The affective milieu of school market competition: using affect and governmentality to study market competition

This paper integrates insights from affect theory into Foucault’s governmentality framework to analyse school markets. Using a Deleuzian approach to affect, we theorise school markets as an affective milieu that composes the field of competition. Drawing on interviews with staff at two rival high schools, we highlight how an affective milieu that included threat, anxiety, insecurity, resentment and confidence shaped market dynamics. Our analysis shows that affective milieus reflect and reinforce power asymmetries in local school markets and are a condition for generating competitive practices to enhance schools’ capacities to affect and be affected. Our central point is to move beyond a strictly discursive analysis of school markets by demonstrating how affective forces of neoliberal governmentality play a crucial role in recomposing schools and subjectivities as competitive enterprises. We also suggest that, while material and symbolic resources remain central to understanding educational marketisation and inequality, attention to the conditions of affectivity helps to grasp how competitive relations, perceptions, sense and actions come into being.