Zealotry or Nostalgic Regret’? 1 Women Leaders in Technical and Further Education in Australia:...

‘Zealotry or Nostalgic Regret’?1

Women Leaders in Technical andFurther Education in Australia:Agents of Change, EntrepreneurialEducators or Corporate Citizens?

Jill Blackmore* and Judyth Sachs

Education has been restructured in many Western post-industrial nationstates during the 1990s. The Australian Technical and Further Educationsector (TAFE) has been particularly susceptible to discourses of respon-siveness to the market and the new entrepreneuralism. This articleexplores how women have been repositioned in contradictory andambiguous ways as the new entrepreneurial middle managers by existingand emergent discourses that circulated in and through TAFE organiza-tions. In turn, it points to how discourses of change management and clientresponsiveness took on particular readings within specific institutionaland professional cultures of the eight Technical and Further Educationinstitutions (TAFEs). At the same time, the restructuring that arose fromthe corporatization of TAFE, in a highly gendered process, through thetwin strategies of marketization and the new managerialism produced new possibilities for individual women educators who moved up intomiddle management. Yet these individual women were positioned within highly masculinist ‘neo-corporate bureaucratic cultures’ that co-opted their passion for the capacity of education to make a difference and incor-porated these new entrepeneurial work identities.

Keywords: managerialism, marketization, technical and further education,change management, gender relations of organizations, leadership

In this article we explore how the discourses of change management took onparticular readings within the specific institutional and professional cul-

tures of eight Technical and Further Education institutions (TAFE) in Australia

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Address for correspondence: *Jill Blackmore, Deakin University, Victoria, Australia, e-mail:[email protected]

at a moment when they were expected to become more entrepreneurial as the state linked education more tightly to the national economy after 1987. We explore how women have been repositioned in contradictory and ambiguous ways as the new entrepreneurial middle managers by existing and emergent discourses that circulated in and through TAFE organizations.

We consider the paradox that there were few women in executive man-agement in TAFE, despite equal opportunity policies during the 1980s and1990s and despite the numerous opportunities to shift the cultures, changestructures and remove biases at a moment of radical educational restructur-ing. Furthermore, while these entrepreneurial TAFE institutes offered newpossibilities for individual women educators who moved up into middlemanagement, as individuals they were positioned within highly masculin-ist2 ‘neo-corporate bureaucratic cultures’ (Limerick et al., 1996) that co-optedtheir passion for education to co-operate in the undoing of the type of edu-cational work and relationships many of them valued. The article thereforeexplores two interconnected issues — on the one hand, the corporatizationof TAFE and the gendered nature of that process and, on the other hand, theimpact of these processes of ‘incorporation’ on the work identities’ of a groupof women managers.

Situating the study

The article draws from a larger Australian Research Council-funded projectthat focused upon three groups of women — the institutional achieversalready in formal leadership positions, the aspirants to formal leadershippositions and the capable non-aspirants or informal leaders. In the widerstudy we undertook intensive, unstructured interviews of women in thesegroups across the three Australian education sectors — technical and furthereducation, universities and schools in three states. In the larger project weexplored the ways in which different professional and institutional culturesinformed the way women viewed leadership and how they were viewed inleadership, at a time when education restructuring was being shaped bynationally driven policies seeking both to link education more instrumen-tally to work and to internationalize Australian education (see Blackmoreand Sachs, 1997; Blackmore and Sachs forthcoming; Sachs and Blackmore,1998). While leadership was the conceptual lens, the interviewees alwayscontextualized their positions in the environment of the processes of restructuring.

The interviews from which we draw data for this article were undertakenin eight technical and further education (TAFE) institutes in Victoria, NewSouth Wales and Queensland between 1995 and 1997; a period when the TAFE sector underwent significant and frequent amalgamations and internal restructuring. The TAFEs were selected to provide a sample of

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institutions with different cultures, size and emphases on trades or com-munity education. The sample included TAFEs that were recently amalga-mated as well as institutes that had high and low concentrations of womenand men in senior management and chief executive officer positions. Therewas only one female CEO of a TAFE institute in Victoria.

Methodologically, we sought to problematize leadership as a notion thatis also under reconstruction. To do this, we approached each organizationfrom two perspectives to get a sense of the discursive terrain around womenand leadership and gender equity in particular. We began by interviewingkey ‘gatekeepers’ in the organization, the CEOs and Heads of Departmentsand school principals, gaining a ‘top-down’ mainstream perspective. At thesame time we interviewed the ‘outsiders inside’ on the margins; the equalopportunity officers and the teacher union representatives. We asked each ofthe initial interviewees to identify women they saw as leaders, both in andout of formal positions, without saying who, why and how, who wouldbroadly ‘fit’ the categories: women in formal leadership positions, womenaspiring to formal leadership and women who indicated few aspirations forformal leadership but who were perceived to be leaders by their colleagues.

We then used a snowballing technique, asking each interviewee in eachround to identify other women for us to interview whom they defined asleaders. We interviewed an average of 15 in each institution and, collectively,held over 120 interviews across the eight institutions. These mapping andsnowballing techniques allowed for some triangulation and verificationacross the organization about who were perceived to be leaders outside theinstitutional definition as the person who is the leader is the person whooccupies that role in the hierarachy.

TAFE: the ‘modernist’ response to training

The TAFE institutes were established in Australia in 1974 as non-fee trainingfunded by the Commonwealth to ‘modernize training’. This was to beachieved by the provision of traditional apprenticeships,3 primarily for boys; low-budget, short-term adult education and access courses, largely for women, and ‘fee for service’ courses for industry, again, largely male-dominated (Marginson, 1997, p. 209). Pocock (1988) depicted the bureau-cratic and quite hierarchical culture of TAFE in 1987 as being inhospitable towomen, indigenous students and students from non-Anglo backgrounds.This was a culture dominated by the interests, attitudes and values of youngmale apprentices, with a predominantly trades-trained male staff who hadlittle to no teacher training. The blue-collar, male-dominated trade-workerethos produced discourses that were about trades-based related practice and training that eschewed educational theory and pedagogy.

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During the 1970s and 1980s there emerged more community-oriented col-leges or divisions of TAFE responsive to the needs of mature women andmigrants for adult education and adult literacy programmes. These providedaccess and language courses that were predominantly taught by women anddrew upon progressive educational discourses about inclusive pedagogiesfrom the school sector, where many of the teachers had previously taught(Angwin, 1994). The expansion of the TAFE sector during the next decadedid little to alter this distinct, internal, gender division of labour amongststaff and students that reflected the highly gender-segmented Australianlabour market.

As was typical of public sector bureaucratic organizations during the 20th

century, the dominant model of management in the TAFE sector from its for-mation was a particular form of masculinity associated with technical ratio-nality; one that was overlaid in the culture of TAFE with a high level ofinstrumentalism and pragmatism associated with training rather than edu-cation. It was a predominantly masculinist culture, that marginalized com-munity-based pedagogical discourses, both in terms of who had the powerand in the values underpinning its structures and processes of decision-making and its discursive practices (Angwin, 1994; Pocock, 1988; Sanguinetti,1998).

Neo-corporate TAFE

The process of the corporatization of the Australian state commenced inearnest after the financial crash of 1987, which underscored Australia’s vul-nerability in a globalized context. Corporate federalism under consecutiveLabor governments after 1987 re-worked the post-war welfare settlementbetween industry, government and workers (Taylor et al., 1997), producing anew education settlement negotiated between a triumvarate of big business,big unions and big government that was based on the policy blueprint, Aus-tralia Reconstructed (ACTU/TDC 1987). A proliferation of education policiesduring the 1990s restructured the education sector — including schools, uni-versities and TAFE — into an industry better to service the economy, as thestate sought to ‘steer education from a distance’ through policy and fundingmechanisms. Australian governments seeking to reposition themselves inrelation to new regionalized governmental and economic units (e.g. the European Union), readily adopted the structural adjustment policies advocated by the IMF, the World Bank and the OECD. These policies focusedon a reduced public expenditure on education, an increased focus on exportand not domestic markets, the privatization of education and training costs and the restructuring of industrial relations to be more efficient, deregu-lated and devolved (Taylor et al., 1997).



At this time education was increasingly perceived by government to beboth the creator of ‘new knowledge workers’ to improve international com-petitiveness and become what Labor policy called the ‘clever country’, andalso the source of new export and domestic income through ‘user pays’ andthe internationalization of education as a commodity. Governments nowargue that those who use educational services and indeed benefit from edu-cation as individuals in terms of later earnings, should therefore contributeto payment for these services in part or full.

The effect was increased pressure on TAFE institutions to produce new effi-ciencies through amalgamations, downsizing and outsourcing and increasedself-funding through selling of their educational products and services.

Deregulation of education was meant to produce a seamless educationsector. In line with the OECD notion of competitive national training marketsbased on a diversity of suppliers and diversity of clients, the Open TrainingMarket introduced in 1992 made public providers (that is, universities andtechnical and further education institutes) compete with private providers(philanthropic and church organizations and private businesses) through afederally based tender process that opened up the TAFE sector to increasedmarket competition (Marginson, 1997, pp. 210–11). Government now soughtto control education through course accreditation and standards, shiftingaway from universal educational provision to regulation. TAFE, as the mainpublic provider of training, was encouraged by the government ‘to increaseentrepreneurial behaviours, and full fee training for industry, using a mix of funding cuts, corporate reforms, the seeding of commercial activities, competitive bidding, international marketing and policy exhortation’ (Marginson, 1997, p. 212).

The other side of corporatization was the new managerialism that accom-panied educational restructuring with the move to self-managing educa-tional institutions in devolved systems. The new public administrationimposed private-sector management practices on to public-sector organiza-tions through performance management. The focus on outcomes allowedgovernment to direct without having to administer. The new managerialismdevolved the risks and difficult resource decisions down to increasingly selffunding, flexible and ‘entrepreneurial’ local units that were expected to iden-tify, capture and retain niche markets. Institutional flexibility and respon-siveness to the market for self-managing organizations was contingent onthe casualization of educational labour that impacted differentially accord-ing to gender. Highly qualified and experienced women teachers, who hadleft the public school sector due to downsizing, became a vulnerable andhighly casualized labour source that was used to teach the labour marketand adult literacy programmes in the open training market (Blackmore andAngwin, 1997).

The internal gender division of labour within the TAFE institutes thatemerged during the 1990s reflected the labour market shifts towards the new



work order of late capitalism more generally (Aronowitz and de Fazio, 1997).The new TAFE institutional labour market constituted a core of professionalmanagers; largely but not always male, who set the policies, managedfinances and created accountability frameworks, undertaking the performa-tivity exercises required of self-managing organizations. This core was ringedby a new layer of middle managers, many of whom were women with abackground in teaching. They undertook the role of educational technicians,due to their specialist expertise in curriculum, learning technologies and pedagogy, with the task of designing and managing the delivery of anincreasingly commodified curriculum. For the women who gained access tothe instructional course designers or core management, the entrepeneurialTAFE culture offered new opportunities to utilize their educational skills as managers of knowledge dissemination. Meanwhile, the delivery of educational services on the ground was provided by a peripheral casualizedand feminized teaching labour force (Blackmore, 1997; Blackmore andAngwin, 1997).

Paradoxically, these new corporate structures reasserted traditionalresponses to postmodern demands for responsiveness, diversity and flexi-bility. Executive prerogative was re-exerted out of the need for immediateresponses to government policies and market shifts and strategic planningwas top-down. The devolved responsibility for delivery was regulatedthrough strong accountabilities back up to executive line management. Theseaccountabilities took the form of performance management, performanceappraisal and a strong outcomes focus. This produced a form of ‘centralizeddecentralization’ that typified self-managing organizations. This mirroredthe centralized decentralization that existed between the entrepreneurialeducation institutions and government, the latter controlling through policy,funding, priorities and accountability, while devolving responsibility fordecision-making about resources and personnel down to individual institutions.

The corporatization of education in the late 1990s exacerbated alreadyexisting tendencies within TAFE towards a narrow notion of training and noteducation, strong hierarchical management structures, a management andtraining culture that was highly instrumental and oriented towards short-term strategic planning that was client-sensitive, where the client wasincreasingly becoming industry and not the individual. Limerick et al. (1996)see these characteristics as more typical of ‘neo corporate bureaucracies’rather than ‘post corporate learning organizations’ because they focus onaccountability and meeting the demands of their constituencies:

In such conditions managers become risk-averse and hold onto the onlyform of control they know best — hierarchy. Yet they are simultaneouslyunder pressure to decentralize in order to cope with increasing rates ofchange and in order to reduce costs. (Limerick et al., 1996, p. 84)



Managers made decisions on the basis of what they predicted policymakerswould want.

Leonard (1998, p. 76) argues that, in the case of the further education col-leges in the UK, these colleges are more ‘prescribed by their external envi-ronment, as they are increasingly assessed and monitored’ yet they have‘greater autonomy over their internal financial and structural arrangements’such as recruitment, selection, promotion and so on. In the TAFE sector thishas, in the main, led to the reaffirmation of old managerial masculinities andmasculinist cultural values. As in the UK with the move to marketizationand new managerialism, TAFE indicates a ‘heightening of a managementstyle which emphasizes control and ‘macho-masculinity; where the desire for profit and efficiency overrides other “humanitarian” concerns’ (Leonard,1998, p. 76). In terms of institutional politics, the restructuring of further edu-cation produced a move from ‘benign liberal paternalism to a more entre-preneurial work culture’ (Kerfoot and Whitehead, 1998, p. 437). In TAFEsector in Australia, the new entrpreneurialism and old practical rationalityencouraged tendencies for short-term reactive rather than long-term, strate-gic institutional responses.

Shifting and competing discourses

There were a number of spin-offs related to the dual corporatist processes ofmarketization and managerialism which had an impact on our women par-ticipants, located largely in middle management (as heads of department orunit) in this study. The growth of corporate structures, particularly in aninternationalized private sector, produced a technocracy premised upon anlogic that ‘ “management” equals “doing” in the sense that “doing” equals“making” ’ (Saul, 1997, p. 7): a technocracy whose values were articulatedthrough a discourse of ‘practical rationality’. The traditional discourse of‘practical rationality’ also imparted ‘primacy to practice’ over theory and to‘practical knowledge’ over ‘knowledgeable practice’ (Edwards, 1997). Thiswas not a new discourse, but it was one that was mobilized most frequentlyin the increasingly competitive context as executive managers sought to posi-tion TAFE as ‘different from’ universities in the open training market.

As we have argued elsewhere (Blackmore and Sachs, 1998), within ‘newmanagement theory’ there are two discourses — the hard management dis-course of ‘re-engineering’, a reinvented Taylorism that reinforced the genderregimes of the old bureaucratic hierarchies, even within a liberal humanistframework, by equating leadership with masculinist notions of rationality,independence and hardnosed decision-making (Blackmore, 1989). Duringthe early 1980s this discourse was in competition with a weaker and softerhuman-resource management discourse that was person-oriented and cul-turally attuned and that derived from the post-war human-relations tradi-



tion. This soft management or ‘post-modern’ discourse was best representedin Australia by Enterprising Nation, the Karpin Report (1995) that predictedthat post-fordist work required more inclusive notions of leadership and thatrecognized and valued cultural and gender diversity in styles of manage-ment. But, with government policies focusing on efficiency, income produc-tion and outcomes, the hard management discourse was privileged in mostdecision-making contexts.

This position was reinforced by older versions of bureaucratic masculin-ity seeking to shore up their position against alternative ways of managingand producing institutional cultures that valued instrumental and vocationalapproaches over liberal progressive views, and training over education. Thisis similar to the conclusion by Pauline Leonard on the restructuring of furthereducation in England after 1992: ‘far from introducing a new managerialismpost-incorporation, many of the old features continue, sometimes in a moreexposed and heightened form. The gender picture is therefore one of conti-nuity rather than change’. (1998, p. 75)

At the executive management level, the discourse of practical rationalitywas particularly evident in the strong cultural proclivity to perceive that‘management is doing’, rather than more esoteric notions of visionary or edu-cational leadership. Indeed, leadership discourses were largely absent andthe language of management dominated through planning statements,strategic management and policy texts. The practical rationality discoursefurther marginalized already peripheral discourses or alternative conceptu-alizations of leadership around fairness, equity or corporate ethics andemphasized competition, efficiency, survival and winning.

Management is a theoretical and practical technology geared to efficiency,practicality and control . . . it presents itself as an objective, technicallyneutral mechanism dedicated to greater efficiency (Ball, 1990, p. 157).

But the discourse of practical rationality also circulated at the lower levels ofTAFE institutes, emerging out of the sense of solidarity based on the unionactivities of trades-based teachers whose position was being fragmented bydecentralized wage bargaining and amongst sessional staff, (that is, staffemployed on a casual basis to teach throughout a ‘session’) although thisvaried across institutions depending on staff/management relations. Therewas, therefore, a strong convergence between the types of masculinist dis-courses of the trade teachers and dominant management discourses thatemphasized vocational instrumentalism and practical necessity.

The discourses absent at executive management level were those of pro-fessionalism and educational progressivism, although they still were circu-lating amongst many female middle managers, heads of departments andunits; education professionals who had moved up from the lower echelonsof the organization. These progressive ‘feminized’ discourses, traditionallymarginalized, were now under greater threat within the entrepreneurial



corporate college from government policy shifts and competitive fundingregimes that favoured vocational over liberal education or access pro-grammes as well as programmes responding to short-term market demands(Angus and Seddon, 1998).

Overriding all these were the policy discourses of reform about ongoingorganizational change and flexibility, entrepreneurship and client choice.TAFE was experiencing a ‘culture change’ requiring all employees to become‘entrepreneurial’ — to search out new niche markets, respond to client needsand earn additional funds through consultancies and the sale of curriculummodules. Governments are increasingly putting curriculum developmentopen to tender and universities and TAFE are selling their curriculummodules to other providers nationally and internationally. Competitive ten-dering required institutions to respond rapidly and flexibly to any perceivedor evident market need, to write new tenders continuously in order to main-tain any continuity of programmes and to casualize educational labour asthey sought to hire or fire labour to gain the type of institutional flexibilitycontingent on government contracts of three months to one year’s duration(Blackmore and Angwin, 1997).

Our study indicated that, within this discursive context of becomingincreasingly entrepreneurial, in TAFE institutions that had undergone con-siderable structural reform (such as amalgamations), there were both oppor-tunities and constraints for women seeking to tap into and rewrite practice,particularly in the discursive space around institutional reform and change.Some women achieved an element of individual success, even reaching executive management positions. The restructuring from traditional top-down style management in smaller and newer TAFE institutions, forexample, with a new focus on quality and customer service, displaced oldermore authoritarian modes of teaching and management and providedopportunities for women with curriculum, marketing and teaching backgrounds to participate in different ways.

The newly emergent discourse of entrepreneurship was also gendered, Itdrew more from successful performance in the market and efficiencies thanin the classroom or in people management — it was about winning deals,aggressive marketing and competitiveness, attributes traditionally associ-ated with a new mode of transnational entrepeneurial masculinity (Connell,2000). Yet the discourse of entrepreneurship institutionalized within most ofthe TAFEs in this study provided little space for the new images of leader-ship of management conjured up by the Karpin discourse in EnterprisingNation about cultural and gender diversity and ignored equity reports citingthe ‘boys’ club ethos’, the management culture never named for its white-ness, middle classness and maleness.4

Paradoxically, the new managerialism tended to reassert new modes ofentrepreneurial masculinity that are as exclusionary as were the old authori-tarian patriarchal modes of masculinity that dominated in old education



bureaucracies, and whose vestiges still exist (Reed, 1995). Historically, entre-preneurial masculinity is about order and control and providing (for familyand firm), but in the late 20th century it has taken on a new twist and becomemore ‘hardnosed; with recent emphasis on economic efficiency to the exclu-sion of all else (Reed, 1995, p. 105). The new entrepreneurial masculinity isabout working long hours, being mobile and at the cutting edge, penetratingthe market, allowing a separation from the domestic, thus ‘shorn of itshumanistic discomfort’ which accompanied earlier paternalistic masculin-ities (Reed, 1995, p. 121). This entrepreneurial masculinity was tied closely tothe peculiarly TAFE form of practical rationality that was about the economiconly, focusing on immediate and visible outcomes and a heightened instru-mentalism encouraged by increased uncertainty in a market-driven system.

The enterprising manager

The Australian education sector generally, and TAFE in particular, displaysmany aspects of corporatization around the focus on ‘cutting costs’, ‘winningclients’ and ‘doing deals’ (Angus and Seddon, 1998). This new competitive-ness underpinned by new form of contractualism has fundamentallychanged the relationships between managers, teachers and students (Clarkeand Newman, 1997; Yeatman, 1994). Firstly, there was the redefinition ofteachers’ intellectual labour through its commodification. Teachers, many ofour interviewees argued, were now expected to ‘service clients’, utilizingflexible modes of delivery and ‘teacher proof’, ‘modularized’ ‘Taylor made’curriculum products capable of being sold in international as well as localmarkets (Smyth, 1996). Now teacher/student relations were shaped by con-tractual rather than pedagogical arrangements. Second, the privatization andmarketization of education has increasingly penetrated all aspects of insti-tutional organization and design. The student has now been redefined as the ‘product’; industry or the employer as ‘the client’ and the teacher as the‘provider’. This linguistic shift to client service was readily attained in aTAFE sector already geared up to being responsive to industry. But many ofour research participants commented that industry, not the individualstudent or community, was increasingly becoming the primary client. Bothtrends solidified and accelerated TAFE’s historical role to service industryand to be flexible.

And third, the corporatization of education effectively focused institu-tional practice on performativity (Blackmore and Sachs, 1997). Performativ-ity has two dimensions — the efficiency principle of getting more for less(management). It also, we suggest, is ‘being seen to perform’ (that is, it con-stitutes a market image). Both market and management accountabilities gen-erated a range of performative exercises (such as image management, datacollection, outcomes, indicators, reporting and auditing) that intensified



labour and divert institutional funds, focus and energies (Sanguinetti, 1998).Performativity exercises new modes of control through the internalization bythe enterprising teacher and manager of discourses about quality, outcomesand accountability, so that they manage themselves better for the commoncorporate good. Yet the paradox evident to the educational workers ‘at the chalk face’ was that the dominant organizational response to uncertaintyand risk was risk-aversion and the resort to control. So new modes of self-governance merely replaced old modes of authoritarianism.

Collectively, these three factors shape institutional and professional workpractices, cultures and identities. The discourse of the ‘enterprising worker’(du Gay, 1996) arose from the expectation that TAFE managers, as well asteachers, underwent a reconstitution of their work identity. The hidden cur-riculum of work (Casey, 1995), the social practices of the field of adult andlifelong learning, took on new meanings and values as argued by managerspushing for change — in a search for new markets overseas and nationally,for bigger clients and strategic partnerships. The hidden curriculum in TAFEproduced competing concepts of what constituted being successful in man-agement in a competitive environment — offering a one-stop client service,being accountable, supplying the market, responding to client choice, pro-viding quality service and products, displaying high levels of performance,maintaining control and constantly redefining a strategic direction.

In this context the new entrepreneurial education manager not onlytaught, but also developed courses using new technologies, packaged andpromoted curriculum modules to other institutions, learnt and marketednew skills, managed budgets and offered counselling and guidance to a morediverse student population. The middle managers in our study, women whoconsidered themselves to be teachers and reflective practitioners as well asmanagers, bridged the growing gap between the entrepreneurial knowledgeworkers or managers located at the core of the restructured educationmarket. Here ‘the exposure to risks and costs of their activities is constructedas enabling them to better create opportunities, signifying a form of ‘empow-erment’ and success’ within the organization’ (Edwards, 1997, p. 163).

Part of this sense of empowerment came from the capacity of many ofthese women managers to do the emotional management work that was nec-essary to deal with the different markets and emotions of these increasingly‘greedy organizations’ — the student market, the leadership market and theteaching market (Blackmore, 1996). They were able to work with students,with colleagues and with the emotions produced by rapid change.

The all consuming self managing ‘greedy organization’ seeks to ‘fuse’ theemotions of the worker and the aspirations of management by producing‘a culture within which such aspects of social life are noted, rendered into language and reincorporated into modes of self-evaluation, self-presentation and social competence of the members’. (Rose, 1992, p. 101)



This process of individualization was central to the production of new corporate identities. Casey (1995, p. 150) argues that the bureaucratic andtechnocratic rationalities of traditional industrialism were more overt andstructural and led to structural responses in the form of social class and self-defense around ‘social solidarity and belongingness’ in unions, occupationalcultures (such as teaching) and regional affiliations. The modern corporateculture has, by contrast, subverted these defense mechanisms through theappropriation of self, displacing regional identification with a global one andredefining occupational loyalty. The ‘psychic discomfort of anxiety’ meansthat the ‘complex and responsible work’ in the ‘new culture of quality, serviceand global competitiveness’ is readily depicted as ‘transitional’ and ‘nor-malized’ while ‘individual problems’ will be managed by ‘successful groupprocesses and human resource management’ (Casey, 1995, p. 150). Theprocess fragments and alienates individuals and undermines a sense of collectivity. This has led to the sacrifice of the individual for the survival ofthe institution.

Being entrepreneurial in a smaller institution often required a radical rein-vention and new ‘managerial subjects’. One director of a smaller institution,himself well attuned to the discourses of new management theory espousedin the Karpin Report, sought to move away from the ‘old boys’ culture’ ofTAFE. His aim was to reposition his institution by reculturing it aroundnotions of what was required in the new work order of flexibility, multi-skilling, lifelong learning and good people management. This produced newopportunities for women in the middle management ranks. As he stated:

It became quite apparent that individuals who were appointed to positionsin a different time in a different culture, people who were individuals whosaw that a senior position is about having dollars and people and controland direction, had significant difficulty in moving from that role to one ofstrategic leadership, devolution and being mentors and coaches . . . Weneed to put in place the people who haven’t been influenced by the oldculture and the old education culture . . . I guess these with the enterprise-type culture and flexible enough and have the skills to be a modernmanager . . . many of these people happen to be women. (Les)

The added dimension of flexible learning, the new buzz word that providednew entrepreneurial opportunities, promised internationalization and life-long and off-campus learning. These same learning technologies not onlyredefined what constitutes good teaching, but supplied the capacity to linkthese institutional strategic priorities critical to good management. The point was not just, as middle manager argued, that: ‘good teaching nowcannot be done without utilizing ICT’, but also that ‘good managementunderstood how to integrate and exploit notions of flexible learning topromote the institutional curriculum product and to strategically position theorganization.’



Thus discourses of change generated links between technology, interna-tionalization and the new work order around key words of flexibility, com-petitiveness, accountability, quality and choice. These new discourses ofchange created opportunities for many women with the shift away fromtrades to service-oriented occupations and curriculum developmental workby TAFE. The increase of women at the level of middle management in TAFEin the 1990s was indicative of a wider feminization of middle managementin the processes of workplace restructuring Blackmore (1999) and Prichardand Deem (1999) refer to the feminization of subordinate managerial workwhich means replacing expensive male bureaucrats (many who retired with restructuring) with cheaper women educators who will do both management and teaching. Codified management knowledge practices ‘em-phasise women’s suitability for more intensive “people” work of the managerialised post-compulsory sector’, constructing what Prichard andDeem (1999, p. 328) refer to as a new managerialist subject.

One female Deputy Director in a large TAFE suggested that in her insti-tution the new focus on person management, quality and curriculum devel-opment meant that

the composition of the training and development department has changedquite dramatically . . . it used to be all nearly men because a lot of devel-opmental work we were doing related to trade areas and so we had tradeteachers. But in the last three years we’ve only employed one bloke. Allthe rest of the people that we’ve employed — about six — have beenfemale. Young women in training and development are extremely confi-dent and articulate young people who will go a million miles. They’re nothampered by the fact that they’re female . . . nothing like it.

The discourse of client service where students are the clients, a view foundedin good pedagogy, was one that many women managers had some empathywith, given their history in teaching. In those TAFE institutions that wereusually smaller, younger, ‘progressive’ and risk-oriented when taking upKarpin’s recommendations, women’s skills were seen to be a useful additionto the corporate image. One male director commented in such an institutionthat the

anti-female culture in the organization is like only an memory now. I don’tthink that it has a great deal of influence in this organization any more asthere is a strong requirement that the right people with the right skills getthe job. We need a balance of skills including the female contribution tomanagement . . . it is very important for our business.

This discourse about women’s styles of leadership sees women’s attributesas usefully complementing masculine attributes of leadership, without anychallenge to dominant masculinist images. The discourse ‘feminizes’ changeagency and people work, thus positioning women as middle managers,



where they can do the emotional management work of systems under stressin more devolved systems and organizations (Blackmore, 1996).

Such a discourse exploits particular skills, but denies any capacity for dis-agreement with corporate goals. Women are valuable resources of particulartypes of leadership as change agents and person managers for new times,but there is no moral imperative for organizations to include different values,assumptions or ways of doing things around here. Here, the individual ‘fits’the corporate entrepreneurial culture. Many of the women interviewedbelieved they were promoted because of their perceived ‘different’ skills.Once there, they were discouraged to address what that difference meant, interms of the form and substance of institutional management or the types oforganizational objectives and practices that they were expected to adhere to,although they were given scope within these frames to innovate and developmore productive work practices. In particular, many felt constrained aboutaddressing the structural inequalities upon which organizational success waspremised, given that the casualization of teachers’ labour was increasingly a precondition for institutional survival (Blackmore and Angwin, 1997).6

Institutional demise was seen to be the worst case scenario for everyone.As individuals, therefore, these women become incorporated as members

of the new professional managerial class that is at the core of the new workorder of a high-risk society. Contrary to discourses about flexible, customizedlearning, hierarchies were emerging between executive managers empow-ered by managerial prerogative, who conceived policy; the instructional/development/technical/person management middle managers, who putpolicies into action and the mobile ‘educational outworker’ who executedthe work on the run (Aronowitz and De Fazio, 1997; Blackmore and Angwin, 1997). As women moved into middle management, they weresimultaneously doing the type of ‘new knowledge work’ promised by post-fordism while being open to the contingencies of neo-fordist workorders that threatened their labour position on a daily basis. These new hier-archies simultaneously promised and prescribed flexibility: ‘All we hear isthat “We must be more flexible or we will not be globally competitive” or“we must change or we will not survive” ’ said Erica, a middle manager ina large urban TAFE. ‘There is little mention about what that means for us asworkers and, indeed, how we can, through our success, lose our job’ Theissue, according to Prichard and Deem (1999), is how women in middle management ‘handle’ the tensions between teaching and managerial subjectpositions.

Discourses of change and the ‘conditions of possibility’

In the new entrepreneurial TAFEs, therefore, there were a series of contra-dictions shaping institutional policy and practice that were experienced by



all managers. Among others these include the tensions between centraliza-tion and decentralization, as policy and financial frameworks disciplinedorganizational behaviour while at the same time institutions were perceivedto be autonomous and self-managing. The rhetoric of professional autonomyand local decision-making came into conflict with the reality of intensifica-tion of surveillance and accountability. The increased demand for qualityassurance came at a time when the top-down efficiency push intensifiedadministrative and teaching labour. A tension was felt between the enthusi-asm for flexible delivery but less time and resources for face-to-face teach-ing. The move to competency-based learning and improved outcomes wasaccompanied by less concern for empowering pedagogies. Finally, the com-modification of curriculum into uniform modules fragmented learning at atime that discourses about workplace learning emphasized multiple ways oflearning and multiple intelligences (Ferrier and Anderson, 1998).

These contradictions shaped the ‘conditions of possibility’ under whichthese women in management worked, providing them with a limited arrayof discursive positions within the corporate culture of entrepreneurialTAFEs. There were a range of discourses upon which the women leaders inour study called, though not always successfully — those of good teachingpractice, professionalism, flexibility, client need and organizational change— to achieve their ends. In so doing, they took up particular readings of thedominant discourse of practical rationality that provided them with oppor-tunities to undertake the types of pedagogical and person work that theyvalued.

Significantly, many female middle managers usefully mobilized the dis-course of short-term problem-solving or ‘practical rationality’. They spokeabout their capacity to solve problems for the organization and ‘getting onwith the job’, where ‘ “the job’ is increasingly conceived as what goes on inthe immediate setting” ’ (Heather). This discourse of practical rationality inTAFE differed from the bureaucratic rationality of the public service modelthat had infused school education and the abstract rationality endemic inuniversities prior to restructuring. But it was one that worked for manywomen who rose through the ranks because of their organizational abilitiesand proven capacity to ‘get things done’ against all odds. The new corporateculture was different from the bureaucratic mode of rationality. There was anew recognition of individual merit, felt by some of the women interviewed,and an unspoken recognition of their capacities to achieve change. It meantthese individual women gained a sense of success.

But in so doing, they internalized the instrumental mode of rationalityembedded in the flexible and adaptable organization which merely ‘reacts’to its external environment. Organizational learning is about problem-solving, but in the case of TAFE institutions, ‘problems’ were more often thannot defined externally by government or industry; by system-wide or globalnotions, thus limiting the range of possibilities for executives as well as



individuals lower down the organization. For example, the discourse aboutTAFE’s responsiveness to markets determined what courses were developedor dropped on the basis of whether there is ‘a demand out there’, and not onthe quality of teaching or content in the courses, or even their perceived valuefor students in the long run.

This form of practical rationality readily ‘fitted’ with the culture of TAFE,which has historically privileged practice over theory and practical orapplied knowledge over pure knowledge. And it was particularly strategicfor the new entrepreneurial TAFE to stress its preference for useful andapplied or practical knowledge as this positioned them well in the industry-oriented market and education hierarchy. TAFE cultivated its image of beingmore ‘relevant’, ‘applied’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ than universities and more‘vocational’ than academically-oriented schools. Nevertheless, what was for-gotten in this positioning, Edwards suggests, is that ‘[k]nowledgeable prac-tice requires more than practical knowledge’ (Edwards, 1997, p. 155). Thiswas becoming an issue, as TAFE sought to develop a research culture whichinformed the practice of TAFE (Angus and Seddon, 1998).

This led to some ambiguity for educational workers (amongst them edu-cational managers). On the one hand, they gained a sense of agency and‘empowerment’ through reskilling in more diverse workplaces. The flexiblework hours allowed women to undertake ‘home responsibilities’ and theygained a sense of belonging and collectivity in the increasingly prescriptiveteam-oriented approaches (Benschop and Doorewaard, 1998). On the otherhand, they also experienced the ‘disempowering’ aspects of intensified sur-veillance, regulation and self-monitoring to maintain the corporate image.The increased organizational flexibility casualized their labour, cut off careerpaths and developed new work hierarchies between core and peripheralworkers. All these effects operated within a culture of individual competi-tiveness which undermined solidarity and reduced organic and spontaneousgroupings which often were more creative (Sinclair, 1994).

The paradox of the neo-corporate organization was that the tendency of performance-based management to focus upon competencies and out-comes, dollars rather than people, reduces, rather than enhances, profes-sional autonomy and the capacity of individuals to exercise professionaljudgement although it provides new opportunities to upskill in technologyand multi-skill in management work.

As one woman head of department commented, moving beyond meresurvival for herself as a manager meant learning to exploit particular dis-courses subversively, to position herself within it in order to do what shethought important.

Well, you have got to realize that is what they [management] think. So it’sgot to be very insightful, and you have got to make sure that you knowwhat they want to hear. So I only trot out things that, you know, whatever



the theme is at the moment. At the moment it’s quality and it’s flexibledelivery of courses, right? They are the two things they want to hear. Theywant to hear that you are really thinking about quality, because that willget us new courses and new money and they want to know that we aremeeting the flexible needs of the region. (Janet)

The issue here was less about how to adapt and more about how to engagein shaping the processes of change to suit the needs of their particular area,their colleagues and their students. By mobilizing discourses about improv-ing quality processes, Janet was able to attract more resources in the budgetto her area of responsibility, which she then utilized to move casual teacherson to short-term contracts. ‘More teachers’, Janet suggested, ‘was whatensured quality, not more processes’. In that sense, she redefined the man-agerial discourse about quality to serve what she saw as core work of teach-ing and learning and also fulfil her sense of obligation to her colleagues. Butin so doing, she also was behaving in a risk-averse manner, second-guessingher superiors and working within the frame; rather than challenging thefailure of the institution to address the real quality issues.

In so doing, she and other women managers in the study undertook ‘theemotional management work’ associated with the crisis of the growingperipheral teaching labour market of TAFE that was exacerbated by thenational policy of competitive tendering (Blackmore and Angwin, 1997). Thecompetitive tender process made all funding contingent upon successfulbids. In this way government intervened in demand and supply of educa-tion markets, adding another layer of work with the constant writing of submissions. The win or lose nature of tendering added another level ofuncertainty to be managed. One departmental head in the area of teachingEnglish as a second language (TESOL) and adult literacy programmes, witha highly feminized and casualized teaching force, spoke of the despair shefelt. Both TESOL and adult literacy programmes were hard hit by conserva-tive government policies after 1996 that reduced labour market and com-munity language programmes. These managers spoke of the radical effectsof individual institutions, public and private providers, competing every sixmonths for federal government tenders:

I think the effects of the tendering process are enormous and hideouslyfrightening. . . . the department (90% women teachers) would have beenshut down if we had not won the tender three years consecutively. Peoplewent from 12-month contracts to six-month contracts. We tell them beforeholidays whether they will be employed again next semester . . . its prettyawful. It’s not just the additional workload but you also have to write thetender before everything else and call on the skills of everyone to do that.You have to employ an additional person to do the administrative workand all the accountability stuff. The whole nature of teaching has changed.. . . No longer do you get put in a classroom, given students, mark and



prepare. Now you write tenders; you don’t know whether you have a joband, on top of all this, is enterprise bargaining and, of course, possibleTAFE mergers which put your job at risk. You’re given a percentage ofcurrent funding and have to find the rest through the market to survive.(Christine, large inner city TAFE)

While many managers suggest that this is merely transitional as organiza-tions re-jig to meet new demands, most of the women in this study saw it asa permanent re-organization of their educational work in ways that shapedtheir identity as teachers and as workers.

Restructuring has fundamentally altered the social relations of work, edu-cational and work practices towards a new contractualism. The interviewselicited the sense of change, uncertainty and contingency which had domi-nated these women’s work for the previous five years. When asked for fivewords that characterized her work, a head of department in a large inner cityTAFE, Melinda, commented: ‘Change, challenge, . . . interesting, its like oneword — change and challenge: I guess diversity, breadth and depth’. But thenshe elaborated on how her understandings of her work were viewed withinthe institutional and policy framework.

And for us in the area of access and equity in further education, battlingfor status for what we do a fair bit of the time . . . you know, you’re a lotof women doing nice things with a lot of people that nobody wants toknow about most of the time. It all seen to be pretty easy stuff. (Melinda)

Systemically, women’s work continues to be devalued, despite the rhetoricof diversity and radical change.

The ambivalence that the women expressed about the current reformsarose from the contradiction between the discourses of quality teaching andlearning and client service and discourses of competition and efficiency.Many referred to what they felt was the decline in the quality of servicebecause of budgetary cuts. This decline was exacerbated by the competitivetendering process initiated by the federal government for a range of pro-grammes. The anger amongst many of the interviewees was palpable at thetime of interview, as this TAFE department head, who had provided sig-nificant language and labour market programmes, was reeling from a criti-cal psychological blow. They had been undercut by private providers for afive-year contract worth millions in their area of greatest expertise. Whatintensified the despair and anger of these women was the knowledge thatthey had lost the tender to a competitor whose programme was rated at 70%to their 97% ranking in terms its technical quality.

The bottom line of the performative state was that efficiency (getting morefor less), and not quality, won out. Despite this, it considerably dented thisteam of teachers and their managers’ sense of professional expertise, result-ing in a loss of jobs in what had been a well-resourced centre. Thus the



psychic economy of the institution shifts as a consequence of these newwork/management priorities and practices that privilege efficiency overquality and equity; thus producing other value shifts, a new work ethic anda different learning ethos. This was felt by the women managers whose jobit was to hire and fire sessional and contract staff, as management haddevolved such responsibilities down to smaller administrative units in orderto facilitate flexibility. Amy, one middle manager, commented:

If you cost sessionally, you haven’t got continuity of programme and teach-ing and you haven’t got loyalty. You haven’t got someone who is in therefor the long haul, who you can invest in. So there is an understandablelack of commitment because it is all about a commercial transaction . . .and we can’t even hint that there may be work later as we will be sued formaking false promises. So the teaching culture has also changed. It’s allvery business like.

The monitoring and recording requirements of the view of managementpremised upon the client/provider relationship, redefined professional iden-tity. This shift was one that focused upon being professional as a form oftechnical competence in terms of expertise, accountability and following dueprocess; rather than being a professional and exercising professional judge-ment in a relatively autonomous, no less accountable but more sociallyresponsible, manner.

This shift created anxiety and anger amongst many, but not all, the womenmanagers we interviewed. The discourse of professionalism mobilizedwithin the corporate culture was one bereft of any sense of advocacy thathad been typical of progressive pedagogical practices of the communityservice sector in the 1980s. It was one premised purely on what technicalexpertise could be bought and sold. Ideologies of professionalism that calledupon notions of service and responsibility to all students as a public goodwere being replaced by an ideology of self-interest and individual promo-tion by both teachers and students (Clarke and Newman, 1997). Studentswho did not fit were, therefore, also excluded from the very programmes thathad previously sought to assist them. Social justice issues about access andthe social benefits of education and training had no place in the policy andprocedural frames open to women managers and teachers. Instead, layeredover this were the institutional regulatory tendencies of deregulated systemsbuilt around performativity (like audits, performance indicators and out-comes-based learning). These, in turn, acted as another mode of professionalcontrol, for example, documentation and process in the face of potential legalaction. Professionalism was redefined to encompass the ability to demon-strate a strong sense of competence of operating within legal boundaries, butwith no sense of moral obligation about doing the best for the student.

The women middle managers felt the implications of these new work rela-tions at the institutional level, within disciplinary committees, for example,



where they were held responsible if such documentation or due process wasnot evident in case of a complaint. The new contractualism demanded ofmanagers created yet another layer of responsibility that they assumedwithout any management training. It required them to internalize the newaccountability and contractual relations and, therefore, to become a type ofmanager and a type of education professional very different from what theyhad imagined in taking up this position (one that many of their subordinatessaw as a position of power) (Blackmore and Sachs, 2000).

Just how flexible and productive can we get?

This article on women in TAFE raises a number of key issues that reflect thewider study of women in leadership in restructured schools and universi-ties. The first issue is the degree to which institutional and individual flexi-bility can be achieved and maintained without flexibility undermining thevery aspects which make organizations and workers ‘productive’. While fewof us wish to be seen to be ‘inflexible’ and against ‘progress’ (Edwards, 1997,p. 33), the extent to which there can be ever-increasing productivity undercurrent conditions is questionable. There is a considerable body of literaturethat talks about trust, loyalty and commitment as central to the types ofongoing collegial relations so critical to maintaining productivity. The lackof reciprocity of loyalty by organizations to their workers in an era of flexi-bility makes this even more difficult. What happens in organizations thathave a ‘toxic’ psychic economy of compliance, fear and mistrust? What is the‘sustainability of competitiveness as a project?’ (Edwards, 1997 p. 31). Whatcapacity does contractualism promise as the organizing principle for themanagerialist state, the entrepreneurial organization and flexible worker?

Secondly, women’s opportunities were finely tied to an all-pervasivestructure of privilege, interlacing in systematic ways with categories of sex,race, ethnicity, nationality and class. So while this project was focusing uponwomen, leadership and educational restructuring, our consideration of indi-vidual women’s position in leadership was always mediated by an aware-ness of the changing economic and structural relations between women andbetween women and men. It was particularly evident in the growing dividebetween core manager/curriculum designer and peripheral educationalworker in the new work regime: representing the new gender division oflabour within these TAFE institutions. Indeed, leadership itself became lessof the focus than the wider impact of organizational redesign that positionedwomen leaders in particularly difficult ways and sometimes fed into olderdiscourses that were equally marginalizing. The test of equitable gender rela-tions in a workplace is not measured by the stated principles about func-tional structures but in foregrounding the power relations constituted in practice. What was evident was that when cultural and interactional



arrangements also shifted with structural reform, such organizations weremore ‘female friendly’. At the same time, the softer ‘feminist’ discourses ofleadership were subsumed or overwhelmed by the dominance of manageri-alist discourses within most TAFE institutes as established modes of practiceand valuing which circulated throughout the sector.

Thirdly, entrepreneurial behaviour has been given primacy in recent orga-nizational change. Entrepreneurship, as opposed to bureaucratic modes ofbehaviour which are seen to be too regulatory, has been positioned as thedesirable norm. But new modes of regulation and disciplinary technologieshave been instituted in what are best depicted as neo-corporate bureaucra-cies rather than post-corporate organizations. Workers (and managers) thusmanage themselves better towards organizational goals as ‘designer employ-ees’, working within the parameters set by corporate goals, practicing risk-aversion out of fear of loss of job and, thus, by being more compliant thaninnovative (Casey, 1995).

So, while post-corporate organizations ideally are expected to move tomore horizontal relationships and flatter organizations, neo-corporate bu-reaucracies such as TAFE remove middle layers but maintain strong execu-tive control. This means they ‘leave the professional knowledge workers inthe middle of the hierarchy who find themselves carrying out all the hierar-chical processes above and below them’ (Limerick et al., 1996, p. 86). As professional knowledge workers, these women managers were torn between their sense of professionalism and their desire to be seen to be goodmanagers within a masculinist corporate culture. These post-corporatebureaucracies were typified by pseudo rather than real devolution, in thatthe strategic control tightly constrained any discretionary action by localdecision-makers within the organization through elaborate processes and criteria, while arguing that these criteria and processes are essential forequity, quality of service delivery and so on. This leads to low employee satisfaction and also decision avoidance, as they refuse to take responsibilityfor decisions forced upon them procedurally.

Limerick et al. (1996) argue that, ironically, neo-corporate bureaucraciesincrease inequality because reliance upon processes and criteria that are notneutral more often work against marginalized individuals and groups whoare unable to acquire the institutional capital required. Thus:

women tend to suffer disproportionately the effects of work intensifica-tion, because they tend to bank up at middle management and professionallevels where the effects of work intensification are worst. This in turncreates a downward spiraling effect, because they become so busy they areunable to build up their CVs to meet the criteria’. (Limerick et al., 1996, p. 87)

The effects are of a highly politicized culture, that means that ‘those indi-viduals who have a well developed sense of their professional identity find



little opportunity for improving their professional lives within the bureau-cracy’. They tend to withdraw from the co-ordinating positions and leave thefield to those who enjoy control. The system overall becomes inward lookingand unresponsive.

The new entrepreneurial TAFE cultures, even when blended with corpo-rate discourses about flexibility, opportunity and diversity, were no less masculinist than the old bureaucratic cultures. While restructuring along cor-porate lines had a significant impact on both men and women, we argue thatrestructuring also produced a form of structural backlash against women’sadvancement as the embedded advantages within the cultures, structuresand processes of organizations were mobilized either consciously or uncon-sciously through processes of redeployment that included downsizing, jobdescriptions, valuing of different types of work and symbolic and discursiverepresentations about equity for women that do not ‘get down into practice’(Blackmore, 1999; Lingard and Douglas, 1999). At the same time, this projectindicates, as do other studies in Australia and England in further education,that there is no simple binary between educators who seek to defend professional and pedagogic values and managers who seek to promote the bottom line of efficiency. While there is casualization and deprofession-alization, there are also opportunities for female middle manages to contestmanagerial values (Alexiadou 2001; Gleeson and Shain, 1999; Prichard andDeem, 1999).

This leads us to question what constitutes a practical politics in TAFE,when individual women are situated as leader/managers in sites of educa-tional practice not of their own making, with all its constraints and possibil-ities (Angus and Seddon, 1998). Corporatization seeks, on the one hand, toassimilate individuals into the organization and, on the other, createsprocesses of individualization that deflect any sense of collective action. Cor-poratization links society to self-interest — it relies upon the rejection of acitizen-based democracy. Corporatization will ‘efface the distinction betweenpublic and private, dissect the democratic citizenry into discrete functionalgroupings which are no longer capable of joint political action’ (Saul, 1997,p. 80). In so doing it problematizes notions of professionalism premisedaround pedagogy and curriculum.

A practical politics with a more emancipatory intent must go beyond thepractical rationality of ‘getting things done’, problem-solving or even reflec-tive practice in an action research sense within one institution. Reflectivepractice, as it is often used in the management arena, can be utilized in a relatively neutralized way, instrumentally, ‘as a cognitive activity of inputs,process and problem-solving’ means to an end, readily confined to a narrowmode of technical rationality. A practical professional politics, for example,may argue that improved communication is a condition of democratic work-places, because one values collegial relations and not just because it improvesthe efficiency of organizational communication.



A practical professional politics leads to reflection informed by such nor-mative questions as, who benefits from change? (Edwards, 1997, p. 153). Apractical professional politics exists where one has a strong sense of what onevalues, the principles upon which you wish to engage in relationships withothers and a sound sense of strategy, as well as a sense of the professionalcommitment to the public good and not just one set of students or one insti-tution. It is one that deals with and works from a sense of where things arenow, with a recognition that change (at least, progressive change) is partialand gradual, but must be won with an eye on the long term about profes-sional ethics and responsibility (Fraser, 1989, p. 32). Importantly, it recognizesthat there are highly contested value judgements to be made in any form ofpractical politics. This is different from the type of practical rationalityevident in the TAFE cultures we explored.

The issue for women is that they are being incorporated into even the moreliberal TAFE cultures in ways that value diversity as a positive organizationalethos. Nevertheless, we still need to ask: is the new corporate culture anydifferent from traditional culture? In that it is highly instrumental it assumesthat women will ‘fit’ by being assimilated into the new corporate culture,leading to ‘assimilated diversity’ rather than ‘unassimilated diversity’(Thomas, 1992, p. 310). Women are positioned as agents of change in orderto produce a culture change which improves productivity, but which offersno guarantee of gender equity and no shift in gender power relations orsocial justice. Indeed, corporatization puts at risk past equity gains largelyinitiated in the public service and challenges past equity strategies ofworking from within the state education bureaucracies for wider socialreform (Yeatman, 1994).

What does it mean now to be a corporate citizen? Du Gay (1995) suggeststhat shifting public administration towards a new enterprise culture of per-formativity means a new organizational identity is required which supplantsthe priorities of public sector and educational management of the past,premised upon a particular ethics of care and citizenship. The new corporatecitizen is now an entrepreneur and the nature of obligation and the processof ‘responsibilization’ requires individuals (not collectives) to undertakefunctions of organization without a sense of responsibility to the wider com-munity. This function is, however, is a limited one, bounded by organiza-tional parameters.

Thus, entrepreneurial governance in the public sector does not actuallyenhance human relations in ways that are necessarily empowering or constitute a sense of self which has a life beyond the organization. This isperhaps its undoing in the long run. What is lacking in entrepreneurial gov-ernance is a sense of ethics, justice and fairness that was critical to olderadministrative forms in the public sector. It may have been rule-governed,even patriarchal, but it did have a sense of community service that reachedbeyond the bureaucracy (Yeatman 1990). This is not to defend old patriarchal



models of bureaucratic government and instrumental rationality that positioned the emotional against the rational in an older gender order. Wesuggest, instead, that such modes did have a moral, ethical and substantiveelement or life-world which is absent in current modes of the self-optimizing entrepreneurial organization. So the ambivalence these womenfelt about change is because there was a sense of both hope and despair, butthat ‘hope and despair need to be mixed and not polarised if we are to movebeyond zealotry and nostalgic regret in the processes of change’ (Edwards,1997, p. 28)

Notes

1. Yeatman, A. (1994) Postmodern Revisionings of the Political. London: Routledge.Taken from R. Edwards (1997) p. 28.

2. Whereas ‘masculinity’ refers to the features of male behaviour that can changeover time e.g. ‘entrepeneurial’ or ‘macho’ masculinities, masculinism denotes theideology that naturalizes and justifies the enduring and seemingly transcenden-tal domination of men (Blackmore, 1999, p. 24).

3. While apprenticeships were available to girls, they were largely in hairdressing(10% of all apprenticeships). Despite equal opportunity initiatives to encouragegirls into non-traditional pathways during the 1980s and 1990s, the take-up waslimited. The new traineeships that girls took up were offered in service sectorareas and largely offered by the public sector.

4. In a Ministerial Review of Employment Equity for Women Teachers in Victoria(1994–6) that included TAFE, many women interviewed spoke about their exclu-sion from the boys’ club, although this was never be stated in this report. Equityworkers believed the TAFE sector to be in denial about the gender issue, justifiedby a lack of data about the level of casualization and feminization of teachers’work.

5. During the period of this research project there was increased industrial actionagainst TAFE colleges for their move to increase the contractual labour of teach-ing staff.

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Zealotry or Nostalgic Regret’? 1 Women Leaders in Technical and Further Education in Australia:...

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