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Performativity:is a term that is increasingly widely used in policy analysis, but it is not always used properly. What I mean by that is that the usefulness of the concept is not just as another way of referring to systems of performance management but it alludes to the work that performance management system do on the subjectivities of individuals.
performativity This is a term I use in a particular way – (with acks to Lyotard and Butler) not just to refer to systems of performance management or the deployment of performance indicators but rather the complex and powerful relationships between such indicators and management systems and teacher identity and professionalism.
Performativity‘works’ when it is inside our heads and our souls, when we do it to ourselves, when we take responsibility for working hard, faster and better as part of our sense of personal worth. The self-managing individual is produced within the interstices of performativity through audits, inspections, appraisals, self-reviews, quality assurance, research assessments etc.. We become ‘subjects which have to be seen’ (Foucault 1979 p. 187). And we tale responsibility for reforming ourselves and others.
Being ‘calculable’ rather than ‘memorable’Dear Stephen,Where outputs are included in the Institute's RAE submission which draw on research funded by the Research Councils (that is, ESRC, AHRC/AHRB, MRC or EPSRC), we would like to refer in the text box to the grade that was awarded by the Research Council to the final report for the project. For example:"The research draws on an ESRC-funded project, part of the [title] Programme, which was graded outstanding".Three of the outputs, which we are including for you, are described as drawing on one or more Research Council-funded projects, but we do not have a record of the grade given to the final report. Please would you therefore, as a matter of urgency, provide the following information:
for many teachers and researchers this changes the way in which they experience their work and the satisfactions they get from it – their sense of moral purpose and of responsibility for their students is distorted. Practice comes to be experienced as inauthentic. Commitments are sacrificed for impression or metrics. But the force and logic of performance are hard to avoid, to do so, on one sense at least means letting ourselves down, and letting down our colleagues and our institution. We a burdened with the responsibility to perform, and if we do not we are in danger of being seen as irresponsible. The affects of performance – guilt, shame and pride Performativity
Judith Butler ‘I am other to myself precisely at the place where I expect to be myself’ (Butler 2004 p. 15). But performativity also does some very practical ‘work’ on our labour in a related sense.
Privatisation-in a number of senses!!!!Endogenous/exogenousOne part of what performativity does, as outlined above, is to re-render practice into measurable outcomes. That is, the work, the processes, of education come to be represented and appreciated in terms of products, or calculabilities. Individuals and institutions are required to account for themselves in ways that represent education as a standardised and measurable product.
Measurement, tendering and contracting out individuals and institutions can be managed through the use of targets and benchmarks. individuals and institutions can be rewarded, differentially, in relation to their productivity or in response to target achievements. At the individual level this can be translated into systems of performance-related-pay, and bonus or incentive schemes (Mahony et al., 2004b). Also at an individual level employees can be contracted on the basis of output requirements. This enables greater use of fixed term contracts and individual contract negotiations and thus provides for greater budgetary flexibility. At the institutional level the work of the organisation as a whole can be rendered into set of performance indicators and again can be translated into the form of a contract for ‘service delivery’; which is now happening on a large scale in England. Once rendered into the form of such a contract the work of organisations can be put out to tender on a fixed cost, performance-related basis, and opened up to new providers – it can be exogenously privatised!
The ContractContract is an increasingly important administrative and regulatory instrument. Contracting ‘refers to a process whereby a government procures education or education-related services, of a defined volume and quantity, at an agreed price, from a specific provider for a specified period where the provisions between the financier and the service provider are recorded in contract’ (Patrinos 2005 pp. 2-3).
embedded in what I have sketched out above, is 'a struggle for the soul of professionalism' (Hanlon 1998p.50) • - a contest over the meaning of professionalism which has at its centre the issue of 'trust' - 'who is trusted, and why they are trusted is up for grabs' (p.59). The ethos of 'traditional' professionalism is no longer trusted 'to deliver what is required, increasing profitability and international competitiveness' (p.52) and is being replaced by a 'new commercialised professionalism' (p.54).
The State The more the state contracts (out) the more it contracts (the central bureaucracies of the state reduce in size). This is as Vincent-Jones (2006) argues a distinctive new mode of governance. Contracts he suggests take three main forms – administrative, economic and social control ‘each entails the deliberate attempt by the state to structure social behaviour … through regulatory arrangements that harness the contract norms for the attainment of determinate public policy purposes’ (pp. vii-viii).
A polycentric state - from government to governancethe move towards a ‘polycentric state’ and ‘a shift in the centre of gravity around which policy cycles move’ (Jessop 1998 p. 32). a catalysing of public, private and voluntary actors to solve social and community problems and resultant changes in the boundary between state and civil society. a new form of ‘experimental’ and ‘strategic’ governance is being fostered, based upon network relations within new policy communities.the state is by no means impotent in all this but is now dependent upon an extensive array of state and non-state policy actors to achieve its ends. not a giving up by the state of its capacity to steer policy, this is not a ‘hollowing out’ of the state, rather it is a new modality of state power, agency and social action and indeed a new form of state. the ‘institutional void’ created by the dissolution of administrative systems is filled by systems of accountability which employ output measurements, targets and performance indicators to ‘steer’ the new ‘autonomies’ granted to policy agencies
Privatisation reforms also change what is important and valuable and necessary in education. As a new policy paradigm the market form constitutes a new moral environment for both consumers and producers. Within this new moral environment schools, colleges and universities – their staff and their students – are being inducted into a 'culture of self interest'. (e.g. ‘economies of student worth’) Privatisation
New struggles Nowadays, the struggle against the forms of subjection – against the submission of subjectivity – is becoming more and more important, even though the struggles against forms of domination and exploitation have not disappeared. Quite the contrary. (Foucault, 1982, p. 213)
The Second Coming Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
‘Merchantile society’ (Foucault : discipline and punish p. 194) ‘is represented as a contractual association of isolated juridical subjects’.This is also the precondition of and tied to the knowledge economy, or what Lyotard calls ‘the merchantilization of knowledge’ (p. 51). Knowledge is no longer legitimated through ‘grand narratives of speculation and emancipation’ (p. 38) but, rather, in the pragmatics of ‘optimization’ – the creation of skills or of profit rather than ideals.This is summed up in Lyotard’s terms in a shift from the questions ‘it is true’ and ‘it is just‘ to 'is it useful, saleable, efficient’ . The contract
The state - The ‘governmentalisation of the state’ (Foucault).The tendency for state power to be exercised and realised through a heterogeneous array of regulatory practices and technologies rather than (simply) through institutional structuresGovernment as ‘centres of calculation - ‘acting at a distance
Blurring and hybridisationthat is enterprising up the public sector/ corporate form - endogenous privatisation/and exogenous privatisation the substitution of public sector private with commercial enterprises dispensing social goods – interests of public service businesses
We ‘combine public sector values with high quality organisational and financial discipline’ (Prospects Website).
Contracting out:In September 2007 a 3-year contract to run Salisbury school in Enfield was awarded to EdisonschoolsUK, a subsidiary of the US Edison Corporation. Part of the company’s payment will be based on pupils achieving better GCSEs grades and scores in national tests for 14-year-olds. The management team is being led by Trevor Averre-Beeson, a former head of Islington Green school in north London. In 2003 Edison ran one-quarter of the 417 contracted-out schools in the US, teaching 132,000 students in 20 states (see Saltman 2005).
So what does all of this mean for us? Increasingly public service actors don’t know who they are or who they are meant to be, unless perhaps they reside comfortably within the generic ontology of the market. The policy technologies of public sector reform are not simply vehicles for the technical and structural change of organisations but are also mechanisms for reforming public sector practitioners, for changing what it means to be a teacher, researcher, social worker or nurse. That is, 'the formation and reformation of the capacities and attributes of the [teacher's] self' (Dean, 1995 p. 567). Reform does not just change what we do. It also seeks to change who we are, who it is possible for us to become - our 'social identity' (Bernstein, 1996 p.73).
