Dale Globalization Education

Comparative EducationVol. 41, No. 2, May 2005, pp. 117–149

ISSN 0305-0068 (print)/ISSN 1360-0486 (online)/05/020117–33© 2005 Taylor & Francis Group LtdDOI: 10.1080/03050060500150906

INTRODUCTORY ARTICLE

Globalisation, knowledge economy and comparative educationRoger Dale*University of Bristol, UKTaylor and Francis LtdCCED115073.sgm10.1080/03050060500150906Comparative Education0305-0068 (print)/1360-0486 (online)Introductory Article2005Taylor & Francis Group Ltd412000000May [email protected]

This paper seeks to introduce this special issue by setting out what seem to be some of the majortheoretical and methodological issues raised for comparative education by the increasing promi-nence of the discourses of the knowledge economy, which, it is argued, represent a particularlystrong version of globalisation and its possible relationships to education systems, and hence anespecially acute challenge to comparative education. It focuses on the possible implications of thesechanges for each of the three elements of ‘national education system’. In terms of the ‘national’ itdiscusses the nature and consequences of methodological nationalism, and emphasises the emerg-ing pluri-scalar nature of the governance of education. In terms of ‘education’, it argues that educa-tion is now being asked to do different things in different ways, rather than the same things indifferent ways. In terms of ‘system’, it is suggested that the constitution of education sectors may bein the process of changing, with a development of parallel sectors at different scales with differentresponsibilities. Overall, the article suggests that we may be witnessing the development of a newfunctional, scalar and sectoral (non zero sum) division of the labour of educational governance.Finally, it addresses the question ‘what is now to be compared’ and considers the consequences forboth ‘explaining’ and ‘learning’ through comparative education.

The articles in this special issue all raise questions, albeit in rather different ways,about the relationship between globalisation and comparative education. These are,of course, not new issues. Globalisation has not only become a central and pervasiveelement of the comparative education literature, but has been recognised, to thesurprise of some, as giving it a new lease of life, while the implications of globalisa-tion for comparative education have been the focus of numerous publications. How,then, does this special issue, which introduces the idea of the ‘knowledge economy’into the mix, hope to contribute something new or different to the discussionsaround the subject? The fundamental rationale and aim has been to focus on theknowledge economy (KE) as simultaneously an increasingly common component ofthe discourses around globalisation and education, an apparently ubiquitous

*Graduate School of Education, 35 Berkeley Square, Bristol, BS8 1JA, UK. Email: [email protected]

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phenomenon, a concept that is denotative rather than connotative, and one thatseems intrinsically related to education. The rationale for this concentration is thatby focusing on one such central element, or expression, of the relationship betweenglobalisation and education it may be possible to reveal more precisely some keyfeatures of the relationship that tend to be concealed when it adopts a broader focus.In the body of this paper I will go on to argue that in order to achieve that it is neces-sary not so much to work through, or apply, the apparent relevance of the KE, as toquestion and problematise the concept.

The concept is addressed most directly in Susan Robertson’s paper, where it isthe dominant question. Robertson demonstrates in a number of ways how the ideaof the KE represents a qualitative shift from the assumptions and policy prescrip-tions of the 1980s and 1990s. She does this through a detailed analysis of ‘agenda-setting’ documents produced by the World Bank and the OECD on the topic of theKE, and of some recent attempts in the UK to suggest policy responses to thoseagendas. Her paper offers three crucial insights on the meaning and implications ofKE discourses. First, she makes clear that there is not a single KE discourse, butseveral, albeit linked by a common basis in emphasising the importance of ‘knowl-edge’ compared with ‘production’. She illustrates this effectively through a detailedcomparison of work done by the OECD and the World Bank under this heading,particularly in their different views of the role of markets in bringing about therequired changes. Second, she emphasises that notwithstanding these differences, orthe relative imprecision of the concept, the KE discourse has powerful materialeffects. The responses of the major international organisations provide good exam-ples of this, as they both develop and legitimate the discourse and use it to structurethe agenda that their members follow. An example she uses is the readiness ofMinistries of Education around the world to respond to the OECD’s scenarios forfuture schooling. And third, she makes clear that the implications of the KE foreducation systems are extremely far reaching. The changes seen to be required bythe KE would entail the transformation of education systems as we know them;even radical reform of them would be insufficient to bring about the shift from‘education in institutions’ to ‘learning anywhere, any time and just for me’.

David Pang’s article approaches the issue from a rather different angle. It offers agood example of the ‘conversion’ of education and how it might most obviouslycontribute to KEs, from a direct to an indirect mode. He discusses in detail how therelationship between education in and for ‘Asia’ is mediated not only, or necessarilymost prominently, through any of the three most frequently mentioned channels: thetransfer or emulation of practices recognised as successful in the case of the ‘tiger’economies; the sale of education as a commodity on the global market; or as part ofan attempt to capture the benefits of brain drain. Rather, in a strange and distortedecho of the ‘education as legitimation of “proper” statehood’ argument (see, e.g.Finnemore, 1993) he shows how, concurrently, though with little apparent referenceto each other, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA all promoted discoursesand encouraged practices that he places under the generic term ‘education for Asialiteracy’, for the purpose of persuading their Asian trading partners that they were

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not interested in trade relationships alone, but in ‘getting to know them’ betterculturally. As he shows clearly, this exercise was not taken very seriously by eithergroup of potential trading partners; the ‘Asian’ partners were unpersuaded of thesincerity of the moves and the ‘western’ partners never backed up their rhetoric witheither adequate resources or time commitments. All of this leads him to concludethat the contribution of education to the KE was in this case a rather indirect one,albeit in somewhat different ways in the four countries, that he is able to comparemost effectively.

In their paper on the ways that UNESCO education statistics have changed overthe past decade, Roser Cussó and Sabrina D’Amico establish clearly both that andhow the KE is more than a discourse open to multiple interpretations. They are ableto trace the processes through which the focus, purpose and possibilities ofUNESCO’s educational statistics were changed as a result of pressure from the othermain collectors and brokers of educational statistics, the OECD, EU and WorldBank. The objective of this change was clear; to shift the emphasis and basis ofUNESCO education statistics from one that was designed to enable the charting ofprogress of nation-states towards achieving education as a human right to one whereit became possible to create indicators on which all nation states could be comparedand against which their progress could be benchmarked. This places great power inthe hands of the agencies setting up the statistical variables that would determinewhat the ‘proper’ outcomes of education should be, and to produce a basis on whichto judge states’ progress towards the achievement of these normative targets. Thesecould also be used as a basis for their recognition as ‘proper’ states that is moreprecise and ‘remediable’ than the kinds of mutual recognition involved in, forinstance, the global isomorphism of curricular categories (see Meyer et al., 1992). Inparticular, it enables a set of definitions of education to be established at a suprana-tional level—that are in this case linked to the achievement of a global KE—that aredistinct from and parallel with existing national definitions and assumptions, butoften equally demanding and important. We will return to this important pointbelow.

Ka Ho Mok’s article addresses the fascinating transformation of China over thepast quarter century. In the context of the other articles in this issue, and of theargument to be advanced below about the relationship of globalisation and moder-nity, it is notable that the discourse of modernity did not feature centrally in thetransitions he describes, either in education or in governance. We get the sense thatChina was to a degree insulated from both the peaking and the apparent decline ofmodernity over the past half century. As a result, the forces of capitalist globalisa-tion are not so entwined with the problems of modernity, though, as Mok indi-cates, the problem of redesigning and reorienting state–civil society relations andgovernance structures that had reached their apogee in the Cultural Revolution wasa massive one. At the centre of these changes is the shift from what he calls ‘institu-tional transition’ to ‘structural transformation’ in the Chinese state and its relation-ship with civil society since it set out on the ‘capitalist road’. He argues that thistransition has been an extremely radical one, that has seen not merely an

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accommodation to the market, or even a market enhancing approach on the part ofthe state, but a ‘market accelerationist’ state, and that this has had very far-reachingconsequences for the governance, and, less directly, the mission and purpose, ofhigher education. He shows in detail how ‘economies of knowledge’ were intro-duced into higher education, through changes in the processes of governance, thatwhile they have distinct similarities to those referred to in the west as ‘privatisation’,are inflected by local cultural and institutional forms, such as the ‘minban’ schools,which it is difficult to assimilate to, or to describe in terms commensurable with,those used in the west.

Collectively, these papers provide important evidence on how discourses and prac-tices associated with the KE become ‘globalised’. We can see evidence in each ofthem for both of the two approaches that have been identified elsewhere (Dale, 2000)as possessing the three main requirements of adequate theories of the relationshipbetween globalisation and education—a theory of globalisation; a theory of educa-tion; and a theory of the relationship between the two. The main thrust of that paperwas to compare not sets of events, such as national systems of education, but expla-nations of those events, and specifically to contrast these two approaches, referred toas ‘Common World Education Culture’ (CWEC) and ‘Globally Structured Agendafor Education’(GSAE). However, one of the outcomes of that exercise has been therecognition both that these approaches may have more in common than was elabo-rated there, and that there is much to gain from recognising that they have different,but very important, foci, both of which are necessary to an understanding of theissues currently confronting educational systems, structures, processes and practicesat many levels. It may be worth developing further what they have in common (whichis also in some ways the basis on which the real differences between them canemerge). The most important feature they have in common in the context of thispaper is their understanding of the relationship between the global/world level andthe level of the nation state, which enables them to focus on the national level withoutfalling prey to methodological nationalism. For CWEC, both the state and educationsystems are intrinsic features of, and endogenous to, the world polity, based on thevalues of western modernity, that are not reducible to the intentions or interest of anyindividual nation state, which they take as the source of the ideas and processes thatunderlie the isomorphism they see between national education systems. However,they see also see these values, etc., being ‘diffused’ across nation states, rather thanbeing endogenously developed within them and hence representing exogenous influ-ences in the case of each individual nation state. The GSAE follows a similar line ofreasoning, seeing the globally structured agenda for education as similarly not reduc-ible to the interests and intentions of any individual nation states, but created bythem collectively, in the common interest of those transnational forces currentlycontrolling the global economic system, and constructed as external influences onnational systems.

Underlying these arguments is the recognition that rather than merely to adegree complementing each other, these CWEC and GSAE are offering explana-tions of two separate sets of phenomena, that are so closely intertwined as to be


typically taken as symbiotic. Thus, we might see the CWEC and GSAE as offer-ing separate and overlapping accounts of the distinct but mutually imbricatedand mutually reinforcing structures and processes of modernity and capitalismrespectively.

Modernity, as conceived in the work of the world polity theorists (see, for example,Meyer et al., 1992, and especially Chabbott, 2003, who provides the most valuableaccount for present purposes) has among its most central elements the prominenceof the nation-state, national education systems and the individual. Chabbott pointsout that in the CWEC approach, the

repertoire of action or role for actors like nation states (and) international organisationsoperating at the global level … is severely constrained and heavily scripted by an over-arching cultural framework or world culture (which) defines what constitutes ‘rational’alternatives and choices in a relatively narrow way for any given actor. (Chabbott, 2003,p. 6)

Those values are located in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and are charac-terised above all by the idea that it was possible to understand the social world ratio-nally and on that basis to ‘improve’ it; the idea of progress was central. In Chabbott’saccount, ‘This culture of rationality materialised in two critical ways’—through thedevelopment of scientific explanations and through ‘rational purposive action, ororganization, to promote progress through science becom(ing) obligatory’ (Chabbott,2003, p. 6). Education and the state are clearly central to both of these developments,and may indeed be seen as the key institutions of modernity, the key symbols andmaterialisations of the ambition to shape and improve the social world in a progressivedirection.

Capitalism is an economic system that always requires ‘extra-economic embed-ding’; its fundamental character means that it is unable to provide the necessaryconditions of its continued expansion. (For an attempt to spell out the implicationsof this for education systems, in the form of three ‘core problems’, of supporting accu-mulation, ensuring societal cohesion and legitimation, that permanently confrontcapitalist states, see Dale, 1989). It is, for instance, necessary for markets, one of thecore elements of capitalism, to be sustained by extra-economic arrangements. Thisrequirement, is not, however, a prescriptive or determining one; its fulfilment maytake, and has taken, multiple forms. This has resulted in many different state formsand national varieties of capitalism, for instance, while capitalism has shown itselfable to survive under very different sets of social arrangements, for instance familyforms, and different levels of patriarchy and feminism. A major overlap with moder-nity occurs in the state, which is not only, as has just been noted, a key institution ofModernity, but also the key means through which the extra-economic conditions ofcapitalism are installed.

It is important to note that these arguments are not taken to imply zero-sumrelationships between either diffusionist and structural approaches, or global-localinfluences on education policies. It is clear that processes recognisable as diffusioncontinue to make a significant contribution to how states justify or modify their

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education systems, and that nation states are still responsible for the great majority ofdecisions taken about their education systems. However, as will be elaborated below,the fact that (a) decisions are still taken at national level does not necessarily implythat that is where the power over those decisions lies (because of the operation ofagenda setting, preference shaping and rules setting at other levels), (b) existing formscontinue apparently more or less unchanged does not alter the fact that new forms,located at different scales, are coming to exist beside them, (c) existing forms do notnecessarily have the same meaning as they have previously (for example, monarchies)and (d) the nature and breadth of the areas across which international differences mayemerge is narrowing under the KE. For an example of these processes we need lookno further than the changes taking place in the nature and structures of universitiesin response to the KE. Universities are not only becoming more alike, but they arebecoming more alike in ways that are different from those that formerly constitutedthe basis of their similarity and comparability. They may still be regarded as globalinstitutions, but they are global institutions of a kind quite different from the institu-tions they were in the era of modernity. (see, e.g., Delanty, 2003) It is important tonote here that this is not an argument for a totalising convergence theory. Conver-gence may occur or not across a wide variety of sites and instances, such as policy orpractice, funding or regulation. The existence of convergence at one level does notimply convergence at all levels or instances.

Having made the point about the symbiotic relationship between modernity andcapitalism, it is important to point out that this does not mean that both carry equalexplanatory weight in every instance. This is especially so in the case of the KE, wherewe might briefly point to two arguments that suggest that capitalism is more signifi-cant than modernity in explaining current changes in education systems (see also thearguments in Dale, 2000).

The first, more modest, argument is that the values and purposes underpinningthe KE represent a considerable narrowing and thinning of the values of modernityas they are usually expounded. Further, it is difficult to see that this results fromthe process of diffusion and reception itself. While the epistemic communities seenas the agents of diffusion clearly change over time, it is difficult to account for therapidity of the move towards a KE, and the associated narrowing of the base valuesin terms of such a process. It seems more plausible to accept evidence such as thatprovided by Cussó and D’Amico, of a structured and focused shift. The moreradical argument has been put forward with particular force and originality byBoaventura de Sousa Santos (2004). He contends that we are currently witnessingthe end of modernity and that the values that characterised it no longer carry theconviction they have enjoyed for centuries. The ideas of progress, distributivejustice, emancipation, the ability of the state—or any body—to deliberately ‘engi-neer’ change, are all now obstacles to understanding and to improving the lot ofthe mass of humanity who have never been able to enjoy their fruits. In particular,the neo-liberal ideas that drive the KE can be seen as representing what he calls an‘anti-utopian utopia’, a utopia that finds its telos in the final achievement of itsown project.


The argument so far, then, is that the shift to neo-liberalism, reflected in the ideaof the KE, does reflect a particularly strong version of globalisation and its possiblerelationships to education systems, and hence an especially acute challenge tocomparative education. Neo-liberalism is a form of accumulation that containsimperatives for all areas of social life, with education particularly powerfully affectedin its multiple roles of support for accumulation, maintaining cohesion and identityand legitimating the system as a whole. What we are witnessing is not just changes,albeit important ones, in the contexts of education, that have to be adequately takeninto account and reflected in our accounts of the relationship between globalisationand education, but conscious efforts to develop new supranational forms of ‘educa-tion’ that consciously seek to undermine and reconfigure existing national forms ofeducation, even as they run alongside them, and even in their shadow.

In the remainder of this paper I will attempt to outline and elaborate the doublechallenge with which globalisation in the form of the KE confronts comparativeeducation. This double challenge, which underlies in different ways all the papers inthis special issue on globalisation, knowledge economy and comparative education, isboth theoretical and metatheoretical. Theoretically, it provides the intellectual chal-lenge of how to come to terms with what may be seen as a ‘new world for comparativeeducation’ (Dale, 1999a), a world that is no longer unproblematically to be appre-hended as made up of autonomous nation states, an assumption that had been fairlyfundamental to much work in comparative education, indeed, the basis of thecomparisons it undertook. Metatheoretically, the new world exposed more starkly atension over comparative education’s main purpose, that has also been a centralfeature of work in the area from its earliest times, a tension that may best be describedas existing between ‘learning from comparing’ and ‘explaining through comparing’.These issues will be discussed in the final section, where I will address the question‘what is now to be compared?’

In the next part of the paper I will focus on the theoretical issues that globalisationin the form of the KE, that is not reducible to either existing national or institutionalstructures, processes and practices, raises for comparative education. I shall focus ontwo issues in particular that derive from comparative education’s focus on national,education, systems. The first involves considering a significant objection to the critiqueof methodological nationalism, that despite all the globalisation talk, by far themajority of education policy decisions are taken at national level. The second issueinvolves addressing what might be called the ‘institutional parochialism’ of compara-tive education.

Following this, I will address metatheoretical responses to the idea of the KE andthe multiple challenges it represents for comparative education. In particular I willdevelop and elaborate what I will refer to as two ‘methodological and theoreticalgestalts’ that draw on Robert Cox’s (1996) distinction between ‘problem-solving’and ‘critical’ theories. And in conclusion, I will ask ‘What is now to be compared incomparative education? What are the comparable objects of its research? Hownow does it explain? And what is now to be learned from and through comparativeeducation?’

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Globalisation, knowledge economy, comparative education and methodological nationalism by default

I have suggested above both that the KE can be seen as a supranational phenome-non and that the basis of much comparative education is predominantly national.The argument in this section can be briefly and quite simply stated as follows.Comparative education (along with social science as a whole) has to a considerabledegree (and with significant exceptions such as world-system theorists of variouskinds, and comparative ethnographers whose focus has been on the level of practicerather than policy) been characterised by, based on, and in its turn reinforced, alargely unproblematised ‘methodological nationalism’ and an associated ‘embeddedstatism’, and its analyses have been systematically shaped and formed by that basisand association. Though it may be argued that this approach may have been morejustified in earlier eras than it appears in a global era, and that the existence of some-thing referred to as globalisation has been registered and recognised in comparativeeducation, that recognition has often tended to take the form of acknowledging anew and significantly altered context for what remain essentially nationally basedstudies. The argument being advanced here is understanding the relationship of KEand education requires moving beyond a ‘field and context’ approach to one thatrecognises and seeks to explore the relationships between different scales of governance.As will be argued more fully below, the two component elements of ‘methodologicalnationalism’ are tightly linked, arguably to the point of dependence, conceptuallyand methodologically, certainly to the point where the ‘national’ assumption orbasis sets severe limits to any alternative analysis to the comparative. Thus, while itwill be argued that both that the limitations of methodological nationalism areexposed by globalisation, and that it is especially inappropriate as a means ofcoming to terms with issues raised by globalisation, the problems it poses forcomparative education do not begin with globalisation, but are intrinsic to theapproach.

Methodological nationalism

The term ‘methodological nationalism’ was originally coined by Herminio Martins(see Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002, p. 327). It is usually used to refer to the taken-for-granted assumption that nation states and their boundaries are the ‘natural’containers of societies and hence the appropriate unit of analysis for social sciences,which is how I will interpret it below. However, it is important in the context of thisintroduction to distinguish it from another set of assumptions to which it is contin-gently related, particularly in comparative education. This set of assumptions takesthe ideas of western modernity and the western nation-state as the norm againstwhich other arrangements are compared. This is particularly significant in compara-tive education, since it is often the stance assumed in single nation/education systemstudies, where the comparator element of the study is to be found implicitly in theauthor’s own (typically advanced western) national system. Here, methodological


nationalism is not to be regarded as a nationally specific ‘style’ or approach, as in theFrench or German ‘School’ of work in a particular area or discipline, for instance, butrather as a form of methodological perspectivism, as exemplified most notably in theconcept of ‘orientalism’, seeing the world through a particular (national) conceptionof it, and imposing that conception on it.

The basis and background of methodological nationalism (and the frequently asso-ciated term, ‘embedded statism’, which will be discussed below) are crucial to under-standing both its forms and its consequences for social science (in which comparativeeducation is here included). It is widely recognised (e.g., Taylor, 1996; Wimmer &Glick Schiller, 2002) that

modernity … was cast in the iron cage of nationalized states that confined and limited ourown analytic capacities (and that) the epistemic structures and programmes of mainstreamsocial science have been closely attached to, and shaped by the experience of modern stateformation. (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002, pp. 302, 303)

And they go on,

That nationalist forms of inclusion and exclusion bind our societies together served as aninvisible background even to the most sophisticated theorizing about the modern condi-tion. The social sciences were captured by the apparent naturalness and givenness of aworld divided into societies along the lines of nation states (Berlin 1998). What Billig(1995) has shown for everyday discourse and practice holds true for grand theory’sencounters with the social world as well: because they were structured according to nation-state principles, these became so routinely assumed and ‘banal’, that they vanished fromsight altogether. (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002, p. 304)

Wimmer and Glick Schiller identify three distinct modes of methodological national-ism which they refer to as ‘ignorance’, naturalization’ and ‘territorial limitation’. Inthe first mode, methodological nationalism ignores or takes for granted the ‘nationalframing of states and societies … It has produced a systematic blindness towards theparadox that modernization has led to the creation of national communities amidst amodern society supposedly dominated by the principles of achievement’ (Wimmer &Glick Schiller, 2002, p. 304).

In the second mode they show through brief vignettes of the historical developmentand assumptions of disciplines such as international relations, economics, history andanthropology how the ‘national container’ assumption has been taken for granted andtreated as an unproblematic resource rather than as a topic to be problematised. Hereit is important to note that the concepts ‘transnational’ (literally across nations) and‘international’ (literally between nations) commonly used in comparative education,both assume a ‘national’ level or basis of activity; their focus is what happens acrossand between nations. By contrast, the concept supranational (literally above nations)denotes a separate, distinct and non-reducible level or scale of activity from thenational (see Dale, 2000). The non-reducibility of ‘interventions’ or ‘policies’ to theactivities or interests of any particular nation-state that is implied by the term supra-national is one of the characteristics that most clearly defines the qualitative differencebetween it and trans- or inter-national, and that indicates a key element of what is tobe understood by globalisation.

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The clearest example here is that of ‘Europe’. The European Union now representsa distinct scale of political activity, irreducible to the aggregate of the interests of themember states that make it up. This does not mean that all members have equalinfluence on the decisions by which they are all equally bound, but it does entailrecognising the the EU is more than an extension of particular national interests.Decisions made, and policies agreed, at the European scale are not reducible to, orexplicable in terms of, the intentions and interests of individual member states.

What Wimmer and Glick Schiller refer to as the naturalisation mode of method-ological nationalism reinforces and strengthens the approach and its assumptionsthrough taking the nation as the basis of its accounts and analyses. The focus of socialscience, as well as its assumptions, tends to be the national level; it tends to benational policy and needs that guide research activity. As John Agnew puts it,

The major social sciences in the contemporary Western university—economics, sociologyand political science—were all founded to provide intellectual services to modern states in,respectively, wealth creation, social control and state management. It is hardly surprising,therefore, that they find difficulty in moving beyond a world unproblematically divided upinto discrete units of sovereign space. (Agnew, 1998, p. 66)

More than this, the national is the level at which statistics of all kinds are collected;methodological nationalism operates both about and for the nation-state, to the pointwhere the only reality we are able to comprehensively describe statistically is anational, or at best an inter-national, one. In the case of comparative education, itmight be argued that while it is clear the unit of analysis is most often1 a singlenational state/education system, the typical focus on societies/systems other than theirown may tend to immunise its practitioners somewhat from this element of method-ological nationalism. However, we need also to bear in mind (a) that the ‘other’societies are frequently implicitly being compared with (and often intended to shedlight on, or provide ‘lessons’ for) the researchers’ own; and (b) that it is not unknown,to say the least, for comparative educationists to work as consultants to nationalgovernments of the societies they are studying, or to various international agencieswith an interest in the policies adopted by those governments.

Further than this, however, historically comparative education has promoted as wellas assumed the nation-state as the basis of analysis, and prescription, through theclose link between the discipline and modernisation theories of development and(significantly) ‘nation-building’. These theories saw modernisation and economicdevelopment dependent on individual states’ following the path to growth, and adopt-ing the values, that had been adopted by the developed nations. States were, andfrequently still are, seen as the means through which their nations would be built.

And finally, we see the tenacity of methodological nationalism assumptions even instudies of globalisation. Many such studies posit at least implicitly a zero-sum rela-tionship between the global and the state, or see nation-states implicitly or explicitlyas relays or mediators of the ‘effects’ of globalisation. The global level is one of thedirections taken by a posited ‘hollowing out of the state’ (though it is important tonote that this concept does not necessarily entail a zero-sum relationship; it may alsoinvolve a conception of a division of labour between the levels, an idea which will be


elaborated further below. Again, the case of the European Union is particularlyinstructive here, as the clearest example of the severing of the link between sover-eignty and territory, which is an absolutely central feature of the relationship betweensupranational and national levels (ibid). Regional law takes precedence over nationallaw; the European Central bank sets interest rates for all the members of the Euro.The social science response to this unprecedented change has been to focus above allon ‘the domestic (nation-state) effects of EU policy’. While it is important not tounderestimate the contribution of such work, it is also crucial to recognise that it doesnot tell the whole story—for instance, and very simply, what are the ‘effects’ of bothnation-states and their relationship with Europe, on the idea and substance of‘Europe’ (see Dale, 2004).

The third mode of methodological nationalism that Wimmer and Glick Schilleridentify, ‘the territorialization of social science imaginary and the reduction ofanalytic focus to the boundaries of the nation-state … and the correspondingly lostsight of the connections between such nationally defined territories’ (2002, p. 307),may also appear to apply less directly to comparative educationists than to those inthe other disciplines they discuss, given the discipline’s explicitly comparativepurpose. There are, though, three important issues raised here.

The first relates to the necessary linking of the ‘national’ and the comparative. Inessence what is argued here is that the comparison encouraged /required by method-ological nationalism represents at best only one, relatively weak, form of elaboratingthe connections between nation states that Wimmer and Glick Schiller refer to. Thepoint is that the limitation of the unit of analysis to the nation-state makes the nation-state ‘serve as the fundamental point of reference against which other structures andprocesses are defined (as ‘local’, subnational’, international’, ‘transnational’ orglobal’)’ (Crofts Wiley, 2004, p. 79). This means that ‘social action is seen as occur-ring primarily within and secondarily across (state boundaries)’ (Shaw, 2003, p. 37).What methodological nationalism involved ‘was a slippage from the general to theparticular without bringing into the open the problematic abstraction involved inisolating the national case’ (p. 38). This restricts the elaboration of the connectionsbetween states to comparison of the phenomena seen to be common to more than oneof them, while at the same time the unproblematic, unexplicated nature of the stateand society mean that it is not possible to approach the phenomena relationally, forinstance. This is crucial, since nation-states are formed relationally within particularpolitical-economic structures, and take their much of their coherence and identityfrom their relationships with others (see Crofts Wiley, 2004, p. 83). As a result,

when the general pattern of social relations on a world scale came to be represented bymore than a single case, it was … by the comparative method. Comparing different partic-ular social forms came to substitute for understanding the relations between them and thegeneral structures within which these comparisons might be explained. (Shaw, 2003,p. 38; emphasis in original)

This also, of course, means that the comparability of the phenomena internationallycannot be assured, since investigation of any basis of comparability beyond the lexicalis precluded by methodological nationalist assumptions (in this case, the ‘naturalising’

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assumption that not only are states the proper object of inquiry but that they are allthe same in all relevant respects).

The second issue concerns the assumption of the unimportance of the territorialbase that has characterised social scientific accounts of nation-states. The argumentabout the ‘asocial’ character of space in social theory, certainly as compared to themajor emphasis on the importance of time—its reduction to a mere platform onwhich social processes took place—has been made by many social geographers, butfor our present purposes the account given by John Agnew is especially useful.

At one time it made sense to some to see the path of history or social change as a seriesof ‘stages’ (as, for example, in Rostow’s (1960) famous account of ‘the stages ofeconomic growth’) inscribed upon state territories. Today, however, economic develop-ment and social change are increasingly determined by the relative ability of localitiesand regions to achieve access to global networks. In this context, understanding poweras if it is attached singularly and permanently to state territories makes no sense. Butthe commitment to an unchanging spatiality of power retains considerable appeal. Notonly does it allow for a restriction of politics to an unproblematic ‘domestic’ space, italso provides an attractive intellectual and political stability by equating space withthe fixed territories of modern statehood which can then serve as a template for theinvestigation of other phenomena or as the basis for organizing political action. Puttingstate territoriality in question undermines the ‘methodological nationalism’ that haslain behind the workings of both mainstream and much radical social science. (Agnew,1998, p. 66 )

The third point is rather different, and more specific to comparative education. Itconcerns the homogenising of nation-states, or the flattening of divisions and distinc-tions that are internal to them. These internal divisions and distinctions are particu-larly obvious and relevant in studies of education, where, for instance, it is verycommon to see references to the ‘American’, the ‘Australian’, the ‘British’, the‘Canadian’ or the ‘German’ education systems. None of these is a homogeneous orsingle national system of education. Education is not a federal, but a regional orprovincial matter in all of them. This might be seen to present particularly attractiveopportunities to comparative educators, with the ‘pre-controlled variables’ it offers,but while the recognition of intra-system diversity may be acknowledged—often inthe form of a caveat—it appears to have led to remarkably few studies2 (at least incomparative education journals) comparing different ‘sub-national’ educationsystems. This may be taken as further evidence of a methodological nationalist frame-work shaping the discipline—especially since the countries listed above provide a veryhigh proportion of the literature on comparative education.

Embedded statism

The concept of methodological nationalism is often coupled with that of ‘embeddedstatism’, sometimes to the point where they are seen as almost interchangeable; forinstance, Shaw suggests that Taylor (1996), who seems to have coined the term,‘means (by it) something similar to “methodological nationalism”’(Shaw, 2003,p. 39). However, there does appear to be some value in retaining a distinction


between them, since while methodological nationalism fundamentally ‘ assumes thecoincidence of social boundaries with state boundaries’ (Shaw, 2003, p. 37), its rela-tionship with ‘statism’, the assumption that the state is the source and means of allgoverning activity, though it is typically taken for granted, is essentially contingentnot necessary. Thus, it is important to consider the assumption of embedded stat-ism, to question rather than to assume, the ability of the state to act, which is asmuch a part of comparative education (and other social sciences) as methodologicalnationalism, separately from it.

The core and basis of embedded statism in social science is the post-war social-democratic welfare state. While this was pre-eminently a national state, the scope ofstate activity was very wide, from intervention in the economy, to the monopoly ofprovision of welfare services. The state would mitigate the worst excesses of capital-ism and ensure at least a minimum of social protection. It governed, from above,implicitly alone, and primarily through making policy. What is surprising is thatdespite the thorough critiques of this view of the state, some central assumptionsremain, especially perhaps the idea that the state governs through policy; if thingsare to be changed, it is to the state that we expect to look to bring about thosechanges.

The alternative approach involves a focus on governance rather than the state. Bygovernance I refer to the ‘coordination of the coordination’ of the work of governing,usually, but crucially for the argument of this paper and this volume, at a nationallevel. This concept of governance rests on the assumption that the work of governingcan be broken down into independent sets of activities, and that these activities neednot all be performed by the state. In the case of education, the activities of governingmight be broken down into funding, provision, ownership and regulation, and theseactivities might be carried out by the market, the community or the household as wellas by the state (see Dale, 1997).

However, one useful point that emerges from the discussions of governance is thatthey reveal that it is mistaken to assume that there was no ‘governance’ before1989 or whenever. Rather, certainly in public sector areas like education, the (state-dominated) forms taken by the activities and their coordination that we have begunto refer to as governance became so familiar as to disguise what lay beneath/behindthem. With the recognition that the state had never ‘done it all’, and that at least thegreat majority of the activities of governing were not dependent on the state doingthem, the question becomes, as it essentially always should have been, what forms ofgovernance (as ‘the coordination of coordination’) are in place where, and why, andwhat is the place and role of the state within them. In a sense, the state is movedfrom being explanans to explandum, though it is crucial to note that it is still largelythe state, through its role as ‘coordinator in chief’, that determines by whom andunder what conditions government will be accomplished. To put it another way, oneof the benefits to be gained from looking closely at governance is that it revealsthe degree to which we have tended to, in a sense, fetishise the post-war socialdemocratic state and to see departures from it as pathological rather than trying totheorise them.

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A ‘practical’ rebuttal of the perceived problems of methodological nationalism

The key point to be addressed here is that, essentially, despite the criticisms that maybe made of methodological nationalism and embedded statism, the focus on thenational level still makes most sense, given the empirical fact that most if not alldecisions about the shape and direction of national education systems continue to betaken by the states themselves. This is undoubtedly the case, and it is reinforced bythe fact that there is little sign of convergence between nation-states in their decisionsand responses to the common challenges that they face. This is made very clear byboth David Pang and Ka Ho Mok in their contributions to this issue. Pang shows howa commonly perceived problem—that of the need to enrol their education systems inthe battle for access to burgeoning Asian markets—though explicitly recognised inthose terms by the education systems in question (those of Australia, Canada, NewZealand and USA), took quite contrasting forms in those countries, while Mok showsChina following a quite distinctive road, deliberately stepping away from keyelements of the western model.

Does this not suggest, then, that talk of the shortcomings of methodologicalnationalism is not only misplaced but misleading? The response to be advanced hererecognises the strength of the challenge provided by the empirical evidence we have,but sees it as enabling the case to be made more strongly. There are three mainarguments here.

The first suggests in essence that ‘the national is no longer the same’ in significantways. Though what appear to be the same institutions and processes may be present,they are the same only at the level of perception, rather than that of reality (in thesense in which it is used by critical realists, to apply to the level at which events (insti-tutions, processes, etc.) are generated; see Sayer, 1997, 2000). Their meaning ischanged by the new set of conditions and circumstances in which they are located,the most significant of which in this context is the global KE. The clearest exampleof this is probably ‘the economy’. Though states retain the trappings (institutionssuch as Ministries of Finance or Economic Development, processes such as annualbudgets, etc.) that were found in the era when there was a ‘ national’ economy’ overwhich they had some discretion, (a) in an era of globalisation and regionalisation suchdiscretion is drastically limited; crucial decisions that were once taken at national levelare now taken in supranational fora (e.g., exchange rates and the Euro); and (b) theinstitutions themselves are no longer (if they ever were) shaped exclusively by nationalpath dependencies, but also by their location and roles in global and/or regionaleconomic interdependencies

The second argument draws on Steven Lukes’ three-dimensional theory of power.Lukes (1974) argues that while the power to prevail in decision making—which isessentially what we see in national education policy decisions—is the most obviousand accessible form of power, it is far from being the most effective or significant. Heposits two other dimensions of power that he argues are more significant. The first isthe power to define the agenda around which decisions are to be made. This, he


argues is a more effective form of power than that found in the power to makedecisions, since it determines which issues decisions are to be taken about—and moreimportantly, which issues are not exposed to the decision-making arena. It is veryclear that power operates at this level in the area of education policy, as in other areasof policy, and always has. However, the point to be made here is that it can no longerbe taken for granted that the power to set agendas for national education systems isheld or exercised exclusively at a national level. The decisions may still be taken at anational level, but the issues on which they are taken may have been determined at adifferent scale. Here, the agenda setting influence of the OECD has been widelyacknowledged (see, e.g., Papadopoulos, 1994; Henry et al., 2001; Rinne et al., 2004),and it is clear that the EU is in the course, particularly since the Lisbon summit, ofstrongly influencing the agendas of member states. (see for an ‘official’ view, Hingel,2001). We can also see evidence of Lukes’ third dimension of power at work in shap-ing the agendas and decisions of nation-states about education policy. What Lukesmeans by the third dimension of power is the ability to set ‘the rules of the game’, inwhich agendas may be formed and who will be involved in them determined; morebroadly we may see this as setting the rules of ‘what education is about’. The clearestexample of this is the development of international education statistics, performanceindicators and benchmarks, which act to frame what is to be regarded as of impor-tance and value in education systems. Roser Cussó and Sabrina D’Amico’s contribu-tion to this issue demonstrates this dimension of power in action very nicely. Theyshow how, in changing the basis and scope of its statistics in response to pressure fromother international organisations, UNESCO ipso facto changed its mission and theconception of what counts as education that it had embraced and promulgated sinceits creation, and which had formed the ‘rules of the game’ and the definitions of thepurposes of education for developing countries especially over that period. The new‘rules of the game’ implied by the changing statistical base will undoubtedly be inter-preted and acted upon differently by different nation-states. That is to be expected,and it may appear that nothing has changed, as agendas are set and decisions takenat national levels. However, those agendas and decisions are not ‘the same’ as theagendas and decisions determined in what might be called ‘pre-globalisation’ epochs,because they are framed by the supranational agendas that drive and are givensubstance in the changed bases of international education statistics.

This argument does not, of course, as has been pointed out above, mean thateducation policy has moved from the national to the supranational level; this is not azero-sum, either national/or supranational, game, as may be further illustrated by thethird argument. One way in which this is especially evident is that nation-states them-selves are by some distance the most active agents in establishing the supranationalorganisations, and in collectively (though with clearly unequal power) setting therules of the game and the transnational agendas to which all nation-states willrespond. And it is also important to note that the rules and agendas that are set inthese organisations very clearly reflect the different power of their members; as hasbeen made clear in studies of the World Bank, OECD, EU, and more recently theWTO/GATS, as they are involved in education, they may be seen as being made by

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and in the interests of the already powerful countries, and as mechanisms for settingthe rules of incorporation into the global economy as it impinges upon education.Once again, however, it is not necessary to posit a wholesale domination of nationaleducation systems by a group of international organisations, albeit one whosemembers subscribe to broadly similar aims and goals for the world economy, andwhich is dominated by the interests of its most powerful members.

Rather than a zero-sum game, I want to suggest, what we are witnessing is a devel-oping functional, scalar and sectoral division of the labour of educational governance.The simplest way to indicate what this means is through a diagram (Figure 1) thatencapsulates the arguments about methodological nationalism by default, andembedded statism, in pointing to the pluri-scalar nature of educational governance.What the diagram shows is that the activities, or functions, of educational governance

SCALE OF GOVERNANCE

SUPRA- NATIONAL

NATIONAL

SUBNATIONAL

GOVERNANCE ACTIVITIES INSTITUTIONS OF CO-ORDINATION

FUNDING OWNERSHIP

PROVISION

REGULATION

STATE

MARKET

COMMUNITY

‘FAMILY’

Figure 1. Pluri-scalar governance of education


can be divided into four categories (that are for the sake of exposition taken to bemutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive), funding, provision, ownership andregulation. The diagram also reflects the argument made above, that it is neither‘natural’ nor essential that all these activities are carried out by the state, or by anyother single agency. Rather, they may be carried out by any of the broad set of agentsindicated—state, market, community and household, either separately or in combi-nation—and this is broadly what is meant by governance here, the coordination ofcoordination. The other feature of the diagram, which is the key one in this argument,is that we can also recognise that especially in a period such as that we currentlyinhabit, these functions may also be carried out at a number of different scales; theyare no more confined to the national than they are to the state.Figure 1. Pluri-Schiller governance of educationSo, the purpose of the diagram is to assist in recognising the pluri-scalar nature ofeducational governance, that education policy can no longer be seen as the exclusivepreserve of individual nation-states, and to indicate a basis for addressing andunderstanding more clearly the consequences of that. And if we take due note of thearguments about the relationship between global and national (and subnational)scales not being zero-sum, we are led to expect and look for some kind of division oflabour between scales. However, on top of that, the diagram also illustrates theargument that the activities of governance do not comprise a homogeneous whole,but can be broken down into the categories listed. Hence, we might then expect afunctional, as well as a scalar division of labour. What this means, then, in a nutshell,is that any rescaling of the governance of education policy is likely to be selective, interms of the core problems of education. Thus, we might expect those activities ofeducation systems that are related to the predominantly ‘national’ elements of theembedding of capitalism, such as societal cohesion (social order+national identity)and legitimation, which comprise a major part of the policies and processes thateducation systems have traditionally been concerned with, to continue to be exercisedat national level—albeit in a context that is itself altered by the ‘shaping’ power of theinternational organisations. On the other hand, we may also expect, in an era of asupranational KE and the reduced importance of ‘national’ economies, some of theactivities of education associated with the support of accumulation to be increasinglygoverned at a supranational level, in response to the ‘globally structured agenda foreducation’. But even here, as we have suggested above, we should not assume thatnational states and governments will play no role; they will necessarily be involved ininterpreting and translating into nationally appropriate forms and priorities the conse-quences of the shaping ‘rules’ of the international organisations.

Institutional parochialism

In an earlier paper (Dale, 1994a) I referred to what I called ‘disciplinary parochialism’as one of the factors inhibiting the development of the study of education policy. Bythis I meant the tendency to base the study of education policy on approaches fromwithin the field of ‘education’. The problem with this is that it leads to analyses ofeducation policy that assume or share the definition of the topic with those within the

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field; this leaves little space for problematising ‘education’ theoretically, on the basisof approaches from other disciplines. One illustration of this tendency was the relativepaucity of references to books, journals or articles that did not have ‘education’ intheir title. By institutional parochialism I refer to the tendency within all educationstudies, including comparative education, (a) to make existing education systems,institutions and practices in isolation the dominant focus of their analyses, and (b) notto problematise these systems, institutions and practices, but to assume that lexicalequivalence is sufficient guarantee that the objects being studied are sufficientlysimilar to make them comparable without further investigation.

There are three issues here. The first concerns the ‘floatingness’ of ‘education’ as asignifier. One of the things that makes it difficult for there to be effective dialogue oneducation, within as well as between countries, is that it carries so many differentmeanings and connotations. One response to this has been to suggest attempting tofind a basis for commensurability, or a technique of translation, between and acrossdifferent uses of the term in the form of a list of ‘education questions’. These will beelaborated in the final section of this paper, but for the purposes of this section theyentail asking two questions concerning what are the boundaries and responsibilitiesof the ‘education sector’ in any given nation-state; what processes and practices fallunder the administrative heading of education? and how are the responsibilitiesassociated with education defined and allocated, administratively? It might seem thatthe answers to these questions should be either the same or very close, but empiricallyit is clear that there is a range of different answers. In terms of the first question, forinstance, Ministries of Education have a variegated range of associated responsibili-ties, including the Church, Employment, Health—and if we move to the Europeanlevel, Culture, Sport and Multilingualism. And in terms of the second we findsignificant differences in what are defined as ‘educational’ responsibilities and howthey are allocated. One notable and important example here is the conception of therelationship between education and social policy, which varies from very close (e.g.,UK) to non-existent (e.g., Germany; see Allmendinger & Leibfried, 2003). The pointis clear; assuming that ‘education sectors’ are comparable across nation-states may bemisleading.

The second point follows from this. If there is a range of answers to the questionsposed above, it presumably follows that if different education sectors do not have thesame meaning from one country to the next, but are part of societally specific patternsof government/divisions of labour of governing, they will enjoy different relationshipswith other sectors. And given this, the scope, priorities and responsibilities of educa-tion sectors, and their structures and processes, will be shaped by those relationships.Or, to put it more simply, we cannot understand education sectors and their workingsin isolation.

Both these points suggest that caution is required in attempting to compare educa-tion sectors cross-nationally. However, that conclusion is a general one, and notspecific to the relationship between comparative education, globalisation and the KE.The third point addresses this question, in suggesting that the concept of ‘educationsector’ itself may be being both redefined and rescaled in response to the demands of


the KE. We see elements of this in all the papers in the issue. It is most explicit inRobertson’s emphasis on the perceived need to transform or reconfigure existingeducation systems. Cussó and D’Amico show both how this is currently beingbrought about through the statistical redefinition of what is to count as an educationsector and the potential of such redefinition. Pang shows it in his account of theextension of the responsibilities of the education sector to include foreign policy. AndMok shows it in what might be seen as a ‘step change’ from a communist system toone that does not follow many of the ‘orthodox’ parameters of education sectors asshaped and reflected through international organisations such as UNESCO andOECD.

The argument I wish to advance here is that both the national and the institutional(sectoral) features of existing education systems are under severe scrutiny in respectof their contribution to the continuing development of the KE . Discussion of thechanges sought is currently somewhat speculative, but (a) the ambition to bring themabout is sufficiently evident, and (b) the effect of that ambition on existing arrange-ments is sufficiently recognised to suggest that comparative educationists need to beaware of it now in their analyses. Robertson’s paper provides a full account of the aimsand processes of the OECD, and I will consider briefly the somewhat contrasting caseof the EU as an institutional driver of these changes. The two organisations aresomewhat different in their goals and processes (see Noaksson & Jacobsson, 2003;Marcussen 2004a, b) but they share a basic critique of existing education sectors thatis based largely in their perceived inability to respond to what are seen as the needs ofcurrent and future economic developments. It should be emphasised here that myfocus is on what I take to be criticisms of the intrinsic shortcomings of the orthodox,and taken as universal, form of education sectors of individual nation states, rather thanof particular policies advocated or adopted; indeed, it is at the system/sector level thatmost of the work of the two organisations is concentrated.

In the case of the EU, the Lisbon declaration (see European Council, 2000), withits call for Europe to be come the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-basedeconomy in the world, with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion,heralded a major shift in the status of national education systems within the Union.Previously, education had been assumed to be, under the European treaty, an exclu-sively national responsibility, but the Lisbon statement included the promulgation ofsets of Concrete Future Objectives for Education Systems, and stated that thesecould only be met at the level of the Community and not by individual Member States(MS). This was followed by the publication of a detailed working programmedesigned to ensure that education and training systems achieve what is required ofthem by 2010 for the achievement of the Lisbon goals and especially the competitive-ness agenda .While these do contain clear policy features they also contain clearimplicit assumptions of deficits in individual national education sectors that can onlybe remedied by a collective Community programme.

More recently, MS education systems have been castigated for their backslidingand the slow pace of their response to the goals set them by the EC, with the explicitthreat that this endangers the achievement of the Lisbon goals (Commission of the

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European Communities, 2003). The emphasis placed on the importance of theEuropean level, with its implication of a separate sector, is an especially notablefeature of the Commission’s paper, though it must be acknowledged that that empha-sis is somewhat weaker in the Council’s paper on the same subject.

We should also note that the responsibility for reaching these goals is not dividedby sector but is clearly, if quite implicitly, regarded as a cross-sector problem as wellas being regarded as a European level problem, whose solution cannot be reduced tothe aggregated responses of individual MS. Thus both the scale and the sector of theresponse are shifted from the national level. Susan Robertson’s article reinforces thisview, and makes plausible the idea that what may be emerging is a European KnELL(Knowledge Economy and Lifelong Learning) sector that overlaps with but is sepa-rate from and not reducible to the institutional forms, discourses and practices of anyindividual national education sector or any combination or distillation of them. Thisessentially emphasises ‘new discourse over old institutions’. Many elements of thatnew discourse are present in the list below. Collectively, they show that the EuropeanKnELL sector is a qualitatively different creature from national education sectors; forinstance, it covers education from cradle to grave as a single system, rather thanfollowing such traditional distinctions as those between primary and secondary levels.These elements are further developed through the discourses around ICT as themedium, message and symbol of what ails existing sector concepts, institutionally aswell as discursively, and of the direction that it is necessary to take, a direction thatcannot be followed by existing education sectors.

Similarly, Life Long Learning discourse undermines some fundamental featuresof existing sector assumptions, including that education sectors are age-related andto a degree, age-defined.

In very brief summary, it might be suggested that the hypothesised EuropeanKnELL sector would differ from the national education sectors in several respectswith emphases on:

● Learning not education● Competence not content● Particular (just for me) not universal● The nature of its involvement of/with ICT● Specific, employment related, focus, rather than comprehensive social policy,

nation building, etc., scope.

On the basis of Robertson’s account of the OECD strategies (and of some responsesto them being developed in the UK) and this brief analysis of EU activity in the educa-tion field, it does not seem too far-fetched to suggest both that existing educationsectors are seen as obstacles to the necessary development of education’s contributionto learning societies and knowledge economies, and that moves to improve that contri-bution will entail changes to education sectors as currently conceived. And even ifthese shifts are difficult to discern at present, the discursive force of the argumentsdiscussed above do reinforce the suggestion that the integrity of education sectors aswe have known and assumed them is something that now needs to be problematised.


What is now to be compared?

The overall theme of this issue is that globalisation, especially in the form of the KE,seems set to radically change our conceptions of education as a topic. In this conclud-ing section, I want to consider the implications of this change for comparative educa-tion, and how comparative education might help us to explain and learn from thosechanges. I have suggested that as a result of the development of the KE, two of thefundamental assumptions of comparative education, its national base, and its topicalfocus, education, may be altering in highly significant ways. These changes arereflected in changing scales and changing sectoral definitions, respectively. The chal-lenge they present to comparative education, then, is essentially contained in thequestion, ‘What is now to be compared?’ If we cannot assume sufficient stability andcoherence in either the topical or the locational base of our activities, how should wego about the work of constructing categories that are comparable in the ways that wehave assumed heretofore that national systems and education sectors are comparable?

This is a question that requires a response based on solid and coherent theoreticalgrounds. I shall try to address it in two stages. In the first I will set out in tabular form,without significant elaboration, the theoretical and metatheoretical bases on whichthe response will be based. In the second part I will seek to demonstrate in more detailhow relevant theory might be articulated to provide a possible answer to the questionof what now is to be compared, and a possible means of organising answers to thatquestion.

The basis for this attempt is developed through an attempt to articulate by meansof a contrasting set of theoretical and metatheoretical gestalts, that expand on someof the insights contained in Robert Cox’s classic distinction between problem-solvingand critical theory. Cox outlines the distinction thus:

(problem solving theory) takes the world as it finds it, with the prevailing social and powerrelationships and the institutions into which they are organized, as the given framework foraction. The general aim of problem solving is to make these relationships and institutionswork smoothly by dealing effectively with particular sources of trouble. Since the generalpattern of institutions and relationships is not called into question, particular problems canbe considered in relation to the specialized spheres in which they arise. Problem-solvingtheories are thus fragmented among a multiplicity of spheres or aspects of action, each ofwhich assumes a certain stability in the other spheres (which enables them in practice tobe ignored)when confronting a problem arising on its own. the strengths of the problem-solving approach lie in its ability to fix parameters to a problem area and reduce thestatement of a particular problem to a limited number of variables which are amenable torelatively close and precise examination. The ceteris paribus assumption, upon which suchtheorizing is based, makes it possible to arrive at statements of laws or regularities whichappear to have general validity but which imply, of course, the institutional and relationalparameters assumed in the problem-solving approach.

(critical theory) is critical in the sense that it stands apart from the prevailing order of theworld and asks how that order came about. Critical theory, unlike problem-solvingtheory, does not take institutions and social power relations for granted but calls theminto question by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be inthe process of changing. It is directed toward an appraisal of the very framework foraction, or problematic, which problem-solving theory accepts as its parameters. Critical

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theory is directed to the social and political complex as a whole rather than to the separateparts. As a matter of practice, critical theory, like problem-solving theory, takes as itsstarting point some aspect or particular sphere of human activity. But whereas the prob-lem-solving approach leads to further analytical sub-division and limitation to the issue tobe dealt with, the critical approach leads toward the construction of the larger picture ofthe whole of which the initially contemplated part is just one component, and seeks tounderstand the processes of change in which both part and whole are involved. (Cox,1996, pp. 88–89)

It is suggested that the critical set offers considerably more theoretical purchase thanthe problem-solving set, and the proposal below is based on that setoff assumption.The critical assumptions are based heavily in a critical realist (see, e.g., Sayer, 1997,2000; Danemark et al., 2001) metatheory, and are associated with the attempt todevelop a theory of the relationship between globalisation and education that drawson the ideas of a globally structured agenda for education and a functional, scalar andsectoral division of the labour of educational governance.

What is now to be compared? (i) Explaining through comparing

In seeking to answer this question I am guided by the recognition that it reflects boththe issues for comparative education that I mentioned initially, explaining throughcomparing and learning from comparing. The first issue contains two separaterequirements—determining the proper objects of comparison and ensuring that theyare cast in forms that are comparable.

I will seek to develop the proper objects of comparison by elaborating and exem-plifying the approaches contained in the right hand column of Table 1, which containthe essential metatheoretical basis for so doing. The first point insists that both theproblem and the solution must be made problematic. This is a crucial issue, since itrequires us to define what the problem we are addressing is. This sounds obvious,but, as the papers in this issue demonstrate, that is far from the case. In a very clearsense, all of them ‘made’ the problem they addressed rather than ‘taking’ it (Seeley,1971). Pang showed that what was at issue was not so much education policy but theimplications for education policy of it being incorporated into foreign policy. Cussóand D’Amico classically make the issue of education statistics topic rather thanresource. Mok declines the possibility of seeing China’s new education patterns as astep on the road to development as conceived in the west and instead treats them intheir own terms. Robertson shows how misleading are interpretations of the KE thattake it at face value and base their analyses on determining how far it has succeededin its assumed objectives.

The second and third points in Table 1 essentially concern the question of learn-ing rather than explaining and will be considered below, but the next two items, onthe place and importance of structure are central to defining the proper objects ofcomparison. The first suggests that we need always to bear in mind that agency isnever entirely voluntary but always takes place within structures, that need to beinvestigated separately. An interesting example here is the question of convergence,


Table 1. Methodological and theoretical gestalts

PROBLEM SOLVING THEORY CRITICAL THEORY

Relationship between Problem and Solution*

Solution considered from within framework that defines problem

Both problem and solution made problematic

Relationship between theory and action

Theories and actions seen as discrete, disconnected activities

Theories generate frameworks for action

Relationship between frameworks for action and actions

Frameworks for action remain constant overtime

Frameworks for action change over time and according to interests

Relationship between structure and agency

Agents autonomous of structures

Structures shape conditions/contexts for agency

Nature of social structure

Tends towards equilibrium through change (systems/functionalism)

Inherent contradictions in structures open possibility for new agents and forms of agency, and transformation

Level of Abstraction Empirical generalisation Concept formationLevel of Focus ‘Actual’ ‘Real’Level of Analysis Education Politics Politics of EducationDimension of Power Decision making Agenda setting

‘Rules of the Game’; Preference shaping

Scalar assumptions Methodological nationalism;Embedded statism

‘Society’ not confined to national; functional scalar and sectoral division of labour

Evaluation of consequences

Directly ‘policy-related’ Outputs; ‘Effects on’; Programmes

Outcomes; broad conception of consequences;Focus on relational issuesAnalysis of emergent properties; contingent/unintended consequences; Programme Ontologies

Consequences for Comparative Study (from Theret, 2000, p. 111)

Comparison of elementsComparison of systems at the surface of the institutional forms butComparison of these structures not only according to the modalities of their own historical development

Comparison of relations between these elements and the autonomous systems of these relations;Comparison at a level of abstraction which makes it possible to clarify underlying structures common to these multiple forms;but also their synchronic assembly in communicational systems producing societal coherences.

*The first set of five premises about the metatheoretical assumptions of Cox’s account are taken from Robertson (2000)

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especially perhaps as observed through the processes of the EU in the area of socialpolicy. Here, the means of bringing about ‘convergence’, the Open Method of Coor-dination (Dale, 2004), seeks explicitly to bring about convergence with diversity—regional convergence on targets, benchmarks, etc., but national diversity in howthese are achieved. Agency is positively encouraged, but within a broader structure(that is itself located within the overall goals of the EU), which means that none ofthem separately can be a proper object of comparison. The other point about struc-ture is also very important. It insists that that structures are never static and that weneed to look for contradictions within them, which is crucial, but more importantly itrefers to their ‘emergent properties’—the range of potentials that they contain butwhich are not necessarily realised. KE itself may be seen both as an emergent prop-erty and as containing a very significant set of potential emergent properties.

The levels of abstraction, focus and analysis, and the dimension of power that isselected to explore, are all crucial to both determining the proper objects of compar-ison and that they are comparable. They all assume that the ‘facts’, what we observe,and how it is conventionally understood, cannot be taken at face value, but are as theyare by dint of their relationship with underlying structures and mechanisms thatgenerate them. Thus empirical generalisations, such as correlations, or constantconjunctions of events, or accounts at the level of the actual, do not ‘explain’ anything,and thus are not proper objects of comparison, but rather lead us to formulateconcepts, hypotheses and theories that enable us to identify what are proper objectsof comparison. The examples of the CWEC and GSAE that were described abovedemonstrate clearly what is involved in constructing a proper object for comparisonbased on these assumptions.

I have already devoted some space to the contrasting methodological nationalism/embedded statism with the idea of the functional and scalar division of the labour ofeducational governance, and also to the limitations of an ‘effects on’ approach toevaluating outcomes, but it may be useful to elaborate briefly on the idea ofprogramme ontologies, since it speaks very directly to all three of the issues consid-ered in this section. The distinction made by Ray Pawson (2002) between‘Programmes’ and ‘Programme Ontologies’ very helpful. Pawson’s immediatepurpose in that paper was to devise an approach to the evaluation of ‘social interven-tion projects’, such as those to do with road safety, discouraging smoking and so on,in such a way as to be able to indicate more clearly not just whether and to whatextent, but also why and under what circumstances they ‘worked’. Briefly Pawson’sargument is that in attempting to find a basis for generalisation of successful (orrejection of unsuccessful) social interventions and innovations, such as anti-crimeinitiatives, for instance, it is crucial to distinguish between what he calls the‘Programme’ and the ‘Programme Ontology’. Basically, the Programme is the inter-vention, or policy, or innovation, that is being introduced or implemented with aview to bringing about beneficial changes in some social phenomenon. The‘Programme Ontology’, by contrast, accounts for how programmes, policies, etc.,actually work. It is essentially the ‘theory’ of the programme as opposed to its content(and ‘the theory’ is as likely to be implicit in this case as in most others). As Pawson


puts it, ‘It is not ‘programmes’ that work; rather it is the underlying reasons orresources that they offer subjects that generate change. Causation is also reckoned tobe contingent. Whether the choices or capacities on offer in an initiative are actedupon depends on the nature of their subjects and the circumstances of the initiative.The vital ingredients of the programme ontology are thus its ‘generative mechanisms’and its ‘contiguous context’ (2002, p. 342; emphasis in original). While there areclear substantive differences between Pawson’s evaluation project and an attempt tospecify more closely the relationship between supranational and national levels in thearea of education policy, his arguments do point to what may be seen as a crucialelement of a proper object of comparison.

Finally, the contribution from Bruno Theret that completes Table 1 constitutes avery useful bridge between the proper objects of comparison and the means of makingthem comparable. In a sense, it acts as a summary for the former and a stimulus to,and framework for, the latter.

The means I propose to address the second part of the question, ensuring that theproper objects of comparison will be cast in forms that are comparable, is a consider-ably modified version of the ‘Education Questions’ (EQs) that I have used to try makeconceptions of ‘education’ commensurable (see, e.g., Dale, 2000, where the educa-tion questions were introduced as a means of making it possible to compare theCWEC and GSAE accounts of the relationship between globalisation and educa-tion). The problem of commensurability of meanings of ‘education’ is a major andunfortunately neglected one.3 This neglect means that it is always difficult to knowwhether different accounts of education are actually addressing a comparable cate-gory. This was a sufficiently large issue before the era of globalisation, but one of theconsequences of the incursion of the KE, with, as the articles in this issue have shown,a more or less clear intent to alter the meaning if not the vocabulary of education, hasbeen a qualitative exacerbation of the problem. And it is this that has been the imme-diate stimulus for this revision of the EQs.

The basic idea behind the EQs is that rather than assuming/accepting that we allmean the same thing when we are talking about education, we pose a set of precisequestions that can frame discussions and provide a basis for coherent discussion andsystematic comparison. These questions are set at four levels (both to reflect the rangeof meanings that might be attached to ‘education’ and to make clear the complexityof the questions, none of which can be answered from within a single level alone).These levels are those of educational practice (‘who is taught what, by whom, etc.’);education politics (‘how and by whom are these things decided, governed, adminis-tered, managed, etc.’); the politics of education (on what bases and in whose interestare these things determined, controlled, and with what relationships between othersectors and scales, etc.’); and the level of outcomes (‘with what public, private,personal consequences, etc.’).

However, the need for this revision is not confined to updating the problem ofcommensurability. It is also made necessary because the changes made in response tothe KE—for instance, the emphasis on learning anywhere, any time, in any organisa-tion—are such as to require a substantive modification of the content of the education

142 R. Dale

questions, in order to reflect the changing assumptions about educational practiceand its organisation, as well as the scale and scope of the politics of education. Inaddition, some revision of the EQs was necessary to remedy shortcomings andlacunae in the original formulations that have become apparent as a result of changessuch as are signified by the KE.

Finally, it needs to be stated that the EQs still assume a national basis for ‘educa-tion’. This is because that is the level at which empirically we still find the greaterpart of the activities that come under the heading of education taking place. Thisdoes not mean adopting a wholly, or exclusively, national focus, however. Nor doesit mean that the national is the only or the most important scale of analysis. Nordoes it entail any assumption of comparability between national levels; it is stillimportant to problematise the comparability of the categories we use within andacross levels and scales. With those caveats I will now set out the EQs that areintended to enable us to show what is now to be compared and a basis for carryingout such comparison.

Level 1: educational practice

Who is taught, (or learns through processes explicitly designed to foster learning),what, how and why,4 when, where, by/from whom, under what immediate circum-stances and broader conditions, and with what results? How, by whom and for whatpurposes is this evaluated?

Level 2: education politics

How, under what pattern of coordination (funding, provision, ownership, regula-tion) of education governance, and by whom, and following what (sectoral andcultural) path dependencies, are these things problematised decided, administered,managed?

Level 3: politics of education

What functional, scalar and sectoral divisions of labour of educational governance arein place? In what ways are the core problems of capitalism (accumulation, social orderand legitimation) reflected in the mandate, capacity and governance of education?How and at what scales are contradictions between the solutions addressed? How arethe boundaries of the education sector defined and how do they overlap with and relateto other sectors? What ‘educational’ activities are undertaken within other sectors?How is the education sector related to the citizenship and gender regimes? How, atwhat scale and in what sectoral configurations does education contribute to the extra-economic embedding/stabilisation of accumulation? What is the nature of intra- andinter-scalar and intra- and inter-sectoral relations (contradiction, cooperation, mutualindifference?)


Level 4: Outcomes

What are the individual, private, public, collective and community outcomes of‘Education’, at each scalar level?

What is now to be compared? (ii) Learning from comparing

Having sought to outline an answer to the question of how might comparative educa-tion help explain the KE, I will turn finally to considering how comparative educationas a basis of learning might be affected by the latest form of globalisation. Thecomparative education literature makes frequent reference to the long history of theexchange and diffusion of educational ideas and practices, and of what countriescan learn from each other and about themselves through international comparison. Itis not wholly a caricature (see, for instance, the list of what might be learned fromcomparative education in Phillips, 1999, pp. 15–16) to describe such learning asinternational, problem-solving, mimetic and focused at a ‘system’ level. Thearguments made above suggest that it may be necessary to revisit each of theseassumptions in the light of the development of a global KE. The need to do this isrecognised clearly in the volume in which Phillips’ paper appears, largely on the basisof the generation and misuse of international comparative indicators of educationalachievements, which Alexander (1999) describes in his introduction to the volume as‘downright dangerous’ (p. 9).

I want here to trace through some of the consequences of the global KE for thiskind of approach summed up by Phillips’ list (again, it must be emphasised that theseare not seen as zero-sum alternatives; what I will discuss should be seen as runningalongside (and in some cases undermining) the existing approaches and assump-tions). I will do so under four headings: the relationship between problems andsolutions; the scales at which and from which we may learn; the need to recognisediscourses as well as practices; and the nature of the learning taking place.

The relationship between problems and solutions

This relationship is altered in the KE in the relative priority given to problems andsolutions. Most learning from comparing has tended to focus on learning solutions toproblems perceived as common to, or comparable between systems. Associated withthis is the assumption that the learning will be initiated by the ‘receiving’ system (seeDale, 1999b). The global KE has altered this in quite profound ways. In a nutshell,(a) the onus shifts towards a concentration on systems’ ‘learning’ about the nature ofthe problems confronting them, rather than what might constitute a useful solution toproblems that are identified by them, and (b) the source and initiation of this processshifts from national to supranational scale. A good example of this is the EU’s OpenMethod of Coordination, where the problem confronting MS is constructed by theEuropean Commission at the European level, and where also the Commission acts asthe broker in chief of what will count as a common solution; the fact that it is made

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very clear that these solutions will be implemented through nationally diverse meansfurther reinforces the nature of the shift.

Differences of scale

I have already made a number of points around this topic and I will not revisit themhere. In particular, I will take as read the arguments around the focus on the nationalscale. It is, however, clearly important for what we may learn from comparing that theadvance of the global KE may mean that we cannot have the same confidence in theintegrity or the scope of activities of national systems, respectively the issues of sectorand scale of governance. What we are seeing is not only a reorientation of nationalsystems, where they respond to new sets of challenges, but their partial reconstitutionunder the processes of a scalar reallocation of responsibility for some activities and theconstruction of new parallel sectors of activity that include education. The conse-quences of these changes for what we might learn from comparing are many. Theyinclude, for instance, comparing what elements of education systems are rescaled, orallocated to new sectors, and comparing all the scales of activity and not just thenational. In this latter case, Susan Robertson’s article provides a good example ofwhat may be involved, through her comparison of the ways that the OECD and theWorld Bank deploy and seek to implement rather different concepts of the KE. It isalso important to consider the scale of educational activity at which learning isassumed to take place. As has been pointed out quite clearly by Michael Crossley(2002), most comparative educationists tend to make ‘national systems’ the focus oftheir comparisons, rather than educational practices. This has particular importancefor the concept of ‘convergence’, which is often invoked in discussions of the conse-quences of the KE. What such discussions often overlook is what is taken to beconverging; for instance, is it policies, processes or practices, which can vary quiteindependently of each other? The tendency to combine these different activities as ifthey were one is perhaps another legacy of the focus on the national system, typicallytaken as a homogeneous, coherent and integrated whole, but it is one whose limita-tions become evident as the national assumptions are weakened.

Discourses and practices

As noted above, Robin Alexander emphasised the need to see pedagogy as a discourseas well as a practice and this becomes especially important across the board as wemove into a KE. He also (Alexander, 2000) demonstrated the importance of goingbeyond the typically national focus and assumptions of comparative education, whereeducational discourses, if they were explicitly recognised at all, were assumed to behighly local and based in largely implicit elements of culture and values, in exposingthe nature, sources, extent and consequences of the differences between them. Itcould, though, still be maintained that their effects remained essentially local, butthis, too, has changed with the KE, which itself is taken in Susan Robertson’s paperas a bundle of overlapping discourses with sufficient unity to re-inscribe the meanings


of educational activities at all scales. This also enables us to move away from the‘effects on’ calculation of discourses and policies, in that it makes it possible—andshows that it is desirable—to ask questions not (only) about the effectiveness of, forinstance, ‘network’ or ‘market solutions’, but about the circumstances in which suchsolutions are invoked—for the point about the discourses is that they suggest solu-tions as well as framing the problem. Once again, then, what we may learn fromcomparing is about the construction of the problem as well as about its solutions; thisis again exemplified in both Cussó and D’Amico’s article on the changing bases ofwhat is to count as education, and Robertson’s article, through the comparisons ofthe World Bank and OECD discourses of the KE.

Forms of learning

One of the interesting issues around changes in what might be learned from compar-ing is that it involves something similar to what Giddens (1984) referred to as a‘double hermeneutic’; as is clear from the previous examples, what we learn fromcomparing often involves changes in what ‘systems’ learn. This is especially evidentin this case, where what can be learned from comparing concerns how systems learn(this section draws in part on Dale, forthcoming). One useful starting point for thisdiscussion is DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) distinction between three forms oforganisational learning—what they refer to as mimetic, when the learning is based onthe emulation of existing practices, normative, where the learning is based onaccepted norms or principles, and coercive, where learning results from one or otherform or degree of external pressure. It seems plausible to suggest that in most of thelearning from comparing literature, the assumption is that learning will take placethrough mimesis. There are, of course, well-rehearsed arguments (see Dale, forth-coming) to suggest that such direct policy borrowing or transfer is unlikely to besuccessful. The point here, though, is that the existence of ‘models’ to be emulatedcan no longer be taken for granted, as both the nature of problems changes and thescales at which they might be addressed multiply. What we are witnessing, it may besuggested, is the development of forms of learning that might fall under the broadheading of coercion. The best example of this is again the Open Method of Coordi-nation (OMC), often referred to as a form of ‘soft governance’ that contributes to the‘subtle transformation of states’ (Jacobsson, 2002). This involves mechanisms suchas benchmarking, peer review and the development of best practice, where in eachcase a European rather than one or more national definition is used, constructing analternative and distinct model to be followed that is common to all MS and at leastsits alongside all national models (Jacobsson (2002) provides one interesting empiri-cal account of this process and of the multiple ways in which it impinges on nationalprogrammes). And while there is little evidence so far on the effectiveness (in thenarrow sense used above) of the OMC in changing domestic policies and practices,the issue may be more about the wider effect of the strategy. One argument advancingthis point is that of Claus Offe, who talks about the OMC as a means of MS ‘unlearn-ing’ their domestic solutions, and suggests that such unlearning may be ‘the hidden

146 R. Dale

curriculum of the OMC’ (see Offe, 2003). What this suggests for learning fromcomparing is a focus on the mechanisms of learning themselves, as well as on therange of responses to them (especially when, as was pointed out above, in the case ofthe OMC there is an explicit commitment to a diversity of means of achieving thecollectively agreed objectives).

Conclusion

In this paper I have sought to point to some possible consequences of the spread ofdiscourses of the knowledge economy—where ‘knowledge’ takes over from ‘produc-tion’ as the key driver and basis of economic prosperity—for comparative educationand the kinds of contribution it may make. These consequences appear to be bothradical and far reaching, and to require a matching response from comparativeeducationists.

Based on analyses of the nature of the changes implied, I have attempted to indi-cate what may be some components of that response. Underlying the arguments Ihave advanced has been a conception of the need to problematise anew what wemean by education and comparison, as well as the knowledge economy as a form ofglobalisation.

One of the main arguments I have advanced has concerned the value of the‘national’ as the appropriate basis and scale of analysis for comparative education,and the state as the exclusive actor in governing education. While recognising thatthese assumptions are not adopted by all practitioners of comparative education, thenature of the changes associated with the knowledge economy may be too radical tobe accommodated under even weak or modified forms of methodological national-ism. It is not just a matter of recognising that both that the association betweenterritory and sovereignty is no longer to be taken for granted and that ‘the action’ nowtakes place at other levels than the national state, important though that is, but ofreflecting that knowledge economy discourses are, as Roser Cussó and SabrinaD’Amico’s and Susan Robertson’s papers in particular show, currently driving effortsto develop new understandings of education that consciously seek to undermine, andto a degree replace, existing national forms and understandings of education. Theprojects of the supranational organisations are different from and not reducible to theeducation systems of national states—which is not to say, as has been repeated severaltimes in this paper, that there is a zero-sum relationship between national and supra-national scales in the governance of education. The point therefore, is to focus on therelationships between the scales, to problematise and examine the nature of thedifferences between them, and to investigate the nature of the functional and scalardivision of labour—what gets done where and why—between them.

There are similarly radical implications for the understanding of what education nowmeans. I have discussed this through the device of the Education Questions, but it isimportant to recognise that the nature of the questions as well as the to-be-expectednature of the answers have changed in major ways; education is being asked to do differ-ent things in different ways, and not just the same things in different ways. It has also


been suggested that another element of the change required of education is in whatconstitutes an education sector. Though their constitution has always differed nation-ally, raising difficult issues of comparability and commensurability, national educationsectors have all, in different ways, as Chabbott (2003) points out, both accepted abroad mandate, and been organised in particular ways, to ‘deliver’ a common educa-tion experience based on the values of western modernity, such as universalism. Whatwe may see emerging alongside—not in place of—existing national education sectors,are projects like the hypothesised KnELL, that cross existing national sectoral bound-aries in pursuit of goals for which those boundaries are an obstacle. And this mayproduce different and distinct, but mutually linked and interdependent, sectors wherethe activities and practices of education are framed and carried out.

What all this may mean for comparative education is far from clear. What is clearis that comparative education may expect some considerable upheaval in the natureof its topic and focus—but also that this may be accompanied by renewed intellectualexcitement for comparative education as explanation, and extended practical value inwhat may be learned through it.

Notes

1. See, for instance, Broadfoot (1999, p. 23).2. The work of the Edinburgh-based David Raffe on ‘Home Internationals’ is one example of

intranational comparison. See Raffe (1999).3. One major exception to this neglect is Robin Alexander’s brilliant tour de force, Culture and

pedagogy (Alexander, 2000), where he goes deeply into the different meanings and connota-tions of ‘education’ and of ‘pedagogy’ in the five countries he studied—England, France, India,Russia and the USA.

4. The formulation ‘how and why’ is intended to catch Alexander’s distinction between pedagogyas discourse and teaching as an act, though they are inseparable; pedagogy then ‘encompassesboth the act of teaching and its contingent theories and debates’ (Alexander, 2001, p. 513). Seealso the discussion of the concept of the ‘Irreducible Minimum of pedagogic discretion in theteaching-learning transaction’ in Dale (1994b).

Notes on contributor

Roger Dale is Professor of Sociology of Education at the Universities of Auckland andBristol. He is Co-editor of Globalisation, Societies and Education.

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