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Paradoxes of Neoliberal Policy

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Paradox and the School Leader

Part of the book series: Educational Leadership Theory ((ELT))

Abstract

The paradoxes of neoliberal policy draw heavily from discourse analysis undertaken in Chap. 4, where the origins and developmental arc of several of the paradoxes which follow were foreshadowed. These paradoxes use my ethnographic data to discern the presence of struggle in the interactions between principals and the policy expectations bestowed centrally. In continuing to examine the power relations that mark and shape these interactions, the paradoxes are also concerned with the power/knowledge exertions of policy, including the neoliberal conceptions of the principal leadership that they advance, the will to truth they prompt in principal subjects and the governmental power they generate from their ‘expert-technical’ understanding of the domain to be governed (Hunter, 1994, p. 148). The paradoxes seek to interrupt the reification of these forces into singular and productive entities by exposing more fragile and contingent qualities and by revealing the simultaneous and interdependent existence of valid oppositions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Foucault generally refers to ‘technologies’ and ‘techniques’ of the self interchangeably. The distinction suggested here, which is one that is sometimes also evident in Foucault’s work, is to use ‘techniques’ to refer to more specific and localised practices (see O’Farrell, 2007).

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  1. University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

    Chris Dolan

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Dolan, C. (2020). Paradoxes of Neoliberal Policy. In: Paradox and the School Leader. Educational Leadership Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3086-9_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3086-9_7

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