ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the effects on teachers’ work of new forms of regulation, as examples of ideas and political technologies that travel globally and touch down in ways that seek to steer specific national and sub-national forms of teacher professionalism. We explore the macro-processes of policy steering – paying particular attention to the role of the OECD – and responses to those steering processes in terms of their possible effects on professional identities and practices in Finland and England. Our main concern is to highlight the ways in which the OECD’s knowledge-based regulation tools (KBRTs) attempt to promote orthodox professional practice and increased standardisation of professional formation and development. It is important to stress that the strength and power of a KBRT lies in its apparently objective nature, in the attractiveness of the space of negotiation and debate that it creates, where experts, policy makers and other knowledge brokers meet and position themselves, and in its capacity to define the terms of that engagement. According to Pons and Van Zanten (2007) there are three main elements of KBRTs: (1) they reflect particular ‘world visions’ that represent the agenda-setting capacities of particular interests; (2) they represent a particular and politically oriented set of beliefs concerning legitimate policy in a given domain; and (3) they represent a wide and growing network of actors who are constantly drawn into the process of intelligence gathering, audit and meditative policy making (Jacobsson, 2006).
