Debates about responsibility and responsibilisation pervade contemporary social, political and moral life. For this reason, how they are configured, operate, inter-relate and their effects have been the subject of theoretical work across multiple disciplines and sub-disciplines, including but not limited to sociology, economics, business and accounting, ethics, health and psychoanalysis. Here, scholars have sought to document and account for the mélange of rationalities, pressures, technologies and practices of responsibility and responsibilisation that act on and/or are taken up by individuals, groups and organisations, and how they work to both delimit and create possibilities for individual and collective freedoms.
This special issue adds to this body of knowledge by turning an analytical lens on the ways in which responsibility and responsibilisation operates in different sites, jurisdictions and relationships in education. This focus, as Michael Peters observes in his concluding article, makes this collection of articles ‘the first of its kind in education’.
Contributors are all renowned experts in their respective fields. Individually, their articles consider questions of responsibility and responsibilisation in relation to different populations, from children and young people inside and outside of schools, to teachers and students and managers in higher education. The discussions are located in very different social, policy and geographical contexts, including the USA, Europe, the UK, New Zealand and Australia, and attend to both formal and informal educational contexts. Individually and collectively, they provide nuanced insights into the multiplicity of ways that responsibility and responsibilisation work differently in different educational contexts to construct particular social orders and ways of being in the world.
This does not mean our authors agree with each other. A strength of this collection, we propose, is that it presents very different views and perspectives on the operation and effects of responsibility and responsibilisation based on the analyses of different educational sites and actors. These differences send a salutatory caution against making universalised assumptions about responsibility and responsibilisation in education, and about generalising single case findings to the entire field of education. In doing so, the diverse perspectives presented in this collection reinforce the foundational principles of scholarly educational research. They demonstrate the importance of exploring the complex ways in which individuals, groups and contexts are differentiated from one another and of resisting the temptation to reduce key concepts, such as responsibility and responsibilisation, to simplistic categorical oppositions (for example, good/bad) that are fixed in time and space.