Educational Leadership and Nancy Fraser

Jill Blackmore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317693154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser, this book offers a critical view of contemporary educational leadership and reform discourses, exploring how her key concepts of redistribution, recognition and representation may apply to social and therefore educational justice.

Fraser offers a political and pragmatic reconciliation between feminist, neo-Marxist, critical and post-structuralist theories. This book outlines how Fraser has worked on and worked over theories of social justice and how this can inform how we can understand educational theory, policy and practice generally. In particular, the book focuses on the field of educational administration and leadership (ELMA) as it relates to equity issues such as school choice and inequality, gender and inclusive leadership, and alternative schooling. Fraser's argument about 'scaling up' social justice theory is shown to be highly salient given the emergence of the field of transnational education policy and its role in the context of intensified nation-state and edu-business competition.

Overall, through the lens of Nancy Fraser's unitary framework, this book considers epistemological questions about the nature of knowledge, examines the relationship between the state, the individual, education and social movements, addresses the difficulties and dilemmas which arise due to the intersections of gender, class, race, sexuality and culture in a globalized context, and illustrates how the principles of social justice can be mobilized by leaders in everyday practice.

Educational Leadership and Nancy Fraser is an illuminating read for those policymakers, researchers and practitioners engaged in the field of educational administration, leadership and social justice.

1 Introducing Nancy Fraser

Situating Fraser within the feminist political project

Nancy Fraser is a highly influential feminist North American scholar, currently Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science and professor of philosophy at The New School for Social Research in the Center for the Humanities, City University of New York. As a moral philosopher she has been central to debates over what constitutes a socially just society over three decades. Born in 1947, she was educated at Bryn Mawr College and then City University of New York, where she received her PhD. Her areas of specialization include critical social and political theory, feminist theory, nineteenth and twentieth century European thought, and cultural studies. At one time a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, Fraser has been a visiting professor at multiple European, American and English universities, including the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt, Stanford, and the universities of Cambridge, Groningen, Amsterdam and Paris. In 2012 she was Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Free University of Berlin.

Nancy Fraser’s intellectual influence spread throughout Western critical and feminist social theorists in Europe, the USA and Australia during the 1990s, a period of major global economic and social upheaval. She has been critical to feminist thinking because of her ongoing exploration of the notion of social justice that underpins the feminist political project of gender equality. Fraser has worked to offer a pragmatic reconciliation between feminist, neo-Marxist, critical and poststructuralist theories, and as such is difficult to categorize theoretically. Fraser’s greatest contribution is her working through and over three key concepts of social justice — redistribution, recognition and representation — in her publications, which include:

• Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (1989)

• Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (1997)

• Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (co-authored with Axel Honneth, 2003)

• Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (2008)

• Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neo-Liberal Crisis (2013)

In addition, her work has been the stimulus for a number of edited books and special issues. She was co-editor of Constellations, An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory. Her journal articles, book chapters, keynotes and presentations make an extensive list (refer to the Annotated Bibliography, Chapter 7).

Fraser continues to be a public intellectual, involved in debate in multiple arenas. Her influence is marked by ongoing dialogue with key feminist philosophers and social theorists such as Iris Marion Young (Fraser 1995a), who wrote Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990a) and most recently, Responsibility for Justice (2011), published posthumously. These debates often ricochet out of collaborative scholarship, sometimes with Judith Butler, herself best known for Gender Trouble (1990) among other publications (Fraser 1991, 1998), and Seyla Benhabib (Benhabib et al. 1995). Benhabib is a feminist democratic theorist who has written extensively about Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt, as has Fraser (1985b, 1991) (see Gunter 2014, on Arendt in this series). Texts such as Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates Her Critics (edited by Kevin Olson, 2008a) illustrate how such debates, as those with Anne Phillips (1997, 1999, 2001) on democratic theory, have developed and informed Fraser’s thinking over decades.

Fraser, feminism and liberalism

Fraser’s theoretical moves, as those of feminist theory generally, are indicative of how social theory emerges out of, and is informed by, social movements and historical contexts, in part due to the lack of explanatory power of earlier theories with regard to changing social, economic and political conditions. Second-wave feminism emerged in the 1970s, a product of the broad sweep of critical theory stimulated by ‘the new social movements’ (civil rights, students) of the late 1960s. Critical social theory challenged not only how we are governed and who should govern but also the established social, economic and political relations of power in and between the family and other institutions (religious, state, legal, education and welfare). In the forward of Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates Her Critics, Olson writes:

During the 1960s and 1970s, New Leftists exploded the confines of social–democratic conceptions that prioritized distributive injustices and class inequality. Rejecting economism that sees economic factors as a primary source of inequality, they problematized the mainstay of capitalist culture as consumerism and sexual repression, ‘the achievement ethic’; and ‘social control’, while the ‘new social movements’ that followed them expanded the purview of justice to encompass relations of gender, sexuality and ethnicity. (Olson 2008b, p. 1)

Feminist theory, as Fraser argues, is a social, political and an epistemological movement. Feminist theory through necessity, in seeking to unpack the fundamental assumptions about the nature of society, politics and the economy, has been multi- if not inter-disciplinary. Feminists dispute what counts as knowledge, what knowledge is valued and indeed how that knowledge is produced methodologically. Feminists provided a prolific theoretical incursion into the fields of sociology, history, politics, philosophy and psychology during the 1980s. Yet feminist theory, as argued in this text, has been appropriated by mainstream social theory (and in educational administration, leadership and policy), typically without recognition of its feminist origins (See Chapter 4, Blackmore 2013). Walby (2011) reminds us:

Feminism is no longer an outsider protest movement … it is embedded in institutions of civil society and the state. These institutionalized forms are often not recognized as feminist when the definition of feminism is narrowly limited to protest movements and popular culture. (Walby 2011, p. 24)

While feminism constitutes a range of political strategies and theoretical trajectories transnationally, the shared feminist political project is generally understood to be equality for women and girls.

As a daughter of the second-wave women’s movement, Fraser’s epistemological stance is informed by neo-Marxism and cultural studies. In an interview in Scales of Justice (2008) Fraser reflects on her role as a critical theorist:

In the early 1980s … I still had one foot in the activist milieu associated with the new social movements, especially second wave feminism. In those days the relation between theory and practice seemed relatively fluid. It felt natural to address problems that emerged out of political practice and to trust that one’s reflections would filter back to the grass roots … it seemed possible to write for at least two different publics at once … academics … criticizing their mainstream theoretical paradigms … and to engage with the social movements, giving systematic expression to their aspirations … theoretical clarity and political confidence seemed to go hand in hand …. (Fraser 2008, p. 142–3)

But Fraser considers that the nature of social movements and their relation to theoretical development has changed:

Today … the situation is different, largely because the overall political landscape is so much darker. Emancipatory movements still exist … but their energies seemed to be dwarfed by the twin forces of neoliberalism and reactionary chauvinism. In addition, the old clarity has given way to a ‘new obscurity’ in which progressive currents lack both a coherent vision of an alternative and also a plausible scenario. (Fraser 2008, pp. 142–3)

This text charts that shift and how it relates to the field of educational administration and leadership (ELMA) and gender equity through both a policy and practice lens. Education, as a source of women’s emancipation and social mobility through intellectual, social and economic independence, has been a focus for feminists, as it has for other marginalized social groups. Education both reproduces unequal gender and race relations and has the potential to transform individual and collective identities and produce fundamental social change. Fraser is important theoretically in that she foregrounds issues around democratic theory, understandings of public and private spheres, the power of discourse, collective action, the nature of the state and who is responsible for social justice. Her ‘synoptic view’ makes a chaotic context ‘surveyable and intelligible’ (Olson 2008a, p. 8). Such an analysis is appropriate in examining the capacity of education to deliver equity and social justice given the changing nature and role of the liberal-democratic state in Western democracies since the mid-nineteenth century. Then, education was central to individual social mobility and nation building with the rise of modern capitalism. Now edu-business is interlocked with the competitive nation state transformed by transnational relations and fast capitalism, creating, Fraser (2013) argues, the need to negotiate marketization, social protection and emancipation.

Theorizing social justice and the ‘post-socialist condition’

Fraser’s most recognized intervention is her short essay ‘From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a “Post-Socialist” Age’ published in 1995 in New Left Review. This later became the focus of Fraser and Honneth’s (2003) debate in Redistribution or Recognition and Olson’s collection (2008a) Adding Insult to Injury. The origins of this paper lie in the ruins of the Berlin Wall and Fukiyama’s End of History’s claim that capitalism was now the dominant global system. As described in Justice Interruptus (1997b), Fraser depicts post-1989 as the emergence of the post-socialist condition, which she characterized as having

an absence of an credible overarching emancipatory project despite the proliferation of fronts of struggle, a general decoupling of the cultural politics of recognition from the social politics of redistribution, and a decentering of claims for equality in the face of aggressive marketization and sharply rising material inequality. (Fraser 1997b, p. 3)

She queries what constitutes a ‘critical stance’ under such conditions.

Fraser is critical of post-modernism and post-structuralism, which marked the textual turn in social theory during the 1980s. Both failed, she argues, to provide a ‘progressive vision of an alternative to the present order’ or to replace the socialist vision as a result of what Habermas referred to as the ‘exhaustion of [left wing] utopian energies’ (Fraser 1997b, pp. 1–2). Fraser (1989, p. 181) refers to the relativist sentiment in feminist ranks as it ‘undermines the possibility of political commitment’ because it is difficult to judge between different interpretivist accounts (Fraser 1989, p. 181). Drawing on her neo-Marxist intellectual origins, she argues that the efforts to elevate such ‘differentiated progressive activisms’ as multiculturalism and ‘radical democracy’ to the same status are unconvincing because they bracket (that is, do not give equivalent significance to) political economy rather than make it central to their position. Fraser considered that the collapse of communism and the escalation of global capitalism and neoliberal policy orthodoxies in the 1990s, exacerbated a decade later by 9/11, supplanted debates about economic inequality by a surge of demands for recognition foregrounding issues of religion, ethnicity, indigeneity, ‘race’ and gender.

‘Recognition’ has become a keyword of our time … Whether the issue is indigenous land claims or women’s care work, homosexual marriage or Muslim headscarves, moral philosophers increasingly use the term ‘recognition’ to unpack the normative basis of political claims. (Fraser & Honneth 2003, p. 1)

This politics of recognition or difference, Fraser argues, distracted from how ‘economic inequalities are growing as neoliberal forces promote corporate globalization and weaken the governance structures that previously enabled some redistribution within countries’ (Fraser & Honneth 2003, p. 2).

Fraser sees the post-socialist condition as changing the ‘grammar of political claims-making’ (Fraser 1997b, p. 3). That is, claims based on group difference and cultural recognition have supplanted those based on social equality. The socialist imaginary that equated social justice to redistribution of economic goods has been supplanted by a claim for a politics of recognition of cultural difference based on groups struggling against cultural domination. ‘Cultural politics’, she stated, now ‘eclipses social politics’ (Fraser & Honneth 2003, p. 2). Class has been deleted as the struggle for racial and gender justice has been rendered as cultural without mention of redistributive justice. Furthermore, class and identity, social and cultural politics, have been positioned as mutually exclusive ways of thinking as if culture and the economy are separate spheres. Fraser referred in 2003 to the paradox that this disinterest in political economy has occurred at the moment that there has been a resurgence of economic liberalism in which ‘globalizing wall-to-wall capitalism is increasingly marketizing social relations, eroding social protections and worsening the life chances of billions’ (Fraser & Honneth 2003, p. 3).

Furthermore, Fraser chastised post-structuralist theorists’ refusal to take a normative stance in that they accept all versions of life as equivalent, leading to relativism, thus making any judgment about social justice difficult. Fraser (1989, p. 32) had earlier both commended and critiqued Foucault in the essay ‘Michel Foucault: A “Young Conservative”?’ for providing important insights into the ‘distinctive modern modalities of power’ by establishing how power is productive rather than necessarily repressive, and how power is dispersed and works like a capillary through everyday social practices more than through beliefs (see Gillies 2013 in this series). This undermines, she argued, the normative liberal conception of power by collapsing the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power. But Fraser rejected Foucault’s claim that his genealogies were merely depicting how things came to be; or that deconstruction illustrates how power works through discourse; or whether power/knowledge regimes are legitimate or not. Fraser argued that Foucault cannot be both ‘politically engaged and normatively neutral’ because the methodological strategies of describing how power works through practices and processes is ‘tied up with normative ambiguities’ and belief systems. Therefore, ‘distancing is epistemically impossible’ (1981, pp. 273–4). That is, any theory that claims not to be normative still makes certain epistemological and normative assumptions, and always has political implications.

Neoliberalism and social justice

The context for much of Fraser’s theoretical work during the 1990s was the rise of neoliberalism as a ‘mobile technology’ (Ong 2007). Neoliberalism, I have argued, is an economic theory, an ideology, a discourse and a policy orthodoxy (Blackmore 2000). Neoliberalism has reinvented the notion of the individual citizen within the nation state into a particular form of competitive self-interested individualism outside national boundaries. Neoliberal economic theory came to dominate bipartisan responses to economic globalization in most Anglophone Western democracies that were affected by the rapid processes of de-industrialization as fast mobile global capital sought cheaper labour in Asia and South America (Harvey 2007). Whereas some Western economies such as Australia, New Zealand and England adopted structural adjustment policies voluntarily to maintain their global competitive advantage, structural adjustment was imposed as an ‘economic’ experiment by international monetary bodies (IMF, World Bank) during the 1980s, with significantly inequitable effects, in South America, Mexico and Africa in return for loans (Torres 2009). Structural adjustment, an economic orthodoxy of right wing USA think tanks, advocated deregulation of financial and labour markets, reduction of state welfare expenditure, privatization of education and health and small government. It threatened the ‘postcolonial developmental state’ and ‘its effect was to greatly reduce the scope for egalitarian redistributive projects in the South’ (Fraser 2008, p. 108). The retention rates and access of girls and women in education rapi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series foreword
• 1 Introducing Nancy Fraser
• 2 From state-managed to transnational capitalism: Fraser, feminism and the field of educational administration and leadership
• 3 Educational inequality, parental choice and school governance
• 4 The gender politics of educational leadership
• 5 Addressing social justice dilemmas: The case of male teachers and alternative provision of education
• 6 Conclusion: Fraser’s thinking tools and socially just education
• 7 Annotated bibliography
• References
• Index