Confessing the will to improve: systematic quality management in leisure-time centers

Abstract

The focus of this article is to analyze the systematic quality management of educational settings the way it is present in Swedish leisure-time centers. The study explores how the production of both systematic reporting and documentation works through self technologies in this discursive practice. The analysis will illustrate and discuss how the systematic quality work viewed as a discursive practice is expected to be both self-scrutinizing and transparent, but also how this process is supposed to be made with a certain `correct´ attitude—what can be described as the ‘will to improve’. Moreover, it interrogates how the systematic quality management operates strategically and politically to exercise power on and through the personnel working at leisure-time centers. In the empirical material discussed, an ongoing subjectification appears, which takes the form of confessional practices. This can be said to be primarily about constructing a free but loyal collective subject, who produces systematic quality work in line with what the educational authorities want to happen. Such a process of subjectification gives rise to a collective subject, which is regarded as having unavoidable responsibility for an infinite need of quality improvement through confessional acts of ‘truth’.