The European Education Policy Space, driven by forces of globalization and discourses on knowledge economy, has been shaped gradually by the involvement of a multiplicity of actors and institutions within the EU, and by using new tools of education governance, as well as utilizing the expertise of various agencies, such as UNESCO, the OECD, etc.. The Open Method of Coordination and, currently, Quality Assurance and Evaluation methods constitute the main technologies for Europeanizing Member States’ educational policies, and for transforming education institutions and systems by measuring and comparing through indicators, numbers and dissemination of information and «good practices» (Grek et al., 2009). Moreover, as research indicates, understanding the relationships between the knowledge which is produced, distributed and used within processes of change, and the actors mediating and intervening at the national/local level, requires the examination of the characteristics of the environment that shapes these relationships (Pons & Van Zanten, 2007).

The Greek central educational authorities in promoting these European-wide policies have introduced a series of actions in ”government and governing” (Ball, 2009), which can be understood as the localization of the Europeanization/ Globalization Discourse on education (Ball, 2003, Gunter & Forrester 2009). The Europeanizing technology of Quality Assurance in particular was belatedly but forcefully introduced into the Greek schooling system in the midst of acute economic crisis. Our working hypothesis is that these changes constitute a uniquely adapted model for “fabricating quality” (Ozga, 2012), as this has been analyzed by several empirical studies and original research in critical educational studies and policy sociology. These practices provide preconditions for the introduction of broader changes in education, with implications for everyday pedagogical practices, school work, and teachers’ roles and identities (Ball, 2003, Gewirtz et al., 2009).

This paper draws on an on-going research program focusing on the practices of Greek educational authorities in response to supranational discourses on the administration of education around issues of training, selection and evaluation processes for new education executives; and also on the field of administrative work per se, exploring these new executives’ activities, and the role of knowledge in the process of training and “reforming” them. Combining Foucault’s ideas on governmentality and discourse (Burchell et al., 1991, Peters et al., 2009) with Bernstein’s (2000) theory on pedagogic discourse, and Bourdieu-inspired analyses of agents located in different subfields within the educational field (Hardy and Lingard, 2008), we trace the new forms of knowledge and power inscribed in the daily exercise of administrative work, and the practices produced in the intersection of technologies of power and technologies of the self. Our inquiry concerns how priorities deriving from dominant international policy discourses, which are identified in the training, selection and evaluation processes for the executives of education, promote specific modalities of government; and how these shape the field of social action in Greek school education and the subjectivities of this group of educational professionals.

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