The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity

TLDR

The paper examines the origins, processes, and effects of performativity in the public sector. Performativity compels practitioners to align with targets, indicators, and evaluations, abandoning personal beliefs to adopt a calculative, enterprising self. The study finds that performativity enables advanced liberal governance, offers success for some while causing inauthenticity and resistance for others, and ultimately increases opacity through fabricated constructions.

Abstract

This paper is the latest in a short series on the origins, processes and effects of performativity in the public sector. Performativity, it is argued, is a new mode of state regulation which makes it possible to govern in an ‘advanced liberal’ way. It requires individual practitioners to organize themselves as a response to targets, indicators and evaluations. To set aside personal beliefs and commitments and live an existence of calculation. The new performative worker is a promiscuous self, an enterprising self, with a passion for excellence. For some, this is an opportunity to make a success of themselves, for others it portends inner conflicts, inauthenticity and resistance. It is also suggested that performativity produces opacity rather than transparency as individuals and organizations take ever greater care in the construction and maintenance of fabrications.