Abdication of the education state?

This chapter examines the connections between two phenomena in education related to each other: new governance and new mechanisms of social exclusion and inclusion. Here, new governance means managerialist tendencies in education policy, which have been conceptualized in social theory as ‘governance without government’, ‘governance at a distance’ and ‘a new way of making education policies from behind’ (see, for example, Dale, 1999; Lindblad & Popkewitz, 1999, 2000; Rose, 1999). New mechanisms of social inclusion/exclusion refer to practices of introducing market mechanisms into the field of public education (see, for example, Guthrie, 1997; Popkewitz et al., 1999; Taylor et al., 1997).