This doctoral study draws upon interviews with nine curriculum-based FE college middle-managers, and three college strategic plan documents, to critically analyse middle-management identity. Through the use of an analytical framework based on Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical ‘method’ the study shows that when middle-managers talk about their professional practice they are preoccupied with data-metrics. Consequently, they are recognised as ‘disciplined subjects’; disciplined by those data-metrics materially inscribed within the discursive regimes of their college strategic plan documents. The study additionally indicates that the more hierarchically senior the middle-manager the greater the intensity of focus upon data-metrics at the expense of institutional social relations, whereby their preoccupations with data-metrics yield de-socialising effects between themselves and key institutional participants such as teachers, learners and support staff. The study further suggests that while the middle-managers within this study were curriculum-based they were not curriculum-focused; findings which were consistent through the range of middle-management levels: senior-middle, lower-middle and middle-middle, and at separate college sites. Considered together these findings raise a number of important questions for the crucial role of curriculum-based middle-managers, particularly where middle-management as a function is recognised as the means by which policy implementation is secured yet where curriculum-based work, when understood as necessarily tied to pedagogic practices, requires a focus around ‘the learner’; a learner not ontologically foregrounded as data, but in authentically social terms.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:679987 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Fort, Anthony |
| Publisher | University of Manchester |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/constituting-the-managerial-subject-an-investigation-into-middlemanagement-in-fe(56f98fc6-c3f0-4b98-a692-117efb6775e8).html |
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