Globalisation, corporatisation and professionalism.

' Australian Research Council funded the three year project Women, Educational Restructuring and Leadership (1995-7) We also owe much to the considerable work of Judy Bowly, the project's research assistant for much of this time for keeping us on track.

The discourses of soft and hard management, as well as feminist discourses, called upon by the interviewees, all mobilised around understandings of professionality, but in quite different ways. There was a sense amongst our interviewees of a discernible shift in emphasis resulting from the dual processes of corporatisation - marketisation and managerialism. There was space in the new management discourse and market driven organisation for some discourses around what it meant to be professional and not others. To be good managers within the corporate organisation was about 'being professional' (ie technically competent and able to achieve organisational goals set by others). To be good women was to 'be a professional'. This drew from a wider discourse about women's styles of leadership that has circulated throughout the 1990s. This meant taking up advocacy positions for those less powerful amongst colleagues and clients as part of your professional responsibility and commitment beyond the organisation. Being a good woman was also often collapsed into being a good feminist, about being supportive of women using your leadership position but sometimes moving outside your managerial domain to address inequities ie put yourself at risk.

These were not necessarily mutually exclusive positions, as most saw managerial competence as the precondition to good leadership. But there was a growing tension, arising out of different institutional priorities and regimes of strategic management that assumed different understandings about what is was to act professionally. More often than not, the dominant corporate logic was that individual loyalty rested with the organisation, and that issues about equity were not raised, at least not too loudly or too often, in ways that suggested that the organisation was not delivering what it promised or claimed. And where equity was part of the rhetoric, it was most often in the form of symbolic policies eg. 'We are an equal opportunity employer' with little investment of time, money or people into the implementation of such policies. Indeed, the notion of diversity was seen to capture equity issues, where diversity was often equated to having diverse student populations rather than an equitable representation of different groups in the teaching or management workforce (Blackmore and Sachs 1999).

Discourses of professionalism were central to the work identity of most of these women across all three sectors. For those more marginal to the organisation, professionalism was the only discourse that provided them with meaning and a sense of work identity, given their lack of connection to any particular organisations (Blackmore

and Angwin 1996). Teachers and academics working in casual and part time jobs, were particularly reliant upon professional networks outside the organisation for any renewal of professional knowledge and support, given that casualisation worked against collegiality, professional renewal and exchange that occurred on a daily basis for others. As Wenger (1998) notes, identity is formed through practices and the communities in which particular practices occur. The communities of practice of these educational outworkers, as opposed to the core educational workers. was one of isolation, fragmentation, and an inability to improve their skills with ongoing employment insecurity.

In this paper we will explore some of these issues through a wider discussion first, of the changing nature of professionalism under late capitalism. We briefly, visit the literature on academic work, training and teaching that provides us with some understanding of the different professional cultures that informed understandings of what it meant to 'be a professional' and 'be professional' in the three sectors- schools, universities and TAFE. Clarke and Newman(1997,p.7) suggest that "Professionalism operates as an occupational strategy, defining entry and negotiating the power and rewards due to expertise, and as an organisational strategy, shaping the patterns of power, place and relationships around which organisations are coordinated'. We then will explore notions of what this means for professional identity in a post modem, post welfare, post feminist and even 'post equal opportunity' era (Wacjman 1999) when the presence of women in management has been seen as an indicator or the success of equal opportunity and progress of women'. What are the implications for the self operating in the context of learning organisations and new knowledge economies? And finally, to consider the implications of the above for educational leadership and management in corporate times.

We perceive of the self as socially constructed, in on going making and remaking in the sociological tradition of Goffman, Berger and Luckman, or its more recent narrative form which views the self as a 'convenient fiction' or 'narrative construct'(Casey, 1997, p. 3). One does not have to reject the concept of self as an essentialist and fixed notion, as do many post structuralists, but can recognise that there exists a sense of inwardness and individuality, and of agency, but as some 'fluid locus of one's subjective experience, it is where affect and reason are experienced and the capacity to act beheld' (Casey, 1997, p. 3). Notions of the self are tied in closely to who you are, what you do, how you do it and how you are perceived by others. The self, as a classed, gendered, racialised being, is closely tied into professional identity and discourses of professionalism. We also argue that identity is formed through the relationships and practices in which individuals engage. Wenger (1998, p. 149) identifies five dimensions of identity, which are useful for this analysis. These are: i. identity as negotiated experiences where we define who we are by the ways we experience our selves through participation as well as the way we and others reify our selves. ii. identity as community membership where we define who we are by the familiar and the unfamiliar; iii. Identity as learning trajectory where we define who we are by where we have been and where are going; iv. identity as nexus of multi membership where we define who we are by the ways we reconcile our various forms of identity into one identity; and v. identity as a

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So what is different about the past decade that suggests that the notion of professionalism and indeed professional identity is under threat? What characterises the communities of practice of the new work order in education? A range of factors is contributing to a sense of transition about what we understand about professionalism and about work identity. Among others these include the media generated crisis in educational standards, reduced power of unions, feminisation of work, marketisation and privatisation of public service organisations with new public administration reforms, and the re-exertion of executive management within organisations.

More generally, the sense of professional insecurity arises from other factors such as the a sense of loss of control over professional knowledge base--over knowledge production and dissemination with the rise of new technologies (Blackmore 1999). it arises out of the failure of governments in the 1990s to consult with 'the professions' on policy in education, health and welfare reform (Brown et a] 1996). It arises out of new notions of occupation, work and social regulation with reduction in employment protection legislation and provision with the increased emphasis on individual self provision so that there have been substantive changes in that the 'occupational order' in which the professions had significant and particular status no longer does so in the new work order (Crompton et al 1999). 'The development of flexible production systems ... has been accompanied by organisational 'delayering' and the decline of the long term single organisation career' (p. 3). It has also seen the rise of contractualism as the basis for professional relationships as a form of social organisation (Brown et al p. 315).

It is in the context of the penetration of the orthodoxies of management and market into education, and their permeation through all aspects of organisational life. Factors include: the administrative work of performance management, accountability, quality assurance, performance indicators, and standardisation and control of core educational work by centralised frameworks and outcomes based education prescribing curriculum and assessment practices. New information and communication technologies facilitate these processes at all levels, focusing upon managing the teacher, trainer and academic by imposing technical solutions onto pedagogical relations as well as raising new expectations about teaching online that intensifies labour. Here, management exploits discourses of professionality to manufacture consent to adopt and internalise new modes of self management through the technologies (ie have to be multi media proficient to be professional and adhere to codes of conduct with respect to student service).

The division of labour, knowledge hierarchies and professional relations embedded in education and educational organisations are highly gendered. The discourses of professionalism have been used both for and against women's work identity. On the one hand, discourses about the low professional status of teaching are associated with its feminisation, while women were able to claim equity on the basis that teaching needed to be a profession (Blackmore 1999). Education markets and the new

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Feminists have also been complicit in laying bare the racialised and gendered biases of the state and the practices of professionalism. 'Policy formation and implementation, employment practices and the characteristic organisational cultures of welfare institutions were all implicated (Newman and Williams 1995). Feminists have pointed to the two edged sword of discourses of professionalism - of how there have been historical associations between deprofessionalisation and feminisation as in teaching, of how professional organisations and unions dominated by men have actively excluded women, and how the desirability of being seen to 'be professional' (technically competent and responsible) produces considerable dilemmas for feminist political activism, where collective action or advocacy is depicted as 'unprofessional'.

Feminist research on professions and seniority finds that 'women are excluded or marginalised by practices emanating from the organisations themselves, rather than from factors extraneous to workplaces (such as their early socialisation) (Alvesson and du Billing 1997). Some professions, medicine and law, were less impervious than others, welfare and education, to new social movements of the 1960s, and have maintained their elitism and selectivity through exclusionary practices, both overt (controlling numbers into training) and covert (masculinist cultures of training and work)'. The invisibility of the processes of exclusion -the problem that has not name, but referred to variously as 'masculinist cultures' and glass ceilings-- account for their durability in the face of anti discrimination legislation an affirmative action.

Eveline (1998) argues it is even more difficult to speak about these invisible nuances for women near the top on of organisations, seemingly in power, yet who feel powerless. Susan Chase (1995) refers to the ambiguous professional empowerment felt by women in leadership based on their professional expertise - the coexistence of power and subjection. She exposes, through the narratives of women leaders, 'the tension between the discourse about professional work (with its emphasis on gender and race neutral individuals) and discourse about inequality (with its emphasis on gendered and racialised groups). These cultural tensions shape how professional women perceive themselves(p. 6) Quite often, women appeal to gender neutral discourses of professionalism, denying any forms of discrimination or inequality that they have experienced because they wished to believe that they had achieved their position on the basis of individual merit and professional expertise. For them, being professional is about adhering and performing better than anyone else within the frame set by the corporation or organisation. For others, their investment in their professional identity may not 'fit' the corporate educational organisation. To 'become a manager' may often require relinquishing those aspects of professional self which were seen to be critical to how they were viewed by others and wished to be viewed and a reinvestment in practices which could be seen as being complicit with non educational agendas, creating a sense of abandonment of self and adoption of the colluded self (Casey 1995). These produce the types of dilemmas and paradoxes that women leaders have experienced in restructured educational organisations (Sachs and Blackmore 1999, Blackmore and Sachs 1999).

Individuals' work identity is informed by the articulation between particular personal, political and professional discourses circulating within and around educational organisations and professional communities of practice. These give rise to different understandings and readings of individual and collective corporate identities. At the

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same time, each new educational setting defines corporate (and therefore individual work) identity differently, with dominant cultures in each of the three sectors. The entrepreneurial culture of TAFE, the disciplinary knowledge based culture of universities and the pedagogical or caring culture of school produce different discourses about what it is to 'be professional' and 'be a professional'.

Sachs describes two different professional discourses that are emerging around teacher professionalism - democratic professionalism and managerial professionalism. Brennan (1996, p. 22) describes managerial professionalism.

This distinction between democratic and managerial professionalism maps onto Brint's distinction between professionalism based on technical expertise and that based on public trustee and advocacy. Teachers are increasingly feeling the tension between these understandings of professionalism.

Menter's study, as others (eg Gewirtz et al 1996, Blackmore et al 1996) indicate that there is a new type of teacher work identity emerging as a consequence of both wider social change and education reform over the past decades. Menter et al (1 997) in their studies of primary teachers suggest that economically driven notions of organisations implicit in the new managerialism have challenged 'conventional versions of public sector, public service professionalism', undermining what are commonsense understandings about the nature of teachers work. Such understandings presume a service, that talks about their professional orientation, classroom autonomy and a 'professional culture, while bureaucratised and gendered, provided considerable solidarity and constructed identity'(p. 9). Recent reforms indicate that now the primary school teacher's identity, previously constructed through a wider range of resources and networks at the local level has now increasingly become exclusively school focused. Setting up competitive market relationships between individual schools reshaped the 'cultures of autonomy of the primary school work' and the "amateurism of its management'. The trend to school based teacher professional development at the same time reduces it to implementation of policies and not towards a notion of professional renewal.

Teachers in particular felt that their professional judgement was being challenged at the very same moment that discourses about professionalism were being utilised by government. On the one hand, they spoke of the tension between the new forms of control, surveillance and scrutiny by parents, principals, central management and government, and on the other, of new freedoms and skills eg. use of IT but under constraints of reduced free time, increased class sizes and workloads. These teachers felt they were being de-professionalised and re-professionalised simultaneously, but that the controls outweighed new freedoms. The re-regulation of teachers has accompanied the deregulation of principals to allow them to operate competitively in market systems. Women principals likewise referred to how they liked the new autonomy that allowed them to make resource decisions more quickly about personnel, materials and buildings, but at the same time, how the new accountabilities disempowered them in educational matters of curriculum and assessment so central to their sense of their professional knowledge base. They spoke of how they felt they

were good change managers, but there was less space for them to innovate outside the system's priorities. Being professional (technically efficient and competent) therefore did not necessarily mean being a good professional (working for disadvantaged kids).

Women leaders in this context, were positioned particularly dangerously, in that they are caught into the web of surveillance, juggling the competing discourses of democratic professionalism from below and management professionalism from above. For some, it meant changing their collegial relationships, networking with other principals rather than teachers, moving out of the teachers' union and into principals' associations, of learning to judge those below them in the new hierarchies created between teachers and principals and in turn being judged from above through performance management contracts by management ie accepting the rules. Others worked even harder to maintain any sense of collegiality with teachers, worked with principals and teacher unions to keep social justice on the agenda, and tempered the new hierarchies with democratic processes as much as was possible (Sachs and Blackmore 1999).

And in turn, these new modes of professionalism were displayed outwardly to parents and managers-they had to be made visible to be recognised. Teachers and principals alike referred to how the performativity aspects of their work were shifting the nature of their relations with each other and with parents, of how the new forms of transparency were elusionary and elusive. Ball (2000, p.??? )comments on how the new transparency is both paradoxical and disciplinary because it 'bites deeply and immediately in to the practice of state professionals- reforming and re-forming meaning and identity-producing or making up new professional subjectivities'. This power permeated through the new modes of collegiality undertaken through professional appraisal and school review in what Ball calls the 'flow of performativities' in which teachers and principals were being judged constantly and differently in different ways at different times. He refers to the changing expectations and demands placed on principals and teachers by community, parents, government, society and central management.

This is about the managed self, and discourses of professionalism are critical to managing each other. Teachers in turn, have come to practice surveillance on each other through these new modes of surveillance which are premised, not around pedagogic practice and what they can do for student learning, but around what is required by system wide management and market accountabilities. What constituted leadership, or what was rewarded as leadership, therefore became part of this fabrication. So there was a sense of the unreal for those in leadership, and of exclusion for those who do not play the game.

In universities, the site of training for the professions, the discourses about

professionalism in the academy were couched more in terms of the ideals of academic freedom and public intellectuals, as well as disciplinary expertise. Academic understandings of professionalism similarly need to be contextualised as part of the reengineering of universities since 1987 in line with national goals that led to new modes of governance and control premised upon it efficiency (measurement of knowledge production) and relevance (what is taught and researched) (Cowen 1996). While various aspects of market and managerial performativity have been adopted in most nations, markets and management have penetrated some university systems more than others eg Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Cowen (1996) suggests that

marketisation and new managerialism clash with traditional university cultures, shifting it away from more collegial cultures to hierarchical cultures concerned with immediate products. We found that the new universities were also more managerialist, with less entrenched research cultures and weaker discourses about academic autonomy (Blackmore and Sachs forthcoming). As teachers in schools and TAFE, academics have experienced an intensification of work and new modes of accountability and increased expectations to change on all fronts - teaching, research and service (Smith and Sachs 1995 ).

For academics, there are now a range of performativities required - teaching, research, consultancy, development and community service, measured largely in dollar terms - in terms of internal measures of academic performance. Yet system wide measures of performance of academic work, despite the seemingly comprehensive descriptors about what academic work constitutes, are narrowing-around what constitutes research, what is valued in terms of quantums measuring input and output, again largely in dollars or numbers of publications. These new work environments, linking universities both in terms of teaching and research into industry partnerships, require new social practices and relationships. At the same time, university academics are expected to work on and off line simultaneously, be more flexible and yet be more constrained by the new forms of curriculum production that multimedia modes of pedagogy require.

The emphasis on particular performativities changes the relationship to community - premised on commercial contract rather than community service and as paid professional expert rather than public intellectual. The commercialisation and commodification of academic work transforms the lived experience of academic life, reducing it to technique, through new modes of institutional evaluation and curriculum design eg quality assurance, teaching and learning management plans, outcomes focus on graduate attributes, Academic Codes of Ethics, and new models of instructional design for online offcampus learning. At the same time, academic status as the producers, disseminators and legitimators of what counts as valued knowledge is being undermined by the commercialisation and proliferation of sources of knowledge production arising from new information and communication technologies, and the rise of alternative research venues. In order to achieve institutional responsiveness in the face of professional organisations and big business increasing their research capacities, the core work of research in universities is increasingly being hived off from the core work of teaching (Blackmore 1999).

The performative university is increasingly about responding to exterior demands. The new disciplinary technologies of management and market now operating in universities -performance appraisal, quality assurance, teaching and learning management plans, instructional design of new learning technologies, student evaluations and demand determining curriculum-which lead to different practices and understandings that have 'remade' the academic self. In turn, new bodies are being created to manage the professions through certification, qualifications frameworks and registration, some out of the hands of the professions eg Teacher Training Agency in England) and some

more representative of teachers eg Ontario College of Teachers). (Mahoney and Hextall 1998)

These new regimes jostle uncomfortably against old understandings of recognised expertise in research, the intrinsic value of learning, and community service and old mythologies about academic freedom and collegiality. No longer is there a capacity to fall back on professional expertise alone, as the legitimation of disciplinary knowledge is now determined by market demand. At the same time, the performativity principle relies increasingly upon exploitation of the emotional, intellectual and physical work of

academics and their motivation to be academics and to do well in their disciplinary area, but in ways which many academics and academic managers find alienating. This alienation was more obvious the closer one went to the interface of academic work ie. lower down the hierarchy. Academics were increasingly feeling that the core academic work of undertaking research and teaching within their chosen field and in ways that they thought were critical and engaging with wider social issues was undervalued, if not devalued, by new research priorities and curriculum driven by the external demands of industry and students. Entrepreneurship is valued over scholarship, faculty and administrative values are in conflict about university governance, and faculty funding favours those who are self funding. The university and the various faculties within are being brought into line with economic production and the managerial revolution that globalisation requires (Giddens 1994, Gumport and Pusser 1995; Smyth 1995, Rhoades 1997). This is academic capitalism at work (Slaughter and Leslie 1994).

The women leaders in our project saw a new set of institutional evaluations that were biased away from the arts, humanities and education-the traditional domain where the notion of public intellectuals and service were strongest-to the more useful knowledges of science, technology and business. They all spoke of reduced autonomy, and imposed change on multiple fronts that led to a sense of powerlessness. For many lower down the hierarchy the game had changed too often just as they had learned the rules, and they felt marginalised and frustrated. This shift in resources was symptomatic of a socio-psychological shift in the relationship between the individual academic and the university. There was a strong sense that there was little institutional support for workers. The loyalty of workers was increasingly more to their colleagues within a school or sub-unit but increasingly not the institution. The notion of public service was increasingly judged for merit on the basis of consultation or development dollars rather than contribution to policy, intellectual or cultural debate .

TAFE has experienced the same imperatives as schools and universities to undertake a 'culture change' requiring all employees to become 'entrepreneurs'. Brown et al refer to the culture shift that has arisen from moving from a paternalistic to a contractual organisation. They also suggest that

But TAFE, more than schools and universities, has moved rapidly towards an entrepreneurial culture that impacts on identity formation of the teachers and managers under the new contractualism because of its historically strong industry orientation and trades based teaching. Governance issues have been replaced by survival issues, where issues around professionality were couched in terms of dollars. Here enterprise

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self reliance, and the ability to accept responsibility for oneself and one's action (Keats, cited in Du Gay 1996, p. 155)

The new contractualism 'businesses' individuals and collectivities within the wider context of the contractual state (Peters 1997, p. 156),). It permeates the new TAFE through the disciplinary technology of the market and new managerialism and a dominant discourse of 'practical rationality' which imparted 'primacy to practice' over theory and to 'practical knowledge' over 'knowledgable practice'(Edwards 1997). The 'get things done' mentality is central to the 'performative management culture' evident in further education sectors (Kerfoot and Knights 1993; du Gay).

TAFE's own distinctive historical culture and traditions have shaped the management, teaching and pedagogical relations, professional and institutional cultures, and the social relations of gender. TAFE has a well-institutionalised trade oriented culture arising our of the tradition of technical education, one closely associated with a masculinist culture of work and management practices marked by hierarchy and skill. Management cultures that emphasised skill and efficiency, responsiveness to markets and organisational hierarchies. Therefore they fitted snugly with this history. The professional discourses circulating in TAFE, included a dominant discourse of 'practical rationality 'which imparted 'primacy to practice' over theory and to 'practical knowledge' over 'knowledgeable practice' (Edwards 1997). At the management level, it was evident in the strong cultural proclivity to perceive that 'management is doing' rather than more esoteric notions of visionary or educational leadership. The less dominant discourses were those of professionality and educational progressivism. The former emerges out of collectivity and sense of solidarity based on staff union activities, which, in many TAFE, were actively discouraged by executive management. The latter, at the lower echelons of the organisations, particularly at the level of classroom practice where discourses about pedagogy and social justice were in some areas circulating, were largely derived from community education sector and were inhabited largely by women teachers. Overriding all these were the policy discourses of reform about ongoing organisational change, flexibility, entrepreneurship and client choice.

At the management level, it was evident in the strong cultural proclivity to perceive that management is doing' rather than more esoteric notions of visionary or educational leadership. Whitehead argues that the re-masculinised culture of aggression and competitiveness that flourishes in the further education and training sector leads many women to reconstruct themselves in a masculinised fashion as they are 'seduced by the existential pull of management' of getting things done ' as work is beginning to replace other forms of security and identity found more traditionally in family and home' (Shain 1999,p.41; Blackmore and Sachs 1999). The shift from a public service bureaucratic culture to the privatised set of contractual arrangements allows managers to become 'real men' operating in the 'real' market place. Surprisingly, many women in TAFE saw more spaces for their people management skills and change agentry - but this was higher up the organisation where women were more able than the old guard of male management to undertake the performative work of the organisation with industry and clients, where the older more autocratic styles of leadership were replaced ( see also Brown et al 1996). Many women were involved in seeking to maintain control of the core work of teaching and learning and curriculum, and in so do gained entrée into what were considered to be critical areas for TAFEs new image.

Seddon (et al 1997) refer to the more marginal discourses of professionality and educational progressivism, the former largely emerging out of collectivity and sense of solidarity based on staff union activities and the pedagogical discourse arising out of the community education sector. These discourses were under severe challenge within the entrepreneurial corporate culture and reform discourses of responsiveness to

change, flexibility, entrepreneurship and client choice. As our studies of TAFE institutions, as schools and universities, corporate management pushes the stress and difficult personnel and financial decisions down the line at the same time as executive management seeks to increase corporate appeal through image management. The extent of institutional 'fabrication' or structural aspects of institutional schizophrenia hits hardest for middle managers who are presented with images and strategic plans etc that do not represent the experiences, needs or desires of those at the interface of student teacher or teacher / industry relations .

It is in this context, and one of radical restructuring and severe financial constraint that many women are moving into middle management in the further education sector. There are limited spaces available here for alternative approaches to leadership in the context of what is a re-masculinisation of executive leadership (Shain 1999, Gleeson and Shain 1999b). Ozga and Walker (1999) see educational reform has been premised upon a 'sustained attack on teacher professionalism' based on a 'low trust model of accountability' and that New Labour's consensual 'third way' is at times equally punitive of teachers. Women are both managing and teaching, concentrated low down in the organisational hierarchy, and therefore most vulnerable not only to market shifts in terms of employment, but also bear the brunt of the new management accountabilities.

Women in middle management, work collegially and in different ways, but are also seen by some to be complicit in the hegomonic masculinist work order. But as we have argued, Gleeson and Shain (1999) see that the existence of the soft management discourse was important to complement, but not challenge, corporate discourses at the level of middle management in the core market where tenure was possible and where the emotional labour of leadership occurred. This assisted in binding individuals more closely to the corporate vision within the context of a 'fractured environment' with little work security. This loyalty and trust operated at this level quite often, more to each other than to the organisation itself or executive management. Indeed, it was contingent upon a sense of resistance to what was being done.

So women leaders in this context worked through a number of different 'managerial identities or positions, speaking through a number of discourses that were competing if not contradictory (Whitehead1998). It was possible for middle managers in TAFE to speak about their commitment to the union, their sense of professionalism in seeking to improve students learning and then to be part of the wider institutional and labour market structures that kept other women in casual, underpaid educational work. As Sachs (1999) comments there are

Shifts in understandings of professionalism have been produced by the multiple discourses of competency and outcomes based education. Each of these promotes a technical view of what it is to 'be professional' as does the commercialisation of the relationships between academics and clients in tender driven research and between trainers and their clients, now largely understood to be industry and not students (Blackmore 1999). This is in the context of the shift from public to private provision of the range of services that were previously the domain of particular professions. The

changing nature of work in terms of speed, intensity, values, security, relation is being accompanied by the transformation of the nature and role of institutions through which work is organised and understood eg. unions, professional organisations, voluntary organisation through this process of corporatisation (Casey 1995).

Educators experience these contradictions and transformations in a range of ways that have come to 're-make' their sense of self. Discourses offer particular kinds of subject position and identity through which people come to view their relationships with different loci of power (Clarke and Newman, 1997, p. 92). The individual has, we suggest, become both the managed self (external forces of management and markets) and more self managing (internalisation of new accountabilities and work conditions). But there is, we suggest, a professional self that is absent in this new equation of identity, that makes problematic and worries the other selves that were called upon to perform. Understandings of professional autonomy, for example, are now framed more tightly by the strategic direction of the organisation, decided collectively. To break out of that frame is to put both the organisation and individual at risk, and risk taking with regard to image in a more performative and risky society is less acceptable. Professionalism, therefore, is a highly contested concept in 'academic and ideological struggle between union leaders, bureaucrats and academics that have been played out in various settings'(Sachs 1999).

More broadly, we see the performative aspects of new modes of educational leadership - of being seen to be a good manager, efficient and competent (second order functions)- were taking over the substantive aspects of quality teaching and learning (first order functions) about what it meant to be professional, with often quite severe contradictions. What was evident in schools, universities and TAFE colleges was a type of institutional schizophrenia because often first order had little to do with second order functions (Blackmore 1997). Middle management work is therefore not only about emotional management work that keeps the social aspects of organisations glued together, but also about doing the fabrication work for organisations. For example, institutions geared up to produce programs that sought to attract particular types of students, programs that may took away from those which would best meet needs of current pupils. Performativity doesn't just get in the way it actually changes the nature of educational work with a 'fundamental change in the relation between the learner., learning and knowledge' where these relations are de-socialised (Ball 2000, p. 16). Middle managers in particular were held responsible for meeting the performativity demands of the market and executive management. Ball (2000) suggests this leads institutions and their leaders in particular, to construct institutional fabrications, that are about escaping from the gaze rather than being more transparent. Institutions thus invest in these fabrications, and individuals are expected to live up to them and be measured against them. The new accountability regimes of management and market were not just about being efficient or dead (in Lyotard's sense of performativity) but also about performance ie an enactment or outward expression of what has occurred (Butler 1990). In particular, there was a sense that leadership was a performance.

We consider our studies of three different organisational cultures that operate within the wider cultures of the profession of education indicated some key issues for those women. These women tended to be located within organisations where they were doing the emotional management work, managing the psychic economy as well as the fabrication work that buttresses up the performative aspects of educational

organisations. The issue is whether on returns to nostalgic ideas of professionalism or whether one addresses the new contexts and practices that are shaping professional work. We felt it was not enough to draw simplistic dichotomies between new and old forms of professionalism. Rather we needed to work the boundaries and the possibilities more strategically and energetically.

There was an imperative that leadership should be reconceptualised in ways that dealt with notions of ethics and service as central. This requires going beyond the entrepreneurial or self maximising self, the entrepreneurial and self maximising organisation that neo liberal theories of markets and management have advocated. That it is important to work on the basis of wider frames that deal not only with organisational goals, but also wider social goals that indirectly provide returns to educational organisations in other ways that cannot be quantified. We suggest that educational leaders have to focus on the social relationships that underpin the new economies and productivity of organisations, to base these relationships on trust, on open communication and debate and on listening to colleagues. Transparency in itself, as Ball argues, has led to new forms of subterfuge and and fabrication when institutions are unable to be reflective and where discussion is inhibited. Leaders also need not only to recognise the professional expertise of their colleagues, but also recognise how they work productively with the professional communities of practice. Academics not only inform the policies and practices of these professional communities of practice, but also educate for these professions. It is in this role that universities play an important role.

What are the new types of pedagogical relationships that the new professionalism requires? Bourdoncle and Robert (2000) argue that the types of students coming into teaching have had different life histories, emphasising individual and not collective identity. This is a new generation of teachers, trainers and researchers, for whom insecurity is just 'part of their day'. They have been socialised into more competitive relations in a period of limited resources and short ten-n contractual employment. They are highly individualised in terms of self management and self promotion in contrast to the baby boomer generation of professionals who express a form of 'left melancholia' that reverts to traditionalism - in defence of what we had ( or thought we had) in an uncritical fashion. They seek foremost to be professional, arising out of an era of competitive individualism, and do not adhere to an ideology of professionalism where they have internalised the collective norms and values of the profession. These new teachers have experienced employment insecurity and have less of a commitment to unionism. They have learnt to contract out their professional expertise. The trend has therefore been towards fragmentation and individualisation. These new professionals may also think of themselves more as business people without the same traditional and cultural legitimation, collective morality, and responsibility of old trustee professionalism. And as professional knowledge comes to be seen as more of a marketable resource, then it will be more readily regulated externally so the professions will become less self regulatory and more 'managed' by the state. 'More standardised cultures and highly coordinated organisational fields' will be more likely for the non-profit public expertise which will be compared to the niche markets based on specialist areas expertise for profits (Brint 1994, p. 206). We are in different times, as professionals have to understand both what those times require, and also what different forms of professionalism and professional practice we might need.

Within the literature, there is an emphasis that new knowledge economies require professionals that are responsive, that are capable of making professional judgements and that are capable of reflection on professional practice. Barnett (1997) puts the position that we have to work harder on the notion of criticality and developing a critical being. He suggests that contemporary approaches to higher education will need to be

revised. It is clear that we need to work at three levels to develop a strong sense of criticality; for it is 'being critical' that justifies the existence of universities as providing a unique and distinct way of thinking. Developing a sense of the critical will provide students with the capabilities of reflexivity and agency in post modern times.

References

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