Skip to main content

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

Item

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

Export

Comments

No comment yet! Be the first to add one!

I agree with terms of use and I accept to free my contribution under the licence CC BY-SA.

New Tags

I agree with terms of use and I accept to free my contribution under the licence CC BY-SA.