raises questions about the notion of ‘success’ in a meritocratic environment and suggests the operation of a new form of symbolic domination in relation to these working-class high-achievers. Through their ‘successes’ at school, they are distanced from their working-class localities and histories, while they also remain outside of the middle-class sensibilities that they aspire to – they become a ‘third class’ whose core values reside in meritocracy itself. There is no transcendence of class here rather a different form of distinction and exclusion

Paradoxes of freedom. An archaeological analysis of educational online platform interfaces

Many schools and students across the globe are now engaging with educational digital platforms in their teaching and learning experience. Platforms are changing what education is and how it is experienced. In response, educational research has devoted increasing attention to the so-called platformisation of education. This article contributes to this focus of attention, proposing a conceptual framework for the analysis of the configuration of platforms and the kinds of learning experience and learners they create the conditions of possibility for. Using Foucauldian archaeological methods, we present an analytics that focuses on three interrelated axes, the spatial, temporal and ethical configurations of educational platforms. We identify some theoretical tools for the analysis of the educational experience that platforms make possible, thinkable and desirable. We show how digital platforms produce a paradoxical kind of digital learner, whose autonomy and freedom to choose, connect, produce, accumulate, perform and enact is configured within an epistemological space demarcated by the tensions between modularisation and hypertextuality, linearity and co-existence, performance and character/potential. Reflecting on this, we consider the working of a careful, unrelenting, and empirically vigilant digital gaze, which secures a very specific educational experience