ABSTRACT
Picking up themes introduced in Chapters 1 and 2, in this chapter I look more closely at the work of the education businesses as part of governance or what is sometimes confusingly called ‘new governance’ (Rhodes 1995) and more broadly trace the participation of business and the ‘new philanthropists’ in new forms of governance through partnerships and social networks and identify some ‘policy communities’ which are evident within and around current education policies. I use the idea of networks here in a descriptive and analytic way, rather than in any normative sense, to refer to a form of governance that inter-weaves and inter-relates markets and hierarchies – a kind of messy hinterland which supplements and sometimes subverts these other forms. ‘Governance’ is one of those fashionable terms which by virtue of loose and promiscuous use is in danger of being rendered meaningless but it is also productively malleable. Here I use or try it out for size rather than debate this and related concepts (see Newman 2001 and Clarke 2004 for debate). I deploy the term in a fairly simple and straightforward way to mean the use of ‘socio-political interactions, to encourage many and varied arrangements for coping with problems and to distribute services among several actors’ (Rhodes 1995: 5), that is a ‘catalyzing [of] all sectors – public, private and voluntary – into action to solve their community’s problems’ (Osborne and Gaebler 1992: 20). In general terms this is the move towards a ‘polycentric state’ or ‘new localism’ and ‘a shift in the centre of gravity around which policy cycles move’ (Jessop 1998b: 32).
