11 - Assembling New Public Management: actors, networks and projects

Summary

Introduction

A key focus of this chapter is the different kinds of joining up work that make possible the assembling and recontextualization of New Public Management (NPM) within different national and subnational policy spaces. This means documenting how NPM takes hold, endures or becomes disrupted within different national policy spaces as a result of intersecting forces and interests, “including the alignment of divergent political motivations, the translation of different ideas, and the invention of new concepts and programmes” (Prince, 2010, p 169). To make sense of these issues empirically, we trace multiple iterations of NPM within five countries: Argentina, Australia, England, Italy and Spain. We focus our attention on the intermediating actors, networks and projects that have crystallized to produce different possibilities for the emergence of NPM in these countries and reflect on their comparable yet uneven development as dynamic expressions of governance assemblages. By making explicit the active processes through which NPM is made and contested within obscurely national and subnational policy spaces, we draw attention to the fragility and multiplicity of NPM as situated expressions of contingent ideas, relationships and practices.

In the field of global education policy, multilateral, transnational, nongovernmental organizations such as the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD) have been vital to the spread and maintenance of NPM. Elevated by these global organizations to something akin to metapolicy, NPM has been used to remodel (and discipline) schools and school systems around the world according to a narrow set of economic and business objectives focused on “quality improvement” (World Bank, 2012, p viii) and “effectiveness of management control systems” (World Bank, 2013, p xiv). This includes producing schools and school systems that are comparable and commensurate with each other through their shared use of performance indicators and output measurements to calculate teaching quality, school management, inputs and infrastructure, and learner preparation. The result is schools and school systems that are vulnerable to capture from standardized testing regimes and global measures of “good governance” (Sellar and Lingard, 2013). Yet, empirical studies point to the uneven development of NPM across the globe as the co- function or coarticulation of pre- existing laws, networks and institutional logics (Gunter et al, 2016; Wilkins et al, 2019).