Fabricating Quality in Education by Ozga Jenny;Dahler-Larsen Peter;Segerholm Christina;Simola Hannu;

Author:Ozga, Jenny;Dahler-Larsen, Peter;Segerholm, Christina;Simola, Hannu;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

8 Governing by numbers

The rise of data in education

Hannu Simola, Jenny Ozga, Christina Segerholm, Janne Varjo and Vibeke Normann Andersen

Introduction

In Chapter 7 we discussed the ways in which the ‘governance turn’ may be connected to education/learning policy across Europe, and also reviewed the role of data in supporting this shift away from hierarchical structures of government towards looser, more flexible networks of governance. We further argued that although the project of governing education/learning and governing through education/learning is coherent, and supported by the massive development of data capacity, it is also incomplete – it remains a ‘project’ that should be understood in terms of its contradictions and tensions as well as its internal logic. In making this argument we are attempting to take the analysis of the European education policy space beyond top-down approaches that tend to frame problems as those of inserting global templates at national level, or that construe the global policy field as one in which national systems move at different speeds towards what is assumed to be a common terminus (Dale 2001). We suggest that education/learning policy in Europe continues to be shaped – to greater or lesser degrees – by national histories – alongside global orthodoxies and supranational agenda – and that it needs to be understood in terms of its constitutive tensions rather than, or alongside, an attempted coherence.

In this chapter we look at some of the interconnected factors that help to explain the differences that we discuss in the operation of new governance within the different national contexts in our study. These factors include the history, geography and politics of the different places that data enter and seek to reconstitute. Whereas the project of ‘Europe’ seeks mobility and fluidity of people and knowledge/data, they remain embedded in their specific contexts and practices, which need to be acknowledged in any account of Europe and its governance (Giraudon and Favell 2007). As Delanty and Rumford (2005) explain, the spatial dynamic of contemporary Europe contains a tension between an emphasis on territoriality, places marked out by established geographical coordinates, and the fluidity represented by ‘network Europe’. For example, Castells (2000) argues that the network society is constituted by the space of flows: ‘social practices without geographical contiguity’ (ibid.: 14) in a world of mobility and networked connections.

This division can be treated as a tension between fixity and mobility – confrontation with the logic of places and the logic of networks and flows foregrounded by an increasing awareness of the impact of globalisation. According to Delanty and Rumford (2005) the older nation-state understanding of places has provided us with a certain imagery of territoriality – boundedness, cohesion, social solidarity, and functional integration of administrative levels – which still exerts a powerful influence on the way we think about European space.

Nations are at different phases in their individual Europeanisation processes – Finland being the latecomer with its 1995 membership of the European Union, Sweden remaining somewhat ambivalent, while Denmark and the United Kingdom are long-term members since 1973.

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