Conclusions
The logic of global economic change may produce a script that records parallel process of reform, in which markets subdue bureaucracies, modernised states ensure efficiency through performance management and individual educational workers and students take responsibility for their own success or failure. At the same time the account given above reminds us that globalisation is a process, with ‘illogics’ (Jessop, 2001) and contradictions that are played out differently in different contexts. There are difficulties in designing and implementing networks to carry the modernisation project, as the material from the EAZs illustrates. However it is not sufficient, in my view, to assess this project on the basis of its success or failure in creating networks of engaged, businesslike, responsible citizens. Instead attention needs to be paid to the modernisation project’s reconstitution of the relationship between the social and the economic in its adoption of social capital theory, and the consequences that has for our thinking about civil (and uncivil) society.