The processual life of neoliberalisation: permutations of value systems and normative commitments in a co-operative trust setting

ABSTRACT

Since 2010 the government in England has committed to accelerating the expansion of academies (‘state-funded independent schools’) through displacing the role of local government as principal manager and overseer of schools. In response increasing numbers of schools are embracing the co-operative trust model to improve economies of scale, facilitate stakeholding and community resilience and resist capture from the monopolising tendencies of some large multi-academy trusts seeking wholesale takeover of certain underperforming schools. Yet there are concerns that co-operative schools do not represent a radical departure from routines of neoliberalism – defined by managerial deference, technocratic efficiency, upward accountability and performativity – despite clear signs that co-operative schools promote themselves as jointly-owned, democratically-controlled enterprises. In this paper, I adopt a ‘processual view of neoliberalisation’ [Peck, J., and A. Tickell. 2002. “Neoliberalizing Space.” Antipode 34 (3): 380–404] to complicate the idea that co-operative schools can be judged in binary terms of ‘either/or’ – neoliberal or democratic, exclusionary or participatory – and instead point to the variegated organisational life of co-operative schools and their messy actualities as they straddle competing and sometimes conflicting sets of interests, motives and demands in their practice of school governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Co-operative schools
• neoliberalism
• school governance
• processual sociology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Andrew Wilkins is Reader in Education at the University of East London. He is a member of several editorial boards including Journal of Education Policy, Critical Studies in Education and British Journal of Sociology of Education. His recent books include Modernising School Governance (Routledge, 2016) and Education Governance and Social Theory (Bloomsbury, 2018).

ORCID

Andrew Wilkins http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4486-8034