ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a number of theoretical concepts, explaining how they can provide a framework to help understand how accountability has been allowed to intensify to toxic levels. It discusses performativity, a disciplinary technology that uses judgements and comparisons against what is seen as efficient as a means of control, and leads to cultures where teachers have to demonstrate progress to the detriment of their professional selves. This is linked to disciplinary power, Foucault’s ideas about power-knowledge and the role of discourse and normalisation in making schools arenas of super performativity and hyper accountability. The chapter draws on Foucault’s work to view teachers’ work through the lens of surveillance and governmentality, and through the data it shows how the culture in teaching is dominated by the acceptance of performative discourses and the shift from disciplinary power to governmentality and self-governance. The data from RP1 (the Inspection Project) demonstrate a level of performativity called panoptic which served to get the teachers and their school through inspection. Data from the subsequent projects show teachers both accepting the need to reflect and improve, and expressing frustration at the increasingly performative nature of much of their daily activity.
