The business of schools: Corporatization of schools and its impact on the meaning of work

Abstract

The famous Milton Friedman tenet goes, a??The business of business is businessa?? a?? but what about the business of schools? The fascination about the market; its philosophies, language and assumptions is hegemonically taking over all spheres of our lives a?? including public education. In public education, policy makers around the world are marketizing their school sectors. As schools are being corporatized, the practices of their business counterparts are often slavishly imported and implemented in schools. This phenomenon has important implications for policy makers, administrators and organizational researchers. Using the grounded-theory approach, I conducted interviews with 31 teachers to understand the impact of corporatization on their work. A grounded theory of the meaning of teaching work was developed as a result of this study. The negative implications of corporatization and implications for both policy makers and researchers will be discussed at the end of the thesis.