Meanings, Power and Norms. The structuration of the educational governance

In this paper I present a case study regarding the raising of a new form of governance of education policy in a province of the south of Italy. The research to be presented has been focused on the constitution and the implementation of a new instrument of governance, the “Conference of zone”, promoted by an italian local authority (a province). Since the late 90s the italian education system has been restructured after a long period of non-decision making. The rhetorics (Derouet, 2000, Ball, 2005) conveys the necessity of changing the governance of educational field, moving from a rule-governing perspective to a objective-oriented approach. This implies a re-balancing of the main organizations of the field, where the ‘centralistic and bureaucratic mode’ is replaced by a ‘devolved environment’ and “locus” of dialogue and coordination (Rhodes, 1997). Then the system has been changed along two different paths: schools have become autonomous. At the same time a relevant part of the central Ministry competencies have been decentred towards local authorities. Consequently, new local policy arenas have been “constituted” and new actors are involved into the decision-making processes. The case of the province analyzed in the paper is widely considered an example of best practice in the national scenario. The province has classified its territory in districts, creating a “conference of zone” for each of them. The conference represents an emerging “collective actor” and involves all the relevant stakeholders in the decision making processes regarding educational planning and scholastic building. In order to qualify the mode of governance emerging in this reshaped local educational arenas and understand the role of the conferences, I have chosen to adopt ideas drawn by Giddens theory of structuration (Giddens, 1976; 1979; 1984) and new institutionalist approach (Powell, DiMaggio, 1991; Barley, Tolbert, 1997). The analysis of the interactions within the conferences and in the other “locus” of the local educational governance will be conducted in terms of signification, dominance and legitimation. It will allow us to highlight the role of the conferences as points of trasformation of the structural properties (Giddens, 1984) of the local educational system. The analysis will be carried out through the classification of the scripts recurring during the interactions (Barley, 1986; Barley, Tolbert, 1997). Specific objects of analysis will be the strategic conduct (Giddens, 1979) of the actors involved in the interactions, the developing of the dialectic of control and the unintended consequences of the different conducts (Giddens, 1984). The analysis will show: a) how the conferences represent an instrument for Province’s actors to put themselves as an obligatory point of passage within a new “circuit of power” (Clegg, 1987); b) how they constitute a new kind of “front region” (Giddens, 1984) where decision making processes are revealed and submitted to intersubjective control. This duplicity of the conference implementation process implies an increase of the accountability as well as the return of some core issues regarding the education policy to the “back regions”, typical of the bureaucratic mode of regulation. The research has comprised durable contacts with the field (3 years), where we have conducted observations of the interactions during the conferences as well as the daily work activities of the Province’s actors responsible for the educational planning. Many actors involved in the process have been also interviewed. The research activity has so far led to collect documents, transcripted in-depth interviews with managers and civil servants of the province, observations of their everyday working practices, observations of negotiation practices among many stakeholders of the educational arena. These research materials have been analysed according to the principles of the Grounded Theory (Strauss, Corbin, 1990).