Educational governance and innovation: Technology as end and means of government

Abstract

Innovation in education enhanced by new technologies has become a central issue in the agenda of many countries around the world. This article analyses this emergence as a dispositive installed in education and points out the need to understand how it is enacted on specific practices. As a main theoretical framework, this work employs an analytics of government, providing an understanding of the enactment of such dispositive for innovation through the analysis of concrete practices of government. In examining three practices, that is, shepherding, accountability and action at a distance, I propose a critical understanding of the role of technology as an end and as a means for the practice of government. Furthermore, I suggest that revealing a dispositive for innovation in education is not sufficient unless the analysis includes a deep reflection on technologies and their implications for the constitution of subjects.