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
Date
In publication
Volume
28
Issue
2
Pages
207-232
Resource type
Research/Scholarly Media
Resource status/form
Published Text
Scholarship genre
Theoretical
Keywords
Open access/full-text available
Yes
Peer reviewed
Yes
ISSN
0895-9048
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
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