Toward a Theoretical Understanding of Corporations and Corporatization in Education

• In Event: 16.026 - Beyond Public Versus Private: Critical Race and Feminist Perspectives on Public, Private, and Corporate Spaces in Education

Abstract

Drawing on an integrative literature review of the field of privatization, this paper analyzes how corporations and corporate foundation, the processes of corporatization, corporate-style attributes, and corporate power are theoretically conceptualized and empirically attended to within the literature on privatization.

The critical literature on privatization in education focuses on the processes by which private actors, including corporations and corporate foundations, influence policies and practices in education in the U.S. and globally. This is evident in the extensive literature on the role of corporations and corporate foundations (Author 2013, 2014; Bhanji 2008, 2012; Burch 2009; Burch and Good 2015; Koyama 2010; Robertson et al. 2012; Saltman 2010), private foundations (Scott 2009), non-governmental organizations, religious organizations, lobbying, advocacy, and networking groups (Anderson and Donchik 2016; Ball 2012; Lubienski et. al.), think tanks, parent organizations, (Posey-Maddox 2016), community associations, and individuals and families. This literature illuminates the material and non-material resources, knowledge practices, networks, and power-relations these diverse private actors employ, frequently with the goal and/or effect of shifting the provision and/or governance of education through private means and/or towards private ends. The literature has made an important contribution to tracing and understanding the complex shifts and openings that have enabled many of these actors to increase their power and relevance over the past three decades, the policy enactments, new practices, and configurations they have generated, and the intended and unintended effects they have had on a diverse range of unequal social, political, and economic actors, including children, families, and communities.

Yet, through the analysis, the authors argue that by analytically conceiving of corporations under the private sphere and, correspondingly, by subsuming the processes of corporatization under privatization, this literature reifies the public/private binary and obscures the distinct nature of the corporate sphere as one oriented towards profit-maximization. This has the following effects on the field. First, the literature conceals the specific role of corporations and the increasingly disproportionate nature of corporate power. Second, in reifying the public/private binary, the literature, with notable exceptions (Dumas 2011; Lipman 2013; Pedroni 2007; Scott 2005), assumes the character and history of the public sphere as inclusionary rather than exclusionary towards particular racialized and gendered bodies and populations, whereby conceiving public education as an institution structured for the benefit of all and advocating for a return to a public that never existed in the fight against the privatization of education. Third, the field broadly conceptualizes the public as a democratic space based on accountable and transparent systems of governance that stands in contrast to the private and corporate spheres despite ample evidence that neither the public, private nor corporate spheres in education have broadly institutionalized mechanisms to ensure equity and accountability across co-formations of difference.

Given the reality of historical and ongoing racial, gender, and class inequities in education, how the field of education conceives of corporations and corporate foundations and their related practices, processes, and power relations is analytically and empirically significant for ensuring democratic, transparent, and accountable educational systems in the US and globally.

Authors

• Kathryn Moeller, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Maria Velazquez, University of Wisconsin - Madison