Abstract:
The roles and expectations of managers in the Australian vocational education and training (VET) sector are changing under dynamically complex conditions. The adoption of a more 'open' national training market as a government policy initiative has led to significant changes within VET providers and significant challenges for VET managers. Drawing on topological approaches to the study of organisational change, this paper explores modes of organising education in post-compulsory education. It promotes a theoretical and empirical imperative to look keenly to hybrid spaces to challenge established modes of coordinating and governing education organizations. Essentially interrogatory, these spaces open up the possibility of the negotiation of identity across differences of private and public education. Using case data from a national, empirical research project, the argument is made that VET organisations are located in a complicated nexus between public policy, corporate strategy, and educational practice. As the central node in this nexus, strategy offers ways of securing identities and spatialities that are specially valued in VET. More broadly, spaces exist that provide the terrain for elaborating new organizational identities. 'Co-operatives', networks and partnerships constitute some of these. Possibilities of change lie in the contradictions of identity and spatiality within established modes of coordinating post-compulsory education as well as in site-specific constructions of spatiality, identity and organization.