Performativity:
is a term that is increasingly widely used in
policy analysis, but it is not always used
properly. What I mean by that is that the
usefulness of the concept is not just as
another way of referring to systems of
performance management but it alludes to
the work that performance management
system do on the subjectivities of
individuals.
performativity

This is a term I use in a particular way –
(with acks to Lyotard and Butler) not just
to refer to systems of performance
management or the deployment of
performance indicators but rather the
complex and powerful relationships
between such indicators and
management systems and teacher
identity and professionalism.
Performativity
‘works’ when it is inside our heads and our souls,
when we do it to ourselves, when we take
responsibility for working hard, faster and better as
part of our sense of personal worth. The selfmanaging individual is produced within the interstices
of performativity through audits, inspections,
appraisals, self-reviews, quality assurance, research
assessments etc.. We become ‘subjects which have
to be seen’ (Foucault 1979 p. 187). And we tale
responsibility for reforming ourselves and others.
Being ‘calculable’ rather than ‘memorable’
Dear Stephen,
Where outputs are included in the Institute's RAE submission which draw on
research funded by the Research Councils (that is, ESRC, AHRC/AHRB,
MRC or EPSRC), we would like to refer in the text box to the grade that was
awarded by the Research Council to the final report for the project. For
example:
"The research draws on an ESRC-funded project, part of the [title]
Programme, which was graded outstanding".
Three of the outputs, which we are including for you, are described as
drawing on one or more Research Council-funded projects, but we do not
have a record of the grade given to the final report. Please would you
therefore, as a matter of urgency, provide the following information:
Performativity
for many teachers and researchers this changes the way in
which they experience their work and the satisfactions they get
from it – their sense of moral purpose and of responsibility for
their students is distorted. Practice comes to be experienced as
inauthentic. Commitments are sacrificed for impression or
metrics. But the force and logic of performance are hard to
avoid, to do so, on one sense at least means letting ourselves
down, and letting down our colleagues and our institution. We a
burdened with the responsibility to perform, and if we do not we
are in danger of being seen as irresponsible.
The affects of performance – guilt, shame and pride
Judith Butler
 ‘I
am other to myself precisely at
the place where I expect to be
myself’ (Butler 2004 p. 15).
 But performativity also does
some very practical ‘work’ on our
labour in a related sense.
Privatisation
-in a number of senses!!!!
Endogenous/exogenous
One part of what performativity does, as outlined above, is
to re-render practice into measurable outcomes. That is,
the work, the processes, of education come to be
represented and appreciated in terms of products, or
calculabilities. Individuals and institutions are required to
account for themselves in ways that represent education
as a standardised and measurable product.
Measurement, tendering and
contracting out
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individuals and institutions can be managed through the use of targets and
benchmarks.
individuals and institutions can be rewarded, differentially, in relation to
their productivity or in response to target achievements. At the individual
level this can be translated into systems of performance-related-pay, and
bonus or incentive schemes (Mahony et al., 2004b).
Also at an individual level employees can be contracted on the basis of
output requirements. This enables greater use of fixed term contracts and
individual contract negotiations and thus provides for greater budgetary
flexibility.
At the institutional level the work of the organisation as a whole can be
rendered into set of performance indicators and again can be translated
into the form of a contract for ‘service delivery’; which is now happening on
a large scale in England.
Once rendered into the form of such a contract the work of organisations
can be put out to tender on a fixed cost, performance-related basis, and
opened up to new providers – it can be exogenously privatised!
The Contract
Contract is an increasingly important administrative and
regulatory instrument. Contracting ‘refers to a process whereby
a government procures education or education-related services,
of a defined volume and quantity, at an agreed price, from a
specific provider for a specified period where the provisions
between the financier and the service provider are recorded in
contract’ (Patrinos 2005 pp. 2-3).
embedded in what I have sketched out above, is
'a struggle for the soul of professionalism' (Hanlon
1998p.50)

- a contest over the meaning of
professionalism which has at its centre the
issue of 'trust' - 'who is trusted, and why they
are trusted is up for grabs' (p.59). The ethos
of 'traditional' professionalism is no longer
trusted 'to deliver what is required, increasing
profitability and international competitiveness'
(p.52) and is being replaced by a 'new
commercialised professionalism' (p.54).
The State
The more the state contracts (out) the more it contracts
(the central bureaucracies of the state reduce in size). This
is as Vincent-Jones (2006) argues a distinctive new mode
of governance. Contracts he suggests take three main
forms – administrative, economic and social control ‘each
entails the deliberate attempt by the state to structure
social behaviour … through regulatory arrangements that
harness the contract norms for the attainment of
determinate public policy purposes’ (pp. vii-viii).
A polycentric state - from government
to governance
the move towards a ‘polycentric state’ and ‘a shift in the centre of gravity
around which policy cycles move’ (Jessop 1998 p. 32).
a catalysing of public, private and voluntary actors to solve social and
community problems and resultant changes in the boundary between state
and civil society.
a new form of ‘experimental’ and ‘strategic’ governance is being fostered,
based upon network relations within new policy communities.
the state is by no means impotent in all this but is now dependent upon an
extensive array of state and non-state policy actors to achieve its ends.
not a giving up by the state of its capacity to steer policy, this is not a
‘hollowing out’ of the state, rather it is a new modality of state power, agency
and social action and indeed a new form of state.
the ‘institutional void’ created by the dissolution of administrative systems is
filled by systems of accountability which employ output measurements, targets
and performance indicators to ‘steer’ the new ‘autonomies’ granted to policy
agencies
Privatisation
Privatisation reforms also change what is
important and valuable and necessary in
education. As a new policy paradigm the market
form constitutes a new moral environment for both
consumers and producers. Within this new moral
environment schools, colleges and universities –
their staff and their students – are being inducted
into a 'culture of self interest'. (e.g. ‘economies of
student worth’)
New struggles

Nowadays, the struggle against the forms
of subjection – against the submission of
subjectivity – is becoming more and more
important, even though the struggles
against forms of domination and
exploitation have not disappeared. Quite
the contrary. (Foucault, 1982, p. 213)
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the
falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is
loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all
conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely
some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The
Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of
Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the
desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank
and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about
it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops
again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were
vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its
hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The contract
‘Merchantile society’ (Foucault : discipline and punish p. 194)
‘is represented as a contractual association of isolated juridical
subjects’.
This is also the precondition of and tied to the knowledge
economy, or what Lyotard calls ‘the merchantilization of
knowledge’ (p. 51). Knowledge is no longer legitimated
through ‘grand narratives of speculation and emancipation’ (p.
38) but, rather, in the pragmatics of ‘optimization’ – the
creation of skills or of profit rather than ideals.
This is summed up in Lyotard’s terms in a shift from the
questions ‘it is true’ and ‘it is just‘ to 'is it useful, saleable,
efficient’ .
The state The ‘governmentalisation of the state’
(Foucault).
The tendency for state power to be
exercised and realised through a
heterogeneous array of regulatory practices
and technologies rather than (simply)
through institutional structures
Government as ‘centres of calculation ‘acting at a distance
Blurring and hybridisation
that is enterprising up the public sector/
corporate form - endogenous
privatisation/and exogenous privatisation
the substitution of public sector private with
commercial enterprises dispensing social
goods – interests of public service
businesses
We ‘combine public sector values with high
quality organisational and financial discipline’
(Prospects Website).
Contracting out:
In September 2007 a 3-year contract to run Salisbury
school in Enfield was awarded to EdisonschoolsUK, a
subsidiary of the US Edison Corporation. Part of the
company’s payment will be based on pupils achieving
better GCSEs grades and scores in national tests for 14year-olds. The management team is being led by Trevor
Averre-Beeson, a former head of Islington Green school in
north London. In 2003 Edison ran one-quarter of the 417
contracted-out schools in the US, teaching 132,000
students in 20 states (see Saltman 2005).
So what does all of this mean for us?
Increasingly public service actors don’t know who they are or
who they are meant to be, unless perhaps they reside
comfortably within the generic ontology of the market.
The policy technologies of public sector reform are not simply
vehicles for the technical and structural change of
organisations but are also mechanisms for reforming public
sector practitioners, for changing what it means to be a
teacher, researcher, social worker or nurse.
That is, 'the formation and reformation of the capacities and
attributes of the [teacher's] self' (Dean, 1995 p. 567). Reform
does not just change what we do. It also seeks to change who
we are, who it is possible for us to become - our 'social
identity' (Bernstein, 1996 p.73).