Novel forms of research governance and their possible impact on the future of educational research

Abstract

This article sets out to contribute to the current debate on the transformation of educational research with regard to global transitions and challenges. Nation-centred hierarchical organizations in Europe have increasingly failed to address emergent processes. And in contrast novel forms of governance have gained prevalence in controlling uncertainty and contingency in the transforming European Educational Research Space. The paper addresses one particular dimension of current educational research – that of the mechanisms by which transnational research operates within the European Educational Research space. Within this framework special attention is given to the issue of the governance, as a specific process shaping research cultures in the past, present and future, and to the role of European research associations as a system of evolving networks of ‘knowledge spaces’. The article problematizes assumptions about the potential of European research associations to construct vocabularies, perspectives and applications in an attempt to open up dialogues, discipline narrativity and create a new sovereign actor. The paper concludes with proposals for possible future visions based on the outcomes of the analysis of the nature of the current educational research governance.

Introduction

This article develops ideas presented at the EERJ Moot during the 2014 ECER Conference in Porto. In starting to think about the future of educational research it is worth considering what we actually mean by the future in general and educational terms in particular. ‘Education’, as Keri Facer has written, ‘is a site in which visions of the future proliferate’ (Facer, 2011: 1) Education is built on but also perpetually creates images of the future and there are always explicit and implicit alternative views that need to be challenged and managed at the same time (Toffler, 1974; Young, 1998; Lawn, 2009). In this context, the question that needs to be answered is whether the future of educational research, as opposed to education as a social process, is something ‘out there’, an imagined scenario or, as Facer suggests, is a matter of the imagination, of material and political sets of processes already in development in the present. Seen in this light the future of educational research is far from an innocent utopia or a mere projection, instead it is the productive possibility of already existing procedures and processes of research. The aim of this paper is to show some of the future visions of educational research which are embedded in the productive possibility of procedures and processes that already exist. The paper will address one particular dimension of educational research today which shapes the future – that of the mechanisms by which transnational cooperation operates within the European Educational Research Space. Within this framework special attention will be given to the issue of the governance as a specific process shaping research cultures in the past, present and future.

Education as an academic discipline is not a discipline where knowledge is accumulated in a linear fashion based on the consensus of a single dominant research community; rather, it is an open space formed by various factors and contexts (Keiner, 2002). It is this characteristic, its in-betweenness, which gives rise to the richness of educational research. This paper makes a plea to address this richness, this in-between character of educational research and research governance, as a resource for enabling certain novel forms of governance to operate.

What is the nature of governance in terms of educational research?

While policies as governance tools have become somewhat insufficient for managing challenges in educational research in the last ten years, other governance tools have come to the fore (Ball, 2009; Lawn, 2007; Nóvoa, 2013; Pels, 2005). It has become evident that the art of governance is enriched by novel forms as global transitions disturb the perspectives, vocabulary and application of nationally framed policy discourses. Novóa calls the first decade of the 21th century ‘a lost decade in educational policy’ (Novóa, 2013: 110). He refers to the annual report of the European Community which acknowledged officially that the ambitions of the Lisbon Strategy had not been met. Educational and training objectives had been only partly achieved, other than those concerned the ‘benchmarks on increasing the math, science and technology graduates’ (CEC, 2011: 7). Novóa argues that there is a need for greater integration of policies – including educational research policies – and there is a need for new orientations and dynamics in methods of action. Expressing some concerns about the inappropriateness of policies, Novóa underlines the importance of meaning generated around policy texts and evidence based data as compensation for the failure to fulfil policy requirements. Meaning, he speculates, is essential for establishing a viable framework to cover the performance gap, legitimize decisions and even address and overcome certain forms of fragmentation in the field. He shed light on the fact that parallel to the growing non-transparency of the policy-making process, it is becoming more and more a case of ‘governing without policies …governing without governing’ (Novóa, 2013).

Governance turn

There is a large body of literature exploring novel forms of government and portraying mechanisms through which textual and technical information can be converted into powerful knowledge, procedures and priorities (Ball, 2008; Ozga, 2012; Maroy, 2012).The way emerging topologies impose their logic over scattered areas of research and monopolize resources is also manifest in a wide range of the extant literature (Dale and Robertson, 2012; Seddon, 2014). The book edited by Brooks et al. (2012) and the collection of essays edited by Martin Lawn (2013a) illustrate this.

Portraying the current novelties of governance, Stephen Ball (2009) even advocates talking about a ‘governance turn’, indicating changes in the forms and modalities of the state. He reflects on the state as a social phenomenon which is embedded in convolving, conflating, interacting transnational policies and policy discourses. Ball has drawn attention to the fact that ‘policy can no longer be “thought” or “thought about” within the limits of nation states and national boundaries’ (Ball, 2009: 537). With insight he offers a framework for joining the national level to the transnational level through following policy trajectories. This conception of policy does not simply emphasize the inapplicability of the problem-centred, top-down implementation model of policy: it is insightful in terms of understanding the movement from ‘government’ to ‘governance’. It is crucial to recognize that the milestones of the above mentioned ‘governance turn’ are the new ‘forms of government (structures and agencies)’, ‘the nature of the participants in the process of governance’, the prevailing power of discourses and finally the production and governing of ‘new kinds of “willing subjects”’ (Ball, 2009: 537). Consistent with these novel forms of governance, policy acquires different layers of meaning not only in terms of education as a social process or as an area of study but also in the case of educational research governance. This paper, influenced to a certain extent by Ball’s categorization, offers an insight into these aspects of novel forms of governance from two interwoven perspectives: that of the state, which is increasingly forced to re-invent itself in the face of global challenges; and that of the emerging European scientific associations.

Novel forms of research governance and the modern state

One of the conceptual problems currently present in the background in much of the policy research and policy sociology is the transformation of the modern state. Research findings have demonstrated that as the modern state is confronted with the contemporary neo-liberal agenda, the global financial crisis or the challenges of globalization governance gradually detaches from its nationalistic frame. This view focuses attention on the world of transnational policies and policy discourses (Ball, 1993, 2008, 2009; Lange and Alexiadou, 2010; Shapiro, 1992).

In an attempt to reveal the nature of the inefficacy of policies, policy sociologists argue that policy is not a response to existing social conditions but a textual intervention into practice (Beilharz, 1987: 394; Codd, 1988; Murray, 1988; Taylor, 1997). The textual, contextual and discursive character of policy is much debated but there is an overall concern that policy enters rather than changes power relations and constructs circumstances rather than responding to them. In order to understand the changing relationship between structures and agencies in a given policy field, several academics have argued that prevailing policy discourses, through which power is exercised in relation to the production of ‘truth’ and knowledge, must be analyzed cross-sectionally (Bacchi, 2000). The concept of policy discourse is portrayed not only as mental and textual phenomenon but also that which is characterized by material and institutional dimensions. Policy discourse is conceived in a wide range of studies as a shifting frame that identifies distinctions which, in turn, delineate knowledge, articulate structures or positions and accomplish various tasks.

Despite intensive research some aspects of policy discourses have received insufficient attention and remain lacking with regard to underpinning theory. Predominantly it is the question of the production, use and effect of discourses that has been addressed, with far less attention having been given to the contours of a given policy discourse. The contest of discordant, incoherent and contradictory discourses on top of the subjugated ‘remnants’ of previous policy discourses remains systematically lacking theory. This indicates a need for more precise analysis of extra-discursive factors, which directs attention to the spatial, temporal, social and institutional context in which discourse is located.

The concept of ‘discursive location’ or the ‘context of a discourse’ is intended to be far more than a certain scene or target of the governance educational research. The notion of context as a flat landscape where interest-driven people use available resources seems to be inadequate for explaining changes in the contingency of emergent processes such as the way market-driven competition and entrepreneurial discourse seize educational research environments. Context must be taken into account at multiple levels. The representation, interpretation, problematization and even the enactment of a policy have their own ‘history’ (Ball, 1993: 11). Context and contextualization appear to be central for investigating problems to be solved or constructed and logics to be imposed. Hence the multilevel spatialities, temporalities and relationalities (knowledge–person–object interaction) in which policy discourses are embedded shed considerable light on the oft-neglected character of discourses (Seddon, 1993).

With reference to the range of work from contemporary policy research and policy sociology, Ball proposes the study of policy trajectories rather than policy discourses. He addresses educational ‘thoughts’ that framed the evolution of knowledge-making in sociologies of education in different periods of the last century (Ball, 2008). In an attempt to highlight the changing concept of justice in education, he traced the ongoing discursive changes cross-sectionally, by means of various recipients and linkages, as policy has evolved. Compellingly, he described the expanding space and the growing need for sovereign entities as education is being re-narrated from different national–transnational discursive positionings and locations. He pointed out how relations between structures and agencies open a space for new kind of ‘participants’ in the process of governance.

Drawing on Ball’s conception, Seddon (2014), in her account of novel forms of educational research governance, also stresses the significance of context and contextualization as a ‘“cultural matrix” for action and a “textual matrix” of meaning’. She is more vociferous in her criticism of policy research and recommends using the notion of ‘knowledge spaces’ in the hope of capturing spaces from which academics narrate education and educational research. Inspired by new research on transnational research environments and the modern states, she emphasizes that current trends of research governance cannot be explained from disciplinary, sectional or national perspectives. With the aim of offering a better analytical tool she introduces the notion of the ‘shifting spaces of knowledge making’ as a conceptual framework for understanding novel forms of research governance. ‘Knowledge spaces’ as opposed to discourses are portrayed as cultural–material constructs which frame and locate the evolution of cultural practices in research. She argues that the interplay of knowledge and research practice is anchored in diverse forms of narrativity. Each time educational research is narrated or re-narrated it is narrated from a specific relational locality. Therefore processes of educational research or research governance can be explored from an ecological perspective. Supporting Albott’s (1988) and Massey’s (2005) arguments, Seddon stresses the importance of studying the educational ecology of knowledge which enables us to see through the inflated rhetoric and reopen a dialogue about ‘discursive location’ (Seddon, 2014; Somers, 1994).

In recent discussions of research governance there appears to be a tendency to move away from the vocabulary of the nation state. On the basis of recent findings in the field of policy research and policy sociology, it is possible to argue that prevailing discourses embedded in their spatial–temporal context have gained increasing relevance as tools of governance.

Novel forms of research governance and European associations

In a related manner, albeit from a different provenance there are voices emerging who have analyzed the governance of educational research from another angle that of the perspectives of transnational research environments. Educational trans-European research associations have emerged in the last 25 years, as an initiative led by national academic communities and professional networks and supported by the European Commission. These associations include, among others, EERA and EARLI and they are part of what has been termed the ‘European Educational Research Space.’ (Gretler 2007; Lawn and Lindgard, 2002; Novóa and Lawn, 2002; Pepin, 2006). Lawn, in a highly detailed analysis of European associations, shows the process by which unstable and voluntary scientific networks, hybrid organizations and social partners constructed and were constructed by an emergent policy space (Lawn, 2013b). These, sometimes rather specific, research associations were founded with the hope of overcoming problems of integration and adaptation that had arisen in centralized, hierarchical, administrative, regulatory and professional systems. In an effort to manage rapid findings and solve difficulties of production and consumption of policy, educational research associations were intended to be research ‘observatories’, as an analytical tool that would be indicative in terms of shifts in communication and structures of policies.

However, as evidence shows, these associations have evolved in a somewhat different direction and the loosely connected professional relationships achieved a higher stage of maturity with communities of associations, professionally manageable relationships and an infrastructure of supporting flows of contextual variety (Lawn, 2007: 23; Pataki, 2014). Several studies devoted considerable effort to exploring the development and the role of these associations in the fast changing European Educational Research Space (Hannerz, 1996; Keiner, 2002; Sirota et al., 2002). The analysis of European associations with regard to their communicative culture and integrity indicated that there is a delicate balance between evolving organizational standards and entrenched cultural codes and norms. This balance is based on reason, enticement and discursively enforced sanctions (Seddon, 2014: 14; Pataki, 2014).

Apart from having associational, network and hybrid properties, some associations can be portrayed as an innovative research environment where powerful cultural transformation takes place. The strong sense of culture, extended across heterogeneous networks of academic contexts and traditions of work, may persist after the collapse of the association (Lawn, 2007: 14). Further to an analysis of the nature of this cultural dimension in the case of the European Educational Research Association, it has been argued that the cultural transformation is essentially communicative in nature (Pataki, 2014: 448). This cultural transformation in turn repositions, re-narrates and rescales institutional, disciplinary and administrative boundaries in the internal and external environment of these associations. It stabilizes the interaction between mobile organizational standards and cultural norms from inside and empowers researchers to navigate among discourses in the national and transnational space. Equally, it creates heterogeneous spaces of freedom and interest in established systems in which scholars can experiment and delineate.

Evidence is growing that the self-organizing, self-governing networks of actors have evolved into self-observing bodies with the collective capacity for reflection. The question here though is: what is the role of the shifting social, institutional, epistemological, methodological, communicative perspectives within which academics work in these associations? European scientific associations appear to be ‘shifting places of knowledge making’ as places of cultural transformation. They reveal emergent perspectives and vocabularies that are shaped by research practices situated differently in terms of geography, sociology and politics. The practices of European research associations therefore seem to contribute to the increasing emergence of reflexive modernity – to borrow a term from Ulrich Beck et al. (1994). These associations are indicative in terms of spaces out of which education and educational research are rescaled, reframed or re-narrated. In the interstices of the European Educational Research Space an infrastructure appear to be developed to deploy diversity respectively and reflexively (Rizvi, 2011). On the basis of the available evidence it is can be seen that these organizations are ‘observatories’ not in terms of policy but ‘observatories of narrativity’. They give information about the spatial, relational and temporal location of scientific discourses and discoursive activity.

An important question that must be addressed before continuing is how the way education is narrated can be disciplined in a transnational research environment. To draw attention to the process in which taken-for-granted master-narratives can be destabilized and renarrated, it is important to consider the institutional hybridity of the European educational research associations, the complexity of their exchanges and their collective capacity for reflection. Seen in this light, it is possible to discern that these transnational associations focus and coordinate novel relations, harness and mobilize joint resources and, on the basis of constant reflexivity, influence the way ‘knowledge spaces are materialized as educational context for further knowledge making’. Viewed in this way, the real potential of European research associations, from the perspective of educational research governance, lies in the capability of reflexively observing and disciplining narrativity.

To conclude, in modern states, as Popkewitz (2000) and Wouters (2008) remind us, power is predominantly not exercised institutionally but, rather, through knowledge and the ‘embodiment of discipline’. The place out of which educational research is narrated is shown to be a novel field of knowledge-based research governance. Recent studies in emerging transnational scientific associations would suggest pursuing further the lines of investigation opened up by Ball (Ball, 2009) They shed light on the mechanisms by which narrativity and discursive location can be observed, reflected upon and influenced.

Shaping the future – parameters, possibilities and problems

While current trends in research governance were portrayed in the previous sections, the focus is now on a more detailed discussion on possible future scenarios for educational research. Assuming that governance does influence research environments, this section of the present paper raises the question of the difficulties the given parameters and possibilities of the emergent knowledge-based instruments of governance mentioned may cause in the future.

The fact that the polyvalent, polysemic, shifting nature of novel forms of governance can cause problems of coordination, accountability and transparency is manifest in more explicit discussions about the changing nature of governance (Ball, 2009; Keiner, 2002; Urry, 2007). The emerging European Educational Research Space redefined hierarchies, institutional transparency and led to a democratic deficit (Keiner, 2002). The key question to highlight factors lying behind the lack of transparency under current conditions of research environment is how ‘willing subject[s]’ are constructed and disciplined by the emergent knowledge-based governing relations. The question as to how narrativity and collective reflection produce and govern the sovereign actor.

On the one hand, as it is described above, power can be exercised through narrativity and discourses, which ‘systematically form the object of which they speak’ (Foucault, 1977: 49). On the other hand. power works through the production of a ‘context’, that systematically forms the environment in which it can operate. Governmentality that spatializes power through governing logics uses conceptual politics, whereas governmentality that ‘deterritorializes’ power by creating environments uses participatory politics.

Disconnected from the terms and conditions of their origins, narratives become strong and powerful empty signifiers. In turn they congeal cultural structures and networks and become collective entities, which are popularized for everyday use. Consequently, taken for granted meta- and master-narratives can be deployed for multiple purposes. Conceptual politics, therefore, can be regarded as the art of decontextualization from the perspective of governance (Somers, 1994).

Alternatively, another model of power also lies at the core of much contemporary thinking, which envisions somewhat dissimilar futures of educational research. This notion is connected to the reconceptualization of the modern state and the emergence of transnational scientific associations. It builds on the respect of contextual variety with the aim of endorsing sovereign actors to step out from their territorial relations and institutional hierarchy and create a space around their interest. Participatory politics, as fundamentally special politics, rescales national stances and repositions hierarchies and marks of honor in pursuit of mobilizing capacities and resources. In this form of governmentality resources are mobilized through creating an emergent ‘citizen’ who is encouraged to develop and mobilize capacities and capabilities in-between spaces, times and scales. While actors in conceptual politics are forged into ‘partnerships’ in the hope of securing materialized forms of reason discursively, actors of participatory politics are sovereign ‘participants’.

Concluding remarks

Discussions about policy discourses have often been conducted in terms of unhelpful dichotomies such as exercise of power versus resistance, use versus effect of discourse, and contribution to status quo versus endorsement of change. However, little attention is given to the context in which the discourses are embedded and the work of subjects who use and amend discourses as well as navigating among them.

Recent advances in the study of European educational research associations have raised important questions about context and subjectivity. Focusing critical questions beyond national frames these studies draw attention to the fact that institutional and discursive hierarchies will most probably be disturbed and rescaled by a new dimension in the future. The question of ‘who is sovereign, at what scale and through what capabilities and capacities’ will most notably reorganize access to resources. The question of who is ‘able’ and ‘willing’ to participate in creating contexts across relations, times and spaces will almost certainly contribute to the development of localities. It is possible to foresee a reorganization of national research environments in line with the process in which institutional aspects increasingly cut across communicative and contextual ones. Power that constructs, orders and selectively resources research environments is likely to be more and more discursively and contextually mediated. We should therefore not forget the richness we can gain from the contextual variety of educational research.

This is of course neither a new insight nor something which is specific to educational practice. It is simply stating that creating and controlling uncertainties through communicative practices is a constructive element of educational research. The attempt here to map some trends in the field is not meant to be exhaustive, but is presented as a contribution to a more nuanced understanding of the importance of context and contextualization in anticipating and proposing possible, probable and preferable futures of educational research.