Economic crisis, technology and the management of education

Abstract

The 2008 crash has been likened to that of 1929. Does it have consequences for the management of education, and in particular for distributed leadership? Informed by evolutionary economics, it is argued that 2008 marked the end of the installation period of a major technological innovation, namely ICT. In the aftermath of the crash, a period of wider deployment of digital technologies now beckons. It will require a new institutional infrastructure, of which education is a part and which is compatible with the technology which had been installed since the 1980s. Informed by the history of management theory, it is also noted that towards the end of an economic upswing (as after 2000), the ‘rational’ control managerial rhetorics which had driven the upswing since the late 1970s began to lose their legitimation and effectiveness. After 2000, a softer ‘normative’ rhetoric supplemented and complemented the prevailing rational rhetorics, and this persists in the guise of, for example, distributed leadership and emotional management. In particular, distributed leadership resonates discursively with the deployment of distributed, open, smart software. It is part of a new structural isomorphism in the management of consent in educational organisations as they enter the post-crisis phase of the current economic cycle when digital technologies will undergo wider deployment.