Corporatised fabrications: The methodological challenges of professional biographies at a time of neoliberalisation

We present corporatised fabrications as a novel and useful way of thinking about the lies told to professionals as school headteachers or principals to install entrepreneurial professionalism in neoliberal times. In this chapter, we define corporatised fabrications, trace their development through education policy in England and demonstrate the ways in which the concept helps explain how educational professionals in senior roles position themselves and are positioned. Corporatised fabrications raise methodological challenges for how researchers interrogate practice: professional biographies elicited through interview require new thinking to identify and understand the lies told to and by headteachers doing leadership. We address this here by deploying thinking tools by Bourdieu and Arendt in two illuminative empirical case studies. We make methodological contributions by using the concept of corporatised fabrications to think sociologically and politically with and against extracts from the professional biographies of two headteachers in England. Through this, we reveal not only the lies but also the cognitive and axiological dissonances in the impact of those lies on professionals in senior roles.