No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Escaping Numbers?
Abstract
Numbers have long been associated with statecraft. In bureaucratic processes of accounting, regulation was effected by forming centres of calculation. This paper suggests that contemporary post-bureaucratic regimes are evolving new forms of accounting, in which the centre inserts itself into individual sites to exercise authority. This ‘intimate accounting’ involves technologies of transparency through which individual sites such as schools are required to declare intimate information publicly. In turn, the public, armed with information, is exhorted to become informed and to exercise influence on institutions to excel and to hold them to account. Using the case of Australia’s ‘Education Revolution’, this paper describes the processes of intimate accounting. It then explores the efforts to resist, subvert and undo such calculations. Finally, it speculates on why these calculations have continued to appear robust in the face of opposition and what would need to be done to escape or resist such calculations. Keywords: Sociology of Numbers; Education Policy and Numbers; Accountability
... Esta perspectiva funcionalista adota, sobretudo, aspectos de busca pelo desempenho, transparência e accountability, que são mensurados a partir de indicadores de desempenho (Gorur, 2018). No entanto, a atenção exclusiva para os resultados dos indicadores de desempenho tem gerado debates acerca da acurácia do uso dos números (Gorur, 2018;Ozga, 2017), do impacto desses resultados na comunidade escolar (Gorur, 2018), bem como do risco de se relegar aspectos tácitos do ensino-aprendizagem do aluno e da escola, que são difíceis de ser mensurados e, consequentemente, marginalizar circuitos de conhecimentos não orientados para os padrões de mensuração de desempenho (Landri, 2014). ...
... Esta perspectiva funcionalista adota, sobretudo, aspectos de busca pelo desempenho, transparência e accountability, que são mensurados a partir de indicadores de desempenho (Gorur, 2018). No entanto, a atenção exclusiva para os resultados dos indicadores de desempenho tem gerado debates acerca da acurácia do uso dos números (Gorur, 2018;Ozga, 2017), do impacto desses resultados na comunidade escolar (Gorur, 2018), bem como do risco de se relegar aspectos tácitos do ensino-aprendizagem do aluno e da escola, que são difíceis de ser mensurados e, consequentemente, marginalizar circuitos de conhecimentos não orientados para os padrões de mensuração de desempenho (Landri, 2014). ...
... Esta perspectiva funcionalista adota, sobretudo, aspectos de busca pelo desempenho, transparência e accountability, que são mensurados a partir de indicadores de desempenho (Gorur, 2018). No entanto, a atenção exclusiva para os resultados dos indicadores de desempenho tem gerado debates acerca da acurácia do uso dos números (Gorur, 2018;Ozga, 2017), do impacto desses resultados na comunidade escolar (Gorur, 2018), bem como do risco de se relegar aspectos tácitos do ensino-aprendizagem do aluno e da escola, que são difíceis de ser mensurados e, consequentemente, marginalizar circuitos de conhecimentos não orientados para os padrões de mensuração de desempenho (Landri, 2014). ...
Resumo O objetivo deste estudo foi analisar a prática da gestão escolar à luz da sociomaterialidade em uma escola pública de uma capital do nordeste brasileiro. Ao estudar a gestão escolar a partir da sociomaterialidade, entende-se que essa prática não ocorre, exclusivamente, por meio das "mãos" do diretor(a), mas trata-se de um fenômeno dinâmico, situado e que assume várias nuances em decorrência da interação dos diversos atores (humanos e não humanos). Utilizou-se a pesquisa qualitativa, por meio dos métodos de shadowing e interview to the double. Para análise dos dados, foi utilizado o framework elaborado por Bispo (2015). Identificou-se a existência de três fragmentos de práticas que compõem a textura da gestão escolar: prática pedagógica, prática de apoio administrativo e prática do interesse social. Ficou evidente como a prática da gestão escolar não acontece de maneira isolada, mas está interligada a uma textura maior de práticas sociomateriais. Palavras-chave: gestão escolar; teorias da prática; sociomaterialidade; educação; estudos organizacionais.
... This functionalist perspective emphasizes the search for financial control, transparency, and accountability, which are measured through performance indicators (Gorur, 2018). However, the excessive attention to managerial results while drawing on performance indicators has generated debates about the accuracy and adequate use of these numbers (Gorur, 2018;Ozga, 2017). ...
... This functionalist perspective emphasizes the search for financial control, transparency, and accountability, which are measured through performance indicators (Gorur, 2018). However, the excessive attention to managerial results while drawing on performance indicators has generated debates about the accuracy and adequate use of these numbers (Gorur, 2018;Ozga, 2017). The impact of this managerial perspective on the school community (Gorur, 2018) risks relegating to a lesser position the tacit aspects of teaching-learning that are difficult to measure, marginalizing knowledge circuits that are not directed towards measurable standards of performance (Landri, 2014). ...
... However, the excessive attention to managerial results while drawing on performance indicators has generated debates about the accuracy and adequate use of these numbers (Gorur, 2018;Ozga, 2017). The impact of this managerial perspective on the school community (Gorur, 2018) risks relegating to a lesser position the tacit aspects of teaching-learning that are difficult to measure, marginalizing knowledge circuits that are not directed towards measurable standards of performance (Landri, 2014). ...
The objective of this study was to analyze the practice of school management in light of sociomateriality in a public school of a capital in the northeast of Brazil. When studying school management from the perspective of sociomateriality, it is understood that this practice does not occur exclusively through the "hands" of the principal, but is a dynamic, situated phenomenon that develops different nuances through the interaction of various actors (human and non-human). A qualitative research method was employed, through shadowing and interview to the double. Data analysis relied on the framework prepared by Bispo (2015). Three fragments of practices that make up the texture of school management were identified: pedagogical practice, administrative support practice, and social interest practice. We found that the practice of school management does not happen in isolation, but is interconnected within the greater texture of sociomaterial practices.
... In the case of Learner B, it doubles the battle towards his/her performance in Accounting. Therefore, the standardised test in many occasions beyond the above-illustrated example has continued to marginalise the defeated communities, because such tests disregard the context of each learner and accordingly assess them in an unjustified manner (Gorur, 2018). ...
This paper analyses the effective use of the principles of good teaching as they are operationalized toward the creation of spaces for cognitive justice in the processes of teaching and learning Grade 10 Accounting. The envisaged spaces enable all forms of knowledges to co-exist and to complement another, in an enabling dialogue among these knowledges. Critical Accounting Research (CAR) is the lens couching the paper since it perceives the co-existence of knowledge as a way to contribute to a more sustainable, equitable and democratic world, and by extension, becoming beneficial to all. Participatory Action Research method operationalises CAR, where dialogues and discussions with the co-researching groups are conducted in order to formulate and operationalise this effective use of the principles of good teaching. Critical Discourse Analysis makes sense of the results as it allows for the use of text by participants to reveal the meaning at the deeper levels of discursive practice and the social structure.
... Varhaiskasvatuksen ohjauksen on esitetty jäsentyvän Lundqvistin (1992) jaottelun mukaisesti neljään dimensioon: suoraan ja epäsuoraan sekä detalji-ja puiteohjaukseen (Alila, 2013). Tässä tutkimuksessa ohjaus, jota muissa yhteyksissä on kutsuttu myös hallinnaksi, ymmärretään ihmisten toimintaan vaikuttamiseksi, joka tapahtuu yhtäältä yhteiskunnassa vallitsevien ongelmien nimeämisen ja ymmärrettäväksi tekemisen tapojen ja toisaalta konkreettisten käytäntöjen ja välineiden avulla (Gorur, 2018;Miller & Rose, 2010). ...
Artikkelissa tarkastellaan varhaiskasvatuksen ohjausta päiväkodin johtajien arkipäivän työssä. Perinteisesti varhaiskasvatuksen ohjausta on lähestytty sektorikohtaisesti varhaiskasvatuslaista ja eri tasoisista varhaiskasvatussuunnitelmista käsin. Sektorikohtaisen ohjauksen tarkastelu ei kuitenkaan auta ymmärtämään arjen tilanteissa syntyvää ristivetoa sektorikohtaisen ohjauksen ja muun ohjauksen välillä. Tutkimuksessamme huomio kiinnitetään ohjausvälineisiin ja niiden välisiä suhteita järjestelevien päiväkodin johtajien työhön. Hyödynnämme tässä kehkeymän käsitettä. Keskitymme siihen, millaisia kehkeymiä institutionaaliset dokumentit ja niihin kytkeytyvät rationaliteetit muodostavat päiväkodin johtajien työssä. Analysoimme valtion ja kunnan ohjausasiakirjoissa, kuten talous-, suunnitelma- ja päätösasiakirjoissa sekä päiväkodin johtajien kalenterimerkintöihin tukeutuvassa haastattelupuheessa muodostuvia sosiomateriaalisia suhteita ja niiden seurauksia. Artikkelissa kehkeymän käsite tekee näkyväksi, kuinka varhaiskasvatussuunnitelma väistyy taloudellisen ohjauksen tieltä ja työhyvinvointi lokeroituu työolosuhteista irralliseksi asiaksi päiväkotiympäristön ulkopuolelle.
... In education policy and governance there has been an increasing move towards standardization in combination with a growing reliance on numerical evidence (Gorur 2018;Landri 2021;Jarke and Breiter 2019;Ozga 2016). Moreover, the use of advanced technical systems that gather, label, and combine data using algorithms and often various forms of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly enhancing this move towards digital datafication in education in general (Jarke and Breiter 2019; Lewis and Hartong 2021;Lupton and Williamson 2017) and in ECE in particular (Bradbury 2019), especially in relation to testing and assessment practices. ...
There has been an increasing move worldwide in education policy towards standardization in combination with a global trust in digital quantification and calculation. These policies cause frictions in early childhood education (ECE). Hence, this paper examines the way standards ‘work’ in ECE. The empirical study draws on the ideas of Actor-Network Theory to recount and examine the highly material processes of calculation and representation, in which standards become enacted and act in practice. The data was drawn from extensive interviews with early childhood teachers in the Netherlands as well as additional ‘object interviews’. The analysis describes how a particular standard becomes enacted as an assemblage, which both invites and compels teachers and managers to engage in particular educational practices. Foregrounding standards and highlighting the way professionals work with, through or around them, enables educational professionals to (re)consider the doings of standards and creates a space to imagine how practices – and policies that shape these practices – might be assembled differently. We advance the argument that it is important for professionals to critically analyse their professional practices in light of increasing datafication. Enhancing sociomaterial sensibilities of teachers might support them to offset persuasive powers of sociomaterial policy assemblages.
... Another more recent kind of governance instrument is public displays of educational data (Decuypere, Ceulemans, & Simons, 2014;Gorur, 2013Gorur, , 2018, of which the website Education Zoom is an example. With Education Zoom, the Danish government adds the population of potential students to the subjects of higher education governance. ...
This concluding chapter draws on the previous chapters of the book and shows how the Danish case of governing by numbers and human-capital-oriented education policy adds new perspectives to the understandings of how quantification permeates and affects educational governance. The chapter demonstrates how quantification and governance practices in Danish higher education are not first and foremost affected by global neoliberal thinking and practices but rather by Cold War and Nordic welfare state traditions in alliance with economic thinking. These traditions affect both the mode of governance implied in educational data, in which techno-scientific decision-making, a preference for planning, and managerial soft governance practices are deployed to improve the welfare of the population, and the economic narrative of education in the welfare state, in which providing the general population with skills that are relevant for the labor market has been seen as an important tool in achieving a democratic and equitable society. The chapter discusses whether the emphasis on national governance traditions, rather than global trends, is better theorized through the notion of hybridity than the notion of convergence. Either way, the implications for the humanities do not evoke optimism.KeywordsGoverning by numbersHuman capitalEducational governanceHigher educationAccountabilityHybridity
... Finally, the Education Zoom instrument functions as a performance measurement instrument that penetrates higher education institutions and their programs, making their performance visible to the public through the display of intimate data (Gorur, 2018). Katja Brøgger has described the comparability feature of Education Zoom as a 'major exposure of the performance of each university … and their specific educational programs' (Brøgger, 2018: 361). ...
Educational data or indicators are influential because of their role in educational governance and management practices. One way of understanding how metrics operate when they are incorporated in governance practices is to turn to the instruments that are used to govern. Drawing on the instrumentation approach to public policy, the chapter analyzes six Danish instruments that all deploy graduate outcome data as techniques of governing: performance contracts, performance-based funding, accreditation, expert commissions and committees, a regulatory policy initiative called the Resizing Model, and a website called Education Zoom. The analysis places these instruments in four categories: performance measurement instruments, evidence-for-policy instruments, algorithmic governance instruments, and a nudging instrument. Data play different roles in these instruments, acting as performance indicators, as evidence, as inputs for algorithmic computation, and as probability data available for anticipation and self-governance. The analysis shows how marketization instruments are virtually absent in the analyzed case of Danish graduate outcome data and thereby suggests that other modes of governing are at play in this context than in contexts characterized by stronger neoliberal modes of governing and by a partial privatization and marketization of the higher education sector.
... In contrast, within the bureaucratic model, given the high level of de facto autonomy, the predominant sentiment of mistrust with external evaluations, and the prevalence of a bureaucratic form of accountability that gives more importance to rule compliance than to performance outcomes, it is easier for teachers to "escape numbers" (see Gorur, 2018;Piattoeva & Boden, 2020). ...
In recent decades, the governance of educational systems has experienced dramatic changes in many countries. Schools have been given more autonomy whilst being held increasingly accountable at the central level through standardized testing and other forms of external evaluation. The mechanisms of performance-based accountability (PBA) and the consequences attached to test results vary. In high-stakes systems, teachers’ careers are more directly connected to students’ performance, and low performing schools might risk closure, whereas in lower-stakes systems, the official administrative consequences of accountability for school actors are more symbolic than material. The main aim of this paper is to understand the impact of different forms of PBA on teachers’ work from a comparative perspective. Most research on this topic is based on single-context case studies, which makes it difficult to understand the impact of policy factors and professional contexts in teachers’ decisions and autonomy. To address this challenge, we review recent investigations (2017-2020) on the topic and compare their findings in different teachers' regulatory contexts. The review includes 101 articles from the SCOPUS and Web of Science databases. We find that evidence on the impact of PBA on teachers’ perceptions and beliefs are variegated, and that the implications of PBA on teachers’ autonomy does not only depend on the level of accountability stakes, but on teachers’ professional regulation.
This paper brings together an examination of the discursive and material architectures of equity contained within the Gonski Review, a watershed policy document in the history of Australian school funding and equity policies. The Review cemented an approach to disadvantage in school funding based around the identification of ‘equity groups’ − socio-educational disadvantage, low English proficiency, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, disability, small schools and schools in regional and remote locations. Working an assemblage approach, we suggest the need for research that attunes to the discursive and material elements of funding policies, that together shape possibilities for policy understandings and responses to disadvantage in education. Through a close analysis of the Gonski Review, this paper demonstrates that the ‘equity groups’ constructed by the Review are underpinned by a logic of data quantifiability and measurability. It simplifies and fixes in place the complex, lived reality of inequity. Taking the equity group of disability in the government school sector as an exemplar, we demonstrate how students, teachers and schools are required to navigate multiple measures of classification and quantification to secure their government funding. We suggest that this process of repetitive classification carries consequences for the amount of funding a student ultimately receives.
This article presents autoethnographic short stories that describe an early childhood education and care (ECEC) centre director's work for one year in a municipality in Finland. The purpose of this article is to provide a glimpse into what it is like to enter into an ECEC director position and live everyday ECEC life with economic data that are produced by frequently fluctuating child–staff ratios. This study contributes to a better understanding of the transformational implications of datafication by providing insight into affective interrelations held together by economic aspirations. It shows that datafication is a powerful tool to affect and to be affected in the female-dominated care work of ECEC. The study highlights the possibilities of using an autoethnographic analysis to recognise how data affect the body in data dominated ECEC and how to utilise this very recognition as resistance.
This chapter discusses the operation of digital education in relation to the changing governance of education in Russia. It examines how digitalization changes the character of traditional actors and enables new actors and actor assemblages to enter the scene of education governance and provision. It then looks at how datafication extends spaces of governance in both a topographical and a topological manner. Topographically, some practices of datafication follow established administrative structures enabling tighter vertical control over regions and education institutions by the federal authorities. But datafication also generates spaces that overcome topographical distance through relationality and connectedness. These manifest, first, in intensifying proximities to the global level of education governance bypassing the national authority, and, second, in the possibilities of intimate governance reaching into individual subjectivities.
Social institutions increasingly appear as data-driven entities, with data analytics and information technology transforming social life across health care, education, and criminal justice. Social science scholarship characterizes the political nature of this paradigm by emphasizing technology’s role in the governance of life and the sociocultural values embedded within technical design. But little research has examined the intimate work taking place inside these very institutions, resulting in inadequate attention to everyday data practices as they intertwine with evolving technopolitics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork of the integration of Electronic Health Records at a large safety-net health system in the United States, in this article I emphasize the intimate work involved in becoming data-driven and how this work shapes the material contours of contemporary data politics. I compare the implementation of two health system initiatives, including a Complex Care Program for an algorithm-defined population and a Disparity Reduction Plan targeting Latinos with Type 2 diabetes, to demonstrate how on the ground actors make intimate decisions about what constitutes the ‘right data’ in becoming data-driven. As data analytics expands to transform organizational decision-making, redistribute resources, and reconfigure the professional gaze, social science must follow data politics on the move to fully account for the evolving technopolitics of data-driven society.
Governments use metrics made possible by new data technologies to allocate budgets, manage pandemics, valorize ecosystems, and demonstrate how these actions are legitimate. Big data is pointed to as providing objective answers that emerge untampered from observations of the world as it is – a view from nowhere. While data is more valued than ever in environmental governance, so too are arrangements that seek stakeholders’ input and otherwise address their subjective interests – a view from everywhere. Different kinds of metrics perform state actors as accountable in both registers: metrics that are responsive to dynamic conditions; that account for specific stakeholders; that can be prioritized against one another in interactive data visualization tools. Louisiana, USA’s Coastal Master Plan is an attempt to stem wetlands loss through fine-scale modeling of large volumes of data and calculation of these kinds of social and environmental metrics. State actors there make accountability claims that appear contradictory: their decisions are legitimate because they are driven by the best available coastal science and technology, while their data tools ‘didn’t make decisions for us.’ As state actors deploy environmental big data and metrics to make sense of it, we should be able to explain these apparently contradictory stances and the controversies that result. STS theory on metrics in environmental governance benefits from characterizing how ‘modes of authorized seeing’ are given expression by different metrical forms and what brings modes into contact and conflict.
In the context of international systemic reforms promoting professional standards for teachers and inclusivity of diverse students in schools, this paper presents and demonstrates conceptual means by which educators can critically respond to the uncomfortable couplet of standardisation and difference. This is primarily achieved by theorising alternative ways of making sense of difference. Core to the argument is that standards can become more than prescriptions for educating in the same way when teachers recognise their positionality, examine the socio-cultural context of their work, and take action to ensure equality or equity of opportunity within the classroom. The paper is presented in three sections. The first section addresses the use of teaching standards in the United States and Australia, examining various ways inclusive education is articulated as a standard for practice. The second section engages theory from critical disability studies as a fillip to thinking differently about disability. The final section creates conceptual space for educators to move effectively between different intentions – their own as practitioners, the profession’s standards, and socio-material conditions involving ethics and accountability. On the whole, conveyed throughout the paper is the necessity for teachers to orientate towards contextual sense-making of professional standards to support inclusive practice.
Data are increasingly interwoven in various aspects of our social lives. In our everyday and professional lives many kinds of data are produced, as we make online searches via search engines, chat with loved ones and friends via social media, or use a maps app on our smartphone to find our way in an unfamiliar place. To use these digital data for decision-making, and literally anything else, people rely on computational technologies. With these, digital data can be processed, recombined, operated with, used, and sold. Going hand in hand with the pervasiveness of data in our society is the process of datafication.
Researchers across manifold academic disciplines and fields from computer science to sociology, media studies, communication research, humanities, and education research are working on topics concerning this datafied society. In the recent years, this body of academic work has been consolidating under the terms ‘critical data studies’ or just ‘data studies’, drawing on various ontological, epistemological, theoretical, and methodological approaches to studying datafication processes. How, then, in this manifold of perspectives, academic knowledge about datafication processes and our datafied societies is produced? What is ‘critical’ in data studies? How do scholars conducting research on datafication reflect about “what matters we use to think other matters with;” (Haraway, 2016, p. 12) in their studies? With my thesis, I advance our understanding of how what is known about datafication and datafied societies is produced.
I show how empirical datafication research produces re-situated conceptualisations of datafication and discuss the role of critique in data studies. I propose "care-ful data studies" as a pathway for further, generative, care-ful critique, contributing to the literature bridging data studies with feminist traditions of thought.
Despite its infancy as a research field, a number of different approaches to the study of governing by numbers have begun to emerge. This chapter discusses the methodological approaches used in this book. One important methodological perspective adopted throughout the book is the understanding of numbers as performative agencies, rather than as representations of reality. This framing of numbers enables analyses of how numbers govern. Meanwhile, it also matters whether the research object is framed as numbers, statistics, data, indicators, or metrics. The book argues for a combination of different framings and methodological approaches, ranging from studies of metrics and their abilities to quantify, categorize, conceptualize, commensurate, compare, and differentiate phenomena, to studies of how numbers in governance processes are framed as indicators, evidence, or information, and to studies of how data are received by actors and form the basis for personal, institutional, and political decisions. With this combination, the more common approach of studying data as a generalized object is complemented by studies of the specificities of particular numbers. Together, these approaches produce analyses that enable a more detailed mapping of how governing by numbers and ideas from human capital theory become entangled, respectively, with neoliberal thinking, understood as a philosophical preference for markets, and social democratic governance ideals.KeywordsMethodological approachesAgential realismEducational dataMetricsGoverning by numbersEducation policyNeoliberalism
Educators, parents, and policymakers agree on the need to assess children’s learning to inform literacy teaching practices but are often divided about how best to gauge literacy development. In ensuing debates, school data walls have become pedagogically and spatially contested sites. We think of data walls as -scapes and scopic regimes that have sociomaterial force and that coalesce as complex assemblages worth interrogating. On that basis, our aim is to consider two kinds of data wall by drawing from a three year study of literacy teaching practices in government schools in one Australian state and sharing insights with resonance in similar education systems. Analysis shows that the first, more common data wall mapped and privileged quantitative data about, and summative testing results for, children and functioned primarily as an accountability tool. The second data wall added layers of qualitative data and formative assessment and facilitated valuable professional learning and development in support of children’s learning outcomes. Our findings are significant because they reveal how data walls foster integrative approaches to literacy assessment that cut through the debate. Findings also furnish theoretical insights about how data walls are powerful assemblages, enable sound educational outcomes, but require ongoing attention to their sociomaterial effects.
The proliferation of standardized testing and administrative statistics in compulsory education is embedded in the rise to prominence of quantified accountability as a mechanism of education governance. Numbers work by stripping away the contexts of their production and the granular and ambiguous detail of the phenomena they claim to represent. The article re-examines qualitative interviews collected during a completed international project that studied policies and practices of accountability reforms and quality evaluation in Russian school education to understand how actors involved in quantified accountability—from producers to users of large-scale assessments of learning outcomes and administrative statistical data—articulate measuring or being measured in a decontextualized manner. The article offers two theoretical contributions on the enactment of accountability policies. First, it shows the importance of analytical attention to the materiality of accountability policies, that is, their specifically numerical nature. Second, it proposes that the study of accountability enactment should address the question of how actors deal with the decontextualizing propensities of quantified accountability. I conclude that enactment of accountability is fuelled by quantified decontextualization and the diverse ways in which actors experience, make sense of and act upon it.
In recent years, international development organisations have responded to concerns about the growth of private schooling in the global south by calling on governments to commit to quality public provision and effective regulation of the private sector. This paper draws on the case of India’s experience with the Right to Education Act to consider the challenges that nations face in attempting to regulate private sector participation in education. Using the concept of ‘modes of ordering’ from Science and Technology Studies, we explore how attempts to impose this rights-based, government-centred order have fared against resistance from the market-based order of the private sector. As more countries express a commitment to a rights-based order, the Indian case study and the concept of ‘modes of ordering’ could help in anticipating and countering the challenges they might face.
Mapping India’s vast, complex, and unruly education system through the systematic generation of accurate and current data, and encouraging accountability by persuading a diverse array of actors to engage with such data, is an ambitious, if not heroic, project. Yet this is what India’s Education Information Management System (EMIS), the Unified District Information System of Education (U-DISE), has set out to do. This digital platform must persuade actors in India’s 1.5 million schools to regularly upload trustworthy data to populate the database. A range of actors must be cajoled into becoming data-informed, to plan and strategize, and to enforce accountability. This paper traces how U-DISE attempts to impose its desires on a range of distributed actors, and how these actors respond to its overtures. Using concepts from Science and Technology Studies (STS), and based on interviews with the designers of U-DISE, central and state government officials, school-level data coordinators and NGOs and activists, as well as policy documents and government websites, we argue in this paper that, to realise their ambitions, digital platforms not only aim to be ‘user friendly’, but also engage in efforts to make the user friendly.
This is an editorial introduction to the double special issue entitled "Escaping numbers? The ambiguities of the governance of education through data". We argue that quantification, counting, accounting, enumeration and numbering are inherently and simultaneously complex socio-cultural and socio-technical practices. Although often portrayed as robust, objective and neutral, numbers are nevertheless inherently interpretive, fluid and amorphous. The paradox of numbers is that their legitimacy as objective representations of reality or impartial tools of governance relies on de-contextualization and opacity, on being removed from the complex living texture of the world. Thus numerical technologies are always subject to a tricky trade-off between the rigidity of commensuration required to make things quantifiable and mobile, and the demand of making these reductive numbers still speak to the concrete idiosyncratic contexts in which they must make sense to spur action (at a distance or intimately) (Rottenburg & Engle Merry, 2015). Grounded in science and technology studies, we explain how numbers are contingent (non-human) actors, or actor-networks, and are dependent on the will of the multiple human and non-human actors and processes that bring them into being and determine how they are used, and by whom. This renders numbers prone to both reinterpretation and iatrogenic effects. In presenting the papers published in this special issue, we suggest that the ambiguity of governance by numbers could be rendered visible by examining the dynamics between the development of new numbers and the surprising inertia of existing calculations, the contingent nature of trust in and demand for numbers, and the role of informed publics as key adherents.
In 2017, it was excitedly pronounced across major newspapers in Australia that public schools’ share of student enrolment had increased, marking a “determined end to a 40-year decline”. The claims were bolstered by numerical data, and an accompanied media release, issued by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. These bold claims immediately caught my attention, first for the assertion they were making and the implications for public schools; but second, for the way in which they potentially elided complex and variable units of analysis, to simplify and stabilise the numbers into a depoliticised narrative. Education reform relies on measurements, quantification and statistics to inform policy, but also to inform public opinion. Drawing on Petty’s notion of political arithmetic and Gorur’s “sociology of measurement”, this paper explores and critiques the role of counting in relation to national school enrolment shares, as divided between public and private schools in Australia.
Calculating and making public carbon footprints is becoming self-evident for multinational corporations. Drawing on ethnographic data I narrate of the calculative routine practices involved in that process. The narration shows how routine yet sophisticated mathematical transformations are involved in retrieving salient information, and second that mathematical consistency is readily interrupted by 'dirty data'. Such interruptions call for opportunistic data management in devising work-arounds, which effect enough mathematical coherence for the number to hold together. Foregrounding an episode of calculative data retrieval, interruption and work-around contrivance, I employ it to make a comparative reading of two STS analytics, arguing: whereas Callon and Law's (2005) analytic technique of qualculation reveals the episode of data management and work around contrivance as a teleologically oriented process that manages to bridge mathematical inconsistency, Verran's technique of ontologising troubles enables us to recognise how a number-as-network configures its particular kind of certainty and coherence, how it sticks.
This paper explores the ways that qualities and quantities can be enacted, bringing realities into being and how qualities and quantities might also be undone, and sometimes in order to do realities better. In particular, undoing has become a focus for accountably resisting quantification. Utilising the neologism of the qualculation, the paper begins by exploring a particular kind of undoing: deletion. Questions are raised regarding the legal, technical and organisational aspects of deletion and then how we might bring ideas from Science and Technology Studies (STS) together to pose questions of deletion and accountability. Subsequently, data from a study of the development of an algorithmic deletion system is presented to explore qualculation, undoing, deletion, accountability and market value in action. The paper will conclude with a discussion of the nature of undoing qualculations, of how undoing is a constitutive action in itself.
PISA is an extremely influential large-scale assessment, and its ‘policy lessons’ are being incorporated in a range of nations all over the world. In this paper I argue that not only is PISA influencing policies and practices, but also that ‘seeing like PISA’ is becoming a widespread phenomenon. Globally, education administration is now characterized by an intense focus on output measurement, a highly competitive environment heightened by national and international rankings, and an economic and instrumentalist approach to education and education reform.
Using James Scott’s account of 18th Century German forestry practices as a parable, this paper suggests that ‘seeing like PISA’ could have far reaching and damaging effects. The paper proposes the following: first, understanding PISA as a ‘project of legibility’ enhances our appreciation of its purposes and possibilities. Second, PISA is much more than a ‘representation’ of existing conditions, but is creating new conditions – in other words, it is not descriptive but performative; and, finally, ‘seeing like PISA’ is bringing about deep-rooted changes, and it is likely that the effects will be very long-term. Some of these effects may only manifest themselves in the next
fifteen or twenty years; and, by then, the possibilities of redressing some of the ill effects may be very limited.
From the moment Australia’s newly elected Labor government announced in 2008 its intention to introduce a national assessment scheme for Australian schools, and to publish the results of these assessments on a public website, it courted controversy. The National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) and the MySchool website were introduced as part of the new government’s ‘transparency agenda’ and have been widely discussed and debated. NAPLAN is seen not only as an assessment of students, but also of the schools they attend. On the MySchool website, all of Australia’s nearly 10,000 government and non-government schools that receive government funding are required to present a range of information, including their NAPLAN results. The results are displayed in a comparative format, against the results of 59 other similar schools, as well as against its own past performance. Only selective special purpose schools are exempt from reporting their NAPLAN results.
Capitalism manages to enact environments in the midst of its centres by means of keeping other environments out. The fundamental practice which allows for this contradictory and generative move is that capitalist agents enact environments. Capitalism does not require a clear, neat, distinct, singular environment. Multiple, fluid, dynamic environments allow far better the tactical and strategical project of staging capitalism as having its destructive environmental impacts in control. That control is a decisive fiction sustaining the unsustainable.
These theses are the result of an ethnography, reported in this book, that scrutinised corporate carbon accounting practices as a site at which we are able to simultaneously explore two significant issues for the management of environments: on the one hand studying practices of corporate environmental accounting allows us to engage with agents' practical work reality by which capitalism seeks to render itself 'green' and 'sustainable'; on the other hand the focus on precisely how accountants achieve taking carbon into account is able to sharpen our understanding of how quantifying practices perform in a non-substantial area of business, such as engaging with climate change.
In the received view, corporate carbon accounting is about providing the facts and figures about the emissions which a company produces. Accounting for these emissions is supposedly a condition to take carbon into account – economists would call this process internalisation. The discourse which assumes that 'if only capitalist society is able to internalise its environmental problems' (like carbon emissions which are identified as the culprit of global warming and, in consequence, climate change) 'then capitalist society will be able to solve environmental crises' – this discourse is called ecological modernisation. Within environmental sociology arguments over whether that discourse is actually materially reflected abound. Ecological modernisation theory proposes that capitalist organisations do get green(er). In the midst of debate, little attention, if at all, has been paid to those agents who are, supposedly, implementing the programmes of ecological modernisation, such as environmental management systems (EMS) and carbon accounting. This study contributes to understanding how capitalism organises its relation to environments by means of scrutinising the work practices of these agents. To conduct that study, I have carefully avoided to make assumptions about whether a particular organisation would be conducting greenwash. Much rather, the intentionally open question was: what do agents of ecological modernisation do and how do they achieve it?
With this orientation, this study turned to sociological theory and methodology which does not presume any overarching structure as determining agents. Instead, by means of methodological triangulation between ethnomethodology, actor-network theory (ANT) and Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of field and habitus, this study reconstructs by which specific practices and discursive action agents manage to make greening more central to capitalism. The decisive finding is that while agents do manage to bring environmental data into the heart of the corporation – the centre of capitalism – what that data is about (the things this data is related and presumably representing, the material hinterland of that data) is simultaneously distanced from the corporate core. This study, thus, shows how capitalism manages to enact a epicentral movement of 'environment' and, in parallel, to ensure that environmental issues and concerns do not challenge orinterfere in that centre. It manages by means of keeping the largest degrees of environments out.
The overarching thesis of this study is, thus, that environments, such as carbon, are not existing – for all practical purposes of corporate agents – out-there but, rather, they are carefully crafted and enacted into corporate, social and, eventually, economic reality. Environments are enacted. The plural matters. Within the organisational practices of capitalism, agents may imagine to refer to 'the' environment. Their everyday practices of taking environments into account, however, relate to specific materials, such as spreadsheets, pieces of papers, flip-charts. Environments exist through these multiple materials, in multiple versions; ontologically, thus they do not exist in the singular but they are staged as such. If the carbon emission fact of a company is established, that fact may well be out-dated a few micro-seconds or years later; it may differ several kilometres off or in a neighbouring storage unit in a computer. Any global fact is enacted in particular located situations. Emissions facts are not stable but fluid, flowing in and between myriads of situations. They are hold together by means of humans' material-discursive performances. And they shift with agents' practices just like with the dynamics in-built into materials, like a database. These processes produce artefacts, versions of environments. And these versions matter. What a society is dealing with when encountering a corporate emission fact is not Nature but a version of an environment. Next year, the same fact (as in, signifying the same imagined out-there) may have changed.
Vis-à-vis Science and Technology Studies (STS), my analysis of the effects of enacting environments is indicative of a potentially general characteristic in digital quantification practices – whether in offices or in laboratories: data flows are not that clean and under control. While workers may achieve staging being in control, in practice parallel versions of realities may proliferate – for the better or worse. What we find is that the reality of corporate carbon emissions is enacted as mutable, mobile and multiple. In the practical work of corporate fact finders, it is not necessary, albeit it is deemed required, that facts are singularised and immutablised. In consequence, social and economic reality is confronted with diverse carbon emission accounts, all implying universal truths. Societies and politics which resist engaging with parallel realities and insist on singular ones may not be well equipped to manage those crises that may be co-constituted by these parallel realities.
Ethnographic work underlying this argument involved participant observation over a period of twenty months as well as document analysis. The study took place at a Fortune 50 financial services provider positioned in a legitimising network involving one of the largest international environmental NGO's and one of the four largest auditing firms. The findings of this study are, thus, considered to point to practices indicative of widely organisationally accepted and shared realities within hegemonic modern capitalist culture.
The OECD's international education indicators have become very influential in contemporary education policies. Although these indicators are now routinely, annually published in the form of Education at a Glance, the calculability upon which the indicators depend was an achievement that involved the mobilisation of a huge machinery of expertise, trust, pragmatism and other resources. This paper traces the ways in which varied constraints were addressed, interests translated, categories defined, classifications negotiated, frameworks agreed upon, choices made, methodologies established and protocols developed, as the indicators exercise moved from being nearly impossible to becoming routinely produced. Using resources from Science and Technology Studies (STS), it demonstrates that the work of making such assemblages is both instrumentalist and performative, and argues for an undertaking of critique as a moral enterprise.
In this article, the author tells the story of her search for appropriate tools to conceptualise policy work. She had set out to explore the relationship between the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Australia's education policy, but early interview data forced her to reconsider her research question. The plethora of available models of policy did not satisfactorily accommodate her growing understanding of the messiness and complexity of policy work. On the basis of interviews with 18 policy actors, including former OECD officials, PISA analysts and bureaucrats, as well as documentary analysis of government reports and ministerial media releases, she suggests that the concept of ‘assemblage’ provides the tools to better understand the messy processes of policy work. The relationship between PISA and national policy is of interest to many scholars in Europe, making this study widely relevant. An article that argues for the unsettling of tidy accounts of knowledge making in policy can hardly afford to obscure the untidiness of its own assemblage. Accordingly, this article is somewhat unconventional in its presentation, and attempts to take the reader into the messiness of the research world as well as the policy world. Implicit in this presentation is the suggestion that both policy work and research work are ongoing attempts to find order and coherence through the cobbling together of a variety of resources.
Abstract: A Sociology of packaging, When the Buridan’s donkey faces the market. The Buridan’s donkey is a starving animal placed at equal distance from two identical quantities of a same food. Being unable to choose between the two, he lets himself starve to death. The situation of the contemporary consumer is close to that of the donkey, since it is often that of a man or woman hesitating between two identical products: Rank Xerox vs. Ricoh copiers, Sony vs. Philips CD player, Renault vs. Peugeot cars, and so on. This situation introduces a “packaging economy”: there is no possible choice problem without two haystacks, that is: without the clandestine introduction of a new actant—packaging—between the subject and the object at stake. From this starting point, the book shows to what extent this a priori futile envelope—it is aimed at being thrown away!—is on the contrary one of the most powerful market mediations that work to bridge supply and demand. The packaging posits the problem of Buridan’s donkey—the choice between the same and the same—and it solves it at the same time: indeed, it enables the inscription of some elements liable to overcome the indecisiveness in which it first places the consumer. The packaging hides the product to show it differently. In so doing, it unveils some invisible entities like the chemical composition of the product, it informs the consumer about the product’s origin (brand), it diverts the consumer’s attention from prices to quality; it goes beyond brand competition in introducing third party labels… Through an endless game of differentiation and mimicry at the packaging’s surface, one discovers that packaging can preserve and sustain economic rationality when figures are lacking. Producers try to avoid price comparisons in continuously modifying product characteristics. Symmetrically, consumers attempt to take rational decisions in evaluating the given characteristics and/or in mobilizing some “ready to choose” devices. In relation with this double statement the book proposes to account for the role of economic “qualculation” in contemporary market exchanges. The “quaculation-calculation” homophony attempts to suggest that there is no clear boundary between prices and qualities. The book does not try to oppose economics and sociology, but rather to find some ways that lead to their mutual enrichment.
Résumé : L’âne de Buridan est un animal affamé qui, placé à égale distance de deux quantités identiques d’une même nourriture, ne parvient pas à choisir, et se laisse donc mourir de faim. La situation du consommateur contemporain est proche de celle de l’âne, puisqu’il s’agit souvent d’un homme ou d’une femme tiraillé(e) entre deux produits identiques : photocopieurs Rank Xerox ou Ricoh, lecteurs de CD Sony ou Philips, voiture Renault ou Peugeot. Cette situation inaugure une « économie d’emballage » : pas de problème de choix possible sans deux bottes de foin, c’est-à-dire sans l’intronisation clandestine d’un nouvel actant — l’emballage — entre le sujet et l’objet. À partir de ce constat, l’ouvrage montre combien ce contenant a priori futile — il est destiné à être jeté ! — est au contraire l’une des médiations les plus puissantes qui œuvrent à rapprocher l’offre et la demande. L’emballage pose le problème de l’âne de Buridan — le choix entre le même et le même — et le résout en même temps, puisqu’il permet l’inscription d’éléments susceptibles de sortir le sujet de l’indécision dans laquelle on l’a tout d’abord placé. L’emballage cache le produit pour le montrer autrement, révèle des entités invisibles telle la composition chimique de l’objet, informe sur son origine (marque), déporte l’attention des prix vers la prise en compte de la qualité, dépasse la concurrence entre marques en introduisant des labels tierce partie… Au travers du jeu infini de la différenciation et du mimétisme à la surface des emballages, on s’aperçoit que ces derniers permettent de préserver et de prolonger la rationalité économique « quand le nombre vient à manquer ». Les producteurs tentent de couper court à la comparaison en termes de prix en variant continuellement les caractéristiques des produits ; symétriquement, les consommateurs s’efforcent d’opérer des choix informés en appréciant les caractéristiques offertes et/ou en mobilisant des dispositifs de « prêt-à-choisir ». Cette double constatation fonde la proposition d’une prise en compte du « qualcul économique » du producteur et du consommateur. Si le préfixe « qual » vise ici à désigner la part croissante de l’« économie de la qualité » dans l’échange contemporain, l’homophonie « qualcul-calcul » s’efforce de faire comprendre qu’il n’y a pas de rupture ni de frontière étanche entre « rationalité par le chiffre » et « rationalité par les formes » : il s’agit moins d’opposer la sociologie à l’économie du marché, mais bien de réfléchir à leur enrichissement mutuel.
Australia's Education Revolution, launched in 2008, emphasised equity as a key reason for reforms. It identified ‘pockets of disadvantage’ as one of the main problems that needed to be addressed through its reforms. Through a series of translations, the problem of ‘pockets of disadvantage’ was converted to one of a lack of information, a lack of comparable metrics and the absence of an informed public, leading to a number of solutions such as the development of a national assessment scheme and the My School website. In this paper, using the theoretical and methodological resources of actor-network theory, I argue that these translations were also, simultaneously, the processes by which the Australian education space was further ‘marketised’. These marketisation processes involved homogenisation, whereby schools were rendered comparable through the development of common evaluation and common metrics; the development of informational resources that enabled parents to function as economic agents and exert ‘market forces’; and coordinating the activities of the actors through the My School website. The paper concludes with a discussion of how such descriptive analyses might serve as critique.
In contemporary education policy, simplified technical accounts of policy problems and solutions are being produced with the use of numeric calculations. These calculations are seen as clear and unbiased, capable of revealing “what works” and identifying “best practices.” In this piece, the authors use resources from the material-semiotic approach of actor-network theory to discuss how calculations have begun to serve as a subtle infrastructure underpinning the way we understand and organise our world. They demonstrate the usefulness of the approach in tracing the technicisation of policy by deploying it to qualitative studies of like-school comparisons in the two unexpectedly linked locations—New York City and Australia. The authors reveal how technical accounts are precarious and need constant maintenance to endure, even as they increasingly becoming routine, curtailing the policy imagination and limiting the spaces of contestation. It is for this reason, they argue, that a deeper understanding and sustained critique of such accounts is of pressing importance.
The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is increasingly depended upon by education policy makers to provide reliable measures of their country's education system against international benchmarks. PISA attempts to provide efficient, scientific and technical means to develop educational policies which achieve optimal outcomes (Berg & Timmermans, 2000, p. 31). This kind of scientific evidence is seen by policy makers as being free of prejudice and ideology. Science is expected to represent the truth, state universal facts and make predictions. Thus PISA seeks to rank countries' performances, work out future scenarios and offer policy direction. By what means does PISA gain knowledge and speak with confidence about diverse cultures and distant nations? How does it acquire a ‘voice from nowhere’ (Haraway, 1988; Suchman, 2000), and become a modern-day Oracle that countries might consult for policy advice? Modelled on early actor-network accounts of laboratory life, this ethnography traces how PISA knowledge comes to be made, guided by interview data with two ‘insiders’ in the ‘PISA laboratory’. It traces the translations and the circulating reference that turn PISA into a ‘centre of calculation’. It highlights how human and non-human entities are imbricated in the assembling of scientific facts and argues for a suspension of the divide between ‘science’ and ‘politics’. In the process, the paper offers an empirical instantiation of how some concepts from actor-network theory may be applied in the field of education policy, and ponders the implications of such an understanding for evidence based policy making.
It often seems to be taken for granted that numbers produce effects and that practices of accounting enhance authority. This also goes for accounting and the environment. This paper shares this belief and argues that practices of accounting have been a crucial technology for taking nature or 'the environment' into account in the post-war era. Nevertheless, the 'constitutive turn' in the studies of accounting should not tempt us to leave unexplored the limitation of accounting practices and the inabilities to govern by numbers. With a point of departure in a pollution control agency, the paper explores the making of a non-authoritative office. It points to the emergence of what is labelled 'accounting intimacy' rather than the exertion of government at a distance. The paper also points to the ways in which the agency, rather than building a separate and distinct authority, came to reproduce the actor subjected to being governed, i.e., the polluting factory, within its own office. The author argues that this can be related to the investment in a shared 'technical interest' and the belief that the right (emission) number in itself would be sufficient to move the factory. The paper then explores the conditions for which numbers nevertheless came to have effects. The argument is that this should be seen as inextricably linked to the emergence of an 'interesting object', i.e., 'the environment' and an environmental interest, within the office. Thus, we need to pay attention to the formation of interests, and as accounting scholars turn to 'the environment', the latter should not be taken for granted.
This article discusses a number, 6.15%, as it comes into being in the course of an evaluation study of education in a southern Afghan province. This number indicates that out of 100 school-aged girls 6.15 go to school. While this kind of number may invite refl ections on its epistemic accuracy, more often it draws attention to its inherent negative — the girls that do not go to school — substantiating a need for sustained international commitment. As this article will show, numbers work to establish girls as research entities, as part of populations, and as a concern for the Afghan government and the international intervention. This interfacing work of numbers — between girls, states, interventions, and research protocols — is often absent from academic work that takes numbers to be stable and passive tools with which the world can be known. This article, instead, takes numbers to have an internally complex multiplicity and to actively engage with their environments. In this article, I use the interface between numbers and environment as a space for ethnographic exploration of world-making. By describing three moments in the lifecycle of the number — data cleaning, analysis and presentation — I describe three distinct moments of interfacing in which the number comes to act in three capacities: effecting reference, constituting proportional comparison, and evoking doubt and certainty. Detailed understanding of numbering practices provides an opportunity to not just critically assess numbers as end products but to carefully assess the worlds that emerge alongside numbering practices and the ways in which numbers contribute in processes of governance.
This paper outlines a new approach to the study of power, that of the sociology of translation. Starting from three principles, those of agnosticism, generalised symmetry and free association, the paper describes a scientigc and economic controversy about the causes for the decline in the population of scallops in St. Brieuc Bay and the attempts by three marine biologists to develop a conservation strategy for that population. Four "moments" of translation are discerned in the attempts by these researchers to impose themselves and their degnition of the situation on others: Z) problematization-the researchers sought to become indispensable to other actors in the drama by degning the nature and the problems of the latter and then suggesting that these would be resolved if the actors negotiated the "obligatory passage point" of the researchers' program of investigation; G) interessemen- A series of processes by which the researchers sought to lock the other actors into the roles that had been proposed for them in that program; 3) enrolment- A set of strategies in which the researchers sought to degne and interrelate the various roles they had allocated to others; 4) mobilization- A set of methods used by the researchers to ensure that supposed spokesmen for various relevant collectivities were properly able to represent those collectivities and not betrayed by the latter. In conclusion, it is noted that translation is a process, never a completed accomplishment, and it may (as in the empirical case considered) fail.
Controversies over such issues as nuclear waste, genetically modified organisms, asbestos, tobacco, gene therapy, avian flu, and cell phone towers arise almost daily as rapid scientific and technological advances create uncertainty and bring about unforeseen concerns. The authors of Acting in an Uncertain World argue that political institutions must be expanded and improved to manage these controversies, to transform them into productive conversations, and to bring about "technical democracy." They show how "hybrid forums"—in which experts, non-experts, ordinary citizens, and politicians come together—reveal the limits of traditional delegative democracies, in which decisions are made by quasi-professional politicians and techno-scientific information is the domain of specialists in laboratories. The division between professionals and laypeople, the authors claim, is simply outmoded. The authors argue that laboratory research should be complemented by everyday experimentation pursued in the real world, and they describe various modes of cooperation between the two. They explore a range of concrete examples of hybrid forums that have dealt with sociotechnical controversies including nuclear waste disposal in France, industrial waste and birth defects in Japan, a childhood leukemia cluster in Woburn, Massachusetts, and Mad Cow Disease in the United Kingdom. They discuss the implications for political decision making in general, and they describe a "dialogic" democracy that enriches traditional representative democracy. To invent new procedures for consultation and representation, they suggest, is to contribute to an endless process that is necessary for the ongoing democratization of democracy.
Processes of globalization and decentralization are changing the relationship among statistical knowledge production, nation, and state. This article explores these changes through a comparison of five projects to design and implement indicators of sustainable development to replace conventional measures of economic welfare and social demographics - community sustainability indicators, Metropatterns, greening the gross domestic product, the Living Planet Index, and standardized accounting rules for inventorying greenhouse gas emissions. Drawing on a coproductionist idiom, the article argues that these projects constitute experiments in modifying the civic epistemologies of democratic societies, transforming not only knowledge production but also political identities, relationships, and institutions.
What might an academic and a social anthropologist have to say about making the invisible visible? Taking its title from a paper by Tsoukas (The Tyranny of Light), the result is a short excursus into the social world of accountability. Techniques for assessing, auditing and evaluating institutions are often defended on the grounds of transparency. What is interesting about this case is that in a social world where people are conscious of diverse interests, such an appeal to a benevolent or moral visibility is all too easily shown to have a tyrannous sidethere is nothing innocent about making the invisible visible. How are we to understand such deliberate striving for transparency when it is applied, for instance, to research and teaching in higher education? This experimental account tries to avoid simply adding more visibility and more information.
Rizvi and Lingard's account of the global politics of education is thoughtful, complex and compelling. It is the first really comprehensive discussion and analysis of global trends in education policy, their effects - structural and individual - and resistance to them. In the enormous body of writing on globalisation this book stands out and will become a basic text in education policy courses around the world. - Stephen J Ball, Karl Mannheim Professor of Sociology of Education, Institute of Education, University of London, UK, In what ways have the processes of globalization reshaped the educational policy terrain?, How might we analyse education policies located within this new terrain, which is at once local, national, regional and global? In Globalizing Education Policy, the authors explore the key global drivers of policy change in education, and suggest that these do not operate in the same way in all nation-states. They examine the transformative effects of globalization on the discursive terrain within which educational policies are developed and enacted, arguing that this terrain is increasingly informed by a range of neo-liberal precepts which have fundamentally changed the ways in which we think about educational governance. They also suggest that whilst in some countries these precepts are resisted, to some extent, they have nonetheless become hegemonic, and provide an overview of some critical issues in educational policy to which this hegemonic view of globalization has given rise, including: devolution and decentralization new forms of governance the balance between public and private funding of education access and equity and the education of girls curriculum particularly with respect to the teaching of English language and technology pedagogies and high stakes testing and the global trade in education. These issues are explored within the context of major shifts in global processes and ideological discourses currently being experienced, and negotiated by all countries. The book also provides an approach to education policy analysis in an age of globalization and will be of interest to those studying globalization and education policy across the social sciences.
Since the early 1980s there has been an explosion of auditing activity in the United Kingdom and North America. In addition to financial audits there are now medical audits, technology audits, value for money audits, environmental audits, quality audits, teaching audits, and many others. Why has this happened? What does it mean when a society invests so heavily in an industry of checking and when more and more individuals find themselves subject to formal scrutiny? The Audit Society argues that the rise of auditing has its roots in political demands for accountability and control. At the heart of a new administrative style internal control systems have begun to play an important public role and individual and organizational performance has been increasingly formalized and made auditable. Michael Power argues that the new demands and expectations of audits live uneasily with their operational capabilities. Not only is the manner in which they produce assurance and accountability open to question but also, by imposing their own values, audits often have unintended and dysfunctional consequences for the audited organization. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780198296034/toc.html
This review essay considers the relations between quantification and democratic government. Previous studies have demonstrated that the relation between numbers and politics is mutually constitutive: the exercise of politics depends upon numbers; acts of social quantification are politicized; our images of political life are shaped by the realities that statistics appear to disclose. The essay explores the specific links between democracy, as a mentality of government and a technology of rule, and quantification, numeracy and statistics. It argues that democratic power is calculated power, calculating power and requiring citizens who calculate about power. The essay considers the links between the promulgation of numeracy in eighteenth-century U.S. and programmes to produce a certain type of disciplined subjectivity in citizens. Some aspects of the history of the census are examined to demonstrate the ways in which the exercise of democratic government in the nineteenth century came to be seen as dependent upon statistical knowledge and the role that the census had in “making up” the polity of a democratic nation. It examines the case of National Income Accounting in the context of an argument that there is an intrinsic relation between political problematizations and attempts to make them calculate through numerical technologies. And it considers the ways in which neo-liberal mentalities of government depend upon the existence of a public habitat of numbers, upon a population of actors who calculate and upon an expertise of number. Democracy, in its modern mass liberal forms, requires numerate and calculating citizens, numericized civic discourse and a numericized programmatics of government.
Profile Methodist Ladies College
ACARA (2018) School Profile Methodist Ladies College. Available at: https://www.myschool.edu.au/School-Profile/Index/109401/MethodistLadiesCollege/46144/2016 (accessed 4 January 2018)
On qualculation, agency, and otherness
- M Callon
- J Law
Callon M and Law J (2005) On qualculation, agency, and otherness. Environment and Planning D-Society &
Space 23(5): 717-733. doi: DOI 10.1068/d353t
Quality Education: The Case for an Education Revolution in our Schools
- Australia Commonwealth Of
Commonwealth of Australia (2008b) Quality Education: The Case for an Education Revolution in our Schools.
Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia.
Delivering the Education Revolution
- Australia Commonwealth Of
Commonwealth of Australia (2010a) Delivering the Education Revolution [Press release]. Available at: https://
ministers.employment.gov.au/gillard/delivering-education-revolution (accessed 4 January 2018).
My School to provide unprecedented school performance data
- Australia Commonwealth Of
Commonwealth of Australia (2010b) My School to provide unprecedented school performance data. Online:
Australian Government. Available at: http://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/release/transcript-17380
(accessed 4 January 2018).
Transparency revolution promised for schools
- S Donovan
Donovan S (2008) Transparency revolution promised for schools. In: Australian Broadcasting Corporation,
PM. Radio National.
Effectiveness of the National Assessment Program -Literacy and Numeracy Final Report
Education and Employment References Committee (2014) Effectiveness of the National Assessment Program
-Literacy and Numeracy Final Report. Canberra, ACT: The Senate.
- W N Espeland
- M Stevens
Espeland WN and Stevens M (2008) A Sociology of Quantification. Archives of European Sociology XLIX(3):
401-436.
Principals reject My School site. The Sydney Morning Herald
- D Harrison
Harrison D (2010) Principals reject My School site. The Sydney Morning Herald. Available at: http://www.smh.
com.au/national/principals-reject-my-school-site-20100324-qwtq.html (accessed 4 January 2018).
Testing Regimes, Accountabilities and Education Policy
- R Lingard
- Martino W Rezai-Rashti
Lingard R, Martino W and Rezai-Rashti G (2013) Testing Regimes, Accountabilities and Education Policy.
Journal of Education Policy 28(5): 539-556.
Labour Party Manifesto, General Election
Politicsresources.net. (1997) Labour Party Manifesto, General Election 1997 [Archive]. Available at: http://www.
politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab97.htm (accessed 2 July. 2017).
Julia Gillard joins Lateline. Radio Interview
- L Sales
Sales L (2008) Julia Gillard joins Lateline. Radio Interview. In: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Lateline.
Governing by Numbers: The rise of data in education
- H Simola
- J Ozga
- C Segerholm
- J Varjo
Simola H, Ozga J, Segerholm C and Varjo J (2011) Governing by Numbers: The rise of data in education. In:
Ozga J, Dahler-Larsen P, Segerholm C and Simola H (eds) Fabricating Quality in Education: Data and governance in Europe. London & New York: Routledge, pp. 96-106.
Schools caught cheating on NAPLAN. The Age
- F Tomazin
Tomazin F (2013) Schools caught cheating on NAPLAN. The Age. Available from http://www.theage.com.au/
victoria/schools-caught-cheating-on-naplan-20130216-2ek6p.html (accessed 4 January 2018)
Schools are failing us, says Gillard. The Sydney Morning Herald
- F Tomazin
- J Tovey
Tomazin F and Tovey J (2009) Schools are failing us, says Gillard. The Sydney Morning Herald. Available at:
http://www.smh.com.au/national/schools-are-failing-us-says-gillard-20090621-csld.html (accessed 4
January 2018)
Why ICSEA fails our schools
- M Williss
Williss M (2010) Why ICSEA fails our schools. Available at: http://www.aeusa.asn.au/why_icsea_will_fail_our_
schools.pdf (accessed 28 May 2010)
Notes