Session Information
28 SES 02, Standards, Knowledges and Assessment
Paper Session
Contribution
This communication proposes to enlighten some different politics driven by the European policy of standards in the society of knowledge (Lawn, 2011). If market and competition are often described as important neo-liberal drivers in the agenda of the European Commission, the policy of standards implement other political technologies related to a worldwide circulation of tools from New Public Management and quality insurance (Busch, 2011). These new political technologies challenge the State and its capacity to edict legal norms to govern education systems while new actors (experts and stakeholders) are involved in the design of European standards at the opposite of classical modes of representation of interests (polity) (Lawn, Normand, 2014a; Normand, 2014b). These technologies legitimates new forms of political liberalism and procedures in decision-making at European level. The process of rationalization of a European government by objectives transforms also the formats of information used by policy-makers (indicators, benchmarks, best practices). At least, political technologies shape a new individual agency of the Lifelong Learner in delegitimizing the statist or communitarian modes of responsibility and solidarity in which education is experienced as a collective good (Normand, 2014c). Through an opposition between standardization of objects and normalization of practices, the communication will propose a reflexive account on the way these politics reduce the ontology of human beings in underestimating the variety of modes of their involvement in the social world and their attachment to different principles of justice (Star, 1991, Lampland & Leigh Star, 2008; Thévenot, 2002, 2009). It will use some theoretical concepts of the French pragmatist sociology to reflect on the possibility of a new criticism (Boltanski, Thévenot, 1999, Boltanski, Chiapello, 2005).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Boltanski, Luc & Laurent Thévenot (2006) On Justification: Economies of Worth, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boltanski, L., Chiapello (Ève), (2005) The Role of criticism in the dynamics of capitalism in: Max Miller (Ed), Worlds of Capitalism: Institutions, Economics, Performance and Governance in the Era of Globalisation, Routledge, London. Boltanski, L., & Thevenot, L. (1999). The Sociology of Critical Capacity. European Journal of Social Theory, 2(3), 359–377 Busch, L. (2011). Standards: recipes for reality (p. 390). Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Lampland, M. & Leigh Star S. (eds.) (2008) Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Lawn, M. (2011). Standardizing the European Education Policy Space. European Educational Research Journal, 10(2), 259-272 Normand R., (2014a) (Forthcoming), avec Martin Lawn, Actors, Tools, Ideas and Structures in the shaping of European education. London: Routledge. Normand R., (2014b) (Forthcoming) Boundary Objects, Translations, Irreversibility. The Policy Tools Borrowing from Local to Global in Education. In Lawn M., Martens K., Normand R. (coord.) Actors, Tools, Ideas and Structures in the shaping of European education. London: Routledge. Normand R., (2014c) (Forthcoming) “Constructing the Lifelong Learning Self: European policies and the sense of justice” in Marcella Milana M. (ed.), Holford (J.) (eds), Adult education policy and the European union: Theoretical and ethodological issues , ESREA Book Series: Research on the Education and Learning of Adults (Sense Publishers) Star, Susan Leigh (1991) 'Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions', in J. Law (ed.), A Sociology of Monsters? Power, Technology and the Modern World, Sociological Review Monograph 38 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell): 27-57. Thévenot L., (2002) “Which Road to Follow? The Moral Complexity of an “equipped Humanity” in Law John, Mol Annemarie (eds) Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, Durham and London, Duke University Press, pp.53-87. Thévenot, L., (2009), "Governing Life by Standards. A View from Engagements", Social Studies of Science vol. 39, n°5, October, pp.793-813.
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