The practice of scalecraft: Scale, policy and the politics of the market in England’s academy schools

Abstract

This paper builds on geographical understandings of scalar practices and illustrates how they can enrich studies of policymaking, in particular for the area of education policy. It achieves this by integrating a focus on ‘scalecraft’ with an approach to ‘policy as practice’ featuring in critical policy studies. The paper draws on one of the few empirical studies of England’s academy schools policy and analyses the work of actors tasked with implementing the policy in two local authority case studies. Analysis presents a new critical perspective on the academies policy by revealing how policy actors’ work is underpinned by scalecraft practices. The analysis also reveals how scalecraft intersects with marketisation politics to create scalar tensions which profoundly shape the work of policy actors. The paper uses its analytical findings to conceptually develop the relationship between scalar practices and the politics of the market, and to propose new conceptual dimensions for understanding the practice of scalecraft.

Place-based governance and leadership in decentralised school systems: evidence from England

“…Where the LA's influence appears particularly critical is in sustaining collective commitment to a shared local identity and set of rules, for example agreeing and policing a set of protocols on pupil exclusions. This suggests that in addition to boundary spanning skills, LA leaders must also use 'scale-craft' skills (Papanastasiou 2017). In this sense, 'system' leaders must be able to shape a shared and meaningful conception of why and how a particular notion of 'place' matters, even while also working across multiple, alternative scale-based realities, because by doing so they can bind diverse stakeholders together to work towards realising this place-based vision.…”

“…This definition allows for an analysis of both formally constituted, hierarchical bodies, such as LAs, and also less formal networks, providers and partnerships. It also allows for scale and place to be interpreted at different levels and in different ways, although the focus here is largely on LA areas (Papanastasiou 2017). Following Streeck and Thelen (2005), the 'middle tier' is thus conceived as an institutional regime, which establishes legitimate mutually related rights and responsibilities for actors (primarily schools) and so organises behaviour into predictable and reliable patterns.…”

Practices of scalecraft and the reassembling of political boundaries: the contested nature of national schooling reform in the Australian federation

“…In this article, we seek to deepen our understanding of the dynamics of Australia's national policy assemblage in schooling by bringing into the analytical frame a set of literature that has sought to theorize processes of "scalecraft" (Fraser 2010;Papanastasiou 2017). Specifically, we explore how the concepts of assemblage and scalecraft might work together to provide a useful framework for understanding the new forms of boundary imagining, crossing and blurring that we argue are central to the formation of national schooling reform in the Australian federation.…”

Global–local imbrications in education policy: Methodological reflections on researching the sociology of Teach for Bangladesh

“…Such nascent spatial and cultural forms of power supplement and compete with older residual ones, all affected by the dominant forces of neoliberal globalization (Williams, 2005). Our spatialities approach to policy influence embraces the residual as well as the powerfully nascent roles of agency (Appadurai, 1996), structure (Peck and Theodore, 2015) and scale (Papanastasiou, 2017). For one thing, the context of these transformations is characterized by complex dynamics of flows, fields, scales, spaces and relationships, which can be understood as spatialities or spatializations.…”