Legitimacy, power, and aesthetics, in the International Baccalaureate

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the facilitation of the emancipatory in an International Baccalaureate (IB) context of privilege. It aligns with the idea that capitalism, even in welfare state democracies or ‘do good’ corporations, maintains the interests of the owners of capital. It is by nature unjust and exploitative and must conceal this injustice by securing a (spurious) legitimacy for itself. This makes a rare methodological contribution as the article provides critical ‘meta-analysis’ of IB research literature by prioritising work that affords insight into the lived reality within the IB-Sphere. It then triangulates this analysis through the work of German Social Philosopher Jürgen Habermas. This work provides a significant and timely contribution to ‘franchised education’ in the twenty-first Century, and will be of essential reading to scholars, policymakers and leadership whether involved in the IB, or active in the Neo Liberal spaces of education more generally: such as Multi Trust Academies, Free Schools, or Charter Schools. This is thanks to the lessons learned over nearly 60 years of educational franchise in a diverse and globalising sphere as presented here from IB research through critical analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• International Baccalaureate
• legitimacy
• Habermas
• emancipatory education
• privileged education
• aesthetic

Established in 1962, the International Baccalaureate (IB) is an internationally focussed curriculum known for progressive rigour, global-mindedness and distinction, having experienced rapid quantitative growth since the 1990s. However, the IB is drawing increasing attention due to the now paradoxical nature of its mission versus operational strategy. This is because the IB ‘making the world a better place’ has consistently followed market-logic; focussing on those already in a better place and eluding the rest.

The theory of Habermas is introduced in ‘Key Terms’ in order to later unpick the IB system world as it acts upon its constituents’ lifeworld. This is achieved by borrowing the concept of meta-analysis and systematically reviewing the scholarly literature on IB concerned with the social/policy impact of this global system. Unlike a conventional statistical Meta-Analysis (Card 2015), this approach is anti-positivist, and achieves its analytical rigour through theoretical triangulation (Bush 2012). By doing so, it is theorised that the IB is a system-driven entity increasingly skilled in corporate practice. It finds that this system faces considerable challenges, not (immediately) to its financial successes, but to its legitimacy as a whole. A monopolistic positioning in the international market, a closed elite circuit of rationality, and the exploitation of educational values and rigour have led to a focus on markets that are comfortable or cash-ready and preferably both. The theory of Habermas reveals why the IB faces increasing challenges: who wins, and who loses. The paper concludes with an overview of the IB's legitimacy and recommendations.

Introducing the IB-Sphere

Established in 1962, the International Baccalaureate (IB) is an international curriculum which is known to bring together progressive pedagogy with rigour, and global mindedness with distinction (Doherty 2009; Gardner-McTaggart 2016). In line with more general mores on education, it does so whilst aiming to make the world a better place (IBO 2021a). IB educational philosophy remains embedded in the thinking of Dewey, Neill, Piaget and Bruner [Sic] (IBO 2017) and its organisation has experienced rapid quantitative growth since the 1990s (Bunnell 2008; ISC 2022; Wright and Lee 2019). This has led to the notional bubble, or global network that I will term the ‘IB-Sphere’; one that generates its own class (Bunnell 2010), distinction (Doherty 2009), assemblages (Resnik 2019), ways of being and knowing (Gardner-McTaggart 2016), discourses (Fitzgerald 2022) and economic capital (IBO 2021a). This sphere of influence is empowered, enabled, locally capital-rich and globally mobile.

The IB does not run or own schools rather, it provides the service of an international curriculum, along with teacher training workshops, annual conferences, conferring a sense of identity on schools authorised by it; in short, it provides a community and a collective identity (Cambridge 2010; Bunnell, Fertig, and James 2020). From a small, rather select movement couched in the elitist backdrop of Switzerland, and Western Europe (Hill 2006) it has moved to a global corporate education ‘power’ (Resnik 2019). Its creation in the 1960s signalled a firm departure from old conservative thinking (Habermas 1983) around elite education. The IB provided new impetus to traditional private schooling typically focussed on national forms of elite social reproduction (Bourdieu 1996), and their international offshoots (Kenway et al. 2017). Instead, it pointedly broke with such mores in order to promote non-national education. In a broader socio-political context, this occurred before the wane of global socialism: the break-up of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. By changing focus from national to international, the IB catered for a very clear market of itinerant and expatriate wealthy. This occurred along Neo-conservative (Greval 2019; Habermas 1983) values and thinking as evident in the privileging of pedagogies based upon Dewy et al. (IBO 2017); operationalised through international private schooling.

From small but classy origins, the institutional identity of the organisation has established itself through notable proliferation as the global player in international educational provision. Indeed, there are currently 1,950, 000 students, in 5,400 schools in 159 countries studying on International Baccalaureate (IB) ‘continuums’ (IBO 2021a). The IB is franchised in two broad school areas. The first, and its historical base are private and autonomous making up 44% of all IB schools. Most (but not all) of these present the term ‘international’ in their name, in their marketing and in their identity and typically understand themselves as ‘international schools’ or national private schools with strong international reach. The second and largest proportion (by student percentage) are found in publicly funded schools in the United States of America (USA): and also in Australia, Canada, China, the European Union, New Zealand, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom – and others.

Comparison of four years between 2016–2017 to 2019–2021 in the relevant IB ‘Financial Overview’ (IBO 2017, 2021c) reports total assets of US$ 161.1 million in 2016, rising to US$ 431.6 in 2020, and Net assets of US$ 124 million in 2016 rising to US$ 312.9 million in 2021.

These profits are naturally generated by the public and private schools described above. Any school wishing to be considered as a candidate pays £2510 GBP and authorisation costs £5900. For successful schools, the annual fee is calculated by continuum, with the most common one, the post 16 terminal IB Diploma programme costing the school £6990, the middle school MYP costing £6030, and the primary school PYP costing 5110. In addition, the IB charges each student a fee, which in a typical IB diploma case costs the school £850 in total, or £46 per year for each MYP student (IBO 2021b).

The IB has transitioned and transformed through a rapidly changing era of globalisation, from an idea based upon international private schooling, with roots in the 1950s, in a post war / cold war Western Europe, to a global business providing an expensive quality product to an increasing market of financially capable schools (Bunnell 2008; Bunnell 2010; Bunnell, Fertig, and James 2020; Gardner-McTaggart, 2016; Resnik 2020; Tarc and Mishra Tarc 2015). Despite the epochal societal changes of the last decades, it is unclear how the structures of its organisation deliver on its mission and to what extent the IB serves its own ideas, and its own communities in ways that are epistemic, practical, and intersubjective. By deploying Habermas it is important to see that rationality is less about ‘having’ a certain knowledge, but more about the way in which people access and use knowledge; in short, can ‘communicative rationality’ (1991) be operationalised in the IB-Sphere, or is the system without legitimacy?

The IB in action

The IB was conceived in the wake of the Second World War, the British Empire, and amidst a socially progressive Europe firmly couched in post-war welfarism. However, this was a time (and in elite education; a context) that assumed an implicit and natural order to human organisation (Durkheim 2007) more commonly known as ‘functionalism’. In contrast to functionalism, emancipatory thinking is concerned with challenging inequity and improving the world through direct human action (Habermas 1991). As a result, the IB mission reflects ‘global dreams’ (Tarc 2009) of a better world but as this critical analysis reveals, does so in ways that appear functional rather than emancipatory. In other words, the IB presents an anachronism of progressive thinking due to matters of illegitimate aesthetics because the organisation is ‘blind’ to its own advantage; its ontology rooted in the past, driven by a (present) corporate strategic action, aiming for a future of increased market share. The aesthetics may lack legitimacy because they might not be negotiated through a communicative rationality (Habermas 1970; Habermas 1981) but rather invented, marketed and self-promoted without legitimation through communicative interplay between the system and its actors.

Introducing key terms

Due to the social philosophy invoked (Habermas 1981), there follows an overview of terms helpful in understanding the IB Sphere in this analysis.

Lifeworld

‘The stock of skills, competencies and knowledge that ordinary members of society use, in order to negotiate their way through everyday life, to interact with other people, and ultimately to create and maintain social relationships’ (Edgar 2006, 89).

Lifeworld is the transcendental space where speaker and listener encounter each other’ (‘Die Lebenswelt ist gleichsam der transzendentale Ort, an dem sich Sprecher und Hörer begegnen’ this author’s translation) (Habermas 1981, 192); ‘Lifeworld’ is a complimentary term used with communicative action, and describes the participant perspective of acting subjects. (Gardner-McTaggart 2022, 651)

System

Edgar (2006, 145) provides a clear description of this: ‘Within a system, the elements are selected and so ordered that only certain relationships between them are possible, and other relationships prohibited or made impossible … the selection and ordering of elements is strictly rule-governed’. What is at issue is that system can never accommodate the complexity of nature and indeed humanity. ‘This makes the system clearly separable from its surrounding environment, not least because the environment is more complex’ allowing for many more relationships.

Colonisation of the lifeworld

This is what occurs when people’s skills, competencies and knowledge used to live by, are infiltrated (taken over) by external, system-level forces, changing the way they are without intersubjective negotiation: as is common between people.

A central issue for Habermas is that the lifeworld once influenced the system-world (i.e., people collectively dictate what systems should be like to service society), but in modern societies, it is now a system that influences (colonizes) the lifeworld. Power and money steer the cultural and social process of society, in other words, rather than people and peoples steering the way the world works. It is the system (market economy) which steers how people work. (Gardner-McTaggart 2022, 651)

Legitimation

When authority is generally accepted by the majority. Contrast with power, which may simply be the exertion of brute force. Habermas expresses concern that systems set up the parameters that define their own success in binary or monopolistic action with no form of debate or alternative. By example, a political party winning the election is considered legitimate (even if the process is not), more pertinently for this enquiry, a ‘system’ may be considered legitimate if it beats the competition, whether it is appropriate or not (Edgar 2006, 86).

Strategic action

‘A type of social action where one or more participants treat the other subjects as if they were objects rather than fellow human beings with whom agreement and mutual understanding should be achieved’, the actor might resort to emotive rhetoric to cover up the weakness of their argument and coerce the other to action (Edgar 2006, 144).

Critical meta-analysis of IB literature

Functionalist roots

In a mixed methods study Bailey and Cooker (2018) conducted 93 interviews and a survey of 2526 students in nine international schools deploying ‘aspects of’ Foucault in researching the IB learner profiles as practices of self with emphasis on ‘caring’. With further analysis achieved through Resnik (2008, 2009) and Brown and Lauder (2011), the authors found that ‘ … the liberal curriculum offered by the International Baccalaureate (IB) to foster international-mindedness and cultivate an idealised learner in fact reifies social divisions’. Bailey and Cooker found this was not intrinsic to the curriculum but was enacted to the extent that ‘Caring was operationalised as a modern form of noblesse oblige’ (237), or more pointedly as a patricidal noblesse oblige. From this data, it follows then that the IB concept of caring is about ‘caring for IB people’ first because; overall, the IB was found to be likely to exacerbate divisions¹ (237). In confirmation of Resnik (2020) Bailey and Cooker found that when schools accommodate IB as the alternative, they may legitimise [social] inequality. Most strikingly, their analysis finds that governments adopting the IB are likely to lose the ability to address inequalities by delivering them in a curriculum over which they have no control (238).

Aesthetic is important in public relations and multiculturalism may appear to mitigate inequalities. However, in the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum, it has been deemed more instrumental than emancipatory; seen to provide the managerial skills for handling diverse workforces: ‘As a result, only children graduating from international and exclusive private schools may have access to prestigious global jobs that require multicultural skills; for the rest of the students, even the most brilliant, becoming a global manager might remain only a dream, an impossible mission’ (Resnik 2009, 218). Resnik’s analysis provides cogent insight into the aesthetics at work in the IB.

Functionalism versus emancipation

Bailey and Cooker (2018) propose that IB learner attributes and their dispositions may just as likely foster emancipatory action, yet the IB context is one of advantage, wealth, and power. Emancipatory action is often the result of communicative action, but more hierarchical, top-down strategic process is conjoined to ‘strategic action’ known to be pursuant of the articulation and consolidation of power (Habermas 1981). In other words, a sphere at odds with challenging the power status quo. While Bailey and Cooker note the affordance for the IB attributes to foster emancipatory action, the statement is without weight as the affordance is merely that. Such thinking is common in the IB sphere, and this remains in parts a product of the structural thinking that birthed the IB in the 1960s and one that foregrounds and privileges the normative and the aesthetic over the individual voices: and the IB’s actual impact upon global society.

This following study illuminates the challenges in facilitating emancipatory action (or even thought) in an IB context of privilege. The aesthetics of the IB place it as having values in-line with Oxfam (Hayden et al. 2020, 689) and add greatly to its legitimacy. Through research into Community Action Service (CAS), on responsibility and environment the data collected showed groups of respondents who consistently ‘strongly disagreed’ with the impact of the IB to create lasting change (599). The authors conflated ‘thinking about the future’ with affluence and concluded that the means required to engage in emancipatory thought is at odds with the process of ‘ … socialisation into individualism in cultures dominated by Neo-Liberal regimes’ (600). Overall, relatively few participants agreed that CAS had a strong impact on them, posing difficult questions on the IB’s curricular legitimacy.

IB aesthetic and the free market

In contrast to the above discussion on IB in international schools, one of the great legitimisation claims of the IB in recent times, is with regard to its increasing numbers of students in public schools; this provides the distinctive aesthetic (a consensus of rationality or a difference aesthetic) (Habermas 1970; Habermas 1981) of making the world a better place by authorising a more socially and economically diverse selection of schools.

Africa is known to not be as economically strong as the countries where IB schools cluster, and accordingly. Bunnell (2016) finds that although the IB has moved considerably in recent years towards public education particularly in the USA, at the same time its operational paradigm appears mostly unchanged in Africa, unmoved since the 1980s – 76 schools located in 25 countries across that continent. Such evidence provides a clear insight into how the IB is organised and operates in a sphere of its own making. It is one where IB authorisation, training and fees are standardised and levied globally, regardless of financial means or any organisational accommodation of the notion of ‘making the world a better place’: a practice undermining the legitimacy of the IB as a non-profit (Fitzgerald 2022). Pricing continents and populations out of the sphere is a hard-nosed practice and one that is unconcerned with global welfare – as it is common to business. Such pricing policies demonstrate (one of) the most significant challenges to the IB’s legitimacy in the twenty-first Century.²

Seen from the perspective of a wealthier demographic, data collected on several school sites in Israel takes a bottom-up approach and looks at relatively better-off families and the appeal of the IB. It considers parental policy influence enacted by ‘Mobile middle-class families’ (Yemini 2021, 72). This study finds that the IB can be favoured as an alternative to state systems particularly among itinerant families who identify internationalism and global mindedness as valuable capital (typically in more affluent areas), leading to schools attempting to accommodate aspects of internationalism, from hiring to interschool collaboration. These findings confirm Resnik (2012) on the ‘percolation’ of state policy towards the IB, in what the authors identify as an ‘isomorphic flow towards the IB’ (75). This research also confirms Gardner-McTaggart (2019) on the compatibility between religious schools and the IB, sharing as they do notions of global thinking (75–76). A key outcome of Yemini (2021) is in demonstrating how a supra-national educational body (the IB in this case) appeals to the uncertainty of those with an itinerant lifestyle (76–77). Yemini’s conclusion shows how globally mobile parents in Israel who are unable to afford private schools, push for internationalism in state schooling (78) acting as consumers lobbying for an educational policy of personalisation (Hartley 2012). The key outcome from this paper is in uncovering how the parent-customer initiates a process of competition among public schools in a de-regulated public education system where the IB has a monopoly on branded internationalism.

Seen from the perspective of schools, Conner (2008) in the USA provided an early overview of the tensions involved in pushing an expensive and high-prestige education franchise. Conner’s essential query following his research is to ask: If the IB acts as a magnet to attract a certain demographic, then should it really be offered to all students? In a marketized educational system Conner recognises the value of Distinction in IB education (see Doherty 2009) and questions the appeal of a system that everybody has access to and is no longer ‘special’. From a more social perspective, Conner reflects upon an IBDP coordinator’s cohort of diploma students and asks how a working-class schoolgirl with absentee parents and child-caring responsibilities for siblings will be able to take part in CAS activities? He predicts a dismal de-selection from IB continuums based upon income.

Resnik (2012, 256) finds the ‘Conditions such as economic globalisation and neoliberal education policies favour the expansion of IB schools’. Seen historically, the collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in the era of the many capitalisms (Eyal, Szeléyni, and Townsly 2003) or Neo Liberalism (Gill 2012; Hartley 2012), meaning wealthier parents seek out international education in order to ‘secure passage into the global marketplace’ (256). Further, that insertion of IB programmes into state sector schools and percolation of IB thinking has led to a ‘metamorphosis’ of this global actor as ‘emblematic’ of educational (Gardner-McTaggart, 2018; Gardner-McTaggart, 2022) globalisation and the denationalisation of education (Resnik 2012, 249). This can be viewed as ‘a free market response to a global need’ (Pearce 1994, 28), and one that sets off a competition between national education systems, influenced as they are by globalisation and the spread of free market values (Cambridge and Thompson 2004, 168–169). As this meta-analysis is able to reveal, the Legitimacy of an IB education is not achieved through a functionalist (not emancipatory) CAS experience (Hayden et al. 2020), or in one where Conner’s (2008) working class girl is systematically pre-selected for failure, but not included in the Aesthetic.

The public aesthetic

The IB claims that it is now more than ever involved in public education. This assertion appears to rest in a functionalist (possibly 1950/1960s) view of what public and private mean. However, the free-market and privatising trends in public education are already well understood (Apple 2000; Ball 2012; Hartley 2012; Resnik 2020). The IB’s claim is functionally/semantically accurate as the quantitative figures cited in the previous section show larger IB engagement in the ‘public’ sector at 56% market share (IBO 2020).

As a result, the legitimising aesthetic of an organisation no longer focussed on private elites is clear for all to see. IB-sphere normativity, semantics and percentage figures provide gloss, yet the IB a upholds clear financial boundaries equal for all (and accessible to few), as is uncovered in the following research.

This larger study (Resnik 2020) was based on interviews with IB representatives, schools, and other stakeholders over three Canadian provinces, lending critical insight into the legitimisation claims of the IB to be less elitist; increasingly engaged in public schooling. This research draws attention to Canadian educational reforms. These are of the type that encourage competition between schools based on parents’ school choice and have been taking place since the late 1980s (Apple 2000; Ball 2012; Hartley 2012; Sahlberg 2006) where proponents of school competition (i.e., state funded schools competing against each other) are satisfied that market forces lead to greater efficiencies. This is understood to mean more effectiveness in schools and improvement of students’ performance, devising entrepreneurial strategies to eliminate unnecessary costs, ensuring schools be given more autonomy (Resnik 2020, 315). This aesthetic is seductive, and yet, in analysis of her data, Resnik finds that such competition fails to deliver on its own objectives. Instead, it leads to ‘great kids’ being pulled away into IB schools. Ultimately, neither the IB’s progressive pedagogy, nor its core values increase its market share, and net value. Instead, it is this brain drain which is identified as one of the biggest factors pushing schools to adopt the IB (330), i.e., legitimacy through market dominance. In support of these findings, Kidson, Odhiambo, and Wilson (2019) question internationalism in Australian schools and highlight its marketisation versus ‘value added’ claims. Analogously, these researchers question the organisational and administrative impact of IB on schools and its operational burden, including additional language learning, costs, training, etc. These authors validate the notion that functionalist approaches to knowing remain privileged in this sector, illuminating research on the IB in Australia which remains focussed on the diploma programme and the perceived socioeconomic benefits that come with it (Kidson, Odhiambo, and Wilson 2019): highlighting the societal perks for a few (Hartley 2012) without addressing the wider picture. Resnik’s (2020) study peels back the band-aid holding this aesthetic together with an intricate overview of funding and curriculum choice in Canada, where schools cut programmes, courses and costs to ‘afford’ the expensive IB. The researcher then concludes that these policies have led to an ‘all against all’ competition (between Catholic, Anglophone, French, Independent, public, etc).

While the legitimacy of the IB rests to a great extent upon its pedagogy and values, by drawing upon Lubienski (2009) and an analysis of consumer and producer domains, Resnik (2020) is able to illuminate perhaps one of the greatest challenges to IB legitimacy in public schools. It is one that sees them adopting a marketing strategy aimed at improving school enrolment not student achievement or pedagogy.³ Despite the IB’s projected aesthetic, it is found to be a clear contributor to social inequality (332), leaving serious questions as its legitimacy in this public school’s context.

IB, higher education and privileged futures

One of the major attractions of the IB lies in its terminal diploma programme (IBDP) geared towards young people heading for university (Tarc 2009), yet consistently associated with an elitist form of education: ‘Indeed, a decade ago Gehring (2001) referred to the IB’s Diploma Programme as the ‘Cadillac of College-Prep Programs’ (Lee, Hallinger, & Walker, 2012, 291). As with much in the IB-Sphere, it is anecdote and gloss that infuse much of this perception, and a notable dearth of significant qualitative research (Hill and Saxton 2014).

Doherty, Mu, and Shield (2009) note that education sectors are becoming more complex and that taking the IBDP is associated with opportunity but also risk. The many downsides (of not performing in exam for example) heighten the desirability of the advantages (268) making it more ‘distinct’ (Bourdieu 1984). They posit social imaginaries of boundary artists, ‘ … making their way in the world beyond and despite national boundaries with the IB as part of this plan’ (Doherty, Mu, and Shield 2009, 269). The risk and challenge of IB opportunity is shown in the following Turkish context. Here, recent research conducted by two investigators in their own school in Turkey lends some qualitative insight into the workings of student performance with regard to entry into Higher Education (HE) (Metli and Özcan 2021). It is of merit because it demonstrates how (as is common in many contexts) nation states may demand state examinations as a measure of University aptitude. In other words, they do not rely simply upon terminal school qualifications such as Advanced placement, Abitur, A levels, Baccalaureate, Certificate, Diploma, Gakao, High School Graduation Equivalency, IBDP, Senior Certificate, etc. How long such national imperatives remain and in how many countries is questionable in the face of mounting globalising influence to standardise or rather, accommodate free market product such as the IB. Resnik (2019) reveals the extent of IBDP HE admission assemblages, and how they are being strengthened in alignment with the privileging of free market initiatives. According to Resnik, IB schools worldwide act increasingly as policy drivers, ultimately contributing to the transformation of the IB network into a global education power (Resnik 2019, 355).

Metli and Özcan’s (2021) study provides helpful documentary insight into the impact of the IBDP on University entrance in Turkey. This is because it illuminates the existence of quite a definitive procedure as follows:

Higher Education Institution Examination (HEIE) as of 2018 consists of three rounds, including a Basic Proficiency Test (BPT), an Area Qualification Test (AQT), and a Foreign Language Test (FLT). Students make their choices based on their total scores. SSPC places students into departments of universities through rank ordering students with the highest scores for the related departments (Atas & Erişen, 2016; Berberoğlu, 1996). (Metli and Özcan 2021, 257–257)

The authors find that the extensive extra workload of an IBDP curriculum means that students may not be performing so well in other exams as a result of it, complementing findings above on the interference of IB on established school practices (Conner 2008; Kidson, Odhiambo, and Wilson 2019; Resnik 2020). Results indicated that a student attaining a higher IBDP score would not necessarily achieve a higher exam entry score. This situation is exacerbated by the very different nature of exams: in the case of the IBDP they are formative, summative, prosaic, open-ended, but when it comes to the Turkish system, they are multiple choice (263–264). This insight is particularly helpful in understanding how state systems and privatised ones do not necessarily work together, and combining them places increasing burdens on schoolchildren that only extra-tuition and wealthy, stable (Middle/Upper class) families can provide. Wright, Lee, and Feng’s (2018) study in the Chinese context, utilises interview data and illuminated how private supplementary tutoring was discouraged by most teachers and administrators due to a perception of tension with the IB’s educational philosophy. This was the view that private supplementary tutoring is not conducive to IBDP assessments, and that providers lacked specialised knowledge of the IBDP curriculum. Nevertheless, interviewees noted that low-performing IBDP students often utilised private supplementary tutoring for remedial purposes, especially for Mathematics and languages (Wright, Lee, and Feng 2018).

It appears then that the rigours of an IB curriculum place considerable demands upon students which easily go beyond the provision of schools with more modest endowments – particularly those notionally in the public realm (Conner 2008; Kidson, Odhiambo, and Wilson 2019; Resnik 2020; Sahlberg 2006). In their 2019 paper, Wright and Lee explore how the existing Middle Class reproduce their social position and how local families enter the global middle class in IB schools and top universities in Hong Kong. (They characterise global middle class by professional or managerial careers and with cosmopolitan sensibilities). The study finds a competitive environment where increasingly, young people are being expected to do more to stand out from the crowd (692). ‘The educational pathway may, therefore, be a means for the existing Global Middle Class to reproduce their social position and for local families to enter the Global Middle Class’ (692).

The semantic shift is of interest here in that Wright and Lee equate Upper Middle Class, with Global Middle Class (GMC). The phrasal adjective ‘Global Middle’ becomes cognate with ‘Upper Middle’ in a powerful articulation of the class-cache apparent in international and global education: a key component of the IB Aesthetic. It follows that data from the study finds local IBDP students wanted to retain local⁴ ties, some saying they wanted to give back to the local community (691). They also found that the IBDP affords for cosmopolitanism as a ‘soft currency’ and that global student networks and English language proficiency are seen as marking the GMC distinct from the local upper middle class. (693). Despite this they report further dislocation and separation by being a part of the IB-Sphere: ‘Instead, the cosmopolitanism sensibilities of IBDP alumni may be lacking in capacity or willingness to blend in with the local’ … ‘given a relative lack of openness to encounters with local social groups with alternative educational backgrounds and life experiences’. The authors find ‘ … disconnection from the local to be an inherent characteristic or by-product for our IBDP alumni participants at world-class East Asian universities in their educational pathway into the Global Middle Class’ (Wright and Lee 2019, 693). Although some may wish to ‘give back’ (it is not known if this response to a research question transfers to action), it is clear that extrication from the local is a more pervasive effect of the IB and University experience, further strengthening an elitist/individualist outcome (Hartley 2012) in IB graduates, raising deeper questions of legitimacy for the IB more generally.

Japan provides a particularly helpful insight into how IB HE assemblages (Resnik 2019) work at national policy level in one of the world’s most powerful economies. Nitta (2019) documents how government in that country has been publicly lobbied by ideologically oriented and market-driven groups and individuals in order to increase English in primary and secondary education. Here, the IB is promoted centrally because it is perceived to offer this affordance along with improved university entrance. As a result of this lobbying, the IB then became part of a package of incentives designed to ‘globalise’ education provision nationally. This provision is critiqued as contrived consensus (345) focussed in global conservatism -and in line with much Neo-liberalist action (Hartley 2012) – based upon belief rather than expert voice (Nitta 2019). The author makes clear that these initiatives have had the effect of marginalising large groups of the population who are not politically aligned, or privileged. Nitta’s work is illuminative as it demonstrates how power works around and through the IB. In this study, it becomes apparent what role the IB may be playing in privileging dominated knowledge over valid knowledge claims (Eyal, Szeléyni, and Townsly 2003; Habermas 1981) levying influence not only on its advantaged stakeholders, but also excluding those not culturally, socially or economically fortunate.

Bunnell, Donnelly, and Lauder (2021) take issue with the legitimacy of the IB as an elite and top-quality education provider in its most privileged manifestation in international schools, and do so from the opposite angle by questioning its efficacy to afford access to elite Universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. The authors point out that the IB is known to cater for a large body of expats and even locals in the form of traditional international schools (ETISs) (Tarc and Mishra Tarc 2015) that offer an international curriculum, mainly the IB diploma (IBDP). They reveal that many of these ETISs were constituent producers of helping to test and pioneer (and thereby form) the IB in the early 1960s, achieving highest scores for their pupils (Bunnell, Donnelly, and Lauder 2021, 560). This research shows that IB graduates from these schools cluster in certain Western cities, but do not gain access into the very most prestigious universities. It lends a valuable insight which questions the aesthetic and legitimacy of an elite IB education and its rigour. However, it leaves unexplored why and if relatively few high-scoring IB graduates pass interview at Oxbridge and therefore take their second choice of a Canadian/UK/US city University. Further research is required to establish whether the cosmopolitan appeal of a few English-speaking cities, is a first choice, or more of a second choice after rejection from Oxbridge, Harvard and co. This study calls into question the disconnect between an Aesthetic of elitism and its Legitimacy asking: does the IB actually deliver to its GMC customers?

Fitzgerald deploys Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) on public responses to the IB diploma examinations during COVID. Her work lays bare the operation of communicative reason (in one of the few spaces and contexts it ‘is allowed’) in the intersubjective space of Twitter. In an IB Sphere, defined by strategic reason (and controlled ‘comms’), such social media can and does provide a space for intersubjectivity (Habermas 1981) in what Fitzgerald has termed an ‘intensification strategy’. Her findings on IB customers (clustered under ‘concordance lines for the keyword ‘profit’) provide a typically non-dominated and human voice to the tensions raised above showing the shape of things to come in this sphere: ‘we were sold non-profit, not Wall Street’ or ‘the IB is a for profit organisation masquerading as a non-profit’. Or ‘big business designed as flower power non-profit, it’s a for profit scam with a complete disregard for its clients’ (2022, 11). The analysis points out how comparable A Level results were influenced the by intersubjective process of communicative reason (i.e., government adapted to public outcry) yet confirm the strategic, top-down ontology of the IB which remained mostly silent, did not react to its ‘public’, or at least ‘..the organisation controls the messaging in a proprietary way, constructing an image of a uniform and united ‘IB World’ that is the same regardless of context’ (Fitzgerald 2022, 16).

The IB and its teachers

Rey, Bolay and Gez’s ground-breaking 2020 study on teachers in (IB) international schools involving interview data is of singular note, because it uncovers a new, Neo Liberal reality of IB, that is at odds with the often normative and marketed image that is portrayed. It is relevant as the IB is a most prolific international curriculum (Rey, Bolay, and Gez 2020, 370). The authors observe the pervasive societal shift in the last 40 years through the neo-liberal project: from system to individual. They make light of this societal trend because of the effects it has had upon the teachers in IB international schools. Neo-liberalism has led to the crushing debt of student loans and an increased negative push for educated people to compete in ever more precarious and even unsafe environments (365). The authors note a change in teacher demographic, where, next to established teachers with their families and local hires, there has been added a newer ‘typical person profile’. It is that of an Anglo-Saxon who is initially prepared to accommodate some failure and discomfort in order to gain experience: see the world and most of all, work towards paying off debts (267–268). Rey et al.’s findings support the view that the institutionalisation of teachers in precarious circumstances are at odds with the implementation of a world leading pedagogy. Teachers feeling unsafe are likely to be motivated extrinsically, and systems will revert to increased hierarchy and transaction (Gardner-McTaggart, 2022). This typically results in a work environment characterised by contrived collegiality (Hargreaves 1991) where relational culture and social practice (Gardner-McTaggart, 2022) are very hard to achieve. Implications for any form of communicative rationality (Habermas 1981) and co-construction of consensus are likely to be challenging under such circumstances and further weaken the IB’s legitimacy as an organisation bent on ‘making the world a better place’. Aside from the precarious nature of this teacher demographic in international schools, it is important to understand more about how teachers identify with the IB in general as outlined below.

Bunnell, Fertig, and James (2020) explored institutionalising effects on IB teachers’ identity though focus groups. They found that the IB institutionalising process is powerful and even coercive and teachers often find themselves as willing participants in this process which may be a by-product of establishing institutional legitimacy (241). They argue that institutionalisation is important as part of legitimisation. The authors draw upon the work of Scott (2014) and consider institutionalisation through the notion of three pillars: the regulative, the normative and the cultural-cognitive (244). Parsons (1960) is also deployed to understand how organisations as sub-systems of wider social system gain legitimacy by conforming to norms, values and technical traditions institutionalised in wider society. In Parsons’s view, organisations construct their processes and structures to emphasise compliance with societal institutions in the organisation’s environment and in ways that promote legitimacy as opposed to efficiency (Bunnell, Fertig, and James 2020, 242). Features the authors identify in the IB-sphere include: common shared language, resources and artefacts, being part of a small network globally, a common shared philosophy and beliefs, a common overarching identity, personal investment, common regulations and standards, pressure to act like an IB educator to the extent that,

‘The compulsory attendance at IB workshops felt like a rite of passage into the group for some respondents. Joining this all-embracing body clearly impacted on the teachers’ identity, as, in a sense, they became ‘something different’, as opposed to simply learning new capabilities. The institutionalisation processes appeared to have the implicit purpose of ensuring that the legitimacy of the school as a provider on the IB curriculum was secure’ (254)

Bunnell, Fertig, and James (2020) clarify how institutionalization and to some extent legitimisation are perceived and experienced by agents within the IB system as a coercive transformational process which is well documented in education in transformational leadership (Allix 2000; Gronn 1996; Gunter 2016) as but one example of a colonisation of the educational lifeworld by corporate and business practices (Habermas 1981; Gunter 2016).

The coercion is not confined to the economic (albeit dependent on the remunerative), it infiltrates the social and cultural (Bourdieu 1984) of the teacher, it is transformative, it is absolute. Rey, Bolay, and Gez (2020) help understand why this is so, and present the instrumental challenges and consumerist desires in agents brought about by the social restructuring of the Neo-Liberal project. They sketch what amounts to the Dionysian (Nietzsche 2012) appeal humans experience by portraying an emotionally charged, ambiguous (and glamourous) lifestyle (Edgar 2006), as is common in expat teacher social media and reporting.

These concluding studies indicate the allure of the IB; the dreams (Tarc 2009) it projects and the aesthetic it deploys. As with any utopia, these are flashes of a better life; they are what drives the ideological (Habermas 1981). Far from acting with communicative rationality, aware and responsive to its own mission and the voices of its constituents, the IB-Sphere emerges in analysis as a system dominant⁵ culture where ‘ … complex strands of visions, longings and aspirations, as ordinary people are seen to use cultural resource to cope with and make sense of their lives, (rather than merely accept an imposed vision from the ruling class)’ (Edgar 2006, 68). It is a process that leads naturally to ideology critique and an attempt to levy the social philosophy of Jürgen Habermas onto the aesthetics and legitimacy of the IB.

The IB, legitimation and communicative rationality

Understanding the power of the IB and relating this to its legitimation begins with articulating the difference between ‘Power’ and ‘Authority’ (Weber 1968 [1921]). Exercising power alone through martial means, force, or coercion is one thing, yet achieving authority is another. Authority may also include the means of brutal force but will involve the consent of those being coerced if it is to be legitimate. This concept underpins the organisation of democratic society. For example, a citizen may be fined for not adhering to the rules on small gatherings in COVID lockdown, and despite the fact they may feel this is unfair, will generally accept the fine because it is legitimate. Legitimacy is therefore part of Authority. Where some might see the challenge to legitimacy coming from those who disagree with it, Habermas contends that authority can only ‘ … be genuinely legitimate if it can be backed by rational justification’ and his conception of legitimation builds towards and is linked in the concept of communicative reason (Ewert 1991, 86).

Communicative reason and communicative action make sense of system and lifeworld. Lifeworld is a term used to describe the individual their language communication, attributes and their interface to the world. Habermas develops this phenomenological term as follows: ‘The cultural reproduction of the lifeworld ensures that newly arising situations are connected up with existing conditions in the world in the semantic dimension: it secures a continuity of tradition and coherence of knowledge sufficient for daily practice’ (Habermas 1991, 123).

Bunnell, Fertig, and James’s (2020) exploration of teacher identity demonstrates how the IB-Sphere manifests at system level to create and recreate culture. The ‘rite of passage’ teachers report in workshops establishes a continuity of tradition and the ‘learning something different’ provides an ethos specific coherence of knowledge. Despite this continuity, these educators report ‘becoming something different’ (254). It is clear that in order to fulfil the daily practice requirements of being IB, teachers lifeworld’s undergo externally dictated change. In other words, they experience a colonisation of lifeworld, ‘The process by which individual freedom is undermined in more complex societies … restricting the action of those who are subject to them’ (Ewert 1991, 17).

Bunnell et al. note that these IB practices had the purpose of ensuring legitimacy. However, the activities reported on show a power that is in no small degree forced, and so legitimacy should not be assumed. The reader may be forgiven for questioning why teachers may engage wholesale in practices that appear onerous, coercive, and invalid: they have not elected the IB as their governing authority, why should put up with it, why don’t they speak out? Habermas finds that when the generation of culture goes wrong: ‘This can be seen in disturbances of cultural reproduction that get manifested in a loss of meaning and lead to corresponding legitimation and orientation crises’ (Habermas 1991, 254). Nitta (2019) shows how this happens at policy level, Fitzgerald (2022) demonstrates this loss in the community/intersubjective and Bunnell, Fertig, and James (2020) convey this from the perspective of the teacher. This last as a sense of a loss of meaning, a cynicism towards the ‘transformational’ teleology of the event and provide clear evidence of disruption of communicative reason, in other words, ‘ … free and open discussion by all relevant persons with a final decision being dependent on the strength of the better argument and never upon any form of coercion’ (Ewert 1991, 23).

As presented clearly in the Bunnell et al.’s data, participants faced with problematic interactions shift to ‘discourse’ (Habermas 1991); they ponder its reasonableness, reflect upon their goals, and the most effective means of achieving them (Ewert 1991, 27). This shift is clearly confirmed in Fitzgerald (2022). Equally, students who are reported to be disengaged from emancipatory thought and action (Bailey and Cooker 2018; Doherty 2009; Kidson, Odhiambo, and Wilson 2019; Nitta 2019; Resnik 2019; Resnik 2020; Wright and Lee 2019) experience IB culture more or less as teachers do (Bunnell, Fertig, and James 2016); a shared language, shared artefacts, shared identity, being part of a network. Should the system of IB be found to be at odds with itself, then, according to Habermas (1991), the inevitability of communicative rationality will elude the system. Instead, the communicative process resides with the agent(s), in student/teacher discourse and personal thought. It follows that such IB disconnects are either challenged, or accepted, yet predominantly internalised.

Authority requires consent (Habermas 1991). Rey, Bolay, and Gez (2020), report that many teachers (internationally) are prepared to take risks, endure early fails, and toe the line, as the purpose of being there is to earn money/pay off debt, and take part in the aesthetic of a glamourous lifestyle. Bunnell, Fertig, and James’s (2016) data highlights a situation where communicative action is unrequited as knowledge and culture are imposed by the system; teachers go along to get along. The authority of the IB system rationalises and justifies itself through coercion. Rather than a communicative to and fro between actor and system, teachers report only a ‘to’, and naturally the ‘fro’ is internalised in discourse. Interestingly, this begins to manifest as a general system affecting even customers (Fitzgerald 2022). Whether in policy, the culture of teaching and learning, or in examination process; this analysis reveals that the IB is not communicatively rationalised and of questionable legitimacy.

TINA (There is no alternative)

The success of the IB means it could now be argued to have a monopoly in the international market in secondary and University Entrance. While IGCSE’s, A levels, Advanced Placement, (French) Baccalaureate may offer options for international schools, none of those mentioned are international in origin and focus, nor are they as delineated as the IB with its mission, learner profile, values, and culture. State schools are faced with an even narrower pathway and one that increasingly leads to the IB (Resnik 2020). In the middle part of the twenty-first Century, the IB begins to manifest as a closed elite circuit of rationality. It is one where the system drives the demands and needs of the constituents in powerful cultural acts (Habermas 1991), replicated and repeated all over the world from alternate truth (Nitta 2019), to documentation and behavioural training (Bunnell, Donnelly, and Lauder 2021) to customer interface (Fitzgerald 2022). The IB has become the corporate expert in the exploitation of educational values and perceived rigour in an increasingly uncertain (Yemini 2021) globalising world. This has led to a focus on markets that are comfortable or cash-ready and preferably both.

Manufacturing legitimacy

The International Baccalaureate (IB), like any system, should be in a position to make itself rationally accountable to its people; to the public sphere (Habermas 1989). Similarly, it is concerning that any school seeking a non-national curriculum (the source and objective of which is international), has few alternatives (Doherty 2009; Resnik 2020); the IB stands alone. Additionally, the system markets an altruistic imaginary to customers but presents a hardnosed corporate face to schools. This critical review has shown that the IB offers its continuums, but manages the discourse and sets the culture with (predictable) failures in times of acute crisis (Fitzgerald 2022). With little evidence for legitimacy present from this analysis, the existing rules of capitalism provide the main rationality of legitimacy for the IB, in other words market legitimacy, rather than rational legitimacy.

This legitimacy of the IB organisation and its claims are likely to emerge as paradoxical to a functionalist viewpoint and flawed to an emancipatory one. This is because the appeal of ‘helping’ as captured in the IB mission statement and values, does not appear to have articulated aspiration and hope in the world. As evidence shows, it also enunciates class divisions and exacerbates injustices (Bailey and Cooker 2018; Nitta 2019; Resnik 2009; Resnik 2020; Wright and Lee 2019). It does so with little or no transferral of the values (Hayden et al. 2020) used in its marketing. Public sector education (the unlikely hero of the hour?) has responded quicker, better, and with more communicative rationality in crisis than the IB as a free market entity (Fitzgerald 2022), confirming Habermas on the significant system weaknesses of strategic rationality (Habermas 1981) in education (Ewert 1991). This paper concludes that such a disconnect is likely due to a corporatized operation of a pedagogical imperative with a functionalist (Resnik 2009) philosophical underpinning. One articulated through the strategic action of IB operations (Ewert 1991; Habermas 1991).

Recommendations

Put plainly, the IB does not ‘put its money where its mouth is’. Despite even the corporate caché in charity, it does not subsidise deserving schools or training for teachers form unrepresented demographics or even invest in schools in challenging contexts. The strategic rationality (Habermas 1991) in the organisation accommodates no economic diversity as less well-endowed schools must sacrifice valuable educational resources to compete (Resnik 2020), or go down. The poorer school is excluded from the IB sphere. Although the ‘old conservative’ (Habermas 1991) tradition of private schooling has centuries of differentiation to widen participation though scholarships and bursaries, the IB is not (old) conservative, it is Neo Liberal and makes no such concessions. The IB remains couched in its business plan, promising (and dictating) distinction for the Global Middle Class (Wright and Lee 2019) without listening to them (Fitzgerald 2022).

Legitimacy, power and aesthetics

The IB plays its silent part in subverting valid knowledge generation where belief is privileged over knowledge (Nitta 2019); silent, because this strategy increases market share. The IB has become a robust business organisation, and one that has identified a target market which would provide fulfilment for its selected customers. It does this by appealing to an altruistic imaginary ironically at odds with its technicist operation; its strategic focus renders the transformational aspects of its pedagogy ineffective (Hayden et al. 2020; Wright and Lee 2019) and (predictably for strategic action) increasingly sets itself against its customers (Fitzgerald 2022): because its strategic focus stifles communicative rationality (Habermas 1981). The differentiating aesthetic supports an elitist (Bailey and Cooker 2018; Kidson, Odhiambo, and Wilson 2019; Nitta 2019; Resnik 2019; Resnik 2020) system-drive to acculturate; to create and maintain the cultural platform for effective product delivery. As a result, the legitimacy of the IB rests in its networked power and market dominance only in so far as ‘Making the world a better place’ has come to mean focussing on those already in a better place; and effectively avoiding the rest.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

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