Competition, Governance and Global Education Policy

Abstract

The adoption of neoliberal rationalities is changing the way in which social relations and institutional practices are conceived and organized. Working together, these changes here are part of a global shift, with local idiosyncratic variations, from disciplinary societies (Foucault, 1979) to societies of control (Deleuze, 1992, p. 174), which ‘no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication’. This involves a redefinition in the form and modalities of the state and the deployment of new or recycled policy technologies, which are new ‘forms of discipline that constitute a new regime of public sector regulation’ (Ball, 2007, p. 24). At the level of personal experience, then, neoliberalism should be understood not simply/only as a new pervasive ideology or a political programme but more broadly as a new form of life or a ‘new anthropology’ (Foucault, 2010a), which would be at the foundations but also resulting from what Cerni calls ‘embedded neoliberalism’: Embedded neoliberalism involves first of all an acceptance that we live in a multi-level, more open and market-like globalizing world in which informal and negotiated policy processes do not merely complement relations among nation-states but constitute a complex, fungible, pluralized political game that is drawing in ever more actors. Furthermore, globalization has generated a range of multi-level, interlocking playing fields on which actors have increasing scope to experiment and innovate policy approaches in practical situations… Neoliberalism, with its mixture of free-market liberalism, arms-length regulation, institutional flexibility and international openness, has proven to be a relatively manipulable and fungible platform for actors to use to reconstitute their strategies and tactics. (Cerni, 2008, p. 38)