Pedagogies of the Best Dressed: School-Business Relationships in New Zealand 1990-2004, Including the Case of Food

Abstract

In the 1990s there was public speculation that New Zealand schools and businesses were establishing new and more relationships. Three broad public discourses sought to articulate this shift and its effects. They collectively represented business motives for school-business relationships as commercial, social, or operationally focused, or mixtures of these. This thesis argues with evidence from literature and original research, and with special attention on the activities of the food industry, that the prime business motive for school-business relationships was commercial. This motive is explored within the interwoven cultural contexts of changing businesses, changing childhoods and changing schools. In recent years businesses have assumed greater power as corporate meaning-makers in childhood identities as the boundaries between the cultural categories of advertising, entertainment and education collapse and new hybrid forms emerge including new school-business relationship forms. As business integrate public relations with their marketing objectives, this meaning-making role in an information society has intensified and fulfils a wide range of objectives from increased sales to management of public opinion. Businesses with the most fragile public profiles have gravitated to schools the most, and school children have become both key producers and key consumers of the sign value of the socially responsible business. Childhood is considered within a social constructionist perspective and it is argued that businesses influence childhood identity through the transgressive pedagogies of children's popular culture, and the commercialized adult discourses of child development and innocence. The tensions between these are being brought to some resolution in the increasingly popular commercialized edutainment pedagogies offered to students in schools, which simultaneously address adult and child desires. Responding to school-business relationships in New Zealand from 1990 was the marketised and corporatised school. The structural and cultural dimensions of New Zealand's marketisation reforms enabled pervasive discourses of competitive entrepreneurialism and managerial pragmatism to jostle with educational ethics in school-business relationship decision-making. Many school-business relationships found favour as fundraising opportunities or complex and financially advantageous relationships, limiting the potential for teacher dissent or community deliberation and debate. Teachers maintained an influential role in the key area of curriculum-related school-business relationships, but in this research, their perceptions about sponsored materials and programmes were overwhelmingly constructed within a discourse of curriculum utility and student appeal. The corporate agenda was usually positioned as benign advertising and marketing and there wes little understanding of the evolution of corporate public relations in recent years. Teachers decoupled the learning gain through school-business relationships from this corporate marketing. This steered them away from undertaking a deeper analysis of the corporate cultural agenda, limited their interest in the school's wider business relationships, and created a compelling argument for commercialized edutainment in schools. The business-like school was less capable of a critical understanding of the education-like business, and was often disinterested in resistance to school-business relationships. This thesis argues that school-business relationships need to be rescued by teachers from a discourse of pragmatic utility, and critically reconsidered as corporate pedagogies seeking to construct a consuming childhood and further various corporate ideologies and agendas. Schools as meaning-makers themselves are vital to this cultural assessment.