The commercial school heterarchy

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the rise of philanthropy and the influence corporate partnerships have on the practice of public schooling. We do this by focusing on one public school in Australia and its partnership with one global commercial actor. The paper proceeds by outlining new philanthropy in public schooling and in particular, how commercial organisations are now sponsoring or making donations to local public schools as part of their focus on Corporate Social Responsibility. We then analyse the participation of one commercial actor – McDonald’s – in what we are conceptually referring to as the commercial school heterarchy. Our data demonstrates how McDonald’s used different kinds of power to market its brand, gain entry into the school and diversify its field of influence from that of ‘sponsor’ of a sports team to that of a ‘business partner’. In our discussion we consider the implications of this partnership for principled positions in public schooling.

KEYWORDS:

• Commercialisation
• philanthropy
• public schooling
• principled positions
• networks

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Eimear Enright http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7206-4781

Notes

1 In 2011, the first Gonski report (Gonski et al., 2011) was released and this was followed in 2018 by Gonski 2.0. (Gonski et al., 2018). Gonski 2.0, titled ‘Through growth to achievement: Report of the review to achieve educational excellence in Australian schools’ was released in 2018, and is broadly focused on the improvement of student outcomes. While this report does not detail any further discussion on the private funding of schooling it does promote greater partnerships between schools and industry.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number DP130101376].