Summary
Contents
Subject index
This book explores the limits to rational management. The authors develop the idea of organizational irony as a central concept for analyzing and explaining management activity in a managerialist environment. Drawing on international research as well as their own extensive experience in educational organizations, the authors show that effectiveness is not necessarily the result of over-rationalistic approaches to educational management. Focusing on school leadership and management, authors Eric Hoyle and Mike Wallace suggest that major reforms have had limited success because the changes introduced have diverted school staff from their core task of promoting student learning. The result is dissatisfaction, frustration, and stress. The authors use the ironic perspective to show how practitioners respond by mediating the reforms.
Patterns of Ironic Response
Patterns of Ironic Response
Part Four takes our argument forward to its conclusion. So far we have employed the ironic perspective to show how the excesses of managerialism have exacerbated the ambiguities and consequent ironies which are endemic in the educational enterprise. The potential for excess has been illustrated in central government policies for the reform of schooling through the conduit of leadership and management, and in practices influenced by current leadership and management theory pursuing the knowledge-for-action and instrumentalist intellectual projects. The present chapter draws upon a number of professional workplace studies suggesting that most headteachers and teachers, in their responses to managerialism, are to varying degrees deviating from the stated intent of policy-makers and holding to their professional beliefs and values. ...
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