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When democratic education goes to market

Jo Frankham a
a
University of Manchester, UK

Online Publication Date: 01 July 2006

To cite this Article: Frankham, Jo (2006) 'When democratic education goes to
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Pedagogy, Culture & Society

Vol. 14, No. 2, July 2006, pp. 241247

REVIEW ESSAY

When democratic education goes to

market
Jo Frankham*
University of Manchester, UK
Pedagogy,
10.1080/14681360600738376
RPCS_A_173800.sgm
1468-1366
Review
Taylor
202006
14
jo.frankham@man.ac.uk
JoFrankham
00000July
and
&
Essay
Francis
Culture
(print)/1747-5104
Francis
2006 &
LtdSociety (online)

Democratic education: ethnographic challenges

Dennis Beach, Tuula Gordon and Elina Lahelma (Eds), 2003
London, Tufnell Press
12.85, 159 pp.
ISBN 1-872-76742-7
This book, although largely drawn from studies in Nordic countries, will be of much
wider interest. It interrogates the effects of neo-liberal reforms in education across a
number of sites and fields and takes issue with marketisation of education through
an examination of the impact of changes that have been imposed on education (p. 1).
It is particularly concerned with the impact of marketisation on schools with a
commitment to comprehensive education and democracy; the authors consider
what happens when democratic education goes to market (p. 1). The authors use
the term restructuring (drawing on Castells, 1996) and Lindblad and Popkewitz (in
Chapter One) summarise. This is:
inspired by economic changes in order to deal with the inflexibility of institutions and to
improve their efficiency (Papagiannis et al., 1992). This restructuring is based on decentralisation and deregulation combined with new ways of managing autonomous schools.
The transition from governing by rules and directives to governing by goals and results is
vital in this process (Lindblad et al., 2002). (p. 10)

The text is also important inasmuch as it considers restructuring as a global and

local phenomenon and considers the limits and methods of ethnography in such a
context. Appadurais (1996) work also addresses the global in the local. As he
describes, we need to find new ways to think about these relations which avoid the
dualistic metaphors of push/pull or centre/periphery models. There are now fundamental disjunctures between economy, culture and politics that we have only begun
to theorise (Appadurai, 1996, p. 33). The authors also want to challenge New Right
*School of Education, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Email:
jo.frankham@man.ac.uk
ISSN 1468-1366 (print)/ISSN 1747-5104 (online)/06/02024107
2006 Pedagogy, Culture & Society
DOI: 10.1080/14681360600738376

Downloaded By: [Universidad de Oviedo] At: 17:16 4 July 2008

242 J. Frankham
politics and policies (my emphasis) and speak to an audience who do not need to be
taken through all the ways in which the market is having detrimental effects on
education. Nevertheless, many of the chapters do contain brief sections on these
effects.
This is also an important text in its focus on ethnography. In the United Kingdom
(UK), it is now unusual to read of ethnographic studies in education. This method of
investigation and analysis is resource-intensive, of course, and its outcomes cannot be
predicted in advance. These factors make ethnographic research anomalous in a
context dominated by the audit culture (Power, 1994). Audit is an element of the
restructuring processes described in this book, where educational practices are
increasingly judged in terms of outcomes and accountability measures dominate
practice. In such a context, as Strathern (2002) describes, research according to the
norms of audit means bypassing making judgements according to what you find:
The form in which the outcome is to be described is known in advance. The investigation
the research if you willis in that sense retrospective; that is it works backwards from the
bottom line up, from the categories by which accountability (say) can be ascertained to the
evidence for it.

In parallel with so much of what is reported here, such research produces its
own effects in so far as the report on outcome/output takes a form it itself creates
(Strathern, 2002, pp. 306307). In many chapters we see the consequences of
accountability pressures on knowledge production, practices and relationships as the
ends increasingly influence the means of education.
Hargreaves (1996) description of the requirements of educational research in such
a context was part of a wider critique which saw the rise of the evidence-based movement in education in the UK. Researchers were exhorted to focus on measurable
achievements and provide conclusive demonstrations of what works in classrooms.
Systematic reviews, such as those initiated by the Evidence for Policy and Practice
Information and Co-ordinating (EPPI) Centre at the University of London, are
another manifestation of this trend. MacLure (2005) describes how:
Exasperated by the inability of educational research to deliver the kind of seemingly hard
evidence offered by health and medicine, systematic review favours quantitative methods
and embodies a scarcely concealed positivism that places qualitative research far down the
credibility hierarchy. (p. 394)

In such a context, reiterating the value of ethnography is itself a political act. It

helps to mark out a field which acknowledges that educational action is:
dependent upon and inseparable from a tacit and emergent culture which is fashioned and
refashioned in the light of the problems that people face in the routine accomplishment of
their day-to-day work. (Heath & Hindmarsh, 2002, p. 99)

In the performative society, as Ball (2003) describes:

Teachers are no longer encouraged to have a rationale for practice, [or give an] account of
themselves in terms of a relationship to the meaningfulness of what they do. Beliefs are no
longer importantit is output that counts. (pp. 222223)

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Review essay 243

Ethnographic work which is constructed from the changing interactions of people,
policy texts and ideas reinstates the notion of education as inevitably about values, as
dynamic and not amenable to improvement via universalised recommendations.
A further contribution of the book lies in the variety and scope of the studies
reported, from the macro to the micro, analyzing student and teacher voices in many
different settings of education, focusing on different subject areas and new forms of
school governance. This is a collection, then, of some importance as a whole as well
as in respect of individual chapters. A particularly strong example relates to the notion
of the self-directed learner and inter-relationships with other elements of teaching and
learning, such as changed student/teacher relationships and the production of knowledge. Individual chapters, however, also make significant contributions.
The first three chapters (Lindblad and Popkewitz, Gordon and Holland, and
Lahelma and Ohrn) are unusual, in ethnographic terms, in relation to the scale of the
studies they report. They are all cross-national and set out to connect educational
policies with classroom practices. Chapters One and Two are the least obviously
ethnographic in form, while Chapter Three does include some transcripts of classroom interactions. As a consequence I did not feel up close, in the usual ethnographic sense, to the research. All three chapters are highly ambitious in what they try
to do and this perhaps also explains my initial disappointment. The chapters are
highly condensed and much of the content takes the form of the authors conclusions,
without much detailed argument or analysis. However, given the scope of the studies
reported on and the connections the authors want to make, it is difficult to see how
this could have been avoided. What we have instead are important contributions to a
debate which challenges New Right policies and politics at the level of policy.
The authors of Chapter One raise an important, little-explored theme in this collection. The authors describe the fatalism with which much restructuring is received.
Their analysis is that many changes appear to be authorless and the product of
anonymous forces of society. Here they employ the concept of topoi, something that
is assumed to be known by everyone but with no points of reference or specificity
other than their mobilising of a seeming consensus about change (p. 20). In Chapter
Two we also have an important, and unusual, worked example of spatial analysis.
Shields (1992) describes why globalisation should direct our attention to such analyses, because space hides consequences from us by exceeding the local and national
scale on which capital has been regulated (p. 43).
Chapter Three underlines the importance of avoiding homogenisation (in terms of
gender, ethnicity or class) in our analyses. All three chapters in this first section
provide important context which is relevant to several other chapters. In addition,
these chapters set up the expectation that they will consider the challenges of the
conduct of ethnography in relation to work of this scale, where local cultures are not
necessarily performed by the situated actors and cultural practices are not only situated in specific observable contexts (p. 11). There are new sets of obligations to the
interpretive qualities of ethnography (p. 11) in this context. Chapter One is unusual
in its (brief) acknowledgement of the ethnographers role in constructing realities.
They ask in what ways, and with what rights does the ethnographer deploy these

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244 J. Frankham
distinctions and categorisations of human kinds? (p. 11). These questions are surely
worthy of a further book.
The tone and approach of all subsequent chapters is quite different. Here we are
presented with ethnographic data in a more obvious sense and the scope of the chapters is much more modest, mostly drawing on case studies. There is a focus on
discourse, attention to the analysis of transcripts and a more familiar approach to
methods: participant observation, conversations in corridors, etc. There is fascinating
ethnographic data here which opens up questions about many different effects of
restructuring. Each chapter makes a unique contribution to the debate, in focusing
on different elements of teaching, learning and schooling. Readers should be aware
that there is little detailed analysis of the connections between restructuring and the
examples the authors describe, however.
Chapter Four (Arnesen) focuses on Helen, a 14-year-old who is isolated and
ostracised at school, and examines the ways teachers and peers construct her as
deviant. Teachers, on the whole, avoid suggesting their practices or school policies
may be part of the problem. Instead it is Helens incapacity to fit in (even with extra
help, etc.) that explains her situation. Chapter Five (Gitz-Johansen) looks at teacher
talk about ethnicity and representations of ethnic minority students. Individual children and their families are constructed as not very resourceful (for example) and
therefore unable to take advantage of the opportunities available to them. Again, the
problems lie in the students backgrounds, not in school practices, and a second
language or culture is rarely constructed as interesting or valuable in the classroom.
As a consequence of the deficit model in operation, compensatory education is seen
as an appropriate response.
Chapter Six (Lappalainen) looks at constructions of nationality in preschool,
through an exploration of how other nations are characterised during International
Week. The author concludes that the children learn most about Finnishness, in fact,
and this is celebrated as the norm. Differences between nationalities are underlined,
and groups of people become conceptualised as a resource for two weeks of the year.
In the final section of the book, Chapter Seven (Sundberg) takes the example of the
decentralisation of timetabling and looks at its effects. There is ambivalence evident
here in teachers practices as they try to maintain control and also let go. This chapter is unusual in its emphasis on changing (as compared to changed) forms of professionalism. Sundberg ends with more questions than answers, about a context in
which much is changing fast. He also sounds a cautious note in relation to simple
readings of policy reforms. Further work is clearly called for on these complex
networks of control patterns (p. 103). He also reaffirms the need for ethnography in
such a context, not least because we need to study these changes over time.
Chapter Eight (Salo) considers how young children become pupils largely through
systems of (explicit and implicit) ordering. These orders are conceived of as functional frames in which different things can become possible and impossible in school
(p. 109). It tells of how school knowledge proves to be stronger, more serious and
more certain than ones own (p. 112) and provides an account of the ending of
childhood.

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Review essay 245

The final two chapters in the book focus in a different and important way on how
restructuring is changing knowledge itself: in Chapter Nine (Beach) in relation to
maths, and in Chapter Ten in relation to teacher education (Kvalbein). Market logic
dominates as teachers become resources relied upon to supply what the student needs
in order to pass exams and, in the process, what is regarded as worthwhile knowledge
is transformed. Thus we see Lyotards (1979) predictions coming true about the
exteriorisation of knowledge:
The old principle that the acquisition of knowledge is indissociable from the training of
minds, or even of individuals, is becoming obsolete and will become ever more so
Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order
to be valorised in a new production: in both cases the goal is exchange. Knowledge ceases
to be an end it itself, it loses its use-value. (pp. 45)

I will end with a couple of hesitations about the book, raised in the spirit of the
ethnographic project outlined by Strathern (2002). I touched earlier on her description of research conducted as a consequence of audit. She goes on to say that loop
is an apposite metaphor for this work, because:
audit cannot afford to tolerate loose ends, unpredictability, or disconnections. It carves
out its own domain of what is going to count as description Itself a system, audit elicits
a view of an institution or organisation as a systemas systemnot as a society. Ethnographic practice, on the other hand, elicits the open-endedness of institutions and organisations as society. What characterises peoples behaviour in society is precisely their
capacity to tolerate loose ends, to deal with unpredictability, and to revel in the disconnections that mean that they live in multiple worlds and traverse different domains. (p. 309,
emphasis added)

It is in respect of living in multiple worlds and traversing different domains that

some chapters disappoint, particularly in a context where the inter-relationships
between the global and the local are acknowledged and where we are promised
ambivalence and ambiguity in the accounts.
The introduction has a brief snipe at postmodernism. Ethnography, it is suggested,
can provide insights into the material matters despised in research that has been
influenced by the most strident postmodern textual turns (p. 4). I would propose an
alternative reading of the concept when theorised in relation to globalisation and
spatiality. As Shields (1992) says:
The notion of postmodernity involves arguing that disparate cultural and economic trends
have unifiying tendencies and are mutually reinforcing. That is, events previously theorised as being in separate conceptual hierarchies or reducible in the last instance to an
economic determinism, are now, it is argued, being co-ordinated in newly spatialised
manners. The focus is therefore more often on contiguity and interdependence than on
causal determination; on local variation as general trends take on contingent manifestations in the context of historically and spatially rooted localities. (p. 41)

As I have suggested, there is ambivalence and uncertainty in this text, but there is
also some overstatement of the effects of restructuring and some associated nihilism. There is acknowledgement of the pressures on teachers as a consequence of
restructuring, but there are also characterisations of teachers who seem changed by

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246 J. Frankham
restructuring to an implausible extent. As I have already suggested, Sundberg
avoids a polarised, deterministic account and emphasises struggle and disparate
meanings and consequences. Sundberg draws on Stronach et al. (2002), who
describe how teachers (and nurses) are located in a complicated nexus between
policy, ideology and practice. Stronach et al. develop an account where identities
are nuanced and unstable. Certainly, teachers are having to re-story themselves in
and against the audit culture, but this not does mean the wholesale departure of
values or previous forms of professionalism associated with autonomy and trust.
Given that teachers are surely a key audience for this text, it would be a shame if
this undermines one of the books intentions: to challenge inequity.
In respect of some of the oppositional thinking (Lyotard, 1979) evident in the
text, I want to return to questions of globalisation. Where does this book perform
globalisation, rather than being seen as outside that discourse? Appadurai
(1996) describes how the image, the imagined, the imaginary direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice
(p. 31). He describes the fantasy imagined in response to the postmodern condition:
rootlessness, alienation and psychological distance between individuals and groups on the
one hand, and fantasies (or nightmares) of electronic propinquity on the other. Here, we
are close to the central problematic of cultural processes in todays world. (p. 29)

This text, in its occasional tendency to draw out doom-laden scenarios of the end of
professionalism, the end of childhood and play, and the end of democracy, echoes
this problematic, as does the title of the book. In suggesting challenges to Democratic
education, it asks us to buy into elements of the Enlightenment world view, which
consists of a chain of ideas, terms and images including freedom, welfare, rights,
sovereignty, representation, and the master term democracy (p. 36). This imagined
world is then used to set up a somewhat polarised argument in relation to Utopian
and/or nostalgic visions of teachers and teaching which (probably) never existed.
British schools, at least, have always been about who should succeed and who, inevitably, must fail.
Certainly this text contains many important continuing challenges to democratic
education, but these surely preceded restructuring (and no doubt have been
changed because of them). In the spirit of ethnography, it is perhaps equally important to reiterate the significance of the discontinuities and unpredictability that are
also evident in changing times. This perspective emphasises the unintended spaces
within which we might continue to work for democracy as reforms are uneasily and
unsteadily mis/applied. Wickman and Ostman (2002) argue that:
new questions and objects of analysis become important for illuminating the process of
how individuals become participants of a new practice and of how discourses change. One
important focus for our analysis is to identify gaps, because gaps are encounters where
prior difference and similarities will not suffice to construe meaning. (p. 606)

Generalised calls for equity, social inclusion, social justice and critical reflection
(p. 126) may be unhelpful in analogous ways to the topoi previously outlined. As

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Review essay 247

many others have remarked, calls for empowerment, emancipation, etc., are inserted
into educational discourse as if they were an educational magic bullet (McLaren &
Giarelli, 1995). Others have described this process as theoretical painting by
numbers (Dale, 1991), where the invocation of the idea seems to preclude the need
for more theoretical work when, in fact, such work is sorely needed. It would also be
unfortunate if explorations of marketisation, which inevitably results in a dehumanising of the production and dissemination of knowledge (Bernstein, 1996), are
complicit in dehumanising the actors involved.
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