Platform governance, normative power and teacher agency: a critical realist study of digital management in English secondary schools

This thesis examines how digital platforms shape power relations in the management of teachers in English secondary schools, and how teachers interpret, negotiate, resist and at times actively support or innovate within these developments. This study addresses a significant gap in research on school contexts: the absence of empirically grounded, mechanism-based accounts of how digital infrastructures acquire governing force within school organisations. In particular, studies of schools have paid insufficient attention to the normative dimensions of platform governance, including the combined role of teacher groupings, spatial arrangements and institutional cultures, despite their relevance to both the management and digital-governance literatures. The thesis adopts a comparative qualitative design, drawing on a critical realist theoretical framework that integrates Bhaskar’s stratified ontology, Archer’s morphogenetic approach, Elder-Vass’s norm circle theory and selected aspects of Foucauldian governmentality as a lens on relational and soft power dynamics. This combination is justified by a specific gap in the literature on digital governance in schools: whilst research on schools as complex organisations exists, studies of digital governance have tended to foreground technological infrastructures or policy frameworks in ways that under-theorise relational power and leave the meso-level processes through which teacher groupings, spatial arrangements and institutional systems interact over time largely unexamined. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews at two English secondary schools: a Multi-Academy Trust (MAT) academy characterised by centralised authority and intensive platform-based oversight, and a Local Authority-maintained school (LA school) marked by leadership instability and platform governance that was contested and variably enacted across settings. Analysis followed a five-stage process combining open coding, retroductive inference, stratified explanation and morphogenetic synthesis, itself an original methodological contribution to critical realist studies of schools as organisations. The findings show that comparable digital systems produced markedly different patterns of oversight and teacher experience across the two settings. Aligned norm circles, groupings of social actors whose shared normative commitments shape practice, and stable leadership in the MAT school enabled platform governance to consolidate into a largely morphostatic regime of visibility and compliance. In the LA school, dispersed normative alignment and leadership instability left platform oversight fragmented and open to reinterpretation. Teacher agency also took different forms across the two cases: in the MAT school it was largely channelled into selective compliance, whilst in the LA school it tended towards reinterpretation and informal resistance, a finding that challenges determinist accounts in which the governed play no constitutive role in outcomes. The thesis makes three original contributions. It reconceptualises platform governance as an emergent form of normative power, rather than a purely technical or surveillance-driven phenomenon. It operationalises norm circles as a meso-level explanatory mechanism within critical realist analysis, deploying them as a comparative diagnostic device within educational governance, a use not previously developed in the literature, and extending the reach of Elder-Vass’s framework into school organisations as sites of digital management. It also extends Organisation Studies and HRM scholarship by treating schools as organisations and demonstrating how digitalisation reorganises management control and teachers’ work through processes of normative mediation, rather than through platform properties alone. The thesis will be of interest to critical realist researchers, organisation studies and HRM scholars, and professionals and policymakers with responsibility for digital governance in educational settings.