Education management machines: Digital domination and augmented bureaucracy

Abstract

The article criticizes the managerial promises of reducing the bureaucratization of education, admitting, on the contrary, the relevance of rational-legal authority and its possible transmutation into rational-informational authority, served by information technologies, and their respective instruments of control and of digital surveillance. Attention is drawn to the need to study the new forms of digital domination of organizations and the administration of education, which may constitute an augmented bureaucracy, or hyperbureaucracy. The new education management machines tend to produce education that is both more irrational in substantive terms and more rational in formal terms, which can result in dehumanized education and schooling processes.