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Widespread neoliberal approaches to education consider schools increasingly accountable for self-management and 'client' recruitment, encapsulating economic ideologies that assume privatisation is essential for social progress. With an ever-shifting landscape of market-driven policies and the increasing growth of private education settings, more research is needed to cast light on emerging or under-researched aspects of autonomous schools. Located within a U.S. state that has strict constraints on tax subsidies for religious K-12 education, this paper investigates how an extensive form of decentralisation corresponds with schools' discipline and ethical environment. It analyses teacher interviews and web documents from faith-based, autonomous schools in a state that has devolved power and authority for decision-making to parents and other independent 'agents', having a distanced relationship with its nonstate 'actors'. The paper follows Foucault's use of the metaphor of the panopticon and adopts his power analysis to examine the nature of parental control and its influence on disciplinary and ethical practices. Evidence suggests that these autonomous schools are driven by a 'mini-public' ideology that constrains educators' autonomy and generates particular disciplinary norms; entangling ethical, educational, and social ramifications, including teacher resistance and teacher demoralisation. Implications for policy are discussed in this context of control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to contribute to the sociological analysis of power through the study of the structuration and retrieval of information on the internet. The main argument of the paper is that, paradoxically, in an age when the availability of information has increased exponentially, there is a risk that diversity in the use of sources for the construction of knowledge becomes more restricted than in the past and that information search moves towards greater objectification and centralisation. Knowledge management systems increasingly shape the ways in which we think about the questions we ask and how we try to answer them, which raises fundamental and largely neglected questions for education policy. The paper illustrates these trends with particular reference to the use of Google and Google Scholar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the iconoclasticism of water as a plentiful resource and the near universalization of decentralizing institutions to manage it. The authors explore two agro-pastoral regions - Ambovombe District (Madagascar) and Tana River District (Kenya) - and consider institutional change, particularly the disengaging state, the lack of fiscal and administrative support throughout decentralization, community responses, and informal private markets. This paper concludes that decentralization holds the potential to increase accountability of the resource management process, improve governance and leadership accountability, and maximize the resource in a sustainable fashion. However, what we are seeing instead through the process of decentralization are the states exiting from the water governance process too rapidly and without concern for the culturally embedded social and economic norms, and the growing gap between new institutions and the needs, desires, and capacity of participants in the new systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws parallels between the market trend in the English NHS and Polanyi's (1957) The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our time, Beacon Press: Boston (originally published in 1944 in the United States as The Great Transformation, Rinehart: and Co: New York, and in 1945 in England as Origins of our time, Gollancz: London) account of how the rise of markets provokes a self-protective counter-reaction that tries to re-embed economic relations in social relations. We report findings from a qualitative study of NHS contracting, which examines the recent move to harder-edged contracts with greater use of financial penalties and incentives. In practice, use of these techniques tended to be confined to nationally-mandated sections of the contract rather than emerging from local bilateral agreements, and when things went wrong the parties relied more on cooperative behaviour than on the provisions of the contract to find solutions. Making the current contracting system work depended more on existing relational networks than on the incentive structures created by recent 'marketisation' initiatives, but the inability of the market to evolve as expected has encouraged policy makers to publish plans for further radical reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors describe the incremental approach to the marketisation of the English National Health Service (NHS) since the introduction of an 'internal market' in 1990 until the 2010 White Paper, 'Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS', and the subsequent Health and Social Care Bill published in January 2011. The introduction of a competitive market for a universal, tax-financed health system requires fundamental changes in regulation in order that market bureaucracy can be substituted for direct management. The components of reform are insufficiently captured by the framework of hierarchies and networks in new public management theories of decentralisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]