The conceptual framework

The following illustrates how the conceptual tools will be explicitly used in the analysis and interpretation of the data presented in Chapter 6.

(i) Disciplinary technologies

Foucault explored the disciplinary technologies that are most relevant to education and leadership in Discipline and Punish (1991a). The "specific technology of power" (Foucault, 1991a, p.194) that Foucault calls 'discipline', outlines the ways that "individuals and populations are managed and controlled, and surveillance is the term for all the means by which they are monitored, assessed, judged" (Gillies, 2013, p. 14). Foucault identifies the individual as "the fictitious atom of an 'ideological' representation of society" and as "a reality fabricated" by it (Foucault, 1991a, p.194). While discourse plays a role in the fabricated realities that contribute to the 'subjectivation' of the individual, surveillance has an explicit significance within the context of the school inspection regime.

Choosing a narrative based initially on actions to control the plague at the end of the seventeenth century - where "Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere” (Ibid. p195) - Foucault uses Bentham's prison design, the panopticon, as a metaphor for societal surveillance and discipline. In providing backlight shone onto the subject, here "a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy" (ibid. p. 200), Foucault suggests the inmate, or subject, is induced into "a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power" (ibid.) regardless of whether being watched by

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the 'supervisor' or not. The parallel here between schools and the school inspection regime has been well documented by Perryman (e.g. 2006, 2009) and is detailed in Chapter 2. Perryman (2006) identified the threat of the 'supervisor' figure as aligning with the omnipresence felt from the school inspection regime. Currently the concept of surveillance, while being experienced by all schools, due to both short notice inspection and widespread data reporting, is more likely to be intensely felt by the schools that have not yet reached the 'good' or better judgment. This would include the recent experiences at the case study schools. In the research site, there is one school that has experienced the disciplinary technologies forcefully and explicitly but is now 'rewarded' by a 'lighter touch', and a second school that is more similar to that observed by Perryman. Schools currently have further surveillance through the form of an increased data monitoring of schools, teachers and pupils through a “results driven approach’ (Perryman et al, 2011) and “high stakes testing” (Roberts-Holmes, 2015). The impact of the disciplinary tool of surveillance through the inspection regime is considered specifically in relation to the types of policy response, or enactment it produces, and the impact of this on social inequality within a coastal area of deprivation. Foucault concluded Discipline and Punish by suggesting that what presides over punitive mechanisms is “the necessity of combat and the rules of strategy…that permit the fabrication of the disciplinary individual” (1991a, p.308). This informs the discussions on fabrication in relation to the school inspection regime – a punitive mechanism. It is in this respect that there becomes a shift in being disciplined by a disciplinary mechanism such as the school inspection regime, and self-discipline. Perryman et al (2017a) suggest that while teachers may not now fear the “autocratic head” or the “tendrils of performativity that

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terrorise their soul (Ball (2003)”, they may undertake the disciplining themselves, “by becoming a truly reflective practitioner under the subtle persuasion of governmentality, dominated yet free” (p.755). The second Foucauldian concept used in the research therefore, is the technologies of the self, that was of increased concerned in Foucault's later writing.

(ii)Technologies of the self

While the concept of domination remained a central preoccupation for Foucault and remains influential in this research, he became increasingly interested in the ways in which we as subjects continue to be worked on through the techniques of self-government he termed, technologies of the self. Foucault describes the process of transforming ourselves "in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality" (Foucault, 1988, p18) as 'the care of the self' (Martin, 1988). This is not a departure from previous ideas, and indeed it returns to the concept of self first explored in the first volume of The History of Sexuality written in 1976 (Martin, 1988), but here the focus is away from sex, and instead concerned with "a certain number of operations on their (the individuals) own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being" (Foucault, 1988, p19). The technologies of the self include any particular shaping of self in response to discourse (Gillies, 2013, p15). In my experience, this might include for school leaders: internally and externally rationalising difficult decisions for staffing or pupils; developing a more competitive edge to demonstrate commitment to the direction the school is taking; simply ensuring that performance management targets are met at the next review point regardless of how meaningful they might appear. These examples demonstrate the potential

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areas of tension for school leaders that relate back to conflict of purpose, and the space within compliance and resistance (see Chapter 1 and Chapter 4). Ball states, "The neo-liberal subject is malleable rather than committed, flexible rather than principled" (2013b, p.139). Neoliberalism demands that we are agile, competitive, fit etc. to adjust and respond to the changing demands that neoliberal governance demands. Olssen and Peters usefully illustrate the features of neoliberal demands in their ‘Ideal-type model of internal governance of universities (2005, p.329). The neoliberal (or private) attributes for work relations, for example, are “Competitive; hierarchical; workload indexed to market; corporate loyalty; no adverse criticism of university” (Olssen cited in Kolsaker, 2008, p.514). This is compared to “Trust; virtue ethics; professional norms; freedom of expression and criticism; role of public intellectual” (ibid.) for the Liberal or public sphere. For Foucault then, this demonstrates "the techniques, the practices, which give a concrete form to this new political rationality" (1981, p153). Foucault questions these types of technology that have "been put to work and used and developed in the general framework of the reason of state in order to make of the individual a significant element for the state" (Foucault, 1981, p153). Technologies of the self is concomitant with domination and Foucault reflects in his later writing, "Perhaps I've insisted too much on the technology of domination and power' (ibid, p19). School leaders and teachers have been required to ‘work’ on themselves through being “truly reflective practitioners” (Perryman et al, 2017a), concerned with continuous improvement.

The research I am presenting here considers how leaders enact policy to produce reality through disciplinary power (Foucault, 1991a, p194) and self-regulation or

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self-discipline. Gillies (2013) reminds us that the acts of compliance or of resistance are formed in relation to discourse (ibid. p.15). Indeed, Foucault spent much of his writing on the genealogy of discourse. Ball and Olmedo (2013) however, apply "the terrain of struggle, the terrain of resistance" (ibid. p.85) drawing on technologies of the self and ask whether this makes social reality "not as inevitable as it may seem" (ibid). The authors conclude that the "spaces of doubt" (ibid. p.93) opened up by the teachers they studied may be "ways of exploring the possibilities and impossibilities of transgression" (ibid. p.94). This has been significant for the research, as it enables school leaders, policy enactment and context to be examined in relation to similar notions of compliance and resistance. This is the care of the self and when asked whether the care of the self could become an "exercise of power on others" (Foucault, 1984, p.8), Foucault replied that "a tyrannical power only comes from the fact that one did not care for one's self and that one has become a slave to his desires" (ibid.). This suggests that the micropolitics of resistance that might be seen in policy enactment, for example, has some scope for providing a 'space of doubt', refusal or point of transgression (e.g. Ball, 2016).

The final concept which has been used in addition to the two main Foucauldian concepts is from Benjamin. This subsidiary theoretical concept is applied here to offer further insight into the decontextualised nature of reproducing the ‘good’ school.

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(iii) The fading of aura

Benjamin makes a distinction between two poles: cultic value and display value (2008, p.12). Cultic value is described by Benjamin as the moment of artistic production whereby “their presence is more important than the fact that they are seen” (ibid.). This typically means that the work of art remains in the location (or context) for which it was designed, for example, an altarpiece or an oratorio in the cathedral, a symphony in the concert hall etc. In art that is reproduced through technology, that which is the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction Benjamin refers to in his essay title, displayability, or display value, becomes the main purpose. This renders therefore, that “the artistic function, stands out as one that may subsequently be deemed incidental” (ibid. p.13). The capacity to display displaces then, a sense of context. When this occurs, its genuineness “starts to wobble” (ibid. p.7). Reproduction “substitutes for its unique incidence a multiplicity of incidences” (ibid.) resulting in “a fading of aura” (ibid. p.9). Benjamin continues by stating “The uniqueness of the work of art is identical with its embeddedness in the context of tradition” (ibid. p.10).

While reading about the conceptual tools used in the existing educational literature on fabricated and other performative responses to the school inspection regime, and connecting these terms with what I had experienced in my earlier previous professional setting under the school inspection regime, it was an earlier reading of Benjamin’s essay that aligned with that experience. Under the disciplinary gaze of the school inspection regime, my own professional experience at the ‘failing’ institution led to policy enactment that seemed to me somewhat lacking in genuineness – inauthentic. The contextualised narratives of

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the educational setting were disregarded by the school inspection regime – displayability was more important than moral purpose, or ‘artistic function’ to align with Benjamin. There is also an explicit connection here with ‘normalisation’ (Foucault, Butler, Ball, Perryman etc. as a process of neoliberal governance by which we become easier to govern. I have therefore used the term ‘fading of aura’ from Benjamin, as a further conceptual tool to examine the fieldwork in this research.

3.3. Relationship between key questions for my research arising from the review