Who is the Good High School Student? By Greg Thompson

manifestations of the shaping of the self. The first of these chronologically is Jean-François Lyotard’s examination of the increasingly “performative” political and bureaucratic mechanisms that correspond with certain ways of understanding knowledge and the self within those knowledge systems (Lyotard, 1984). The individual performs according to measures of productive output and becomes known in terms of representations of those measurements (Lyotard, 1984). Part of Lyotard’s critique of performative university cultures concerns the changing role of the knowledge expert.

The second articulation of performativity is closely associated with the work of Judith Butler, who understood performativity through gender in order to argue that the self may best be considered as a masquerade through which the performance regulates a complex system of expectations and consequences (Butler, 1997). Although Butler’s work opens a very interesting line of enquiry on the performance of subjectivity, that topic falls outside the limited scope of this book.

The third articulation of performativity argues that performativity is best understood as “a technology, a culture and a mode of regulation that employs judgements, comparisons and displays as means of incentive, control, attrition and change” (Ball, 2003, p. 216). This critique of performative culture has been particularly powerful in the United Kingdom, and increasing attention has been paid to it in the United States and Australia as educational researchers explore the implications of economically driven education reform. Writing in the context of the United Kingdom, Ball argued that education reform concerns the ways that teachers are made subjects through commodifying discourses that seek to measure effectiveness, productivity, outputs, and quality (Ball, 2003). In essence, teachers become enmeshed within relations of power that produce subjects who live their “lives as neo-liberal professionals” (Ball, 2003, p. 217). One consequence of this subjectification in schools has been the privileging of “the logics of accountants, lawyers and managers” over the judgement of the teachers (Ball, 2008, p. 217). This has led to an increase in levels of emotional pressure and stress, an increased intensity of work, changed (diminished) social relationships,