Sociological Analysis and Education Management: the social context of the self‐managing school

In this paper I take issue with the claim of Ozga (1992) that because of the poor quality of many recent texts on education management, and their lack of a sociological perspective, they are not proper material for analysis in the British Journal of Sociology of Education. I argue that sociological analysis of such texts is an urgent priority because they have gained credibility among education practitioners and provide a spurious legitimacy to new right policy directions. This general argument is illustrated by focussing on four specific limitations of one of the most popular current texts on education management.