Introduction

Our research explores how educators today are immersed in the marketisation and commodification of education (Hogan & Thompson, 2017; 2020). Within a neoliberal educational policy contextFootnote 1, we are increasingly witness to educational leaders compelled to become strategic operators in order to ensure the success of their schools (Ball, 2011; Wilkins, 2016). With this in mind, we trace the everyday work of one school leader in an Australian school site that was in ‘survival mode’ after experiencing an unprecedented decline in enrolment numbers. In presenting a case study, we unpack some of the ways education policies which encourage marketisation are experienced in the everyday and the various tensions pervading a school in survival mode. Our focus is on capturing some of the key stratagems the leader draws upon to promote the school as a vehicle of educational excellence and quality within a performance-based educational landscape to attract potential clientele.

A prominent theme across critical scholarly work in policy sociology is how neoliberalism contributes to a doxic discourse which ignores significant contextual factors and negates what is achievable in terms of equity. Bourdieu’s (1984, 1988) concept of doxa refers to the unspoken, unquestioned beliefs and values of a society that shape how people perceive the world, while doxic discourse is the dominant discourse that reinforces these beliefs and values, maintaining the status quo by naturalising social and cultural norms. As policies are enacted in relation to not only the multifaceted nature of local school sites, but also the demands of the wider schooling market, we are interested in how layers of global, national and state/territory policies are experienced in the everyday. Ball, Maguire, Braun and Hoskins (2011) remind us ‘policy-making and policy-makers tend to assume the “best possible” environments for implementation’ (p. 595) and our research captures some of the tensions involved in policy enactment. As market pressures remain both influential and consequential, the case study of Paul highlights how school leaders often ‘blur the boundaries of the political, personal and philosophical’ (Riddle & Cleaver, 2017, p. 498) to ameliorate the various tensions they encounter. We adopt the terminology of what has been called neo-performativity highlighting how educators ‘rationalise their position as being underpinned by a socially progressive moral purpose’ (Wilkins et al., 2021, p. 30), a sort of post-performativity (Wilkins, 2011) where they find ways to rationalise their actions within less than desirable circumstances.

We draw on institutional ethnography (IE) as the method of inquiry (Smith, 1987, 1996, 2001, 2003, 2005), an ‘alternative sociology’ (Luken, 2021), to investigate a school that is struggling (Del Col & Stahl, 2023). A key tenant of IE is mapping ‘how things work’ in terms of policy enactment at the local level (see Spina, 2019; Spina & Comber, 2021). In tracing the work of one school leader, we consider the school site as a bounded space subject to competing global and local market forces that are historical, political and economic in nature. We draw on IE to explore how one school leader, Paul, is compelled by market forces to strategize and ensure the survival of his school. Paul sits on the Executive Level at Waterford College and has been involved in education for over 35 years. He has worked at Waterford College for over 20 years where he also attended as a student. We document how Paul’s identity, as an educational leader, is realised in relation to taken-for-granted practices privileging standardisation, accountability and performativity. Using IE, we trace the global–local forces influencing the market and the everyday milieu of Waterford College and call attention to the ways IE allows us to nuance Paul’s agency and constraint as a leader and how his actions are constrained by the tenets of neoliberal educational policy and New Public Management (Lingard, 2010; Ong, 2007).

The paper is structured in five main parts. First, we provide an overview of IE—with a specific focus on the main tenets: standpoint, everyday tensions and the problematic—before addressing how we found it useful. This is followed by a section which documents how global education policy trickles down into the everyday highlighting how normative schooling practices are increasingly influenced by neoliberal policy enactment. Third, we present Paul’s experiences as a leader at Waterford College in ‘survival mode’ where we highlight two key tensions in his strategizing: marketing results and the pressure to perform. The paper concludes with a brief discussion and conclusion.

Institutional ethnography

Feminist sociologist Smith (1987, 1996, 2001, 2003, 2005) developed institutional ethnography (IE) as a method of research to explore the social relations coordinating people’s everyday lives. The starting point of any IE is ‘the actualities of people’s lives’ (Smith, 2003, p. 61) and, as an approach, it foregrounds how people are experts in their own life. According to Smith, IE adopts the term ‘standpoint’ from Harding (1987) and is considered a ‘sociology for people’ (see Luken & Vaughan, 2021). Other aspects include the balance between open-ness and orthodoxy which results in certain conundrums regarding what actually constitutes IE or adopting an IE approach (Luken & Vaughan, 2021).Footnote 2 In Smith’s early work, where she developed and honed IE, we see a careful exploration of how her subjectivities as a university academic and mother were organised, compelled and situated within society (Smith, 2005, p. 12). Therefore, as an approach, for Smith, IE first focuses on capturing participants’ lived realities (Grahame, 1998) where there is no determined aim (Murray, Ablett & Delucchi, 2021). This ontology can often result in criticism of IE for being too descriptive or atheoretical which fails to acknowledge the diversity of IE approaches (Luken & Vaughan, 2021) or how it remains a ‘broad church’ (Murray, Ablett & Delucchi, 2021).

As institutional ethnographers, we are interested with what people are doing and how that doing is shaped by the doings of others. We see IE as immersive, focused on bringing the everyday into sharp relief through foregrounding the problematics embedded in everyday experience in relation to wider global changes. For institutional ethnographers, the term ruling relations is paramount in how institutional ethnographers analyse their practice. For Smith, ruling relations as the ways in which power is exercised and maintained within social institutions where ruling relations are not just about individuals in positions of authority—but instead are embedded in the everyday practices and routines of social institutions. DeVault (2006) reminds us that ruling relations are not just a heuristic device pointing to structure and power, rather it ‘refers to an expansive, historically specific apparatus of management and control that arose with the development of corporate capitalism and supports its operation’ (p. 295).

We find IE to be expansive in broadening our understanding of schooling and the work of the educators today. Contrasting early school ethnographies (Ball, 1981; Hargreaves, 1967; Lacey, 1970; Willis, 1977; Woods, 1979), which adopted a predominantly Marxist approach to explore schools as sites of social reproduction, we draw on IE to think in different ways about schooling connecting it to what is occurring at the national and local levels (Spina, 2019). Our IE is closely aligned with more recent school-based ethnographic work which has investigated the extensive effects of neoliberal policies on education (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000; Thomson, 2002; Valenzuela, 1999; Del Col & Stahl, 2023; Stahl 2017) and how schools are positioned within wider global education policies. We find IE has a certain analytical purchase in enhancing our understanding of how the global policy context influences the actions of educational leaders at the local level.

Smith’s (2005) purpose in developing IE was to ‘discredit sociology’s claim to constitute objective knowledge independent of the sociologist’s situation … The only way of knowing a socially constructed world is knowing it from within’ (p. 28). For IE, deciphering the actions of real people in real places involves embracing the researcher’s subjectivity and mapping this to the happenings outside their immediate local context. Smith (2005) writes:

Exploring the social relations organizing institutions as people participate in them and from their perspectives. People are the expert practitioners of their own lives, and the ethnographer’s work is to learn from them, to assemble what is learned from different perspectives, and to investigate how their activities are coordinated. It aims to go beyond what people know to find out how what they are doing is connected with others’ doings in ways they cannot see. The idea is to map the institutional aspects of the ruling relations so that people can expand their own knowledge of their everyday worlds by being able to see how what they are doing is coordinated with others’ doings elsewhere and else when (p. 225).

Thus, critical to Smith’s approach is that the inquiry of IE begins from an embodied standpoint rather than ‘theory’ (Kearney et al., 2019, p. 19) though this is, of course, not to say Smith’s work lacks theoretical or conceptual density. In other words, where some sociological studies employ theory as a means to explain and understand people or a place in relation to a mapping of power or structural dynamics, IE provides a toolkit to define, map and elucidate the manifestation of power through texts and actions as well as dialectically and relationally. Drawing on Smith, Spina and Comber (2021) emphasise how institutional ethnographers are cautious of the dominance of theory and how it can preclude ‘an understanding of how people’s everyday lives happen’ (p. 239). To delineate some of the parameters of IE, which are relevant to this particular case study, we explore prominent IE themes: standpoint, everyday tensions and the problematic.

Standpoint

Institutional ethnographers ground their work in an understanding that people are ‘active and competent knowers’ of their own lives (Smith, 1987, p. 142) where most IEs explore people’s lives in situational contexts from the standpoint/s of those engaging in work/labour. As an approach, IE foregrounds the concept of ‘embodiment’, which ‘emphasizes people’s knowledge of the world as generated from the experience of their lives’ (Bisaillon, 2012, p. 611). The intent is to capture the embodied experience and to provide an authentic account of people’s everyday realities. As the actualities of lived experience become the lens to explore the socially organised world, Smith’s (1992) ‘notion of standpoint doesn’t privilege the knower [researcher] … It shifts the ground of knowing, the place where inquiry begins’ (p. 90) with the aim of privileging the knowledge of people enmeshed in their social milieu. The aim is that through examining the participants’ standpoint (as well as our own standpoint) we were able to explicate how individual and institutional actions are both related and coordinated by societal forces.

Everyday tensions

Institutional ethnographers begin their point of inquiry by listening and documenting people in their everyday work within institutions. Central to IE’s investigation is locating people’s experiences of tension and contradiction in their daily lives in relation to the institutional values, culture, etc. Rankin and Campbell (2009) refer to this as ‘different ways of knowing’, highlighting the often frequent disjuncture between an individual’s work, knowledges and authoritative institutional knowledge—what is often referred to in IE as continual everyday tension. Therefore, central to our study, is the prerogative of institutional ethnographers to foreground the disjuncture between the institutional idealism and the lived reality of the people working within it (Del Col & Stahl, 2023).

The problematic

Finally, a distinction between IE and other ethnographic approaches is the focus on exploring the problematic. Smith (2005) explains that using a problematic as a starting point requires the researcher to consider how everyday life is ‘orchestrated by a set of social relations and produced from beyond the local’ (p. 103). Essential to the remit of the IE is that the problematic stems from the participants’ experiences of disjuncture (Benjamin & Rankin, 2014) and not from simply from ‘social relations of the ruling apparatus’ (de Montigny, 2014, p. 179). In other words, the problematic is a territory of discovery more than a question that is concluded with an answer (Smith, 1987, 1996, 2001, 2003).

The problematic adopted in this study is the competitive marketised context in which one school and one school leader operates and how declining student enrolments lead to a certain set of circumstances which compel certain actions. We focus on understanding how moments of tension manifest when enacting policy within a climate of heightened performativity. In capturing Paul’s story, and the stratagems he adopts, we see how his work is informed by the tenets of global–local neoliberal educational policy. In focusing on this problematic, our investigation is one of deciphering some of the layered tensions informing how one school leader seeks to salvage his school which is in ‘survival mode’.

Global education policy and the everyday

As institutional ethnographers, how we understand the everyday—and the continual everyday tensions—are informed by how education policies trickle down and inform the lived experiences. Crossley (2000) asserts that educational practices and policies must be understood in reference to powerful global influences (see Fig. 1). In order to better understand the pressures involved with the marketisation of education, and its effects on daily school life, we must consider the ‘neoliberal imaginary’ (Ball, 2012) structuring a wider global market around education (Connell, 2013). Specifically, we recognise extensive research documenting how economic imperatives arising from globalisation have changed the way education and schooling are conceptualised and performed (see Ball, 2012; Lingard, 2009; Maguire, 2002). Such changes have led to a provision of education based on ‘financially-driven, free market ideology, not of a clear conception for improving education’ (Carnoy, 1999, p. 28). Furthermore, as educational research continues to highlight the influence of neoliberalism on contemporary schooling, we see a clear focus on how individuals negotiate the demands of performativity and how this contributes to the construction of their subjectivities (see Wilkins, 2012, 2016; Del Col & Stahl, 2023). While Fig. 1 presents a seamless top-down model, this is clearly not always the case as the agency of individual often leads to various forms of resistance.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Mapping the field

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As we present the experiences of one leader working within a school in ‘survival mode’, we trace neoliberal ideologies and discourses underpinning educational policy. In neoliberal policy contexts, market forces and the pressure for profit structure the expectations placed upon educators and influence the provision of education for students. Most forms of schooling are centred around competition and academic performance, where current market-orientated ways of thinking foster notions of meritocracy, competition and choice (Savage & Gorur, 2013). As public–private partnerships are promoted through educational policy, we are witness to new business models as part of New Public Management (Lingard, 2010; Ong, 2007; Stahl, 2017; 2020). What has now become common in education is common ideas and practices from the business sector (Bottery, 1996; Hood, 1991; Ward, 2011) including the introduction of markets/quasi-markets to create competition, the heavy emphasis on standards and measures of performance, the emphasis on outcomes and data, standardisation, administrative decentralisation and closing of low-performing organisations/schools. With this in mind, Rizvi and Lingard (2010) highlight how:

An analysis of education policies therefore requires not only an examination of their specific content but also an investigation of the context that provides them meaning and legitimacy. Since education policies cannot simply be inferred from a particular value position, policy analysis requires an understanding of how multiple, sometimes competing, values are brought together, organized and configured in a policy statement and are allocated in an authoritative manner. Policy analysis needs to show how some values are glossed over while others are highlighted, re-articulated or sutured together in any given policy context (p. 75).

In other words, the enactment of policy at the local level cannot be examined without considering the macro policy network context in which it is born and, by examining such networks, ‘we are looking at the institutionalization of power relations’ (Marsh & Smith, 2000, p. 6) or, more simply, how people and practices are coordinated by both of global and local discourses. Building on Rizvi and Lingard (2010), Spina (2019) writes ‘policy is much more than what is inscribed in single texts’ emphasising ‘how policy expresses “patterns of decisions” (p. 4) that are part of normative fields of activity’ (p. 355). Institutional ethnographers are interested in how actions are coordinated via texts (Luken & Vaughan, 2021), each with their own ideological code. These texts are central to how we ‘map the institutional aspects of the ruling relations’ as they guide us in understanding how everyday actions of individuals are ‘coordinated with others’ doings elsewhere and else when’ (Smith, 2005, p. 225).

Schooling in a neoliberal performative agenda

As education continues to be influenced by neoliberal prerogatives, we see schools increasingly compelled to reorganise themselves to ‘a new ensemble, based on institutional self-interest, pragmatics and performative worth’ (Ball, 2003, p. 218). The majority of educational policies aim to steer the organisational culture of schools towards various forms of commodification, performativity and economisation emulating private-sector management (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000; Stahl, 2017, 2020). Furthermore, the implementation of educational policy—locally, nationally and internationally—promotes performativity and accountability agendas. Within a performative culture, professional identities are shaped by an agenda of competition and accountability; these, we argue, become valorised as necessary aspects of the school enterprise but not without resistance.

We draw here on Ball’s (2000, 2003) notion of the ‘culture of performativity’, a specific conception of productivity where every person within the school are expected to perform as active and enterprising individuals. We find Ball’s work in this area assists in extending how we understand the everyday tensions (Smith, 2005) and standpoint (Smith, 1987). Ball (2016) uses the term performativity ‘not just to refer to systems of performance management or the deployment of performance indicators but rather to the complex and powerful relationships between such indicators and managements system and teacher’s identity and professionalism’ (p. 1052). According to Ball, the subjectivities of educators working in schools enter in to ‘a particular type of struggle against/with the practices of performativity’ (Ball & Olmedo, 2013, p. 86).

Methodology

While this research is a small case study, it aligns with a wider body of work employing IE to highlight neoliberal trends in education (Spina, 2019). In order to capture a school in crisis, data were gathered through interviews, journal entries, direct observations, photo-elicitation and the collection of texts (for more detail see Del Col & Stahl, 2023). Central in conducting the IE, we also made observations that were purely descriptive and to avoid evaluative comments or thoughts where possible (see Del Col & Stahl, 2023). The observations were of staff meetings led by the leadership team of Waterford College and provided data related to how the participants behaved, engaged and responded within different places and spaces at the research site. These were then analysed in conjunction with the semi-structured interviews which served as a valuable instrument to generate data and foreground the research participants’ standpoint regarding their working lives.

For the purpose of this article, we focus on two one-h interviews conducted with one school leader, Paul, where the interview questions were designed to learn how things ‘typically [are] organised around the idea of work’ (DeVault & McCoy, 2006, p. 25). The interviews were conducted by the first author who had a robust ‘insider’ knowledge of the school site having gone to school there and been employed as both an educator and school leader. The questions were varied and focused on the changing nature of education, his sense of professional responsibility and the skills he used to position the school effectively. Then, the first author worked with the second author who did not know the school as well to devise a set of thematic codes before coding the data in NVivo Program.

The school context and the market

Waterford College, like other fee-paying private urban Catholic schools, is compelled to maintain student enrolments in order to safeguard its future. The school is a single-sex boys school and has slightly fewer than 1000 students from Reception to Year 12 and draws from a range of socio-economic backgrounds and geographical locations. According to the 2018 school board report—which is freely available on the school website—the school represents a Socio-Economic Statue (SES) category of disadvantage index of 102, indicating the College is predominantly working class. The SES is an index of socio-economic disadvantage measured by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and is expressed numerically ranging from 50.72 to 127.27. Schools with lower SES indexing have greater socio-economic disadvantage. The school serves a high proportion of School Card recipients with 154 students eligible in 2019. Fee remissions for financially struggling families exceeded $1.2 million dollars in 2018. Thus, while the school is a fee-paying school—which suggests privilege—students actually come from a diverse range of socio-economic backgrounds. This is not uncommon in Australia.

One of the most pronounced aspects of neoliberal education policy is the facilitation of school choice fostered by the weakening and removal of regulations regarding school enrolment and the correlation between school funding and enrolments (see Rizvi & Lingard, 2010; Ball & Youdell, 2009). Within an Australian context, school choice has resulted in a large portion of students attending a growing private school market. This is different from other Western countries (see Lingard et al., 2013; Lingard et al., 2017; Hogan & Thompson, 2017). In fact, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2018), over 34.3% of Australian school children are educated in non-government schools. More specifically, 19.7% are enrolled in Catholic schools and 14.6% are enrolled in the independent school sector. However, as we will demonstrate, the private Catholic sector has fallen into difficult times. Saltmarsh (2007) claims that ‘many perceive private sector schooling as providing moral, social and academic benefits beyond those available to students in public sector’ (p. 335), thus ‘consumers are seen as entitled to expect something more’ (p. 350).

We recognise non-government schools in Australia, both Catholic and independent, have been engaging in marketing campaigns long before their school numbers were threatened. During the mid- to late 1980s and early 1990s, we were witness to the publication of ‘how to’ texts (Davies & Ellison, 1991; Kotler & Fox, 1985; Stott & Parr, 1991) focused on effective educational marketing and the rise of advertising agencies came to specialise in the area of school promotion (Vining, 1995) and it remains entirely plausible that marketing strategies have now been assimilated into educational practice globally.

At the time of data collection, Waterford College had failed in the last 10 years to reach 100% high school certificate accreditation, meaning a small portion of students did not successfully complete the requirements of senior courses. In most of these cases, students have failed to achieve their high school completion certificate due to not completing tasks and assessment items for Year 12 courses. Within the single-sex schooling market, competitors of Waterford College boast annual 100% high school completion certificates. In an address to staff at the beginning of the year, an executive member of the leadership team stated: ‘It is not unreasonable that parents paying nearly $10,000 can at least expect their son get a certificate. We understand the boys can be stubborn. But we need to be 100%’ (Fieldnotes, January). The statement above was made by leadership to staff at a time when the decline in student enrolment numbers was starting to take effect. Throughout Australia, schools annually boast of their high school certificate accomplishments by means of social media posts and newspaper advertisements. However, during this time, in the context of a competitive school market, Waterford College was underachieving compared to similar and neighbouring schools.

Deciphering tensions in a ‘survival mode’ school

As the role of school leaders has become increasingly managerial in nature, they are responsible for whole-school performance, report to education departments and boards, provide annual reviews and audits, complete grant applications and market school results. As such, school leaders, performing as neoliberal subjects, are ‘accountable, disciplined and perpetually assessable subjects’ (Niesche, 2013, p. 150). In adopting the terminology of neo-performative, Wilkins et al. (2021) highlight how ‘neoliberal reforms have become embedded and performative school system have ‘matured’, recent entrants to the profession—and teachers moving into leadership roles—might more properly be characterised as the neo-performative generation’ (p. 35).

Arguably, school leaders are the policy gatekeepers of a school. They must decide how educational policy is adopted, adapted, ignored or countered in a complex context of ‘situated necessity resulting from the history, location, pupil and parental social mix, staffing, material and economic conditions of the school and community infrastructure’ (Blackmore et al., 2017, p. 108). These responsibilities are tied to a high level of policy accountability. The work of Blackmore (2017) and Keddie (2014) demonstrates how school leadership in Australia and England is accountable to notions of school effectiveness as schools are compelled to restructure towards a self-management schooling model which operates more like a small business within local, national and global education. In the section below we capture some of the continual everyday tensions experienced by one school leader, Paul, as he sought to adopt stratagems to position Waterford College advantageously within the market (e.g. the ruling relations).

Marketing results

As previously alluded to, in Australia, high school completion results are often used as a tool to market the school as a product. As we are witness to the reshaping of school leaders ‘in the neoliberal imagination as a managerial class, exactly parallel to corporate managers in the private sectors’ (Connell, 2013, p. 107), it is the responsibility of the school leader to market effectively. The publicising of Year 12 results by schools in Australia still heavily occupies local papers during December each year. However, unlike My School where entire datasets are clearly relayed, school leaders have some agency—and employ some strategizing—as to what results they choose to advertise or share publicly on school websites, social media platforms and/or newspaper advertisements. This echoes research on school governance where Wilkins (2016) calls attention to how educational leaders navigate neoliberal marketisation which requires ‘expert handling’. As institutional ethnographers, we recognise policy is predominantly manifest in a definitive and material form of texts, meaning words, numbers or images (Smith, 2005; Smith & Turner, 2014). These results, as texts, contain a certain power—an ideological code linked to the ruling relations (e.g. the market)—and they contribute to how actions are coordinated (Luken & Vaughan, 2021).

In considering Doolan and Blackmore’s (2018) assertion that ‘increasingly mediatized policy processes influence practice in schools as education becomes a site of parental anxiety and choice exacerbated by standardised national assessment and ranking of schools in the media’ (p. 818), a school’s capacity to celebrate and contextualise achievement in its own right evinces the neoliberal ideals of accountability and transparency. In other words, what and how a school promotes itself as a vehicle of educational excellence provide insight to the pressures and value systems coursing through it. Or, more specifically, the stratagems further illustrate the highly competitive and marketised nature of the local school market and how many school leaders are compelled to engage. In drawing on IE, and recognising the ruling relations structuring action, our research highlights how Paul performed his daily actions in response to the expectations of the market. Highlighting the expectations around performativity, Paul, quickly pointed out:

[Waterford College] needs to be seen as a school that’s progressive and is challenging students. If it’s not challenging students, students will go elsewhere. We are in a different market now and parents will use virtual classroomsFootnote 3 to have a look and make choices.

Paul speaks of the school’s future adopting a managerial discourse emulating a businessperson who understands that if a product and experience do not resonate with the customer, they ‘will go elsewhere’. Within the context of Waterford College, the neoliberal dogma of ‘market’ and ‘choice’ has become increasingly pertinent considering the decline in school enrolment numbers. During the period of the study, Waterford College intensified its commitment to advertising and promotion in order to bolster its presence within the school market. In capturing how Paul marketed—with the full knowledge that Waterford College had failed in the last 10 years to reach 100% high school certificate accreditation—what he chose to foreground was the school’s ethos, history and ideals (Mills, 2004; Saltmarsh, 2007, 2008).

School achievement data are regularly seen as a significant extension of school marketing strategies and engagement within the competitive school market (Meadmore & Mcwilliam, 2004). As McDonald et al., (2012) argues, research continues to highlight how promoting the high academic achievement of students thereby offers ‘future students positional advantage over their peers’ (p. 5). In our discussions with Paul regarding school results, he further commodified the school as a product competing within a market:

It is a competitive market now so you have to be looking at what are you offering. You can’t just go on tokens these days you know. “Building boys for tomorrow”—what are you building? Parents are quite critical now and want to know exactly what their son is going to get. What’s the value add? And will compare, you know, product 1 with product 2.

According to Paul, the school (as marketed product) enters into a relationship with a parent (the consumers) premised on assurances of educational outcomes and performance come the end of Year 12. At the end of every academic year, Paul is engaged in actively portraying Waterford College as a place whereby academic results are seemingly assured. This annual publicising of school achievement contributes not only to ‘the making of ideology, of knowledge and of culture’ (Smith, 1987, p. 17) but is also integral to how Paul sees his role as a school leader. Rather than his primary focus on ensuring the best for the students and staff in his remit, his time is instead devoted to making sure the media gets the right message regarding the Year 12 results and achievements so Waterford College can position itself advantageously in the competitive market. Here, drawing on IE, we see how the ruling relations control what is possible, structuring the game and how the game is played (DeVault, 2006).

Pressure to perform

The previous section demonstrated the power of the market and how it informed Paul’s actions. However, Paul does not simply accept, implement or regurgitate policy. Instead, our conversation with Paul suggests he is engaged in a struggle ‘against/with the practices of performativity’ (Ball & Olmedo, 2013, p. 86), where his subjectivity is in tension with the ruling relations. This complements research by Blackmore et al. (2017) which examined how school leaders respond to globalisation policy discourse and suggest where they ‘struggle with government policies and guidelines that do not account for the broader social and material disparities that impact on their communities’ (p. 123). For Paul, and Waterford College more broadly, the direction of the school is structured—or coordinated—from the global competition existing beyond the school site (Maguire, 2002). Demonstrating an awareness of these pressures, Paul notes:

Unfortunately, we are dictated to by the universities, influenced by [secondary school qualification board] and other powers… there is a big focus on how do we develop capabilities of our students and the [Catholic Education Office] has provided some big projects next year on this. How do we assess it? How do we know they have developed those capabilities in particular areas? And so with [high school completion certificates] are now looking at that being part of the formalised assessment that occurs. That is a different mindset for us to be thinking about (Paul, Interview).

Paul’s words here (‘we are dictated to’) suggest the school has little agency or choice with regards to the educational direction for the students. His references to ‘assessment’ and measurement allude to a structural chain of institutions, texts and processes that bind the school to both curriculum authorities and universities, the ruling regimes. This structural chain is akin to what Smith and Turner (2014) call institutional circuits, a term that ‘locates sequences of text-coordinated action making people’s actualities representable and hence actionable within the institutional frames that authorise institutional action’ (p. 10). It is important to note that each link of the chain contains a myriad of texts which contribute to how practices are coordinated (Del Col & Stahl, 2023).

Here, it is important to note Paul’s struggle is one of the minimal resistances—rather his words suggest he is redefining how the school needs to operate in relation to what the curriculum authorities and industries demand. Therefore, while agentic, his agency exists within certain constraints limiting what is possible. As Paul explains below, in order to position Waterford college well, he intends to create a new paradigm of work for teachers and students:

I would be setting up professional learning teams…We would be sitting down and saying what are the requirements of our students today in the 21st Century. What skillset do they need to have? What professional standards, say do we need to have for our students? In those professional learning teams, we need to discuss and bring them forward to look at what are the key points of difference and to develop those.

IE aims to keep the institution in view by tracing how its discourses, texts and action create certain conditions and experiences for people (McCoy, 2006). Paul’s experience illustrates how educational leaders of school sites often serve as the drivers and implementers of global–local policy shaping what happens in classrooms. In this case, Paul is considering the direction of the school (which extends from an external source), while devising a possible strategy as to how it will be enacted within the school. Hence, his agency as a leader appears largely bound to discourses and policies beyond his control and, arguably, is moulded by the global forces. One could make the argument that Paul’s 35 years or expertise as an educator (not to mention his time as a student) is devalued as he is compelled to position the school site advantageously in what has become a competitive market.

Bearing in mind his aforementioned comments regarding parents comparing ‘product 1 with product 2’, Paul also adopts a neo-liberalised rhetoric where he references ‘points of difference, “skillset[s]” and “professional standards”’. Through his words, we can trace how ruling relations, as authoritative forms of knowledge, displace individuals’ local knowledge and experiences. In our dialogues, Paul does not speak of the students’ needs; rather, he focuses on the pressures of the market and the imperatives of policy. Therefore, the displacement of local knowledge occurs primarily in two ways. Firstly, when Paul speaks of the pending release of a new curriculum focus, he dismisses his own knowledge and experience within the school community. His words largely suggest that he seemingly accepts the macro-educational landscape as the parameters to which he must work. Secondly, Paul goes on to explain how the lives of teachers and students will be heavily influenced by this potential curriculum change.

I think there has to be consultation with the staff and agreement and consultation to agree what these will be. And then put them in a framework, how are our classes going to operate? So you know, every class at Waterford will have creativity, will have innovation, will have group work…. But there has to be an agreement of what we want to see in the classroom.

We can see how Paul’s language here is peppered with what have become buzz words in educational marketing today (e.g. creativity, innovation, etc.). Furthermore, we are reminded here of Wilkins et al. (2021) arguments concerning the neo-performative where ‘data-heavy benchmarks of “quality” and “effectiveness” have increasingly become normalised, adopting the broader neoliberal conceptualisation of what makes a school successful…’ (p. 35). Paul then explains how such policy implementation would implicate the classroom work of both teachers and students:

If we are going to go and observe classes, teachers need to know what we are observing and we need to say what is the needs of our students today. How do we do that in an effective way rather than they all come in like a spaghetti machine and they all go out. There has to be: What development we are seeing? What measures are we making? How are we seeing this growth? Whatever that happens to be we decide and how do we ensure that students are meeting benchmarks if we are going to set them.

Central to Paul’s understanding of his role as an educational leader, here is the introduction of surveillance and measurement, thus providing insight to how performativity measures are introduced, maintained and negotiated within the school. There is a managerial discourse in Paul’s talk of ‘measures’, ‘growth’ and ‘benchmarks’. And we would argue Paul’s aim to attain data and insight regarding a particular pedagogical investment/strategy, and how it will yield particular results, provides some insight to how educators perform and are validated in relation to the school. But also, importantly, how the school performs and is validated by external forces. As illustrated earlier in Fig. 1, we see Paul’s agency as a leader to be largely constrained by the tenets of neoliberalism. This manifests in how he sees it as a necessity for the school to be seen as innovative and successful—and marketised as such—and the risks involved with the school not ‘seen as a school that’s progressive and is challenging students. If it’s not challenging students, students will go elsewhere’. As Waterford is in survival mode with both declining enrolments and academic performance failing to meet expectations, this situation contributes to Paul seemingly buying in further to the neoliberalising of education seeing it as a solution to what are a complex set of issues.

Discussion

While IE varies substantially between each project and each researcher (Luken & Vaughan, 2021; Murray, Ablett & Delucchi, 2021), at its core, it seeks to explore the interconnected ways in which actors are bound to ruling relations (see DeVault, 2006). We foreground how IE allows ‘for understanding material and social relations of ruling through the actualities of their lives as both a social subject in the research and a conscious and embodied being’ (Russell & Reid, 2019, p. 5). The neoliberal demands of the market structures Paul’s strategic decisions and the direction he sees for pedagogy—and this is all done under the assumptions that these stratagems will be effective. This case study highlights how his work is embedded within a global–local context where Paul’s neo-performative strategic work is a cog in the wider apparatus of educational policy (see Fig. 1). His words suggest he feels that he is doing good work within a specifically volatile climate—or at least performing well at his job. Though, for the most part, his words fall short of ‘a socially progressive moral purpose’ (Wilkins et al., 2021, p. 30), suggesting the power of neoliberal markets to structure subjectivities.

Furthermore, as a case study, we see how the school is governed by New Public Management (NPM) specifically administrative decentralisation and bounded autonomy. Discourses of NPM and neoliberal governance hold significant implications for the conduct of school leadership teams which have trickle down effects on students and teachers (Wilkins et al., 2021). Not only does the neoliberal governance of education ground itself in a deceptively objective and apparently rational approach (e.g. a doxa), but it also provides a convenient language where the solutions Paul considers and invests in are underpinned by accountability and measurement. His words suggest that a hyperfocus on academic achievement is what is required which, we would argue, casts students and their learning as commodities with a certain market exchange value (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000; Stahl, 2017).

In recent research on school leadership in Australia, Doolan and Blackmore (2018) analyse the scrutiny and pressure felt by six principals responding to parental anxiety concerning media coverage of standardised national assessment and rankings of their schools. This research demonstrates that, while principals have some agency in ‘talking back’ with regard to their school’s performance, a policy discourse of failure positions leadership teams as ‘vulnerable’ to ‘reputational and financial damage if their NAPLAN results are poor’ (Doolan & Blackmore, 2018, pp. 217, 218). We argue that Year 12 performance at Waterford College cultivates a similar scrutiny and pressure. With this in mind, and considering Paul’s inclinations and actions, we acknowledge Doolan and Blackmore’s (2018) argument that the subjectivity of school leaders is complex, political and paradoxical, as leaders must balance accountability, performance and reporting requirements against the needs of their communities.

In IE, texts coordinate action and ‘are never looked at in abstraction, devoid of the context in which people use them but once read or used in some way, they and the discourse embedded within them are viewed as being “activated”’ (Kearney, et al., 2019, p. 19). As institutional ethnographers, we are interested in how texts are activated. Paul’s sensitivity to how results are represented in the media (a prime example of an influential text), interpreted by parents, highlights the effects of neoliberal educational policy. Specifically, the impetus to market education to ensure the survival of the school. Therefore, focusing on the experience of one school leader, we see how some of the neoliberal and global discourses coordinate educational policy filter down into schools (see Fig. 1). However, what remains unclear is Paul’s own sense of his positionality and his developing sense of ‘expertise’ in relation to how the market necessitates a certain level of performativity. As a neo-performative educational leader engaged in ‘expert handling’ (Wilkins, 2016), his words highlight his strategic decisions—and we would argue these strategic decisions are largely pre-set given the climate he finds himself in.

Conclusion

Research continues to demonstrate that schools are complex political sites where policy, curriculum orientations and markets are often in tension with what educator’s think is best. We find IE—specifically standpoint and everyday tensions—assisted us in mapping how the global neoliberal performative agenda trickled down in to the everyday working life of one school leader. Additionally, IE allowed us to see the power of texts and how Paul’s actions (and strategizing) are coordinated in relation to these texts. Paul’s everyday work highlights how he does not necessarily disapprove of the power of the market (or what Ball (2003) refers to as the ‘terrors of performativity’) but instead sees it as part of the contemporary normative expectations of his role as an educational leader. This complicates how we understand the ‘struggle against/with the practices of performativity’ (Ball & Olmedo, 2013, p. 86). Our examination of how one leader within one school works within policy is not generalisable, though the finding do echo international educational research how neoliberal policies increase the pressures regarding performativity. IE foregrounds standpoint by recognising that people’s experiences and perspectives are not just subjective, but also shaped by the ways in which institutions are organised and operate as well as the rules and regulations that govern the work. In capturing Paul’s standpoint, we highlight not only the pressures of the market but also how he is deeply enmeshed in a culture of performativity, unable to ‘resist’ it (see also Wilkins et al., 2021). His words suggest the nature of neoliberal educational policy remains a powerful force structuring the subjectivities of those working in education. To conclude, the neoliberal reconfiguration of schools, whether public or private, continues to foreground the production of ‘highly individualized, responsibilized subjects who have become entrepreneurial actors across all dimensions of their lives’ (Brown, 2003, p. 38), which, in turn, holds powerful implications for the subjectivities of educators working in schools.