ABSTRACT
This chapter explores whether FE professionals share a set of values, or faith. It considers how ethicality features as people move through their post compulsory career.
Lumby and English (2010) highlight the metaphorical significance of faith and leadership: commonplace professional and organisational terms such as vocation, mission and vision can ritualise practices such as strategic planning, rendering them impervious to challenge or change. Boocock (2015) similarly explores metaphors reminiscent of Chaucer's pilgrims in his account of lecturer and manager motivation in FE; considering them as self-interested knaves and altruistic knights. Returning to metaphors of faith, in his study of FE Page (2011) develops a typology of first tier managers: fundamentalists, priests, converts and martyrs; and suggests future categories such as evangelist, prophet or atheist could be added.
The chapter seeks to consider how FE’s current alienating methods of local production, and enveloping techniques of national political domination, might render FE professionals as unwilling and apostates in their own places of work.
