The Modern Cult of Efficiency: Intermediary Organizations and the New Scientific Management

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Title: The Modern Cult of Efficiency: Intermediary Organizations and the New Scientific Management
Abstract/Description: This article analyzes one intermediary organization. It draws on critical policy studies to frame the agency’s behaviors amid a discourse of managerialism in the public sector, and critical studies of education markets to explain the relationships between its reforms and education policy. Findings illustrate how the intermediary enacted managerial data monitoring systems as the core drivers of its reforms; how it framed leadership and teaching as reductive, managerialist pursuits; and why its reliance on business-inspired logics, roles, and language enabled it to compete in a marketplace and preserve its industry niche. In this way, its behaviors resembled those of the “efficiency experts” during the industrial revolution. The result was an intermediary that erroneously equated data with professional judgment, and that guided decisions based not on a century’s worth of evidence about the limitations of purely managerial reforms, but on an enduring ideological faith in technocratic solutions to complex social problems.
Author/creator: Trujillo, Tina M.
Date: 2014
In publication: Educational Policy
Volume: 28
Issue: 2
Pages: 207-232
Resource type: en Research/Scholarly Media
Resource status/form: en Published Text
Scholarship genre: en Theoretical
Keywords: leadership; educational equity; politics of education; urban schools; educational policy; standards reform; educational reform; standardized testing; high-stakes accountability; history/philosophy of education
Language: en
Open access/full-text available: en Yes
Peer reviewed: en Yes
ISSN: 0895-9048
DOI: 10.1177/0895904813513148
URL: Official Publisher's Webpage (SAGE); Full-text PDF Shared by Author (Academia.edu)
Citation: Trujillo, T. (2014). The Modern Cult of Efficiency: Intermediary Organizations and the New Scientific Management. Educational Policy, 28(2), 207–232. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904813513148
Cited in: Critical Perspectives on the Contexts of Improvement Research in Education; Critical Perspectives on Educational Innovation and Improvement Science
Abbreviation: Educational Policy

Item sets: Handbook Chapter 11 Citations; OB Citations - Critical Perspectives on Educational Innovation and Improvement Science

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