A Canadian study, sponsored by the Ministry of Education Skills and Training (MEST 1995), Province of British Columbia, identifies a number of common themes that now appear to characterise the education and training policies of the governments of the United States, Australia, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, New Zealand and Japan. These themes include: a commitment to lifelong learning/recurrent education systems, a gearing up for international competition, a commitment to excellence and effectiveness in education and training, development of closer links between education and the economy and finally encouragement of greater efficiencies in education and training systems.

The emphasis placed on the economic value of education (OECD 1988, 1989, 1991) is justified on the grounds that national economies are entering new and uncertain times characterised by increasing globalisation of economic activity, rapidly changing markets, increased international competition for goods and labour, new technological innovations and the movement from mass production to flexible specialisation in industrial processes (Castells 1993: 15-18). Given the urgency of adapting to these new economic conditions, educational systems are being asked to fully contribute to the economic adaptations required in modern societies; societies that are variously referred to as post-capitalist societies (Drucker 1992), post-industrial societies (Block 1990), post-Fordist societies (Mathews 1989), or, as Thurow (1996:3) puts it, new societies where capitalism plays a 'new economic game with new rules requiring new strategies to win'.

Another feature of these discourses is that they suggest these new times generate new types of work and work organisation that require workers with new knowledge, skills and attitudes to meet the challenges of the 'new economic order' and point to the importance of education and training to meet these new challenges. (Gee, Hull & Lankshear 1996:xiv).

This ‘economic turn’ in the educational policies of governments has been called the ‘new vocationalism’ by a number of educationalists (Purvis & Walford 1988, Grubb 1996, Ball 1994). New vocationalism emphasises the need for all educational institutions to contribute to national economic development and, for the most part, are embedded within human capital theories of economic performance. They promote the idea that economic performance is closely connected to the skill level of the workforce and are prominent features in the educational discourses of most OECD governments (Papadopolous 1996).

This ‘economic turn’ also plays itself out more broadly in government calls for greater efficiencies and effectiveness in public sector services, forming part of a contemporary discourse, known in Australia as economic rationalism. Economic rationalism (sometimes referred to as market liberalism) promotes the view that governments should withdraw from many of their traditional social responsibilities and promote market-style environments and commercial business practices within State services, including education (Pusey 1991, Marginson 1994). Economic rationalists call for the installation of a culture of 'enterprise and 'excellence' within the public sector (OECD/CERI 1989, Du Gay 1996: 56) and advocate increased accountability, a greater focus on quality and greater competition in public sector services. Economic rationalism is also commonly associated with government policies that seek to privatise State owned assets, reduce public spending and decrease budgetary allocations for public sector services such as education.

The Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector has not been immune from these major policy shifts in education. TAFE, once viewed as being synonymous with VET, is now only one of many providers. Schools, universities, industries and private training providers are all seen as being part of VET (Maglen 1996:3). Federal and State governments have legislated to change structural arrangements in education and training systems and have used monetary policy to promote an increased focus on VET in all publicly funded educational institutions. They have encouraged the creation of a new competitive education and training market by sanctioning the establishment of private providers in VET. They have promoted a competitive ethos within publicly funded educational institutions and have extended the public accreditation processes of education and training into industry and organisational training programs. Publically funded TAFE systems have also been the subject of continuing reform. In New South Wales, for example, restructuring has been a constant theme for the organisation since the publication of the government commissioned report TAFE's Commission for the 1990's: Restructuring Vocational, Basic and Adult Education in NSW (Scott 1990).

Teachers in TAFE have experienced the impact of these government policies on their everyday pedagogical practices. As some recent studies have shown (Smith et al 1997) the implementation of competency based education and training, a central platform in the policies of the new vocationalism, is considered by many TAFE teachers as representing a radical change in the way they conceptualise and undertake their work. New curriculum designs, assessment methods, recognition of prior learning processes, the use of new learning technologies and the establishment of national curricula are all seen as not only making new demands on teachers but altering teachers' understanding of their role within the educational process. Teachers and TAFE managers have also had to come to grips with the ‘market-oriented’ policies of government, including the establishment of private providers in vocational education and training, increased competitive practices within the public sector, new tendering arrangements for supplying education and training services and an increased emphasis fee-for-service courses.

TAFE personnel have also been the focus of policies to do with quality and accountability in education. A number of reports have been commissioned by governments to investigate the quality of teaching and the new skills, knowledge and attributes needed by teachers in the emerging educational environment (NCVER 1990, VEETAC, 1993, Chappell & Melville, 1995). A common conclusion reached by these reports is that teachers in TAFE need to be 'new' teachers in the educational and economic environment of the late nineteen nineties.

Over the next ten years the role of the VET provider will change significantly from the 'stand and deliver' classroom based teacher to richer and more diversified roles of facilitator, researcher, consultant, strategic partner, designer, strategist, manager, communicator, career developer, assessor and accreditation specialist. ( Lepani cited by Diplock 1996: 58)

The debate over government reforms to VET has commonly revolved either around problems to do with issues of implementation (Sweet, 1993, Curtain 1994) or the professional competence of teachers working in the new educational environment. Therefore, teachers seem to be positioned in this debate as requiring new knowledge and skills in order to implement the reforms (NCVER, 1991), they are asked to work in different ways (Diplock 1996) and to undertake new roles and responsibilities in vocational education and training (VEETAC, 1993, NBEET, 1993. MACTEQT, 1994).

However, in this paper I argue that this position makes an overly instrumental means-ends connection between teachers' knowledge and skills and the professional practice of teaching. It fails to appreciate that when teachers are asked to 'do things differently' in their everyday teaching practices they are also being called on to become different teachers; that is, to have different understandings of their role in education, to have different relationships with students, to conceptualise their professional and vocational knowledge differently, to change their understanding of who they are in vocational education and training. In short, to change their identity. Taking this perspective, the current educational policies of government can therefore be seen as not only changing the institutional practices of TAFE but also constructing new identities for teachers working in this institution.

Making a connection between the institutional practices of work and identity formation is based on the acknowledgement in social theory that all social practices, including work practices, must be meaningful to the people involved (Du Gay 1996:40-41). To conduct any social practice social actors must have a conception of it in order to think meaningfully about it. The production of meaning is therefore a necessary condition for the functioning of all social practices. An individual's identification with shared social meanings, understandings and sense making constructions constitute identity formation and therefore provides a process of reality construction through which social actors interpret particular events, actions, objects, utterances, or situations in distinctive ways. It therefore provides a mechanism by which individuals can make sense of their own social practices. The claim made here is that the policies of government are now constructing new meaning making practices in TAFE and at the same time disrupting the previous institutional practices that formerly contributed to the construction of TAFE teachers’ identities.

For the most part, conceptions of TAFE teacher identity are configured around the idea of professional practice. Teaching is regarded as professional work and teachers are positioned as belonging to a particular professional community, sharing particular characteristics (NBEET 1993, MACTEQT 1994). The characteristics that distinguish professional work from other occupations are generally based on the idea that professions hold a body of specialised knowledge and, given the specialised nature of professional knowledge, society surrenders a degree of control to individual members of professions, who in turn are expected to exercise ethical responsibility and self-regulation in their professional interactions with the public (Winter & Maish, 1991). This leads to the idea that all members of a profession share a common professional identity, based on particular sets of knowledge, ethical practices and underpinning values. Professions are therefore socially constructed as a 'knowledge elite' (Etzi-Levi, 1989) based on their monopoly over an area of specialised knowledge.

While teachers have generally been located within this definition (VEETAC, 1993, NBEET 1993, MACTEQT, 1994), this positioning is now not without problems. The postmodern and poststructural ‘turn’ in intellectual debates have undermined the conception of knowledge that has traditionally been used to legitimise professional identity (Usher & Edwards 1994). More recent work done in the area of cultural studies (Hall & Du Gay 1996, Du Gay 1997) has also not only problematised modern conceptions of identity but has foregrounded the power of discourse to construct the social realities that ground individuals ‘sense of who they are’.

This standpoint rejects conceptions of identity that either assume a knowing conscious subject at the centre of subjectivity or characterise identity as the product of the social and economic conditions that exist at particular historical moments, regarding these explanations as inadequate and incomplete. What emerges is a much more ambiguous conception of identity, one that foregrounds multiplicity, contingency and ambiguity within the concept. It takes a processual view of self-formation regarding it as always incomplete and subject to continuing re-formation. Some contemporary theorists argue that identity is a modern fiction (Rorty 1989), an invention of modernity (Bauman in Hall & Du Gay 1996) or a concept now operating ‘under erasure’ (Hall 1996:1-2) with some suggesting that individuals are always capable of being different kinds of people in the multiple discourses that circulate within their life-worlds (Gee, Hull and Lankshear 1996: 10).

From this position the construction of TAFE teacher identity is therefore intimately connected to the discourses that circulate both in the educational policies of government and in the institutional sites where TAFE teachers work. Discourses act as powerful mechanisms of reality construction or as Foucault puts it, discourses do not describe reality but:

systematically form the objects of which they speak ....Discourses are not about objects, they do not identify objects, they constitute them and in the practice of doing so conceal their own invention. (Foucault 1977: 49)

This Foucaldian perspective provides a radically different reading of the way policy operates in institutions. Traditionally, policy is regarded as a site where conscious social agents actively engage in its formulation and implementation. Social actors contest policy, highlight contradictions, re-interpret meaning and form alliances. However, the poststructural perspective rejects this position, claiming that government policies are discursive practices and therefore, like all discourses hold within them the ambiguous power of representation; the power of naming; the power to construct particular realities or as Ball (1994:21) describes it, the power by which ‘certain possibilities for thought are constructed’

This discursive approach therefore suggests that the current policies of vocational education and training reform cannot be seen as representing a world as it is but is itself a 'world-making practice’; that is a practice that creates a world discursively (Scott & Usher, 1996: 26-28). The policy discourses of new vocationalism and economic rationalism act as powerful mechanisms that construct new educational realities for teachers working in TAFE and thus become implicated in the formation of teachers’ understandings of who they are in education. While this power is never absolute, being mediated by other discourses that circulate within the institutional setting of TAFE and in the broader social, cultural and political sites that make up the life-worlds of TAFE teachers, these discourses have, nevertheless, powerful effects on the formation of teacher identity in so far as they construct new meaning making practices and new institutional realities in TAFE workplaces.

The power of policy to construct particular realities for people working in the institutions of education is not only derived from its location within government but is also enhanced by wider discourses that circulate outside of government. Grubb (1996), for example, acknowledges this when he traces the emergence of new vocationalism in the educational policies of the United States. He suggests that the rationale for this development involved discourses that contained 'insistent economic rhetoric' concerning 'the threat to our country's future' and the 'rising tide of mediocrity in the schools, causing a decline in competitiveness with the Japanese, the South Koreans and the Germans (1996:2) and this insistent economic rhetoric can clearly be seen in a number of Australian government reports (Dawkins 1989, Australian Education Council Review Committee 1991: 6, Mayer 1992: 5)

The discourse of economic rationalism also contributes to an antipathetic construction of public sector institutions, such as education, by suggesting that the public sector fails to meet the needs of contemporary society and has to be reformed along more commercial lines. Government policies restructure the management of public educational institutions in similar ways to those that operate in the private sector. The language of the commercial world is adopted by these policy discourses. (Pusey 1991, Marginson 1994) and this commercial turn is justified on the grounds that unless public education makes these necessary changes it will be incapable of providing either the quantity or quality of educational services required in contemporary societies.

Implicit in this discourse is the notion that the operation of the ‘market’ delivers more effective and efficient services to the public. It points to the inefficiencies of the public service and its costs to taxpayers and commonly promotes the view that the private sector is a better, more efficient system to supply society with the goods and services that it requires. Ontological priority is given to the norms, values and interests that circulate in the commercial world and public sector management including that found within the educational sector now 'talks the talk' of entrepreneurialism, competitive advantage, customers, markets, profit, enterprise, value adding and bottom lines.

The TAFE system is not immune from this new discursive practice. The students, communities and industries that TAFE serves become clients and consumers. VET becomes a competitive market, in which courses are constructed as flexible modularised commodities that are bought and sold. TAFE teachers become industry consultants, marketing strategists, entrepreneurs and facilitators of learning and the private sector is encouraged to compete with TAFE in a new education and training market. All of these discourses combine together acting as powerful 'world making' practices within the institution of TAFE. It is the degree to which this new discursive reality has influenced teachers’ and managers’ understanding of who they are in this new institution that is the focus of this paper.

A series of interviews was conducted with thirteen TAFE teachers, eight senior head teachers and seven college directors in NSW. The purpose of these interviews was to allow TAFE staff to speak about the changes that had occurred in their institution in order to identify the degree to which the new policy discourses of government had been taken up in the meaning making practices that circulated within the organisation. The interviews were all held on site and the interview protocol was semi-structured with the interviewer being given a specific brief to cover three areas. Interviewees were asked to speak about:

The transcripts of these conversations were then analysed in order to find out the extent to which the discourses of new vocationalism and economic rationalism had entered the talk of TAFE staff when speaking of their work. The analysis involved looking for the discursive ‘markers’ of new vocationalism and economic rationalism that were found in the ‘talk’. The ‘markers’ of new vocationalism were derived largely from the the MEST report (1995:7) which nominated:

The report identified these factors as the common characteristics of government educational reform policies in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Scotland, Canada and New Zealand. The discursive ‘markers’ of economic rationalism were developed from a variety of sources, including federal and state government policy documents and the work of a number of economic commentators including Nevile 1993, Pusey 1991 and Marginson 1994. These ‘markers’ included:

The results of this analysis revealed that while the policy discourses of new vocationalism and economic rationalism are now prominent features in the institutional ‘talk’ of teachers and managers, they are used by these groups to construct quite different institutional realities. These different groups privilege different features of these discourses in their institutional ‘talk’. College directors, for example, ‘talk the talk’ of the commercial world, a discourse notably absent in the ’talk’ of teachers and senior head teachers. While the discourses of new vocationalism appear much more prominently in the ‘talk’ of teachers and senior head teachers than college directors.

The talk of college directors constructs TAFE as a changing institution entering a new competitive education and training market. Indeed the language of the ‘market’ is the favoured language of college directors. ‘Competition’, ‘the market’, ‘private providers’, ‘quality’, ‘efficiency’, ‘commercial orientation’,‘ entrepreneurialism’,‘ fee-payingc ourses’,‘ internationalisation’, ‘client focus’, ‘customer driven’, and ‘the bottom line’ are expressions that college directors use when speaking of the new TAFE.

However they also speak of reduced public funding and link this to the need for greater efforts in income generation and cost cutting by the institution. ‘Doing more with less’, ‘running as a lean machine’, ‘more economic thinking’, ‘cutting costs’, ‘reducing costs’, ’better marketing’, ‘generating more income’, ‘selling training packages’ , ‘greater emphasis on fee-paying courses’ and developing ‘cost effective courses’ typify the language that TAFE managers use when speaking of reduced government funding.

The discourses of economics also surface when college directors construct new roles for teachers in the ‘new’ institution. Teachers must be ‘educational resource developers’, ‘market focused’, ‘designers of learning packages’, consultants to industry’, ‘more responsive to clients’, ‘more innovative’, and entrepreneurial’ in the new institution. They need to ‘liaise with industry’, be more ‘customer driven’ and more sensitive to ‘economic considerations’ in their work. The qualities and values that TAFE teachers now need are also closely linked to these economic discourses. Teachers must be ‘more flexible’, ‘‘facilitators of learning’, actively contribute to the change process’, ‘maintain closer links with industry’, ‘be more accountable’, ‘focus more on quality’, ‘be open to change’, meet the needs of customers’ , ‘be more loyal to the organisation’ and ‘look at ways of generating income’.

Finally, when college directors construct this new institutional reality they link it quite explicitly to job security. Unless TAFE teachers 'lift their game' in this new competitive world, job losses are inevitable. Teachers could not continue to undertake their work as they had in the past, because they now needed to consider issues of 'quality' and deliver 'that little bit extra' in order to make sure that their 'programs are as competitive as a private provider'. Without change teaching jobs are in jeopardy:

There are a lot more people out there who are running training courses and they are in competition with us and we won’t have jobs.

In stark contrast to the institutional reality constructed by college directors, the language of increasing competition, income generation, entrepreneurialism and the new education and training market, are conspicuous by their absence in the talk of senior head teachers and teachers. None of those interviewed used the new language of business in their construction of the institution.

The talk of teachers and senior head teachers focused much more on the issues of reduced funding, increasing workload and the negative impact of organisational restructuring on their work. Some were highly critical of the changes speaking of them in terms of‘increasing workloads ‘, ‘fewer resources’, ‘more administrative work’, ‘less teaching time’, ‘shorter courses’ and an emphasis ‘on training rather than education’ ,in the institution. Some were quite scathing in their comments suggesting that organisational restructuring had undermined the morale of teachers by changing the institutional culture of TAFE:

TAFE always used to be a friendly and helpful place, it's not friendly anymore, it's not friendly to the teachers either so you get to the stage where you think they are going to chop courses and make teachers redundant ( Senior Head Teacher)

Another significant difference between the talk of college directors and teachers also appeared when teachers spoke of the values and qualities needed by TAFE teachers. Unlike college directors, teachers and senior head teachers emphasise ideas such as a commitment to ‘access’, ‘equity’, fairness’, ‘respect for difference’, ‘individual need’, ‘personal development’ and ‘second chance educational opportunity ’. They also nominate qualities such as ‘keeping up to date’, ‘maintaining credibility’, professional commitment’, ‘respect for students’ and general qualities such as ‘honesty’, ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘integrity’.

The issue of job security also looms large in the talk of teachers and senior head teachers, indeed this was a feature of institutional talk common to all three groups. Organisational restructuring was linked to job losses by teachers and senior head teachers: ‘they probably won’t need any of us, that is the way we feel’, ‘some teachers have been made redundant’, ‘there isn’t enough work here for everybody’ with some suggesting that the reduction in courses and the increased focus on ‘getting students through as quickly as possible at as little cost as possible’, not only threatened job security but reduced the quality of courses.

In contrast to the new economic discourses of reform, the policies of new vocationalism were less prominent in college directors talk. Only three aspects of new vocationalism were spoken of and included; flexible delivery strategies, closer links with industry and changing student profiles. College directors generally saw these aspects of reform as primarily the responsibility of teachers in TAFE and conceded that these changes required a considerable degree of up-skilling by teachers in order to meet the challenges that these issues presented. flexible delivery required teachers to have ‘ new teaching techniques’, to ‘deliver total learning packages’ and to ‘keep up with new educational technologies’. Teachers needed to ‘network with industry’, be able to ‘teach in the workplace’ and ‘be prepared to move around’. They also need to work with ‘students from schools’ and be conscious that students were now ‘more customers than students’.

The discourses of new vocationalism were, however, now very much more a part of the meaning making practices of TAFE teachers and senior head teachers. Competence, flexible delivery, open-learning, student-focused learning, modules, competency based training, facilitation, assessment, the recognition of prior learning, links with industry and school to work transition were expressions that littered the discourses of teachers. Comments such as ‘there is more flexibility in courses’,‘I'm involved in setting up an open learning centre’, ‘there will be self-paced learning units’, ‘the teacher will act as a facilitator’, ‘everything is heading the way of modules and CBT’, ‘the assessment associated with CBT is more specific’, ‘greater industry involvement is what we are aiming for’, ‘our students have changed, there are more young people’, typified the discourses of teachers.

While a number of teachers and senior head teachers also spoke of the difficulties of implementing the policies of the new vocationalism, particularly at a time of decreased resources, generally their responses revealed that they saw little contradiction between the discourses of new vocationalism and their understanding of their educational identity and the role of TAFE . Tensions that did emerge were confined to a perceived over-emphasis on industry need at the expense of individual student needs and the increasing number of young people in TAFE courses which did not fit the adult education focus that many teachers in TAFE spoke of as a central feature of their professional practice. Some teachers and senior head teachers also expressed concern that the emphasis on ‘training’ rather than ‘education’ together with reductions in course time and a perceived pressure to get students through as quickly as possible reduced the quality of TAFE provision.

Students have to learn independently they have to do that because courses here at TAFE have been cut, the hours have been cut down and we have to push students through much faster.

The results of this study suggest that the institutional discourses of college directors, teachers and senior head teachers in TAFE NSW construct significantly different institutional realities for the organisation. As managers of the institution, the discourses of college directors, create an institutional world dominated by the norms, values and interests that circulate in the commercial world of business. TAFE management discoursess now speak of entrepreneurialism, competition, customers, markets, profit, enterprise and bottom lines and TAFE teachers are themselves constructed by these discourses as the personnel who must adopt the norms, values and interests of the commercial world in order to achieve increased efficiency and profitability for the organisation. This construction is also supported by more coercive management discourses that suggest that unless teachers adopt these new institutional many will be without jobs. These management discourses are made more powerful by being embedded within wider economic discourses that construct post-industrial societies as entering new and uncertain economic times and by educational discourses that privilege learning outside of educational institutions as the privileged site for learning. Government policy discourses that characterise the existing public sector of the economy as inefficient and in dire need of reform also contribute to the legitimisation of the new management discourses in TAFE.

However while these discourses combine together to construct a particular and powerful institutional reality for TAFE, the localised discourses of teachers and senior head teachers build a significantly different and in some ways, oppositional reality to that constructed by managers. The talk of teachers and senior head teachers reflect quite different norms, values and interests than those embedded within the discourses of business. Words such as 'equity','access', personal and social development', 'second chance education' and 'adult education' are more closely associated with the discourses of liberal education than the economic discourses of business. Indeed they are much more consistent with the language that characterised TAFE after the publication of the Kangan Report in 1974. This Report specifically rejected an economic 'manpower' orientation for technical education and promoted TAFE as an educational institution with important social purposes (ACOTAFE 1974: xviii).

Using the principles established in the landmark UNESCO report 'Learning to Be: The World of Education Today and Tomorrow, – the right of all people to education and lifelong learning', published in 1972, the Kangan Report constructed a new identity for technical education in Australia by articulating the purposes and aims of this sector of education. For the first time, an educational philosophy was set out for vocational education in Australia, based on the principles of access, equity, the primacy of the individual learner in the learning process, the need for continuing and life-long learning and an increased emphasis on adult education. It constructed a much broader educational and social role for TAFE conceptualising this new role as a means to:

This study suggests that the discourses of the Kangan Report and the government policies that emerged after its publication, constructed an institutional reality for TAFE and its teachers, that continues to provide teachers with a sense of who they are in education. The resistance by teachers to the new institutional reality being constructed by the contemporary discourses of economics is, in no small measure, the result of the success of the liberal education discourses of post-Kangan TAFE in constructing a particular institutional identity for this organisation.

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