Little tools of governance: How and why to explore mundane documents in policy sociology

Little tools of governance: How and why to explore mundane documents in policy sociology

Education policy sociology is often concerned with the study of visionary documents, such as strategies, policy briefs, or legislation. While these documentary genres offer fruitful and important insights into policy objectives, discourses, ideologies, or power (im)balances there is a plethora of less spectacular documents that deserves scholarly attention. I call these “mundane documents” or “grey manuals” to underline their taken-for-granted and invisible nature (thus “mundane”). In my talk I would like to explore these documents through examples of my ongoing work on national assessments and other practices of quantification in school and higher education. The lecture draws on insights from Science and Technology Studies as well as existing work about the nature of bureaucratic practices in general and administrative documents in particular (Asdal & Reinertsen, 2022; Riles, 2006). I argue that the administration of assessments or other practices of quantification as new means of governance rely on and breed mundane documents and grey manuals. While the grey documents may seem insignificant, they determine tasks, responsibilities and actions that must be taken, issues that must be prioritized, and by whom. In other words, they construct the regulatory space of everyday governance (cf. Riles, 2006). Thus while seemingly merely technical and bureaucratic, these documents exercise power by their highly prescriptive yet mundane nature and active exclusion of (human) deliberation. The rules and routines constructed by these documents then help us to explore how power is exercised through shifting and expanding assemblages of heterogeneous human and non-human actors and across distributed sites (Joyce & Mukerji, 2017).

Nelli Piattoeva • Tampere University (Finland )

Professor of sociology of education at the Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University, Finland and director of the Research Centre on Transnationalism and Transformation, Tampere University. Her research is motivated by the broad questions about what education does and is asked to do for society, leading to a focus on how education governs, and thence to enquiry into the actors and technologies that are implicated in governing. Nelli’s ongoing research examines how the historical role of education as a conduit of national socialisation is reenacted today through discourses of digitalization and digital applications constituting contemporary school education. Her previous works have been published, among others, in Critical Studies in Education; Journal of Education Policy; Comparative Education Review; Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies; and Learning, Media and Technology. Nelli is lead associate editor of the Journal of Education Policy.