The Potential of Insider Action Research in Making Transparent Everyday Enactments of New Public Management

• In Event: Creating Spaces in Schools for the Critical Professional: Action Research as Principled Resistance

Abstract

Theoretical framework: Anderson’s paper (above) makes the case for action research as principled resistance, requiring a rethinking of how we engage with our own organizations. Mechanisms of neoliberalism are realized and constituted within mundane and everyday practices of institutional life and while it imposes limiting conditions, at the same time, new spaces for resistance and struggle are possible (Ball and Olmedo, 2013). Objective: This paper draws on work by Tripp (2012) asking how insider action research might render everyday institutional practices as “problematic,” that is what kinds of things are seen to be problems and which theoretical structure “causes the phenomenon in question to be seen as a problem?” (p.14). I take up Alvesson’s (2003) notions of “self-ethnography” and work to extend it. This approach aims to “draw attention to one’s own cultural context, what goes on around oneself;” this is in contrast to a self-study approach that puts “oneself and one’s experience in the centre” (Alvesson, 2003, p. 175). Alvesson describes more of a stance toward a consideration of contexts and this paper probes how this might be enacted methodologically. Mode of Inquiry: In working to employ self-ethnography in my own work context, I constructed what I came to call “contextual disjunctures,” that is those instances of a shift or disconnection from typical ways of operating, where the university initiated or signaled a departure from common practices that trickled down to my sphere of daily work. I then posed the questions: “What does it mean (apart from the obvious)?” as per Alvesson’s (2003) suggestion and from what theoretical stance is it seen as problematic (Tripp, 2012)? Conclusions: I make the case that the new public management insinuates itself into our work lives in ways that seem barely worth noticing or resisting but rapidly become the new commonsense. Yet there is a window of awareness where a close examination of shifts in university practices can bring us inside these mechanisms of new public management and the un/intended re-working of professional identities presented via these changes. I believe these close examinations present possibilities for resistance to this reshaping of our selves and our work lives. Scholarly Significance: Shifts in the workplace serve as mechanisms for reforming teachers, scholars and researchers, changing what it means to be a professional or as Ball (2003) suggests current reforms do not simply change what we as educators do, it changes who we are. Insider action research has a long history of “making the familiar strange” (Anderson, Herr and Nihlen, 2007) so everyday practices may be examined in new ways with an eye toward change. Development of methods of self-ethnography is potentially one more approach to insider inquiry and can serve as a platform for making transparent and then resisting everyday enactments of new public management.

Authors

• Kathryn G. Herr, Montclair State University

• Michael Ian Cohen, University of Northern Colorado