School systems are shifting towards forms of post-bureaucratic governance (PBG), implying higher levels of school autonomy, choice, and performance-based management. Under this governance approach, which combines forms of administrative and market accountability, schools face greater levels of competition and external pressure to perform. Schools…

Since the 1990s, charter schools have spread rapidly across the nation. The replication and expansion of charter schools has become a common feature of the portfolio management model which situates the district as strategic manager of a choice-based system including traditional and charter schools. Yet, many school districts have experienced…

This paper analyses, from the perspective of the political sociology of policy instruments, the adoption and re-contextualisation of School Autonomy with Accountability (SAWA) reforms in Spain, with a particular focus on the region of Madrid. Over the last few decades, Madrid has adopted a wide range of education policies that have contributed to…

This contribution focuses on quality assurance (QA) agencies in the sphere of higher education. It develops a theoretical framework that interrelates systems theory with Gramsci's theory of hegemony with a view to situating this new control of universities in the broader context of a further differentiation of society and emerging heterarchical…

Since the launch of the Lisbon Agenda, European higher education systems have gravitated towards a common policy blueprint for governance that concentrates power in the hands of executive authorities and increases accountability to external stakeholders. The Polish system remains an outlier, providing an informative case study of a clash between…

Community colleges in the United States and Canada operate within postsecondary environments that are being reshaped by neoliberal policymaking. As community colleges in both countries respond to the pressures of neoliberalism, their capacity to serve students already marginalized by their "nontraditional" status may be affected in…

We examine how discourses of leadership and responsibilisation are used in contemporary universities to deepen neoliberal administration and further the corporate university's business plan by restructuring and redescribing academic work. Strategically, responsibilisation discourse, promoted as "distributed leadership", is a technology…