Stephen Ball

University College London | UCL · Institute of Education

The chapter argues that the modern school is an ‘intolerable’ institution. Contrary to the sensibilities of educational research that look for more and/or better schooling as a way of making education more equal and more inclusive, our position is against the modern European school as an institution of normalisation and exclusion within which equal...

Available at: https://books.google.com.br/books?hl=en&lr=&id=yD_9EAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA1991&dq=info:JcyJKlRzlhYJ:scholar.google.com&ots=PzBsm5I42L&sig=nqaamPAcwdKskYcBj1VdrWjni4E&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false. xxxxxx Authors: Alice Casimiro Lopes, Camila Costa Gigante, César Tello, Dalila Andrade Oliveira, Elizabeth Macedo, Eneida Oto Shiroma,...

In this third paper in a series of four, we explore some ways of doing education differently. An education that moves beyond the persistent failures and irredeemable injustices of modern mass schooling episteme. The episteme for education we adumbrate-an episteme of life continuance-begins with a recognition of interdependency and the value of dive...

Drawing upon Foucault’s governmentality, this study sets out to explore how enterprising subjects constituted through self-monitoring are fashioned in the epoch of performance management drawing on a survey of junior-high-school teachers’ (n=2,275) attitudes toward its core elements of performativity, data governance, self-knowledge, and teaching c...

In response to the growing internationalisation and privatisation of education provision and governance, education policy research needs new tools and methods. This paper discusses theoretical and methodological adaptations needed to address new forms of governance. To do so, it draws from the literature on governance and policy mobility, and the m...

This paper develops previous work in which we deployed a form of Foucauldian critique to clear a space in which it might be possible to think education differently. Here, in that space, we are hoping to ‘get lost’ in some unexplored spaces of possibility. We sketch some starting points, some ‘lines of flight’ for such thinking. To do this, we ident...

This paper develops previous work in which we deployed a form of Foucauldian critique to clear a space in which it might be possible to think education differently. Here, we are not offering an 'alternative' here to modern education. Rather, we are hoping to 'get lost' in some unexplored spaces of possibility. To do this excursion we analyse the co...

In this article we examine some of the difficulties that surround the understanding and use of the term neoliberalism. We consider different approaches to neoliberalization and review their value in making sense of the dramatic changes that have occurred in education worldwide. We employ Foucault's notion of the dispositif to trace the way in which...

Published in a 2005 special double issue, 'Reclaiming the radical tradition in state education', the imperative for this piece from the FORUM archive was a collective refusal from contributors to accept all that made up contemporary educational presumptions as they existed in England during New Labour's third term (2005-10). Seventeen years on, Jan...

This topical book uses network analysis and interviews with key actors to address the changes in education, with a focus on education and the role of new philanthropy.

The focus of this book is on ongoing and related changes in education policy, policy networks and governance in England; in particular, the increasing participation of philanthropy and business in policy and service delivery. In this chapter we will sketch out the conceptual terrain across which our analysis moves and introduce some of the key idea...

This topical book uses network analysis and interviews with key actors to address the changes in education, with a focus on education and the role of new philanthropy.

“It's part of their tradition [Goldman Sachs] and, secondly, they make a huge, an outrageous amount of money for working there. So the combination of the two means that a lot of those guys are very active philanthropically. They’ve got the money and there is sort of a feeling that, I think, if you work at Goldman, that you don't just put all that m...

This chapter will return to some of the issues signalled in Chapter One as we attempt to visualise and actualise policy networks, to get inside them and examine how they work. As noted, one of the key issues in research on policy networks is the exercise and effects of ‘influence’. That is, how do we map and specify relations of power in policy net...

In this chapter we will draw together some of the main themes and issues addressed in the previous chapters and return to some key questions and difficulties signalled previously. In particular we seek to answer, or at least tackle, the very basic questions invested in the object of this analysis – network governance. That is, can we make a case fo...

• • Jon Aisbitt (New Philanthropy Capital; Goldman Sachs; The Man Group) • • Adrian Beecroft (Apax Partners) • • Peter Bull (HSBC Global Education Trust) • • Jo Clunie (KPMG Foundation) • • John Copps (New Philanthropy Capital) • • John Craig (Innovation Exchange Director) • • Peter Englander (Apax Foundation) • • Charlie Green (Private Equity Foun...

“As part of building the Big Society, we want to open public services up to small and medium-sized enterprises, employee co-operatives, voluntary sector organisations and social enterprises, who may often partner with the private sector. We believe that this will create more innovative and localised services, while also decreasing costs and increas...

As noted in previous chapters, new philanthropies provided New Labour with opportunities for policy ‘experiments’ – new policy ideas, new ways of doing policy, introducing new policy actors. These new methods and several of the new actors are being taken up and taken further by the Coalition government – for example in legislation to allow for the...

In this paper, we examine a set of complexly related education policy issues that concern changes to the form and technologies of the state, and changing modalities of government and processes of policy and service delivery, and concomitantly, the re-agenting of education policy within extensive but exclusive policy networks. We also explore the ro...

This article explores some aspects of the relation between neoliberalisation and the increasing use of digital technologies in school classrooms. It does this in relation to a specific case – a specific school, classroom and a fictionalised child – Sarah, who stands as a historical singularity and an exemplary space of relations. Sarah’s classroom...

The paper argues that the modern school is an ‘intolerable’ institution.¹1 We refer to the modern school in Foucault’s sense of modernity as an attitude and a power/knowledge regime. That is, a form of power that developed since the sixteenth century, drawing on and expanding an older technique of ‘pastoral’ power that has it’s origins in Christian...

A metapesquisa pode ser brevemente conceituada como pesquisas sobre pesquisas, realizadas com o objetivo de melhorar as pesquisas sobre um determinado campo, tema ou área de investigação. Este livro apresenta aspectos teórico-metodológicos, conceituais e práticos da metapesquisa no campo da Política Educacional. A metapesquisa é uma proposta recent...

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 th...

The academisation of schooling in Northern England is an example of a new mode of educational governance that promises greater autonomy for schools and school leaders. A common claim regarding the benefits of academisation is that it will improve student outcomes by delivering greater autonomy for Headteachers. In this paper, six Headteachers from...

This paper considers the sociology of education (SOE) as a modern human science. It suggests that the SOE is mired in a set of unreflexive, redemptive, Enlightment rationalities, and explores the messy relationships of the sociology with education that result from this. It is argues that the sociology of education has consistently failed to distanc...

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, focu...

Neoliberal policy technologies are spreading across the globe. Most go unrecognised and unopposed, but in some cases, they have provoked reactions and movements that reject or resist them. In this article we focus on one such movement of resistance, consisting of a network of families (the ‘opt out’ movement) that is boycotting the Standard Assessm...

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...

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 exclus...

Building on the work of others, this article sketches out what a Foucauldian ‘education’ might look like in practice, considers some of the challenges, paradoxes and (im)possibilities with which such an ‘education’ would face us, and indicates some of the cherished conceits and reiterated necessities that we must give up if we take seriously the ne...

Some authors argue that access to elite universities can bring about a ‘habitus transformation’ for working-class students, however in this paper, based on a three-year life history study, it is suggested that the transformative effects of the elite university experience come about in relation to and constrained by the working-class habitus. Workin...

Most work on the Global Education Industry (GEI) has focused on the role and growth of the ‘big players’—the multi-national corporations (e.g. Pearson, McKinsey, Microsoft, and News Corporation) or major global philanthropic foundations (Gates, Broad, Walton, Omidyar, etc.)—and has sought to map their national and global reach, their programs and i...

Social Networks Analysis (SNA) has become increasingly popular with education policy researchers over the last decades. Network ethnography is made up of a set of techniques that directly engage with the new policy topography. In the space available this chapter explores some of the relationships, connections, activities, movements, sites, and even...

This article draws on case studies of four English schools to explore some of the ways in which trade union representatives in these schools see their roles and the role of their unions in relation to how policy gets done in their schools. The article attempts two things. First, it details and describes some discomforts, oppositions and resistances...

This chapter outlines the main elements of “network ethnography” which has been developed as a set of techniques and a research sensibility appropriate to the study of the functioning of global education policy networks and policy communities. It focuses on one aspect of the method of network ethnography: the role of conference attendance. The chap...

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 financialisat...

This chapter asks—what can we learn from Foucault the teacher, the intellectual? How can we use Foucault to uneducate ourselves? It answers that we are invited to learn an attitude, a method, a relation to our own historicity, and our existence within and in relation to power. We are invited to learn the possibility of modifying our relation to our...

This chapter takes up the possibility of ‘lines of fragility’ explored in Chap. 2, in relation to education, through Foucault’s later work on subjectivity and ‘the care of the self’. It both considers subjectivity as a significant site of political struggle and education and explores some of the techniques of care that Foucault draws upon—from Grec...

This chapter explores education as one nexus of Foucault’s three vectors of analysis or ‘aspects of experience’—truth, power, and subjectivity. It further considers how the changing emphases between these vectors in Foucault’s oeuvre can enable us to think about education differently. I put these vectors to work in relation to a exploratory and ver...

In this paper we focus on one specific case to explore how networks of governance and concomitant processes of "heterarchization” operate in practice in education. We analyse the relationship between the Brazilian Federal Government and an advocacy coalition for national learning standards, named Mobilization for the National Learning Standards (MN...

This paper asks the question: to what extent do inspection regimes, particularly the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), influence the work of a school, and how might that influence be conceptualised? It draws on an ESRC-funded study of ‘policy enactments in secondary schools’, which was based on case-study work in four ‘ordinary’ schools....

The Education Reform Act introduced in England and Wales in 1988 brought about enormous changes in schools, both as management units and as educational institutions. This book, first published in 1992, was the first to look at the effects of the Act in all its aspects on the basis of empirical evidence gathered from schools over the first three yea...

This paper deploys some concepts from the work of Michel Foucault to problematise the mundane and quotidian practices of policy translation as these occur in the everyday of schools. In doing that, we suggest that these practices are complicit in the formation of and constitution of teacher subjects, and their subjection to the morality of policy a...

Edu.net builds upon, and extends, a series of research studies of education policy networks and global policy mobilities. It draws on comprehensive data resulting from a Leverhulme Trust research study focused on Africa, and a study funded by the British Academy focused on India, which explored the wayin which global actors and organisations bring...

This book considers Foucault as educator in three main ways. First, through some consideration of what his work says about education as a social and political practice. That is, education as a form of what Allen (2014) calls benign violence – which operates through mundane, quotidian disciplinary technologies and expert knowledges which together co...

This chapter begins with a very brief survey of current education policy in England, it describes a system of schooling riven with divisions, inequalities, alienation, failure, despondency and bias – 6 evils (See EHRC (2010) How Fair is Britain? London: Equality and Human Rights Commission; OECD (2011) Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising,...

El gobierno de lo educativo y de cada centro escolar se está modificando de manera profunda y acelerada. Ante las preguntas fundamentales: ¿qué es una buena escuela?, y ¿cómo debería gobernarse un centro educativo para convertirse en una buena escuela o un buen instituto para todo el alumnado, para los docentes y para las familias?, las respuestas...

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 Pe...

This chapter offers a general overview of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government's education policy (2010-2015) and attends to some specific features and trends. It has not been possible to comment directly on the early years, further and higher education as our emphasis is on the compulsory sector. However, the main trends and emph...

Introduction This chapter offers a general overview of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government's education policy (2010–15) and attends to some specific features and trends. It has not been possible to comment directly on early years, further and higher education as our emphasis here is on the compulsory sector. However, the main tre...

This book examines the social policies of the coalition government from 2010 to 2015, and outlines the incoming Conservative government’s approach during its first 100 days in office. Drawing on contributions on cross-cutting themes such as public expenditure and the governance of social policy, and on key service areas, including education, health...

This chapter will present a worked through example of a contemporary global education policy network and the various connectivities that structure and animate the network. These connectivities are financial, discursive, facilitative, and social. They make possible the flow of policy ideas, policy modalities, and policy technologies, and the dissemi...

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...

My career in education – moral and occupational – has been marked by dramatic changes and dramatic continuities in what it means to be educated. As a sociological life and as an intellectual journey my biography seems to consist of a set of ruptures and tensions and inconsistencies. These remain unresolved and are difficult to explain but form the...

Este artículo discute y analiza tres aspectos de la política educativa; estos aspectos son: i) el desempeñoentendido como la tecnología y la forma de regulación y reglamentación que utiliza juicios, comparaciones y demuestra como medidas de· la productividad o de resultados la valoración de individuos y de organizaciones; ii) la privatización, ente...

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.

This paper extends the author’s previous enquiries and discussions of governmentality and neoliberal policy technologies in a number of ways. The paper explores the specificity and generality of performativity as a particular contemporary mode of power relations. It addresses our own imbrication in the politics of performative truths, through our o...

This collection is an inside look at European Commission policy-making in education and the privatization of policy-making in the European Union. Along with contributions from leading academics in the field of European educational policy and policy-sociology, this book also introduces the 'absent voices' in the policy privatization debate: policy c...

This paper is a reflection on What is policy? Texts, Trajectories and Tool Boxes, which was first published in 1993, in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. It looks back to what the 1993 paper was trying to do and at some of the developments of the ideas first sketched there in my later work, in particular in the book How Scho...

This latest volume in the World Yearbook of Education Series focuses on educational elites and inequality, focusing particularly on the ways in which established and emergent groups located at the top of the social hierarchy and power structure reproduce, establish or redefine their position.The volume is organized around three main issues:- analyz...