New Managerialism in Education

This book, now in paperback, examines the impact of neo-liberal discourses and practices on the traditional caring and development ethos of public services such as education. Drawing on intensive case studies of the appointment process and the experiences of newly appointed senior managers in the education sector in Ireland, the book explores the gendered nature of neo-liberal reform from the perspectives of both men and women in each of the main education sectors. Using feminist and egalitarian theory, it highlights the structural and cultural impediments which undermine attempts to break through the glass ceiling of senior management appointments. It explores how organizational cultures combine with 'local logics' in the appointment process of senior managers, as well as universal trends in what 'counts' as effective managerial practice.The book also highlights the stresses, strains and identity conflicts among newly appointed senior managers as they seek to marry broader vision for education in an increasingly competitive and performance driven environment and evaluates the implications of such practice for the wider educational culture and its capacity to combine care and family with the demands of the leadership role.

Kathleen Lynch is Professor of Equality Studies at the School of Social Justice, University College Dublin, Ireland. She has published many books and papers on education and is the co-author of Equality: From Theory to Action and Affective Equality: Love, Care and Injustice. She is an Advanced Research Scholar of the Irish Research Council. Bernie Grummell is a Lecturer with the Departments of Education and Adult and Community Education in the National University of Ireland Maynooth. Dympna Devine is a Professor in the School of Education, University College Dublin, Ireland. She is Deputy Director of the UCD Childhood and Human Development Research Centre. She was a Fulbright Scholar in 2013-14 at CUNY where she undertook transnational research on migrant children.

"The enormous value of the book is that it brings together and demonstrates the close and complex relationships between neoliberalism, managerialism, gender, carelessness and inequity. It is a salutary, sad and stirring read." - Stephen Ball, Critical Social Policy "New Managerialism in Education demonstrates that the process of commodifying education through neoliberal policy initiatives in Ireland is neither uncontested nor complete. The power of this study is in its presentation of rich qualitative data, which demonstrates the uneven integration of neoliberal reforms within the Irish education sector. In this way, this research provides important contributions to a growing body of research that evaluates specific neoliberal projects, with a focus on gender. This work is exactly the kind of research that governance scholars Wendy Larner and Pat O'Malley, have argued is needed to enrich the areas of governmentality studies, political economy approaches, and sociological work on neoliberalism. This book will also be of benefit to scholars who study comparative education, educational leadership, and gender." - Alison Fisher, Canadian Journal of Sociology "This research provides a very insightful critique of the development of the current political principles that inform and shape the focus of current educational direction." - The Leader "This marketisation of education is an Anglo-American import, a key element of the disastrous neoliberal policies that have brought the world's economy to its knees and deepened already shameful patterns of inequality. The shorthand for this revolution is 'managerialism', and New Managerialism in Education: Commercialization, Carelessness and Gender is to be welcomed as the first research-based attempt to analyse some key aspects of how it has operated at all levels of education in Ireland. The research seems exemplary, its approach based, appropriately, on qualitative criteria rather than on the narrow reductionist quantitative indicators on which virtually all educational policy