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The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Leadership and Management Discourse pp 1–22Cite as

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The Worldwide Specter of Neoliberalism and the “Neoliberalization” of Educational Leaders

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Abstract

The hegemonic tendencies of neoliberalism as a political rationality informs a significant segment of the educational leadership literature. From within this field, this chapter draws mainly from authors who provide critique of the marketization of education and the concomitant narrowing of its purposes. While these writings are susceptible to “bulldozer” portrayals of the inevitability of neoliberalism’s global dominance (Larner, 2003), it is argued that, in its subject forming work, neoliberalism may also be usefully characterized as a “specter” – a haunting and insistent presence that becomes constitutively powerful as it insinuates its way into the thoughts and practices of educational leaders. In a shift from this spectral reading to a more tangible and scrutinizable representation, neoliberalism is conceived as a “political rationality” that intertwines with specific “technologies” and “freedoms” of government to make governing thinkable and practical, while judging the conduct of “economized” subjects (Brown, 2015) as reasonable and knowable according to the truth claims it promulgates. These power/knowledge arrangements are given expression in the idealized form of homo œconomicus before attention shifts from the constitutive triumph of neoliberal subjectivity to the more diverse and localized possibilities held in Foucault’s governmentality and in “neoliberalization” as a subject forming process. A “processual” reading of neoliberalism is taken to highlight its variegated, contingent, and inconsistent qualities and, by extension, illuminating how educational leaders might engage in a struggle to occupy different subject positions and to work at and beyond the limits of the currently dominant discursive order. Various theoretical, rhetorical and practical resources – configured as “struggle tactics” – are described and the risks and possibilities of their individual and collective deployment are evaluated.

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  1. Education, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Chris Dolan

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  1. Chris Dolan
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Correspondence to Chris Dolan .

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  1. Education, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

    Chris Dolan

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Dolan, C. (2021). The Worldwide Specter of Neoliberalism and the “Neoliberalization” of Educational Leaders. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Leadership and Management Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39666-4_3-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39666-4_3-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-39666-4

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