ABSTRACT
Recent educational reforms in England have emphasised school-to-school relationships as the cornerstone of school improvement initiatives in a radically devolved system of schooling (Department for Education, 2010; Hargreaves, 2010). These shifts reflect an emphasis in new public management more broadly on organisational autonomy within overarching frameworks of ‘light touch’ institutional regulation by the state (Mulgan, 2009). Such devolution highlights linkages among organisations as a means of systemic improvement in lieu of centralised initiatives (e.g., King, 2010; OECD, 2003; Rashman, Withers, and Hartley, 2009). Critical perspectives have pointed to the ways in which organisational autonomy has structural features that maintain dominating discourses, particularly in terms of the distribution of power and the ways in which ‘professional’ is defined. According to these critiques, beneath the velvet glove of ‘light touch’ lies not the fist of the state, but the ever more elusive networks of control of advanced capitalism (Apple, 2009; Ball, 2007; Bourdieu, 1998). A fulcrum of both sides of this debate concerns modalities of authority in public-sector institutions, and a frequent contrast is the distinction between hierarchical authority characteristic of bureaucracies and the professional authority of those at work within.
