Activating self-monitoring through the discourse of fear and hope: The subjectivation of enterprising teachers

Abstract

Drawing upon Foucault's governmentality, this study sets out to explore how enterprising subjects constituted through self-monitoring are fashioned in the epoch of performance management drawing on a survey of junior-high-school teachers’ (n = 2,275) attitudes toward its core elements of performativity, data governance, self-knowledge, and teaching commitment. The best model of SEM analysis indicates that while such enterprising subjects cannot be manufactured through the coercive force of performance management, this outcome can be effectively achieved by introducing intermediates, such as self-knowledge, performativity, data-comparative governance, and commitment to high standards. This finding indicates that the mission of neoliberal governmentality is mainly completed through subjectivation, in which discourses of fear and hope install care of self into teachers’ self-knowledge thus engendering the mechanism of self-monitoring.