Quality, Economic Reason and State Classification: A Rhetorical Political Analysis

This research proposal sets out the case for a detailed study of the politics of 'quality', using the case of public education in England and Wales. Quality has been a pervasive and dominant concept in public policy since the late 1980s, yet despite this there is relatively little critical academic literature on the topic. This research is premised on the notion that a good part of the explanation lies in the fact that 'quality' is an ideological concept, in the sense that it has been thoroughly normalized, naturalized and institutionalized.

The chief aim of this project is to examine the veracity of such an explanation and to examine if, how and why such processes have occurred. If quality is best understood as a concept that is the product of argument and processes of normalization, it is these very processes that should be the object of political analysis. The research proposed here is therefore conceptualized as a study in interpretive political analysis, in particular, rhetorical political analysis, a perspective which makes the analysis of how "commonsense is constituted and altered" a matter for research rather than "an unexamined and foundational given" (Finlayson 2007:560).

From these theoretical underpinnings the research proposal sets out a core of generative research questions. These are centered firstly, on investigating the ideological and political provenances of quality, and how and why political actors have defined and constructed the concept rhetorically. However, an important further aspect of the research will be concerned with the relationship between collective interests and state structures. The theoretical scope of the planned research is therefore broad; it is contended that quality has to be understood in the contexts of the state, competing collective interests and political power. Any significant attempt to understand quality, moreover, requires a genealogical element; preliminary research indicates that 'quality' is simply the most recent manifestation of economic reasoning at work within state structures, and can be traced back to roots in scientific management and the efficiency movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. Balancing and resolving the tensions between interpretive and structural approaches will be a key theoretical task in this project. While such theoretical work is challenging, these two theoretical elements are by no means incompatible and the study of discursive shifts at periods of crises will enable investigation of key moments of state re-structuring.

Implicit in this approach is the view that good political analysis requires theoretical approaches capable of penetrating the 'universal reign of the normative' constituted by quality (Foucault 1977). This is in contrast to the approach of one prominent political scientist, who suggests that in fact good political analysis is simply common sense, since it is, "often a case of stating and re-stating that which is obvious but all too rarely reflected on" (Hay 2002:129). Successful criticism of such a position is theoretically challenging, but it also requires methodological rigour. This research will address the core research questions primarily by way of the construction and analysis of a large corpus of textual material, drawn from official documents covering a period from 1902 to 2016. Data will be qualitatively analysed using text mining software and iterative close reading techniques. The sources will also enable the derivation of quantitative data, enabling network and correspondence analysis.

There may also be the opportunity to augment these sources with interviews with key personnel involved in developing policy on quality in the early 1990s. In this way, the research will facilitate critical analysis of the claims made on behalf of quality and generate answers to questions central to an understanding of the relationships between collective interests, state structures and public policy.