Science, Globalization, and Educational Governance: The Political Rationalities of the New Managerialism

Introduction

The modern school has been a critical site for imagining possible publics and publicly-defining national purposes. Public education is presumed to provide a collective good to "a public"-"a public" of which the discourse about educational purposes conjures and addresses.¹ Yet the imagined publics and purposes of education have varied considerably at different historic junctures. These variations have been shaped in part by the rise and fall in prominence of two contrasting political horizons and the quite distinctive roles they have envisioned for the state and the market. The first, articulated in classic form by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations,² privileges the role of the free market, arguing that state efforts to promote the social good are ineffectual compared to unbridled market forces. The second stresses the state's central role in protecting its citizens from the vicissitudes of the market by insuring social security and increased well-being.

Over the past century, assumptions about the state's responsibility for the social good have been intrinsic to various forms of governance across the globe. Political systems from socialism to social democracy to social liberalism-while differing in ideology and approach-have been founded upon the fundamental principle that issues of governance should be decided on the basis of benefits to "the social." As Nikolas Rose has argued, "Whatever their differences, in each case the term 'social' implied a kind of anti-individualism: the need to conceive of human beings as citizens of a wider collectivity who did not merely confront one another as buyers and sellers on a competitive market."³ The social state, to a greater or lesser extent, has been envisioned as a force for social progress, contributing to the gradual betterment of all citizens, while cushioning the hardships suffered by society's worst-off.

Many argue that the past thirty years have witnessed "the end of the social"-the eclipsing of what for decades has been an inevitable horizon for political thought and action.⁴ The end of the social has corresponded to the return of the market and to a reworking of relations between government and capitalist markets. From New Zealand to Japan, states have implemented new styles of public service governance marked by a transformation in "ethos from one of bureaucracy to one of business, from one of planning to one of competition, from one dictated by the logics of the system to one dictated by the logics of the market and the demands of customers."⁵ New models of public management address a particular configuration of "the public," one inscribed within a utilitarian notion of the public sector's relationship to citizen-consumers.⁶ The business ethos of customer service has repositioned the public sector as product provider, and has shifted management's focus to serving its citizen-customers by providing quality services.⁷ The production and measurement of quality have become a central focus for governance systems, and public sector workers are held accountable for standards of performance and for producing results at less cost to the consumer (tax-payer).⁸ New public management discourse addresses "a public" depicted as customers who relate to their government on the basis of an economic, rather than a social, contract-through the logic of consumption-getting value for their dollars.⁹

New public management's recent embrace of free-market principles does not reflect a return to laissez-faire liberalism; for the role of the "neoliberal" state is not simply to "free" the market from social and political constraints, but rather to "enable" the market to work more effectively. The political imagery of the "social state" has been usurped by the notion of the "enabling state."¹⁰ Instead of providing for the public's needs "from the cradle to the grave," the state's role in the era of "advanced liberalism" is to enable citizen-consumers to take responsibility for their own well-being.¹¹ New public management challenges the universalizing logic of citizenship associated with the welfare state wherein a citizen by virtue of birth possesses "certain...