The Triumph of Managerialism? by Anna Yeatman Bogdan Costea

Author:Anna Yeatman,Bogdan Costea
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786604897
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)
Published: 2018-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

METHODOLOGY: NETWORK ETHNOGRAPHY

Network ethnography is a methodological technique proposed by Howard (2002) to counter the challenges of studying organisational forms built around new media and mobilities. I would also note that the new governance structures referenced earlier, and the associated increases in the opaqueness of education policy, can be productively analysed using a network ethnography approach. Primarily network ethnography argues that the Internet can be employed as a site for research, where an increase of interactive communication technologies has provided qualitative researchers with useful techniques for collecting data on the policy networks produced through increasingly complex public–private interactions. Indeed, using the work of Kenway and Bullen (2001), I have promoted the idea of the network ethnographer as cyberflâneur, who can access the Internet and move through online communities, collecting information from websites, blogs, Facebook pages and twitter accounts. The cyberflâneur is able to move seamlessly between these spaces, travelling through what Beaulieu (2004) calls ‘links of association’. The approach to research that can be undertaken by the cyberflâneur redefines the ways in which researchers can engage with contemporary policy issues and inspires a remapping of how one is able to trace the flows and mobilities of policy today (see Hogan 2015). Importantly, digital methods of this kind go beyond a focus on researching Internet technologies and online relationships and representations to examine what these technologies and relationships can tell us about social conditions more broadly (Rogers 2013).

Indeed, network ethnography has been applied in a small number of studies to convincingly portray changing educational governance structures in policy production and implementation (see Ball and Junemann 2012; Olmedo 2014; Shiroma 2014). As Ball and Junemann (2012, 6) observe, ‘This method constitutes a mapping of the form and content of policy relations’, where the network diagrams can be deployed as both ‘an analytical technique for looking at the structure of policy communities and their social relationships’ and a conceptual device that can be ‘used to represent a set of “real” changes in the forms of governance of education, both nationally and globally’. Thus network ethnography is able to visually portray changing educational governance structures and enables recognition of the heterarchical nature of education policy processes that are produced through vertical and horizontal relations between public and private actors.

This analysis is informed by the three interrelated activities of network ethnography including: (1) Internet searches; (2) the use of these searches to construct network diagrams; and (3) the use of these diagrams to identify nodes for further analysis, primarily through semi-structured interviews. To this end, I present (below) a network diagram that was constructed using Gephi software. This network should be seen as a visual explanatory device, rather than a strict analytical representation. As such, networks encompass policy initiatives, policy actors and the interrelations between these to illustrate the complexity of contemporary policy networks. I rely upon Internet searches and a Freedom of Information (1982) request submitted to ACARA to map the policy networks associated with NAPLAN and to generate a network ethnographical account of the contexts of policy influence and production in Australia.

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