Irrational bodies and corporate culture: further education in the 1990s

The further education sector in England and Wales has been marketized. Colleges are now corporations, business practices have been adopted wholesale and a new managerialism is clearly evident. Economic rationalist discourse, a new cult of the individual and a growing emphasis on the promises of new technology are all major features of the further education sector today. In this paper, I want to argue that these changes are not simply the result of the global restructuring of the economy and New Right politics, but can be seen as a direct descendant of deeply patriarchal philosophical trends in the history of Western thought. The Cartesian mind/body dichotomy, with its gendered, racialized and classed implications, is replayed within the discourses and practices of economic rationality, masculinist managerialism and the mythologies of the new technology. I will argue that far from being neutral and rational, newly marketized colleges embody those irrational and dangerous elements usually reserved for ‘Others’.