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The Rise of the Global Education Industry: A Discursive Account

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The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Leadership and Management Discourse

Abstract

This paper aims to describe and explain the unprecedented levels and global reach of private interests in school education. Using Foucault’s theoretical work on power/knowledge, a discursive account unfolds from the neoliberal logics of governance, human capital, and the enterprise form. Each of these logics is shown to orient power relations towards certain truths about the private provision of educational services, thus bringing a type of discursive patterning to the relations of free enterprise and schools. Foucault’s notion of the apparatus (dispositif) is subsequently used in analysis of more tangible relations and affects. The apparatuses of marketization, economization, and commercialization are identified and explicated, with Deleuze’s (What is a dispositif? In Michel Foucault: Philosopher, pp. 159–168, 1992) “map” of Foucault’s apparatus used to orient conceptual possibilities towards a method of analysis. The chapter concludes with a discussion of whether the apparatus as a tool of analysis includes disruptive possibilities that oppose, ignore, or look away from the aggregations and uniformities of current arrangements.

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Authors and Affiliations

  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. Department of Educational Leadership, Ball State University, Muncie, IN, USA

    Fenwick English

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Dolan, C. (2021). The Rise of the Global Education Industry: A Discursive Account. In: English, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Leadership and Management Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39666-4_2-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39666-4_2-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-39666-4

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