Paradox and the School Leader by Chris Dolan

Author:Chris Dolan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811530869
Publisher: Springer Singapore

When this work of detection exceeds a hunt for showings of counter-conduct, it is to draw attention to new possibilities in subverting dominant ways of doing and being. As Foucault (1982) notes of the one over whom power is exercised, ‘faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions may open up’ (p. 789). To extend the theoretical development of governmentality that commenced in Chap. 3, detection of counter-conducts will be used to help delineate what Binkley (2009) describes as ‘the tactical reversals to which rationalities of governmentality are prone’ (p. 75) and to respond to allegations that governmentality studies tend to remain quiet about questions of agency and, in doing so, overlook the fact that it is people who create meanings and practices (see Bevir, 2010).

Understanding the Tactical Importance of Freedom

In the chapters which follow, references to ‘spaces of freedom’ and ‘practices of freedom’ underscore the notion that, while government gives shape to freedom, it is not constitutive of freedom (Dean, 2010, p. 21). These references are to the tactical importance of treating freedom as exceeding the ways that its purpose is foreseen by government. It is in this excess that principals are conceived as actors capable of fashioning out spaces less encumbered by authority and of developing practices, in these spaces, that amount to counter-conducts – to desires, decisions and efforts to not be governed thusly.

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