Privatising education policy-making in Italy: New governance and the reculturing of a welfarist education state

Abstract

Philanthropies and private foundations are increasingly acting as key nodes of the policy assemblages through which neoliberal and neomanagerialist policies are entering the field of education in Italy. In a country where public school ‘ineffectiveness’ and ‘resistance to innovation’ are taken for granted nowadays, policy philanthropists-entrepreneurs are attempting to lead the way in re-thinking education according to the new globalised economic imperatives.

Starting from the ongoing ‘evaluation turn’ of the Italian education system, the article unravels the complexities of those processes of policy influence. The analysis addresses multiple foci: the emergence of new discourses of education reform and the networks of social interaction they are rooted in; the generative effects such discourses can have on producing new positions, subjectivities, opportunities; and the structural selectivities influencing education policy-making.

The article highlights the first moves of a peculiar process of ‘policy privatisation’ whose main potential outcomes are both a process of education policy-making privatisation and a reculturing of education according to a new private-business ethos.

• policy privatisation
• philanthropy
• education governance
• neoliberalism
• NPM
• Italy

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Nafsika Alexiadou and the two anonymous referees for their insightful comments and suggestions in the revision of the early drafts of this article.

Notes

* This article is the outcome of the collaboration of the authors. However, in order to ascribe responsibility, we declare that the Introduction and the Conclusion are co-authored, Roberto Serpieri wrote the “Theoretical sensibilities and methodology” and “The ‘holy crusade’ for merit as a picklock for reculturing education”, while Emiliano Grimaldi is the author of the “A new education policyscape in Italy. Privatising educational imagination” and “Making education a domain of calculability”.

1 In this paper, we use the terms “philanthropy” and “private foundation” to refer to distinct legal entities that are provided for by Italian civil law. They have some peculiar traits: a) they are private and non-profit entities with a non-distribution constraint; b) they have a distinct patrimony independent of its founder and hold assets that are dedicated to a public utility purpose (cultural, educational, religious, social and/or scientific) established by the founder (an individual, a bank, an enterprise, and so on) and set out in its constitutive documents; c) they have no shareholders, although they may have a board, an assembly and voting members; and d) their administration and operation are carried out in accordance with its statutes or articles of association rather than fiduciary principles.

2 Another member of the Scientific Committee was Michael Barber, a world renowned Third-Way guru. However, Barber did not take part in the work of the Committee for reasons that are difficult to reconstruct here.

3 Referring to the tangle of multiple, heterogeneous, non-linear and non-hierarchical relations

4 FIAT was founded by the Agnelli family in 1866 and has always been held and governed by family members.

5 Since 2008 Marchionne has been a key player in the Italian entrepreneurs’ struggle to decentralise at the firm level the welfarist national collective bargaining in labour relations and to abolish the social-democratic inspired 1970 Labour Statute.