Introduction

The deployment of regimes of practice has so far enabled the presentation and analysis of positioning by knowledge producers and their relationship with each other and with education policy. Knowledge production as a social practice can be for and/or about the game in play: political and economic elites determined the purposes of schools and the professional practice of the workforce through a codified doxa and attracted players through the illusio of how the game spoke to them. The mapping of the NLPR and PRR has revealed the need to understand how power works within and between regimes, and specifically that a regime of practice has a logic of practice in the staking and symbolic exchange of capital where boundaries are drawn. In this chapter, I intend examining regime practices through a review of social relations and exchange process before I then go on to focus on the impact of this on knowledge production about educational leadership.

Regime practices

All of those interviewed for the KPEL project espoused a commitment to students and their learning and educational organisations such as schools, and there is a strong professional experience background amongst policy entrepreneurs. However, it is clear that there are groups of people who have been and are institutionally located in universities, and in public and private organisations, who are variously networked nationally and internationally through distinctive hubs and special interest groups. What has been identified in the regime knowledge production processes is the importance of professional ‘genealogies’ (Bourdieu, 1992, p 15), with relationships based on a form of contractual kinship where people who know and who are in the know reveal particular dispositions and are central to its generative potential through how they engage in practice (Bourdieu, 1990, p 13). What distinguishes location and positioning is the structure and structuring of relations within epistemic groups, and so capital and hence identity is conceptualised and shaped in distinctive ways. However, kinship is not unconditional.

This is because there is ‘the good player, who is so to speak the game incarnate, does at every moment what the game requires’ (Bourdieu, 1990, p 63), but, as already acknowledged, ‘anything goes’ is not allowed and indeed is punished.