ABSTRACT
In the arena of school management various forms of ‘democracy’ currently jostle with ‘scientific’ business management, the ‘new managerialism’. The purposes of both are to bring schools into line; in one case with the wishes of the immediate community, and in the other with the wishes of their more evident and distant political masters. Both schools of thought claim that their underlying raison d’être is the improvement of performance. In this chapter it is suggested that both streams of thought have fundamental weaknesses and are likely to do more harm than good. In neither case is there a great deal of understanding evident of the nature of teachers’ work, or any clearly apparent interest in examining closely schools as institutions to see how they do work, and how they might be encouraged to perform better.
