Managerial Rhetoric, Accountability, and School Leadership in Contemporary Australia

Abstract

On an international scale, public administration is undergoing considerable restructuring as principles of private enterprise are becoming the orthodoxy. At the same time, economic instability (or crisis) is gripping both national and global financial markets, suggesting a flaw in the system or even that capitalism has reached it limits. Crises in capitalism are frequently met with shifts in the rhetoric of management. In this article we mobilize an emerging research program (Relational Administration) to argue that contemporary discourses of school leadership in Australia have a hybrid—part normative part rational—management rhetoric as a result of the unique economic conditions compared with many developed nations. With particular attention to the role of accountability in constituting and sustaining this hybrid rhetoric, we craft an argument for greater attention to sociogeographic location and temporality when thinking of, with, and through leadership.

Notes

1. 1. We refer here to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s (1911) classic The Principles of Scientific Management, which itself was a precursor to Fordist labor structures.

2. 2. In a similar argument almost ten years earlier, but using the lexicon of the time, Martin Thrupp and Robert Willmott (2003) argued that “management” was constructed as the solution for the time.

3. 3. This is an economy based on giving in the context of a relationship rather than making an immediate transaction. In the case of education, the potential reciprocation of the gift (knowledge, skills, and values) is in becoming a productive citizen. This return on investment is not immediate (as in market exchanges) and there is no guarantee.

4. 4. Hartley use the label “neoliberalism,” but we feel this is too broad a brushstroke, both for our purpose and that of our critics. Therefore we mobilize “managerialism,” which takes much of its constitution from the work of Taylor (1911). Neo-Taylorism was a possibility, but this has been used by Gronn (1982) in a methodological sense—different to our purpose—and is far less used than managerialism in the discourses of educational leadership, management, and administration.

5. 5. AITSL is the national body tasked with the development of professional standards for teachers and principals (see Dinham et al., 2013), offering professional learning opportunities and acting as a centralized hub for the education profession. See http://www.aitsl.edu.au

6. 6. Retrieved from http://www.alp.org.au/agenda/school-reform/

7. 7. Retrieved from http://www.alp.org.au/education

8. 8. Elsewhere, Scott Eacott (2013) has argued that ”leadership” as a concept is brought into being as a result of this normative perspective and its empirical validation in performance data.

9. 9. While this term has a degree of popularity, it is reminiscent of Taylor’s (1911) “one best method.”

10. 10. http://deewr.gov.au/questions-reward-school-improvement-initiative