10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17486
application/pdf
2038-3460
17486
2
en
Michael Schlauch
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Paolo Landri, Digital Governance of Education: Technology, Standards and Europeanization of Education, Bloomsbury, 2018
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
11
Book Reviews
2021-03-09
2023-06-27
2021-03-09
2023-10-16
150-154
TS
Michael Schlauch
2020
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17486
150
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
2038-3460
2
en
154
Paolo Landri, Digital Governance of Education: Technology, Standards and Europeanization of Education, Bloomsbury, 2018
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17486/16333
11
150                                                            Tecnoscienza – 11 (2)

taken for granted understanding of participation.

References
Andersen, L.B., Danholt, P., Halskov, K., Hansen, N.B. and Lauritsen, P. (2015)
      Participation as a Matter of Concern in Participatory Design, in
      “CoDesign”, 11(3-4), pp. 250-261.
Barney, D., Coleman, G., Ross, C., Sterne, J. and Tembeck, T. (2016) The Partici-
       patory Condition in the Digital Age, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota
       Press.
Lengwiler, M. (2008) Participatory Approaches in Science and Technology: His-
      torical Origins and Current Practices in Critical Perspective, in “Science,
      Technology, & Human Values”, 33(2), pp. 186-200.
Lezaun, J., Marres, N. and Tironi, M. (2016) Experiments in Participation, in C.A.
       Miller, E. Smith-Doerr, U. Felt and F. Rayvon (eds.), The Handbook of
       Science and Technology Studies, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, pp. 195-222.
Marres, N. (2012) Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Eve-
       ryday Publics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.



                                      ***
   Paolo Landri
Digital Governance of Education: Technology, Standards and
Europeanization of Education, London, Bloomsbury, 2018, pp. 192

Michael Schlauch Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

    Since the upsurge of remote schooling due to the current COVID-19
pandemic, research about the digitalization and the digital governance of
education systems has gained significant importance. In this context, Paolo
Landri’s monography Digital Governance of Education – Technology,
Standards and Europeanization of Education appears both as a valuable
guide and as a precursor for methodological concerns that researchers in-
creasingly have to respond to. This is especially the case if one shares
Landri’s intent to not produce a static rendering of education policy and
practice as “matters of fact”, but rather to retrace the shifting power rela-
tions and risks regarding digital governance. What makes this book unique
is that it provides a sophisticated account of the state of affairs regarding
the digital governance and digitalization within the European and Italian
educational landscape shortly before the acceleration towards digital
schooling we are witnessing during the ongoing pandemic. The research
Book Review                                                               151
questions Landri aims to investigate concern the sociomaterialities of digi-
tal governance, the relationship between standardization and digitalization
and their potential impact on schools as we have known them in the past,
which he refers to as the “classical morphology of schooling” (p. 106). The
book illustrates not only how digital technologies contribute to the stand-
ardization of education systems. Moreover, it demonstrates how digitaliza-
tion reshapes the conditions of educational practice itself. In other words,
it gives insight into how some aspects of schooling that once remained tacit
and implicit are now susceptible of being either codified or hidden within
a new regime of visibility.
     As it has been acknowledged in many other STS studies, social research
at the intersection between social phenomena and technology presents
considerable methodological challenges due to the necessity to
acknowledge the entanglement of human and nonhuman actors and the
need to uncover the concealed workings of algorithms and digital infra-
structure. In an effort to bridge STS, sociology of education and a digital
sociology of school, Landri responds to those challenges with a “composite
approach” consisting of historical analysis, semiotic analysis and multi-
sited ethnographies. He uses these methods in order to develop complex
cartographies of the digital governance of education. Here, Landri em-
braces the concept of “cartography” introduced by Rosi Braidotti (2011,
p. 4), considering it as a “theoretically based and politically informed read-
ing of the process of power relations”. In writing these critical car-
tographies, Landri makes use of Actor-Network Theory (ANT). However,
as he explains, ANT is used as a sensibility rather than as a systematic and
complete theorization. This is consistent with the problematization that the
word “theory”, present in the acronym ANT, that we find in previous dis-
cussions about “after-ANT”. As educational contexts are often character-
ized by volatile configurations and assemblages of learning, this non-reduc-
tive perspective of ANT as sensibility has enriched a number of studies in
the past. Thus, Landri draws from a strand of studies that have been adapt-
ing ANT to issues of learning and education since the ‘90s, featuring,
among others, researches such as those of Jan Nespor, Helen Verran,
Estrid Sørensen, Radikha Gorur, Tara Fenwick and Richard Edwards
(2010; Fenwick et al. 2011). Recently, the concept of sociomateriality has
been used to refer to the co-constitutive entanglement of humans and non-
humans in practices. With the addition of a sociomaterial vocabulary in
recent studies, it is possible to discern how this book advances an emerging
research field related to the study of sociomateriality in education.
     The book is structured into seven chapters. While the first, second and
the last chapter respectively represent the introduction, the theoretical
frame and the conclusion of the overall book, chapters 3-6 approach the
digital governance of education from different directions. Chapter 3 con-
sists of a historical analysis of European cooperation that brings us back to
the apparent paradox between current developments and the avoidance of
152                                                        Tecnoscienza – 11 (2)

cooperation in the domain of education in the original Treaty of Rome of
1957. Landri retraces how different education systems have gradually been
made commensurable, leading to the current emergence of a “suprana-
tional space of European Education” (p. 33). In chapter 4, the author shifts
to the national Italian context and discusses emerging forms of digital gov-
ernance. The analysis focuses on the case of a national database of school
profiles (“Scuole in Chiaro”) and the fabrication of a school data infra-
structure of self-evaluation. In chapter 5 we get an additional view on these
issues by means of data from a multi-sited ethnography in different primary
and secondary schools. Interestingly, head-teachers are supposed to insert
reports for self-evaluation and self-improvement in a national web inter-
face. The authorship of these reports, however, is not entirely independent,
as automated compliance checks and notifications encourage the integra-
tion of performance items that are linked to certified national data and
benchmarks already registered in the system. Landri shows how schools,
in relation to their socio-economic status and pedagogical culture, find dif-
ferent strategies of compliance or non-compliance with the system, which
he classifies as “alignment”, “muddling through”, “fabrication” and “opt-
ing out”. In chapter 6, we learn more about the new emerging morphology
of the “digitally supportive school” in the Italian context. Landri connects
the new identities of “digitally confident and supportive” teachers, stu-
dents and schools framed in EU policy documents and surveys (European
Commission 2013, 143-151) with the evolution of policymaking that has
recently led to the second National Plan Digital School (MIUR 2015). In
an effort to account for the complexities of organizational change, this is
complemented by another ethnographic case study of an Italian school that
is recognized on a national level as a digitally supportive school.
    Under the influence of COVID-related school closures and limited re-
openings, one could easily be inclined to think that digital technologies
disrupt educational practices in ways that either reflect hopes for a de-
schooled society (Illich 1971) or elicit skeptical voices about the potential
failure of public education (Postman 1995). Landri, however, illustrates
how digital governance is performing “change without rupture” and de-
scribes how schooling experiences “a deformation of its space while retain-
ing its basic properties” (p. 106). Arguably, in light of recent emergency
remote teaching experiences during the pandemic, one may determine that
digital means can be used to perform continuity. Strikingly, Landri shows
how the conformity of digital governance with traditional regimes of stand-
ardization may also interfere with the enactment of a digitally supportive
school. In the case described in the book, the digitally supportive school is
characterized by distributed educational leadership, an orientation to
knowledge-in-action rather than highly standardized skills and a reflexive
enactment and shaping of digital technologies, e.g. by choosing not to fol-
low the national trend and opting to acquire video projectors rather than
Book Review                                                                153
the more expensive smartboards. Today, these considerations help gener-
ate further hypotheses about the reactions of schools in the shift towards
emergency remote teaching and after, with either the temporary absence
or consolidation of digital forms of governance. At the same time, they may
also indicate directions to consider for future configurations of digital
schooling.
    A recurrent theme throughout the book is the “myth” or the “paradox”
of transparency. Landri demonstrates that dominant forms of digital gov-
ernance add additional layers of opacity and obscurity and do not neces-
sarily ensure more accountability. Consequently, an apparently well-in-
tended pursuit of transparency can result in unintended effects, suspicions,
uncertainties and ambiguities along with tendencies of surveillance and
control. This makes it all the more urgent for researchers to follow the path
outlined by Landri in order to critically engage with the ongoing changes
in education systems.
    Whereas in the book we get to know some of the possible tensions that
arise from the introduction of new forms of digital governance in educa-
tional practices, we now face a situation that exhibits an unprecedented
scale of shifts towards global platforms, transformations of teachers’ digital
labor practices and digital inequalities (Selwyn and Jandrić 2020). Landri
acknowledges that the cartography he has produced is necessarily incom-
plete, as unreachable actors remain impossible to account for. Yet, I argue
that in the future it will be possible to look at this book as a work that
marks and documents a “pre-pandemic” digital governance of education
in Italy and Europe. At the same time, such a retrospective view will pro-
voke questions about further aspects of educational practice that may have
appeared as too mundane in the past to justify extended exploration. In
fact, as the topology of schooling now reaches beyond the classroom into
home environments through the integration of digital devices, new chal-
lenges for a digital sociology of school arise that extend the original scope
of Landri’s book. For example, it would have been compelling to know
more about the extent to which the described forms of digital governance
have affected or have not affected yet the everyday lives of students from
their own perspectives. In spite of that, I consider the theoretically and
empirically grounded cartographies presented in Digital Governance of
Education as a valuable landmark in the challenge of critical, STS-in-
formed education research that should not be ignored by anyone investi-
gating contemporary education policy.

References
Braidotti, R. (2011) Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti, New York, Co-
       lumbia University Press.
European Commission (2013) Survey of schools: ICT in education. Benchmarking
154                                                             Tecnoscienza – 11 (2)

       access, use and attitudes to technology in Europe’s schools, Brussels, Euro-
       pean Union.
Fenwick, T. and Edwards, R. (2010) Actor-network Theory in Education, London,
      Routledge.
Fenwick, T., Edwards, R. and Sawchuk, P. (2011) Emerging Approaches to Edu-
      cational Research: Tracing the Socio-Material, London, Routledge.
Illich, I. (1971) Deschooling Society, New York, Harper and Row.
MIUR (2015) Piano Nazionale Scuola Digitale, URL http://www.istru-
     zione.it/scuola_digitale/allegati/Materiali/pnsd-layout-30.10-WEB.pdf,
     [Accessed 2019-04-30].
Postman, N. (1995) The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, New
      York, Vintage.
Selwyn, N. and Jandrić, P. (2020) Postdigital Living in the Age of Covid-19: Unset-
       tling What We See as Possible, in “Postdigital Science and Education”,
       2(3), pp. 989-1005.



                                       ***
    David Neyland, Vera Ehrenstein and Sveta Milyaeva
Can Markets Solve Problems? An Empirical Inquiry into Neoliberalism in
Action, Cambridge, MA, the MIT Press, 2019, pp. 336

Chris Ivory Anglia Ruskin University

    Neyland, Ehrenstein and Milyaeva’s monograph poses the question of
whether or not markets solve problems. Although ultimately the authors
leave the reader to answer this question for themselves, they do provide
more than enough empirical detail to allow them to do so. After a ground-
ing in the fundaments of neoliberalism (e.g. Harvey 2005) and the issues
associated with markets being introduced to areas from which the public
sector wishes to withdraw, the reader is introduced to the sensibilities of
social Studies of Science and Technology through the work of Callon
(1998; 2007) and others. Through these works, the reader is alerted to the
fact that markets are created – through disentangling relations between ac-
tors before re-entangling them into new configurations. Such work, draw-
ing as it does on ANT, also draws attention both to important non-human
actors – non-human actors form the network linkages the make possible
these new configurations - and to the fact that markets are performative,
the result of the work done by the many public and private organizations
who undertake to create them. This introductory chapter is clear to note
