Democratic management in dispute in the policy enactments of Educational Management Technology: contingent articulations of democracy

Abstract

This article analyzes the enactment of democratic management in a Escola Cidadã Integral within the Paraíba State Public School System, operating under the Educational Management Technology (Tecnologia de Gestão Educacional – TGE). The study articulates Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Discourse Theory with the Theory of Policy Enactment developed by Stephen J. Ball, Meg Maguire, and Annette Braun to understand curriculum policies as contingent discursive processes constituted within the practices through which they are interpreted, translated, and put into action. The study draws on documentary analysis of the Escola da Escolha handbooks and on records produced through interviews conducted in 2024 with twelve participants working in the school under investigation. From this perspective, TGE is understood as an educational policy whose intelligibility is produced within the very process of policy enactment, as actors recontextualize its guidelines within the routines and relational dynamics that organize the school’s space-time.The analysis shows that management emerges as a nodal point in the articulation of the meanings attributed to the policy, producing readings of democracy that are frequently associated with participation oriented toward the institutional organization and functioning of the school. At the same time, the evidence indicates that these attempts at stabilization never fully succeed, since different interpretations and positionalities continuously reopen the dispute over the meanings of management and democracy. In this way, the enactment of TGE is revealed as a process of contingent articulation in which different projects struggle to hegemonize the meanings that come to organize school life.