The practice of scalecraft: Scale, policy and the politics of the market in England’s academy schools
本文结合地理学中的尺度实践与批判政策研究中的政策作为实践视角，通过英格兰学院制学校政策的实证研究，揭示政策行动者的工作如何被尺度技艺所支撑，并分析尺度技艺与市场化政治如何交织产生尺度张力，从而塑造政策行动者的工作。
This paper builds on geographical understandings of scalar practices and illustrates how they can enrich studies of policymaking, in particular for the area of education policy. It achieves this by integrating a focus on ‘scalecraft’ with an approach to ‘policy as practice’ featuring in critical policy studies. The paper draws on one of the few empirical studies of England’s academy schools policy and analyses the work of actors tasked with implementing the policy in two local authority case studies. Analysis presents a new critical perspective on the academies policy by revealing how policy actors’ work is underpinned by scalecraft practices. The analysis also reveals how scalecraft intersects with marketisation politics to create scalar tensions which profoundly shape the work of policy actors. The paper uses its analytical findings to conceptually develop the relationship between scalar practices and the politics of the market, and to propose new conceptual dimensions for understanding the practice of scalecraft.