Servile Power: When Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark

Abstract

This article scrutinizes the political demand for a strengthening of the culture of evaluation in public schools in Denmark. Using a combination of governmentality literature and the concept of paradox provided by systems theory, a number of recent political initiatives to promote evaluation and assessment in Danish primary schools are investigated. This sheds light on how the Danish Ministry of Education has come to recognize that local teacher resistance undermines means of power and has developed new strategies of selfevaluation and self-governance. Drawing on Mitchell Dean's concept of culture governance the article examines how political governing can function as power, not by means of control and regulation, but by affecting the teachers' wills and desires to change the way they think and act in their professional lives. The article suggests that political governing is not only exercised by detailed regulation that disempowers teachers or diminishes their freedom in the classroom but that strategies of self-governing are highly complex and ambiguous in their ways of operating through the cultivation of teachers' identities.

A feel for numbers: affect, data and education policy

“…This literature brings together affect theory and governmentality studies based on the argument that there is 'a blind spot concerning the affective and emotional aspects of ways of governing mentalities' (Juelskjaer, Staunaes, & Ratner, 2013, p. 1134. Pors (2009) and Staunaes (2011) have examined intersections between the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) education policy work and new modes of governmentality in schools that draw heavily on the tropes of positive psychology and operate through the management of intersubjective affective relations to create positive feelings and to engage school staff and students in optimistic projects of selfempowerment and self-improvement. This body of literature not only illustrates how Critical Studies in Education 135 discursive analysis of education policies can yield insights into new technologies of management and government that operate affectively, but also, drawing on Wetherall's (2014) conception of affect as a social practice, demonstrates how this affectivity can be studied empirically in contexts of policy enactment (e.g.…”