Ideological disempowerment as an effect of neoliberalism on teachers

Abstract

In works based on deprofessionalisation/proletarianisation theory, teachers are described by researchers as technically disempowered because of the entry of neoliberalism into the institutional environment of education. Technically disempowered teachers suffer not only from work stress but also from other kinds of negative emotional experiences. This article contributes to deprofessionalisation/proletarianisation theory by introducing the concept of ideological disempowerment to explain why teachers complain that they are overloaded by ‘non-instructional work’ that is instructional in nature. It shows that the inability of teachers to identify the instructional meanings of ‘non-instructional work’ stems from neoliberalism’s tendency to ideologically value the managerial purposes of teachers’ work over its instructional purposes. This leads teachers to break away from ‘non-instructional work’ and devote themselves only to work that appears to be directly related to teaching. Accordingly, ideologically disempowered teachers may have a narrowed concept of teaching, resulting in them being discouraged from performing various tasks that are likely to be conducive to the whole-person growth of students. By explaining neoliberalism in both technical and ideological terms, this article advances deprofessionalisation/proletarianisation theory and contributes to a better understanding of the process of teacher disempowerment that results from neoliberalism.

Keywords

Neoliberalism deprofessionalisation proletarianisation ideological disempowerment

Since the 1990s, the institutional environment of education across the globe has become more managerial because of the implementation of education reforms based on neoliberalism (Lee et al., 2019; Simkins, 2000; Thrupp and Willmott, 2003). Neoliberalism can be defined as an ideological framework of political economy that supports the minimisation of state intervention to promote property rights, free markets and free trade through the marketisation and privatisation of public sectors (Berry, 2014). Its core characteristic is the adoption of the logic of accountability (Hallett, 2010). It has had profound effects on all aspects of education, including teachers’ work (Hall and Pulsford, 2019). For example, it has significantly transformed the patterns of teachers’ work (e.g. Hargreaves, 1994; Robertson, 2000), changed the roles and responsibilities of teachers (e.g. Besley, 2019; Valli and Buese, 2007), altered teachers’ relationships with parents and students (e.g. Lasky, 2000; Prakke et al., 2007) and redefined teacher professionalism (e.g. Brass and Holloway, 2019; Hargreaves, 1999). As a result, an increasing number of teachers in different parts of the world report feeling stressed, anxious, depressed and burnt out (Day, 2017), which has led neoliberalism to be criticised as a structural force that works against teachers’ well-being. In general, this analysis falls under the deprofessionalisation/proletarianisation theory. It argues that neoliberalism deprives teachers of autonomy and power over the labour process of teaching, forcing them to handle a heavy load of work that they do not value and rendering them unable to change the situation (Smyth et al., 2000). As a Marxist theory, it captures the technical dimension of the disempowerment of professionals, which is the deprivation of power over labour process, and shows how technical disempowerment drains the value out of the labour power of professionals and makes their work become menial through, for example, new forms of organisational development and new information and communication technologies (Buyruk, 2014; Livingstone, 2019). However, recent literature on the neoliberal environment of education suggests that teachers also encounter what we call ideological disempowerment, which is the deprivation of one’s power to identify the meanings of his/her work (e.g. Tsang, 2019b). According to this literature, neoliberalism subordinates the logic of instruction, as a professional ideology guiding teachers in performing and interpreting their work, to the logic of accountability (Tsang, 2019a; Everitt, 2013). As a result, the instructional goals of education may be displaced by managerial goals (Choi, 2005), meaning that teachers tend to be unable to identify the instructional meaning even of their instructional work, and thus perceive much of their work as ‘non-instructional’, which results in work dissatisfaction and discouragement (Tsang, 2019b). Since the deprofessionalisation/proletarianisation theory tends to ignore the ideological dimension of disempowerment, it might fall short of comprehensively explaining the deleterious effects of neoliberalism on teachers.

To advance the deprofessionalisation/proletarianisation theory, we discuss how neoliberalism may ideologically disempower teachers in addition to their technical disempowerment. To achieve this goal, we briefly review the technically disempowering effects of neoliberalism based on existing deprofessionalisation/proletarianisation theory and illustrate how neoliberalism may also ideologically disempower teachers. The discussion shows that a version of deprofessionalisation/proletarianisation theory that accounts for ideological disempowerment may allow for a more dynamic and complex picture of the teacher disempowerment induced by neoliberalism.

Deprofessionalisation/proletarianisation theory: Technical disempowerment

Deprofessionalisation/proletarianisation refers to the process of the occupational condition and status of professionals declining to match those of blue-collar workers (Buyruk, 2014). Education scholars have argued that teachers are among those professionals who are experiencing deprofessionalisation/proletarianisation (Densmore, 1987; Eillis et al., 2014; Ozga and Lawn, 1981; Smyth et al., 2000). According to deprofessionalisation/proletarianisation theory, physicians, lawyers, educators and similar professionals were originally self-employed, a condition that afforded them a high degree of autonomy and power to determine the nature of their work and how and why they pursued it. However, with the advent of modernisation, these professionals have become salaried employees of bureaucratic organisations, a change that has caused them to lose their autonomy and power (Derber, 1982). As salaried employees, these professionals have become similar to blue-collar workers in that they experience estrangement from their labour, which is sold to bureaucratic organisations in exchange for a living (Karger, 1981). In this situation, although these professionals may retain some autonomy and power due to their specialised skills and expertise, their technical autonomy and power in the workplace are restricted by bureaucratic rules and regulations and the managerial supervision typical of organisations (Volti, 2008). This technical disempowerment can render them powerless to exercise control over their labour and unable to fulfil their professional interests and values in the workplace, giving rise to negative feelings (Derber, 1982).

From the perspective of deprofessionalisation/proletarianisation theory, Ball (2003) and Robertson (2000) are among the number of scholars who have identified teachers as being among the professionals who are technically disempowered, due to the entry of neoliberalism into the institutional environment of education. According to their analysis, neoliberalism forces teachers into a closer relationship with capital. It introduces the logics of accountability and performativity into the education system, which have the effect of removing teachers’ power and autonomy over their teaching (Smyth, 1995). These logics bring forth education reforms that decentralise financial power to individual schools while centralising managerial power through measures like performance indicators, parent choice and external review (Mok, 2003). In this context, teachers have to work in a quasi-market environment in which their labour is monitored by and accountable not only to the school bureaucracy but also to the external authority of students, parents and communities (Tummers et al., 2009). Technical disempowerment results in the intensification of the non-instructional work that teachers conduct for their schools’ managerial welfare (Smyth et al., 2000). Thus, teachers may experience their labour as external, alien and hostile because they find that it does not allow them to express and actualise themselves, rather it only satisfies the needs and interests of the schools (Brooks et al., 2008). For instance, the literature has shown that teachers in many societies are pressured to do a lot of paperwork and produce visible evidence of the positive academic and non-academic achievements of students for schools to meet the criteria of school evaluation or attract student enrolment (e.g. Ball, 2003; Smyth et al., 2000). Therefore, technically disempowered teachers suffer not only from work stress caused by a heavy workload but also from other kinds of negative emotional experiences, such as frustration, guilt and depression, due to their powerlessness to refuse meaningless work (Brooks et al., 2008; Santoro, 2011).

In addition to the technical impacts of neoliberalism on teachers, some theorists also recognise its possible ideological effects. For example, Derber (1983) used the concept of ideological proletarianisation to describe how professionals lose the power to define their work purpose. According to these theorists, professionals should be able to define the purposes of their work based on the ideology of their profession without regard to the will of external authorities. For example, teachers tend to view their work as a moral occupation to nurture children’s growth and make a difference in children’s lives (Hao and de Guzman, 2007; Lam and Yan, 2011; Low et al., 2011). This idea emerges from the ideology of teaching, i.e. teacher professionalism, which emphasises that teaching is a moral occupation for unconditionally taking care of students’ welfare (Zembylas, 2004). However, teachers become ideologically powerless to define their work because, as noted, the purposes of their work are being controlled by external authorities who impose their definitions of teachers’ work upon teachers (Apple, 1982; Ball, 1994; Robertson, 2000). As a result, teachers become workers who merely implement assigned work without thought or conception (Apple, 1982).

However, the concept of ideological proletarianisation might not fully capture how teachers are ideologically disempowered, because it limits its focus to powerlessness over the purpose of work, which is only one component of the labour process and does not include its other components: the procedure, content and products of work. In addition, ideological proletarianisation still regards teachers as ‘managed professionals’ (Codd, 2005) or ‘confined professionals’ (Lai and Lo, 2007) who are powerless to negotiate the meanings of their work in the neoliberal environment of education. In contrast, the literature suggests that teachers have their own definitions of teachers’ work by which they reflexively monitor and interpret their work in teaching (Tsang and Jiang, 2018). For example, the ethnographic study conducted by Hallett (2010) illustrated that teachers in the United States actively negotiated the meanings of their work with external authorities in the neoliberal environment of education. For instance, he observed that teachers would formally and informally debate, disagree with and confront the school principal’s neoliberal ideas of education, and that this could lead the school principal to change the neoliberal school policies. In other words, it is not necessarily the case that neoliberalism fully disempowers teachers to define their work purposes to the extent that they subordinate themselves to the neoliberal definitions of the work even when they feel that their work is meaningless or purposeless to teaching. In its current state, however, deprofessionalisation/proletarianisation theory may not be sufficient to help us to effectively explain this phenomenon.

Ideological disempowerment

To advance deprofessionalisation/proletarianisation theory, the concept of ideological disempowerment is proposed to depict teachers as social agents who can define their work in teaching but whose ideological power to identify the meanings of their work is constrained by neoliberalism. As social agents, teachers generally define their work ideologically as a moral profession that aims at the welfare of students (Sanger, 2017). This explains the attention they are likely to pay to instructional work, which is the work performed for students’ welfare from the teachers’ perspective, such as classroom teaching, lesson preparation and marking assignments (Tsang, 2019b). However, Tsang (2019b) finds that Hong Kong teachers frequently complain that, in the neoliberal environment of education, they are overloaded by ‘non-instructional work’, even though this so-called ‘non-instructional work’ can be instructional in nature or have strong instructional implications, as is the case with the work of organising extracurricular activities and moral education programmes for students. According to that study, the teachers’ inability to identify the instructional meanings of ‘non-instructional work’ is an outcome of neoliberalism’s ideological emphasis on the managerial purposes of this work, such as the pursuit of school effectiveness, school reputation and student enrolment. This emphasis tends to lead teachers to detach themselves from the so-called ‘non-instructional work’. Accordingly, ideologically disempowered teachers may have a narrowed concept of teaching, resulting in them being discouraged from performing a variety of work that is likely to benefit students’ whole-personal growth.

It is noted that ideological disempowerment does not function alone but rather accompanies technical disempowerment. Technically disempowered teachers tend to be subjected to managerial control; this structure of accountability aims to ensure the effectiveness and efficacy of schools, as defined in the neoliberal context. For example, a performance indicator framework may require schools to prove their effectiveness and efficacy in supporting students’ all-round development and performance in the neoliberal environment of education (Tse, 2005). Thus, schools may push teachers to organise various kinds of educational programmes and extracurricular activities for the purpose of proving performance (Leung, 2003). To some extent, teachers may agree to do this kind of work because it is beneficial to students’ holistic growth. However, they may find that schools force them to organise such a large quantity of activities and programmes that they lack the time and energy to assess the quality of these programmes (Tsang, 2019b). Even though they might be dissatisfied with the situation, they find they are powerless to negotiate with schools about the number of such activities and programmes because they are accountable to school management. In this condition of technical disempowerment, teachers find it difficult to perceive the instructional meaning of these tasks beyond their managerial meanings; they define these tasks as ‘non-instructional work’ and dislike doing them, becoming committed only to those kinds of work they perceive as instructional (Tsang, 2019b). They are thereby ideologically disempowered.

Accordingly, the concept of ideological disempowerment implies that there are two contradictory ideological logics of teaching in the neoliberal environment of education. The first is the logic of accountability, which emphasises standardisation, cost-effectiveness and performance evaluation in teaching, and the second is the logic of instruction, which emphasises teaching as an exercise of care for and commitment to students, the cultivation of students’ all-round development and the inclusion and engagement of all students (Tsang, 2019a; Everitt, 2013). Although the two logics co-exist, the literature suggests that the ideological logic of accountability tends to dominate in the neoliberal environment of education, inhibiting the ideological logic of instruction (Tsang, 2019a). Therefore, the meaning of some teachers’ work may be ideologically distorted by the logic of accountability, leading teachers to find it difficult to identify how certain tasks are relevant to the instructional meaning of teaching.

The teaching experience and managerial role of teachers and school administrative practices have been found to mediate the ideologically disempowering effects of neoliberalism. For example, Ball et al. (2012) showed that UK teachers who had more teaching experience and who took on managerial roles in schools enjoyed greater authority and power to interpret state-level education policies and to translate them into school policies that affect teachers’ work. Tsang’s (2019b) study of the work and emotions of Hong Kong teachers arrived at similar findings. Therefore, these teachers have greater ideological power to understand the meaning of assigned and intensified work. Studies also note that if school administration is more democratic and allows teachers to voice their opinions, then there are more opportunities for teachers to understand how the assigned and intensified work is ideologically relevant to teaching (Tsang, 2019b). These studies imply that giving teachers greater authority and power to influence school policy, or democratising school administration, may be an effective approach to ideologically empower teachers in the neoliberal environment of education.

Conclusion

The deprofessionalisation/proletarianisation theory criticises neoliberalism for technically disempowering teachers, with its emphasis on the logic of accountability resulting in an intensification of non-instructional work that reduces the time and energy available to teachers to concentrate on instructional work (Ball, 2003; Robertson, 2000; Smyth et al., 2000). However, the theory may not reflect the ideological impact of neoliberalism on teachers. Thus, this short article introduces the concept of ideological disempowerment to contribute to deprofessionalisation/proletarianisation theory by capturing the ideological impact. The concept implies that neoliberalism may inhibit the logic of instruction through its emphasis on the logic of accountability in the institutional environment of education, such that the instructional meanings of instructional work are ideologically displaced by the managerial meanings (Tsang, 2019a; Choi, 2005). Under these conditions, teachers may define much of their instructional work as ‘non-instructional’ because they become powerless to identify the meanings of the work. The consequently narrowed conception of instructional work may lead teachers to perceive much of their work to be irrelevant to education and teaching, resulting in negative emotions and low levels of motivation toward the work. Accordingly, the concept of ideological disempowerment helps us to pay attention to how neoliberalism creates structural barriers that prevent teachers from identifying the meanings of their work, leading them to avoid committing to certain tasks even when they are likely to contribute to students’ welfare.

Ideological disempowerment may be the result of many factors such as neoliberal measures of education, the ideological logics of accountability and instruction, teachers’ definitions of instructional and non-instructional work, teachers’ teaching experience and managerial roles in schools and school administrative practices. The influences of each may differ between sociocultural contexts. For example, China’s education system is not only influenced by neoliberalism but also by other social, cultural and ideological ideas such as Confucianism, progressivism and Maoism (Guo, 2015). In other words, in China’s education system, teachers’ interpretations of instructional and non-instructional work and the nature and content of the logics of accountability and instruction may be different from what is illustrated by the literature on western societies. These differences may generate different patterns of ideological disempowerment. Therefore, further studies are required to pay attention to the sociocultural contexts of ideological disempowerment and investigate possible sociocultural differences.

Although accounting for ideological disempowerment helps us to recognise that a more dynamic and complex process of teacher disempowerment results from neoliberalism, ideological disempowerment is just one dimension of teacher disempowerment. Theoretically, it occurs together with technical disempowerment in the neoliberal environment of education. Teachers are therefore both technically and ideologically disempowered, i.e. they may be unable to exercise control over the whole labour process of teaching while also being incapable of identifying the instructional meaning of their work. Thus, we should also consider the relationship between the two forms of teacher disempowerment to facilitate the theorisation of teacher deprofessionalisation/proletarianisation and develop a more sophisticated framework to explain the deleterious effects of neoliberalism on teachers.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to say thank you to Mr. Benjamin Green, because he gave us a lot of contributive comments while we were writing this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Kwok Kuen Tsang

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