Cadastral VET: cartographic and architectural legibility

Responding to calls to expand theoretical repertoires by encouraging researchers to conduct more empirical studies of VET, this article employs neo-institutional theory to explore how the stewards of Australian VET have come to represent the sector in the twenty-first century. Applying the institutional logics perspective, a Foucauldian archaeological discourse analysis of public policy documents that self-identify as roadmaps, blueprints or landscape descriptors is used to investigate how they frame the sector’s stewards’ understanding of VET. Contemporary stewardship mobilises a range of instrumentalities to give continued effect to the long-standing national policies of marketised delivery of competency-based VET in the federation of states and territories. In order to govern over distance, banal technologies of government make VET legible to the state institutional order’s logics of welfare capitalism, redistribution and bureaucratic control. Cadastral surveys and maps have historically served to symbolise and abstract populations and landscapes in pursuit of state legibility. Roadmaps and blueprints have proven to be mobile technologies that provide metaphors and analogies which make the sector visible to governments’ tripartite governance arrangements by using quantifiable and calculable discursive practices invoked by landscapes. Cadastral VET serves an unexpectedly practical role for individual stewards.