Bureaucratization, education and the meanings of responsibility

Abstract

In US-based educational research, the bureaucratization of education has been interpreted primarily from economic points of view. This paper examines bureaucracy and education from a political perspective, which provides key insights into the ways that bureaucracy as a form of governance influences ethical consciousness. As this paper puts forth, bureaucratic socialization supplants procedural for ethical responsibility. To understand the gravity and pervasiveness of this process, I turn to Max Weber’s theory of rational bureaucracy and Hannah Arendt’s insights into bureaucracy as a type of political domination, which she calls ‘rule by Nobody’. Following Arendt, bureaucracy is the most tyrannical type of rule given that there is tyranny without a tyrant. As such, responsibility falls by the wayside since no one can answer for what is being done. I argue that to understand the meanings of responsibility in education, one must do so in light of the ways that universal bureaucratization – its rational procedures, managerial techniques, knowledge fragmentations and so on – undermines ethical consciousness. As understanding rests at the heart of this inquiry, the paper ends on a note of caution regarding what to do about the breakdown of educational responsibility in a bureaucratized society.

KEYWORDS:

• Responsibility
• educational research
• ethics
• rationalization
• bureaucratization

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their insights and suggestions that helped me to refine this paper. I would also like to thank Bill Pinar, who read and offered feedback on an earlier version of this work. Last, I give thanks to Jo-Anne Dillabough and her discussant commentary for the 2016 American Educational Research Association conference symposium on ‘Thinking with Hannah Arendt on the Cultural of Instrumentality in Education’, which provided early inspiration for this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Hannah Spector is an Assistant Professor of Education at Penn State University – Harrisburg. Her primary research interest involves the interplay between politics, ethics and education. She has published research articles in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Crime|Media|Culture, Studies in Philosophy and Education, Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, among other journals. She co-edited a special journal issue of Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies (2017, with Robert Lake and Tricia Kress) on Maxine Greene and the Pedagogy of Social Imagination: An Intellectual Genealogy, which has been republished as a book with Routledge (2018). She can be reached at [email protected].

Notes

1 There is more recent scholarship on the bureaucratization of American education – e.g. Saltman (2012) and Mehta (2013) – though this subject matter is not as prevalent as it once was; nor does it explicitly emphasize questions concerning ethical responsibility in education.