Governing Knowledge. Comparison, Knowledge-Based Technologies and Expertise in the Regulation of Education

This book focuses on a major and highly significant development in the governing of education across the globe: the use of knowledge-based technologies to make policy, rather than simply as aids to decision-making. These technologies, we suggest, are themselves becoming the process of governing. A combination of factors has produced this shift. First, the massive expansion of technological capacity signalled by the arrival of ‘big data’ (McKinsey 2013) allows for the collection, circulation and processing of extensive system knowledge. The second factor is the growth of comparison as a basis for and justification of action. This growth is accompanied, inevitably, by the increasing displacement of contextualised, messy and ‘local’ understandings and meanings as resources for policy development, along with much of the ideological debate that previously fuelled a politics of education.