(un) Doing Standards in Education with Actor-Network Theory

Recent critiques have drawn important attention to the depoliticized consensus and empty promises embedded in network discourses of educational policy. While acceding this critique, this discussion argues that some forms of network analysis – specifically those adopting actornetwork theory (ANT) approaches actually offer useful theoretical resources for policy studies. Drawing from ANT-inspired studies of policy processes associated with educational standards, the article shows the ambivalences and contradictions as well as the possibilities that can be illuminated by ANT analysis of standards as networks. The discussion outlines the diverse network conceptions, considerations and sensibilities afforded by ANT approaches. Then it shows four phenomena that have been highlighted by ANT studies of educational standards: ordering (and rupturing) practice through ‘immutable mobiles’, local universality, tensions among networks of prescription and networks of negotiation, and different co-existing ontological forms of the same standards. The conclusion suggests starting points, drawing from these ANT-inspired network analyses, for examining policy processes associated with educational standards. Among recent policy studies, some well-justified challenges have been raised over the conception of networks. Jo Frankham (2006) provides a thorough critique of conventional network thinking – particularly in considering the proliferating appeal of ‘learning networks’ as an educational policy ideal and practice. She rightly points out the potential of network metaphors to presume to map and therefore fix flows of information and resources, to assume a ‘language of consensus’ and a collective desire for positive connectedness, to suggest homogeneity where there is incompatibility, and to neutralize or obscure the micro-politics of educational processes. Jenny Ozga (2009) shows that network principles have been deployed in discourses of educational governance reforms to signal the decentralization of performance management to local education authorities and schools. However, cautions Ozga, the network functions only as an appearance of deregulation while the ‘centre’ continues to control the data and decision-making. The critique of network for both authors illuminates the tensions embedded in its promise of democratic, decentralized governance and its associations with trust, flexibility and responsiveness. However, not all network analyses of policy assume that a network signifies benign distribution, depoliticized ‘flows’ or connections of consensus. Nor does the metaphor of ‘network’ necessarily refer to a flat and static horizontal array of linkages. Some accounts trace the dynamic, complex and contested negotiations of network formations in policy processes, as well as the efforts required to sustain what are usually precarious connections. Such accounts attend to the multiple and often ambivalent or contradictory effects of networks set in motion through policy processes. These accounts tend to associate themselves with STS studies of technology and science, and in particular with a branch of STS called actor-network theory (ANT). Proponents of STS/ANT have argued that one of its most promising contributions is to open new understandings of policy processes, through (1) a propensity to cause trouble, provoke, be awkward; (2) a tendency to work through difficult conceptual issues in relation to specific empirical cases, deflating grandiose theoretical concepts and claims (and even some ordinary ones); (3) an emphasis on the local, specific and contingent . . .; (4) caution about the unreflexive adoption and deployment of standard social science lexicons (e.g. power, culture, meaning, value); (5) reflexive attention to the (frequently unexplicated) notions of our audiences, value and utility. . . (Woolgar, Coopmans and Neyland, 2009, pp 21-22) In this spirit, the present discussion purports to introduce possibilities afforded to educational policy analysis through actor-network theory. More properly termed a ‘sensibility’ and now a highly diffuse cloud of diverse studies and approaches, ANT has emerged in interesting directions since its early enthusiastic uptakes. Indeed, many of its progenitors such as Bruno Latour, John Law and Michael Callon have struggled to avoid defining it as a set of theoretical ideas and have distanced themselves from others’ efforts to do so. Frankham (2006) points out problems that have also frustrated prominent ANT commentators: that many ANT uptakes have solidified particular models of analysis, have reified concepts such as ‘networks’, and have colonized their objects of inquiry in representational ways that ANT approaches were intended to disrupt (see McLean and Hassard, 2004 for a summary of such critiques). In a much-cited volume of essays Actor Network Theory and After (1999), Law (1999) attacked the many misinterpretations of ANT’s topological assumptions for homogenizing the spatial and relational possibilities of socio-material events instead of tracing their incoherent complexities. Other authors argued to delimit ANT’s claims, destabilize its language, unravel its models, and open its conceptual scope (Latour, 1999; Mol, 1999). But in the past decade there has continued a remarkable profusion of ‘after’ ANT uptakes and hybridic theoretical blends as ANT has travelled across disparate disciplines ranging from organizational change to cyber-punk semiotics and urban planning to medical sociology. A growing, if still surprisingly limited, educational interest in ANT is evident in studies of curriculum and schools (McGregor, 2004; Nespor, 2003), higher education (Fox, 2005), literacy (Hamilton, 2009; Leander and Lovvorn, 2006), and educational policy and change (Clarke, 2002; Edwards, 2002; Nespor, 2002; Waltz, 2004). These uptakes have each helped to extend and reconfigure ANT ideas in ways that trace the mess, disorder and ambivalences that organize policies and practices such as those comprising education. Some have tried to periodize these developments as early-ANT, after-ANT, ANT-diaspora and so forth. Some avoid saying ‘ANT’, alluding to their work in broad terms as complexity, STS broadly, or ducking labels altogether. But for the purposes of promoting the contributions of ANT’s theoretical resources, it seems useful to stick with one term for this wide constellation of ideas. Therefore, ‘actor-network theory’ (ANT) is employed here as a loose, contingent marker to refer to all approaches, early-, afterand in-between, that have associated themselves with ‘ANT’ at some point. These approaches share notions of human/nonhuman symmetry, network not as metaphor but as sociomaterial performances that enact reality, and translation in multiple and shifting formulations. Using this one term also helps to distinguish ANT approaches from other available conceptions of socio-material practice and interobjectivity that have captured interest among educational researchers, such as post-structural geographies, complexity theory, and cultural-historical activity theory. In direct opposition to network discourses of consensus and democratic decentralization, ANT treats networks as contested and precarious multiplicities which order practices, bodies and identities through complex enactments. The key point is multiplicity – not just multiple views, but enacting multiple worlds – multiple simultaneous ontologies, as analysts have argued working with ANT resources (Law, 2004b; Mol, 2002; Moser, 2008). Further, and most important, a network in ANT does not connect things that already exist, but actually configures ontologies. For educational policy analyses, Edwards (2002) has claimed that ANT thus ‘provides a framework for analysing the exercises of power by which cultural, social and economic capital is produced and reproduced’ (p 355). When exploring the multiple enactments that comprise any one object such as a policy, ANT provokes questions about the politics that constrain, obscure, or enable certain enactments to be most easily performed and recognized, and why. The following discussion argues the continuing merits of actor-network theory as one approach to study educational policy. The focus chosen here are those policy processes associated with developing and mobilizing educational standards. Standards have become integral to educational policies intended to guide curriculum, pedagogical practice, assessment, reform initiatives and teacher supervision. A reasonable definition of standard could be ‘any set of agreed-upon rules for the production of (textual or material) objects’ (Bowker & Star, 1999, p.13). That is, practices of developing and integrating educational standards are not only politically contested, but actively produce and order the texts, identities, objects and bodies that assemble to become educational practices – practices of pedagogy, assessment, administration, public relations, policy-making and so forth. The purpose of standard-setting practices could thus be described as the attempt to order practice at a distance. Standards aspire to ensure consistency and comparability in the everyday conduct that occurs at diverse locations in which a whole constellation of relations meet and weave together in particular ways to constitute practice. Popkewitz (2004) argues that in education as in most aspects of governing modernity, standards fabricate particular kinds of people to effect some desired action towards a perceived problem (p246). Whether we are examining the most common form of educational standards, measures of children’s learning, or other ‘salvation’ fictions in the form of standards for school improvement, teacher regulation and the like, writes Popkewitz (2004:248), what needs to be questioned are ‘the standards and rules of reason through which the child and teacher are made as objects of scrutiny, interpretation and administration’ [italics added]. But for any idea such as an educational standard to be 'mobile, durable and capable of inciting action at a distance' the idea must 'have the form of a trace, an inscription, a representation' (Bowers 1992: 117). Formal or prescribed standards that attempt to define levels of competence across locations, therefore, take a variety of ‘trace’ forms in educational practices: curriculum documents, assessment instruments, and accountability systems. In the following discussion, sample studies were selected to introduce ANT-uptakes in very different sites of standards enactment: prescribed curriculum standards, professional practice of standardized protocols, standardized student achievement testing, literacy assessment, and professional standards of competency. The studies also offer different theoretical perspectives of networks within ANT. The discussion is theory-based, and proceeds in three parts. The first section introduces network concepts and analytical approaches of ANT (including the recent proliferations calling themselves ‘after ANT’) pertinent to processes of enacting standards. The second section briefly presents ANT-associated studies of standards – their forms, their diverse enactments and their multiple effects. These studies illustrate not only different complexities in these policy processes but also different conceptualizations of networks. The conclusion suggests contributions that ANT’s theoretical resources might offer to analysis of educational standards and studies of educational policy more broadly. The overall purpose here is suggestive, rather than definitive. A single article cannot engage in depth the diffuse theoretical debates now associated with actornetwork theory, or retrace the fine-grained complexities of ANT-analysis explicated in the different studies that are mentioned. So sacrificing depth for breadth, this overview is intended to suggest starting points for analysis through a glimpse of uptakes associated with actor-network