ABSTRACT
Globalization has provided the justification for the restructuring of the workplace, and of educational work more specifically, in most Western liberal capitalist nation states in the past decade. The general logic of most theories of globalization is that globalization is a threat to national and cultural identity due the totalising impact of information technologies and global markets and the demands of more culturally diverse and shifting populations (Waters 1995; Green 1996). Paradoxically, the typical policy ‘response’ in most Western liberal nation states to globalization is that of localization (Lawton 1992). The global pattern in educational restructuring has been marked by a shift to self management to produce greater flexibility at the level of the local in order to be ‘responsive’ to global markets (Taylor et al. 1997). More optimistic post-Fordist readings of the labour market and work organization see this as producing flatter, more democratic, organizations in which responsibility is devolved to individuals, thus enabling them to work collaboratively, productively, reflexively and creatively in teams. Such readings are seductive to feminists who have communitarian proclivities. More pessimistic neo-Fordist readings of post-modernist theory confirm feminist materialist accounts of workplace reform. They focus upon the apparent re-assertion of executive prerogative arising from the strong centralizing mechanisms of accountability back to the centre so typical of devolved systems of management, and upon the arising anomie and individualizing nature of life in self managing institutions informed by the principles of market liberalism (Harvey 1989; Hargreaves 1994; Brown and Lauder 1996; Blackmore and Sachs 1997). ‘To describe these changes as “cultural” is not just rhetoric; the aim is to produce new cultural values and workers who are “enterprising” or self motivating, or, as Rose has put it, “self steering” ’ (Fairclough 1992: 7).
