Policy disruptors or entrepreneurs? The tensions emerging from a network of philosophy educators

Abstract

In this article we examine a network of philosophical and critical thinking ‘policy entrepreneurs’ (Ball and Junemann, 2012) and consider to what extent they operate as conduits of or challenges to a neoliberal discourse of education. The neoliberalization of education has brought about a new mode of heterarchical network governance in education where the traditional hierarchical power of the state and local authorities has dissipated, and new policy actors have emerged. We ask whether it is possible for alternative ‘grass roots’ networks to operate within this quintessentially neoliberal framework of heterarchical network governance to challenge neoliberal discourses of education (Ball and Junemann, 2012). In considering the space that network governance potentially opens up for challenges to neoliberal orthodoxies, we are trying to take the study of network governance in a new and different direction. We draw on Foucault's notion of the dispositif to probe the tensions that exist as members of this 'philosophers’ network' operate as both advocates of an alternative progressive pedagogy disrupting key tenets of neoliberal thinking on education and neoliberal entrepreneurial subjects who embrace and benefit from a system of heterarchical networks and justify their alternative approach in distinctly neoliberal terms. This research points to the complexity of the relationship between network governance and wider forms of neoliberal governance.