EDUCATIONAL 
ORGANISATION: TECHNICAL/MANAGERIAL AND PARTICIPATIVE/PROFESSIONAL 
PERSPECTIVES

Lawrence Angus
Monash University


I commenced a recent paper on school management with the claim that: 

Despite the current level of rhetoric about local school management, times 
are tough for advocates of democratic participation and collaboration at 
the school level. This is because forms of school level participation may 
well serve as conservative managerial devices rather than as genuine 
democratic reforms. Current versions ... tend to take educational 
management in educationally, socially and administratively conservative 
directions.  (Angus 1992a. p. 4)

Recent developments have meant that times are even tougher. The social and 
educational vision of an equitable and socially just society has been 
dimmed by one of a technological future in which economic imperatives are 
to be pursued through individual competition and industrial restructuring. 
Business and industry, media, politicians and political appointees have 
become influential new players in the educational arena. The voices of 
educationalists generally, and particularly of teacher unions, parent 
groups and members of the education bureaucracy have become correspondingly 
muffled. Educational workers may well feel that their position is weakened 
because the rhetoric of equity and democracy, which had been used to 
support progressive initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s, has been 
progressively devalued and marginalised during the 1980s and 1990s.

Even before the recent election in Victoria, the Australian state in which 
the rhetoric and practice of participation and collaboration in educational 
governance has been strongest over the past decade, there had been a 
significant retreat from democratic to managerial practices (Angus 1989; 
Bessant 1988). Despite important gains at the level of particular school 
communities where participation was strongly asserted from below, and 
within now-marginalised sections of the education bureaucracy, 
participative democratic practices have not, in the main, been 
institutionalised within the Victorian administrative system (Angus and 
Rizvi 1989; Rizvi and Angus 1990). This does not mean, of course, that we 
should be pessimistic about the ultimate possibilities of more democratic, 
participative and professional modes of educational governance. We do need 
to recognise however that there has been a general shift in the educational 
policy context throughout Australia and elsewhere such that schools are 
being pushed towards more technical and managerial forms of administration 
after a period in which there had been some opportunities for participative 
management.

In this paper, after briefly examining participative and managerial 
conceptions of educational organisation and the current education policy 
context with its climate of corporate managerialism and educational 
control, I shall illustrate how developments in the literature of 
educational administration have been compatible with the political and 
economic press for conservative educational reform and managerialism. 
Finally, I shall endeavour to illustrate two opposed types of educational 
organisation by discussing several aspects of organisation which would be 
conceived of differently in the case of an organisation characterised by a 
technical/managerial form of organisation or a participative/professional 
one. For the purpose of the exercise, I shall examine the possible 
differences between technical/managerial schools and 
participative/professional schools in terms of their general conception of 
leadership, their response to policy direction, their conception of 
organisational roles and their relationship with the school community.

Participative and managerial conceptions of educational organisation


The nature of school-based management of local schools within systems of 
educational provision has not yet been thoroughly analysed within the 
education literature. Good analyses of general trends and positions exist 
(e.g. Chapman 1990) but these, quite rightly, raise more questions than 
they answer. There are also management texts which purport to show 
practitioners how to do local school management (e.g. Caldwell and Spinks 
1988; Fidler and Bowles 1989) but these generally lack a critical dimension 
or any sense of the social and political context in which schools must 
operate. Perhaps most helpful have been attempts to critically analyse 
instances of, and the political framing of, the nature of participation in 
practice at the school level (e.g. Angus and Rizvi 1989; Smyth, 
forthcoming; Watkins et al. 1987).

This last literature group is patchy but is largely characterised by an 
attempt to explore the possibility that local, participative organisational 
forms can enhance both progressive opportunities for partnerships between 
schools and communities and also the development of a collaborative form of 
teacher professionalism in a climate of industrial democracy, social 
equality and commitment to the democratisation of education. This view 
recognises that education serves social and cultural purposes as well as 
economic ones. It also recognises the possibility that the rhetoric of 
school-level management can be employed in a seductive, efficiency-oriented 
and prescribed manner which excludes participants from genuine questioning 
and critique of educational issues and possibilities. This approach to 
school-level management is exclusive rather than inclusive, and controls 
and directs participants rather than inviting all members of the school-
level educational partnership to reflect upon and appraise the education 
afforded by schools in terms of its social, educative and democratic 
possibilities. Increasingly this literature warns that it is the managerial 
possibilities of school-based management, with an emphasis on efficiency 
and control, which are currently in the ascendant (Angus 1992b; Smyth, 
forthcoming). 

As an example of the shift in the educational debate away from 
participation to managerialism, the ultimately flawed Victorian attempt to 
reform educational bureaucracy and promote broad school-level participation 
in the early 1980s can be contrasted with recent reforms in the 
neighbouring state of New South Wales, which also claim to promote school-
level participation and decision-making. A major NSW report on education 
(Scott 1989) set out to recommend ways of improving the operations of the 
stateÕs education bureaucracy. The starting assumption seemed to be that 
the performance of the Education Department could be improved by a more 
tightly defined structure of roles and responsibilities, a better 
coordinated, hierarchical accountability system and a clearer definition of 
goals. In the ensuing report, Schools Renewal: A Strategy to Revitalise 
Schools Within the New South Wales State Education System (Scott 1989), 
there is an emphasis on local school management, but the particular 
recommended version is accommodated comfortably within the principles of 
corporate management (Angus 1989; Bessant 1988). An important element in 
all this is a strong rhetoric of the need to reduce unwieldy and self-
serving bureaucracy (the so-called Ôeducational establishmentÕ) and release 
schools from both bureaucratic restrictions and presumed undue control by 
the education profession. In other words, rather than reforming bureaucracy 
in ways that would render it more responsive, participative and 
professional, the emphasis is on, as far as possible, eliminating 
bureaucracy. 

Dramatically symbolic of such a shift was the selling-off of the historic 
Bridge Street ÔheadquartersÕ of the New South Wales Education Department. 
To many it seemed then that the Department literally had no ÔCentreÕ. The 
emphasis, then, is upon local management of schools as a means of inducing 
efficiency and effectiveness into the system. The notion of local 
participation in school governance as an extension of democracy and 
equality is displaced by one of local management as a means of ensuring 
accountability and task-orientation at the school level, and of ensuring 

greater efficiencies through local responsibility for spending. The climate 
of competition in an educational market further presses schools to lift 
their game and make greater efforts to deliver the educational goods for 
their customers.

It seems clear that there is an international trend towards a simultaneous 
shift in the direction of decentralisation for some kinds of decisions, and 
centralisation for others. In particular, central governments are assuming, 
or in some cases returning to, a powerful role in setting broad educational 
goals, mandating curricula, and establishing common methods of 
accountability so that school-level decisions are made within a broad 
framework of centrally-determined priorities, and, most importantly, within 
the constraints of a devolved budget. The imposition of centralised 
curriculum and evaluation provides a means of guaging the ÔperformanceÕ of 
particular schools. The emphasis on testing, therefore, may have less to do 
with providing educational feedback, or even determining standards, than 
with providing a basis on which schools can be compared by education 
consumers and administrators.

A climate of conservative educational reform

There has been a general dismissal of educational arguments in favour of 
economic arguments in recent formulation of education policy (Angus 1992b, 
Lingart 1991). This seems in part to have resulted from a false perception 
that schooling has failed to serve the needs of the economy. The obvious 
problem with this perception is that schools are being blamed for 
contributing to social and economic uncertainty that is, in fact, a product 
of the failure of capital, social and cultural change, and shifting 
economic relativities. In the face of such uncertainty, we tend to fall 
back too easily upon a general faith in managerialism that has been 
socially constructed in industrial societies through the 
institutionalisation of practices of bureaucracy and scientific management. 
These practices, now represented in educational administration in terms of 
competencies and corporate management, need to be recognised as more than 
neutral managerial devices but as significant contributors to patterns of 
social relationships. The institutionalisation of these as standard and 
proper ways of managing has led to the taken for granted acceptance of the 
necessity of efficiency and effectiveness, conceived of in a particular 
managerial fashion. Tightly controlled school-level management is appealing 
within this rationale. The democratic and participative procedures that had 
become partially institutionalised in the school-based practice of teachers 
and administrators over the past decades are being displaced as the press 
is towards greater managerialism, technical procedures and corporate 
control.

The various duties imposed on school councils in the new wave of 
decentralised management arrangements have not resulted in any general 
devolution of real power (Angus and Rizvi 1989). However, there are 
instances in Victoria in particular where the systemÕs rhetoric of 
participation and democracy has been appropriated in particular sites and 
used to assert local participation in a meaningful sense. The policies of 
the new Victorian government, however, despite their rhetoric of self 
management, will, like those of their colleagues elsewhere, make the 
exercise of power and autonomy at the school level more difficult. 

Within the versions of local school management that are on offer in New 
South Wales, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and now Victoria, and in 
conservative education policy generally, it would appear that what is 
actually devolved to schools is responsibility for a range of management 
tasks and control of a larger proportion of their budgets. As budgets 
become more and more precarious, local decisions about the best and most 
appropriate form of educational delivery and policy, or about the nature 
and purpose of schooling, are likely to become secondary to, and to be seen 
as subordinate to, budget considerations. In other words, while the 
rhetoric celebrates autonomy and control at the school level, the financial 
limits within which schools must work are obscured (Ball 1990a; Ball and 

Bowe 1992). Within a climate of expenditure cuts in education and the 
public sector generally, local management begins to sound like a euphemism 
for devolving to schools the blame for cutbacks. School management 
therefore needs to be entrepreneurial in attracting both pupils and 
additional funds. The essential idea, consistent with a market view of the 
world, is that schools must maximise their local control over their budgets 
in order to gain the best competitive advantage over other schools. 

According to the research of Ball (1990a) and his colleagues in the United 
Kingdom, this has resulted in a situation in which school-level decision 
making is dominated by financial considerations (Ball and Bowe 1992). Even 
more alarming in terms of collaboration within educational organisations, 
Ball (1990a) has warned of a division emerging in schools between managers 
(concerned now increasingly with marketing, image building and financial 
planning) and teachers (concerned with matters that are educational). 
Principals, who must ÔproveÕ themselves as efficient and entrepreneurial 
managers, may well feel themselves pressed to become more task-oriented and 
to push a personal agenda in order to make their ÔmarkÕ on the school. 
There is of course a strong danger that this press may have the effect of 
eroding team building and professional collegiality amongst principal and 
staff, and of limiting rather than enhancing community participation in 
democratic, school-level decision making.

Leadership: managerial authority or professional discourse and influence

Many education participants have quickly come to realise that forms of 
local school governance do not necessarily amount to participative 
democratic reforms. They can just as well amount to conservative managerial 
devices (Angus 1989). Within the mainsteam literature on educational 
administration, however, there does not seem to be any distinction made 
between these contradictory possibilities. Indeed, in this literature 
notions of participation, organisational democracy and school culture are 
generally incorporated into a top-down managerial perspective.

For instance, what is considered appropriate school leadership in 
educational literature has been heavily influenced by managerial notions of 
organisational culture, especially as found in the United States management 
literature such as In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman 1982) and 
in the school effectiveness literature (e.g. Purkey and Smith 1985). In 
particular, this literature gives special attention to the so-called 
Ôhigher-orderÕ attributes of leadership, namely Ôthe capacity to articulate 
and win commitment to a vision for the school and ensure that vision is 
institutionalised in the structures, processes and procedures which shape 
everyday activitiesÕ (Caldwell and Spinks 1988, p. 21). Once the ÔvisionÕ 
of the principal has been asserted or imposed, the next step is Ôto build 
the enduring school culture which is critically important if excellence in 
schooling is to be attainedÕ (Caldwell and Spinks 1988, p. 54). There is an 
apparent assumption that the appropriate cultural expectations of those 
associated with a school will be embodied in the particular values and 
vision of the leader. The elitist implication of this view is that not only 
are leaders more visionary than anyone else, but also they are more 
trustworthy as well.

Administrative leaders, in keeping with managerial notions of 
organisational culture, are expected to manipulate people and situations so 
that the leaderÕs ÔvisionÕ is willingly shared by followers. This vision, 
however, is constrained in current circumstances by the direct imposition 
on the school of quite specific system goals and priorities. Active 
leadership is therefore required in order to incorporate the desires and 
needs of followers into a corporate agenda that is set by the leader within 
the system parameters. Such emphasis on the principal as cultural leader 
features heavily in the approaches to local school management that are 
advocated in a bumper crop of recent school management texts (e.g. Beare et 
al. 1989; Caldwell and Spinks 1988, 1992). These draw heavily on the work 
of writers like Sergiovanni (e.g. 1984) and Starratt (e.g. undated), who in 
turn incorporate much of the perspectives of such scholars as Weick (1976), 

Burns (1978), Vaill (1984), Bennis and Nanus (1985) and Deal and Kennedy 
(1982). Within current management thinking it is believed that leaders of 
vision are able to bring about a negotiated order which accords with their 
own definitions and purposes and ensures that any change is directed into 
reasonable, predictable channels by their own overriding moral force. Other 
organisational participants, such as teachers, parents and students, if 
mentioned at all, are generally viewed as essentially passive recipients of 
the leaderÕs vision. By asserting and defending particular values, it is 
argued, leaders need not rely solely on their rational-legal authority but 
must also so strongly articulate and endorse their own vision that it 
becomes also the vision of followers and so bonds leader and followers 
together in a shared covenant which then informs the non-negotiable core 
beliefs and values of the organisation. This core, according to the 
argument, amounts to an oganisational culture which effective leaders or 
line managers can manufacture and manipulate.

According to AustraliaÕs best-known advocates of self-governing schools 
(Caldwell and Spinks 1988), the process is argued to work as follows: the 
leader (principal) articulates a vision for the school which becomes shared 
by other school members; the vision then ÔilluminatesÕ the ordinary 
activities of school members and invests them with Ôdramatic significanceÕ; 
at this point the leader Ôimplants the vision in structures and processes 
of the organisation, so that people experience the vision in the various 
patterned activities of the organisationÕ; this leads to the happy 
situation in which day-to-day decisions are made Ôin the light of the 
visionÕ which by then has become Ôthe heart of the culture of the 
organisationÕ; one can recognise that the leaderÕs vision has been 
institutionalised in this way when Ôall members of the organisation 
celebrate the vision in rituals, ceremonies and art formsÕ (pp. 174-5). 

This general perspective remains largely consistent with the more 
traditional versions of the technical/managerial approach, which assumes 
that particular leadership tasks can be ascribed to a hierarchical position 
and that these will be instrumental in the realisation of largely 
predetermined organisational goals. The approach is particularly conducive 
to decentralised systems in which principals, the key line managers at the 
school level, are expected to accept responsibilty for, and be accountable 
for, local management decisions. Most of the managing of so-called Ôself-
managingÕ schools (Caldwell and Spinks 1988) is therefore to be done by the 
principal who is expected to take seriously the task of leadership. The 
general approach seems totally consistent with the tradition of managerial 
reforms since Taylorism (Taylor 1947) which have attempted to secure the 
consent of subordinates and build it into otherwise unchanged forms of 
management control (Braverman 1974; Clegg and Higgins 1987; Wood 1985).

This conception of leadership as a moral and cultural enterprise is 
consistent with the broadly functionalist perspective within which the 
currently dominant approach to education policy and school self-management 
is located. Through an undue emphasis on the role of the principal as the 
hierarchical and managerial leader in schools, this perspective assumes 
that it is possible to reduce complex educational questions to management 
issues that can be solved merely by the application by the principal of 
correct management techniques, skills and knowledge. The main skill 
required of most participants is for them merely to adopt the leaderÕs 
vision and to slot into the leaderÕs definition of school culture. This is 
consistent with the tried and tested managerial approach to educational 
administration which is still celebrated in such well-known texts as that 
of Hoy and Miskel (1987) which proudly informs readers that the book is 
about the Ôstate of the scienceÕ of educational administration (p. ii). 
Management in education is regarded as an end in itself. That is why 
critics of managerialism such as Bates (Bates 1987) have long held that 
educational administration amounts to a giant technology of control.

Managerial theories of school administration and organisation have become 
largely accepted as orthodoxy. As such they legitimate particular 
managerial concepts and forms of organisation while constraining the 

conceptualisation of alternatives. Because of the hegemony of managerial 
thinking, even reforms that include a rhetoric of participation, local 
decision making, and even school culture, are incorporated into 
managerialism with an emphasis on hierarchical leadership. It should come 
as no surprise therefore that academics in the field of educational 
administration should leap onto the bandwagon of school-based management 
and incorporate such notions into straightforward techniques of management 
control of schools. The priority given to management as a set of techniques 
means that it becomes a vehicle not only for the implementation of reforms, 
but also for linking school-level practices with central policy directions.

In contrast to the above, in a participative/professional approach to 
organisation, authority would not reside entirely with occupants of 
administrative positions. From the participative/professional point of 
view, if leadership is to contribute to educational reform that goes beyond 
the reproduction of managerialism, it will be necessary to conceive of 
school leadership as something other than part of a top-down hierarchy. Any 
participant is capable of exercising leadership and performing acts of 
leadership on some occasions. From a broad social and political 
perspective, an act of leadership would be one that was influential or 
potentially influential, and which contained a degree of penetration or 
potential penetration of the broader social and political context so that 
an aspect of education might be seen more clearly within that context. 
Knowing participants, as human agents, would make connections between their 
everyday actions and the organisational structure which they attempt to 
influence.

The connection between leadership and influence is important. In a 
participative/ professional environment, those in formal leadership 
positions may well use the authority of their position to facilitate the 
exercise of influence of other participants who, for one reason or another, 
have begun to examine critically, and engage in dialogue about, educational 
issues and educational purposes so that they are rendered problematic and 
subjected to scrutiny. Such administrators would not stand on their 
positions but would welcome considered input from all quarters in open 
discourse in which the aim would be to assist all education workers Ñ 
teachers, parents, administrators and others Ñ to regain power over 
educational and organisational processes. Leadership would then necessarily 
be more free-floating and could be appropriated by any participants as they 
exerted influence in self-determining ways. Through such processes the 
apparent permanence and stability of technical/managerial structures may be 
open to challenge and reconstruction by participative/professional 
organisational actors.

Implementation of policy or interpretation and appropriation of policy

Current educational policy and planning is linked strongly with national 
social and economic goals and this linkage has profound implications for 
the ways in which the purposes of education are regarded. It is significant 
that in countries like Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, the 
voice of public educators has been largely marginalised in the educational 
policy arena (Angus 1992b) as renewed emphasis has been placed on 
technical/managerial educational control. This is largely because, in 
Thatcherite terminology, education is believed to suffer from Ôprovider 
captureÕ Ñ the education profession is not to be trusted. Self-interested 
educators and education officials are claimed to have been running the 
system to suit themselves rather than the needs of children or the nation. 
This is one of a number of assumptions that seem to be shared by the main 
political groups. Accordingly, educational participants and educational 
perspectives are largely ignored in the policy arena in which schools and 
the education system are seen largely as key strategic sites in which 
pupils can be trained to contribute, individually and collectively, to the 
nationÕs economic and industrial development and competitiveness. Within 
this general approach, the essential role for education is one of 
contributing to the efficient development of a nationÕs human resources, or 
human capital, as a major part of the effort to achieve the nationÕs social 

and economic priorities.

Despite the policy rhetoric about the local management and even the self-
management (Caldwell and Spinks 1988) of schools, therefore, the school-
level reality is that a plethora of changes are being directly imposed upon 
schools from above. Through the recentralisation of major policy and 
monitoring functions, along with the devolution to schools of ÔbulkÕ or 
ÔglobalÕ funding, school managers and school councils are increasingly held 
responsible for the effective implementation of policy and management of 
the budget. Close monitoring and accountability measures are designed to 
ensure that schools use their limited autonomy to do the right thing in 
terms of imposed policies and mandates. For instance, schools in most 
states are expected to produce Development Plans and mission statements 
which are consistent with central and regional Development Plans and 
mission statements.

The school-based line managers and a managed process of school-level 
decision making legitimise central policy and the reform process, because 
these give the appearance of providing local input and therefore rendering 
current policies to some extent more acceptable. All participants, even 
virtual non-participants who merely offer passive compliance, are 
implicated. At the school level, but within the parameters of system plans 
and priorities, teachers, administrators and school councillors are 
expected to construct appropriate and specific development plans and 
detailed action plans which indicate how objectives will be realised. To 
this extent there is local, but limited, involvement. Such plans, of 
course, are generally linked to performance indicators so that local 
personnel can be held accountable for their performance in achieving the 
planned results. The focus throughout is on outcomes. Mandated policies are 
to be implemented largely unproblematically. The process allows for very 
little real discretion at the local level. The emphasis is always on the 
end-product Ñ the achievement of performance indicators, the realisation of 
action plans and development plans, and the implementation of policies such 
that prescribed results are achieved and targets are met. 



This approach is consistent with classical managerialism in which policy is 
determined by experts and the job of administrators and teachers is merely 
to implement it uncritically. It fails to take account of the results of 
the huge amount of policy research during the 1970s and 1980s which 
attempted to address the so-called Ôimplementation problemÕ Ñ the 
consistent finding that mandated policies were not implemented as policy-
makers intended because institutional-level practitioners, the Ôstreet-
level bureaucratsÕ (Lipski 1980) exercised their autonomy and discretion in 
critically appraising and re-interpreting such policy. The exercise of such 
critical scrutiny would not deny the importance of system policy in 
identifying and highlighting important areas of attention. However it would 
also seek to appropriate the policy and adapt it to the needs of the local 
school and community. This would seem to be the essence of the kind of 
educational professionalism that requires education workers to be capable 
of informed analysis of schooling in its social and political context.

From this perspective, part of the work of being a teacher, for instance, 
would be to contribute to education debates and to work with fellow 
teachers and the school community towards a position on educational issues. 
Teachers, students, administrators and school communities would develop the 
practice of critical scrutiny in the knowledge that decisions about 
education involve negotiated cultural and political choices and contested 
questions of value rather than simply questions of efficiency and 
effectiveness. Such an approach would be consistent with educators seeing 
their role as one of not merely conveying knowledge for consumption, but as 
one of Ôhelping students to become creative, critical thinkers and active 
social participants, and to become capable of redefining the nature of 
their own lives in the society in which they liveÕ (Gordon 1985). To be 
educative in this sense, educational organisations would need to embody 
principles of professional judgement, reflective practice and critical 
scrutiny. 

The current managerial press is already bringing about conservative changes 
in the nature of teaching and the role of teachers. In keeping with an 
approach to education that is consistent with principles of scientific 
management (Taylor 1947; Callahan 1962), the focus on line management gives 
apparent autonomy to the manager but in fact reduces the autonomy of both 
managers and teachers. Most destructively, it makes a clear role 
distinction between managers and non-managers, between educational 
administrators and teachers, between managersÕ market-oriented concerns 
with budgets, staffing and public relations, and teachersÕ classroom and 
pupil-oriented concerns with educational and curriculum issues (Ball 1990a; 
Angus 1992b). Consistent with the principles of corporate managerialsm, the 
roles of education workers become more fixed and formalised, there is an 
emphasis on direct supervision, and work and community relationships become 
more instrumental, impersonal and role-based. 

In contrast to such managerialism, members of participative/professional 
school communities would assert their professional judgements by refusing 
to be simply objects of policy, people to whom the policy is applied. 
Instead they could well see themselves in the appropriately educational 
position of active participants, historical actors in the creation or 
utilisation of policy in ways that are appropriate in their arenas of 
practice. They would resist the renewed elevation of managerialism into an 
increasingly unchallengable position (Ball 1990b) and, with it, the current 
reduction of important social, cultural and educational problems to 
management concerns that can be rendered soluble by managerialist 
techniques. They would resist the current reconstruction of educational 
work along technical/managerial lines and the shift from tentative 
experiments in participative/professional approaches in the governance of 
schools to tried and tested technical/managerial forms.

Educational researchers and theorists have long argued that one of the 
weaknesses of the traditional occupational culture of teaching is that, in 
various ways, it acts to preserve the status quo. In particular, teachers 

are said typically to go about their work in ways which emphasise the 
individualist and isolated nature of the way teaching has been historically 
and socially constructed. Teaching is seen as a private activity, separated 
from the social context, and is assumed to be politically neutral. The 
appropriate role for a teacher is therefore generally seen as a public 
servant or teacher technician (Bullough et al. 1985). These aspects of 
teacher culture are reinforced by current conservative policies. 
Alternative understandings of the nature of teacherÕs work, which had 
become to be asserted to some extent during the past two decades or so, 
have become correspondingly marginalised. These include the notion that 
teachers and school communities would take the initiative in critically 
appraising their teaching practice and the experience of schooling. Such 
critical questioning did not come easily or readily to teachers, however, 
because like most of us they are socialised into the prevailing 
bureaucratic, technical/managerial rationality. This is precisely why 
experience in participative/professional organisational forms, in schools 
and society more broadly, is important: participation is itself educative 
as participants learn to contribute to dialogue over issues that are 
problematic. Such an educative process would would seem to me to be 
critical in democratic versions of professionalism.

Community as market or as education participants

The way people participate in school organisation is influenced by 
entrenched structures and their associated patterns of power relationships 
(Angus and Rizvi 1989). Despite a rhetoric of reform these are likely to be 
sustained in often subtle ways that involve the culturally and historically 
constituted dispositions of particular groups. Amongst the strongest of 
these are institutionalised expectations about the nature of education and 
educational administration, and the familiar roles of education 
participants. Because of widely shared historical understandings of these 
matters, participants in educational governance tend to shape themselves to 
fit the pattern of established, ÔneutrallyÕ defined role positions. There 
is a fairly common set of expectations, for instance, of people who occupy 
the roles of pupil, teacher, parent, principal and so on. The current 
rhetoric of local management of schools does not, in my view, challenge the 
traditional, technical/managerial construction of these role positions. 
Instead, participants in education are expected to fit roles and management 
processes which are centrally defined. The role of the individual or group 
is represented as one of participating according to appropriate rules, 
policies and processes.

The guiding principles which informed notions of decentralisation in the 
state of Victoria in the early 1980s were ones of participation and 
collaboration in a spirit of democratisation and community involvement in 
local schools. Similar themes entered the education debate around 
Australia. In the 1990s, in Victoria, NSW and elsewhere, the emphasis is 
upon notions of effective and efficient institutionally-based educational 
management which is argued to result from the reduction of bureaucratic 
control and interference at the school level. The reduction of central 
control is linked with the deregulation of school zones. This has enabled 
schools to be placed in relation to each other as competitors in an 
educational market. Within such a relationship, quite clearly, individual 
schools will have to compete with other schools for pupils (or market 
share) in such a way that, according to the advocates of this style of 
institutional management, the more efficiently managed and entrepreneurial 
schools are likely to be successful.

Part of the recent electoral appeal of the Coalition policies in Victoria 
was their promise to ÔfixÕ the education ÔproblemÕ by putting schools on 
this type of market footing. Within the demands of the market in which 
schools must compete, schools themselves become more competitive places. 
Education may then be regarded as a commodity which gives its recipients a 
competitive advantage rather than as a social good of fundamental 
importance in its own right. The interests that are privileged are those 
that are assumed to be consistent with the competitive interests of the 

nation, namely, the wealth producers, accumulators of capital, those who 
can contribute to a productive culture and high-tech future. It follows 
that the interests of the socially and culturally marginalised, those not 
in tune with the new and competitive Australia, or simply those not 
organised into constituencies vying for a slice of the action, are less 
likely to be served or to be accommodated in curriculum which is not made 
relevant for distinctive communities and local cultures. Unless we are very 
careful the result is likely to be increased polarisation of schools and 
educational attainment along lines of social class and ethnicity (Ball 
1990). 
In the managerial, market-oriented perspective, society is envisaged as a 
collection of possessive individuals who, as human capital, seek from 
education the best return for their investment of time, effort and money. 
The dominance of values associated with this approach has meant the 
marginalisation or incorporation of other values associated especially with 
equity, justice and community. However, such competing understandings of 
the fundamental purposes of schooling reflect different educational 
visions, different notions of the good society and, importantly, different 
conceptions of the appropriate relationship between schools and their 
communities. The interest of the consumer parent or the consumer community 
will be specifically in the maximisation of immediate satisfaction from 
what the school is able to offer students in terms of their own economic 
advancement in a competitive marketplace. Parents may be welcomed as school 
governors or school councillors if they can contribute valuable financial 
management skills, but their main role in education is to make the right 
choice of school.
Those community members who do become participants in education management 
are likely, for a host of reasons, to come from the ranks of Ôconcerned 
citizensÕ Ñ those articulate, relatively prominent and often privileged 
members of the community who are likely to be found also on other local 
bodies and service associations. The rhetoric of local school management 
implies that limited opportunities for some parents to sit on the governing 
bodies of schools is equivalent to total community involvement. Community 
interests are regarded as relatively homogeneous so that what is presented 
is Ôa homogenised view of parents and community which overlooks major 
social and cultural differences, even antagonismsÕ (Seddon et al. 1990, 
p.45) in favour of a neutral concern with Ôgood managementÕ.
Education is therefore reduced to school management problems that are 
represented as being amenable to direct solutions within the school. This 
is consistent with the mainstream literature in educational administration 
and, more importantly, with developments in the broad educational policy 
arena within which technical/ managerial notions pervade the rhetoric of 
accountability, corporate management, school effectiveness, centralised 
curriculum, national testing and the like. The narrow focus of education 
management on schools as neutral institutions that are to manage budgets, 
implement policy and deliver quality outputs, diverts attention from the 
problematic nature of education in its social context and from the social 
and cultural issues which education must address. Concern with corpoeate 
management and program budgets sits easily with the market rationality 
which has become the dominant feature in educational debates. Its emphasis 
on efficiency, which in education management becomes increasingly complex 
as greater budgetary powers are devolved to self-managing schools, may well 
increase rather than decrease the distance between communities and schools. 
Community representatives in the form of school councillors or governors 
increasingly must spend meeting time working on (or giving approval to) 
school budgets rather than considering educational issues. The pressure is 
strong for education systems to be integrated into the mechanisms of the 
commercial market yet schools have long been regarded as significant social 
institutions. By treating education as a commercial product and schools as 
competitors in a marketplace, we are altering the nature of participation 
in what for many people is the most significant social institution after 
the family (Bastian et al 1986).
Given the press to corporate managerialism and the reduction of education 
to the service of the market, the economy and national interests, the 
priority given to schooling as a public good in the past will need to be 
re-asserted. From the emerging new right perspective, the citizen as 

individual is sovereign, with freedom from interference of others in the 
pursuit of individual interests. The community in this perspective is 
simply the locale in which the market operates, and local management of 
schools pits schools against each other to win customers. Within an 
alternative view, one which emphasises social democracy, community members 
may be seen as active social and political beings (Held 1989) whose 
individual existence merges into membership of a collectivity which brings 
with it rights and responsibilities of participationÑ including 
participation in local school governance. This would be consistent with 
participative/professional notions of school organisation.

An educational project which incorporates notions of participation and 
social democracy, and questions whether the best education for children is 
to be provided within the individualist, competitive and managerial 
approach, needs to be asserted (Connell 1991; Quicke 1988; Wexler 1989). 
Such a project could well embrace forms of local school management which 
would be developed collectively with the partnership of school and 
community members. The approach would need to make explicit, and to 
confront, barriers to participation experienced by particular individuals 
and groups, and to make connections between local issues and the broader 
social, political and economic context. The kind of genuine democratic 
participation in school governance that might result from such a project 
need not run counter to efficient site management (Rizvi 1986). It may even 
result in better decisions and greater commitment to those decisions, and 
would also stimulate greater democratic awareness of and commitment to 
democratic participation in a broader sense. All of these are significant 
but, in my view, democratic participative/professional involvement would be 
most important because it could raise for scrutiny a host of issues related 
to the purpose and meaning of education that are left dormant under 
technical/managerial notions of educational organisation.

Conclusion: predetermined results or uncertain consequences

Within the kind of participative/professional school organisation that I 
have advocated in this paper schools would be less certain and less 
predictable places than current technical/managerial approaches to 
educational administration and policy would require. There would be less 
concern with matters of administrative technique that could be drawn upon 
to ensure the efficient and effective implementation and policy and 
realisation of planned results. Such linear and insrumentally rational 
thinking would be rejected in favour of an acceptance of consequences that 
were somewhat uncertain, but which would result from participantsÕ 
generation of their own meanings rather than unproblematic acceptance of 
imposed meanings. There would be a rejection of the neutrality and 
bureaucratic rationality that is associated with managerialism and which 
induces subordinates to surrender their professional responsibility. From 
this perspective organisations could not be seen as consisting of neutral 
and carefully delineated role positions but of persons of creativity and 
insight who reflect on experience and use such reflection as a basis for 
connections with the wider context of schooling and for negotiation with 
others in the organisational politics of the school. As a result, while 
mandated policy may not be implemented unproblematically or result in 
linear effects, the critical appropriation and adaptation of policy at the 
school level by participative/professional communities may well result in 
sound and considered educational outcomes, which may be arguably better and 
more appropriate in their particular locales.



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