Chair: Cathryn Magno, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Local Chair: Nikolaos Papadakis, University of Crete, Greece
Governing education organizations occurs within institutional frameworks that are shaped by political interests and mediated by social, cultural and economic forces. Such frameworks, often perceived as stable and impermeable, are nevertheless dynamic. Questions related to who governs education, how and to what end(s) have been treated in the literature in relatively hierarchical terms, giving priority to governmental, intergovernmental and even international nongovernmental organizations, not least in the educational development ‘industry’, against more vulnerable local or individual efforts to lead education processes.
We wish to highlight these power dynamics along with understandings of governance (as well as governmentality, in Foucault’s terms) that acknowledge heterogeneous assemblages, interest politics, networks and influences, cross traditional boundaries, and interrupt both rationalist and incrementalist theories of policymaking and organizational change. We suggest that governing frameworks are not necessarily top-down and static; rather, they are constructed, facilitated and interpreted by various sets of human and non-human actors within mutable contextual environments. They require manoevering and negotiation within and among regulatory spheres and spaces of contested control. Newer approaches such as sustainable leadership are grounded in reflexivity, participation and ethics and require social innovation with the goal of enhancing the capacity of people to lead lives they value while sustaining responsible organizations and the planet.
This Working Group will consider all aspects of governing education, from the challenges built into the daily management of schools to visions for an imagined future of leadership outside of current notions and constraints, while it will also emphasize the process of policymaking in education (including issues such as implementation gaps that affect its governance), at the international, national and regional level. Papers may address the following questions but are not limited to them:
- To what extent are instruments of management, oversight and assessment, including those for the collection and analysis of data, relevant in 2023?
- How can we learn from local, national or international negotiation and power in policymaking, administration and research?
- How can we utilize or push forward theories of governance and leadership, from distributed cognition to spatial thinking to ecofeminist leadership?
- How are increasing regulatory and accountability mechanisms in education systems manifested and/or resisted?
- How do the rising culture of managerialism and the market-driven approaches affect policymaking, governance and administration of education?
- How do governing actors and institutions deal with shifting demographics and diverse community and corporate interests in education?
- What does the multi-level governance paradigm actually mean for governing education?