The Gendered Realities of Managerialism in Education

Abstract

Over the years that I have been writing the Reviewing Policy section of this journal, I have paid particular attention to critical conceptual and empirical work that either overtly supports or directly challenges the taken-for-granted assumptions that tend to guide dominant policies in education. These policies may deal with larger issues involving the relations among education, politics, and the economy or those surrounding the more “on the ground” realities of curricula, teaching, and evaluation. One of my key concerns has been the complex ways in which differential power works on and through education. In examining these issues, I have at times turned to books that, while they are not based on material from the United States, still have important things to say to researchers in the United States. The book I shall discuss in this essay provides another example of why this is important. It is written from an Irish context. But it raises more general and quite substantive questions about the ways in which neoliberalism and its accompanying assemblage of mechanisms of audit culture actually work and how the ways they work privilege particular groups. Gender is the primary focus of New Managerialism in Education; but though in itself that is of crucial importance internationally, the implications are also wider than that.