International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) |Volume VI, Issue XII, December 2022|ISSN 2454-6186
Complying with Neoliberal Performative Techniques in Chinese Education
Lydia Osarfo Achaa
School of Education, Zhengzhou University, Zhongyuan District, Henan Province, China
Abstract: In this period where performance management has gotten to an abolishing degree of teacher quality and school viability; educational institutes, students and teachers are presently under pressure to compete for acknowledgment on the premise of evaluations, yearly audits, and ranking of tables: where teachers are now positioned as self-governing professionals with their work progressively measured against students’ performance on national and international tests. And teachers who are’ ethical subjects’ find their values have been tested by what Stephen Ball called ‘the terrors of performativity’. Further, the value placed on measuring, politicizing, and labeling teachers has caused emotional stress in transforming what it’s meant to be a teacher. The literature review results were based on one research question: Why do teachers still comply with neoliberal performative techniques? The literature search was based on the following primary keywords such as “teacher performativity,” “teacher + neoliberalism”, and “teacher + performance management”. The paper unravels that teachers are still complying with neoliberal performative techniques because it provides a stage to gain joy and social acknowledgment, which worked as a psychical motivating force persuading them to utilize them for their academic advantages.
Keywords: Education reform, Performance Management, Performative Techniques, Neoliberalism, China
I. INTRODUCTION
Performance management is a set of organizational practices, procedures, and design elements that are used to motivate and support workers to get the intended results (Huang & Xu, 2020). It allows management to better evaluate employee job performance against company guidelines, make better job assignment decisions, and determine their employees’ training and development needs (Benedikt, 2014). The primary goal of performance management is to create a high-performance culture in which people and groups accept responsibility for the continuous enhancement of the organization’s processes as well as their skills and ability to contribute within a framework provided by effective leadership (Armstrong, 2006).
According to Liu and Liu (2016), Chinese municipal governments were enthusiastic about the implementation of a performance management system since the early 1990s, later various performance management efforts were introduced across China’s provinces and cities in the late 1990s. They posited that the State Council passed “The Program for Comprehensively Promoting Administration by Law”, stating that it will proactively examine performance management systems in 2004. For the first time in the following year, the State Council offered “performance management” and a