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In Neoliberal Times

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Paradox and the School Leader

Part of the book series: Educational Leadership Theory ((ELT))

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Abstract

The ‘meteoric’ expansion of academic inquiry into neoliberalism (Springer, 2012, p.135) over the last two decades has undone scholarly consensus about its meanings and effects. Disagreements have emerged over the way the ‘academic growth concept’ (Flew, 2012, p. 44) of neoliberalism should be apprehended and about its power and pervasiveness across social fields such as education. To commence this chapter, I flag an a priori concern about neoliberalism’s burgeoning literature catalogue and the enormous breadth and depth of its contexts and applications and the contemporaneous disappearance of unifying structure or coherent meaning.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a more comprehensive coverage of Foucault’s treatment and framing of neoliberalism, see Brown (2015), Chaps. 2 and 3.

  2. 2.

    The process of ‘neoliberalisation’ as it might be applied to principal subjectivity is given more detailed treatment at the beginning of Chap. 5.

  3. 3.

    Foucault (1977) uses the term ‘dressage’ in reference to ‘a technique of training’ that regulates behaviour and ensures obedience (p. 166).

  4. 4.

    For purposes on anonymity, I have not cited or fully expanded these references.

  5. 5.

    Heffernan (2018) adds theoretical weight to ideas like those of Bansel (2014) by invoking the notion of a ‘sociology of numbers’. She claims that this notion embodies the idea that ‘numbers are fair and rigorous representations of the work undertaken in schools and indeed may be adopted as a means of making this work measurable or accessible to those with little knowledge of the field, providing licence to make judgments without having expertise to support these judgments’ (p. 7).

  6. 6.

    While this reference is, most obviously, to the Australian Professional Standard for Principals, it encompasses a range of other third-party documents, such as professionalism/performance rubrics, psychometric tests and various state-based leadership frameworks.

  7. 7.

    In a chapter titled Unforeseeable freedom (Derrida & Roudinesco, 2004), Derrida cautions against careless use of the word ‘freedom’. However, he adds an interpretation that accords with my use of the word in the phrase ‘new spaces of freedom’. He says he would ‘militate for a recognition and respect’ for a freedom that ‘is an excess of play in the machine, an excess of every determinate machine’ (p. 48–9).

  8. 8.

    ‘Textual data’ is used descriptively to indicate the contribution of literature to my empirical work (rather than to suggest a link, metaphorical or otherwise, to the technical process of extracting data from texts).

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Dolan, C. (2020). In Neoliberal Times. In: Paradox and the School Leader. Educational Leadership Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3086-9_4

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