Restructuring discourse, space and reregulation in New Zealand : the case of the Education Review Office

Abstract

In the last fifteen years, New Zealand society has experienced a period of rapid and profound change. The reform of the state has been a central element in this experience. A new state, erected under the auspices of neo-liberalism, has displaced the principles, institutions, and technologies of control of the welfare state. The changes have imposed a new dominant spatial metaphor on the relations between the state and socio-economy (the ‘level playing field’) and a central spatial logic on the organisation of the state (the centralisation of control and devolution of responsibility). This thesis aims to contribute to our understanding of the process of change and the new regulatory arrangements. The emergent state has applied new technologies to the enduring problems of state government. This has significant implications for the form and potential stability of a ‘neo-liberal’ social settlement. It also has significant implications for the political geography of New Zealand. The thesis examines the new geographies of the state and the new spatial technology of control. It proposes that the state was reformed by a political project, which was in turn informed by, and articulated within, a set of discourses of restructuring. The ‘reforms’ represent the working out of this project. The thesis portrays the discourses of restructuring as a dominant ‘govemmentality’, which has erected a dominant ‘representation of space’, and argues that they have established a definably less stable regulatory order. It argues that the new order rests on foundations of the ‘responsibilisation of the self, but that it is far from an ideologically pure neo-liberalism. The ‘neo-liberal’ state can be better understood as a strategic accommodation of ideology to resistance from prior institutions, spatial forms, political forces, material conditions, and inherent nature of the activities in which the state engages. In this account, neo-liberalism is a govemmentality - a technology of control centred on market and self regulation, but complemented by a programme of targeted intervention. Social settlement in these terms means something very different to consensus and compromise. State schooling and the activities of the Education Review Office are used to explore five themes - the process of reform, the nature of the new technology of control, the translation of reform into real places, geographies of the state, and the emergent regulatory order. Schooling is a pivotal social institution. The ‘neo-liberal’ state remains intimately involved in its provision and regulation, but deploys new models of control - contract, market, and community responsibilisation. The external review of schools remains a key feature of the new regulatory framework. The Education Review Office (ERO) was created as part of the reform process to perform this function. It presents an illustrative example of the process of reform It has reinterpreted the review function in terms of neo-liberal govemmentality. As with other elements of the reforms to schooling, this re-interpretation has been heavily contested. In the years since 1992, ‘the reforms’ have been consolidated and ERO has defined its function more precisely in terms of the new models of control. Its reinterpretation has taken two forms - a reduction of review towards audit in schools (centred on a standardised, low-trust, aspatial review model) and an amplification of school review towards guardianship in public and policy arenas. Taken together, these forms of work illustrate the nature of and potential for neo-liberal social order. As auditor, the Office represents the minimal state presence necessary to confirm the articulation of self to state interest in schools. As guardian, it occupies a section of the planning gap created by the ‘hollowing out’ of the state. Together, audit and guardianship allow ERO to articulate the calculations and management of risk that might secure a neo-liberal social settlement. In each of its forms of work, ERO has a significant impact on the production of school space. In regulatory space it works to secure the neo-liberal interpretation of ‘today’s schools’ and a successful articulation of the models of control, and to promote a programme of further reform. In real school spaces it enforces the formal regulations of ‘today’s schools’, mobilises the quasi-market, and activates a range of creative effects centred on the reconstruction of the participants in school spaces as neo-liberal subjects. These impacts are mediated by the extent of resistance it encounters, particularly from the material spatial relations of schooling. The Office forces schools into patterns of self-regulation, and marks out fields of systematic resistance to ‘today’s schools’. It has become instrumental in patterns of government through ‘calculations of risk’ and the development of programmes of targeted intervention. ERO represents a key technology of the flexible neo-liberal state in education.