‘If you can’t beat them, join them’: utility, markets and the absent entrepreneur

Abstract

Marketisation and competition within public schooling systems impact the work of principals in varying ways. Previous work on the marketisation of schooling and school autonomy has drawn attention to the ‘entrepreneurial principal’ as an effect of marketisation. In this paper we explore principals’ engagements with marketisation based on 21 interviews with public school principals across two Australian states. Using the work of Christiaens (2020), we highlight a difference between entrepreneurialism and utility-maximisation in marketised systems, evident in how principals engage with leadership within these systems. For most principals in our study, engagements with marketisation were entangled with different orientations toward utility maximisation. Evidence of genuine entrepreneurship was far more scarce. We argue that the need to ensure school survival in a saturated market gives rise to a performative veneer of entrepreneurialism that is largely absent of innovation and the ‘leap of faith’ that lies at the heart of true entrepreneurialism.

Keywords:

• School autonomy
• school leadership
• marketisation

Introduction

Public schooling, in many parts of the world, is increasingly framed and shaped by marketisation, competition and policies that aim to deliver ‘consumer’ school choice. The public school has been reshaped by decades of reform centred on ‘logics of competition, instrumentalism, and atomization’ (Clarke and Moore 2013, 488). School autonomy, one of the key reform agendas deployed since the 1980s in public school systems, has been widely (although differently) taken up across education jurisdictions, manifest in the emergence and growth of, for example, Charter Schools in the United States, Academies in the United Kingdom, Free Schools in Sweden, and Independent Public Schools in Australia. A common argument utilised by policymakers across these jurisdictions is that marketisation steers, and indeed requires, the more autonomous principal to become more entrepreneurial (Woods 2013). These justifications occur within the restructured social that has challenged what is meant by publicness, what is to be left to the market, and what amounts to private interests and concerns (Newman and Clarke 2009). These concerns have particular relevance for public education, particularly as systems take on characteristics, often by design, usually associated with the market such as styles of leadership styled as edupreneurialism. However, we believe there to be a problem in this styling, in that what is commonly considered entrepreneurial conduct is more consistent with Becker’s idea of utility-maximisation. Using the work of Christiaens (2020), we argue that there is a difference between entrepreneurialism and utility-maximisation, and that authentic entrepreneurialism remains exceedingly rare as, when enacted in systems that claim to reward principal autonomy, entrepreneurial conduct remains likely to bring the school leader into conflict with the system.

This article suggests that this misrepresentation emerges partly from Foucault’s theorisation of ‘homo economicus’ (2008) that in practice equates the actions of school leaders in marketised systems with entrepreneurialism. In education systems, and some critical education leadership work, performative utility maximisation is often equated with entrepreneurialism. Drawing on the work of Christiaens (2020) we find that, in systems privileging competition between schools and the cultivation of leadership styles in the image of corporate CEOs, there is nothing entrepreneurial about responding to the logics of the system. Interviews with 21 principals across two Australian school systems suggested that in systems apparently rewarding entrepreneurialism through autonomy, other structures in the system (steering at a distance through test-based accountability and so on) mediate against that type of principalship, with school leaders having to strategically navigate those structures. We identify and contrast four different engagements with markets of public schooling, suggesting contexts and factors that nurture each, and arguing that principals’ orientations are enacted in response to the conditions within which they work moreso than they are than creative of those conditions.

The paper is presented in three parts. In the first, we briefly locate our work within the broader field of the marketisation of school education, school autonomy and entrepreneurial principalship and introduce our study, including a sketch of the policy contexts of the two jurisdictions, and the conceptual framework employed in this paper. We then draw on our interview data to present four different principal stances in relation to engagements with markets, contextualising these with reference both to the circumstances and conditions of participants and in relation to the broader literature on principalship, school autonomy and performative accountability. We argue that while marketised schooling systems perpetuate a performative veneer of entrepreneurialism, the genuine innovation and ‘out of the box’ thinking that lies at the heart of true entrepreneurialism is far more scarce.

Marketisation, school autonomy and the ‘entrepreneurial principal’

The links between the marketisation of schooling, school autonomy and principal entrepreneurship are well-established in the literature. Twenty years ago, Ball (2003) drew attention to a phenomenon centring around three ‘policy technologies’ of the market, managerialism and performativity. Ball argued that ‘when employed together’ they ‘offer a politically attractive alternative to the state-centred, public welfare tradition of educational provision’; ‘play an important part in aligning public sector organizations with the methods, culture and ethical system of the private sector; and ‘create the pre-conditions for various forms of “privatization” and “commodification” of core public services’ (2003, 215–216). Marketisation, the introduction of ‘market forces into education’ (Ball 1994, 86), is a multi-layered effect of policy created through discourse, that elicits a kind of values clash or dilemma as those working in schools ‘find their values challenged or displaced’ by a new ‘field of judgement’ (Ball 2003, 215). The inducements toward principalship defined by business or corporate logics remain powerful, even as they can sit uneasily with lessons learnt and commitments made as public educators. It is this idea of struggle, or contradiction, that plays out in the experiences of public school principals reflected in the ways that they perform their professional selves.

Marketisation of schools and leadership

Marketisation in schooling has been evident in Australia in some form or another since the mid-1800s, with competition between ‘corporate schools’ (formed by corporate bodies such as churches and in some cases colonial governments), selective and other government schools emerging for enrolments from both ‘old’ and ‘new’ middle class families (Campbell, Proctor, and Sherington 2009; Sherington and Campbell 2007). Various colonial Education Acts of the 1850s to the 1870s, which ensured ‘free, compulsory and secular’ public education, established separate Catholic school systems that, while initially catering to working class children and families, over time shifted to accommodate the growing middle classes. This dual system of Catholic and Government schools was the precursor to a tripartite system that rewards parental choice. Currently, over a third of Australian children and young people attend non-Government schools (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2021). The OECD has found that 91.3% of Australian schools are in competition with two or more other schools for at least some students, against a TALIS average of 63.1%. Only Singapore and England reported greater levels of competition between schools based on this measure (OECD 2014, 283).

In Australia, systemic moves toward public school autonomy can be seen in the self-managing schools policy introduced in Victoria in the early 1990s; the Independent Public Schools policy introduced in Western Australian in 2009 and Queensland in 2014; and in the Local Schools, Local Decisions policy introduced in New South Wales in 2013. As Keddie (2017b) has noted, moves toward school autonomy are appealing because they simultaneously argue for more localised decision-making and against centralised authority ‘improving public education by creating the conditions for school leaders to better respond to the local needs of their schools and by promoting innovation and resource efficiencies at the school and system level’ (374). Autonomy is often desired, not just on a systemic level but by school leaders themselves, because it potentially recognises and enhances professional expertise (Keddie 2017a; Thompson, Lingard, and Ball 2021). It is this promise that autonomy extends to school leaders, leading to strategies to best position their schools within the market through leveraging resources, ‘promoting innovation’, and engaging in entrepreneurship, that this paper explores.

Much education leadership literature, particularly grey literature emanating from think tanks, consultancies and charities, extols the virtues and possibilities of entrepreneurial school leaders (sometimes called edupreneurs) to deliver school reform and innovation.¹ Similarly, critical scholarship has embraced the entrepreneurial/edupreneurial leader as one of the triumphs of global neoliberalism (Poole, Sen, and Fallon 2021; Apple 2006; Kulz 2017). However, as Yemini, Addi-Raccah, and Katarivas (2015) have argued, while fostering (or indeed critiquing) entrepreneurship has become a global policy priority, there remains a lack of clarity as to what defines an ‘entrepreneurial principal’. They identify an ongoing contradiction wherein the autonomy of the entrepreneurial principal is limited by ‘being accountable for school outcomes in line with prescribed regulations and standards’ (Yemini, Addi-Raccah, and Katarivas 2015, 526), a paradox also noted by Connolly and Hughes-Stanton (2020). What seems to define the entrepreneurial principal is their response to market-based and performance‐based accountability strategies ‘that have required new tasks and dispositions of school principals and superintendents’ (Anderson and López 2017, 157). Woods (2013, 227) notes that three factors of ‘energy, creative visualization of change, and the practical activity of mobilizing resources, and their ongoing interrelation’ are intrinsic to the notion of entrepreneurialism and make this form of leadership attractive to education policymakers. What is often taken for granted as ‘entrepreneurialism’ is, in fact, more congruent with an individual making the best of the marketised system, conforming to Becker’s (1965) notion of the utility maximising agent.

The impact on principalship of increased marketisation and privatisation of public school systems and enhanced school autonomy, has been the subject of extensive research by critical education scholars (see, for example, Gobby 2013; Woods et al. 2021; Thomson 2010; Keddie et al. 2020). Entrepreneurial principalship needs to be understood as complex and sometimes contradictory (Keddie, Gobby, and Wilkins 2018) and has led to calls for further empirical work to probe the intersection marketisation and autonomy in schooling and develop better understanding of leadership within these marketised systems (Woods 2013). While systems privilege the autonomy/choice/entrepreneurship nexus, the reality is that principalship has always ‘served a boundary-spanning or mediation role as they vertically mediate the enactment of policies and reforms from above and horizontally mediate school–community relations’ (McGhee and Anderson 2019, 181). Principals’ modes of engagement with marketisation are beyond the characterisation of marketised schooling systems and principal autonomy giving simply giving rise to an easily recognisable ‘entrepreneurial principal’.

Conceptual framework

Ball (2003) argues that educational reform associated with marketisation, managerialism and performativity ‘does not simply change what people, as educators, scholars and researchers do, it changes who they are’ (215). He speculates that the content of the processes of subjectivation changes as new modes of thinking, being and acting become normalised and/or rewarded. While there is no ‘outside’ of subjectivation, political, economic, institutional and other powers ‘come to bear upon the subjective existence of people and their relations one with another’ (Rose 1989, xxvii). The work of Ball, Rose, and others posits that new modes of self-governance, or subjectification, come into being through changes in institutional logics that influence how it is that individuals make sense of, and respond to, society and its institutions. Whether we call the systematisation of late modern capitalism neoliberalism (Harvey 2005) or economic rationalism (Pusey 1991), the argument is that there is an internalisation of economic risk and reward at the heart of contemporary systems of thought and/or subjectivity. Foucault, a noted provocateur for Ball, Rose and many others referred to this as the rise of ‘homo economicus’ (2008, 147).

Foucault’s notion of homo economicus developed from economist Gary Becker’s theory of the utility-maximizing subject of human capital. Becker’s theory, simply put, postulates that individuals are rational actors that ‘decide on their education, training, medical care, and other additions to knowledge and health by weighing the benefits and costs’ (1993, 43). The rational actor tries to maximise their return on time and effort in domains such as education, in other words, rendering education an economic benefit such that policies should target human capital development to promote social and economic flourishing. Human capital theory, and the practices, government policies, and institutional logics that flow from this conception, create the preconditions for homo economicus as ‘an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself’ (Foucault 2008, 226). Read (2009, 4), notes that Foucault finds similarity between ‘the two forms of liberalism, the “classical” and “neo”’ in that ‘they place a particular “anthropology” of man as an economic subject at the basis of politics. What changes is the emphasis from an anthropology of exchange to one of competition’.

Homo economicus, then, represents for Foucault a new mode of subjectivation, a ‘fundamentally different subject, structured by different motivations and governed by different principles, than homo juridicus, or the legal subject of the state’ (Read 2009, 5). This new form of subjectivity is, for Foucault, an entrepreneur of the self, operating within ‘a society subject to the dynamic of competition… The homo oeconomicus sought after is not the man of exchange or man the consumer; he is the man of enterprise and production’ (Foucault 2008, 147).

In education, this concept of homo economicus has been widely used to argue that teaching is being recast as a competitive endeavour (Attick 2017); that learning is being reconceptualised as a lack that requires a particular socioeconomic optimisation of the self (Atasay 2014); that education policy has become neoliberalised (Clarke et al. 2021) and so on. However, what animates this paper is Christiaens (2020) argument that the way that Foucault’s analysis has been taken up misses an important distinction regarding entrepreneurialism. Entrepreneurialism is more than the ‘calculative rationality’ inherent in Becker’s notion of utility-maximization. In fact, the entrepreneur is the exception to the utility-maximisation agent because entrepreneurs are those subjects that ‘take a leap of faith and forego the calculative management of human capital’ (Christiaens 2020, 497) in order to create their own markets, or to create the necessity for the market to respond to them. Christiaens (2020, 504) goes on to argue that:

there is a tendency among students of neoliberalism to identify the neoliberal subject as ‘entrepreneur of oneself’ with the calculative homo oeconomicus, Becker’s utility-maximizing agent… but a look at the history of economic thought reveals diverse forms of entrepreneurship deviating from Foucault’s account.

In making his argument for progressing understanding of neoliberal subjectification beyond Foucault’s conceptualisation of homo economicus, Christiaens (2020) creates a ‘critical confrontation’ between Foucault’s analytical framework and notions of entrepreneurialism embedded in the work of Knight, Schumpeter, Hayek and others. He argues that beyond homo economicus, the neoliberalised subject incentivised to ‘rationally calculate the costs and benefits of each choice they make in order to maximise the returns on their efforts’ (494), lie three further ways of understanding entrepreneurship as neoliberal subjectification. Against the utility-maximisation approach of homo economicus, Christiaens posits an arbitraging approach, finding success ‘where no one else has looked before, profiting from ignorance’ (505); an uncertainty-bearing approach, where risk-taking is augmented by good judgement; and an approach that privileges innovation, taken up by ‘visionary individuals motivated by their desire to revolutionize the world, driven by an almost instinctive sense of duty’ (503).

This significant extension of how we think about entrepreneurialism is important for understanding contemporary school leadership. In the context of marketisation of public schools in Australia and elsewhere, and the dynamic of school choice and principal autonomy, understanding how leading within this market represents a series of ‘leaps of faith’ is an analytic advance beyond the homogenous ‘neoliberal subject’ found in much educational work. It is this complexity that we bring to bear on our data in understanding school principals’ engagements with marketisation, asking how far leaders’ actions and values constitute evidence of actual entrepreneurialism, as opposed to utility maximisation.

Method

This paper focuses on data collected in the context of a larger, transnational study.² Twenty-one in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with public school principals in two Australian systems (see Table 1). System 1 is a public education system with a history of selective and stratified schooling and a whole-of-system approach to school autonomy, while System 2 is arguably less stratified, and has adopted an Independent Public School (IPS) model of school and principal autonomy, where a significant number of schools have opted in to this reform. The 2020 ICSEA (Index of Community Socio-educational Advantage) score for each school is provided according to five bands, ranging from significantly disadvantaged (<900) to significantly advantaged (>1100).³ The majority of school communities from which principals were drawn were below the national ICSEA average, indicating some element of socio-educational disadvantage.

Table 1. Contextual information about participants.

Principal		Type	Type	ICSEA
System 1	Principal 1	Secondary	Metropolitan	<900
	Principal 2	Secondary	Regional	901-1000
	Principal 3	Secondary	Metropolitan, Partially Selective	901-1000
	Principal 4	Secondary	Regional	901-1000
	Principal 5	Secondary	Regional	901-1000
	Principal 6	Secondary	Metropolitan, Partially Selective	>1100
	Principal 7	Secondary	Regional	901-1000
	Principal 8	Secondary	Metropolitan	901-1000
	Principal 9	Secondary	Metropolitan	<900
	Principal 10	Primary/Secondary	Regional	901-1000
	Principal 11	Primary	Metropolitan	901-1000
	Principal 12	Primary	Metropolitan	901-1000
	Principal 13	Primary	Metropolitan	901-1000
System 2	Principal 1	Secondary	Metropolitan, IPS	901-1000
	Principal 2	Secondary	Metropolitan, IPS	1001-1100
	Principal 3	Secondary	Regional, Non-IPS	901-1000
	Principal 4	Secondary	Metropolitan, IPS	1001-1100
	Principal 5	Primary/Secondary	Metropolitan, IPS, Partially Selective	>1100
	Principal 6	Secondary	Metropolitan, IPS, Partially Selective	>1100
	Principal 7	Primary	Regional, Non-IPS	901-1000
	Principal 8	Primary	Regional, IPS	901-1000

Interviews with principals focused on organising features of public education provision (e.g. school types, competition, choice, student enrolment, funding mechanisms, forms of privatisation, commercial participation, and so on), along with further understandings of the ‘publicness’ of the public school system. With the consent of participants,⁴ interviews were audio recorded and transcribed, and two researchers conducted independent thematic analyses of the transcribed interview data using NVivo software. The two sets of thematic codes developed were then compared and synthesised into a single version.

Overall, the interviewees reported some commonalities in their experience. First, it was widely agreed that the work of the principal was increasingly complex and that work demands were subsequently difficult to manage. Second, it was perceived that there was a lack of understanding of the complexities of educational leadership, and a frustration with policy-based accountabilities and associated administrivia. Principal autonomy, and the desire to be able to respond more autonomously to the needs of the school community, elicited more diverse views and perspectives, particularly regarding how best to use that autonomy. It is these contrasting views about autonomy in Australian contexts that animate this paper, because this diversity of views was a point of difference not identified in other contexts within the study (Canada, England and New Zealand).

Principalship within markets of public schools

Across the two systems, four different modes of engagement with marketisation were evident in our analysis. Here, we explore these four modes, relying on the voices of participants to highlight their subtleties and nuances. We use the word entrepreneur here advisedly within Christiaens (2020) theorisation, as more than an actor who is seeking to maximise their reward or utility, but rather someone who takes a leap of faith despite the specific characteristics of the market, or are driven by an instinctive sense of duty to effect change, with the belief that the market will ultimately respond to their innovation or leap of faith.

Principal as enthusiastic maximiser

Principals as enthusiastic maximisers showed themselves to have embraced principal autonomy, engaging freely in what Sahlberg (2011, 101) has referred to as ‘transfer of models from the corporate world as a main logic of change management’. One principal, for example, discussed at length their school’s ‘change management journey’, funded through IPS funding and facilitated by an international corporate consulting firm:

We’ve actually worked with both tertiary and private enterprise in establishing both vision and I suppose a change management model. We’ve actually spent some time working with PwC in using a corporate change management model within a school. I funded that through our independent schools funding. (Principal 4, System 2)

This principal’s commitment was to reform, underwritten by the corporate sector, aimed at producing distinction and excellence as characteristics of their school. The reform focused on carving out a market advantage for their school based primarily on strong relationships with the corporate sector and on enhanced systems of governance within the school, firmed up through those relationships:

I think the conversation with other colleagues, more so in the private sector of how they actually develop their own strategic planning and use corporate models, far more efficient than an educator who doesn’t necessarily have experience in corporate models to go, right, well how do I access that intelligence? Like there are so many schools… and there’s some mental models I think associated with state schooling, where principal colleagues in state schools won’t necessarily approach corporate or won’t necessarily approach enterprise.

I am sometimes questioned as to whether - I had a really interesting conversation with someone …over the fact that they thought that I operated more like a private school principal. … I think that was just in relation to people’s perspectives over engaging with corporate to the extent that we probably do and what they offer in the school and the fact that we do our strategic planning through corporate enterprise. (Principal 4, System 2)

This principal exhibited an extreme version of the ‘corporate embrace’, imbued with a confidence in the power of competition and corporate values underpinning marketisation to make schools more ‘strategic and accountable’. In the appointment of a Chair for the newly-established School Council, positioned as an accountability mechanism for the principal, they reported having been ‘looking for someone who can bring a corporate background of lived experience to the school’.

This valuing of corporate models was reflected in a level of quantification that, even when moving beyond issues of strategy to link innovation to student learning, positioned this innovation as transactional:

…You know you talk about outputs and outcomes. You’re always going to get a bucketload of outputs but what do they relate to in terms of tangible outcomes for kids and learning. I think that’s the - when we talk about independent public school or we talk about a school’s governance, that’s where you actually want that council to hold you accountable to - if we’ve just spent that amount of money, we need to absolutely make sure that that’s actually given X amount of years in growth for learning for that cohort. (Principal 4, System 2)

For enthusiastic maximisers, competition, either within the public sector or between public and private schools, provided a source of energy and was seen to drive innovation and improvement within their schools. This mode of engagement was differentiated by the extent to which they embraced the potentially cut-throat edge of the competitive market, saw it as a natural and consequential state of education systems. This was often linked to faith in the market to work things out:

There’s a competitive market… I would like to think that increasingly places like [School X] just up the road might eventually get to a point that it becomes, I was going to say redundant, but that’s not an educational decision that’s a political decision. No local member wants to be the local member for closing schools. (Principal 10, System 1)

The enthusiastic maximiser adopts a individualist, rather than systemic, view of public education. In this view, there is no system to be valorised, only atomised communities that fail or succeed based on the attributes of each school community and the efforts of their leaders. The enthusiastic maximiser valorised those performative logics (Ball 2003), inherent in reshaped and reconstituted publics, as the purpose of their conduct rather than as a counter to it.

Enthusiastic maximiser principals effectively identified as CEOs of their schools, demonstrating highly pro-active practices around marketing and communicating their school’s competitive edge, along with a high level of energy and enthusiasm associated with these practices. Much of their focus was on their personal brand as an individualising point of difference. Additionally, a high level of personal and professional investment in these practices aimed at enhancing their school’s position in the market characterised these principals, accompanied by a strong sense (and embrace) of responsibilisation. Enthusiastic maximisers, while embracing the stylistic performance of entrepreneurship, thus fall short of what we, along with Christiaens (2020), classify as authentic entrepreneurs.

Principal as educative maximiser

A second mode of engagement with marketisation was demonstrated in our research by those principals who cautiously, but strategically, embraced the policy enthusiasm for more corporate models of principalship. These principals, while less enthusiastic and energised by competition and less committed to the corporatisation of their schools per se, nevertheless embraced the importance of marking out their school’s ‘point of difference’ in the belief that it benefitted their immediate school community in some way. Some principals still spoke of different techniques designed to promote their school and ‘sell what we’re good at’. For example, this included tailoring their ‘old media’ advertising to attract parents and families:

I think we’re doing a little bit better at selling what we are good at. I'm just looking at doing more advertising… You know nothing big and nothing costly but just doing a bit more… Just to say ‘hey, we’re here’. (Principal 3, System 2)

Most ‘educative maximiser’ principals, however, tended to focus on educational or programmatic strategies in their attempts to position their school as a ‘school of choice’. One participant, for instance, described how they sought to acquaint their local community with their secondary school by connecting with their ‘feeder’ or ‘partner primary schools’ through transition programs so families were more inclined ‘to want to come to [our school]’ (Principal 8, System 1). Another spoke about the need to invest in high-quality staff, and that their niche as an IPS school was being able to promote their capacity to hand-pick ‘better’ teachers for the school than those they might have been allocated by central staffing:

… we’ve sent our academic staff just straight through the roof in the last seven or eight years. That’s actually impacted quite seriously on a number of our competitors. Headmasters [of privte schools] have moved on as a result of the improvement here, because boards are saying, ‘why can’t you do that? We have two or three times the amount of money to spend they do; what’s wrong with you?’. (Principal 6, System 2)

Other than recruitment and staffing, principals observed that unique curriculum offerings could help distinguish their school from other schools:

For example, we have a Mandarin excellence program here. So, that’s a marketing factor, and we do have students doing extension Mandarin in senior. I introduced Spanish here a few years ago, trying to get a point of difference with a couple of my competing schools. (Principal 2, System 2)

Moreover, some principals, particularly those with academically selective streams in their schools spoke of how their specialist programs and strong academic results positioned them as ‘having a proven track record… where people look at our outcomes and just go, there’s no comparison’ (Principal 6, System 2). Another stated that their high ranking across the state meant they’re ‘definitely the local school of choice’ (Principal 3, System 1). This cultivation of academic success was seen as beneficial for attracting ‘aspirational families and students’, such as in the case of one principal who had established a creative arts program within their partially selective secondary school:

… one of the things [at the school] was to establish an external user program which certainly allowed aspirational families and students who were very mutable to see that it is a creative opportunity as well as comprehensive selective, so really meeting my child’s creative needs. So we’re certainly not stealing from the very top end from any [schools], however we’ve certainly attracted this year the largest ever number of in-area applicants that we’ve had. So there’s been some ‘clawing back’ shall we say. (Principal 6, System 1)

This mode of engagement differs from the ‘enthusiastic’ mode in that while principals exhibited a similar belief in the capacity of the market to deliver high quality public education for all, a focus on educational rather than corporate strategies was evident in their attempts to position their school as a ‘school of choice’. In this mode, a less proprietorial and more collective tone was invoked around these strategies, reflective of a more pedagogic mode of leadership which uses different educational initiatives to position their school as a ‘school of choice’ while simultaneously aiming to protect their schools and school communities from the worst aspects of the marketised system. In the educative maximiser we see a pragmatic embrace of opportunities to leverage the affordances of marketised systems to maximise educational objectives. This remains bound within the rewards of the system, there is no heroic version of utility-maximisation, albeit applied to a collective entity rather than for personal reward or profit. For Christiaens (2020, 507) there can be no Schumpeter-ian ‘superhuman individuals striving to innovate economies’ in education maximisation.

Principal as reluctant maximiser

A third group of principals in our study demonstrated a ‘reluctant’ engagement with marketisation, recognising that contemporary circumstances to some extent demanded it of them, but also seeing the limitations of it in a ‘public’ system. The reluctant maximiser found the clash of system and personal ideals difficult to negotiate. This was particularly evident in their deep discomfort at the ways that schools are encouraged to promote themselves to attract student enrolments. As one principal observed:

Every single school [in the local area is a specialist school]. To my mind we’re just about the only non-branded comprehensive high school which is a point of minor irritation and frustration in some ways but also a great credit to us that we weren’t seen as needing a label to attract students. (Principal 8, System 1)

A problem with this, as explained by another ‘reluctant maximiser’ principal is that public schools are placed in a position where they compete with each other, where principals are required to either engage in practices and strategies with which they disagree, or otherwise comparatively disadvantage their school in terms of its market positioning:

From the noticeboards out the front that we have to waste $30,000 buying because if you don’t have one, you’re not as good as the school down the road. There’s a whole lot of hidden things which we waste money on because we’re competing with one another – the concept of trying to sell your school even to the [local] primary schools. (Principal 1, System 1)

Another ‘reluctant maximiser’, the principal of a disadvantaged comprehensive school surrounded by partially selective and other specialist schools noted on this issue:

So there are those little things that we’re trying to do that have no relevance on education but we need to do them if we’re going to be in a market where I feel that we have to kind of compete for these people which is crazy stuff but that’s what you’re doing… In my world my competition is not so much from private or Catholic schools it’s actually from within [the system] and I think we’ve created that. (Principal 9, System 1)

The proliferation of selective schools and streams within formerly comprehensive public schools in System 1, for example, was seen by principals inhabiting this mode of engagement as directly responsible for their own school’s diminished position within the market, and a contributor to their school’s comparably weaker performance:

If you take all the talented kids out of my school and put them in a selective setting… you can’t then punish me because I don’t get – I’ve still got 25% of kids below the national minimum standard or whatever …because that’s how it works. You can’t criticise the local comprehensive when you give them the hardest kids to teach. (Principal 2, System 1)

The segregation of the market and the consequences of this segregation for schools and communities was a concern expressed by many principals in the study, regardless of whether they felt that their own school suffered the consequences. In some cases this was linked to an assumption that schools should reflect (and be connected to) diversity, and the concern now that ‘many schools in the metropolitan areas are so highly segregated now that they are no longer reflective of the communities in which they sit’ (Principal 4, System 1). In other cases, this was about more holistic consequences for schools in terms of not only their connection to their communities but also the capacity of schools to provide a breadth of options and experiences for all students.

For other ‘reluctant maximiser’ principals, an elevated position within the market meant they felt as though they were not actively competing with other schools for student enrolments. They did, however, still have to manage a competitive mindset on the part of prospective parents. As described by one participant:

We’re seen as a school of first choice. We’re enrolment-managed which means we have a defined catchment area. You either have to be a child of a staff member or within catchment or a sibling of an existing child. What I get at the moment, it’s about one a fortnight, is a parent providing me false statutory declarations trying to enrol their kid into the school. I can understand the desperation of parents. They’re trying to get their kids into what they perceive is the best school around… It’s the parents that put the competition in place… Yeah, it’s playing out competitive but it’s not intentional. It’s not the desire for us. (Principal 8, System 2)

While expressing a reluctance to compete, this principal argues that competition is a reality of being a player in the marketplace of public schooling. Indeed, in this mode of engagement there was clearly resignation regarding the limitations of a marketised system, but simultaneously, a recognition of the desirability of maintaining a position of strength. For instance, the fact that some schools already had ‘a good reputation within the community… and don’t feel a sense of competition… because people want to come to this school’ (Principal 12, System 1) meant that principals could perhaps choose to be ‘reluctant’ rather than ‘engaged’. One participant spoke frankly about their scepticism of the marketised system:

My [child] goes to a fully selective high school, my [partner] works in one, I went to one - they suck absolutely. They are a cancer on education but if you can’t beat them, join them, unfortunately. (Secondary Principal 8, System 1)

This last quotation implies a level of ‘fabrication’ (Ball 2003) on the part of school leaders in response to the pressures of marketised reforms, a response on the part of a number of principals working within this mode of engagement. Here, a sense of the limiting and less-than-desirable nature of the segregated and marketised system was evident, along with a sense that the intransigence of the system made resistance futile. In this mode, principals reported engaging in endeavours to position their schools within the system to the best of their ability – with more or less success – while maintaining a scepticism about the marketised system itself.

On the other hand, some ‘reluctant maximiser’ principals reported having worked against some of the competitive aspects of the marketised system in a more collaborative mode with other schools:

…we never wanted to take people away from someone else’s school either. We just wanted to stop the tide of people leaving [our school] for whatever reason. But we do moderation, assessment and planning with those schools now, so whatever school they go to, it’s all aligned at the same time as well. (Principal 7, System 2)

As this principal describes, schools in their regional community had made a concerted effort to be ‘on the same page’ and assure parents that whatever local primary school they choose to enrol their children in, the curriculum or school programming would be similar.

Finally, the reluctant maximiser mode of engagement encompassed not only a sceptical stance on the marketisation of public schooling, but in some cases, an active frustration at the individualistic approach promoted by marketisation:

…some of my State School [principal] colleagues where they’re enrolment managed … they can pick and choose who they can take out of catchment. In that situation, I think - I don’t know. I just say stop it, stop it. I'm a firm advocate of go to your local school and stay in your local school, work with your local school to get the results. We all do that and we don’t have that situation [we do] at the moment. (Principal 1, System 2)

The reluctant maximiser highlights what Christiaens (2020, 507). calls the ‘network of diffuse and multifarious tactics in the production of subjectivity’ that have emerged in response to what is too often theorised as the ‘monolithic advance of calculative rationality’. The calculative move to resist the entrepreneurialism rewarded within marketised and performative systems can be as important a driver of subjectivity as the lure of ‘profit’ or reward. In effect this is one of the problems with the easy application of homo-economicus with regard to principals’ work, it is rarely a case of calculative utility or not but moreso a question of who profits and how.

Principal as the entrepreneurial anti-maximiser

Finally, some principals demonstrated an entrepreneurial ‘anti-maximiser’ mode of engagement, wising utility maximisation to a more authentically entrepreneurial stance. These were the principals most likely to adopt an entrepreneurial ethic, embodied in a willingness to ‘take a leap of faith and forego the calculative management of human capital’ (Christiaens 2020, 497). The entrepreneurial anti-maximiser principal actively rejects the conventional wisdom that says that corporate logic will lead to better schools and better schooling outcomes:

We got told the other week to start acting like we’re CEOs and I said, no, when you pay me $500,000 I’ll act like a CEO, until then I’m not. I already work 24 hours a day, open my eyes and check emails; I can’t work any harder. I have that fundamental thing inside me that says I’m doing a great job but everything at this school is not about the marks… It’s about how do we make great people. I don’t produce products, I’m not a business, I produce people, so go away. (Principal 7, System 1)

The anti-maximiser principal takes a ‘leap of faith’ aligned with Christiaens’ ‘uncertainty bearing’ conceptualisation of the entrepreneur, navigating uncertainty and taking calculated risks on the basis of good judgement which, in the case of school principals, is strongly based on deep knowledge of both education and their communities:

It’s a moral scope I have. I know systems requirements. I know it’s a moral scope in terms of [the curriculum authority] and their requirements, but then I have to think about the context of the school. I'm interested in what’s in front of me, not what a system’s telling because the system isn’t teaching the kids, I am. Yes, I'm part of the system, but I've got to make those decisions about our students and what our students need. (Principal 13, System 1)

Interestingly, the two principals that most clearly embodied the anti-maximiser mode were engaged in particular types of curriculum and pedagogical reform within their schools that sat uncomfortably with contemporary orthodoxies related to (e.g.) the primacy of literacy and numeracy within the curriculum.

All around the world I see kindergarten children playing - in fact many places around the world, children don’t start school until seven, they play. We jam them up with Best Start and plan data and everything else. It’s almost from when they arrive, the next three years, you’ve got to get ready for your fourth year to do NAPLAN. That’s not what we’re all about. So that’s a big moral dilemma that I face every single day. And that is that I know I've got system requirements, but I also know what’s best for our students. My context is very different from the school up the road, whose context is different from rural, remote and all that. So that’s a dilemma. I find that a real difficult one where I have to make decisions and I fully know that that may not be kosher within the system. (Principal 13, System 1)

A willingness to operate in ways that ‘may not be kosher’ within the system, to work the ‘moral scope’ that comes with understanding the community and where its interests may not align with the orthodoxy of the day was a hallmark of this mode of engagement, as was a willingness to take a leap of faith that involved ‘pushing back’ on the local status quo:

So yeah, I inherited a very old school, as in traditional, very traditional, lots of behaviour problems because kids were bored, kids were stuck in classrooms and teachers would just get out. Lack of relationships, lack of understanding, no work around trauma informed practice due to a lot of issues around that stuff in the kids, teachers wanting to teach other kids that weren’t actually in their classrooms, you know, well, they’re the ones you’re paid to teach, so you either get them to where you want them to go or we really start to rethink this. I said, we can continue to do the same thing we’ve always done and always get the same results. We can tack things on to the edges of this, I can come down really hard on all of those traditional measures – uniform, behaviour, suspension, expulsion – what does that do? Fundamentally, what impact does that have? And when you look, it’s zero. Zero. (Principal 7, System 1)

In this case, a persistence on the part of the principal around deliberately shifting the secondary school from one with a very ‘traditional’ approach to one organised around collaboration, integration and connectedness had paid dividends not only with parents who proclaimed that ‘if this is what school looks like, I want to come back’, but also with teachers and students:

I’ve got teachers who they didn’t want to teach together to start with. I’ve got teachers now who go I never want to teach on my own again ‘cause it’s co-teaching, co-assessing, collaborating and then the most exciting part of it is now in Year 9 the kids are co-developing the courses with the teachers. And the kids are deciding how they want to be assessed. So they have authentic buy-in and voice and choice in what they’re doing.

This form of entrepreneurial ‘anti-maximiser’ principalship involved practices of counter-conduct, where the ‘leap of faith’ was imbued with a concern for moral and ethical leadership exercised as a form of ‘policy resistance’ (Fuller 2019) and articulated as a vigilance that required ‘courage and leadership’ (Principal 7, System 1).

Discussion and conclusion: the absent entrepreneur

Over the past few decades, many countries have reorganised their public school systems through marketisation that emphasises choice, competition, and autonomy. This is commonly referred to as neoliberalisation and is widely seen as problematic, not least because of how it has altered the role of the school principal. Much of the educational leadership literature, even that which seeks to take a critical stance, either assumes all principals to be similarly positioned by neoliberal reforms as either ‘buying in’ or resisting. Fitzgerald and Savage (2013), for example, have argued that ‘leadership of schools is a form of ritual performance that is staged and scripted by policy for a particular audience’ (127), while elsewhere (e.g. Gobby 2013) ‘the entrepreneurial principal’ is positioned as a consequence of marketised schooling. A key to this is the idea that homo economicus is now ‘the man of enterprise and production’. Thus, in a system that claims to be granting principals more autonomy, any form of local decision making (even of the type that principals have routinely done over many centuries/decades such as trying to attract the best staff etc) is an example of neoliberal subjectivity.

While we acknowledge the basic point that external forces produce the territory in which individuals construct their subjectivities, the ease with which school leader subjectivities can be parsed as ‘entrepreneurial’ because of marketisation/neoliberalism is not self-evident in the context of our study. In fact, these principals suggest that these performances, while subject to common policy pressures, are more aptly described as utility maximisation than entrepreneurial. As societies and their institutions experience the restructuring of public spaces, politics and communication that effectively ‘displace the classical values of publicness’, discourses commonly perceived as defining characteristics of state run and financed education systems change (Mahony, Newman, and Barnett 2010, 1). Importantly, these discursive shifts affect subjectivation within those school systems. Entrepreneurialism, once seen as characterising attributes rewarded in the private sector has seemingly become a valued characteristic within public institutions. This is evident as ‘models of the public as a privileged scene of collective agency’ give way to ‘strategies of governance that empower individual persons … [through] offering opportunities for independence and self­development’ (1). Utility-maximisation is an example of that individualisation that ironically is systemically produced within public systems. Of course, the old subjectivities of collective agency remain, such that what we see in leadership is essentially a series of contests, battles and strategic negotiations regarding these new configurations.

We extend Christiaens (2020) argument to suggest that the principle of utility-maximisation embedded in Foucault’s conceptualisation of homo economicus is inadequate to completely understand principals’ engagements with marketisation within systems that have been rearticulated through competition, autonomy and school choice. While, for some principals in our study, those ‘enthusiastic maximisers’, utility maximisation was very much about performing as an ‘entrepreneur of the self’, utility maximisation, for ‘educative’ and ‘reluctant’ maximisers, was more often about navigating the tensions inherent in marketised schooling in such a way that their schools stayed viable and remained ‘under the radar’. It is these tensions that are most generative in this paper, what Carpenter and Brewer (2014) conceptualise as the ‘implicated advocacy’ of principalship itself which mediates against entrepreneurialism in various ways. Our interview data suggested that in a system apparently rewarding entrepreneurialism through autonomy, other structures in the system (for example, steering at a distance through test-based accountability and so on) mediate against entrepreneurial principalship. The system decides what entrepreneurialism looks like and then rewards individuals accordingly creating a feedback loop that paradoxically limits the potential for entrepreneurialism.

Implicit in entrepreneurialism is a type of disruption and unwillingness to accept the status quo that does not sit comfortably with either regimes of autonomy and marketisation or those things that are generally valued within marketised schooling systems. As Christiaens argues: ‘entrepreneurial forms of subjectivity emphatically encourage individuals to creatively revolutionize the market’ on their own terms, and this engagement with the market is strikingly absent from our interviews. While school autonomy, competition and marketisation are said to be drivers for entrepreneurship amongst principals and school leaders, our research suggests that paradoxically, the need to ensure school survival in a saturated market actually gives rise to risk aversion, and a performative veneer of entrepreneurialism that is absent of authentic innovation and the kind of leaps of faith supposed to lie at the heart of being an entrepreneur.

Systems cannot and do not fully orchestrate principals’ engagements with the market regardless of the way in which autonomy, competition and marketisation are deployed, as principals’ engagements are mediated and moderated by their personal orientations and particular school situations. Almost 20 years ago, Pat Thomson wrote that ‘the identity of the principal is itself an uneasy amalgam of teacher, leader and manager’ (2004, 46), and the principals in our study demonstrated this in their navigation of marketisation on an institutional level. Like those in Keddie and Holloway’s study (2020), they often expressed a commitment to the role of public education as a ‘public good’, and a striving for social justice and equity through their work, although for many this commitment was circumscribed, in that ‘what counts in their efforts for social justice remain bounded in this space’ (299). The consequences of these circumscribed and conflicted commitments for others beyond the immediate school context within the broader system are well-recognised in the literature, and include greater system segregation and stratification (Rowe and Lubienski 2017); residualisation (Hattam 2018; Vickers 2015) and increased, rather than reduced, educational inequality (Keddie 2017b).

Responding to calls to develop more nuanced and differentiated understandings of school principals’ encounters with entrepreneurialism (Woods 2013), our research has highlighted the complex and contradictory nature of these relationships. The four orientations identified in our analysis are, we argue, a product not only of principals’ own orientations to the marketisation of education and their expectations of markets of public schooling to produce ‘public goods’, but also their level of personal and professional investment in the practices of marketisation, framed by the particularities and circumstances of their own schools. The leap of faith encompassed in true entrepreneurialism may not be desirable or even possible for principals trying to navigate systems which prize performative accountability and a particular version of standardisation, and are largely devoid of trust. Real educational innovation is steeped in a deep knowledge of the conditions that foster learning and human flourishing in local contexts, which is not consistent with the pursuit of the market niche for the purposes of getting ahead of the school next door. Our research suggests that the conditions that foster actual entrepreneurism are not inherently present in marketised schooling systems, pointing to the need for systems wanting principals to engage in innovation to embrace less, rather than more, corporatisation and competition.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council.

Notes

1 See for example https://www.raiseyourhandtexas.org/stories/school-principal-as-entrepreneur; https://blog.enrollhand.com/we-analyzed-what-successful-school-principals-do/; http://esheninger.blogspot.com/2017/05/rise-of-edupreneur.html; https://www.solutiontree.com/blog/edupreneurs/; https://educationchangemakers.com/books/

2 DP170103647 The Commercial Provision of Schooling and its Implications for Australia, Bob Lingard, Greg Thompson, Nicole Mockler & Anna Hogan, 2017-2020. Human Research Ethics Committee approval provided by the University of Queensland (#2017001883).

3 The mean ICSEA for all schools in Australia is 1000, with a standard deviation of 100.

4 The project was approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee at the University of Queensland in 2017. Approval number 2017001883.