ABSTRACT
In this chapter I explore the positioning of the school principals within regimes of school-based management. I demonstrate how each of the school principals is differently inserted in discourses of school management. Within these regimes, it is the government of individualisation as the actual figure of power (Masschelein, 2004) that it is important to acknowledge for its normalising and disciplining capacities. While elements of this power also consist of totalising practices, there does exist the productive side of power that can operate through critique, reflection and resistance. Therefore, this chapter reflects these power regimes. This chapter is structured into four main sections. In the first section, I return to the portraits of the schools using observation notes as illustrative examples of the work practices of each principal in their respective selfmanaging schools. Second, I examine how each principal is placed within disciplinary regimes that use them as both objects and instruments of the exercising of disciplinary power, using Foucault’s notions of docile bodies and panopticism, as well as use of space, time and architecture. In the third section, I use the constant writing and managing of submissions and grants as an example of a disciplinary technique that functions within regimes of governmentality. In the final section, I analyse how the principal is constituted by particular accountabilities and relationships by their respective communities, staff and controlling bodies. I use Rose’s (1999) notion of community as a new power game operating in a field of ethico-politics that is implemented as a part of governmentality through school-based management. Within this section I also examine issues of race, and the principals’ ‘whiteness’ operating as a disciplinary regime within their respective communities that creates new and different subjectivities for each principal. This is not to say that this is the only way of approaching this complex issue, but one of a number of approaches that could be taken. The approach I have
chosen, however, I feel is more sympathetic to the work of Foucault. In so doing, I recontextualise the work of these two school principals that can be often overlooked and ignored by much of the literature promoting leadership models, such as transformational leadership, for school principals that I raised in the previous chapter. It is through this analysis that it becomes possible to see how each of the school principals is differently inserted within discourses of self-management, as well as illustrating the creation of multiple subjectivities through disciplinary processes existing in forms of governmentality.
