Servile Power: When Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark

This article scrutinizes the political demand for a strengthening of the culture of evaluation in public schools in Denmark. Using a combination of governmentality literature and the concept of paradox provided by systems theory, a number of recent political initiatives to promote evaluation and assessment in Danish primary schools are investigated. This sheds light on how the Danish Ministry of Education has come to recognize that local teacher resistance undermines means of power and has developed new strategies of self-evaluation and self-governance. Drawing on Mitchell Dean's concept of culture governance the article examines how political governing can function as power, not by means of control and regulation, but by affecting the teachers' wills and desires to change the way they think and act in their professional lives. The article suggests that political governing is not only exercised by detailed regulation that disempowers teachers or diminishes their freedom in the classroom but that strategies of self-governing are highly complex and ambiguous in their ways of operating through the cultivation of teachers' identities.