Economic crisis, technology and the management of education

Abstract

The 2008 crash has been likened to that of 1929. Does it have consequences for the management of education, and in particular for distributed leadership? Informed by evolutionary economics, it is argued that 2008 marked the end of the installation period of a major technological innovation, namely ICT. In the aftermath of the crash, a period of wider deployment of digital technologies now beckons. It will require a new institutional infrastructure, of which education is a part and which is compatible with the technology which had been installed since the 1980s. Informed by the history of management theory, it is also noted that towards the end of an economic upswing (as after 2000), the ‘rational’ control managerial rhetorics which had driven the upswing since the late 1970s began to lose their legitimation and effectiveness. After 2000, a softer ‘normative’ rhetoric supplemented and complemented the prevailing rational rhetorics, and this persists in the guise of, for example, distributed leadership and emotional management. In particular, distributed leadership resonates discursively with the deployment of distributed, open, smart software. It is part of a new structural isomorphism in the management of consent in educational organisations as they enter the post-crisis phase of the current economic cycle when digital technologies will undergo wider deployment.

Leadership of international schools and the International Baccalaureate learner profile

“…While this appears to display cognitive dissonance, it also supports the idea of an ‘alienation from self’ (Marx, 2009), where the market place can do nothing but commodify things (Bourdieu, 2003), including the professional practice of a highly-educated educationalist. This could be referred to as a ‘colonisation of practice’ (Gunter, 2013), where business practices colonise the educational sector: the rigid agenda is cloaked by the normative discourse (Hartley, 2016). This also appears to confirm the concern in educational leadership circles over a rejection of intellectualism in the school context (Gunter, 2001).…”

Estrategias para la Transformación Digital de un Centro Educativo: una revisión sistemática

“…Un aspecto relevante es el que propone Hartley (2016), basado en los distintos ciclos económicos. Plantea el uso de la TD como una simbiosis con el liderazgo distribuido.…”

Birds of a Feather: Senior International Baccalaureate International Schools Leadership in Service

“…Cambridge and Thompson (2004), and Caffyn (2010), appear to add to the limited critical engagement in this research field. These dualities appear as tensions between normative and rigid agendas in this globalised school sector (Cambridge, 2003; Sylvester, 2005; Bates, 2011; Fail, 2011; Wylie, 2011; Gardner-McTaggart, 2016; 2018) which may be expressed in leadership as a veneer of distributed discourse cloaking a rigid agenda (Hartley, 2016). Gardner-McTaggart (2018) finds that the school directors’ foregrounding of societal values over the IBLP places them as catalysts for the change culture so widely reported in international schools.…”