The Emergence and Workings of a Process View in Public Education Policy

This article presents a study of Danish primary education policy with the purpose of exploring what is put at stake when contemporary management discourses describe the object of management as fluid and emergent processes rather than as entities, persons and things. The article examines how such a process view of organisation allows policy makers to imagine innovative change, but also how a process view interacts in particular ways with financial pressures and become entangled to increased performance measurements. We
conclude that in this particular case, a conception of the object of management as processes is utilised to stabilise a belief that undoing organisational structures and categories offer an almost limitless resource for a simultaneous improvement of performance and reduction of expenses.