ABSTRACT
As we saw in Chapters 1 and 2, discursive influences within the social and educational terrain impacted in different ways on the general debate about the role of education in society during the 1960s and 1970s. Continuing that discussion, we explore one of the main arguments of the book, namely, that educational policy and research cannot be decontextualized from society, politics and culture. We argue that the ascendancy of school effectiveness in national educational policy reflects ongoing management concerns within the state. Drawing on French regulation theory (Aglietta, 1979; Lipietz, 1979, De Vroey, 1984), the chapter seeks to highlight the relationship between concerns about accountability, effectiveness, efficiency and economy in the educational system and:
the ongoing restructuring of the capital accumulation process (i.e. the systematized means by which capital profits are generated);
the transition from an industrial-based economy to the multifaceted technologically-driven capital accumulation process; and
the emergence of a new capitalist mode of regulation.
Within the analytic framework of regulation theory, the mode of regulation refers to:the ensemblement of the institutional forms, networks and explicit or implicit norms which assure compatibility of market behaviour within a regime of accumulation, in keeping with the actual pattern of social relations, and beyond (or even through) the contradictory, conflictual nature of relations among economic agents and social groups. (Bonefeld, 1987:99–100)
Discursively constructed, and organic in the way in which it operates, the mode of regulation serves to secure hegemonic, structural and system support for the overall capital accumulation process. Hegemony refers to the rationalization of:relations of domination and subordination, in their forms as practical consciousness, as in effect a saturation of the whole process of living—to such a depth that the pressures and limits of what can ultimately be seen as a specific economic, political and cultural system seem to most of us the pressures and limits of simple experience and common sense. (Williams, 1989:57)
We argue that school effectiveness represents a potent political and rhetorical device through which education can be incorporated into the overall restructuring of economic and societal relations during a period of sustained economic crisis and social change. We focus, in particular, on the emergence of new organizational forms as an integral part of the structural and systemic changes that have evolved in the UK economy during the 1980s. Organizational forms describe the strategic ways in which social, economic and political institutions, processes and practices have been reconstituted as part of the process of national and global economic crisis management. Structural changes refer to the evolution of new forms of production, the re-organization of work practices, of labour and labour relations, and the restructuring of the capital accumulation process. Together these support the development of a new mode of regulation. Systemic change refers to the transition from one socio-cultural, technological, political and economic milieu to another, and overall transformations within the global cultural economy.