Peter Emmerson

1.1

I want to explore the hypothesis that large numbers of people whose job it is to manage the process of educating have a way of seeing and thinking (perceptual habitus) which is excessively, even obsessively, positive. Such a perceptual habitus is not an authentic positivity that is geared to an honest and motivated commitment to group (figurational) aims, it is a ‘pseudo-positivity’ that is more often than not just a ‘front’, as Goffman would say; merely a smokescreen of impression management, that is used as a tactic by many educational managers to guard against censure. The threat of censure is a constant problem: at the operational level subordinates find fault on a day to day basis. However, such pressure from below can easily be blunted by using the social influence that goes with authority. Censure from the side or above is a more difficult problem. Pseudo-positivity is a method of coping with these more serious dangers. On one level it bonds managers of roughly equivalent status together in highly cohesive ‘figurations of the positive’, where negativity is stigmatized and with it the potential for insider conflict is controlled. In addition, such collectivities protect managers from any attempt by those at more senior levels to exclude them from the policy making process (serious social influence). From my experience, this brand of compliance or ‘yes-saying’ is rife throughout the network of managers who run education, certainly in the UK. It is a significant element in their managerial strategy, a strategy which is defensive and is correspondingly counterproductive to any attempt at educational improvement.