Conference Program

Global education systems have experienced significant structural transformation as corporatised reform imperatives increasingly penetrate the field of public education (Lingard and Hursh, 2019). Privatisation agendas have progressively displaced democratic logics, installing market-oriented doxa as the organising principle of educational governance (Gunter et al., 2016). This reconfiguration has transferred legitimate authority away from democratically constituted institutions toward corporate actors, whose accumulated economic capital affords disproportionate symbolic power in shaping educational policy trajectories (Au and Ferrare, 2015).

This paper explores the hysteresis effect and the symbolic violence experienced by parents engaged in decision-making within the empowered and public spaces of a corporatised school governing body in England. Specifically in England, the field conditions structuring school governance have become simultaneously corporatised and professionalised (Hetherington and Forester, 2025a; Healey, 2024), producing a systematic privileging of skill over stake (Simkins et al., 2019). Subsequently, valorising particular parents in participating in school decision-making, reproducing the dominance of white, middle-class professionals across both the formal empowered and informal public spaces of governance (Kultz, 2021; Reay, 2004; Hetherington and Forester, 2025b), and generating fundamental questions concerning whose voice legitimately represents the local (Woods et al., 2014).

I draw on Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and hysteresis to explain and theorise the positioning of parents in the field and their response to misrecognition and associated symbolic violence. I argue that those privileged and valorised parents navigating the corporatised field of school governance having the dispositions and symbolic capital to enter the field successfully accumulating further capital and positioning themselves higher in the field. Those others or marginalised parents from subordinated communities, find their dispositions and capital out of place in the field, experiencing both the hysteresis effect and misrecognition of their capital, experiencing significant symbolic violence. Symbolic violence in the form of anti-democratic, civilising and silencing practices is metered out to all parents, irrespective of their illusio for the game. Furthermore, I argue that the response to this symbolic violence is dependent on individual parents’ historical trajectories, habitus and capital. This argument is revealed through the analysis of data from the accounts of three parents contributing to the decision-making in school governance. The data originated from a wider study exploring alternatives to corporatised models of school governance in neoliberal contexts of education (Hetherington and Forester, 2025b).

Using hysteresis in this way allows me to make significant and original empirical and theoretical contributions to the field. Thinking with Bourdieu, firstly I contribute that parents navigate hysteresis, misrecognition and symbolic violence, whether acquired to the field (Healey, 2024) or not. Secondly, symbolic violence, I argue, is mandated through inculcated corporatised leadership practices, is designed to advance the orthodoxy of dominant field structures, reinforcing dominant field positions whilst further subordinating others. Significantly and finally drawing on Bourdieu and his lacuna regarding individual acts of resistance, I argue that the concept of hysteresis be expanded to include notions of agentic resistance, habitual reflexivity and postulate a habitus of resistance.