Poster #4 - Corporatized Fabrications: The Methodological Challenges of Professional Biographies at a Time of Neoliberalization

• In Event: 79.052 - MTCC Poster Session 19
  In Poster Session: 79.052-1 - Division A Section 1 Posters: Leadership in a Modicum of Contexts

Abstract

Corporatised fabrications are a novel and useful way of conceptualising the lies told to and by school principals to install entrepreneurial professionalism in neoliberal times. We define corporatised fabrications and demonstrate how the concept helps explain school leaders’ (self) positioning. Corporatised fabrications raise methodological challenges for researching practice: professional biographies elicited through interview require new thinking to identify and understand the lies therein. We address this here by deploying thinking tools by Bourdieu and Arendt in two empirical case studies. We make methodological contributions through elucidating and deploying corporatised fabrications to think sociologically and politically with and against extracts from school leaders’ biographies in England. We reveal thereby the lies and their impact on school leaders and the education system.

Authors

• Steven John Courtney, University of Manchester

• Helen Gunter, The University of Manchester