THE IMPACT OF COMPARATIVE EDUCATION RESEARCH ON INSTITUTIONAL THEORY
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INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON EDUCATION AND SOCIETY Series Editor: Abraham Yogev Volume 1:
International Perspectives on Education and Society Volume 2: Schooling and Status Attainment: Social Origins and Institutional Determinants Volume 3: Volume 4:
Education and Social Change Educational Reform in International Perspective
Series Editor from Volume 5: David P. Baker Volume 5:
Volume 6:
New Paradigms and Recurring Paradoxes in Education for Citizenship: An International Comparison Global Trends in Educational Policy
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INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON EDUCATION AND SOCIETY VOLUME 7
THE IMPACT OF COMPARATIVE EDUCATION RESEARCH ON INSTITUTIONAL THEORY EDITED BY
DAVID P. BAKER Pennsylvania State University, USA
ALEXANDER W. WISEMAN The University of Tulsa, USA
Amsterdam – Boston – Heidelberg – London – New York – Oxford Paris – San Diego – San Francisco – Singapore – Sydney – Tokyo JAI Press is an imprint of Elsevier
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JAI Press is an imprint of Elsevier The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, UK Radarweg 29, PO Box 211, 1000 AE Amsterdam, The Netherlands 525 B Street, Suite 1900, San Diego, CA 92101-4495, USA First edition 2006 Copyright r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher Permissions may be sought directly from Elsevier’s Science & Technology Rights Department in Oxford, UK: phone (+44) (0) 1865 843830; fax (+44) (0) 1865 853333; email:
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CONTENTS LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
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FOREWORD John W. Meyer
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THE SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMPIRICAL COMPARATIVE RESEARCH ON EDUCATION AND NEO-INSTITUTIONAL THEORY Alexander W. Wiseman and David P. Baker
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INSTITUTIONAL SEQUENCES, PEDAGOGICAL REACH, AND COMPARATIVE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS John G. Richardson
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THE THEORIZED SOCIETY AND POLITICAL ACTION: EFFECTS OF EXPANDED HIGHER EDUCATION ON THE POLITY David H. Kamens
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CULTURAL COEXISTENCE: GENDER EGALITARIANISM AND DIFFERENCE IN HIGHER EDUCATION Karen Bradley
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THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS EDUCATION David F. Suarez
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RETHINKING ‘MACRO’ AND ‘MESO’ LEVELS OF NEW INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS: THE CASE OF INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION CORPORATIONS Scott Davies and Janice Aurini
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THE NORMATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF MODERN STATE SYSTEMS: EDUCATIONAL MINISTRIES AND LAWS, 1800–2000 Jong-Seon Kim
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THE CHANGING NATURE OF TERTIARY EDUCATION: NEO-INSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON CROSS-NATIONAL TRENDS IN DISCIPLINARY ENROLLMENT, 1965–1995 Gili S. Drori and Hyeyoung Moon
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PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT AND EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS OF EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM Hyunjoon Park
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INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE IN POSTSOCIALIST EDUCATION: THE CASE OF POLAND Edward F. Bodine
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HOW STATUS COMPETITION COMPLICATES INSTITUTIONAL EXPLANATIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATIONAL EXPANSION: A CARIBBEAN CASE STUDY Regina E. Werum and Lauren Rauscher
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Contents
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THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF EDUCATION IN LATIN AMERICA: LOCI OF ATTRACTION AND MECHANISMS OF DIFFUSION Jason Beech
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POLICY ENACTMENT AND ADAPTATION OF COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION IN EDUCATION: THE CASE OF ARGENTINA M. Fernanda Astiz
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EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT OF IMMIGRANT-ORIGIN AND NATIVE STUDENTS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS INFORMED BY INSTITUTIONAL THEORY Claudia Buchmann and Emilio A. Parrado
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FROM CITIZEN TO PERSON? RETHINKING EDUCATION AS INCORPORATION Francisco O. Ramirez
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AUTHOR INDEX
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SUBJECT INDEX
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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS M. Fernanda Astiz
Graduate Education & Leadership, Canisius College, NY, USA
Janice Aurini
Department of Sociology, McMaster University, Ontario, Canada
David P. Baker
Educational Theory & Policy Department, Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA
Jason Beech
Universidad de San Andre´s, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Edward F. Bodine
Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA
Karen Bradley
Sociology Department, Western Washington University, WA, USA
Claudia Buchmann
Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, OH, USA
Scott Davies
Department of Sociology, McMaster University, Ontario, Canada
Gili S. Drori
International Relations Program Stanford University, CA, USA
David H. Kamens
Northern Illinois University (Emeritus), Washington, DC, USA
Jong-Seon Kim
Stanford University, CA, USA
John W. Meyer
Department of Sociology, Stanford University, CA, USA
Hyeyoung Moon
Stanford University, CA, USA
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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Hyunjoon Park
Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA
Emilio A. Parrado
Department of Sociology, Duke University, NC, USA
Francisco O. Ramirez
School of Education, Stanford University, CA, USA
Lauren Rauscher
Department of Sociology, Emory University, GA, USA
John G. Richardson
Sociology Department, Western Washington University, WA, USA
David F. Suarez
Stanford University, CA, USA
Regina E. Werum
Department of Sociology, Emory University, GA, USA
Alexander W. Wiseman
School of Education, The University of Tulsa, OK, USA
FOREWORD John W. Meyer
David Baker and Alexander Wiseman have put together a most impressive collection of studies on the role of sociological institutional theory in comparative educational research, and on the contributions of this research to the development of institutional theory itself. The chapters in this book clearly advance both institutional theory and the field of comparative education research, in a number of important ways. Institutional theory in sociology is built around the core idea that actors and activity in local situations are deeply penetrated by cultural meanings and organizational forms obtaining in their wider environments (see Jepperson, 2002 for a review). In strong versions of the theory, the effects go far beyond simple influences or incentives. Environments, it is thought, constitute local actors and their actions, so that their basic identities, means, and ends are taken from the wider system in which they are embedded. Applied at the level of contemporary national societies and states, the argument is that these entities simply and directly reflect models established in the wider world – models of how to be a nation-state, what forms of progress to pursue, and how to define individual rights and capacities. Applied to organizational structures within societies, the argument is that these structures tend, isomorphically, to reflect legitimated models, and to change along with changes in these models. Applied to individual human actors, the idea is that the identity of the modern ‘‘individual’’ is highly scripted by national and sometimes global models, and tends to reflect these stylized models. Education is a social arena much studied in these institutional terms. Indeed, research on education has been basic to the development of institutional theory at every level from individual to national society. David Baker and Alexander Wiseman, in their introductory chapter of this book, give an excellent and comprehensive analytic review of the whole matter. They cover both the intellectual tradition, and the research literature xi
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accompanying it, and add a good many insights in doing so. I, here, provide the briefest sketch. At the nation-state level, comparative studies have shown that educational systems around the world are much more similar than would be predicted by the extreme variations among them in levels of development and cultural traditions (Meyer & Ramirez, 2000). And they tend to change in parallel ways, clearly affected by world fashions. Enrollment patterns, curricular programs, and even detailed curricular materials drift along in world-set patterns. At the organizational level, many studies show striking similarities in conceptions of the school or the university, and thus pronounced tendencies to isomorphism. And of course individual career lines, in the modern world, are highly patterned by fairly standard rules about education, credentials, occupations, and so on. The studies assembled here by Baker and Wiseman reinforce the intellectual tradition of institutional theory. They also enliven it, criticize it, add to it, and propose valuable modifications and extensions. Major themes stressed in the work here will set the agenda for future institutional analyses in the field of comparative education for years to come. I can call attention to some of these central themes here:
1. EFFECTS OF WORLD MODELS ON NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS A major line of argument in institutional theory, as applied to comparative education, has been that national educational arrangements, and changes in them, reflect models obtaining in world society. The models are transmitted by professionals, by all sorts of world governmental and non-governmental associations, and by the natural influences of prestige in the world’s stratification system. So recent American reforms in science education, for instance, are built into the world’s professional educational discourse, and policy organizations like UNESCO and the OECD and the World Bank, and flow into policy and sometimes practice in the most unlikely places. The studies in this book dramatically support and extend this core argument. David Kamens, Jong-Seon Kim, Francisco Ramirez, and Gili Drori and Hyeyoung Moon discuss the nature and impact of major worldwide trends in education – trends that flow to every type of country. Karen Bradley notes sweeping changes in gender enrollments, and David Suarez in human rights education. Both Jason Beech and M. Fernanda Astiz discuss world effects on current policy changes in Latin America, and Edward
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Bodine emphasizes the impact of some of the same ‘‘participatory’’ ideologies in Poland. Regina Werum and Lauren Rauscher discuss the same broad changes in Trinidad. Scott Davies and Janice Aurini tell a related story about Canada, and Hyunjoon Park reports on related phenomena in Korea and elsewhere. In fact, in the modern world broadly standardized global impacts on national education are so pervasive, that the authors here tend to take them for granted and to move on to further steps in analysis. Their agendas are often, not about the obvious similarities, but about the various sorts of differences within common broad trends.
2. WORLD EFFECTS VARY DEPENDING ON NATIONAL AND LOCAL CIRCUMSTANCES AND INTERESTS Over and over, the studies in this book provide evidence on the ways broad educational movements flowing through world society produce distinctive effects depending on the arrangements of the local societies into which they flow. This is perhaps the most common theme of this book. Because many of the authors focus on case studies, they tend to emphasize the ways their cases involve unique transcriptions of dominant world models. Sometimes, the story is simply the classic institutionalist one of ‘‘loose coupling’’ – the idea that the adoption of valued educational models is likely to occur without much effective implementation. M. Fernanda Astiz notes that community participation in education comes down through Argentine centralization looking quite different than the original model. Hyunjoon Park emphasizes that educational emphases on parent participation can, in some contexts, simply reinforce local stratification arrangements. Sometimes the story gets more dialectic, so that reforms in one direction can produce effects in the opposite direction. Karen Bradley shows ways in which globally expanded female education can produce increased vertical and horizontal stratification or segregation, and Regina Werum and Lauren Rauscher discuss parallel effects of expanded educational ‘‘opportunity’’ in Trinidad. And sometimes the story emphasizes the way a world-generated educational change can produce resources and opportunities that essentially create organizational diversity rather than simple isomorphism. Educational expansion and change produce opportunities for unique organizations in Canada (Davies and Aurini) and in Poland (Bodine).
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3. WORLD MODELS EXPAND THE ROLE OF EDUCATION IN THE NATIONAL-STATE One can imagine a world in which dominant standard models influence policy and practice in many or most states. This intellectual stance is common in institutional theory about education. The papers David Baker and Alexander Wiseman have put together here go far beyond this point, contributing to a recent major shift in institutional theory. Over and over, they call attention to the impact of EXPANSIVE change in world models. The proper educational system grows in size and scale. It penetrates society and constructs stratification at more and more points, creating a brave new model of the schooled society and person. The modern nation-state has been to school in ways that could not have been envisioned in the 19th century. Thus David Kamens, Francisco Ramirez, Karen Bradley, and Gili Drori and Hyeyoung Moon all stress the extraordinary world-wide (and worlddriven) expansion of higher education in the current period. David Suarez, Hyunjoon Park, Edward Bodine, Jason Beech, M. Fernanda Astiz, JongSeon Kim, John Richardson, and Regina Werum and Lauren Rauscher discuss expanded participatory logics at lower educational levels. Scott Davies and Janice Aurini discuss organizational impacts of such logics. The proper modern nation-state has expanded education, expanded community and student participation and choice, expanded training agendas, and so on. Behind the reasoning explicitly put forward in many of the chapters, here is the looming story of ‘‘globalization,’’ seen much more broadly than in the common economistic visions. The better-schooled individual and society are necessary if we are to compete in the big world. ‘‘We’’ are, in the papers here, Canada, Argentina, Poland, Trinidad, Brazil, Europe in general, and apparently almost everywhere else. But the impact of globalization, as seen here, goes beyond the yen to improve and expand modern national educational systems. The shadow of a global educational society appears.
4. CREATING THE GLOBAL EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM Institutional theory has tended to emphasize world impacts on national educational systems – impacts that create a good deal of isomorphism and isomorphic change. The idea of a national educational system supporting a national society has been central. As noted above, recent world models have
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gone far beyond simply presenting a standard model – the standard model itself is one of the explosive educational expansion and rationalization, with the picture of a nation-state on educational steroids. But curiously, in the chapters here, the nation-state does not seem so important or charismatic, educationally. These chapters certainly put the nation-state at the center of things in policy terms, and often treat it as a unit of empirical analysis. But hard driving nationalism is little present, and there is no idea that ‘‘the playing fields of Eton’’ are the mechanism for defeating the enemy in war. A major contribution of this book to the development of institutional theory is to emphasize modern education as increasingly building a sort of world society, rather than simply a set of national societies. It is a world society with common elites trained in a world higher educational system (Kamens). It is a world society in which individual participation and choice are central, rather than the old story about sacrificing individual expansion to the national good (most of the chapters here). It is a world society in which the incorporation of outsiders is a necessary and natural good (Buchmann and Parrado). The chapters are not organized around this theme, but it appears in the background of most of the discussions. And the point is indeed very central in the modern world. We now have an agreement that education is a natural human right everywhere (celebrated in the Education for All movement: Chabbott, 2002). So each country has the responsibility to press and support all the other countries in properly responding to this universal obligation. So do all the non-governmental organizations that flood the world. So, indeed, do individual persons, who now have the right and obligation to address educational defects everywhere in the world.
5. EXPANDING THE IDENTITY OF THE SCHOOLED PERSON World-driven educational expansion, and the partial transcendence of the national-state in the modern educational model, are linked to another major change that is thematic in this book. And that is a change in the global notion of the rights and capacities of the student. This imagined student is no longer a component in a national society, but directly a member of an emergent global one. Everywhere, there is an expanded emphasis on student choice, student (and parent) participation, or the shift from citizen to person (Ramirez). And the students involved are envisioned as having much greater
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capacity and empowerment than in the past. They are all pretty much appropriate for university training, now, and for entry into the highly participatory service sectors of the society. None of the papers discuss the virtues of educational policies to restrict ‘‘overeducation’’ (something that apparently no longer exists), or to channel educational losers into roles as hewers of wood and drawers of water. When the papers here discover stratifying restrictions in educational systems, as many do, they see these restrictions as injustices and inefficiencies and social problems. And this is exactly the perspective institutionalized in the modern world educational system itself. So limiting gender opportunities happens, but is a kind of normative violation (Bradley). So, potentially, are institutions restricting the ‘‘special’’ students (Richardson). And so are training and sorting mechanisms that potentially limit more marginal students (Buchmann and Parrado; Werum and Rauscher). The modern world educational system celebrates expansion, participation, and opportunity for everyone. When these outcomes do not properly appear, it is a social problem. An older idea that people should be fit into a national table of educational and occupational organization is in the modern system a violation of human rights. So the chapters here contribute to the extension and revision of institutional theory, in the sociology of education, in a variety of ways. They reflect the established emphasis on global forces producing educational isomorphism, but show all sorts of variation in the ways these forces play out. And they add important new emphases – on the expansion of the role of education in models of national society, on the globalization of these models themselves, and on the transformed expectations about the rights and capacities of the student, as envisioned in our global society. The editors and authors are to be congratulated on their contributions, which substantially advance, not only institutional theory, but also the field of comparative education itself.
REFERENCES Chabbott, C. (2002). Constructing education for development: International organizations and education for all. London, UK: Taylor & Francis. Jepperson, R. (2002). The development and application of sociological neo-institutionalism. In: J. Berger & M. Zelditch (Eds), New directions in contemporary social theory. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Meyer, J. W., & Ramirez, F. O. (2000). The world institutionalization of education. In: J. Schriewer (Ed.), Discourse formation in comparative education (pp. 111–132). Frankfurt: Peter Lang Publishers.
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THE SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMPIRICAL COMPARATIVE RESEARCH ON EDUCATION AND NEO-INSTITUTIONAL THEORY Alexander W. Wiseman and David P. Baker Comparativists of education have increasingly incorporated institutional theory into the collective consciousness since its renaissance as neo-institutional theory in the 1970s. The uses and benefits of institutional theory have been discussed in the scholarly literature, at professional comparative education conferences, and among those from various multinational development organizations working in the field around the world. It has become increasingly difficult to deny that an institutional theory of education is a productive perspective offering new ways to examine education and its influence on modern society. To a large extent, comparative research on education has been instrumental in broadening and testing hypotheses from institutional theory.1 In just a few decades, the combination of comparative research teamed with institutional theory has transformed how scholars and policymakers appreciate the greater integration of formal education into modern life. This is a symbiosis proven intellectually fertile on a number of empirical fronts
The Impact of Comparative Education Research on Institutional Theory International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 7, 1–26 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3679/doi:10.1016/S1479-3679(06)07001-0
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including the role of education in the political development of nation-states, comparative scholarship on school and university expansion, the incorporation of mass schooling into the world culture, the spread of global schooling ideologies and operational models, the rise of a common curricula, and the explosion of internationalized education policy (e.g., Baker & LeTendre, 2005; Fuller & Rubinson, 1992b; Meyer & Hannan, 1979; Wiseman & Baker, 2005). Even though the symbiotic relationship between comparative research and institutional theory is productive, there has been little reflection on this relationship, particularly for an audience of comparativists of education. As the introductory chapter of this volume, which is dedicated to the impact of comparative education research on institutional theory, this relationship is described using relevant examples from the large literature on comparative education specifically undertaken from an institutional perspective. The major reasons for this productive relationship are four-fold. The first reason is that a worldwide educational revolution coincided with the intellectual development of institutional theory. Second is the conceptual advantage that institutional theory offers the study of education through the development of the concept of world culture. Third is the particular institutional quality of the dominant form of formal education worldwide – publicly funded, mass education. And fourth is the methodological advantage comparative research on education offers institutional theory. We begin this chapter, therefore, with the coincidental overlap of the massive, global expansion of education and an intellectual spark.
1. THE WORLDWIDE EDUCATION REVOLUTION As comparativists of education are well aware, over the second half of the 20th century there was a dramatic increase in the pace of educational expansion around the world. This revolution has made the world a schooled place both in terms of enrollment rates and increased average total years in schooling. What has been particularly noticeable is the degree to which governments in all types of nations have come to see that education plays a central role in the future development of the nation’s human capital, and in turn governments have become the main providers of schooling. This alone is a significant shift from anything ever seen before the 20th century. Further this remarkable expansion of education has fostered notable homogeneity of goals, aims, and basic organizational forms of elementary and secondary schooling and, more recently, higher education.
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Institutional theory, as applied to education’s role in modern society, began its intellectual development just as the worldwide educational revolution was becoming increasingly widespread and obvious. At Stanford University in 1977, John W. Meyer, a founding theorist of neo-institutional theory, authored a seminal institutional analysis of education’s influence on modern society titled, ‘‘The Effects of Education as an Institution’’ (Meyer, 1977). This article, which is fundamentally a set of hypotheses outlining the dimensions of education as an institution, mapped out a comprehensive research agenda that has included extensive use of comparative research on education in every decade since its appearance by a large and diverse community of scholars either aligned with or inspired by institutional theory (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991; Jepperson, 2002). What closely followed Meyer’s 1977 article was a cascade of comparative studies documenting the dimensions of the educational revolution – including its causes and consequences. In that same year, under the title ‘‘The World Educational Revolution,’’ Meyer and three young colleagues published what would be one of the first in a long line of comparative analyses of the growth of schooling (Meyer, Ramirez, Rubinson, & Boli-Bennett, 1977). Important developments of this literature appeared in the pages of the Comparative Education Review (e.g., Meyer, 1971; Boli, Ramirez, & Meyer, 1985; Meyer, Nagel, & Snyder 1993) and in other arenas sympathetic to comparative research on education (e.g., Kamens, 1977; Meyer & Hannan, 1979; Meyer, Ramirez, & Soysal, 1992; Ramirez & Boli, 1987; Ramirez & Meyer, 1980). In addition to documenting growth, these studies also statistically assessed if educational growth patterns were influenced by economic, political, and social factors in nations (Meyer & Hannan, 1979; Thomas, Meyer, Ramirez, & Boli, 1987). Early on institutional theory-inspired comparativists were struck by the relative weaknesses of economic, political, or social attributes of nations to predict school enrollment rates. Empirical investigations of the education revolution, which had been previously and persuasively linked to labor markets, political interests, and various social factors, did not provide empirical justification for a direct linkage between the dramatic and ongoing expansion of education and these causes. This intriguing finding resonated with the earliest application of institutional theory to education, in that here was evidence that education spread as a worldwide institution, at least as much as if not more than a phenomenon related to national factors or overt agendas (Ramirez & Meyer, 1980). Because of this basic finding, related lines of comparative research on education began to explicitly focus on the institutional qualities that drove
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educational expansion around the world (e.g., Frank, Hironaka, & Schofer, 2000; all of the chapters in Fuller & Rubinson, 1992b; see also Kamens, Meyer, & Benavot, 1996). This effort has culminated in a recent institutional theory focus on a large-scale comparative analysis of the continuing expansion of higher education, which is arguably the next phase of the education revolution (Schofer & Meyer, 2005; see also the Kamens, Drori, & Moon and Werum chapters in this volume). Here is a matured application of institutional theory where world cultural factors – in the form of a changing model of society around scientific rationalization, an ideology about social progress, and political focus on human capital formation as a national resource – have driven both the global rise of educational attainment levels and consequently the rate of growth in higher education in nations around the world. Resting on ideas and concepts from a long tradition of sociological inquiry, the institutional perspective considers institutions as the building blocks of any human society (e.g., Berger & Luckmann, 1967; Weber, 1952). Imbued with historicity, institutions are thought of as packages of culture that define a particular sector of society (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). In this perspective on institutions, culture is everyday knowledge that is institutionalized as cognitive models of the everyday world, also referred to as scripts and scenarios. Culture is seen as the fundamental product of institutions, and its nature is that of a script by which social actors define actorhood and meaningful action (Meyer & Ramirez, 2000). At the heart of this conceptualization is the idea that society is not made up of naturally occurring entities, such as individuals or organizations that enter into institutional arrangements as autonomous agents, rather at its most basic level society is made up of institutionalized culture that creates and spreads commonly held models of the individual and the social organization (formal and informal). In the production of collective reality, institutions are more cultural than structural. In a sense institutional theory ‘‘cut its teeth’’ as a theoretical paradigm for empirical accounts of the educational revolution; it developed intellectually through its attempts to describe and understand the causes and implications of worldwide educational expansion. And the educational revolution provided a lengthy historical and global empirical test case from which to observe institutionalization in action during the most intense period in the development of schooling in the entire history of education in human society. Within the educational revolution, the pace and level of educational development has varied historically and across regions and nations of the world – perfectly lending itself to comparative institutional analysis. In turn,
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institutional theory lent comparative research on education some useful conceptual advantages.
2. INSTITUTIONALISM AS CONCEPTUAL ADVANTAGE Institutional theory has been adopted into and shaped by many different fields such as the arts, business, economics, history, medicine, political science, and sociology in addition to education (e.g., Burlamaqui, Castro, & Chang, 2000; DiMaggio & Powell, 1991; Meyer, Boli, & Thomas, 1987). Comparative sociologists, in particular, are often drawn to theories on institutions because they (unlike more functionally oriented social scientists) emphasize complexity in social environments and processes of institutionalization (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991). So, conceptually, the worldwide educational revolution was the first major phenomenon linking institutional theory to comparative research on education. But, it was not the last. The conceptual attraction of institutional theory has led to many different approaches to comparative research on education depending on the subfield or context involved. There is indeed a disparity in institutional meaning and allowance for individual as well as collective agency, which takes the shape of differing emphases on macro-and microelements of society, variation in the foci on either cognitive or normative characteristics of institutions, and diverse approaches to the creation and spread of institutions (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991). Even though there is a fair amount of diversity, or perhaps some uncertainty, about exactly what institutional theory is, as a general perspective it has afforded a number of conceptual advantages to the comparative study of education. There are three main advantages. First, institutional theory has brought back culture as a dynamic causal force in determining educational development, explicitly in the form of world culture and its influence on formal education (Baker & LeTendre, 2005). The notion of culture as an independent force in the development of education systems around the world lost favor, as structural-functionalism and structural Marxian theories chased culture out as a social determinate. Indeed, institutional theory was initially developed as an alternative to the structural and conflict arguments about education’s role in society. This advantage has broadened comparative research on education in the past several decades to go beyond educational expansion by examining the
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substance of curriculum and values spread by worldwide education (e.g., Benavot, Cha, Kamens, Meyer, & Wong, 1991; Chabbott, 2003; DiMaggio, 1985; Fiala & Gordon-Langford, 1987). Second, institutional theory provides a rationale for unique empirical descriptions of factors in education that often went unobserved and untheorized before the application of institutional theory to comparative research on education (Jepperson, 2002). Some of these factors include the global homogeneity of education, the unique differences between schools within individual nations, and the isomorphic change in school structure, curricular content, and educational impact occurring over time. By offering theorydriven observations of the considerable degree of stability, isomorphism, and homogeneity in educational development, institutional theory provides fuller comparative accounts by virtue of its empirical tendencies toward change over time, differences, and heterogeneity. Third, institutional theory enables links between the study of large-scale historical social phenomena, such as the worldwide education revolution, and nation-specific as well as more microaspects of schooling (Baker & LeTendre, 2005; see also Scott, 1987). The advantage of comparative research on education using institutional theory is that by focusing on institutional processes, educational comparativists have been able to step back, as it were, from the focus that much educational research and policy has on individual students and on individual nations. This does not mean that the nation-specific and microelements of schooling are lost; it instead means that they are given context and perspective. This opens the way for institutional theory to generate an integrated theory of the role of education in modern society. All of these advantages have led institutional theory to move comparative research on education from national to world levels through the idea of world culture. Education, like a major world religion, is transnational in nature. It is a world cultural institution (Boli & Ramirez, 1986), and as such has helped create both the nation and the state elements of the modern nation-state. A world-level collective educational agenda both allows for and constrains national educational system variation (both within and between nationstates) (Meyer, Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997). For example, culture and economy – both unified and linked across nation-states – comprise the modern world system (Meyer et al., 1987; Meyer & Hannan, 1979). Yet, cross-national variation in educational organizations still clusters by polity types (Jepperson & Meyer, 1991). This duality of institutionalized organizations coupled with internal variation is a conceptual advantage of institutional approaches to comparative research on education.
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The concept of world culture has given comparative scholars the advantage of being able to look at larger, ‘‘institutionalized’’ trends. In so doing, it became quickly apparent that that there were many previously unrecognized tendencies toward homogeneity in structure and organization within global institutions like education (Jepperson, 2002). In other words, the perspective that an institutional culture among educational organizations exists and is shared across the traditional political and geographic boundaries is often missed in studies of students in single nations. World culture embeds nation-states in wider cultural meanings and economic contexts. Indeed, much of a nation’s legitimacy within the global community is the result of meeting internationally recognized standards for democratic nations. Having a well-informed and participatory citizenry, a strong civil society, and a government that guarantees state–society interactions are all internationally recognized democratic values. The national quest for legitimacy of this sort leads to some degree of isomorphism, particularly in terms of recognized values and policies (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). However, institutional scholars also recognize that the meeting of those worldacclaimed standards does not happen in an environment free of conflict. Indeed, conflict comes in part from the problematic implementation of national policy in local communities (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Meyer & Rowan, 1977). For example, some degree of mismatch between policy purpose and policy implementation is common within schools and educational systems since policies are often modeled on external (i.e., exogenous) goals (Meyer et al., 1997; Vickers, 1994). Because so much of the literature focusing on an educational production function has attempted to fit schooling to national and individual economic and political productivity, the research and policy literature on education often ignores larger educational contexts in favor of individual or situation-specific studies. So, the ability to explain the spread of world culture and the incorporation of individual youth as citizens of an organization or community is another conceptual advantage that institutional theory on education provides.
2.1. The Comparative Advantage of World Culture An illustrative example of fruitful connections between institutional theory and comparative research is a set of studies on how educational institutionalization manifests itself as a partner, or arm, of world culture in the incorporation of individual youth as ‘citizens’ of social, political, and economic communities. Fuller and Rubinson (1992a) argue that individuals
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become linked to an imagined community as much as the state through citizenship, and that schooling creates the opportunities and activities which connect individuals to nation-states (see also Anderson, 1996). Likewise, Ramirez and his colleagues have asserted that the nation-state as a political force leads to the formation and conferral of individual citizenship through state-sponsored schooling (Ramirez & Boli, 1987; Ramirez & Rubinson, 1979; Ramirez, Soysal, & Shanahan, 1997; Ramirez, Van Buuren, Kooij, & Rupp, 1992; Ramirez & Weiss, 1979). Therefore, citizenry is not only necessary for international legitimacy, but it is also the link that integrates individuals into the larger community. As such, a goal of political leaders is often to use schooling, particularly mass schooling, as a way to incorporate various and differing groups into national organizations and economies. Schooling as an institution of modern society may impart citizenship to youths, but the process of schooling does not necessarily lead to the democratic civic participation of youths in society. Even scholars who are inspired by or aligned with institutional theory agree that conflict is historically at the core of the process of democratic development. Democratic systems worldwide have developed as a result of struggles within social and political groups as well as between the state and society. Thus, as nation-states become democracies, social and political institutions are framed to guarantee citizens’ rights and political participation in an effort to institutionalize the democratic result of previous social and political conflict (Moore, 1966; Rueschemeyer, Stephens, & Stephens, 1992; Skocpol, 1979, 1992; Skocpol & Fiorina, 2000; Thelen & Steinmo, 1992).2 Boli (1992) asserts in an historical analysis of Sweden that nation-level progress and achievement required the political incorporation of even lowly peasants (beyond formulaic indoctrination). Likewise, Cheung and Leung (1998) point out that schooling can legitimate and maintain political power and dominant ideologies through control of school curricula. If this is the case, then the social, political, and economic incorporation of youth into the broader community is not only an effect of education, but it is one of the most important outcomes of schooling. Evidence presented in Fuller and Rubinson (1992b) further suggests that individuals should affiliate with institutions at the nation-level rather than the local-level intermediary institutions in order to establish themselves as political and economic opportunists and receive meritocratic status awards. Sometimes, therefore, citizenship and civic participation among youths depends on their participation in the national economy and politics. In the case of Sweden, Boli (1992) notes that political citizenship historically depended on economic
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citizenship. Since economic citizenship was individualized, political citizenship became likewise. State-sponsored schooling encourages citizenship (or in some instances vice versa) because it is a project of nation-building, and because it confers, or at least implies, citizenship for individuals. Therefore, the incorporation of individuals as citizens in national communities and political aggregates increases pressures to expand education (Fuller & Rubinson, 1992a). As citizens acquire political responsibility they become obligated to perpetuate and encourage access to the citizenry through institutions such as schooling. This is so because individual citizenry becomes the status quo in a system of mass education. Ultimately, then, individual citizenship conferral via mass schooling benefits national-level institutions because it engenders individuals’ support and assimilates them into the collective institution. Further, from an institutional perspective, education itself is a form of world culture. For example, Kamens et al. (1996) argue that highly institutionalized world ideologies, which rationalize widespread educational expansion, provide standardized models of modern curricular content. Schools implement these models of curricular content that affect the political development of youth at the local level in the United States and similarly decentralized school systems, but most policy or curricular decisions in more centralized countries like France or Japan are made at the national level. Therefore, through the expansion of mass schooling and the accompanying establishment of citizenship rights for youth, youths are individually incorporated into the larger social, political, and economic community, which then affords them certain rights and responsibilities. Institutional theory suggests that cross-national trends in education matter because they demonstrate that youth everywhere are socialized into shared norms and cooperative societal action through schooling – in other words, schools are both part of a world culture and reproduce this world culture by incorporating youth into these shared norms and values. By recognizing and reintroducing the importance of culture in explaining educational phenomena, and by using both a cross-national and a wide, historical lens to do so, institutional theory offers a conceptual advantage to comparative research on education. But, the relationship between institutional theory and comparative research on education is not one-sided. It is the institutional quality of formal education that feeds the symbiotic relationship between comparative education research and institutional theory.
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3. THE INSTITUTIONAL QUALITY OF FORMAL EDUCATION Schools are unique compared to other institutionalized organizations because of the character of schools as public service, as well as publicly funded organizations. Schools are sometimes compared to hospitals in their degree of public permeation, but, while there is a large degree of public penetration into health care, by comparison to schools it is minimal. Schools’ ‘‘clients’’ are generally the entire population of a nation or community because schools are mass – and often compulsory – public institutions. The consequences of these characteristics of schooling are staggering. In most nations, not only does every person have the opportunity (or right) to take advantage of the services that schools provide, but in many nations everyone of a certain age is required to do so. Although mass, public education is certainly not compulsory in every nation around the world, it is the dominant form of modern mass schooling. The fact that daily attendance and minimum levels of attainment in a government-sponsored organization is compulsory in any nation sets schooling apart from health care or hospitals – where there is no daily requirement to get a check up or complete a series of health checks (and it is unlikely that there ever will be). Schools are the only organizations in the world in which high degrees of organizational autonomy and high levels of external penetration are both expected and required. This is quite the double punch. Public access and performance accountability make the school’s role one of public service, but also one of complex contexts. This complexity of the school’s public environment is one of the reasons that comparative analysis of education lends itself to institutional theory. The institutional quality of formal education also has an impact on the nature and range of public policy reforms in schools. Because educational systems and the schools that constitute them are so intimately connected to both the community and the larger political administration, school reform and change is highly contextualized by cultural context. Schools create structures according to the larger legitimacy myths that then impart social and cultural identity to students (Kamens, 1977). Schools produce and reproduce knowledge and culture, which is often represented by abstract symbols rather than actual, detailed information or real-world application (Meyer, 1977), but the ubiquity of schooling makes this the norm rather than the exception. School reform, therefore, is often tied more to assumed knowledge and a culture of legitimacy than to real-world problems in spite
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of what policymakers may say (for an example of this phenomena, see Vickers, 1994). Confidence in our perception of reality, derived from what we think others believe, is what creates and validates cultural scripts of social action. So schooling’s organization and policies are thought to be rational, but these characteristics are more about the cultural of rationality than about a fully rationalized operation (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). The institutional qualities shaping how schools operate has more to do with what people expect of them in form than what the organization does in areas that are less inspected. In this way, education contributes as much to the importance and relevance of institutional theory, as institutional theory does to empirical comparative research on education. As such, the unique characteristics of formal education (i.e., mass, public, compulsory) define the institutional culture of schools embodied around three expectations for schools related to (1) achievement, (2) accountability, and (3) access (Wiseman, 2005).
3.1. Expectations about the Form and Operation of Schools The first popular education expectation concerns academic achievement. This is an expectation that something will be accomplished in a school, that it will be better than before, and that student performance levels will always rise over time. The achievement expectation is largely a functional one, which suggests that the end product of schooling is improved student learning evidenced by high levels of student achievement. From this point of view, schools mold the formal structure of instruction in order to facilitate and encourage the production of high student achievement. The achievement expectation has been one of the most stable and widespread characteristics of a global culture of education since the mid-20th century, and it is closely related to the unprecedented access to education that much of the world has had as a result of the worldwide education revolution. The second expectation that characterizes the world culture of education is the access expectation. It is important to remember that the school systems in most nations are either public or at least semi-public institutions. There are even often publicly elected officials who have some major say in the administration of schools. School systems are also increasingly locallycontrolled meaning that the voice of even the least of the taxpayers or community stakeholders is a booming voice that must be answered if not obeyed. This access expectation, therefore, requires that the voice of every
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parent, every citizen, every business leader, every politician, and on top of that everyone else who is in that school’s community carries decision-making weight in the schools. Not only do school administrators and teachers have to be available, but they are also expected to listen, to try to implement the suggestions (or demands) of these constituents, and to provide some evidence back to the public that their wishes have been fulfilled. Some scholars assert that how schools are governed directly affects aspects of the work structure, such as school climate and school educational organization, which then influences student learning – technically measured as student achievement (Boyd, 1996; Ogawa & Bossert, 1995). The pressure from parents, communities, and policymakers on schools to influence and, hopefully, improve the academic performance and life chances of youth is significant. As schooling becomes and remains the dominant formal mechanism through which youth are formed, socialized, and prepared for adult roles as citizens, the popular perception is that formal public education becomes increasingly essential to society at all levels (Ramirez, 1997). This perception often leads to a belief that schools should be held accountable for student achievement above all other potentially influential people, situations, or events. The third expectation concerns educational accountability. This expectation requires that the responsibility for the ever-rising performance of students belongs to the school or educational system first and foremost (instead of the parents, community, or students themselves), and if ever the achievement expectation should not be met, then the school must be at fault. The worldwide explosion of internationalized educational policy thrives on this expectation because most of these policies are based on international comparisons of student achievement. Of course, comparative research on education using institutional theory suggests that schooling is often not directly linked to student performance. Institutional perspectives suggest that organizational level models (of legitimate school activity) may result from functional and locally-based reasoning, but the outcomes of schooling (such as student learning and achievement) may defy the functional accountability expectation. For example, when student learning improves, it may not necessarily be because schools or instruction changed or precipitated the change. School administrators such as principals may influence organizational level change without any accompanying change in outcome at the student level. Similarly, cross-system variation in schooling is not necessarily linked to the
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real-world teaching or learning that takes place within each educational system or school. Schools’ individual characteristics are not as significant to student learning as the institutionalized model or environmental context in which schools exist and to which they conform. Classic sociological works have argued that organizations become structured by their environments and change with them. Indeed, rational and contextually legitimate models of school structure, instructional processes, and institutional outcomes drive schoolbased activity. Legitimate school activities depend on the institutional model and culture. The institutional quality of formal education suggests that individual schools may not be accountable for student-level outcomes because these outcomes are predicted by factors to which schools may contribute, but which are not dependent upon or significantly related to specific schoolbased activities. School-based activities and changes follow legitimate, rationalized models in part to ensure the institutional legitimacy of the school in spite of rather than because of individual student learning. Institutional theory suggests that it may be more appropriate to look at institutional-level characteristics that correspond with individual-level outcomes independent of school-based activities than to use these school-level activities to predict individual-level outcomes like achievement. Although school-based activity may be tailored by the local needs or contexts in which they operate, comparative research on education using institutional theory suggests that cross-system variation in many schoolbased activities is not significantly associated with variation in student achievement. There are several possible reasons why what individual schools do does not directly influence student performance. One may be that the legitimate, institutionalized model for schooling is so strong that even when given the latitude to influence instruction, schools do not take full advantage of that opportunity and do not deviate significantly from the model. Another explanation may be that even when variation occurs, the legitimate model for schooling is so strong and the desire for legitimacy so great that principals’ behavior is not related specifically enough to schools’ and students’ contexts. One could also argue that the transitory and temporary influence of one school cannot outweigh the consistent influences of resource and opportunity over the course of students’ whole lives and academic careers. Instead, the institutionalized schooling model or environmental context may indeed be determining which school-based activities are legitimate and rational.
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4. COMPARATIVE METHOD AS EMPIRICAL ADVANTAGE Often the uninitiated read comparative research on education that uses an explicit institutional theory perspective as a somewhat dubious and pedantic account of educational expansion miss what motivates it in the first place. Indeed, quite literally it is the stuff of compendiums of education statistics, but institutional theory uses these common data in a new way. Research from comparative education is instrumental in broadening and testing hypotheses from institutional theory (esp. sociological neo-institutionalism – see Jepperson, 2002). In particular, the comparative method and use of nations as units of analysis in cross-national comparisons has allowed scholars, policymakers, and practitioners alike to identify important trends in schooling. Methodologically, the emergence of cross-national comparisons as commonplace (instead of focusing on individual cases or limiting comparisons to two or three nations at a time) has breathed new life into the empirical analysis of education. Because of the incremental isomorphic change in education, which institutional theory highlights, there is also now an emphasis on historical context and historical change in education. While culturalist and realist approaches to the investigation of educational phenomenon had previously given lip-service to the importance of historical context and change, it was not until comparative research on education using institutional theory featured it prominently that history took its proper place as an important empirical key to much comparative education research. Sometimes this important contribution to empirical investigations of educational change and school effects gets lost in the details. Early institutional comparativists of education focused so heavily on the details of educational development such as enrollment rates, average daily attendance, length of school careers, official curricular guides, and so forth because for them these were empirical measures of the central process of the institutionalization of education. And, the core of comparative research on education using institutional theory continues to be these seemingly mundane empirical measures of educational institutionalization. The idea is that the process of institutionalization is the key to understanding the dynamic relationship between education as an institution and modern society. But, there have been side effects of comparative research on education – specifically regarding the development of educational policy based on data from international studies of education.
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Educational planning and policy is part and parcel of the modern nationstate (LeTendre & Baker, 1999; Meyer & Baker, 1996). And, cross-national comparisons of educational achievement have become accepted and expected arms of educational policymaking (Wiseman & Baker, 2005). But, the education-related planning and policy that does occur at the national level is frequently abstract and broadly interpretable – meaning that there is sufficient room for school administrators and educators ‘‘on the ground’’ to vary how they respond to these broad top-down proclamations (LeTendre, Baker, Akiba, & Wiseman, 2001). This does not mean that institutional homogeneity is sacrificed, however. Instead, it is quite evident that the form and content of these abstract national plans and policies align with a common, rationalized, and legitimate ‘‘blueprint’’ (Ramirez, 2000). And, it is the world culture of education that defines this blueprint. Comparative education research can describe the form and effects of institutionalized cultural environments by paying attention to the common characteristics of public, government-sponsored schooling in most nations around the world. These cultural environments are flexible and changing (Jepperson, 2002). There is little about nation-states, organizations, or individuals that is necessarily static, so it is important that theoretical approaches to educational comparison at all levels remain open to and allow for change – even irrational or unexpected change. Several recent cross-national comparisons have been the target of institutional analyses; and, this approach provides an appropriate lens for looking at (1) how institutional theory has influenced the development of comparative research on education; as well as, (2) the value of cross-national educational comparisons themselves. The institutionalist approach to organizations such as schools is that although there may be certain elements of each nation, region, or culture that will influence the character of schooling both in structure and process there is, for better or worse, a trend of isomorphism in educational policy and practice (Grant, 2000). Isomorphism is a product of national legitimacy-seeking efforts and leads national educational systems to develop relatively similar elements of structure and policy, although the implementation and outcomes of education may vary considerably at the regional or local levels. 4.1. Empirical Measurement of Non-Technical School Effects As Meyer and Baker (1996, p. 126) assert, ‘‘the sociology of education has generated a large literature on the institutional structure of modern
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schooling ... [which] ... argues effectively that schools are more than technical organizations of achievement.’’ Consequently, as institutionalized organizations whose functions extend beyond the purely technical, schools take on, as one of their fundamental functions, the creation and incorporation of students as citizens in largely democratic or legitimacy-seeking nation-states (Meyer et al., 1979; Meyer et al., 1992). According to this institutional approach, cross-national variation in achievement should associate with the degree to which schools incorporate students as citizens in their respective nation-states. And, the degree to which student (i.e., citizen) achievement is an institutionalized element of schooling within these systems reflects the legitimacy of the nation-state. Therefore, in nations where mass schooling and nearly universal enrollment are the norm, student achievement should be more closely tied to national productivity and development. Furthermore, cross-national comparisons of student achievement should be perceived as more valuable for educational decision-making. By the same reasoning, however, in nations where schooling is shaped more by the cultural and organizational context of schools or where mass schooling and universal enrollment have not been attained, cross-national comparisons of student achievement will be less valuable. The institutional twist to these two expectations is that international isomorphism has occurred and resulted in structures for schooling that are relatively consistent across nations.
4.2. Shifting Effects of Formal Schooling Educational agencies of the state become not only involved in providing access to schooling, but also in assessing educational quality and establishing policies aimed at increasing educational quality. This has been a marked trend in educational governance over the latter half of the 20th century. This dual process of educational expansion and assessment of educational quality is now well understood and documented in the macrosociology of schooling (e.g., Fuller & Rubinson, 1992b). At the same time, much is known about microorganizational processes that produce school-level effects on achievement. But the link between the two – macrolevel state actions and microlevel organizational production of achievement – is not well understood. Policy discussions are often predicated on the assumption that the state and what it does in organizing schooling can affect achievement levels of student populations, as in the rhetoric and recommendations of famous and influential American federal documents on the national quality of schooling
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such as A Nation at Risk in 1983 and Goals 2000 ten years later. This comparison of national systems of education based simply on means of student achievement has been referred to as horse-ranking and derided as a result of laziness or ignorance on the part of educational researchers and policymakers (Meyer & Baker, 1996). However, cross-national comparison of student achievement as a legitimate method of estimating nations’ level of development and productivity is a decidedly more complex process (Baker, 1997; Wolhuter, 1997). The shift from level of attainment to level of achievement as a fundamental indicator of national and systemic legitimacy has not often been theoretically demonstrated beyond the macrosociology of educational expansion. Nor has it been sufficiently documented through empirical investigation although many nations follow cross-national comparisons as if they were valid predictors of actual economic productivity and social welfare (Anderson, 1979; Rubinson & Fuller, 1992; Altbach, 1997). These shifting effects of formal schooling – from attainment to achievement outcomes – change the focus of comparative research on education. Unfortunately, little discussion has considered whether cross-national comparisons of student achievement are pervasive because of the 20th century saturation of schools with students. With little room to expand educational systems, the increasingly global, legitimized method of assessing educational quality is no longer access or attainment related. Instead, educational quality is tied more and more to average achievement levels. If this is true, then high and pervasive enrollment throughout a nation’s school system is no longer enough to warrant status as a legitimate and competitive nation. Around the world, these characteristics of modern, nation-states are now expected rather than hoped for. The advent of a global mass-schooling community has made it important for national educational systems to have high performing students as well as universal enrollment. Consequently, national means of student achievement have become tools for building and maintaining national legitimacy. This trend may be attributed to the cross-national institutionalization of education, but certainly there are other more localized influences that contribute to this phenomenon.
4.3. The Empirical Importance of Loose Coupling Institutionalism is a global theory, but not a universal philosophy. This begins to account for the pervasiveness of certain educational forms and
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processes without complete conformance or uniformity throughout society. In other words, institutional accounts of empirically observable educational phenomena are meant to be generalizable (i.e., global) without being strict (i.e., universal). Loose coupling is one avenue that institutional scholars provide that takes account of the agency of individuals and others at the sub-macrolevels. This loose coupling allows institutional arguments to apply globally without applying strictly and uniformly across all educational situations and contexts. Institutional theory emphasizes the importance of rationalized scripts rather than tightly tying form and function together. Actors may influence the outcome of an institution or organization without altering the legitimate process prescribed by appropriate rules and codes of behavior. Having established that institutionalist explanations may be contextualized without abandoning legitimating myths, we can connect comparative education research to institutional theory by focusing attention on the most common level of comparison in comparative research on education: the macrolevel. The emergence of the macrolevel as the unit of analysis in comparative research on education is similar to other sociological approaches to noneducational global phenomena as well. For example, innovation and change in society often begins with some functional activity or behavior in one or more centers. Slowly but surely, these functional activities or behaviors become increasingly noticeable until other people and organizations in surrounding ‘‘social space’’ begin to also adopt these activities and behaviors (Elias, 1998a). This incremental adoption of the original activities and behaviors spreads outward to increasingly greater circles of society – first from community to district, then from district to region, and eventually from region to nation and across nations. This process is one in which the level of influence expands from the individual and more localized level outward until the global institutional realm is encompassed in a sphere of influence. A similar process applies to the comparative research on education conducted from an institutional approach. It has elements of individual agency and distinct contextually motivated action, but the argument is that these levels of influence are somehow constrained or contained by the larger, collective wave of influence that exists at the macroinstitutional level. The process by which educational change occurs follows this pattern of outward expansion of level of influence so that although the expansion occurs as a micro-to-macro process of change, the influence penetrates from the macro to the micro to initiate the change process.
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In other words, the legitimacy of the globally institutionalized educational model is powerful enough to guide (or even sometimes constrain) educational processes at sub-macrolevels. This means that the behavior and activities in local schools should and usually do align with the larger, legitimized institutional myths and models – even when there is significant variation between schools themselves. Thus as variation both within and among institutions lessens, the speed and process of change slows proportionately so that the latter stages toward which mediation dominates is the slowest and most incremental in arriving (Elias, 1998b). As societies and organizations become more like each other, the top-down processes become vulnerable to some bottom-up penetration. This is, however, most likely as the distinction between top and bottom erodes to a point where equilibrium is either inevitable or foreseeable. With organizational institutionalization comes equilibrium, and with equilibrium come more opportunities for penetration from all sides of a power-dominance relationship. This suggests that agency is available to all potential actors involved in an organization and institutional process, although the outcomes of agency still may not be significant because the relative influence of particular agents is aligned with legitimate models appropriate to the institution. Educational policymakers often rely on more functional perspectives of schooling processes in which schooling’s function is to prepare students to be productive citizens – empirically measured with achievement scores. However, as just described, an advantage of institutional theory is that comparative research on education from this perspective recognizes and empirically measures how institutionalized schooling may separate (i.e., loosely couple) from the technical output of schools. In other words, the organizational context of schooling is just as, if not more, influential on the outcomes of schooling as are the technical processes of schooling. And, since the contextual influences are so important, the methods for comparing the US with other nations that are not framed by institutional theory have often been less than appropriate.
5. WHERE IS COMPARATIVE RESEARCH USING INSTITUTIONAL THEORY HEADED? Since comparative education research has been paying attention to the characteristics and trends in educational systems across and between
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nation-states, educational institutions have become increasingly homogenous. For instance, the classroom model of one teacher with many students together in a room for a large part of the day for the purpose of learning is a rather entrenched model for education in every corner of the world. Although the number of teachers may vary and the arrangement of students to teacher in the room may vary, this situation for learning hardly resembles early 20th century apprenticeship situations where experts outnumbered novices. And although apprenticeship situations may occur, they are not comparable or equal to legitimate ‘‘schooling’’ situations although they are often more respected and legitimate regarding the technical output of education. Advocates and skeptics of institutionalism alike must ask if this is, therefore, the ultimate form of schooling: teacher-directed learning in classroomlike environments. Will schooling ever be changed either by expansion or limitation of legitimate models to mean something other than this? It is difficult to imagine so, but the possibility must logically exist. Institutional theory does not seem to account for what will happen once legitimate models and forms reach a state of equilibrium – if they ever do. One possibility may be that institutional forms will compete with each other and that consequently there are and will be competing legitimating myths and models. Historical trends suggest that, however, this type of competition cannot exist indefinitely. Although this chapter has focused on comparative research on education, consider for a moment the 20th century example of capitalist versus socialist and communist economies. The 1990s saw a rapid transformation from formally and legitimately communist social and economic models espoused in large sections of the world (which were great instances of reproduction of and adherence to a formal legitimating model being dramatically decoupled from the technical output of institutions conforming to these models) to adherence and conformance to legitimate capitalist models of process and production. Contemporary economies seem to all adhere to capitalist models functionally and in most cases formally as well. Thus, in this instance, institutional theory perhaps has a complete example that can shed specific light on the institutionalization of formal education. The question remains, however, if new competing legitimate models of economy will develop or if the legitimate model will be divided into many more alternative models, which are still legitimate replicas or subordinates of the larger model so that the models may increase in frequency while simultaneously becoming increasingly less differentiated. Logically, this process could again repeat itself so that one of the subordinate legitimate
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models out-competes the others to become the standard legitimate model itself, which then becomes splintered into yet another set of subordinate yet legitimate models. Another result could be that contextually driven decoupling will change the validity of various legitimate models so that capitalist economies, which become regionally or locally contextualized, will differ from each other in fundamental ways, such as de-emphasizing the role of the individual in some or emphasizing it in others. If this is the case, however, there is again the advantage of institutional theory being a primarily cultural explanation rather than only a macrolevel global explanation. Comparative research on education using institutional theory has followed this trend somewhat as well. By investigating the transformation of multiple ways of ‘‘doing’’ school into a globally institutionalized model for ‘‘legitimate’’ schooling, comparative research on education using institutional theory has documented stages in this transformation. For example, mass schooling first became a global phenomenon at the elementary level, and then at the secondary level. Having expanded into the traditionally public (and compulsory) stages of schooling, educational expansion to the masses has reached post-secondary or higher education and shows no signs of slowing (several chapters in this volume attest to this fact). And, while it may seem to some that there is no place to go beyond higher education, the evidence suggests that there certainly is. The impact and importance of institutionalized formal education has already spread beyond the traditional, formal educational venues to out-of-school formal education as well as what many now call ‘‘lifelong learning’’ (e.g., see Stevenson & Baker, 1992; Baker et al., 2001, on ‘‘shadow education’’). In fact, there are many directions for comparative research on education using institutional theory. The World Conference on Education for All (EFA) in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990 cemented the global push for modern mass schooling in every nation. But, ‘‘education for all’’ is harder to achieve than most had originally hoped. There are many national and local challenges to the global model of mass, public education that cannot be easily dismissed. This tension between global promises and national challenges will continue to test world cultural values regarding education, and may even lead to gradual changes in what education as an institution looks like. As a global phenomenon, modern mass schooling has created a world in which the structure and values of education are highly institutionalized among every demographic. Whether poor or powerful, disenfranchised or privileged, everyone ‘‘knows’’ education. This familiarity with and
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expectation of education now permeates every aspect of life. Outside of school, in everyday society in every part of the world, schooling happens. It is in the labor market, in the family, in the political arena – everywhere. Both large companies and small businesses do some from of personal development education. This is beyond the vocational training that is merely technical in nature. It is an educational process that overlaps the job itself; it is not training for the vocation, but is instead an orientation to the culture and demands of the workplace. Families are becoming increasingly ‘‘schooled’’ as well in that more and more parents are overtly teaching their children about family values and social customs beyond the basics of manners or household chores, which are the more traditional topics of family based ‘‘education.’’ Politicians in many nations have gotten into this game by helping to create or disseminate family values curricula that both teachers and parents can use to teach children the differences between broad concepts such as ‘‘right’’ and ‘‘wrong.’’ These and other examples demonstrate that schooling is an institutionalized element of society and that the relationship between school and society is symbiotic in its give and take. Society is increasingly ‘‘schooled,’’ and schools are increasingly socialized. This has gotten to the point where in advanced settings many of the formal characteristics of modern mass schooling are disappearing. Teacher-focused classrooms, children seated in rows, tardy bells, and even textbooks are slowly fading from the schools. The model for schooling that has existed for so long and is responsible for institutionalizing schooling in the global psyche is being gradually replaced. Schooling and training is increasingly occurring along the lines of the formal school model, but without the external trappings of a ‘‘school.’’ The structure and culture of schooling is increasingly built into people, the family, the community, the workplace, and so on. Schooling phenomena like these mentioned here continue to occur and spread around the world. In the years to come, exploring these phenomena promises to be a prominent part of comparative research on education from an institutional perspective.
NOTES 1. See DiMaggio and Powell (1991) for an explanation of the origins and scope of neo-institutional theory. 2. We are indebted to M. Fernanda Astiz for her assistance in framing this discussion of historical institutionalism.
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REFERENCES Altbach, P. G. (1997). The coming crisis in international education in the United States. International Higher Education, 8(Summer), 4–5. Anderson, B. (1996). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. New York: Verso. Anderson, C. A. (1979). Societal characteristics within the school: Inferences from the international study of educational achievement. Comparative Education Review, (October), 408–421. Baker, D. P. (1997). Surviving TIMSS: Or, everything you blissfully forgot about international comparisons. Phi Delta Kappan, (December), 295–300. Baker, D. P., Akiba, M., LeTendre, G. K., & Wiseman, A. W. (2001). Worldwide shadow education: Outside-school learning, institutional quality of schooling, and cross-national mathematics achievement. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 23(1), 1–17. Baker, D. P., & LeTendre, G. K. (2005). National differences, global similarities: Current and future world institutional trends in schooling. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Benavot, A., Cha, Y., Kamens, D. H., Meyer, J. W., & Wong, S. (1991). Knowledge for the masses: World models and national curricula, 1920–1986. American Sociological Review, 56(1), 85–100. Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The social construction of reality. New York: Doubleday. Boli, J. (1992). Institutions, citizenship, and schooling in Sweden. In: B. Fuller & R. Rubinson (Eds), The political construction of education: The state, school expansion, and economic change (pp. 61–74). New York: Praeger. Boli, J., & Ramirez, F. O. (1986). World culture and the institutional development of mass education. In: J. G. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 65–90). New York: Greenwood Press. Boli, J., Ramirez, F. O., & Meyer, J. W. (1985). Explaining the origins and expansion of mass education. Comparative Education Review, 29(2), 145–170. Boyd, W. L. (1996). The principal as teacher: A model for instructional leadership. NASSP Bulletin, 80580, 65–73. Burlamaqui, L., Castro, A. C., & Chang, H.-J. (Eds) (2000). Institutions and the role of the state. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing. Chabbott, C. (2003). Constructing education for development. New York: RoutledgeFalmer. Cheung, C., & Leung, M. (1998). From civic education to general studies: The implementation of political education into the primary curriculum. Compare, 28(1), 47–56. DiMaggio, P. (1985). Cultural capital, educational attainment, and marital selection. American Journal of Sociology, 90, 1231–1261. DiMaggio, P., & Powell, W. W. (1991). Introduction. In: W. W. Powell & P. DiMaggio (Eds), The new institutionalism in organizational analysis (pp. 1–38). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. DiMaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48(April), 147–160. Elias, N. (1998a). Diminishing contrasts, increasing varieties. In: S. Mennell & J. Goudsblom (Eds), Norbert Elias: On civilization, power, and knowledge (pp. 67–74). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Elias, N. (1998b). The social constraint towards self-constraint. In: S. Mennell & J. Goudsblom (Eds), Norbert Elias: On civilization, power, and knowledge (pp. 49–66). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fiala, R., & Gordon-Langford, A. (1987). Educational ideology and the world educational revolution, 1950–1970. Comparative Education Review, 31, 315–332. Frank, D. J., Hironaka, A., & Schofer, E. (2000). The nation-state and the natural environment over the twentieth century. American Sociological Review, 65(1), 96–116. Fuller, B., & Rubinson, R. (1992a). Does the state expand schooling? Review of the evidence. In: B. Fuller & R. Rubinson (Eds), The political construction of education: The state, school expansion, and economic change (pp. 1–30). New York: Praeger. Fuller, B., & Rubinson, R. (Eds) (1992b). The political construction of education: The state, economic change, and school expansion. New York: Praeger. Grant, N. (2000). Tasks for comparative education in the new millenium. Comparative Education, 36(3), 309–317. Jepperson, R. L. (2002). The development and application of sociological neoinstitutionalism. In: J. Berger & M. Zelditch, Jr. (Eds), New directions in contemporary sociological theory (pp. 229–266). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Jepperson, R. L., & Meyer, J. W. (1991). The public order and the construction of formal organizations. In: W. W. Powell & P. DiMaggio (Eds), The new institutionalism in organizational analysis (pp. 204–231). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kamens, D. H. (1977). Legitimating myths and educational organization: The relationship between organizational ideology and formal structure. American Sociological Review, 42, 208–219. Kamens, D. H., Meyer, J. W., & Benavot, A. (1996). Worldwide patterns in academic secondary education curricula. Comparative Education Review, 40(May), 116–138. LeTendre, G. K., & Baker, D. P. (1999). International comparisons and educational research policy. In: G. K. LeTendre (Ed.), Competitor or ally? Japan’s role in American educational debates. New York: Falmer. LeTendre, G. K., Baker, D. P., Akiba, M., & Wiseman, A. W. (2001). The policy trap: National educational policy and the third international math and science study. International Journal of Educational Policy, Research and Practice, 2(1), 45–64. Meyer, J. W. (1971). Economic and political effects on national educational enrollment patterns. Comparative Education Review, 15(1), 28–43. Meyer, J. W. (1977). The effects of education as an institution. American Journal of Sociology, 83, 55–77. Meyer, J. W., & Baker, D. P. (1996). Forming American educational policy with international data: Lessons from the sociology of education. Sociology of Education, (Extra Issue), 123–130. Meyer, J. W., Boli, J., & Thomas, G. M. (1987). Ontology and rationalization in the western cultural account. In: G. M. Thomas, J. W. Meyer, F. O. Ramirez & J. Boli (Eds), Institutional structure: Constituting state, society, and the individual (pp. 12–37). Newbury Park: Sage. Meyer, J. W., Boli, J., Thomas, G. M., & Ramirez, F. O. (1997). World society and the nationstate. American Journal of Sociology, 103(1), 144–181. Meyer, J. W., Nagel, J., & Snyder, C. W., Jr. (1993). The expansion of mass education in Botswana: Local and world society perspectives. Comparative Education Review, 37(4), 454–475.
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Meyer, J. W., & Hannan, M. T. (Eds) (1979). National development and the world system: Educational, economic, and political change, 1950–1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Meyer, J. W., & Ramirez, F. O. (2000). The world institutionalization of education. In: J. Schriewer (Ed.), Discourse formation in comparative education (pp. 111–132). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Meyer, J. W., Ramirez, F. O., Rubinson, R., & Boli-Bennett, J. (1977). The world educational revolution, 1950–1970. Sociology of Education, 50(4), 242–258. Meyer, J. W., Ramirez, F. O., & Soysal, Y. N. (1992). World expansion of mass education, 1870–1980. Sociology of Education, 65(2), 128–149. Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83(2), 340–363. Moore, B. (1966). Social origins of dictatorships and democracy: Lord and peasant in the making of the modern world. Boston: Beacon Press. Ogawa, R. T., & Bossert, S. T. (1995). Leadership as an organizational quality. Educational Administration Quarterly, 31(2), 224–243. Ramirez, F. O. (1997). The nation-state, citizenship, and educational change: Institutionalization and globalization. In: W. Cummings & N. F. McGinn (Eds), International handbook of education and development: Preparing schools, students and nations for the twenty-first century (pp. 47–62). London: Pergamon. Ramirez, F. O. (2000). Women in science/women and science: Liberal and radical perspectives. Unpublished manuscript, Stanford University. Ramirez, F. O., & Boli, J. (1987). The political construction of mass schooling: European origins and worldwide institutionalization. Sociology of Education, 60(1), 2–17. Ramirez, F. O., & Meyer, J. W. (1980). Comparative education: The social construction of the modern world system. Annual Review of Sociology, 6, 369–399. Ramirez, F. O., & Rubinson, R. (1979). Creating members: The political incorporation and expansion of public education. In: J. W. Meyer & M. T. Hannan (Eds), National development and the world system: Educational, economic, and political change, 1950–1970 (pp. 72–82). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ramirez, F. O., Soysal, Y. N., & Shanahan, S. (1997). The changing logic of political citizenship: Cross-national acquisition of women’s suffrage rights, 1890–1990. American Sociological Review, 62(October), 735–745. Ramirez, F. O., Van Buuren, J., Kooij, P., & Rupp, J. (1992). The nation-state, citizenship, and educational change: Institutionalization and globablization. Mens en Maatschappij, 67(Suppl.), 11–27. Ramirez, F. O., & Weiss, J. (1979). The political incorporation of women. In: J. W. Meyer & M. T. Hannan (Eds), National development and the world system: Educational, economic, and political change, 1950–1970 (pp. 238–249). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rueschemeyer, D., Stephens, E., & Stephens, J. (1992). Capitalist development and democracy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Schofer, E., & Meyer, J. W. (2005). The world-wide expansion of higher education. Stanford, CA: Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Scott, W. R. (1987). Organizations: Rational, natural and open systems (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Skocpol, T. (1979). States and social revolutions: A comparative analysis of France, Russia and China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Skocpol, T. (1992). Protecting soldiers and mothers: The political origins of social policy in the United States. Boston: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. Skocpol, T., & Fiorina, M. (2000). Making sense of the civic engagement debate. In: T. Skocpol & M. Fiorina (Eds), Civic engagement in American democracy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Stevenson, D. L., & Baker, D. P. (1992). Shadow education and allocation in formal schooling: Transition to university in Japan. American Journal of Sociology, 97(6), 1639–1657. Thelen, K., & Steinmo, S. (1992). Historical institutionalism in comparative politics. In: S. Steinmo, K. Thelen & F. Longstreth (Eds), Structuring politics: Historical institutionalism in comparative analysis (pp. 1–29). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, G. M., Meyer, J. W., Ramirez, F. O., & Boli, J. (Eds) (1987). Institutional structure: Constituting state, society, and the individual. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Vickers, M. (1994). Cross-national exchange, the OECD, and Australian education policy. Knowledge & Policy, 7(1), 25–47. Weber, M. (1952). The theory of social and economic organization. New York: Oxford University Press. Wiseman, A. W. (2005). Principals under pressure: The growing crisis. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Wiseman, A. W., & Baker, D. P. (2005). The worldwide explosion of internationalized education policy. In: D. P. Baker & A. W. Wiseman (Eds), Global trends in educational policy (Vol. 6, pp. 1–21). London: Elsevier Science Ltd. Wolhuter, C. C. (1997). Classification of national education systems: A multivariate approach. Comparative Education Review, 41(2), 161–177.
INSTITUTIONAL SEQUENCES, PEDAGOGICAL REACH, AND COMPARATIVE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS John G. Richardson INTRODUCTION This chapter proposes a reconceptualization of educational formalization. By formalization I broadly mean when school attendance ceases to be voluntary, and state authority is elevated over local controls. Although these twin processes tend to parallel each other, there is sufficient variation that while both conditions may obtain, countries can be located on a distribution measuring centralized to decentralized control over educational dimensions (see e.g., Baker & Letendre, 2005, p. 139). Very different social origins may indeed matter as the primary source of subsequent centralized or decentralized controls, and yet countries may adopt broadly similar forms of national authority in spite of very different social origins. The former takes the more historicist strategy, concentrating on national differences that elaborate into different organizational outcomes (see especially Vaughan & Archer, 1971; Archer, 1979). The latter argues that transnational, global forces exert defining influences on countries, producing educational patterns that are visible at the global level and are independent of national The Impact of Comparative Education Research on Institutional Theory International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 7, 27–48 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3679/doi:10.1016/S1479-3679(06)07002-2
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differences (see especially Boli, Ramirez, & Meyer, 1985; Ramirez & Boli, 1987; Astiz, Wiseman, & Baker, 2002; Werum & Baker, 2004). Nonetheless, there is no straightforward causality that links social origins to formalization, for it is clear that each strategy needs and incorporates elements of the other. At minimum, the characterization of an educational system as centralized or decentralized remains conceptually risky. This chapter suggests an alternative conceptualization that may lighten this conceptual risk, and bridge the distance between the historicist and institutional approaches to comparative educational systems. At the center of this alternative conceptualization are intervening mechanisms that translate the social and political reforms of groups into educational policies and structures. I argue that these mechanisms are largely ‘‘hidden,’’ and thus have either been absent from discussion, or noted indirectly by different names. These mechanisms are both social groups and institutions. As groups, they exist marginal to or below visible social classes: they are neglected, vagrant and pauper children, the delinquent and criminal juveniles, the deaf, blind and other ways physically deficient, the feebleminded and the mad. As institutions, the mechanisms are the founding of poorhouses, of industrial and reform schools, of hospitals and institutions for the deaf, dumb, blind and feebleminded, of lunatic asylums, and of state reformatories and prisons. The popular and intellectual views of such groups tell us much about the relations between the classes, for they are simultaneously within and yet outside all classes. Moreover, such popular and intellectual views can inform us about the capacity of the respectable and politically dominant to effect educational change. In theoretical terms, the relation between the groups and institutions suggests a dynamic, general sequence, where societies first attend to the problems of poverty and the infirmities of physical and mental deficiency, then to the control of crime and delinquency, finally to educational improvements and remedies. With such a reconceptualization of educational formalization, I turn to a comparison of England and France. They are commonly taken as exemplifying the major organizational contrast, England as decentralized and France as centralized. Moreover, they are especially good representatives of the historicist and institutionalist approaches, for while they present quite different national histories, each continually used the other as a primary referent for educational practice, doing so about the evolving model of a national society generally, but about who was educable in particular. My intent is not to gauge the greater merit of one or the other approach. Rather, I propose a conceptual rapprochement, one founded on the pedagogical reach of state authority, the capacity to define and distribute prevailing ideas about the educability of
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social groups. The variation in pedagogical reach allows for a mutual accommodation of external pressures and internal differences, for the empirical question is how far the former can penetrate the national distinctiveness of countries. I suggest that one answer lies in how a country’s institutional sequence defines its pedagogical reach, which in turn defines the organizational outcomes we then term centralized or decentralized.
THE PEDAGOGICAL REACH OF STATE AUTHORITY Both general and local processes must share elements that are endemic to societies and endure over time. Poverty, the infirmities of the body and mind, and delinquency are such elements: they are universally present across countries and can symbolize an inherited permanency (cf. Webb & Webb, 1916; Foucault, 1979).1 In the 18th century, pauperism cut across social levels and traversed national boundaries. As Koepp (1992) describes 18th century France (p. 123), ‘‘the place of the beggars and the poor in the social structure was heterogeneous and contradictory,’’ for ‘‘paupers called all the categories into question.’’ Although poverty was so often a statistically dominant fact, it called the categories of mental and physical infirmity and delinquency ‘‘into question’’ in large part because they were all objects of Christian charity. As such, they symbolized the ‘‘social dialectic’’ (p. 122) that obligated the ranks of the nobility and clergy to care for and protect them. While they could represent threat and permanency, they could also symbolize godliness and redemption. Thus, it was precisely this liminality that had the potential to expose the ‘‘double temporality’’ of the nation, between what is projected as the national culture at a given time and what lies submerged as emerging alternative images. Bhabha (1990, p. 304; also Forster & Ranum, 1978) terms the former the pedagogical, denoting the narratives of a presumed homogenous, national culture, one that relies on a traditional past that extends into the present through myths and stereotypes. The latter is the performative, the potential counter-narratives that articulate the histories and lives of minority and marginal groups. The movement between the two reflects the struggles, silent and vocal, to define the very boundaries of the nation. A voluntary and stratified schooling reflects pedagogy of difference and exclusion, while a free and compulsory education evokes an alternative image of educability. The former would be tied to a traditional past, while the latter looks to an anticipated future. At stake for both is a substantive difference: the very boundaries of the nation (see also Davis, 1995, p. 75; Stiker, 2002). This difference constitutes
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what I term the pedagogical reach of state authority. If the pedagogical reach is extended, the boundary of ideas about who can and ought to be educated is expanded. In effect, the pedagogical reach of the state into traditional arrangements of voluntary and stratified schooling is emboldened. Yet, pedagogical reach is not simply a point of culmination, measured by the passage of a national legislation implementing free and compulsory schooling. Rather, it is always a variable, extending educational access to one or more groups by a particular act enacted at variable points in time, and always with specific legal, economic and social caveats.
A THEORETICAL RECONCEPTUALIZATION: CITIZENSHIP, INSTITUTIONS, AND PEDAGOGICAL REACH By stipulating some level of schooling to be an individual right, the formation of national education systems parallels the idea of citizenship. The lineage of theoretical approaches to citizenship may be said to originate with the seminal statement by Marshall (1964), that citizenship is constituted by three elements that have ‘‘evolved’’ sequentially. The first element was composed of civil rights, the rights necessary for individual freedom. Marshall joins liberty of the person, freedom of speech, thought and faith, the right to own property and to conclude valid contracts, and the right to justice. The second element was composed of political rights, those that enable individuals to participate in the exercise of political power. Finally, the social element covers the range from the right to a minimal level of economic welfare to the right to live a life commensurate with the prevailing standards of a community (Marshall, 1964, p. 8). Marshall proposed further that each set of rights had particular institutions attached to them. Thus, the courts of justice were associated with civil rights, parliament and councils of local government have been the institutional embodiments of political rights, and the institutions ‘‘most closely connected [with social rights] are the educational system and the social services’’ (p. 8). The critical addition to this schematic outline are the dynamic processes that explain the evolution from civil, to political to social rights. The evolution has involved a ‘‘double process,’’ one of fusion, another of separation. These twin dynamics involved a contrast in the movement of rights, downward from royal authority to local communities for civil and political rights, and upward from local communities to the national level for social rights. As
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these movements occurred, there was the assumption or fusion of authority by new agents as functions became separated from local communities, towns and guilds. The consequence for the institutions ‘‘on which the three elements of citizenship depended’’ has been that they ‘‘parted company;’’ and the consequence for the machinery ‘‘giving access to the institutions’’ has been that [they] ‘‘had to be shaped afresh’’ (p. 9). The larger result, as Marshall portrayed it, was that the three elements of citizenship became in effect ‘‘divorced,’’ proceeding then to evolve at different speeds. During the course of this evolution, there occurred a crucial ideological shift, from an ‘‘old assumption that local and group monopolies were in the public interest,’’ to a ‘‘new assumption that such restrictions were an offence against the liberty of the subject and a menace to the prosperity of the nation’’ (p. 11). If, for Marshall, the manifest topic is citizenship rights, his latent topic is institutions, to which rights were ‘‘associated.’’ Yet it may be just as useful to reverse the order, viewing institutions as the manifest topic and rights the latent one. What then moves at different rates of speed is the founding of institutions, and as they are established, their routine functions and administrative practices that regulate access and exclusion accumulate as a collective meaning system, the conceptual source of rights and obligations. The ideological shift to which Marshall refers becomes, then, a reflection of a more concrete generating process, that of legislating the founding of physical structures and social regulations that organize around the ‘‘old assumption’’ first, and then around the ‘‘new assumption.’’ An especially relevant example of this ideological shift is Donzelot’s rich theoretical inquiry into the origins of ‘‘the social sector,’’ the range of institutions forming ‘‘the tutelary complex’’ (1979). Similar to Marshall’s twin processes of fusion and separation, Donzelot’s (1979) thesis begins with the transformation of the interior functions of the family, in what he terms the ‘‘propagation’’ of medical, educative, and relational norms surrounding children. For Donzelot, the transformation of the family, both its interior relations and exterior status, has resulted in an expansive ‘‘policing’’ over children, performed through the tutelary complex of state institutions. But it is the empirical substance of this transformation that is most important, for the change is from ‘‘discreet protective measures’’ to ‘‘direct surveillance’’ (p. 23). For Donzelot, institutional structures are the concrete agents of this change, and are the proper objects of study. Examples include: convents for the preservation and correction of young girls, foundling hospitals, poorhouses and general hospitals for vagrants, indigents and the physically infirm, asylums for pauper children, protective societies for the poor and neglected children, and correctional establishments for delinquents. In terms
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relevant to educational systems, this transition would be one from voluntary protective measures to compulsory institutions of state surveillance. There is, I propose, an affinity between the sequence of institutional structures and the expansion of citizenship rights, and the two are linked through the pedagogical reach of ideas about educability. The affinities here may offer more toward explaining how countries will enact national systems of education at the same time, yet retain very different structures. Thus, what distinguishes countries as centralized or decentralized is what specific groups are ‘‘coupled’’ (or decoupled) to citizenship and to the institutions that embody the reach of the state’s obligation to implement this idea.2 Seen this way, the contrast between an historicist or national approach, and an institutional or global one becomes less consequential, for the elaboration of social origins and the incorporation of institutionalized myths become variable expressions of a single dynamic. I now explore this dynamic through contrasting the institutional sequences of England and France, often examples of decentralized and centralized systems. Of particular interest is the affinity between their specific institutional sequences and the reach of pedagogical ideas about educability. The larger theme I explore is how pedagogical reach can bridge the gap between national differences and more transnational.
DECENTRALIZED ENGLAND: THE BURDENS OF POVERTY, THE CONSTRAINTS OF CHILD LABOR, AND RESTRICTED PEDAGOGICAL REACH It has been a common practice to contrast England and France. England is taken as the model of decentralized representative government, a consequence in large part of having bypassed absolutism. The problem of English monarchical authority has long been the resilient opposition of local levels, where the powers vested in the justices of the peace was an effective counterbalance to ventures by the crown to penetrate local communities. France, in contrast, was the continental model of absolutist power. France never developed a degree of local autonomy that would constrain the power of the crown. By the early 19th century, England and France were in very different economic locations, with England having begun industrialization a century earlier, and France beginning the great transformation. The contrasts between the two countries should not overshadow their similarities. Both have long monarchical histories that are intertwined with
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dominant religions that have been aligned with state authority. Yet, the dominance of Anglicanism in England and Catholicism in France has persistently been challenged by religious dissent. Both experienced the transstate pressures from the economic transformation stemming from factory systems, and from the attendant social and demographic effects (Zolberg, 1986). These ‘‘effects’’ are especially germane here, for they reflect the endemic problems I propose as common across cases: inherited poverty, mental and physical infirmities, and problems of delinquency. For both England and France, the common effects were unavoidable, principally the rise of rural pauperism and the increasing numbers of vagrants and beggars across the 17th and 18th centuries (see e.g. Farr, 2000, pp. 15–43). These upheavals led, in turn, to the construction of workhouses, houses of correction and prisons, orphanages, hospitals, and asylums. The common effects were rooted in the improving material conditions brought by a market economy, yet bringing with it, in Polanyi’s words, ‘‘an avalanche of social dislocation’’ (Polanyi, 1957, p. 40). Yet, in a comparison of England and France, these effects were ‘‘non-simultaneous’’ (see Ertman, 1997, p. 26). The social dislocations that came in the wake of large-scale economic improvement began much earlier in England. For England, the problems of pauperism would become a persistent matter of statutory law as the Poor Laws replaced the Statute of Artificers. But while the Poor Laws were national in scope, the administration of the poor law was entirely local. English decentralization was solidified early by the disconnection between the legal coherence of the Poor Laws and their fragmentation at the local levels (Webb & Webb, 1916, p. 223). The English Poor Law is a model of what Haydu (1998) calls reiterated problem solving. The succession of Acts and Statutes related to and built on each other, and their cumulative reiteration around problems of vagrancy, beggars and rogues, settlement, criminal, or lunatic paupers, tells the metanarrative of English benevolence. As Slack (1995) shows, the motives behind the Poor Law were not strictly economic, i.e., forced by the rising aggravation of circumstances. On the contrary, the Poor Law was a welfare system that over the centuries engineered a ‘‘positive feedback loop’’ that ‘‘helped to support rising expectations of what an adequate standard of living was’’ (p. 47). A key element of English benevolence was the role of inter vivos charity, or ‘‘associated philanthropy,’’ where funding for poor relief came from a large number of benefactors. One of the greatest manifestations of this humanitarian benevolence was the rising number of Charity Schools that by 1750 numbered in the hundreds. Following these were voluntary hospitals, beginning in London and spreading to the provinces (pp. 42–43; also
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Cobbe, 1861). Importantly, the complex of hospitals and asylums for lunacy, and especially for pauper lunatics, remained within local and provincial jurisdictions (Arlidge, 1859; Hodgkinson, 1966), only rising to national concern by way of the poor law. As we shall see, designation of lunacy as a local problem and responsibility stands out as a significant contrast to France. For England, such a designation reinforced popular and professional conceptions of lunacy as an extension of pauperism, and most of all as incurable. Pedagogical reach to lunacy was thus blunted, by popular stigmatization and by its professional expression in the English elaboration of phrenology (see Shapin & Barnes, 1976; cf. Geison, 1984). The humanitarian philanthropy of the 18th century established the key distinction between voluntary and endowed benefaction. While similar in function, they were legally very distinct. An orphan home maintained by voluntary subscriptions was relatively ignored by the law, while other institutions maintained by charitable trust in perpetuity were the objects of periodic scrutiny. Both arrangements would have their 19th century educational legacies. The endowed track would lead to a network of charity, workhouse, district or separate schools tied to the state by way of the Charity Commission and subject to periodic royal investigations (Chance, 1897). The voluntary track, in contrast, led to three marginal types of school, Ragged Schools (Guthrie, 1973), industrial and reformatory schools (Chance, 1897; Monnington, 1898; Carpenter, 1970). These were born of the humanitarian sentiment that argued for separate residential institutions for the children of the ‘‘perishing’’ and ‘‘dangerous’’ classes (Sturt, 1967). An additional network of schools coexisting with both of these was a nearly invisible network of working class schools that was largely beyond and outside the scope of state regulation. The scale of these working-class ‘‘private schools,’’ as Gardner (1984) terms them, cannot be determined, for ‘‘there are no key dates, no 1833 or 1846; no great names y there is no traceable institutional foundation’’ (p. 11, emphasis added; see also Jefferson, 1964). They had no official place; rather, they were often part of the daily routines of factories. Their visibility, or revelation, became apparent only when they were targeted for elimination by state and local powers seeking to implement the Education Act of 1870. While invisible to official agencies, their existence long predates the 1870 Act, attesting not only to the extent of voluntary educational strategies, but to their independence and selfsufficiency from state resources and administration. The combination of these three networks produced a maze of schools that was decentralized to the point that counts of official school attendance and the population census rarely coincided. By the mid-19th century, ‘‘the untidy mass of educational
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endowments seemed ripe for administrative rationalization and curricular reform’’ (Owen, 1964, p. 249). Although the maze of schools was ripe for rationalization, the opposite occurred: the voluntary principle regained its prominence. Due in large part to the emergence of two competing yet ideologically compatible voluntary organizations, the National Society and the British and Foreign School Societies, education continued to be seen as an extension of private philanthropy. Of the two, the BFSS had the greater impact, due in large measure to the energies of Joseph Lancaster and his tireless promotion of the monitorial system for the efficient instruction of large numbers of students. Lancaster’s method was seen by many as an organizational answer to the problem of inherited pauperism generally, but specifically to the labor problems facing manufacturing industries. The problems of manufactures were increasingly reiterated as educational, and as reformable by means of a monitorial system. By 1815, the monitorial system had gained a wider sponsorship, one that forged links between the maze of schools, official and otherwise, and the system of industrial factories. The view of education as an extension of private philanthropy would be stubborn to change, yet the course of the century was slowly toward more state control. The movement toward more state controls was guided by the reiterated problem solving of the Factory Acts and the educational clauses that developed with each subsequent act. The monitorial method was a bridge between the voluntary principle and state intervention as much as it was an organizational bridge between the factory and the school. The institutional sequence for England is one that centered on the problems of poverty and child labor, and the consequent need for the social control of delinquency, or working-class ‘‘decadence’’ (Johnson, 1970, p. 104; 1976; Silver, 1983, p. 39; see also Wahrman, 1995, pp. 169–170, passim). As shown in Table 1, the institutional events relating to apprenticeship preceded the erection of workhouses. But from there, the series of Factory Acts was the determining path to the Education Act of 1870. The Factory Act of 1831 was a turning point, for it was the ‘‘first English statute to formally recognize compulsory education as a State concern’’ (Cooke-Taylor, 1894, p. 76; also Webb, 1901). As the Factory Acts approach 1870, there was an increasing ‘‘positive feedback loop’’ – increasing restrictions on factory employment of minors parallel an increasing specification of educational requirements. This path linked factory labor, delinquency reform, and elementary education.3 These links were obscured, in part, by the language of free and compulsory schooling. In actuality, the Elementary Education Act of 1870
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Table 1.
Comparative Dates of Institutional Events, England and France.
England
France
1563 1576
Statute of Artificers Workhouses
1609
Houses of Correction
1758
‘‘Act for the Preservation of the Health and Morals of Apprentices’’
1807
Whitbread Bill
1819 1831 1833 1834
Factory Act/Child Labor Factory Act Factory Act/Child Labor Poor Law Amendment
1854 1857 1864 1866 1867 1867 1870 1870
Workhouses
1611 1676 1755
Houses of Correction Hoˆpital Ge´ne´ral National Institute for Deaf-Mutes
1764 1795
De´poˆts de Mendicite´ Lakanal’s Law
1802
Fourcroy
1810
Penal Code
1833 1834– 1838 1841
Loi Guizot
1847 1850 1850
Child Labor: Projet de Loi Penitentiary reform for juveniles Loi Falloux
1874 1881
Child Labor Jules Ferry: Minister of Education, 1879–1883:
Orphan Working Houses
1802
1844
1601
Lunatic Asylums/Psychiatry Loi Sur le Travail des Enfants:
Factory Act/Child Labor
Youth Offenders Bill Reformatories Act Factory Acts Extension Act Reformatory/Industrial Schools Act Metropolitan Asylums Board Act Factory/Workshop Act/Child Labor Factory/Workshop Act/Child Labor Elementary Education Act
Note: Italic references are to acts/legislation with national implications. Sources are available upon request.
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neither initiated state funding for public elementary schools, nor did it introduce a national system sustained by public funds (Murphy, 1972, p. 9; Rich, 1970). More than anything, the Act preserved the voluntary principle (Armytage, 1970, p. 128), and was fashioned on the existing maze of voluntary schools. The Act of 1870 did reflect the principle that the education of the poor was a critical national significance, yet this echoed the Whitbread Bill decades earlier (1807). The pedagogical reach of the Act was quite narrow. As Simon (1969, pp. 335–336) summarized, the educational system envisioned ‘‘was established at the expense of the working class, who were edged out of grammar schools y and left only elementary schools provided and administered by voluntary bodies or small private schools of little value.’’ The matrix of caveats that constituted the Act was condensed somewhat in the Education Act of 1874, the point where ‘‘educational legislation and factory legislation made contact with each other’’ (Robson, 1931, p. 213), doing so with the symbolic affirmation of a free and compulsory national education.
CENTRALIZED FRANCE: THE INFIRMITIES OF BODY AND MIND AND EXPANDED PEDAGOGICAL REACH When we turn to France, one of the most striking facts that goes far to explain its different path of institutional development is the absence of anything comparable to the English Poor laws. The Poor Laws arose in the early part of the 16th century in large part because of the eradication of Catholic structures (principally monasteries) that cared for the indigent poor. As part of a political intent to form a unified state authority, the Poor Laws established a mode of state centralization that would continue for centuries. The French counterpart was the predominance of the Catholic church, its network of parishes and their clerics. The French tradition of bienfaisance was sustained by Catholic doctrines of charity, as both a religious and social obligation (Jones, 1982). As with England, 18th century France witnessed the weakening of apprenticeship as the traditional barrier to inherited pauperism. Local communities of the old regime had their vagrants and indigent poor, but they were for the most part cared and protected by the ‘‘exchange’’ of piety for charity (Woloch, 1986, p. 781). Throughout the French countryside, as well as Paris, there grew a network of hospitals, where the sick, aged, and infirm
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would be cared for in the local hoˆpital general (Jones, 1982, 1989; Foucault, 1988, p. 41). Yet, for the rising numbers of poor who could not be helped by relatives, and who would refuse to work, charity turned to punitive measures, institutionalizing many in depots de mendicite´. The decline of a religiously sustained bienfaisance and the increasing reliance on secular forms of benevolence was softened by the corporatist, paternalistic structure of work. French apprenticeship was much more than the practice of binding out youth to a master to learn a trade and rudimentary book learning. Much more than English apprenticeship, the relationship between apprentice and master was constrained by the ‘‘corporate idiom’’ (Sewell, 1980), the language of labor that referred to a moral community over strictly instrumental exchanges (Farr, 2000, p. 14). The master was the ‘‘core of the corporate community,’’ and the community ‘‘was technically constituted by the masters alone’’ (Sewell, 1980, p. 30). The corporate community was composed of a diverse number of smaller social entities, most notably the compagnonnage brotherhoods of journeymen. Much like the English ‘‘associational philanthropy,’’ such brotherhoods were forms of benevolent institutions, creating horizontal ties among apprentices and journeymen, and structuring vertical hierarchies based on skill and status. With the nearly invisible erosion of the old regime, through incremental commercialization and centralization so keenly described by Tocqueville (1955, pp. 8, 23, passim), cultural divisions emerged that intensified popular and governmental views of the poor. The turning point for the ascendancy of a secular benevolence was the emergence of the enfants trouve´s, the reality of ‘‘large numbers of innocent, abandoned foundlings’’ in hospitals (Forrest, 1981, p. 117). The division made between illegitimate and neglected children by parents too poor to care for them, and children deliberately abandoned and unwanted because of fears of losing employment, became a focal point of popular, humanitarian opinion. What was distinctive, in contrast to English humanitarianism, was the intellectual context of French Enlightenment. But the humanitarianism of the 1770s and 1780s was a late manifestation, antedated by dramatic experiments and pedagogical breakthroughs in the treatment and education of the idiotic, the deaf and blind, and the insane. Nurtured by the climate of intellectual enlightenment and the writing of the philosophes, the work of Edward Seguin (1812–1880) on the ‘‘physiological method’’ for curing idiocy contributed to work on the treatment of deaf mutes. The pioneering work of Roch-Ambroise Sicard (1742–1822), and his teacher, Charles Michel de l’ Epe´e, the ‘‘father of the deaf,’’ led to the establishment of the National Institute for Deaf Mutes in Paris, in 1755. But
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likely the most influential figure was Philippe Pinel (1745–1826), the founder of French psychiatry. Pinel’s believed that the insane should be treated kindly, and should not be shackled and taunted by curious onlookers. Pinel’s ‘‘moral treatment’’ for the care of the mad was soon widely viewed as a cure. Pinel became a leading advocate for reme`des moraux, not only for insanity, but for a host of infirmities. Once appointed physician-in-chief at Biceˆtre in 1793, he gained international acclaim. The influence of Pinel on French medicine and psychiatry, an influence that would extend to French education generally, did not derive so much from his method of treatment, but from the virtue of timing. Pinel was a favorite of revolutionary figures, and his ideas meshed well with republican visions of a healthy and strong nation. What meshed particularly well was the ‘‘populism’’ of Pinel’s method; he gave legitimacy to the daily observations of custodial staff, and joined them to the esoteric, elite knowledge of medicine. In doing so, Pinel’s method resonated with the political climate of the revolution, and especially with the political projects of republican leaders (Goldstein, 1987, p. 75). For Pinel, the measure of cure was the ability of moral treatment to return the patient to his true self, for insanity was essentially an alienation from naturalness. Here, Pinel’s medico-psychiatry embraced the pedagogy of Rousseau as argued in Emile. Rousseau’s thesis that urban society was the cause of moral corruption in children was nearly identical to Pinel’s thesis that insanity derived from a ‘‘disorderly imagination.’’ Both Pinel’s moral treatment and Rousseau’s pedagogical theory relied on direct but honest interactions, but interactions (treatment and instruction) that are strengthened most of all by a force that is larger than oneself. For Pinel, the treatment of insanity necessitated the device of ‘‘counterbalancing’’ the tendency of passions to become dominant and disorderly; for Rousseau, the instruction of the young must begin with their removal from the immoral environment of social dependencies, and their immersion in the larger, more real forces of nature. Both Pinelian psychiatry and Rousseauean pedagogy flourished in the revolutionary climate, for both were elevated to a national stature and relevance. If the mad can be cured, and the young taught to be moral, the nation as a whole would fulfill its ideological principles and uphold its promises for the generations to come. The intellectual and experimental work for the treatment of idiocy, of the deaf and blind, and of the insane, represents an ‘‘institutional event’’ that in the French case had a substantial ideological impact on the image of France as a nation, and as a civilization. It had concrete material expressions in the form of state institutions, such as the hoˆpitaux ge´ne´raux (Jones, 1982, p. 3), and the National Institution for Deaf Mutes erected in 1750 (Lane, 1983,
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pp. 6–8). In contrast to England, the pedagogical reach of such figures as Seguin, Sicard, Eppe´, and Pinel directed benevolence toward a more paternalistic than a punitive trajectory. The ideas and writing of such figures nourished in various ways the very substantive content of national educational legislations. The greater capacity of France to project educational ideas as national was enhanced by the optimism of pedagogical methods which claimed to be able to teach the deaf to speak, the blind to read, idiots to gain developmentally, and the mad to reason. The projection of an optimism that combined the moral with the physical and mental deepened the educational relevance by enlarging the perimeter of educability. Under the revolutionary climate, the infirmities of body and mind were ideologically defined as within the citizenry. The infirmities of body and mind were thus likened to the errors of political opposition. Insanity would be a form of dissimulation, for both were alienation from one’s true self. As Hunt (1992, p. 96) notes, dissimulation was a prominent theme in the revolutionary discourse, for ‘‘the ability to conceal one’s true emotions, to act one way in public and another in private, was repeatedly denounced as the chief characteristic of court life and aristocratic manners in general.’’ The republicans valued transparency, the ‘‘perfect fit between public and private,’’ a ‘‘body that told no lies and kept no secrets.’’ The psychiatry of Pinel, the pedagogy of Rousseau, and republican political ideology shared benevolence toward the infirm and the destitute, and especially when embodied in the child. But they did so from the nation as a central point of reference. From such a reference, institutional and pedagogical strategies assumed a ‘‘centralized’’ character. The implications of the French institutional sequence for the legislation of a national educational system are several. First, there have been more legislative declarations that have articulated and sought to implement education as a national project. Lakanal’s law of 1794 on primary education stipulated that primary schools were to be established for both sexes, and ‘‘they [were] to give instruction needed by ‘hommes libres’’’ (Barnard, 1969, p. 166). The pedagogical reach was statistical: there was to be one school for every thousand inhabitants. From these schools pupils would be able to go directly to central schools, rendering secondary schools redundant. The Committee of Public Instruction was responsible for the content of textbooks used in central schools, and the teachers were to be appointed and supervised by the Committee as well. With the Daunou Law of 1795, much of Lakanal’s law remained in tact, with some modifications. The key modification, expressing the revolutionary vision of a centralized education, was eliminating the class as the unit of school organization, and replacing it with
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the course. The Fourcroy Law of 1802 built on both Lakanal and Daunou by extending the hierarchical structure of the French system. The system was to be divided into three stages: primary schools established by communes, secondary schools established by the communes or by private funding, and lyce´es which replaced the central schools, and were maintained at state expense. The combined impact of Lakanal, Daunou, and Fourcroy was to set in place a uniform system of schools, where progression upward was founded on competition and merit. Such a centralized and outwardly democratic system would be modified in subsequent years largely from religious pressures. The loi Guizot of 1833 placed moral and religious instruction as central subjects to be taught. The law accommodated religious differences at the primary level, enabling a variety of schools to meet the needs of religious minorities. This system of ‘‘confessional’’ primary education would last until 1882 (Anderson, 1975, p. 17). In spite of these concessions to religious sectarianism, the law reflected Francois Guizot’s visions of a ‘‘public instruction,’’ a view that emphasized the political functions of education. For Guizot, and for Victor Cousin (as co-author), the pedagogical reach of the state must be direct: it must emphasize national opinions so that children would not be divided, and it must promote a unified educational curriculum to restrain local communities from enlarging the divisions among themselves, thereby weakening the nation (Johnson, 1963, pp. 103–113; Goldstein, 1968, p. 263). Guizot’s law was, in Archer’s terms, more uniform than centralized, designed to ensure the stability of the nation by not extending instruction beyond the practical needs and capabilities of social groups. The Loi Sur le Travail des Enfants of 1841 mirrored the intent of the English apprenticeship law of 1802, and the Factory Act of 1831, for it addressed the education of minors by way of their employment in factories. The law made attendance at school compulsory for all working children under the age of 12, and gave to the state the authority to extend the law to all types of workshops and occupations (Heywood, 1988, pp. 229–230). The law of 1882, enacted under Jules Ferry as minister of education, made schooling compulsory from the age of 6–13. All primary education was free, and although religious teaching was excluded from state schools, primary education was to include moral and civic instruction. The law essentially overturned Loi Falloux of 1850, where considerable power was given back to the church ‘‘in order to suppress the spread of liberal ideasythe press and working-men’s associations’’ (Barnard, 1969, p. 227). By the law of 1882, the state had assumed both financial and regulatory authority over primary education.
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The impact of the institutional sequence on the centralization of education in France derives, in sum, from the fortuitous combination of a revolutionary climate with the intellectual ideas and practical work relating to the deaf and blind, idiocy, and insanity. In contrast to the English decentralized structure, the centralized system of France was sustained more by an ideological narrative than by a new form of non-legitimate domination. The revolution’s success in ‘‘de-legitimizing’’ intermediary bodies that stood between the individual and the state, a network of family and corporate structures so characteristic of the ancien regime, was conducive to a wholesale transformation of the past, present, and the future. The centralization of education was a main pillar to this iconographic revolution, for through a centralized system the revolution could achieve a national regeneration. In some ways, Liberty embodied the narrative of national regeneration, for she symbolized ‘‘the transcendence of localism, superstition, and particularity in the name of a more disciplined and universalistic worship’’ (Hunt, 1984, p. 62). Similarly, as the Daunou Law of 1795 proclaimed, the school subject would replace the classroom of pupils as the object of worship. Individual children would relate directly to the state through the truthful content of the school curriculum.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS This chapter has explored the comparative differences in the form of national educational systems. Whereas a common way to describe these differences is to distinguish between centralized or decentralized systems, this chapter proposes that a finer dimension that captures this difference is the substantive contrast in the pedagogical reach of state authority. The pedagogical reach of the state is defined by the prevailing and distributive ideas about educability in general, and about what groups can and cannot be educated in particular. Ideas about educability, both popular and professional, are rooted historically in the sequence of institutional events, the timing of establishing institutions for the care, protection, and control of three endemic problems: inherited pauperism, the infirmities of the mind and body, and the threats of delinquency. A country’s history of institutional events reflects both a general sequence and its particular local sequence. The general sequence is trans-national, outlined by the progressive movement from benevolent, to reformatory to educational institutions. The first discourse of reiterated problem solving was humanitarian, and churches enlarged their organizational reach by
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forming a network of new structures, tied nonetheless to their administrative authority. For both charitable and instrumental motives, religion extended and secured its jurisdiction over the care and protection of the poor and physically infirm. Benevolence was, of course, never purely benevolent. Benevolent institutions overlapped with punitive intentions: the almshouses and poorhouses soon became workhouses, and workhouses were often the models for the construction of reformatories and penitentiaries. Similarly, charitable hospitals could be highly punitive, for pauperism was largely associated with indebtedness, and often with madness. The problem-solving discourse over pauperism and the infirmities of the body and mind was reiterated over the problems of delinquency and criminality. As workhouses were transformed into adult prisons, and were models for houses of refuge, industrial and reform schools for adolescent youth, the second sequence of institutions expanded. This reformatory phase overlapped with benevolence, but soon forged its own ideological and institutional jurisdiction. The local sequence is internal to particular societies, reflecting patterns of conformity to or deviation from this general sequence. Decentralized educational systems conform more to the general sequence. In such systems, exemplified by England, the pedagogical reach is more fractionated, coexisting along side entrenched voluntary structures and conditioned by diverse and autonomous local contexts. The strength of benevolent institutions carries over to reformatory institutions, and it is their overlap that goes far to explain the tenacity of voluntary and decentralized schooling. This transition from benevolent to reformatory is not ‘‘interrupted’’ by pedagogical advances relating to the infirmities of the body and mind. Rather, the reformatory phase builds on prior benevolent institutions, continuing a path of punitive benevolence. In these systems, as exemplified by France, the pedagogical reach is more distributed, and ideas of educability are more general and abstract. This greater generality of pedagogical ideas stems from institutional events that elevated ideas as more national in reference. These events centered on the infirmities of the body and mind. France’s lead in the education of the deaf and blind, and of madness and idiocy interrupted punitive motives, inserting a more paternalistic benevolence toward afflicted groups. When the two paths that distinguish centralized and decentralized state school systems are compared, they suggest a difference in content. The path for decentralized systems is structured by the link between pauperism and child labor. As England illustrates, this link was reinforced by the network of working class endowed and ‘‘private’’ schools. With the factory
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acts the discourse over workshop regulation relied increasingly on compulsory schooling as the instrument to control not only child labor but working class educability more generally. The caveats of factory acts mixed the language of national well-being with the language of economic regulation, doing so by specifying minimal educational access for working class youth. In decentralized systems, the pedagogical continues to override the performative. In contrast, the pedagogical reach of centralized systems is defined more by a path that links the care and education of the mentally and physically infirm to the political center, subordinating the education of employed youth to a more national topic. This path implies a discourse of enlightened benevolence, one more favorable to the alliance between professional elites and state authority. Such a path would reflect the movement of local structures upward to the national level. This path would engender conflicts over jurisdictional authority, namely between local communities and state authority. Finally, the role of local institutional sequences in shaping the structural form of comparative educational systems may also be useful to explain when national systems are enacted. The timing of enacting broad-based national legislation, taken as a comparative date across countries, is one way to view timing. But this view can obscure a potentially more revealing conception: educational systems may be formalized only after the sequence of institutional events is completed. Thus, the formalization of national educational systems is a point of culmination, but only when an institutional sequence evolves to an integrated whole. Or, put more accurately, the formalization of mass education is a series of culminations, each point reflecting the most current form of ‘‘non-legitimate domination’’ (Weber, 1978, pp. 1212–1372). The series itself becomes an ‘‘eventful’’ history (Sewell, 1996). Seen this way, educational formalization is akin to how Philip Abrams suggested we view towns: ‘‘y as moments in a process of usurpation and defense, consolidation, appropriation and resistance; as battles rather than as monuments’’ (Abrams, 1978, p. 31, emphasis added). The town, in this instance, is not an entity with clearly demarcated boundaries, but is rather a space and a time wherein dynamics of power exchange occur. Similarly, if educational formalization is extracted from its location in space and time, and the dynamics of power exchange are diluted, centralized, and decentralized systems run the risk of becoming spurious characterizations. Such characterizations are always mixtures of centralized and decentralized elements.4 To typify England as decentralized and France as centralized is to capture the time wherein specific elements were
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usurped, defended, consolidated, appropriated, and resisted. As a consequence, neither the historical richness of comparative differences in social origins nor the theoretical power of global institutionalization may be enough to capture this ever-changing process. Alternatively, the concept of pedagogical reach accommodates mixes of centralization and decentralization, and yet draws attention to more hidden dynamics, ones akin to internal labor markets.5 The formalization of educational systems is certainly measured by the locus and extent of control, yet the pedagogical reach of such control would tap the extent to which such controls are defied and restructured, whether the controls emanate from local or national.
NOTES 1. I use the single term ‘‘delinquency’’ to align with Foucault’s (1979) discussion of ‘‘isolated illegality,’’ how the rise of institutional detention in the form of prisons and reformatories distinguished delinquency from earlier forms of ‘‘popular illegalities’’ (p. 280). Popular illegalities of course long predate the rise of the prison, but this formal means of detention is a specific event that marks a shift from benevolent to reformatory institutions. 2. The overall volume of groups coupled (and decoupled) could be essentially constant across countries, but particular groups coupled to particular institutional structures can vary. This would be a configuration more than a variable. 3. The Philanthropic Society, established in 1788 to reform the criminal poor by reforming delinquent youth, achieved such standing that magistrates and judges committed juvenile offenders to it, where the Society could then ‘‘bind out’’ juveniles as apprentices. In essence, a voluntary philanthropic organization acted as a state reformatory. 4. It may be more helpful, if not more accurate, to conceive of national educational structures as fuzzy-sets (Ragin, 2000). This would make explicit verbal characterizations that accommodate the mixture of elements. We would speak of France as ‘‘a great deal more centralized’’ rather than simply ‘‘centralized.’’ Thus, Archer conducted comparisons of centralized and decentralized systems, yet then referred to France as ‘‘unified but not centralized’’ and England as ‘‘centralized but not unified’’ (1979, p. 174; see also Baker & Letendre, 2005, p. 135). This is empirically demonstrated by Astiz, Wiseman, and Baker (2002, p. 82) with their ‘‘significant mixes’’ of centralized and decentralized administration of curricula. 5. Empirical measures of pedagogical reach, akin to internal labor market dynamics, would be the degree to which exceptional students remain segregated from regular classes, in spite of national mandates (cf. Putnam, 1979; Danielson & Bellamy, 1989; Pijl & Meijer, 1991; Powell, 2004), and the persistence of racial overrepresentation in special education (Richardson, 1999). Such mandates might contribute to a high centralization score, yet their defiance by local practices would reflect a more pervasive feature, the endurance of beliefs about the degree to which some cannot be fully educated.
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THE THEORIZED SOCIETY AND POLITICAL ACTION: EFFECTS OF EXPANDED HIGHER EDUCATION ON THE POLITY David H. Kamens INTRODUCTION A number of commentators have noted significant changes in the American polity over the last half century. More interest groups with more issues are active in the polity now (Dahl, 1994). There is more ideological polarization among political elites (DiMaggio, Evans, & Bryson, 1996, 2004). Participation in voluntary associations has declined among the post 1945 generations, weakening civil society (Putnam, 2000). The new organizations in the polity are more hierarchical in structure, unlike the older voluntary associations that were built on lateral ties (Skocpol, 1996, 1999). Rising education levels have produced lower voter participation rates (Brody, 1978; Nie, Junn, & Stehlik-Berry, 1996). Finally, a number of observers have noted that public opinion, constructed in part by extensive polling, has become a significant force in the polity and this has helped fuel the rise of a media centered politics (Herbst, 1993; Schudson, 1991). This is not an exhaustive list of changes that observers have noted, but it is enough to suggest that the older Tocquevillian polity and the civic culture of the U.S., The Impact of Comparative Education Research on Institutional Theory International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 7, 49–74 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3679/doi:10.1016/S1479-3679(06)07003-4
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portrayed so effectively by Almond and Verba (1963), have been transformed in significant ways. In this paper, we develop a contextualized account of ways in which the expansion of higher education has helped transform the American polity. The point is to show the relevance of neo-institutional theories of education for explaining many emergent features of the new American polity that followed the rapid expansion of higher education in the post 1960 period. Since the argument situates higher education as one of the major mechanisms for diffusing the culture of a global society, the ensuing analysis is relevant to other democratic polities as well.
DIMENSIONS OF EXPANDED HIGHER EDUCATION In his seminal paper on the effects of education, Meyer (1977) pointed to a number of dimensions of education that produce distinctive consequences for individuals and society. We focus on three: 1. The demographic expansion of higher education, 2. The centrality of education: the extent to which positions in society are built up around higher education, and 3. The expanding secular knowledge base that higher education produces. Some of the effects of higher education flow from the fact that more individuals over time attend university level training institutions. Hence any individual level changes that such education produces affect larger number of people. Other effects of education occur because of the centrality of education in society, not through any individual changes that higher education produces. Educated individuals, for example, earn more income largely because of credentialing rules that limit executive and professional positions to people with university level training. Still other effects occur because the expansion of secular knowledge creates new kinds of authority in society and expands the possibility, and likelihood, of collective action by public or private authorities. We try in the following discussion to separate these different kinds of effects. In line with sociological tradition, we refer to these effects as (a) individual, (b) organizational and (c) institutional respectively. We will try to show how these different level effects are both distinct and linked by complex causal processes.
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THE RAPID EXPANSION OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE U.S. AND WORLDWIDE Higher educational expansion has been a very recent phenomenon. Conventional wisdom held that higher education enrollments in the U.S. doubled every 20 years in a smooth progression. New research has altered this picture dramatically. The 1960s ushered in a sea change in the expansion of higher educational enrollments in the U.S. – and in virtually every other society (Schofer & Meyer, 2005). The transition to mass higher education was abrupt. At the beginning of the 1960s about two million students were enrolled in U.S. higher education. Four decades later in the year 2000, this figure had risen to 14 million – a seven-fold increase (Schofer & Meyer, 2005, Figure 5). Earlier developments, such as the G.I. Bill, show no comparable effects on enrollments to the massive changes that the 1960s brought in their wake. The rapid expansion of higher education is not just a U.S. phenomenon. It is worldwide in scope. And the timing of this world ‘‘event’’ coincides with the period when higher education rapidly expanded in the U.S. – the decade of the 1960s. Schofer and Meyer (2005) argue that universities are central cultural institutions in a world society whose discourse is organized around the spread of democratization, the centrality of human rights and the importance of science as the source of authoritative knowledge. In this model of society, universities lose their limited, specialized function of career training and become the source of general ‘‘human capital’’ for society. Everyone is deemed educable and ‘‘education for all’’ becomes the official watchword of international monitors (e.g., see the EFA Global Monitoring Report, 2005, whose title is Education for All: The Quality Imperative). In this milieu, universities have a critical role in establishing a common culture among elites, both nationally and internationally, and encoding it on students. First, their curriculum defines authoritative knowledge. This is increasingly perceived as universally valid and law-like, so that MBA or history curricula look pretty similar across universities and across countries. Secondly, universities are also theories of personnel. They define the appropriate training that people called ‘‘economists’’, for example, must have (see Meyer’s discussion, 1977). But beyond this, universities increasingly define the kind of training ‘‘citizens’’ and other more general categories of ‘‘personnel’’, e.g., informed consumers, must have for society to progress. Poets should learn physics, so there are courses called ‘‘physics for poets’’,
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just as non-biologists should learn biology. At Stanford such courses are called ‘‘human biology’’ to distinguish them from those biology students take. Immersion in such non-career-related knowledge is deemed essential for educated elites as a general source of social capital. In this new world education is triumphant, and education is for all. Through these processes higher education does produce an elite culture that is common both within and across nations. And with the expansion of higher education more and more of the country’s and the world’s population are exposed to these common cognitive outlooks. The contrast between the beginning of the 20th century and the end is striking: in 1900, less than 1% of the world’s population was enrolled in higher education; in 2000, about 20% of world population was enrolled (Schofer & Meyer, 2005, p. 3). In countries like the U.S., enrollment rates are now above 60% of the relevant age cohort, so that one can reasonably speak of ‘‘mass’’ higher education.
INDIVIDUAL EFFECTS OF HIGHER EDUCATION ON POLITICS Here we begin to examine the kinds of effects education has on the polity, starting with its effects on individuals. Higher education has two quite contradictory influences on political participation. The first is well-known and has been documented by scores of studies: attaining higher education increases individual political participation (e.g., Converse, 1972; Nie, Verba, & Petrocik, 1979; Powell, 1986; Teixeira, 1987). This happens for a variety of reasons. In an analysis of the General Social Survey data over 30 years, my research found a number of pathways that generated more participation. College educated people talked more to their 5 peers about politics and social issues; they were regular newspaper readers and more informed on such issues (including getting higher scores on a simple test of knowledge); they had more trust in other people and more confidence in professional and economic institutions. In addition, college-educated people were more likely to be attached to a political party, however weakly. Over time a college education had an increasingly strong influence in keeping them from becoming political ‘‘independents’’. And over time partisan attachment has had an increasing impact in motivating people to vote in national elections. Similarly, more educated people also participate more in community and other kinds of organizations that lead to political participation (Nie et al., 1996). The end
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result is that college-educated individuals participate more in national elections and a variety of other regional and local political activities from local voting to writing legislators to petitioning for a cause to social protest (Kamens, 2005). As access to and graduation from colleges and universities increases, more people are subject to the politicizing influences of higher education. This observation leads us to the second effect of education that is less well-known and understood. Brody (1978) and later (Nie et al., 1996) observed that as higher education expanded, voting rates have actually gone down. Nie and his co-workers (1996) showed in elaborate time series analyses for the U.S. (and several other democracies as well) that the aggregate impact of expanding higher education is different from the impact of individual education on participation rates. As the system expands, voting declines, even though more educated voters participate more. This finding suggests in Schattschneider’s (1960) useful metaphor, that the expansion of higher education changes the ‘‘bias’’ of the system and leads less educated citizens to drop out of the system. How does this happen? The change to a more educated polity we believe has meant that new practical skills are required for effective democratic citizenship. A number of changes we will discuss have altered the scale of the political system and changed it qualitatively. These changes present a challenge for the exercise of democratic citizenship. How in such large scale political systems can citizens effectively participate in political decision making? We cannot answer this question but we can suggest a line of argument that could lead to answers. We focus on two issues: (a) the distribution of skills that facilitate participation; and (b) the structure of opportunities to participate. The resulting theory helps account for the fact that under present circumstances higher education is both such a powerful source of participation as well as a barrier of exclusion from participating. We argue that the changing scale of the system re-organizes the chances of involvement. Phil Agre (2003, p. 5) makes the following point about this process. The problem, he says, is not that political decision making is moving upward in a hierarchy away from local councils and toward central government. The problem is rather the importance of the role of large scale processes in organizing even very local decision making. A major aspect of this change is the speed and scale with which debates collectively unfold in society. Local debates, Agre argues, are not constituted solely by their members or conditioned only by ideologies. They are embedded in larger systems – in great detail and in real time. The point is that there is a larger ‘‘marketplace of ideas’’ that infuses local debates. The function of think
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tanks, pundits, professional opinion-makers and other parts of the political infrastructure is to deliver the right arguments to the right people at the right time. Inclusion in these ‘‘issue networks’’ that create and deliver arguments and ‘‘talking points’’ in real time and space is therefore crucial for the ability to participate in modern politics in any meaningful sense. This is true for local as well as for state and national politics, given the penetration of local politics by wider currents of ideologies and issues. In this view individuals do not rationally deliberate and thereby develop political opinions. Few have the time, attention span to politics and ingenuity to develop new political arguments on their own. Rather individuals pick out the opinions that they happen to agree with that various opinionmakers create. These stances then link them to others and bind them in a common ideology and movement. In a recent report on the public and the media, the Pew Research Center for People and the Press (2004, June 8) found, for example, increasing numbers of the general public choosing new outlets on the basis of their political ideology and distrusting media they think cater to their political adversaries. The job of movements and the political infrastructure associated with them (e.g., think tanks, news sources, pundits, scholars, politicians) then is to develop arguments to suit their members’ interests and to provide on time delivery of them for their members’ use (see Agre’s, 2003, discussion). Political opinion making in this view is very much a collective process. It is also one in which non-local ‘‘markets’’ of opinion increasingly penetrate local decision making. The currently popular bumper sticker nicely encodes this new political logic: ‘‘think globally, act locally’’. Tip O’Neil’s famous aphorism, ‘‘all politics is local’’, is still true as long as one remembers that the content of local politics is increasingly national and global. This view of political opinion formation and decision-making raises very concretely the issue of individuals’ embeddedness in social networks that generate issues and the associated political infrastructures that manufacture and deliver arguments to members. This is the function of issue entrepreneurs and opinion centers. Involvement in issue networks and the overriding ideologies that hold these networks together as movements appears to be a major source of political activism recently. Saunders and Abramovitz (2003) examined activists of both parties in 2000 and found that ideology was a powerful source of their motivation to be active partisans. Activists differed from ordinary citizens by having more sharply defined ideological stances and by having clearer, and among Republicans more extreme, policy positions than ordinary voters on a variety of issues.
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EDUCATION AND ISSUE NETWORKS: DEMOGRAPHIC AND ORGANIZATIONAL LEVEL EFFECTS In contemporary America, the chances for participation in issues and issue networks appear to be remarkably skewed in favor of those with more education, particularly higher education. There are, of course, a variety of sources of this disparity but several stand out as preeminent. First, active issue involvement and entrepreneurship require civic skills that are not evenly distributed. People who study local politics as it is practiced note that many people are afraid to speak in public (e.g., Jane, 1980, pp. 60–64). Similarly, the skill of association and networking is important, as are those of negotiation and coalition building. In poor communities where people are struggling to get the basic necessities, these skills, and even the realization that they are important, are not likely to be present and widely distributed. As Agre (2003) points out, the availability of these civic skills has much to do with whether there are networks of social capital in communities, regions and societies. These are the skills that produce social capital. Second, beyond the question of skills is the issue of the kinds of incentives people have to use them to become issue entrepreneurs. Schudson (1991, p. 273) points out that ‘‘the rich have more information and more incentive to get and use information efficiently’’. As an example, he goes on to describe the efforts since 1984 that both Republicans and Democrats have made in developing computerized lists of constituents, donors and the life histories of potential opponents. The incentives for doing this are very large, and getting bigger as campaign costs soar. But incentives cut two ways: there is a demand for participation based on individuals incentives, and there is a supply of opportunities to participate conditioned by organizational interests and imperatives. A ‘‘scientized’’ society affects not only the individual demand for participation but also the supply of such opportunities. As Nie et al. (1996) argue, as education levels rise, all sorts of organizations are likely to adopt credentialing rules that affect the supply of participation chances. In modern society, education confers social value, e.g. ‘‘human capital’’, and organizations are eager to staff themselves with such talent. Thus organizational opportunities for leadership in the polity become restricted. As educational inflation heats up, credentialing rules expand, thus driving out the less educated from community organizations and other organized forms of participation (see also Collins, 1979).
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Third, for a number of reasons it is harder to get issues that affect the poor and uneducated onto the public agenda. Issues relevant to them are rarely in the public eye, so that information on them is less available and they are less visible. Opportunities for issue engagement are thereby more limited for poor and less educated populations. This is largely the result of changes in the organization of the news media and political institutions. McChesney (2004) and others (e.g., Schudson, 1991, p. 277) have pointed out that the economics of TV and newsprint production has led the media to seek out and compete for ever more affluent audiences in their quest for advertising revenue. This trend has produced fewer news outlets and more homogeneity of news content, as the networks and the press all compete for the same audience. Thus while the news, audiences, and public problems have become ‘‘nationalized’’ in scope, the tilt of the news media is in the direction of issues and information of concern to more affluent, educated audiences who comprise their most important advertising base. For the press one result of this trend has been a decline of working class readers. Furthermore, many issues of relevance to the poor and less educated simply do not get much air time or press coverage (see Cunningham, 2004). As a result, the less educated find they are not well represented in the media and their concerns have little visibility. The bottom line is that it is harder for less educated people and communities to get information, arguments and ‘‘talking points’’ delivered to their target audiences at the right time and at the right place. This makes political organizing and coalition-building more difficult because these all take place in real time and space. Fig. 1 describes how education operates at the individual and organizational level to affect the distribution of civic skills, incentives and opportunities to participate. The individual effects are straight forward and well documented. So are many of the organizational level influences. But Fig. 1 shows several processes that are less well attended to. First, credentialing rules, which have been in place for almost half a century according to Collins (1979), may have two effects besides limiting opportunities to participate. They may reduce the incentive to participate via information deprivation or a sense of helplessness. And by reducing opportunity such rules may operate to undermine individual political skills and civic attitudes, e.g., the patriotic norm that it is a duty to participate. Second, media bias may have similar effects. It may lower citizen incentives to participate. Lack of access to salient issues reduces the motives to act politically and lack of relevant information has the same effect. In addition, lack of good information and ‘‘talking points’’ decreases the skills citizens have available to persuade others, or to know what salient others’ opinions are. Thus, as Cappella and Jamieson (1997) show in their
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The Theorized Society and Political Action Individual citizen skills and attitudes
Citizen Incentives, e.g. information Opportunities for Political Participation
Higher Education
Credentialing Rules
Bias of Media & Issue Markets
Fig. 1.
Individual and Organizational Effects on Political Opportunity/Participation.
studies, the media may contribute to ‘‘learned helplessness’’ and cynicism among citizens about their ability to act effectively in politics.
INSTITUTIONAL EFFECTS OF EXPANDED HIGHER EDUCATION ON THE POLITY In modern democratic societies expanding higher education is a force that results in a more politicized and mobilized society. We focus here on organizational and institutional effects of expanded higher education in producing such a society. First, as theoretical knowledge expands and as experts in these fields proliferate, formerly private worlds, e.g., family and private corporations, become public. The evolution of expertise opens them up to informed scrutiny and debate once it is applied to their operation and organization. The result is that civil society expands. This process creates new interest groups and activists with new kinds of authority in particular domains, e.g., economists, family therapists. Or, as in the case of political life, increasing rationalization may change the content of older roles. Schudson (1998)
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documents the changes in ‘‘citizen’’ roles over time as a consequence of changes in the wider political culture. For example, Progressives at the turn of the 20th century argued that with the spread of literacy and primary schooling, citizens should be more ‘‘informed’’ about politics and less deferential to political parties or elites. In this view new knowledge links more areas of social life to the achievement of collective goals of society. And with this development credentialed practitioners rush in to ‘‘solve’’ newly defined ‘‘problem(s)’’. Furthermore, the process of producing more knowledge and credentialed practitioners accelerates the pressure for further rationalization of societal sectors either by government or others. This process also enhances the likelihood that groups will mobilize those affected or will form to act on their behalf, using the newly created authority of science to do so, e.g., Mothers against Drunk Drivers, Friends of the Earth. In one view this process is one of ‘‘solutions’’ searching for ‘‘problems’’. A second effect is that as more domains become ‘‘public’’, more issues and domains become politicized. Expanding higher education, we argue, accelerates this trend. More domains become subject to rationalizing pressures. As experts proliferate they search for ‘‘problems’’. This often brings them into conflict with traditional stake-holders, based in institutions outside of higher education, as the current politics of faith and ‘‘common sense’’ in opposition to expert opinion attests. The result is that more issues and institutions become ‘‘contested terrains’’. For example, currently the mass media have become a major site of political contention (Kamens & Cappell, 2005). Popular distrust of the media and media elites, e.g., reporters, has grown over time, particularly among political conservatives and lately among liberals (see The PEW Report on the Media, 2004). Both the expansion of civil society and the politicization of more issues increase the size of the political opportunity structure in society. A third process adds intensity and density to this process. As public authority expands, more interests mobilize and seek to become part of the public agenda. Correspondingly, more of these interests find corporate representation, as knowledge based ‘‘solutions’’ abound. This process legitimates a broader range of issues and collective actors representing those interests. Hence, in any given issue domain, e.g. agriculture, public health, or medicine, the number of agents representing legitimate interests grows. Dahl (1994) has argued that the increased number of new issues and new political actors in the political system is a major change in the scale of the system. For example, in 1995 over a thousand lobbyists and farm representatives testified before Congress regarding pending farm legislation.
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In the 1970s, about 30 farm organization representatives and lobbyists showed up to testify when farm bills were discussed (NPR, Wed., Sept. 20, 1995). ‘‘Interest group liberalism’’ as a system of representation (Lowie, 1967; Walker, 1991) has gone through a remarkable growth surge since the 1960s. Practically every issue area has more organizational players in it and the ties between these groups, e.g., inter-locking directorates, become denser over time. Studies, for example, of the conservative movement and its growing network of organizations and institutes make this point repeatedly (e.g., Ricci, 1993; NCRP, 2004). A fourth effect that re-shapes the polity is organizational. One product of an expanded polity is an increase in the rate of mobilization for political action and a corresponding increase in the formation rate of formal organizations dedicated to political action. Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995) have documented the explosion of pressure groups in Washington since 1970, for example, and have also commented on their upper class bias. This process produces a more mobilized and organized polity at regional, state and national levels (see also Skocpol & Fiorina, 1999). Lastly, the new demography of society, created by the expansion of higher education, has an institutional effect. It creates an activist public opinion as a political force (see Herbst, 1993). This ‘‘public’’ has voice and authority precisely because of its presumed high literacy level. Universities are presumed to familiarize broad segments of the citizenry with the same kinds of rationalistic, science-tied accounts of social causation, problems and solutions. In the 1990s about a quarter of the U.S. adult population had a baccalaureate degree from college or more. Among younger age cohorts even more will achieve a college degree and many will graduate as part of the corps of ‘‘experts’’ in particular areas. This new demography, together with the credentialing rules that it creates, produces an ‘‘imagined’’ national community of the educated whose ‘‘voice’’ is given great weight. This is a kind of credentialing rule that is institutional in nature. The authority of the public voice derives from its presumed exposure to science and secular knowledge-based subjects.
THE INSTITUTIONAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTS OF A ‘‘SCIENTIZED’’ SOCIETY ON POLITICS A number of distinctly political consequences flow from these changes in society that expanded higher education brings. We describe them briefly.
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In the 1960s Daniel Bell (1960) was certainly partly correct in arguing that The End of Ideology was at hand. By this he meant that technical rationalizing schemes for re-ordering society, rather than grand ideologies, e.g., Marxism, would dominate public discussion.1 But the salience of technocratic theory has not meant an end to ideology. Quite the reverse, in fact. Over the last 50 years, American politics (even with the end of the Cold War) appears to have become more polarized and more ideological (e.g., Walker, 1991, p. 36ff; Fiorina, 1996). Recent evidence on public opinion supports this idea. While the American public has not become more polarized in many attitude areas, save abortion and attitudes toward the poor, Americans perceive more polarization than they did 20 years ago. Furthermore, among those identified with the main political parties, there is more attitude polarization than existed in the 1970s (DiMaggio et al., 1996, pp. 738–739). However, the same evidence indicates that politics, but not the public, has become more ideologically polarized. Paul DiMaggio’s earlier (1996, pp. 738–739) and latest work (quoted in Robert Samuelson, 2004; see also Fiorina, 2004) shows polarization has occurred among politicians and party activists but not among the general public in the last 30 years. Saunders and Abramovitz (2003) report a similar pattern, except that they find Republican Party activists more radical compared to rank and file Republicans than Democratic Party activists are relative to regular Democrats. Thus as Samuelson notes in his op-ed piece, politics, not the country, is polarized. Partisans in the political establishment (including politicians, activists, pundits, think tanks, pollsters, engaged scholars and commentators) present politics as a struggle between competing theories and ideologies, despite the fact that in practice differences between the parties are small, though important. Most activists come from the ranks of the highly educated so that they have close proximity to the national idea markets that supply rationalizing schemes and ‘‘talking points’’ so useful in contemporary political discussions. Thus, we theorize that a major effect of expanded higher education is the creation of new, abstract forms of public political discourse and more generalized accounts of political action and actors. As a result, politics becomes more ideological and theorized. This means that public discourse is generally now expected to be framed in terms of general ‘‘problems’’ and ‘‘solutions’’ grounded in secular knowledge. These are expected to be universalistic and aimed at the general public, rather than special constituencies. These theorized accounts may be either ‘‘liberal’’ or ‘‘conservative’’ in content and may entail calls for more or less government. The point is
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that they are abstract, theorized discourses that act as sources of legitimation for collective action, e.g., monetarist or Keynesian economics; neo-realist or neo-liberal international relations theories. The ‘‘war on terror’’ is a good case in point. Political recipes for responding to the events of September 11, 2001 depend on different theories of international relations that are publicly available for adoption. Political discourse has simplified these arguments and reduced them to two competing logics concerning the sources of this violence: (a) it is the result of ‘‘state sponsored terror’’ by evil regimes, e.g. Iraq; or (b) it is the result of terror unleashed by loosely affiliated extremist religious groups using weak states and global alliances to fight the West, and particularly the U.S. Different political factions then use one or the other theory as a directive for action to ‘‘solve’’ the problem. Several properties of these accounts are important to note. One is that they precipitate a shift of more authority from private sources to public ones, though not necessarily governmental ones. This occurs because these ‘‘theories’’ of reality encode ever more behavior as having consequences for collective goals. For example, the sex distribution within corporations becomes linked to behavior that either furthers or hinders the goals of the company and more broadly the economy (see Kanter, 1978). Thus, arguments featuring both the larger themes of ‘‘efficiency’’ and ‘‘justice’’ can be invoked to inveigh against gender discrimination. A second property is that these accounts also describe in abstract terms the ‘‘heroes’’, ‘‘villains’’ and ‘‘fools’’ in politics, i.e., those responsible for social ‘‘progress’’ or its absence. In this sense they are normative for they describe the forces that sustain ‘‘progress’’ or obstruct it. But unlike more mundane descriptions of reality, the actors in these accounts are increasingly portrayed as abstract, collective agents, e.g., ‘‘markets’’, ‘‘human capital’’, ‘‘politicians’’, ‘‘special interests’’, the ‘‘nation’’ itself, ‘‘evil empires’’, ‘‘axis of evil’’ etc. These then are highly theorized accounts of ‘‘virtue’’ and ‘‘evil’’. Largely impersonal forces have replaced concrete ‘‘persons’’ as the locus of action in society. Real people personify these forces rather than having an independent power in their own right as causal agents. Collective actors dominate the stage in these accounts, as well as in the actual structure of society (Coleman, 1982). One example of this is the work of historians. Frank, Wong, Meyer, and Ramirez (2000) show that increasingly these arbitrars of the past see themselves as social scientists or theorists rather than as story tellers or chroniclers of events and persons. Thus their histories are more likely to invoke concepts, such as ‘‘classes’’, ‘‘status groups’’ or ‘‘religions’’ as carriers of ideas and action than concrete persons.
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Higher education is a central player in this drama because it is the major supplier of rationalizing ideologies and ‘‘solutions’’ built on secular expertise. There are both liberal and conservative versions available to choose from. Experts and think tanks exist to provide arguments and ‘‘talking points’’ to activists in real time and space. The result is that political discussion of public issues becomes highly framed, stylized and edited. Complex anarchic uncertainties are transformed into rationalized uncertainty along with standardized accounts of the ‘‘problem’’ and a menu of solutions (see Meyer & Jepperson, 2000). Term limits becomes, for example, a proffered solution for legislative inertia and gridlock. There are some eight states undergoing such ‘‘experiments’’ in public policy, e.g., California has enacted term limits (Fiorina, 1996, p. 53ff). Yet it is interesting how little attention is paid to dissecting the consequences of these reforms at the sites where they are instituted and discussing the trade-offs these policies produce. Similarly, ‘‘reinventing government’’ is advocated as a way of making government more efficient and less costly, although the history of these efforts indicates that they are not effective (see March & Olsen, 1983, for evidence). At the state level, citizen referenda (Schrag, 1999) are California’s answer to the problem of governmental responsiveness and costs, though the evidence is that they have made government less responsive and less manageable. Thus, increasingly solutions result from ideological definitions of problems rather than as pragmatic responses to local issues. The supply and use of abstract rationalizing discourses is a major source of both perceived and actual polarization among political actors. Like theological discourse, liberals’ and conservatives’ use of abstract theorizing helps feed a polarizing public conversation in the polity. Two other factors intensify these effects. They are the emergence of permanent electoral competition and of ‘inquisitorial politics’, which together produce perpetual candidate centered campaigning. This occurs for a number of reasons. First, national, and even state-level, politicians must have an agenda to market themselves and to establish name recognition. This means that politicians become dependent on ‘‘experts’’ to provide the ‘‘talking points’’ and write the policy papers. The decline of parties as mobilizing vehicles has meant that politicians must mount candidate centered campaigns that have some of the character of social movements (see also DiMaggio et al., 1996, p. 741). TV has become the major medium for campaigning. Political positioning, therefore, tends to be general, dramatic and hard hitting to get audience attention. Second, given that politicians are playing primarily to educated audiences of voters, and not a mass electorate, the structure of their agenda reflects the audience’s tastes in style. In
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addition, given the salience of state and national public opinion as reference groups, political rhetoric leans toward more rationalization. Politicians now offer up ‘‘plans’’ for collective action, so that politics is now a contest between candidate-based proposals for achieving state and national ‘‘progress’’. Hence, the new politics is more stylized and abstract than the older, more localized politics of interest aggregation and citizen preference. While the old politics is still very much alive, a new rationalizing politics has become standard rhetoric. Success goes to those who master this art. These new political rhetorics take a variety of forms. First, there is the politics of technical rationalization, characteristic of the 1970s. It involved streamlining and fine tuning existing law and programs (Brown, 1983), e.g. Keynesian policies of government spending to mitigate the effects of business cycles on economic growth and unemployment. Second, during the 1980s and 1990 s political rationalization focused on substantive issues, e.g., the role of government, public spending and taxes (see Burnham, 1995). The Reagan administration, for example, sought to reduce government social programs by starving them of funds. The tool was massive federal deficits (Moynihan, 1996). The third phase of the conservative rationalization project under the Bush regime is permanent tax cuts, reduction in government resources and authority, and the delegation of public functions to private corporations, e.g., defense, social security reform. In sum, modern political rhetoric is increasingly built around abstract theoretical schemes that prescribe and justify policy and less on the practical aggregation of interests and preferences. Control over this rhetoric and the ability to construct the cognitive frames of political debate are an important source of power in modern polities. American populism as embodied in the Perot movement is no exception. Perot’s answer to social issues was to refer problems to technical experts who would fashion national solutions everyone could agree on. The result is a more ideological politics that is more stylized and abstract than the politics of the older ‘‘civic culture’’. A second consequence of expanding higher education is that the imagined political community is the nation as a whole. The audience for political debates and news is now a national one. As Schudson (1991, pp. 274, 271) points out, at least since the 1970s, the news, the audience, public problems and news culture have become nationalized. As journalists become fewer, but more educated and well paid, the news increasingly becomes packaged with issues and viewpoints that represent the interests of educated elites (Cunningham, 2004). News has become ‘‘stories’’ that interest a national audience of the educated. Economic news, for example, comes packaged in terms of national unemployment rates, national economic growth rates, and
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national stock market gains or losses. Hence, the social psychological center of attention and source of symbolism for citizens is increasingly the nation and its elites. Accounts of political reality are thus framed in terms of the ‘‘progress’’ of the nation. For individuals this change has contributed to what Kinder and Kiewiet (1981) have called cognitive ‘‘socio-centrism’’ and cognitive nationalization. Increasingly individuals link their own fate to that of the nation and use the evidence of national ‘‘progress’’ or ‘‘stagnation’’, e.g., national crime or unemployment rates, as indicators of their own and their children’s chances of success and security. Several fateful consequences follow from this process of ‘‘nationalizing’’ citizen consciousness. First, the existence of this kind of fictive national community provides the ideological basis for a nationwide competition among social movements, interest groups and other mobilized communities to define and represent the ‘‘national interest’’. The point of interest here is simply that the construction of a national imagined community, such as we have described, facilitates high levels of competitive mobilization among groups in society (e.g., Lubell, 1970). It also provides the legitimation for mobilization on behalf of collective interests and guarantees that almost every conceivable issue will find actors eager to represent it and speak on its behalf. Another consequence is that the institutionalization of higher education has occasioned a profound nationalization of communication networks and issue-networks. Expanded education has produced a nation-wide elite whose status is rooted in the same institution, i.e., education, and who share the same cultural credentials. Information can flow through this national system at great speed because of the shared culture that higher education produces. In an expert society, ‘‘solutions’’ in one region are seen as applicable to others. The universalism inherent in science produces a ‘‘one size fits all’’ mentality. A consequence is an increase in the volume of issues and the speed with which issues generated outside of Washington can surface and win support, circumventing the traditional process of access (see Dahl, 1994). Kernell (1993, pp. 234–235) mentions three issues that had remarkable success in the 1970s and 1980s: Mothers Against Drunk Driving; the ‘‘flat tax’’; and the savings and loan industry’s campaign against an IRS inspired withholding tax on deposits. All owe their success to access to the mass media and the national voice it gives those who are well organized and have financial resources. A further consequence is that political mobilization takes more organized forms. Issue entrepreneurship is the core activity that generates political action. But the scale of this activity has changed. The result is the diffusion
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of issue networks across regions and states and between levels of the polity. As Putnam’s (2000) data suggests, there may be less local organization and less Tocquevillian voluntarism as the mainstay of community and national politics (but see also Greeley, 1997; Ladd, 1999). Skocpol (1996, 1997) has described this change as one that produces ‘‘organizations without members’’, meaning that the lateral connections between members are less important than the vertical ties between members and leaders. Members in this instance provide the resources and the issue constituency for leadership elites who make the decisions about the direction and agenda organizations will pursue. The rise of Washington-based ‘‘think tanks’’ (Ricci, 1993) and mediabased experts has facilitated the nationalization of political discourse and its theorized character. This development began in the 1970s and paralleled the rise of the conservative right as a political movement (see also Lowies’, 1996 discussion). Since then, both the personnel and the budgets of these organizations have increased substantially, as has their presumed influence in particular areas of policy. These organizations are generally aligned with political factions and movements from which they receive funding and for whom they are expected to develop positions, backed by data and expertise, which support the general political outlook of their sponsors. They are also expected to be heavily involved in marketing their sponsors’ positions on particular issues to the public through a variety of media strategies. As a result of the demand for ‘‘talking points’’ and persuasive expertise these groups of professionals have become important actors in constructing national issue agendas and facilitating the development of national issue networks. Progressives argue that Republican success over the last 30 years is a result of building up and funding a vast infra-structure of such groups to get their message across. Matt Bai (2004), for example, reports that one critic of Democratic strategy argues that a 32 year old Republican legislator gets all kinds of materials and leadership training from such conservative supported institutes. By contrast, a 32 year old Democratic state legislator has little intellectual guidance. Instead, ‘‘he learns how to check boxes: you learn to become pro-choice y pro-labor y pro-trial lawyer y and pro-environment. And you end up, in that process, with no broad philosophical basis. You end up with no ideas about national security. You end up with no ideas about American history and political theory. You end up, frankly, with no ideas about macroeconomics and economic policy, other than that it’s scary’’ (Bai, 2004, pp. 8–9). All these changes have meant that local, as well as state and regional, politics become infused with both new issues and new constituencies. The
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result is new kinds of local politics. For example, communities are increasingly taking symbolic stands on national issues, from nuclear weapons, school prayer and racism to the ‘‘war on terror’’. Thus alongside the localism and pragmatism of community politics another dynamic is added that changes political discourse. This development has added national content to local politics through the infusion of issues generated outside the community and through the penetration of local politics by money and expertise brought in from the outside. Congressman Jim Leach’s description of Iowa politics (see Drew, 1983, p. 4) is a good illustration of this process: We’re mainly rural and small business, but in elections the Republicans are largely funded by business, much of which doesn’t have anything to do with the state, and the Democrats are funded by labor, much of which doesn’t have anything to do with the state. And you see a breakdown in citizen access. Not that the constituent isn’t going to get in the door, but the guy who gave the money is going to get in first. So what you really see is a breakdown in constitutional democracy, which is supposed to be based on citizen access and constituency access. We’re seeing regional politics and state and citizen politics become national. National groups determine outcomes, whereas local constituencies used to provide the crucial role. This is new.
In addition, local politics has become more cosmopolitan because it is infused with the ideologies and abstract accounts of ‘‘progress’’ that characterize national debates. The triumph of conservatism has meant that liberals and liberal institutions are on the defensive both nationally and locally, so the content of the debates change. But despite this regime change, local politics becomes a microcosm of the larger conflicts, in addition to being the site where purely local issues are contested.
LEVELS OF ANALYSIS: CREATING THE NEW POLITY These arguments all suggest the hypothesis that over time education has become more important as a source of political opportunity and participation. But as we have argued, these effects are unlikely to be direct. They come about rather because of education’s influence (a) on the macro-environment of politics and (b) on the distribution of skills individuals must have to be successful as citizens. Paradoxically, the latter may even include definitions of what a good citizen is and what her obligations are (e.g., see Schudson, 1998). Fig. 2 tries to capture the complexity of the causal effects of education as it operates at the institutional, the organizational and the individual level of
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Institutionalized Science and Knowledge: Standardized “Solutions” and Experts
New Polity Type
Media Bias Credentialing Rules For Leadership Roles
New Discourse Rules: Universalistic vs. Part-
Icularistic Cognitive Frames National, Professionalized Issue Networks and Organizations
Civic Skills and Attitudes
Fig. 2.
Organizational/ Political Participation
Model of Institutional, Organizational and Individual Effects that Produce a New, Non-Tocquevillian Polity.
analysis. Each level has separate and distinct effects. The point captured in Fig. 2 is that expanded higher education operates to produce a new type of polity, as well as new types of individuals and organizations. This realization opens up new avenues of analysis. The literature has largely focused on individual level processes, represented at the bottom of Fig. 2. These effects are well documented. Much of the post industrial society literature, for example, focuses on individual level effects of higher education. Universities, it is argued, produce people with new value priorities and they in turn enact these by developing a new ‘‘green’’ politics, new organizational forms and altered patterns of participation. But as Fig. 2 indicates, this is only part of the story. Some of the effects on individual participation rates flow from organizational level processes. These are represented in the middle of Fig. 2. One of these processes are the credentialing rules that give university graduates
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privileged social and organizational positions. As a result they have more ‘‘voice’’ in society and their issues are privileged. Other organizational processes are structural in that they achieve their influence by affecting organizations and other collectivities such as occupations, not by affecting individuals directly. Such a process involves the organization of the media and the creation of public opinion. The creation of ‘‘public opinion’’ as a political force privileges issues and interests affecting educated elites and audiences at the expense of the less educated. A third organizational level process is the formation rate of voluntary associations and issue oriented networks that are nation-wide. This is facilitated by the vast supply of theory-based ‘‘solutions’’ and armies of credentialed practitioners that higher education creates. But a number of processes operate at the institutional level. These are pictured at the top of Fig. 2. Expanded higher education creates a ‘‘scientized’’ society and polity, where much weight and authority is given to secular knowledge and its practitioners. This process expands civil society by opening up more domains to science-based inquiry and science derived ‘‘solutions’’. And it turns many issues and institutions into contested sites as ‘‘solutions’’ derived from science conflict with those of faith and tradition. Furthermore, the authority of secular knowledge produces a new kind of political discourse that frames ‘‘problems’’ in abstract, universalistic ways as well as ‘‘solutions’’. One consequence is a politics of competing national ‘‘plans’’ of how to achieve ‘‘progress’’ in the 21st century. Time, place and other ‘‘particularisms’’ lose sway in this discourse. A ‘‘scientized’’ polity is also one in which increasing numbers of citizens are university graduates and hence presumed to be highly literate and numerate. This institutional level and demographic process combined creates a ‘‘public opinion’’ that is a major political force and has great authority. Hence, both elections and public opinion polling, together with other techniques for surveying the public mood, gain validity. Citizen referenda, for example, become preferred ‘‘solutions’’ to legislative gridlock (e.g., Schrag, 1999). The main point of Fig. 2 is that the new ‘‘scientized’’ polity is constructed through a number of pathways. Individual, organizational and institutional processes combine in complex ways to produce the new polity.
DISCUSSION The paper has argued that there are strong effects of expanded higher education in producing a new type of liberal polity. While this necessarily
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involves individual level processes that create the new citizen, it also entails creating the new, ‘‘scientized’’ society. Rationalization processes at the organizational and institutional level produce this new society as well as new types of citizens. One virtue of the argument is that it theoretically organizes a growing body of evidence on changes in the American polity over the last half century. In addition, the arguments are supported by an emerging body of cross national research that provides support for the causal links between the expansion of higher education, science and the emergence of liberal, democratic polities in the 1980s and 1990s (Drori, Meyer, Ramirez, & Schofer, 2003, pp. 265–280). What is less clear from our analysis is which patterns are peculiarly American, as opposed to more general effects of expanded higher education on the politics. Answers to this question will depend on further cross national research. The paper also offers lessons on the usefulness of neo-institutional theory for understanding the impacts of expanded higher education on politics. First, it shows that the causal processes are complex because they operate not only on individuals as units of analysis, but on two other levels as well. Expanded higher education affects populations of organizations, including family units, as well as formal organizations. And it operates at the institutional level by creating structures that institutionalize science, e.g., modern universities, and support the hegemony of science as the ‘‘cultural canopy’’ of society. Other discourses are also created and sustained by institutional structures, e.g., individualism and equality, and these support the extension of democracy and human rights as (functional) ‘‘requirements’’ of modern societies. Second, another lesson of neo-institutional theory is that the sources of change in society are often exogamous to given countries. These processes operate at the world level over time. Higher education, for example, expands in response to levels of democratization in the world. As world democratization increases higher education expands, even in countries that are not democracies (Schofer & Meyer, 2005). Such countries may be preparing in anticipation of the on-slaught of democratization or are simply conforming to world models. The same process appears to happen with regard to efforts to extend human rights (see Suarez, Ramirez, & Meyer, chapter 5). In the U.S., for instance, the extension of civil and voting rights to blacks in 1964 and 18 year olds in 1972 came about largely because of world pressure and the Cold War. The world was under-going rapid de-colonization and democratization, countries that were models of exclusionist, racist societies had been defeated in World War II, and socially inclusive societies became the worldwide normative model for organizing polities. In addition, the
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competition between the U.S. and Soviet Union was cultural as well as military and economic. Which model was the society of the future? In this contest, racially exclusive societies were at a disadvantage, especially if they were competitors for hegemony. With much of the world consisting of enfranchised people of color, racially exclusionary models of society were not prominent candidates for success. This lesson of institutional theory does not mean that internal dynamics of countries are irrelevant. In fact, these often determine the kind of adaptations societies make, as our case study shows. But it does force to the fore the realization that the macro-environment of societies is a significant causal force and that relatively sudden changes in individual societies occur when these world level environments change. Hence, in the post 1960 world a number of unexpected changes occurred worldwide: higher education expansion accelerated rapidly and successive waves of democratization washed over the most authoritarian parts of the world. None of these changes were anticipated by contemporary sociological theories – or informed observers. Arguments that focus on single societies as units of analysis are relatively helpless in understanding these transformations. Lastly, neo-institutional arguments show how effects on society produced by individual, organizational and institutional processes are all parts of a uniform cultural discourse that is causally linked. At the individual level, the impacts of education occur largely because people are socially re-defined by the ritual of education. Whatever students actually learn – and this is highly variable – their parents, employers etc. take seriously the fact that they are ‘‘high school graduates’’, ‘‘college graduates’’ etc. and impute particular social value and skills to them. These imputed traits are increasingly seen as highly general, transferable across social domains and valuable. Hence, individuals with more education know they are more valued by others and act this out in a variety of ways. They are more optimistic, they plan for the future more and behave like the rational actors of neo-classical economic theory (e.g., Inkeles & Smith, 1973). At the organizational level, rationality is prized and embodied in the wide variety of specialties, specialists and bodies of knowledge that universities produce. To insure rationality, organizations put in place credentialing rules and standards of performance that emphasize uniform, often industry-wide, standards that are produced by professionals. The result is to privilege cosmopolitan knowledge and skill over local (folk or practical) knowledge and to give advantage to those with university training. Hence, younger university graduates are promoted over senior managers who did not go to college and higher earnings and salaries are paid to those with specialized degrees.
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Furthermore, the white collar labor force of organizations expands rapidly as new occupations and specialized bodies of knowledge develop and are added to the table of organization. Organizations thus become more complex and their structures more dominated by credentialed practitioners of a dizzying array of specialties. At the institutional level the hegemony of science as the ‘‘cultural canopy’’ of society legitimates and sustains universities as central cultural institutions and serves as the basis for elite integration into a common cultural frame. Hence, a good deal of collective action across industries and domains is possible because leaders share the same cognitive model of society. That model imagines that ‘‘progress’’ for all is a realizable goal, and that education, particularly higher education, is the means. The result is a highly mobilized and networked society that is ‘‘scientized’’ and democratic in culture. That this culture is ‘‘triumphalist’’ and optimistic beyond any reasonable expectation is true, but beside the point. This liberal, democratic cultural regime is now hegemonic across the world. As such, it is the new basis for both cooperation and conflict. From an institutional point of view higher education is thus a transformer of worlds – and a destroyer of alternative worlds. Its scope is worldwide. Higher education encodes a common culture of secular rationality that presumes to be the only true path to modernity (or post modernity). And it claims to be a universal source of knowledge, rationality, and perhaps enlightenment. These claims also make it a world destroyer for those embedded in local cultures and non-accomodationist religions. The triumph of these claims via the practical benefits conferred by technology make Western science and higher education a major source of contention in much of the world. These are some of the insights of neo-institutional theory of education. The arguments have produced almost a half a century of fine research studies and ingenious data collection. It is fitting to give voice to this tradition in this collection of essays.
NOTES 1. However, these technocratic schemes are rooted in modern ideology and culture, even though their assumptions go unanalyzed – and unchallenged. The means and ends implicit in these ‘‘theories’’ of society are simply taken for-granted, e.g., the ‘‘individual’’, ‘‘progress’’ and equality. Under the umbrella of rationality, culture – and ideology – simply disappear as constructs. The result is a theory of society without culture (Meyer, 1986) and societies devoid of grand (often utopian)
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ideology(s). Science as the source of progress, individualism and rational action, education as a form of secular salvation, and formal organizational rationality are all assumed as inevitable, and natural, components of modern society, and hence, go unanalyzed.
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Kamens, D. H. (2005). Higher education, civic virtue and participation in American politics, 1972–2002: An empirical analysis. Unpublished manuscript. Kamens, D., & Cappell, C. (2005). Media distrust as a mobilizing ideology, 1972–2002: The effects of the ‘‘confidence gap’’ in Print and TV Journalism on voting and partisanship in American elections. Unpublished manuscript. Kanter, R. (1978). Men and women of the corporation. NY: Basic Books. Kernell, S. (1993). Going public: New strategies of presidential leadership. Congressional Quarterly Press: Washington, DC. Kinder, D., & Kiewiet, R. (1981). Sociotropic politics: The American case. British Journal of Political Science, pt. 2, 11. Ladd, E. (1999). The Ladd report. The Free Press. Lowie, T. (1967). The public philosophy: Interest group liberalism. American Political Science Review, 61, 5–24. Lowie, T. (1996). The end of the Republican era. Norman, Okla: University of Oklahoma Press. Lubell, S. (1970). The hidden crisis in American politics. New York: W.W.W. Norton and Co. March, J. G., & Olsen, J. (1983). Organizing political life: What administrative reorganization tells us about government. American Political Science Review, 77, 281–296. McChesney, R. (2004). The problem of the media. New York: Monthly Review Press. Meyer, J. (1977). The effects of education as an institution. American Journal of Sociology, 83, 55–77. Meyer, J. W. (1986). Myths of socialization and personality. In: T. Heller, M. Sonna & D. Wellbery (Eds), Reconstructing individualism (pp. 212–225). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Meyer, J., & Jepperson, R. (2000). The ‘actors’ of modern society: The cultural construction of social agency. Sociological Theory, 18, 100–120. Moynihan, P. (1996). Miles to go. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP). (2004). Axis of ideology: Conservative foundations and public policy. Draft Report. Washington, DC. Nie, N., Junn, J., & Stehlik-Berry, K. (1996). Education and democratic citizenship in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nie, N., Verba, S., & Petrocik, J. (1979). The changing American voter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. PEW Research Center for People and the Press. (2004). New audiences increasingly polarized. Washington, DC, (June 8). Powell, E. B. (1986). American voter turnout in comparative perspective. American Political Science Review, 80(1), 17–45. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Ricci, D. (1993). The transformation of American politics: The new Washington and the rise of think tanks. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Samuelson, R. (2004). How Polarization Sells. Washington Post, June 30. Saunders, K., & Abramovitz, A. (2003). Ideological realignment and active partisans in the American electorate. American Politics Research, 31(10), 1–25. Schattschneider, E. E. (1960). The semi sovereign people: A realist’s view of democracy in America. NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Schofer, E., & Meyer, J. W. (2005). The world-wide expansion of higher eduation. American Sociological Review, 70(6), 898–920.
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CULTURAL COEXISTENCE: GENDER EGALITARIANISM AND DIFFERENCE IN HIGHER EDUCATION Karen Bradley Much of the work of social stratification researchers has focused on the movement of individuals through social institutions, notably education and the labor market. In modern societies, educational attainment has become the most consequential factor affecting the occupational attainment of women and men, surpassing the influence of family background (Shavit & Blossfeld, 1993). Furthermore, the democratic ideal of an open society whereby individuals travel through the life course neither hindered nor advantaged by ascriptive characteristics has become an international normative imperative by which societies are compared and ranked (see, for example, the United Nations Development Program ranking of countries on their Gender Empowerment Measure and Human Development Index). Prior to the development of the neo-institutionalist framework by Meyer and his colleagues, comprehensive and explicitly cross-national analyses of such processes were based primarily on collections of country-level case studies that attributed stratification outcomes to endogenous characteristics
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of societies, such as historical legacy or geo-political processes (see, for example, Clark, 1985). Neo-institutionalists challenged the claim that societal-level characteristics alone accounted for social stratification outcomes within and among nation-states. Their disclosure of the remarkable similitude among the structures and outcomes of societal institutions broadened the focus of comparative inquiry from attribution of causality to national distinctiveness to curiosity about the impetus and impact of increasing global structural isomorphism. Educational systems in countries that differed widely in terms of levels of economic development, religious and historical traditions, and political organization increasingly shared common characteristics, post-World War II: educational enrollments increased; ministries of education were established; compulsory attendance laws were passed; educational rights were extended to non-citizens, and the education of girls and women became a priority worldwide. The institutionalist research program has accumulated considerable evidence supporting their central claim that shared cultural understandings concerning the primacy of the individual in society, the causal connection between education and progress, and the rationalization of societal institutions have more explanatory purchase to explain such phenomena than levels of economic development or political structure. In this paper, I consider one aspect of social stratification associated with the transformation of systems of higher education characteristic of the modern era – the dramatic increase in women’s overall access to higher education, coupled with continued gender-differentiated degree attainment by field of study. Neo-institutionalist predictions concerning the influence of global cultural norms are juxtaposed with those prioritizing the effects of societal-level characteristics. Specifically, I consider the impact of structural configurations of higher education systems as well as the social meaning of gender on the forms of sex segregation that have emerged. I argue that two macro-cultural elements of choice are consequential in accounting for sex segregation by level and field within higher education: (a) the structuring of choice within national educational systems; and (b) the effects of cultural norms concerning gender, education, and field/level. Since educational choices are made within the context of culturally constructed pathways or trajectories (Abbott, 1997; Ball, Davies, David, & Reay, 2002), understanding cross-national variation as well as commonalities in educational stratification calls for consideration of how different categories of persons respond to the opportunities and constraints presented within educational structural configurations.
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EDUCATIONAL ACCOUNTS Sociologists working within the institutional framework have revealed the extent to which shared cultural understandings concerning education as an institution have been a driving force effecting similar educational outcomes within diverse national settings. Worldwide models promulgated by international organizations and policy makers define and legitimate agendas, structures, and policies of nation-states as well as the movement of individuals into and through social institutions such as education, the labor market, politics, and the family. The ideological underpinnings of this overarching cultural framework have been documented and discussed extensively in theoretical as well as empirical work in this body of literature (see, e.g., Boli & Thomas, 1999; Meyer, Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997). The pervasive influence of Enlightenment thought in Western society has elevated belief in the sanctity of individuals and a determined protection of the rights of individuals across increasing domains of society (Frank, Meyer, & Miyahara, 1995; Meyer, 1986). The search in stratification research for ascriptive effects reinforces the extent to which belief in universal individualism permeates the definition of stratification itself – all persons should travel throughout the educational and occupational systems, negotiating transitions and turning points as gender-less, race-less, and class-less individuals. The belief that individuals have interests, abilities, and rights to education, occupational success, and happiness has created a thriving industry that attempts to quantify and sort according to qualities that are not capable of direct observation, but believed to exist.1 The tendency to standardize, quantify, and organize society is pervasive in modern society (Meyer, Boli, & Thomas, 1987a; Ritzer, 1996). This everincreasing rationalization adheres to Weber’s model of formal rationality – more and more societal structures and activities are organized around a series of specified means–ends relationships. Faith in rationality itself is thus also a core element of the cultural framework for societal organization. Rational ways of thinking about the roles of educational systems in society act as social facts, allowing the functional model of education to exert extraordinary influence over educational policy. The ways in which researchers theorize the process of educational stratification provide vocabularies of motive (cf. Mills, 1940) for educational policy analysts who initiate reform of the schools and the educational system in response to newly identified crises of an economic or social justice nature. Neo-institutionalists have also revealed the extent to which nation-states modify
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educational structures and enact educational policies in mimetic chorus, distinct from demonstrable need for societal-specific problem resolution. Rather, accounts of educational change reference internal causes; such patterned change appears to unfold in response to the strong force of cultural expectations emanating from global experts with surprisingly little authority to compel nation-states to undertake such modifications (Meyer et al., 1987b).2 During the 1970s, educational specialists from international organizations such as OECD advocated accommodating increased student demand for higher education by expanding access. In addition, a causal connection between educational expansion and socioeconomic progress was promoted officially by a variety of national and international experts. The recommended mechanism to meet both the democratizing and political/economic goals was systemic structural differentiation (see, e.g., Trow, 1973). Structural differentiation within higher education has increased in most industrialized countries in recent decades, particularly through the creation and expansion of the non-university sector (Meek & Goedegebuure, 1996; Siroway & Benavot, 1986; Windolf, 1997). In addition, fields of study proliferated as more program areas were either elevated from a secondary or interstitial level of education (for example, teacher training and nursing) or were newly established at the higher education level (such as tourism/hospitality and motor vehicle operation programs). Although some aspects of the structural configuration of educational systems (e.g., degree of government control, prestige variation among institutional types, public/private sponsorship) vary among countries, the status configuration of all modern systems combines both vertical and horizontal elements. The vertical dimension is comprised of levels (non-university, university, and post-graduate), with status rewards that increase with progression through the levels. In this sense, the levels are hierarchically arranged. The horizontal dimension is comprised of fields of study with less directly aligned elements of reward. That is, fields differ in terms of their loose or tight coupling to particular occupational destinations (e.g., philosophy as an example of the former and engineering as an example of the latter), as well as highly variable rates of economic and status returns. Understanding women’s status within higher education necessitates taking these two dimensions into account (Bradley & Charles, 2003). Factors that promote or inhibit women’s access to or progression through each level may be independent of factors that contribute to women’s representation across fields. With this framework in mind, I review current research examining the coexistence of women’s increased access with persistent sex segregation
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within higher education, giving particular attention to the interplay of cultural norms and cognitive frames with the forces of rationalization.
A NEO-INSTITUTIONAL FRAMING OF WOMEN’S STATUS IN HIGHER EDUCATION The education of girls and women has been an issue of concern for international organizations such as UNESCO and the World Bank since their formation in the 1940s. Attention to this issue intensified during the International Decade for Women (1975–1985), as exemplified by the multiple issues addressed within The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), ratified in 1979. The benchline marker instituted in CEDAW for assessing growth in women’s status in society was consistent with the liberal model of gender egalitarianism: men’s representation in public sphere activities. The liberal model of women’s empowerment thus became the ideological foundation for the advancement of women in public sphere activities. With the identification of women as rational individuals entitled to full citizenship rights, educational access was promoted as the key to women’s full liberation from traditional roles, and became a prerequisite for international funding of educational programs. Similarly, the identification of women and girls as untapped human capital made a strong case for government investment in their education, and was likewise endorsed by women’s organizations to enhance women’s economic advancement (Berkovitch, 1999; Berkovitch & Bradley, 1999). The expansion and diversification of higher education unfolded concurrently with these heightened international pressures for incorporation of women into colleges and universities. During these decades, women’s access to higher education increased dramatically worldwide, closing in on the gender parity goal of liberal egalitarianism: 50/50 enrollment of women and men. Neo-institutional researchers have shown that these normative pressures toward gender parity in education have been significant in enhancing women’s access to higher education, overriding the effects of internal characteristics such as level of economic development and political organization (Bradley & Ramirez, 1996; Ramirez & Woptika, 2001). Constellations of cultural understandings of gender are historically variant and provide a context for the interplay between educational opportunities and choices (Risman, 2004; Ridgeway & Correll, 2004). The mechanism by which transformations in widely held norms effect such
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macro-level change as educational participation at the highest levels is multi-faceted. Formal mandates such as anti-discrimination legislation have been effective in reducing labor market sex segregation in many broad categorical ways. As more women enter the labor force, particularly in professional positions, a signal is sent to young women that they, too, may aspire to such opportunities (Ramirez & Weiss, 1979; Weiss, Ramirez, & Tracy, 1976; Baker & Jones, 1993). In addition, interpersonal interactional processes are likely at work as women and men ‘‘do gender’’ in a variety of public and private settings (West & Zimmerman, 1987; Ridgeway & Correll, 2004). From guidance counselors recommending similar college/university options to male and female secondary students, to university websites prominently featuring women students in laboratories and on athletic fields, subtle as well as formal messages begin to shape the consciousness of females (and males), potentially contributing to a reduction in sex-differentiated distribution patterns. Institutional theorists predict that countries characterized by greater endorsement of gender egalitarian norms, both formally by legal mandate and within the consciousness of citizens, are likely to have less sex segregation by field and by level (Ramirez & Woptika, 2001; Baker & Letendre, 2005). As girls and women become normatively identified as individuals rather than gendered beings in the public discourse, distinctions between the participation patterns of men and women within tertiary-level educational systems should diminish. Research has revealed, however, that women’s degree attainment decreases at the highest levels of higher education in a wide range of countries throughout the world (e.g., Fujimura-Fanselow, 1985; Kelly, 1991; Windolf, 1997; Charles & Bradley, 2002). Recent cross-national data have shown that women tend to be overrepresented at the non-university level in the average country, at relative gender parity at the university/first degree level, and underrepresented at the postgraduate level.3 Sex-segregation across levels is characterized by complex and surprising relationships. Charles and Bradley (2002) found that women’s representation within the non-university sector within highly industrialized countries was highest when that sector was relatively large, controlling for a wide range of variables.4 They found that the programmatic composition of the non-university sector (the relative, nation-specific size of various female-dominated fields such as nursing and education) did not account for female representation within the sector. The absence of a relationship between availability of particular programs of study and women’s degree attainment in the nonuniversity sector is counterintuitive. Rational models of decision-making
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lead to the expectation that individuals would pursue credentials from institutions that offer programs associated with particular educational/occupational goals. That does not appear to be the case for women, however. Furthermore, a negative zero-order correlation between women’s share of non-university and university graduates suggested that women were not using the non-university sector as a first step to higher levels within the education system. Thus, women’s participation in the non-university sector may be more aptly characterized as ‘‘alternative’’ education, rather than second chance education (see Arum & Shavit, 2005 for a discussion of this distinction). Research has also revealed extensive sex segregation by field of study within a range of countries that vary considerably in terms of societal characteristics (Jacobs, 1996; Kelly, 1991; Bradley, 2000). Engineering programs remain male-dominated, followed closely by other math-based fields. Women’s enrollment dominates education, humanities, social sciences, and medicine/health programs, while representation is reaching gender parity within the natural sciences. Recent research examining the relationship between degree attainment in particular programs and by sector uncovered puzzling findings. Charles and Bradley (2002) found, for example, that women were more apt to be located within non-university institutions in countries with higher levels of sex segregation by field of study, and female representation in female-dominated fields was greater in countries with more sex segregation across levels (Charles & Bradley, 2002). These findings suggest that the structural configurations of modern higher education systems exert an independent influence on sex segregation within the institutions that comprise the systems. Structural diversification in particular appears to attract more women to higher education by presenting a proliferation of choices and pathways that subsequently result in genderdifferentiated educational trajectories. The organization of educational pathways within systems may have gender-differentiated consequences, independent of the particular fields and programs offered within the nonuniversity sector as a whole. The non-university sector of higher education is comprised of diverse courses and degree programs worldwide. Cross-nationally, three kinds of programs co-exist: post-secondary vocational programs with wide-ranging occupational status outcomes (day care teacher, computer technician or programmer, hotel service desk attendant); continuing education or personal enrichment courses; and academic programs that articulate with university programs to culminate in a first-university degree. Individual countries vary in the offerings and mission of their non-university sector.
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Researchers have questioned for some time whether the presence of a shorter-term option within educational systems may divert or ‘‘cool-out’’ students from pursuing a four-year degree (see, for example, Brint & Karabel, 1989). The pathway that a student pursues throughout the school system has been shown to influence the probability of making future educational transitions (Breen & Jonsson, 2000), and variation in the structure of educational systems has been shown to influence education-occupational trajectories (see Shavit & Muller, 1998). Discovery of the gender-differentiated relationship between access to the non-university sector and further educational attainment, regardless of country-specific programmatic composition, raises intriguing questions about the cultural meaning surrounding higher education participation by women and men. Within countries that associate status rewards such as salary with acquisition of educational credentials, the differential educational attainment of women is likely to have significant and potentially long-term stratification consequences. As previously discussed, cultural norms concerning gender also may influence educational trajectories of men and women, particularly given global attention to equalization of women’s public sphere participation. Bradley and Charles (2002) found that measures of the extent to which genderegalitarian norms have permeated the consciousness of men and women in a particular country were associated with greater female representation in universities and at the postgraduate level.5 Gender egalitarianism had a stronger effect overall on women’s relative representation across levels than across fields of study within industrialized countries, with one notable exception. Gender egalitarianism had a stronger effect on women’s likelihood of graduating with a degree in engineering than women’s labor force participation rates, women’s overall rate of participation in higher education and size of the higher education system (Charles & Bradley, 2002). Research findings comparing factors affecting women’s access (vertical segregation) with factors affecting programmatic distributions (horizontal segregation) within higher education echo those seeking to explain labor market sex segregation (Blackstone, Browne, Brooks, & Jarman, 2002; Charles, 1992, 1998; Charles & Grusky, 2004). In particular, macro-cultural factors such as the prevalence of gender-egalitarian norms appear to have a greater impact on vertical sex segregation than horizontal sex segregation in each arena. These results lend some support for institutional arguments as the power of cultural norms endorsing gender egalitarianism outweighed the impact of internal societal characteristics on women’s access across levels of higher education, but several puzzles remain. In this study, two features
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associated with modern educational systems – gender egalitarianism and structural differentiation – exerted countervailing pressures within tertiary systems. Cultural universalism undermined some aspects of sex segregation, especially vertical sex segregation, while structural differentiation enabled vertical sex segregation as well as some aspects of horizontal sex segregation.
A CLOSER LOOK AT WOMEN’S REPRESENTATION WITHIN MATH-BASED PROGRAMS As Ramirez and Woptika have shown, women’s representation within science and math tertiary-level programs has increased in recent decades within a wide range of countries characterized by dramatically different internal characteristics such as level of economic development, political organization, and religious orientation (Woptika & Ramirez, 2003; Ramirez & Woptika, 2001). They argue that the increased representation of women within these fields can be attributed to dual intersecting forces: (1) global attention to improving women’s educational and occupational status; and (2) increased emphasis on the social and economic benefits of scientific and technological contributions to society. Global attention to the issue of women’s underrepresentation within the sciences has been attributed, in part, to its inconsistency with the cultural identification of girls and women as rational individuals (see also Baker & Letendre, 2005). Despite growth in women’s share of enrollment in these fields over time, however, women’s representation within math-based programs such as engineering and information technology has remained low as compared to their increased representation in other fields. This underrepresentation of women in the science and technology fields is also a source of concern for other aspects of women’s status since the occupational prestige and salaries associated with these fields surpass those of female-dominated fields such as education and humanities. In addition, scientific advancement for the social good may be limited by the disappearance of talented women from the ‘‘science pipeline.’’ As academic achievement differences between girls and boys/women and men have diminished considerably in recent decades, this account of gender disparity across fields of study appears to have fallen short (see discussion in Baker & Letendre, 2005; Xie & Shauman, 2003). Increasingly, research has focused on the relationship between achievement and gender-differentiated attitudes toward the fields of math and science to shed light on the absence
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of capable girls and women in math-based programs of study (Correll, 2001; Zeldin & Pajares, 2000; Sonnert, 1995; Xie & Shauman, 2003). Recent research has broadened the focus from individual-level analyses of socialization patterns to raise questions about the ways in which structural elements of educational systems interact with cultural beliefs to impact educational trajectories. Some studies have found, for example, that gender divergence in attitudes toward math and science and the related careers emerges around the equivalent of the U.S. eighth-grade (Catsambis, 1994; Hanson, 1996). At this age, male and female students are experiencing hormonal changes and social pressures that heighten sex-based identity formation. This stage in the educational trajectory also has been organizationally structured to be consequential, as students are deciding whether to begin or skip the sequenced progression of mathematics courses. In some educational systems, students are also sorted into highly determinate educational/vocational pathways with few opportunities to make later changes (Shavit & Muller, 1998). Bradley and Charles utilized data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS), UNESCO, and the ISSP (the World Values Survey), to explore the relative effects of level of economic development, structure of the higher education system, and gender-differentiated attitudes about math on women’s representation within engineering programs in 44 industrialized and industrializing countries (Bradley & Charles, 2006).6 Within this set of countries, gender gaps in attitudes toward math and math careers were greater in advanced industrial societies, despite the smaller math-achievement gap. Multiple regression analyses revealed that attitudes toward math/science careers were the strongest predictors of women’s representation in engineering programs within industrialized countries, although these attitudinal measures had no significant effect in less industrialized countries. Structural factors such as the size of the higher education system and level of economic development were the strongest predictors of women’s representation in engineering in less economically developed countries. Charles and Bradley (2006) further examined the gender and math/science participation conundrum by comparing female representation within engineering and information technology tertiary-level programs, utilizing 2001 OECD data for graduates with first university degrees in 21 countries.7 Women are underrepresented in engineering and information technology in all of these countries, although to varying degrees. Women are overrepresented in health/life sciences (relative to the average field), with the greatest degree of underrepresentation in computer science and engineering. Women
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are underrepresented in math and physical sciences in all countries but Turkey, although to a lesser extent than in engineering and computer science. Neo-institutionalists might expect that the coincidence between the emergence of information technology with considerable effort cross-nationally to increase female representation in the sciences would result in greater female representation in information technology. Macro-cultural factors present at the time of founding have been shown to affect various aspects of the composition of social structures (Stinchcombe, 1965). In this set of countries, however, women’s relative presence in information technology was not significantly higher than in engineering, an older and more historically male-dominated field (Charles & Bradley, in press). Some have argued that masculine identification associated with each of these fields override other macro-cultural changes, contributing to persistent underrepresentation of women (Byrne, 1993; McIlwee & Robinson, 1992). There was a positive and significant correlation between eighth-grade aspirations and sex-segregation across programs, although the correlation between girls’ relative mathematical achievement and aspirations was negligible, as was the correlation between female math achievement and female representation in computing. These results again suggest that math competence has limited impact on sex segregation within math-based programs, such as engineering and information technology (see also Xie & Shauman, 2003). This was further supported by the observation that women’s representation in math and the physical sciences was higher than that found in computer science and engineering. Consistent with neo-institutional predictions, level of economic development had no correlation with female representation in information technology. Charles and Bradley did not find evidence of a positive, spill-over effect of female participation in the labor force and women’s share of students in higher education on women’s representation with degree attainment in these fields, as predicted in earlier neo-institutionalist work (Baker & Jones, 1993). Persistent and seemingly irrational gender differentiation in field-specific participation patterns raises important questions about the process by which persons interpret structures of opportunity, including signaling of labor market opportunities (Hanson, Schaub, & Baker, 1996; Baker & Letendre, 2005). This question has emerged as key to understanding the forces that perpetuate and create educational stratification in an era of dramatically diminished formal structural barriers. As higher education has become increasingly democratized in composition and fluid in enrollment options (distance learning, branch campuses, and combined secondary/higher education programs, for example), access
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widened for many more status groups, with dramatic increases in women’s participation worldwide. The strong emphasis on individuals and rationality in the institutionalized model of progress constructs choice as one of the central characteristics of modern educational systems. Beyond enrollment, and especially as one completes a degree program, the very openness of the process allows for the influence of a wide variety of factors. Research has suggested that when students are free to choose their program of study, for example, gender segregation by academic field tends to increase (Catsambis, 1994; Plateau, 1991; Stolte-Heiskanenm, 1991; Kontagiannopolou-Polydorides, 1991). Accounting for such seemingly logical inconsistencies within modern educational stratification regimes provide fertile ground for new applications of neo-institutional theory.
NEO-INSTITUTIONAL FRAMING OF CHOICE Douglas (1986) notes that institutions ‘‘veil their influence’’ by the imposition of classifications that are intrinsically meaningless but given symbolic meaning through very indirect processes. She argues that we gain cognitive understanding of these structures through analogies, guiding metaphors, and the process of classification. The fields of study and various schooling types that comprise systems of higher education function as systems of classification that map meaning onto otherwise disparate activities (Bourdieu, 1984). The web of connections that bind tertiary-level fields of study and occupational outcomes are not always functional in nature, but rather assigned significance in direct and indirect ways. For example, one remedy for women’s disinclination to pursue advanced study in math and science might be to require math and science courses for all secondary students through degree completion. This policy may account for the higher than expected participation of women in tertiary-level information technology programs in Turkey and Ireland where such participation is mandated (Charles & Bradley, in press). Research is accumulating to suggest, however, that educational structures are networks of opportunity that are inconsistently interpreted by participants within and outside of education. Ayalon (2003) found that secondary science achievement and course-taking affected the educational choices of women and men at the tertiary level in Israel, in part through symbolic processes. Because of the weighting scheme used for tertiary level admissions in that country, math courses are taken by a relatively high proportion of female students. But the impact of this course-taking was not the same for
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males and females in her study. Secondary-level math background affected men’s tertiary-level course-taking in instrumental ways (that is, was associated with enrollment in additional math courses, and in related fields of study), while women’s math history led to tertiary-level participation in non-traditional (i.e., not female-dominated) fields where math was not a prerequisite. Correll’s research examining gender differences in the interpretation of math achievement (2001) and Jonsson’s work on comparative advantage (1999) also suggest that complex cognitive/emotive processes are involved in the movement from subject-specific knowledge acquisition to self-identification with programmatic fields and their associated occupational roles. Correll’s work, for example, shows that one’s sense of subject matter competence varies by gender and by subject. American high school males in her study tended to overestimate their competence in math-based fields while females under-estimated their competence. Notably, males did not globally over-estimate their competence in all fields, again suggesting masculine identification with math as a disciplinary category. Similarly, Jonsson’s work suggests that implicit comparisons guide one’s sense of subject-specific competence in an either/or way. Despite information suggesting otherwise to boys and girls, they tended to understand themselves as competent in either the math or verbal arena, thereby indirectly influencing further pursuit of study. This perceptual distinction was still inadequate to account for the considerable sex-differentiated educational patterns observed in Sweden, however (Jonsson, 1999). Additional research on the disappearance of capable students from science and technology programs suggest that academic subjects acquire gendered identities that influence the perception of suitability for potential students, above and beyond seemingly objective information concerning intellectual competence (Seymour & Hewitt, 1997). This kind of implicit understanding lies below the surface of rational explanation, and as such, is more difficult to unseat. Contradictory evidence, including stories of successful female engineers may have little effect on such unconscious beliefs and attitudes. These studies reveal layers of cognitive and affective complexity underlying aggregate patterns of programmatic distributions. Attempts to address the gender imbalance in math/science fields tend to prioritize institutionalized presumptions about the inherently rational (albeit misguided) individual, revealing the extent to which resolute belief in universal individualism has permeated the consciousness of policy-makers and researchers alike.
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The presumption of the liberal model was that once barriers to participation were removed, women would act in a ‘‘rational’’ way, that is, pursue educational and labor market opportunities that would maximize their rate of return on their human capital investment. Women’s choices in the aggregate do not make sense within the neo-classical economic model – women are disproportionately found in fields of study and sectors of higher education that lead to lower wage jobs. The rational choice response to this puzzle might be to reduce the issue to a case of decision-making under conditions of uncertainty and therefore provide more information to women so that rational decisions fall in line with a presumed utility function (Xie, 1997, and indeed considerable funding has been directed toward this approach by organizations, such as the National Science Foundation in the United States and various branches of the European Union (Byrne, 1993). Paradoxically, however, modern educational systems are characterized by decentralized and permeable organizational structures that may undermine efforts for direct administrative manipulation of particular educational outcomes (Astiz, Wiseman, & Baker, 2002). Simultaneously, the permeable character of educational systems makes them more likely to be subject to the critiques and interventions of broad-based constituents, such as parents, status groups, and the professions. The structural elements of these systems interact with broader cultural norms to result in unexpected outcomes. Much of the research reviewed here has suggested that the process of making educational choices is not information-dependent in an idealized, objective sense. Rates of women’s participation in the labor market, a signaling of opportunities to presumed rational, future-oriented women, had less of an impact on women’s participation in the elite sectors of higher education and high prestige fields of study than the prevalence of broadly held gender egalitarian attitudes (Bradley & Charles, 2002). Thus, we seem to have two explanatory accounts falling short and which directly impact presumptions guiding policy initiatives attempting to redress gender inequities in the math/science fields in particular. Girls/women do not seem to be deterred from these fields due to academic shortcomings, nor as a result of inadequate information concerning career options. Individuals may scan opportunities and internalize probabilities of success (Bourdieu, 1973), but they must first apprehend the opportunities as relevant, and that they and the others in those opportunity categories share important characteristics. As Merton observed, the ‘‘structure of the social situation’’ encourages certain status-similarities to become the basis for comparisons, and leads other status-similarities to be ignored as irrelevant (Merton, 1968).
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The puzzle of persistent sex segregation by level and field within higher education while aggregate gender parity prevails may pertain to the clash among the institutional logics of different transrational orders coming together in one institutional setting (Friedland & Alford, 1991). Education straddles different institutional spheres, encompassing the logics of human capital acquisition and political incorporation to citizenship, as well as operating as marriage market arenas which may involve the learning of dominant modes of masculinity and femininity (Kimmel, 2000; Holland & Eisenhart, 1990) as much as learning science. Within this setting, there is a multiplicity of choices and reference groups, each tapping into different aspects of an increasingly elaborated self (Frank & Meyer, 2002). Therefore, there may be a kind of subjective rationality that unfolds within the process of movement through the educational system that only ‘‘makes sense’’ to the participant in reference to the relationship between the aspect of self and frame of institutional logic invoked at the time that a behavior (which later gets labeled as choice) unfolds at any required moment of the institutional timetable. In other words, the process may be more likely characterized as a garbage can model of choice. The search for rationality becomes a search for credible accounts that are themselves framed by the available discourse. This may lend understanding to the wider diversity of women’s programmatic choices compared to men, but does not explain why women in some countries have a greater propensity to pursue educational options that lead to stereotypically female (male) outcomes than women in other countries. For example, attitudes had a stronger impact on women’s programmatic choices in industrialized countries than in less industrialized countries (Charles & Bradley, 2004). Inglehart (1997) has proposed that the relative material security enjoyed by many citizens of advanced industrial countries supports the diffusion of what he termed ‘‘postmaterialist’’ value systems. It thus facilitates the pursuit of self-expressive (as opposed to instrumental) career goals. The proliferation of choice opportunities in modern educational systems strengthens this tendency by allowing greater leeway for accommodating individual preferences, and for suggesting that no choices are permanent. Transfer out of mathematic and scientific fields is common, and often for reasons that appear to be a matter of perceived life-style preferences, and/or a sense of entitlement to an atmosphere of caring within the educational experience that is perceived to be absent in the math pedagogical approach (Strenta, Elliot, Adair, Matier, & Scott, 1994). Promise of high salaries and occupational prestige do not seem to offset these concerns to the same extent for women as they do for men.
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CONCLUDING COMMENTS The structures of opportunity that constitute modern educational systems are subject to considerable interpretation by multiple constituencies and participants who are variously attending to different aspects of the institutional logics that intersect within the social institution of education. New work in cognitive sociology (DiMaggio, 1997; Cerulo, 2002) bears promise in shedding light on how individuals and groups respond to social structures and the multiple messages they convey. The attention that neo-institutionalists have directed toward understanding the normative content of organizational structures merged with this increased attention to the meaning-making of individuals and status groups may bring new understanding to the relationship between the paradoxical outcome of persistent stratification amidst seemingly widened structures of opportunity. Choices are highly social occurrences, taking place in the context of many others who are also choosing, enabled or constrained by structure (Abbott, 1997). As this brief research summary reveals, one’s identity as a student and one’s sense of self incorporate affective as well as intellectual properties that come to bear on educational trajectories in ways that remain only minimally understood.
NOTES 1. Here I refer to IQ testing, the Scholastic Aptitude Test and the Strong Vocational Interest Inventory Blank as exemplars of the wedding of science with belief in the intrinsic and essential qualities of intelligence, academic ability, and interest within individuals. 2. See, for example, the various case studies in Altbach and Selvaratnam (2002) for a discussion of the impact of extant organizational models of higher education on the development and transformation of higher education in several Asian countries. The processes described appear to be decoupled from acute problems attributed to definable educational failure within the adopting countries, and rather stem from coercive isomorphic tendencies (such as World Bank funding of tertiary level reform in China) and mimetic processes (i.e. imitation of perceived successful Western models by Japan and other countries). 3. In several industrialized countries, women now outnumber men as first degree recipients, a dramatic phenomenon occurring within a relatively short timeframe in the history of higher education. 4. Charles and Bradley controlled for level of economic development, labor market structure, structural educational variables as well as the prevalence of gender egaliatarian norms, as described later in the paper. 5. Charles and Bradley measured ‘‘gender egalitarianism’’ as the percentage of respondents ‘‘disagreeing’’ or ‘‘strongly disagreeing’’ with the statement that
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‘‘a man’s job is to earn money; a woman’s job is to look after the home and family. Data are taken from the 1994 International Social Survey Program (ISSP). 6. The 44 countries include: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Latvia, Macedonia, Malaysia, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, UK, and USA. Within this set of countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and United States were analyzed as the more economically advanced countries. 7. The 21 countries include: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Republic of Korea, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and United States.
REFERENCES Abbott, A. (1997). On the concept of turning point. Comparative Social Research, 16, 85–105. Altbach, P. G., & Selvaratnam, V. (2002). From dependence to autonomy: The development of Asian universities. Chestnut Hill, MA: Center for International Higher Education, Boston College. Arum, R., & Shavit, Y. (2005). Secondary vocational-education and the transition from school to work. Sociology of Education, 68(3), 187–204. Astiz, F., Wiseman, A., & Baker, D. (2002). Slouching toward decentralization: Consequence of globalization for curricular control in national education systems. Comparative Education Review, 46, 66–88. Ayalon, H. (2003). Women and men go to university: Mathematical background and gender differences in choice of field in higher education. Sex Roles, 48(5/6), 277–290. Baker, D. P., & Jones, D. (1993). Creating gender equality: Cross-national gender stratification and mathematical performance. Sociology of Education, 66, 91–103. Baker, D. P., & Letendre, G. K. (2005). National differences, global similarities, world culture, and the future of schooling. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ball, S. J., Davies, J., David, M., & Reay, D. (2002). ‘Classification’ and ‘Judgment’: Social class and the ‘cognitive structures’ of choice of higher education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 28(1), 51–72. Berkovitch, N. (1999). From mothers to citizens. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Berkovitch, N., & Bradley, K. (1999). The globalization of women’s status: Consensus/dissensus in the world polity. Sociological Perspectives, 42, 481–498. Blackstone, R. M., Browne, J., Brooks, B., & Jarman, J. (2002). Explaining gender segregation. British Journal of Sociology, 53(4), 513–536. Boli, J., & Thomas, G. M. (Eds) (1999). Constructing world culture. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1973). Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In: J. Karabel & A. Halsey (Eds), Power and ideology in education. New York: Oxford University Press.
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THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS EDUCATION David F. Suarez From the standpoint of the theory and sociology of education, human rights education is intrinsically interesting because it occurs at virtually all levels of education, beginning in primary school or even before, and reaching through postsecondary to professional and adult training. Human rights is a subject studied by schoolchildren, policemen, border and prison officials, philosophers, judges and legal scholars – a diverse and expanding constituency. Because human rights education is becoming a subject taught to many age groups, it thus intersects the problem of stages of moral and cognitive development and how human rights or other concepts can be presented appropriately to and absorbed by students of different ages. Moreover, the universality of human rights, in turn, suggests that education in human rights should be properly available to all, across cultural, ethnic, political and social boundaries. Aaron Rhodes
1. INTRODUCTION Human rights education (HRE) is a professional field and a developing curricular movement that combines work in human rights and education. A variety of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) endorse teaching human rights, an increasing number of national governments incorporate human rights content in formal school curriculum, and many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) throughout the world train teachers, produce teaching manuals, and advocate for HRE in schools. While the movement The Impact of Comparative Education Research on Institutional Theory International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 7, 95–120 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3679/doi:10.1016/S1479-3679(06)07005-8
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dates back at least to the 1970s, in 1995 the United Nations initiated a Decade for Human Rights Education and formally defined HRE as ‘‘training, dissemination, and information efforts aimed at the building of a universal culture of human rights through the imparting of knowledge and skills and the moulding of attitudes’’ (United Nations, 1998, p. 3). This study investigates the gradual institutionalization of HRE, paying particular attention to the construction of the curricular movement through historical change in organizations and publications. Several previous studies on HRE have demonstrated the numerical expansion of organizations and publications addressing HRE (Suarez & Ramirez, 2005; Ramirez, Suarez, & Meyer, 2005). These studies argue that multidimensional globalization (economic, social, and cultural), the rise of mass education, and the development of the human rights movement are critical historical processes that facilitate the emergence and spread of HRE. Building on this prior research, this paper investigates the process of how HRE has changed over time and become more institutionalized at different levels of organization. In addition to the causal processes that create the conditions for diffusion, the construction of HRE involves ‘‘theorization’’ (Strang & Meyer, 1993) – discussions about HRE by professionals throughout the world that serve to build and refine the global model. The construction of human rights education also involves communication and networks of interaction that lead to information exchange and greater theorization. Attention to the process of institutionalization and the mechanisms involved contributes a dynamic account to the construction of the human rights education field and reveals several ongoing changes. First, over time human rights education moves from the periphery to the center of education discourse in many organizations. Second, human rights education transitions from a grassroots, popular education movement to a formal education project for students and professionals. Third, human rights education moves downwards, from elite discourse at abstract levels, to curricular practice in nations. Comparative education research on global models helps to situate the spread of HRE in a broader frame, and comparative education research also helps to address causal processes and sources of variation. The following section reviews the literature on comparative education, focusing primarily on the tradition that most informs the present study – neoinstitutional theory. Subsequent sections investigate the development of HRE in IGOs, NGOs, and nations, utilizing novel sources of data on publications and organizations to supplement historical data on HRE.
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2. GLOBALIZATION AND THE DIFFUSION OF EDUCATION MODELS Globalization has had a major impact on the diffusion of education models. With the advent of new technologies like the Internet, the economic integration of the majority of the nations of the world, and tourism that takes travelers to all parts of the globe, diffusion can happen very quickly. Roland Robertson (1992) refers to this process as the compression of the world. Ideas are exchanged and travel at an extraordinary rate, yet this fact does not explain which ideas diffuse or which ideas persist and become common in many parts of the world. The opportunity for contact can lead to conflict and boundary formation just as easily as it can lead to adoption (Strang & Soule, 1998). In other words, just because the marketplace for ideas has become more global does not imply that adoption and rejection are random or that every idea has an equal opportunity for success. Perhaps because education is such a central institution in modern society, education policy borrowing is quite common. Countries throughout the world recognize that education is important for creating citizens and for developing human capital, and nations constantly tinker with education systems to address problems or achieve desired outcomes. Much of the research and discussion of education models now acknowledges the pervasiveness of policy borrowing – the phenomenon almost becomes assumed or taken for granted and ceases to be a central problem to explain. Instead, the key issue becomes explaining why some models are more global and persistent than others or why models vary by national or local context. Depending on the tradition, research on variation addresses the transformation of global models as glocalization (Robertson, 1994), the ‘‘dialectic of the global and the local’’ (Arnove & Torres, 1999), or translation (Czarniawska & Sevo´n, 1996). Much of the work on policy borrowing and lending in education also focuses on variation (Schriewer, 2000; Steiner-Khamsi, 2004), emphasizing the role of the nation as a self-referential system (Schriewer & Martinez, 2004). Rather than presenting the adoption of foreign models as the enactment of modern development models, this research tradition emphasizes ‘‘externalization’’ – the process through which domestic (national) political and social conditions interact and lead to an active engagement with reform. This type of research is particularly useful for comparative case studies and more micro-level analyses, but demonstrating variation and local context does not explain why an idea like HRE spreads in the first place or why it diffuses globally. Comparative education research on why education models spread and become global are particularly salient for understanding the emergence and
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development of HRE. Globalization, as a set of interrelated economic, social, and cultural processes, acts as an important accelerant for education models. Nevertheless, globalization involves a number of forces that are not always aligned and working in union. Economic globalization, particularly the sponsorship of neoliberalism by countries like the United States and lending agencies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, has had a powerful influence on policy in many countries (Arnove, Franz, Mollis, & Torres, 1999; Carnoy & Samoff, 1990; Dezalay & Garth, 2002). However, even policies like the decentralization of education systems and other similar reforms – endorsed by capitalist nations and international lending agencies—diffuse for several reasons and involve multiple mechanisms (Astiz, Wiseman, & Baker, 2002; Dale & Robertson, 2002; Davies & Guppy, 1997). The complexity of international policy borrowing is particularly evident in research on international education tests (Baker et al., 2001; Baker & LeTendre, 2005; LeTendre, Baker, Akiba, & Wiseman, 2001; Valverde, 2004). This research suggests that the diffusion of education models is a social and a cultural process. Much of this research demonstrates elements of global borrowing and local variation, and a consistent finding is that many nations borrow from each other because they view particular reforms as appropriate and logical. Most nations are interested in modernizing and adapting their education systems to what they perceive as the ‘‘key competencies’’ for development and national progress (Rychen & Salganik, 2003). Policy borrowing often is a mimetic process – nations learn from each other, exchange information, and adopt a wide range of international education reforms. Even in the absence of pressure from lending agencies or powerful governments, many nations borrow and adopt global models because they want to be seen as modern and progressive. Comparative education research also has demonstrated longer historical trends that cannot be explained by the structuring influence of international exams, direct imposition, or human capital theories. In these cases of common policies and the incorporation of global models, the explanations center on cultural explanations. For example, several studies have found cross-national similarities in the structure of the curriculum (Benavot et al., 1991; Kamens, Meyer, & Benavot, 1996; Meyer, Kamens, & Benavot, 1992a), and the authors suggest that the modern primary and secondary curriculum is linked to standardized models of society. Moreover, comparative education research from this cultural globalization perspective has found similarities in teaching methods and textbook content, suggesting that these trends in education are part of a global
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process. A comparative study of the United States, Japan, and Germany found little variation in teacher beliefs or teaching practices (LeTendre et al., 2001), and other research has found comparable teaching scripts in additional countries (Anderson-Levitt, 2004). Textbooks and courses have changed as well, with civics textbooks from a number of countries demonstrating greater interest in global issues relative to national issues (Rauner, 1998), science textbooks presenting more depictions of people as empowered individuals with more participatory learning activities (McEneaney, 2003), and courses in tertiary education addressing more sub-national ethnic and minority groups than in the past (Frank, Wong, Meyer, & Ramirez, 2000). All of these and related empirical studies have influenced the development of neoinstitutional theory in comparative education. Perhaps because neoinstitutional theory was in its infancy in the 1970s and early 1980s, studies in this tradition had to demonstrate that global processes were affecting education. Technical-functional theories and conflict theories dominated education during these decades, prioritizing local dynamics and national contestation over alternative explanations. As a result, evidence of exogenous forces impacting national education systems was uncommon and surprising. Over time, research on globalization has become more common and evidence of exogenous forces continues to mount – not everything that happens at the national level is the result of dynamics exclusively internal to nations. With notions of international context firmly entrenched in education research, many of the key questions have started to change. Besides highlighting the fact that change can be both endogenous and exogenous, new studies in comparative education are grappling with competing or alternative logics within globalization. Education research utilizing neoinstitutional theory continues to prioritize cultural explanations over other alternatives, and comparative education studies from other traditions have elaborated, refined, and challenged these explanations. Much of the research utilizing neoinstitutional theory now places greater emphasis on networks of and linkages to international organizations and professional authority. Additional mechanisms that contribute to the spread of models and ideas are investigated as well, and comparative education research in the neoinstitutional tradition has started to probe into qualitative processes as well as outcomes. As an emerging global model, multiple mechanisms influence the diffusion of HRE. The economic, social, and cultural aspects of globalization have enabled and intensified the spread of HRE. Later sections of this study
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will attend to the structuration in HRE, but two additional global cultural processes situate the curricular movement in a broader context – the rise of mass education and the spread of the human rights movement.
3. MASS EDUCATION AND THE HUMAN RIGHTS MOVEMENT Evidence of the expansion of mass education no longer creates much debate – the majority of countries throughout the world tend to provide access to basic education for their citizens. The United Nations actively promotes ‘‘Education for All’’ (Torres, 2000), NGOs advocate for the right to an education (Mundy & Murphy, 2001), and very few countries claim that an educated populace is not a national goal. Even though the quality of education varies tremendously, most countries provide an education for individuals born in a society regardless of race, class, gender, or religion. Neoinstitutional research on mass education (Meyer, Ramirez, Rubinson, & Boli-Bennett, 1977; Boli, Ramirez, & Meyer, 1985; Meyer, Ramirez, & Soysal, 1992b; Ramirez & Boli, 1987) stresses the importance that education places on the agentic individual, and this research emphasizes the role of mass education in nation-building. Compared to an ‘‘older world’’ in which it was acceptable to deny individuals access to education on the basis of race, religion, or gender, the expansion of mass education represents a significant change. Moreover, this change precedes the development of education for human capital purposes, suggesting that mass education arises in order to create citizens for the modern polity (Meyer et al., 1992b). While the rise of mass education does not necessarily lead to a reduction in inequality between social classes (Hannum & Buchmann, 2004), increased access to education is a major development in the modern world. As an institution, education legitimizes knowledge and legitimizes identities. Mass education in particular ‘‘creates a whole series of social assumptions about the common culture of society and y constructs broad definitions of citizens and human rights as part of the modern world view’’ (Meyer, 1977, p. 69). Even with globalization, HRE would be unlikely to expand if individuals in the majority of nations did not have the universal right to an education. In this respect, mass education serves as a related but independent causal process that contributes to the spread of HRE. Similarly, the human rights movement is an important precursor to HRE, setting the groundwork for the transformation of human rights from a radical social movement to a component of national curricula.
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The human rights movement is part of a historical trend that prioritizes the sanctity and the rights of the individual. Without question, the human rights movement has encountered many obstacles, and it was not until the holocaust and the events of World War II that the human rights movement gained legitimacy at the highest levels. The League of Nations (which preceded the United Nations and was created after World War I) contained some language on human rights but was regarded as an ineffectual organization with no power (Lauren, 2003). Before the League of Nations, most human rights efforts were international campaigns carried out by dedicated NGOs and individuals with little support from governments (Keck & Sikkink, 1998). After World War II, however, the United Nations was created with a clear mandate to promote human rights. In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed, signaling to the world that human rights was a global priority (Lauren 2003). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights also made the first direct international reference to the importance of education for learning human rights in Article 26, stressing that ‘‘Education shall be directed to the full development of human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.’’ Beyond the United Nations, the human rights movement has always relied on the work of human rights organizations as advocates and as watchdogs. A number of different studies have documented the role of NGOs in shaming governments that violate human rights (Keck & Sikkink, 1998; Risse & Sikkink, 1999; Sikkink, 1993). After the creation of the United Nations, NGO work primarily involved the promotion of human rights norms, or the attempt to persuade governments to sign international human rights treaties. This aspect of the human rights movement has never disappeared, but by the mid-1960s there was a shift from the promotion of international treaties to the protection of the rights identified in international instruments (Wiseberg & Scoble, 1981). As subsequent sections will demonstrate, many organizations within the human rights movement also have incorporated a focus on the prevention of future abuses through work in HRE. These developments suggest that human rights education has emerged as part of a global cultural and social process that prioritizes rights and human dignity. Economic globalization also plays a role in the development of human rights education, but the links to neoliberal economics or the
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‘‘Washington Consensus’’ are not straightforward. HRE organizations and publications on HRE began to increase rapidly in the 1980s (Suarez & Ramirez, 2005; Ramirez et al., 2005), during the height of the Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher era. Undoubtedly, individual rights and individual development (particularly through education) have been central components of the neoliberal economic model in recent decades. However, the United States and England withdrew from UNESCO during this same period (both countries rejoined recently), rejecting one of the organizations most responsible for giving legitimacy to HRE. In addition, while plenty of evidence point to an increase in funds for all types of NGOs in recent decades, partly as a result of government devolution policies sponsored by Reagan and Thatcher (Smith, 1998; Tvedt, 2002), Until very recently, education for the promotion of human rights has been seen as the softest side of the already ‘soft’ human rights portfolio. Most donors have gravitated toward human rights projects that involve immediate strategies for dealing with gross violations and their aftermath, rather than long-term preventative strategies. (Seydegart and Jackson 1998, p. 583)
Richard Pierre Claude (1996) concurs with this assertion, finding that during the 1970s and the 1980s, funding went to monitoring human rights violations, not prevention of human rights violations through HRE. The implication is not that that neoliberalism has had no impact on HRE, but economic globalization alone is inadequate for explaining the emergence of HRE. All aspects of globalization, mass education, and the human rights movement provide the institutional context for the diffusion of HRE. Fig. 1 presents a summary of this basic argument. Domestic circumstances such as human rights violations and political factors (like democratization) play a role in the development of HRE, but globalization, mass education, and the human rights movement have independent effects at the global level. Understanding the causal processes involved in the diffusion of HRE is useful for identifying why the model has become global, and the construction of HRE is an important piece of the puzzle as well. Stated differently, knowing why a model diffuses does not always shed light on the process of how the model has developed or changed over time. Investigating the construction of the HRE field helps to highlight the carriers of the movement and the different forms of communication that build and institutionalize the education model.
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Social, Political, and Economic Globalization World Educational Expansion
World-Level Human Rights Education Organization and Discourse
World Human Rights Movement
Controls: Global democratization (fall of Berlin Wall); Major crises (human rights, humanitarian, war)
Fig. 1.
Theoretical Explanation for the Global Expansion of HRE. Source: Based on a Figure from Ramirez et al. (2005).
4. COMMUNICATION AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE HRE FIELD HRE has diffused widely without a central actor pushing a particular model. A large number of actors – individual, organizational, national, and international – have participated in the creation of HRE, and no particular actor has succeeded in imposing one vision. HRE continues to expand and now serves students (primary, secondary, and tertiary), professionals, (doctors, lawyers, police officers), and a variety of populations (women, children, and indigenous peoples). The historical development of the field demonstrates the increasing mobilization around HRE and the creation of a distinct identity for HRE. To begin with, HRE involves a shift from an emphasis on international law to an emphasis on formal education and schooling. Much of the early work in the human rights movement understandably involved the creation of international law and the dissemination of information regarding those laws (Wiseberg & Scoble, 1981). Many of the organizations involved in developing HRE thus had a legal focus. As one human rights educator noted, in the 1970s: Much of what was defined as human rights education was shaped principally by lawyers y . Not surprisingly, on a practical or methodological level, this often led to a focus
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on the law and a formal discussion of rights as the entry point to human rights education. (Miller, 2002)
However, HRE expands from the legal realm to formal education for children. While the legal aspects of human rights continue to be important, HRE for primary and secondary education involves educators and education professionals, not just legal scholars. Researchers and practitioners come to recognize that promoting HRE requires educational activity, not just legal training (Martin, Gitta, & Ige, 1997; Claude, 1997). The implication is that the idea of human rights becomes part of the education process for everyone, and the expansion of the curricular movement has led to the creation of the HRE field. An organizational field refers to ‘‘those organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations that produce similar services or products’’ (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, p. 148). DiMaggio and Powell (1983, p. 148) go on to clarify that: Fields only exist to the extent that they are institutionally defined. The process of institutional definition, or ‘structuration,’ consists of four parts: [1] an increase in the extent of interaction among organizations in the field; [2] the emergence of sharply defined interorganizational structures of domination and patterns of coalition; [3] an increase in the information load with which organizations in a field must contend; and [4] the development of a mutual awareness among participants in a set of organizations that they are involved in a common enterprise.
As recently as 1970, HRE did not exist as a field. The human rights movement itself was still developing, and no organizations or nations were actively promoting human rights as a topic for the school curriculum. The times have changed. Several studies indicate that more countries incorporate human rights topics into the curriculum now than in the past (Inter-American Institute of Human Rights (IIDH), 2000, 2002; United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR), 2005a). Moreover, a number of new databases collect information on organizations working on HRE (Elbers, 2002; Human Rights Internet, 2000; UNHCHR, 2005b; UNESCO, 2005) and publications dealing with HRE (Amnesty International, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1996, 1997; Elbers, 2002; UNHCHR, 2005b). The following sections focus on the construction of HRE in IGOs, NGOs, and nations – the main actors in the field. In each type of organization, changes point to an increasing awareness and attention to HRE. Evidence suggests that the HRE field has become more ‘‘institutionally defined,’’ and information from the databases on organizations and publications will supplement historical evidence of structuration in the field. In order to
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emphasize the development of the field, evidence will be presented in relation to the four components of structuration described above.
4.1. Increasing Interaction among Organizations in the HRE Field The Universal Declaration of Human Rights mentions the importance of teaching human rights, but HRE began to emerge a bit later as part of education documents in IGOs. In 1974 UNESCO promoted human rights as a curricular reform with the ‘‘Recommendation Concerning Education for International Understanding, Cooperation and Peace and Education Relating to Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.’’ Since this first step, all of the other regional cultural IGOs (the Council of Europe, the Organization of American States, and the Organization for African Unity) have endorsed human rights as an important issue for nations to address in schools. The Council of Europe was particularly active in the 1970s and the 1980s, passing a resolution on teaching human rights in 1978 and subsequently passing a recommendation on teaching human rights in 1985. Recently, the Council of Europe created a Commissioner for Human Rights (1999), and one of the mandates of the Commissioner is to promote ‘‘education in and awareness of human rights’’ (Council of Europe, 2005a). In line with the mandate of the Commissioner, the Council of Europe created a human rights activities database that lists past and future Council activities related to HRE. As an example activity, in November of 2005 the Council of Europe had the ‘‘First Seminar on European Human Rights as part of Curricula for the Continuing Education of Russian Militia’’ (Council of Europe, 2005b). Like the Council of Europe, in recent years the United Nations has taken a more central role in supporting HRE. In 1995 the United Nations initiated the Decade for Human Rights Education, and the General Assembly recently approved the World Program for Human Rights Education (UNHCHR, 2005c). While it is possible to interpret these developments as independent of each other, nations comprise the membership of the United Nations and other IGOs. The General Assembly of the United Nations represents the nations of the world, and while more focused, memberships in regional IGOs also are comprised of nations. All IGOs, whether they are regional or global, constitute networks of elites at the highest levels of government. Many of these officials interact with each other in a variety of contexts, and there is plenty of reason to
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suggest that ideas diffuse easily across IGOs through relational contact. Even if there is no direct relational contact, most IGOs are not secretive about their activities, promoting their work and their accomplishments to a broad audience through press releases, websites, and other means. These trends are not limited to IGOs – increasing interaction is evident within NGOs and between NGOs and IGOs. In NGOs, HRE began with human rights organizations and work in popular education – informal education intended to raise awareness about human rights in the community (Candau, 2000; Claude, 1997; Fruhling, Alberti, & Portales, 1989; Magendzo, 1997). Volunteers and activists promoted human rights through organizations at a grassroots level in order to teach human rights concepts and enable individuals to defend their rights (Wiseberg & Scoble, 1981). Over time this model has given way to a much more professionalized model of HRE for formal education. This ‘‘schooling’’ of human rights, the transformation of the human rights movement into part of the education process, has involved a number of changes in NGOs that demonstrate greater interaction. Available evidence suggests that Amnesty International was the first NGO to compile a global bibliography on HRE publications (in 1992). To create the bibliography Amnesty International conducted research of its own, but the organization also solicited information from other NGOs involved in HRE. Besides creating bibliographies and communicating with other organizations, international NGOs (INGOs) have sponsored conferences that bring together a diverse group of individuals. In Latin America, for example, the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights and the Latin American Council for the Education of Adults (CEAAL) have been sponsoring HRE conferences since the early 1980s. Many NGOs have contributed to the development of HRE, and the midterm report on the United Nations Decade for Human Rights Education comments that ‘‘Both the United Nations and its Member States have repeatedly recognized the invaluable contribution of non-governmental organizations to HRE. The present review reconfirms that non-governmental organizations are key actors in that field’’ (United Nations, 2000, p. 20). Increasing interaction represents just one aspect of structuration in the HRE field.
4.2. Interorganizational Structures of Domination and Patterns of Coalition Interorganizational structures of domination are not particularly clear in the HRE field, but there are clear differences between IGOs, NGOs,
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nation-states, and professionals who advocate for HRE. In order for human rights to be included in the curriculum, nations obviously have to endorse the education reforms. In this sense, nation-states dominate the field, but they definitely do not dominate the HRE publications arena. In the works they publish and the policies they endorse, NGOs tend to be more radical than the other actors in the HRE field (Flowers, 2002). Human rights education publications provide a rich source of information on HRE that is available to a broad audience, and the publications begin to diffuse knowledge and create a community of scholars at a global level. Publications point to the ‘‘thickening’’ of the human rights field, but they also demonstrate how organizations help to drive the agenda. NGOs and IGOs advocate for the incorporation of HRE into the curriculum, and they also provide many of the materials available for use in classrooms. Even though nations are the most powerful actors, nations are not responsible for the majority of the content in HRE publications. Fig. 2 presents data on organizations responsible for human rights publications. As the figure indicates, NGOs have written more of the 2231 books on HRE than nations, IGOs, and traditional publishing houses. The first set of 80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 IGO
NGO
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Corporation
Fig. 2. Types of Organizations Responsible for HRE Publications (N ¼ 2231). Source: Amnesty International (1992, 1993, 1995, 1996, 1997); Elbers (2002); UNHCHR (2005b).
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books to address HRE directly in the title began to appear in the late 1960s and the early 1970. Among the oldest HRE books is A Guide to Human Rights Education, by Paul Hines (1969). In 1984 there was an unusual spike in publications by governments, but nations did not publish anywhere near those numbers again until the United Nations Decade for Human Rights Education began in 1995. Interestingly, the largest spike in publications for IGOs also took place immediately following the start of the UN Decade, although IGOs have been much more active in publishing HRE materials than nations. In recent years, traditional publishing houses have been responsible for an increasing proportion of publications, perhaps signaling the increasing profitability of books on HRE and the increasing legitimacy of the curricular movement. Relative to IGOs and NGOs, however, the major surge in HRE publications took place later for traditional publishers. More than anything else, the figure demonstrates the consistency of NGO efforts since the late 1980s. In spite of inequalities in resources and power, NGOs have been leaders in creating appropriate materials for use in classrooms. Patterns of coalition are easier to identify than patterns of domination, and in many cases coalitions develop along regional lines. Little research has documented the expansion of networks of human rights educators, but in the last 10 years national and regional HRE networks have become more common. These networks promote the exchange of information, materials, and ideas, and the networks also create a community of human rights educators. Like IGOs, INGOs sponsor conferences, publish materials, and maintain ‘‘virtual’’ networks of human rights educators through Internet websites. These networks were in their nascent stages of development in the 1980s, but as the field has grown, consolidated, and become more institutionalized, networks of human rights educators have proliferated and expanded. In Latin America, Venezuela created a national HRE network in 1984, Peru established a network in 1986, and Brazil added its own network in 1995. In the late 1990s many HRE networks became ‘‘virtual’’ – communities of teachers and academics exchanging ideas through the Internet. The first global Internet discussion forum was created in 1999 by an INGO, Human Rights Education Associates. Several regional discussion boards have emerged more recently, maintained by: (1) the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights (Costa Rica), (2) the Asia-Pacific Regional Resource Center for Human Rights Education (Thailand), (3) the Cairo Institute for Human Rights (Egypt), (4) the Union Interafricaine des Droits de l’Homme (Burkina Faso), and (5) the Moscow School for Human Rights (Russia).
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There is little question that interactions have increased within the HRE field in the last 20 years. Publications shed light on some of the power disparities but also reveal that many types of organizations participate in the construction of HRE. Moreover, the emergence of national, regional, and global networks of human rights educators demonstrates both increasing interactions and patterns of coalition. As previous sections suggest, the information load with which organization in the HRE field have to contend also has increased substantially.
4.3. Institutional Expansion: Diversifying Content in the HRE Field The increase in publications dealing with HRE represent a central component of the burgeoning material that organizations in the HRE field have to deal with. The increase in information is not just quantitative – the types of HRE publications continue to diversify and the topics that comprise HRE have broadened as well. Fig. 3 presents data on different topics that HRE is beginning to address. Because the oldest publications in the database date back only as far as 1967 and just 13 total publications appeared before 1980, the figure presents 20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 Children
Indigenous
Women
Health
Police
Fig. 3. Subset of HRE Publication Topics (N ¼ 350). Source: Amnesty International (1992, 1993, 1995, 1996, 1997); Elbers (2002); UNHCHR (2005b).
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publications since 1980. The majority of the older publications on HRE are general, with titles like Education and Information in the Field of Human Rights: Activities of the Council of Europe (1982). However, over time the titles of publications suggest that research and documentation has become much more focused. Fig. 3 includes 350 publications that emphasize HRE in relation to five topics or groups: children, women, indigenous peoples, the police, and health. Yearly counts vary substantially, but the figure clearly demonstrates the increasing number of focused publications. Besides the focused publications presented in the figure, HRE has started to address a number of additional topics. For example, in 2004 the AsiaPacific Human Rights Information Center published Human Rights Education in Asian Schools and Amnesty International (UK) published Human Rights in the Curriculum: Mathematics, Bringing Citizenship to Life in the Math Classroom. The first document focuses on Asian Schools, and the second document addresses the incorporation of human rights in the mathematics curriculum. Moving from general documents on HRE, publications now address topics, groups, regions and specific school subjects. Expanding the scope of HRE even further, HRE also now deals with homosexuality, the military, and prisons. Interesting publication titles include: Breaking the Classroom Silence: A Curriculum about Lesbian and Gay Human Rights, published by Amnesty International (Donahue & Phariss, 1994), Strengthening Protection in War: A Search for Professional Standards, published by the International Committee of the Red Cross (Caverzasio, 2001), and A Human Rights Approach to Prison Management: A Handbook for Prison Staff, by Andrew Coyle (published by the University of London, 2002). The content of HRE has expanded, both in terms of the total number of publication and in the types of publications. It is important to stress, however, that the number of organizations has not remained static either. Many organizations deal with specific countries or particular issues. For example, the Uganda Human Rights Education and Information Centre (UHEDOC), the Sudanese Organization for Human Rights Education and Democracy, and the Tanzania Human Rights Education Trust all represent recently founded African organizations dealing with HRE. In addition, a number of organizations that focus on specific groups or topics now address HRE. For example, in 1997 the Centre for Law Enforcement Education (CLEEN) was founded in Nigeria, and in 1999 the Institute for Women’s Studies and Research was founded in Iran and the Society for Human Rights and Prisoners Aid (SHARP) was founded in Pakistan. These organizations work on HRE, but they focus on specific topics. All evidence
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points to greater expertise and local knowledge regarding human rights and education. Nations cannot claim that there is no information available on how to train the military or the police on human rights, plenty of materials are available for use in primary and secondary school classes, and many organizations are capable of implementing training programs if governments suggest there is no local expertise.
4.4. Mutual Awareness among Organizations of Involvement in a Common Enterprise When did HRE become a common enterprise? Although there is no specific date, several issues stand out that serve as clues. The names of organizations dedicated to HRE provide some evidence of the consolidation of the movement, particularly the organizations that mention HRE directly in their name. The database on HRE organizations (Elbers, 2002; Human Rights Internet, 2000; UNHCHR, 2005b; UNESCO, 2005) includes founding dates of organizations, but in many cases organizations began working on HRE well after they were created. Although this issue is a serious problem that makes it inappropriate to credit the oldest organizations in the database with being the first to work on HRE, the actual names of organizations suggest that HRE became a main focus for organizations beginning in the late 1970s. Of the 927 HRE organizations in the database with founding dates, the first organization to mention HRE in its name is the Foundation for Human Rights and Peace Education, an NGO from Hungary that was created in 1976. Most of the oldest organizations that include HRE in their names also mention peace – the International Training Center on Human Rights and Peace Education (founded in 1984) and the Peruvian Institute of Education for Human Rights and Peace (founded in 1985) are particularly good examples. Although organizations were working on HRE prior to the founding dates of these three organizations, it was not until the late-1970s and the 1980s when organizations were founded with HRE in their names. Utilizing the names of organizations to address the emergence of HRE as a common enterprise provides a particularly conservative estimate for the consolidation of the movement, but by the late 1980s organizations were emerging with a main focus on HRE. As examples, the University Center for Human Rights Education was founded in the Philippines in 1987, the Venezuelan Program on Human Rights Education and Action was founded in 1988, the People’s Movement for Human Rights Education also was
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founded in 1988, and the Asian Regional Resource Center for Human Rights Education was founded in 1992. These transformations in NGOs are similar to changes that have taken place in IGOs, particularly the United Nations. As mentioned earlier, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights mentions the importance of teaching human rights, and the 1974 UNESCO ‘‘Recommendation Concerning Education for International Understanding, Cooperation and Peace and Education Relating to Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms’’ was the first education-specific IGO document to address HRE. However, the Recommendation did not address HRE as a stand-alone movement – the title of the Recommendation embeds HRE in a very wide frame. UNESCO approached HRE obliquely, mentioning the importance of teaching human rights while also addressing other topics like peace and international understanding. In both NGOs and IGOs, then, HRE begins with links to other global education models like peace education and education for international understanding. Moreover, at the IGO level HRE encountered stiff resistance in the 1970s. The Recommendation was highly contested, and several Western democracies refused to support the document (United States, France, Germany, Australia, and Canada). Not only was HRE ‘‘hidden’’ in a larger document on education, the entire document encountered considerable resistance. Comparing the United Nations Decade (which began in 1995) to the UNESCO Recommendation demonstrates three trends in the development of the HRE field. First, HRE now stands alone as a policy goal. Whereas teaching human rights was embedded within a larger frame in the Recommendation, the Decade addresses HRE directly. Second, HRE has gained in relevance. UNESCO is an agency of the United Nations; HRE has progressed from being an issue on the fringe of an agency of the United Nations to being an issue for the main body of the United Nations. Finally, HRE is more than a passing fad for the United Nations. Now that the United Nations Decade is coming to a close, the United Nations has given additional support to the movement by endorsing the World Programme for Human Rights Education. In considering the construction of the field, several developments stand out. To begin with, HRE has developed a name – the curricular movement has an official label. The idea of teaching human rights moved from being an abstract concept to being a movement called ‘‘Human Rights Education.’’ Official documents now refer to the acronym HRE, and discussions of teaching human rights now have a common frame. Besides developing a label, the number of IGOs that address HRE has increased, and the example
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of the United Nations suggests that the ‘‘location’’ of HRE is more central in IGOs now than at any time in the past. Developments in NGOs demonstrate similar trends. Organizations founded in the 1970 begin to address HRE in their names, and by the late 1980s many organizations were established with a particular focus on HRE. Considered in conjunction with the tremendous explosion of publications on HRE presented in previous sections, these transformations in IGOs and NGOs provide compelling evidence of the consolidation of the HRE field.
5. THE CONSTRUCTION OF FIELDS REVISITED Human rights education is an emerging field, and the curricular movement is in the process of institutionalization in many nations throughout the world. Understanding the creation and the development of the HRE field is important because Structuration processes are historically and logically prior to the processes of institutional isomorphism to which most institutional research has attended andyare likely to entail quite different causal dynamics. In other words, to understand the institutionalization of organizational forms, we must first understand the institutionalization of organizational fields. (DiMaggio, 1991, p. 267, emphasis his)
A variety of nations include human rights topics in the formal school curriculum, but the form is still in the process of institutionalization. IGOs promote their own models, NGOs develop and promote their own models, and professionals disagree on specifics even though they consider themselves human rights educators. In spite of the differences between types of organizations (and there is plenty of diversity within IGOs, NGOs, and nations as well), many changes have taken place that serve to consolidate the HRE field. Fig. 4 presents a summary of structuration in the HRE field along two dimensions: level of interest and intensity of interest. Over time, more IGOs, NGOs, and nations have developed an interest in HRE. Quantitatively, the number of IGOs, NGOs, and nations involved in HRE continues to increase. Transformations have taken place within these organizations that also demonstrate an increase in intensity of participation in HRE. For IGOs, HRE has moved from the periphery to the center, exemplified by changes in the United Nations. In NGOs, HRE has shifted from grassroots efforts intended for communities to professionalized efforts intended for schools and formal education. Finally, in nations HRE has moved from
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Change in Level of Interest
Change in Intensity of Interest
IGO
Peripheral
Central
NGO
Grassroots
Professional
Nation
Discourse
Curriculum
Fig. 4.
Structuration in the HRE Field.
the level of discourse to textbooks and the formal curriculum. Rather than simply signing documents in favor of HRE, many nations are beginning to include HRE in the intended curriculum. In the formal curriculum, HRE usually appears in civic education, and HRE involves a shift from the rights of citizens to the rights of humans. Citizen rights are reframed as human rights, and the distinction between the rights of citizens and non-citizens become more blurred (Soysal, 1994). Evidence indicates that HRE has become a curricular movement for formal education involving many types of organizations. Some human rights organizations now publish materials, train teachers, and give seminars on human rights based on professional expertise. In addition, organizations not originally aligned with the human rights movement now develop materials for HRE. Not only are new organizations ‘‘born’’ that focus exclusively on HRE, organizations from other fields shift their missions to incorporate HRE. In particular, a number of development organizations (Nelson & Dorsey, 2003; Mundy & Murphy, 2001) and education organizations now maintain programs on HRE. This development of HRE from the fringe to the mainstream is fairly typical in studies of institutionalization. As Sutton and Dobbin (1996, p. 808) find: In the early stages, when the practice lacks legitimacy, semiprofessions y are important sponsors because they act opportunistically and are relatively unconstrained by professional orthodoxy. More thorough institutionalization, signified by the achievement of taken-for-granted legitimacy, seems to require the sponsorship of mature professions.
Although human rights organizations have a high degree of legitimacy at the international level, national governments are not usually very excited to deal with human rights organizations. Human rights organizations frequently
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expose violations and create problems for governments. These organizations are almost always marginalized from traditional political systems, and activities like teacher training and curriculum development for human rights mark a significant innovation. Once these activities started to become more commonplace it was less surprising to see more traditional organizations enter the field. The entry of legitimate and internationally respected actors into the HRE field further expands organization and mobilization. For example, Amnesty International gives HRE more legitimacy and much greater visibility in the world through its promotion of human rights for schools. In many respects these findings parallel developments in IGOs. HRE begins as a ‘‘cottage industry’’ on the fringes of UNESCO, eventually emerges in other IGOs, and finally appears prominently as the United Nations Decade for Human Rights Education and now the World Programme for Human Rights Education. IGOs provide legitimacy for organizations working on HRE, and HRE emerged in NGOs at about the same time that IGOs began to endorse HRE. While causality is unclear, NGOs clearly benefit from being able to refer to the existence of HRE at the highest levels of organization. The increasing visibility of HRE at the international level helps to spur developments at other levels. The incorporation of human rights into national education systems represents the most profound level of institutionalization and legitimation for HRE. Although some nations have participated in constructing HRE (either through pioneering efforts at the national level or through sponsorship of HRE in IGOs), for the most part nations have been much slower than IGOs and INGOs in promoting HRE. Nevertheless, a number of countries throughout the world have started to endorse HRE within their own borders, and some countries have even started to publish their own materials on HRE. In a few instances nations mention HRE in national constitutions or in education legislation without actually incorporating HRE into the curriculum, but over time the curricular movement has moved from the periphery more to the center – from the level of discourse to curricular plans and textbooks.
6. CONCLUSION Comparative education research has made many contributions to neoinstitutional theory, adding studies of process to quantitative work on outcomes, and integrating dynamic analyses of mechanisms into longitudinal research on institutionalization. Comparative education has increased our knowledge of how education systems have changed over time while also demonstrating
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that variation is a common and expected component of institutional processes. In addition, comparative education research has introduced a variety of new theories and hypotheses to explain why and how globalization affects education. Causal explanations in neoinstitutional theory have been refined accordingly, both with descriptive qualitative studies and with quantitative analyses that incorporate new variables. As better data become available, and as new studies refine or challenge prior work, research in the neoinstitutional tradition will continue to grow and inform debates on policy borrowing and education reform. This paper contributes to neoinstitutional theory by pointing to a number of aspects of structuration in the HRE field. To begin with, a variety of actors demonstrate increasing interest and organizing around HRE. A greater number of IGOs, NGOs, and nations promote HRE now than at any time in the past. In addition, professionals throughout the world meet, discuss, and produce materials on HRE. International, regional, and national networks of human rights educators have developed, some functioning through interpersonal contact and others through ‘‘virtual’’ space. These networks have to contend with information from diverse sources representing a variety of models for HRE. Finally, human rights educators are now part of a common movement. Teachers can find materials in a variety of languages, and they can ask for advice from other human rights educators throughout the world. A number of organizations provide free resources through the Internet, and teachers with access to the Internet can develop lesson plans or find organizations in their area with expertise in HRE. All of these transformations indicate that the HRE field has become more cohesive and developed. The discussion of the causal processes involved in the spread of HRE suggests that the curricular movement is part of a broader, historical trend linked to globalization, the rise of mass education, and the human rights movement. The analysis of structuration contributes the finding that theorization and communication intensify the processes of institutionalization while also providing space for local variation and creative responses to the rise of HRE.
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Suarez, D., & Ramirez, F. O. (2005). Human rights and citizenship: The emergence of human rights education. In: C. A. Torres (Ed.), Critique and Utopia: New developments in the sociology of education. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Sutton, J. R., & Dobbin, F. (1996). The two faces of governance: Responses to legal uncertainty in U.S. firms, 1955 to 1985. American Sociological Review, 61(5), 794–811. Torres, R. M. (2000). One decade of education for all: The challenge ahead. Buenos Aires: UNESCO. Tvedt, T. (2002). Development NGOs: Actors in a global civil society or in a new international social system? Voluntas, 13(4). United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). (2005). Online database accessed available at: http://databases.unesco.org/fileh/wwwi32.exe/[in= interro.in]/. Accessed 5/10/2005. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR). (2005a). Untitled web resource available at: http://193.194.138.190/html/menu6/1/initiatives.htm. Accessed 6/10/05. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR). (2005b). Human Rights Education online database accessed in January 2005 at: www.unhchr.ch/hredu.nsf/. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR). (2005c). World Programme on Human Rights Education http://www.ohchr.org/english/issues/education/training/programme.htm. Accessed 6/10/2005. United Nations. (1998). The United Nations decade for human rights education 1995–2004, United Nations document HR/PUB/DECADE/1998/1. New York: United Nations. United Nations. (2000). Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the mid-term global evaluation of the progress made towards the achievement of the objectives of the United Nations Decade for Human Rights Education. Document A/55/360. Valverde, G. (2004). Curriculum convergence in Chile: The global and the local context of reforms in curriculum policy. Comparative Education Review, 48(2), 174–201. Wiseberg, L. S., & Scoble, H. M. (1981). Recent trends in the expanding universe of NGOs dedicated to the protection of human rights. In: V. P. Nanda, J. R. Scarritt & G. W. Shepherd (Eds), Global human rights: Public policies, comparative measures, and NGO strategies. Colorado: Westview Press.
RETHINKING ‘MACRO’ AND ‘MESO’ LEVELS OF NEW INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS: THE CASE OF INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION CORPORATIONS Scott Davies and Janice Aurini INTRODUCTION: INSTITUTIONAL THEORY AND INTERNATIONAL EDUCATIONAL CORPORATIONS Private tutoring is a worldwide phenomenon, long-popular in Europe and Asia (Baker & LeTendre, 2005; Bray, 2003; Stevenson & Baker, 1992), and increasingly so in North America (Aurini, 2004; Aurini & Davies, 2004; Davies, 2004). However, this K-12 ‘‘supplementary education’’ or ‘‘shadow education’’ sector is being transformed. Until recently it has been a cottage industry of individual tutors and test prep companies, but corporate bodies are revolutionizing it around the globe. For instance, Kumon has spread from Japan to now boast 26,000 franchises in 43 countries.1 Educate, Inc., the umbrella company for industry giant Sylvan Learning Center, currently operates 950 centers in North America, and 900 in Europe under the Schu¨lerhilfe brand. Several franchises have expanded from their original target market of math and reading tutoring to aggressively enter new niches, The Impact of Comparative Education Research on Institutional Theory International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 7, 121–136 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3679/doi:10.1016/S1479-3679(06)07006-X
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including SAT/ACT prep, high school credits, online tutoring, and postsecondary programs.2 These corporations are thriving in niches with relatively little competition from established public schools or non-profit institutions. The largest corporations are publicly traded and rank among top companies in business circles. This chapter seeks to understand this phenomenon using New Institutional Theory (IT). These corporations present a challenge to Institutional analyses of educational organizations because of their international scope and hybrid influences. We distinguish between the ‘‘macro-level’’ components of the theory that predict a global diffusion of rationalized cultural ideals that promote educational expansion, and ‘‘meso-level’’ components that predict isomorphism among educational organizations. We argue that the practices of corporations such as Kumon and Educate, Inc. largely support the macro version of the New Institutionalism, but present some interesting challenges to its meso version. Specifically, they embody worldwide trends in which rationalized school forms are further penetrating modern societies, but do so as ‘‘hybrid’’ organizations that mix educational and corporate elements. While they are ‘‘technical organizations’’ that seek profit through product expansion and diversification, they do so in highly ‘‘institutional environments’’ defined by the contours of public school systems. Because they must simultaneously shed legitimate yet costly services while attempting to conform to institutional expectations, they are diverging from standard educational forms in key ways. Overall, we conclude that rising demand for education is creating opportunities for educational structures that are influenced by organizational templates from not only the world of education, but also from the world of business. Below we further elaborate on the macro and meso levels of the theory and set up our examination of this growing sector.
MACRO LEVEL: THE GLOBAL DIFFUSION OF RATIONALIZED EDUCATION The start point for Institutional analyses at the macro level is the worldwide explosion of education. Primary and secondary education became universal in most of the world’s nation-states over the 20th century, and higher education is now following suit. For instance, Institutionalists have documented how worldwide tertiary education enrollments grew a staggering 2000% between 1900 and 2000, and continue to surge to unprecedented levels (Schofer & Meyer, 2004). Today it is common for more than half of a
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young age cohort to enter post secondary levels in developed countries. Even in developing countries, universities are quickly growing, such that ‘‘countries like Algeria, Kazakhstan, and Myanmar each now possess a similar number of tertiary students as could be found in the entire world at the start of the century’’ (Schofer & Meyer, (2004, p. 1; italics in original). Beyond sheer growth, IT also highlights how standard blueprints of curricula and educational practice have diffused around the world, in ways that are decoupled from material conditions within nations (Meyer & Ramirez, 2000; Chabbott & Ramirez, 2000; McEneaney & Meyer, 2000; Baker & LeTendre, 2005). Enrolment policies increasingly emphasize universal access, even in nations with entrenched gendered divisions of labor and ethnic separatism. Curricula increasingly reflect global understandings of knowledge rather than local cultural traditions, national levels of economic development, or regional power structures. Professionals now develop school content that downplays the ‘‘sacred’’ qualities of knowledge, and instead promotes ‘‘socially useful’’ content that is compatible with a view of a modern, inclusive, and manageable society (Ramirez, 2004). There is a weakening of the canons of art and literature and appeals to the intellectual authority of primordial lineages or high culture in favor of education that prioritizes choice and utility for the individual, and aids their personal and economic development. Broadly, this line of theorizing emphasizes educational trends that embody a global model of society that transcends any one nation-state. The kinds of skills valorized in schools are increasingly generic, rather than bound to local traditions. This diffusion is most striking in 3rd world nations that have adopted ideals of individual rights, economic development, and progress. Do international education corporations embody these images of increasingly rationalized forms of schooling? Traditionally, IT has tended to focus on the role of nation states in adopting and promoting global templates of schooling, and focused almost entirely on traditional public sectors. The role of private international education corporations in diffusing models of schooling have been largely overlooked, despite their increasingly key role in educating both young and old citizens.
MESO-LEVEL: ISOMORPHISM OR STABLE HYBRIDS? While macro-level IT investigates world culture, the original meso-level version focused on how organizations relate to their domestic environment. This version of IT typically predicts that organizations operating in domains
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with high technical uncertainty and unclear information about performance will conform to institutional rules in order to maintain stability and enhance their survival (e.g. Meyer & Rowan, 1978; DiMaggio & Powell, 1991). In such conditions, organizations are predicted to embrace isomorphic forms to garner trust, coordinate multiple goals, and ward off inspection, or else be destined to fail. IT thus explains the remarkable convergence of organizational models, highlighting how survival hinges on adapting to norms in the surrounding environment, regardless of whether they help achieve technical goals (see also D’Aunno, Sutton, & Price, 1991; Greenwood & Hinings, 1996, pp. 1023–1028). Such pressures are seen to intensify as an institutional realm stabilizes, and more tightly embeds organizations into its environment. IT commonly portrays traditional schools as the epitome of a loosely coupled organization, one that seldom monitors outcomes or strives to be technical efficient, but instead maintains institutional conformity. The environment for school is seen as one that forgives ineffectiveness but penalizes any deviance from established formal norms of education. Yet, in many respects, environments for education have changed in ways that have de-stabilized the field. As governments around the globe continually prioritize educational productivity, and as more families seek to enhance their prospects for entering postsecondary levels, demand grows for different types of school services, particularly for supplementary education and ‘enhancement’ services such as educational consultants and ‘coaching’ that are offered by popular companies such as Ivywise (see Kirp, 2003). Within any organizational field, IT distinguishes between ‘‘technical’’ and ‘‘institutional’’ organizations (see Scott & Meyer, 1991). Institutional organizations are those that operate in governmental and non-profit sectors, and are largely dependent on legitimacy to survive. Technical organizations are for-profit enterprises that must meet a ‘‘bottom line’’. This distinction captures how different environments pose different demands on organizations. For instance, institutional organizations like public schools rely on state funds, and are thereby motivated to adopt accepted rules and structures. Businesses, in contrast, are presumed to focus on efficiency and their performance, since they need to be profitable to survive. However, not all organizations are easily categorized as either technical or institutional. Some face both efficiency demands as well as pressures to conform to procedural requirements, and thus combine technical requirements with a public good component. In IT, such entities are known as ‘‘organizational hybrids’’ (Scott & Meyer, 1991). Given these twin pressures, IT offers an important prediction (Scott & Meyer (1991, p. 124): hybrid organizations will find it difficult to flourish,
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and will remain small and unstable, unless they either develop their technical activities (i.e. efficient forms of production) or else obtain institutional supports. In this line of reasoning, hybrids are destined to be mere ‘‘fruit flies’’ (Freeman & Hannon, 1983) that rarely survive for long periods because they are caught in a dilemma: if they discard too many of their inefficient institutional elements, they may lose legitimacy but if they are inefficient, they will be unprofitable. Thus, while the market for educational corporations is embedded in an institutional environment, their capacity to closely mimic standard school forms is constrained by their bottom line; yet, if they become too business-like, they may risk legitimacy. Are international education businesses isomorphic or stable hybrids? We argue that these corporations are model hybrid organizations. While they operate in a sector clearly shaped by long institutional models of schooling; as for-profit entities they are also technical organizations that must be efficient to survive. Despite this, these businesses are hardly ‘fruit flies’, given their tremendous growth and international scope.
CONTRIBUTIONS This chapter uses Institutional Theory to understand the recent growth of educational entities that are both transnational and profit-seeking. These corporations challenge Institutional analyses in three ways. First, Institutional analyses have largely focused either on the role of nation-state institutions in promoting educational expansion around the world, or on non-profit NGOs (e.g. Chabbott & Ramirez, 2000), and have not yet examined the role of international profit-seeking businesses. Second, we compliment more recent theorizing on the influences of the state on technical organizations. These studies have tended to examine how firms respond to changing legal environments. For instance, Edelman, Uggen, and Erlanger (1999) found that when organizations responded to employment laws by constructing grievance procedures, they unintentionally constructed rationalized myths about ‘appropriate’ responses. Similarly Dobbin and Sutton (1998) argued that the administrative weakness of the U.S. federal state permitted organizations to comply by adopting specialty departments, and in the process made market and managerial authority more legitimate. These studies highlight how the state and the judicial system force technical organizations to respond to coercive forces, and how firms can do so in ways that expand their power and enhance their economic
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efficiency. In other words, they are studies of how technical firms adopt institutional elements. We extend this line of IT theorizing by considering the opposite scenario: how longstanding institutional organizations are influenced by technical forces. We are unaware of any other studies that have examined how classic institutional organizations, such as libraries, churches, and schools have had to embrace for-profit imperatives. Rather, IT emphasizes how their nonprofit statuses and stable revenues largely protect these organizations from technical demands (Meyer & Rowan, 1978). These corporations present an ideal test case since education organizations have long been regarded as the ideal-typical institutional organization. Yet as education organizations increasingly enter the marketplace, they are less easily characterized as static institutional organizations. Instead, education corporations are a prime test case to examine ‘hybrid’ organizations since they are encouraged to both mimic school forms and to respond to market pressures, pressures that may force them to shed legitimate yet costly academic practices. In doing so, our paper offers a model for studies of other traditional institutional organizations, such as churches, that have new forms that are clearly embracing the marketplace and its ‘bottom line’. For instance, many evangelical groups are energetically pursing commercial revenue streams beyond donations, selling a line to salvation by selling prayers, t-shirts, or Kabala red strings. Third, by analyzing an understudied entity – the for-profit education industry – this study heeds Rowan (Forthcoming) call to broaden existing knowledge of the widening assembly of organizations in the field of education. In doing so, we advance comparative analyses of education by putting empirical flesh on abstract concepts such as ‘‘institutional and technical environments’’ and ‘‘hybrids’’ that are often cited but less often clearly operationalized (for examples of such criticisms, see Hirsch, 1997; Mizruchi & Fein, 1999; Perrow, 1985).
METHODS Our data come from two sources. At the macro level, we rely on the secondary research literature and case studies of corporations. The latter has been generated through searching websites supported by the larger education businesses, on-line business magazines, such as Forbes and Business Weekly and trend ‘watchdogs’ such as Hoover, Inc. and Eduventures. Publicly traded education corporations, such as the Educate, Inc., also publish
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their financial statements and shareholder reports. These sources permit us to tap into international businesses’ mission statements, product and business expansion, and their proclaimed goals. At the meso level, we rely on information that we have gathered as part of a larger project on private education. Since 2001 we have collected data on various forms of private education in the Greater Toronto area, documenting their growth, interviewing key actors, conducting site visits, and attending events (Aurini, 2004; Aurini & Davies, 2004). Our data collection concentrated on education businesses in Toronto, Ontario, that are listed in the Bell Yellow Pages. These listings have been found to be highly effective in mapping the growth of businesses that rely on consumer environments since most established businesses use them for basic advertising purposes (Kalleberg, Marsden, Aldrich, & Cassell, 1990). From this list we concentrated on for-profit businesses that tutor academic subjects found in public schools. We thus excluded businesses that offered only language instruction (English as a second language or foreign language), or only test prep (such as Kaplan and Princeton Review). These exclusions concentrated our study to only those businesses that offer services that directly complement or compete with those offered by public schools. In the case of learning center franchises, we selected two to three locations of each franchise brand. By examining franchises we could observe the formation of standardized product lines, hiring and business practices, franchisee and tutoring profiles, and philosophies. By observing many similarities across cases, and by being aware of the standardizing dictates of franchises, we feel confident to generalize from a few cases to each franchise as a whole. We then contacted all other single location tutoring business listed in Toronto’s Bell Yellow Pages. From a list of 57, representatives of 46 businesses agreed to be interviewed, yielding a response rate of over 80%. All but two also permitted site visits. Five interviewees were representatives or owners of franchises (interview: 1–5), nine were with franchisees (interview: 6–14), seventeen were with independent tutoring businesses (interview: 15–31), eleven interviews with businesses that mixed both tutoring services and private school credits (interview: 32–42), and four were officials from private education associations (interview: 43–46). Interviews lasted 60–120 min, and were semi-structured to allow interviewees to elaborate their responses and explore issues that we did not anticipate. All but two interviews were held at the business location, while the remaining interviews were conducted on the phone at the request of the interviewee. Since we have found that organizational practices vary much more between these
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franchises rather than within, we believe our sample captures the actual variation in the industry.3
MACRO LEVEL FINDINGS: EDUCATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS CROSSING NATIONAL BOUNDARIES As discussed in a previous section, IT highlights the global convergence toward a rationalized curriculum that touts generic skills over the particularities of national or regional traditions. How closely do supplementary providers conform to this prediction? Traditionally, most conventional lone-tutors and small tutoring companies have followed or ‘shadowed’ the content of their local school system (Baker et al., 2001; Bray, 2003; Stevenson & Baker, 1992). These forms of tutoring have typically focused on short-term skills that map onto local school curricula and timetables, assuming the form of test prep and homework help. In doing so, these businesses have reflected the contours of their surrounding schools, grounded in local particularities. As they become more international, however, tutoring franchises are developing more universal skill content rather than shadowing local school systems. This includes courses in reading comprehension, speed-reading, study skills, note taking, time management, test-taking strategies, public speaking, and goal setting. Old ‘‘subject-centered’’ programs are being replaced by a ‘‘skill-building’’ model of tutoring that is less specific to any particular education system, and hence is more portable around the world. In fact, homework support and test prep are strongly discouraged in learning center franchises. As one Sylvan advertisement states: ‘‘yunlike private tutoring, which is meant to fix short-term problems, Sylvan uses the assessment to address the core of your child’s needs’’ (‘‘Considering a Tutor?’’, Sylvan Learning Center, 1998). Oxford Learning Centre, a major Canadian franchise, makes a similar claim in their literature: Tutoring relies heavily on memorization and its benefits are always short term y . That’s why Oxford is ‘Beyond Tutoring.’ We don’t ask students to simply review and memorize the same old stuff. We help them build the cognitive and metacognitive learning skills so that they can absorb, process and understand!’’ (Turbocharge Your Brain!, Oxford Learning Centre, 2002).
A franchisee from this learning center echoed this sentiment, arguing that, ‘‘they (learning centers) offer the bigger picture’’ and ‘‘life long learning
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skills’’ because ‘‘anyone can teach children how to divide and multiply’’. This generic skill model facilitates international diffusion. Curricula that are not tied to any one national tradition can be offered across borders or at most modified for particular national circumstances, and thus easily marketed across many countries. Another way learning centers are able to transcend national borders is by emphasizing the therapeutic benefits of their services. A major trend in international education is the spread of a conception of learning founded on professional psychology, oriented to the development of generic cognitive and emotive processes, rather than the inculcation of time-honored truths or idiosyncratic cultural traditions. This newer model has spread around the world, making the field of standardized educational evaluation busier than ever (Cummings, 2003). All of the major franchises tout themselves as ‘selfesteem’ rather than grade boosters. While their advertising promotes the academic benefits of their services, they place equal emphasis on how their programs improve students’ self-esteem and confidence by attacking ‘root problems’ and closing ‘skill gaps’ and by allowing students to work at their own pace. As Kumon states: Schools must cover material according to age or grade, and classes must advance as a group. Needless to say, not all children grasp all concepts at the same pace. Kumon allows the individual needs and abilities of each child to govern his or her own progress. That’s why Kumon students can perform at 100% of their potential. (http://www.kumon.com)
A third way learning centers loosen the connection between schooling systems and tutoring is by promoting their services as customized to the learning styles of their students. Typical of most learning centers, Sylvan makes the following statement: Because each child is different, with unique needs and learning styles, we create a personalized program just for him or her. Each program, whether in-center or online, is customized to help your child develop skills to master new challenges with confidence. Individual tutoring programs along with self-assessments give students ownership of learning. Sylvan students learn how each aspect of their work is geared toward achieving specific goals, such as improving word recognition and reading comprehension. Then, we teach students how to check their own work and learn independently. Our students serve an integral role in driving their own success. (http://www.educate.com/how/how_cmpnts.html)
By de-emphasizing the school curriculum in favor of more generic benefits such as self-esteem, learning center programs can readily meld to a variety of national contexts. Similarly, since learning centers are not beholden to any particular curriculum, they can create a variety of standardized programs in
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many generic areas such as reading comprehension that can be readily touted as ‘customized’ to any student. This evolution is promoted by corporate franchise templates, which imposes a standardized model that dictates product lines, service delivery, educational materials, and physical plant. Using the franchise form, corporate managers can standardize their offerings around core skills that are not beholden to the specifics of any one region, and regulate their products in a manner that is highly efficient and profitable. Rather than re-inventing the wheel of curriculum to match every regional guideline, they create a standardized product and service. Interestingly, since these corporations lack a formal ‘‘charter’’ with any one nation-state, their spread is unimpeded by public regulation or mandates that could otherwise bind them to a particular region. Instead, these corporations can market their services across many nations without radically altering their content. Importantly, this process illustrates a prime macro-level tenet of IT: how the ongoing evolution of curricula is increasingly de-coupled from local conditions (McEneaney & Meyer, 2000; Baker & LeTendre, 2005). As a result, these tutoring corporations are illustrative of a larger global trend of the rationalization of education. By standardizing their offerings, engaging in modern marketing, eschewing moral mandates, and signalling their usefulness to individuals, these businesses parallel an ongoing drift of schooling’s intellectual authority from traditional toward legal-rational forms. Whereas school authority in many regions of the world has been historically associated with religious orders, aristocracies, and archaic cultural traditions, today it is increasingly linked to notions of societal utility. Fewer educational bodies in nations that are linked to the World Polity are retaining an in loco parentis relation towards their students, and most are increasingly portraying themselves as socially useful institutions that build human capital. International education corporations are riding this broader wave by appealing to a niche of students who are seeking supplementary education, and who, some claim, are more status-striving and consumerist oriented than previous generations (Labaree, 1997).
MESO LEVEL FINDINGS: EDUCATIONAL CORPORATIONS AS HYBRID ORGANIZATIONS What happens when services that are usually provided by institutional organizations get provided by technical organizations? In this section we explore how international education corporations straddle both worlds,
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drawing on structural templates from the world of schooling and the world of business. Our argument is that technical imperatives encourage these enterprises to focus their mandates more narrowly than would purely institutional organizations, but to then pursue those narrowed goals in an organizational form than is broader than the institutional norm. Tutoring corporations are hybrid organizations. Lacking public subsidies, they must be profitable to survive, yet they also operate in an environment shaped by long traditions of institutionalized schooling. For instance, the demand for their services is conditioned by schools’ credential competitions, system of classifications (courses, levels, requirements), and timing of their offerings. After-schools hours are ‘‘prime time’’, while summer demand is weak. Yet, tutoring businesses are clearly ‘‘technical’’ as well, since they must directly collect revenues from customers, and cannot benefit from truancy laws or any state regulations that would ensure them of clients. Instead, they must respond to market pressures. One impact of the technical environment on these organizations is to encourage them to narrow their goals. Tutoring franchises must portray themselves as focused on the teaching of cognitive and vocational skills. Unlike mainstream schools, they do not claim a mandate to socialize students, enhance societal equity, or provide moral leadership. Thus, almost all eschew any sort of extra-curricula or affiliation with religious or ethnic sponsors. They are selective in their offerings, largely rejecting ‘‘generalist’’ courses in the humanities or social sciences, and instead focusing on marketable skill-based subjects like reading and math. Yet, while technical exigencies encourage these corporations to narrow their goals, their need for profit pushes them to expand in ways that defy institutional norms. One impact of franchising is to heighten the investment needed to buy a local franchise. Higher costs compel investors to seek new sources of revenue. For instance, tutoring businesses have found a profitable niche in supplemental education, but their business model has forced them to diversify beyond their original niche. In tutoring, as one interviewee stated, ‘‘your customers outgrow you.’’ Since overhead costs – rented space, office supplies, desks, teachers, advertisements, and accounting – are incurred all day, all year round, tutoring franchises have developed additional programs to make further use of these resources. These ‘‘technical’’ exigencies have led tutors to expand beyond their traditional high school-aged customer base that requires services only after school between 3 PM and 8 PM, and only during school months. The result is that both domestic and international tutoring corporations have repackaged their operations into a franchise ‘center’ format.
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Franchises in other industries seek business growth by standardizing and then diversifying product offerings (see Aurini & Davies, 2004; Baum & Greve, 2001; Nelson, 1995). A standard model of franchising is to extend one’s specialty service into a broader ‘‘center.’’ Whether drug stores, business supplies, or gyms, franchise forms encourage businesses to expand their menu of services. An example is the rise of fitness centers. Many gyms have transformed themselves by stretching beyond athletic and weight training to offer on-staff physiotherapists, massage therapists, nutritionists, personal trainers, as well as having counters that sell juices, fitness gear, and nutritional supplements. Beyond providing an exercise space, fitness centers now give customers an ‘‘assessment’’ which is used to place them into a ‘‘program.’’ Such centers represent a common franchising strategy to secure customers for an extended time period, and to also expand into new taste markets. Corporate tutoring franchises have similarly widened their offerings into at least four new market niches. First, they are pursuing clients who desire coaching for high stakes standardized tests, competing with renowned test prep franchises such as Kaplan and Princeton Review. Second, they are developing preschool services. To fill their morning to noon slots, the larger franchises now offer enrichment programs targeted to children from three to six years old. Third, they have also entered the post-secondary marketplace, in the form of standardized test prep, with some even university degrees. Fourth, many have moved into online tutoring. The organizational template for this structural expansion comes from the business world. For instance, most of the Canadian franchises are members of the Canadian Franchise Association (CFA), which represents enterprises in hundreds of industries, ranging from restaurants, coffee shops, car rental to parcel services. This and other such associations spread business norms and strategies that lending banks come to expect. In doing so, tutoring companies adopt practices that mirror franchises that are renown in very different industries, such as Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonalds. Such practices marry the ‘‘technical’’ sensibilities of business to institutional norms of education. This process can be seen more explicitly in the recent formation of the Education Industry Association (http://www. educationindustry.org), a voluntary association for market-based education services that sets and monitors practices and standards. While being focused on education, this association operates outside of any public or state sphere, and implements its own standards of practice. For IT, franchise forms are interesting because they prompt tutoring corporations to transcend and span grade levels in ways that established educational organizations do not. That is, a single corporate location, unlike
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any school, will cater to preschool, elementary, secondary, and post secondary clientele. Franchises thus differ from schools by offering a wider array of services and product lines that span age groups, credential levels, and formal school levels. This transgresses the modern form of schooling with its strict distinctions between schooling levels. No single modern school organization attempts this kind of structural diversity, since professional norms in education push most schools to specialize in an age-graded division of labor. Rather than engaging in normative isomorphism with public schools, they instead take K-12 supplemental education in a different direction, selectively imitating other franchise businesses, and other non-school organizations. The theoretical point is that tutoring corporations expand in these directions not because of isomorphic pressures from the realm of public schooling, but instead to respond to the logic of generating new revenue streams, and thus adopting the organizational template of the franchise center. While tutoring enterprises mimic schools in some ways, the imperatives of franchising expands their array of services that span several age groups and credential levels. The unorthodox variety of services offered by tutoring franchises reflects the conformity pressures they face not as educating bodies, but as corporate businesses. It reveals their ‘‘hybrid’’ nature. This ‘‘technical’’ or efficiency-driven orientation to education is also illustrated in other corporate practices. Needing fee-paying customers to survive, these businesses have more elaborate ‘‘marketing’’ wings than do regular educational bodies. They have a far sharper sense of their ‘‘competition’’ than other school forms, and accordingly seek information about their potential clientele and competitors. They also put more emphasis on student contact and customer satisfaction since all of these activities directly impinge upon their revenue streams. For instance, most learning centers boast small student–teacher ratios that typically do not exceed 3:1. Many learning centers also cater to their clients over the internet, permitting clients to access tutoring support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This differs from traditional educational organizations that instead place much more credence to professional norms and discretion, known in Institutional Theory as ‘‘the logic of confidence’’ in which certified instructors are presumed to do their jobs, and thus require little monitoring.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION This chapter has described one growing niche in international education, which is being populated by ‘‘hybrid’’ organizations. In many respects
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supplementary education corporations exemplify global trends described in macro-level New Institutional Theory. The widening demand for advanced credentials, reflecting the decentralized spread of schooling’s ‘‘charter’’ to allocate positions in labor markets, is fuelling the demand for supplementary education. By successfully crossing international borders to find their niches, these corporations embody the ongoing penetration of rationalized educational forms in the modern world. As in the broader world of education, their internationalized pedagogy transcends any single nation-state. The growing demand for these enterprises represents a free market expression of the emerging norm of universal access to education, even though these businesses themselves lack a mandate to provide equity or social trusteeship. As relatively late entrants to an already-established field of international education, they are crafting a niche by fitting world culture norms to their own business ends. But at the meso-level, our analysis suggests they have stabilized by mixing their organizational blueprints with elements from both education and business. Far from being ‘‘fruit-flies’’, these organizations have survived by selectively borrowing components from the institutional world of education while developing their own technical capacity to generate profit. They represent instances of education becoming more organizationally variable, as market exigencies expose them to an array of structural templates and interacting bodies beyond mass schools, including marketing companies, advertising and recruitment firms, and franchise associations. We conclude that as formal education implants itself throughout the modern world in so many different realms of activity, it is bound to seep into private markets. As it does so, ‘‘schooling’’ gets exposed to a greater variety of structural templates that can alter its form. As new educational organizations emerge in rapidly growing niches, they may not always mimic successful school-like forms to enhance their legitimacy, but will instead borrow from other organizational templates. International education corporations are exemplars of this process, and thus provide a consequential area of study for sociologists. They also reveal how the macro-level insights of Institutional Theory necessitate some revisions to its meso-level reasoning.
NOTES 1. Kumon (http://www.kumon.com) was ranked fourth in Entrepreneur’s 2005 list of top global franchises (see www.entrepreneur.com).
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2. Educate recently purchased Gateway Learning, which owns the enormously popular ‘Hooked on Phonics’ brand. Educate plans to expand the reading system in a variety of community based locations including libraries, community centers, and daycare centers using the Hooked on Phonics approach (http://www.forbes.com). See also www.educate.com. 3. We also draw on a participant observation study conducted by the second author, who was employed for one year at a large tutoring franchise and participated in all aspects of the franchise, including teaching, implementing curricula, customer interactions, and methods of control. Our interviews with other franchises confirm that her experience can be generalized to other franchises.
REFERENCES Aurini, J. (2004). Educational entrepreneurialism in the private tutoring industry: Balancing profitability with the humanistic face of schooling. Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 41(4), 475–491. Aurini, J., & Davies, S. (2004). The transformation of private tutoring: Education in a franchise form. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 29(3), 419–438. Baker, D., et al. (2001). Worldwide shadow education: Outside-school learning, institutional quality of schooling and cross-national mathematics achievement. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 23(1), 1–17. Baker, D. P., & LeTendre, G. K. (2005). National differences, global similarities: World culture and the future of schooling. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Baum, J., & Greve, H. R. (2001). It’s a multiunit, multimarket world. Advances in Strategic Management, 18, 1–28. Bray, M. (2003). Economics of Education Review, 26, 611–620. Chabbott, C., & Ramirez, F. O. (2000). Development and education. In: T. H. Maureen (Ed.), Handbook of sociology of education. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. Cummings, W. (2003). The institutions of education: A comparative study of educational development in the six core nations. Oxford: Symposium Books. D’Aunno, T., Sutton, R. I., & Price, R. H. (1991). Isomorphism and external support in conflicting institutional environments: A study of drug abuse treatment units. Academy of Management Journal, 34(3), 636–661. Davies, S. (2004). School choice by default? Understanding the demand for private tutoring in Canada. American Journal of Education, 110(3), 233–255. DiMaggio, P., & Powell, W. (1991). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. In: W. Powell & P. DiMaggio (Eds), The new institutionalism in organizational analysis (pp. 41–62). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dobbin, F., & Sutton, J. R. (1998). The strength of the weak state: The employment rights revolution and the rise of human resource management divisions. American Journal of Sociology, 104, 441–476. Edelman, L. B., Uggen, C., & Erlanger, H. S. (1999). The endogeneity of legal regulation: Grievance procedures as rational myth. American Journal of Sociology, 105(2), 406–454. Freeman, J. H., & Hannon, M. T. (1983). Niche width and the dynamics of organizational populations. American Journal of Sociology, 88, 1116–1145.
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Greenwood, R., & Hinings, C. R. (1996). Understanding radical organizational change: Bringing the old and the new institutionalism. Academy of Management Review, 21(4), 1022–1054. Hirsch, P. M. (1997). Sociology without social structure: Neoinstitutional theory meets brave new world. American Journal of Sociology, 102(6), 1702–1723. Kalleberg, A. L., Marsden, P. V., Aldrich, P. V., & Cassell, J. W. (1990). Comparing organizational sampling frames. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35(4), 658–688. Kirp, D. (2003). Shakespeare, Einstein, and the bottom line: The marketing of higher education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Labaree, D. (1997). How to succeed in school without really learning: The credentials race in American education. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. McEneaney, E. H., & Meyer, J. W. (2000). The Content of the curriculum: An institutionalist perspective. In: T. H. Maureen (Ed.), Handbook of sociology of education. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publisher. Meyer, J., & Ramirez, F. (2000). The world institutionalization of education. In: J. Schriewer (Ed.), Discourse formation in comparative education. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Meyer, J., & Rowan, B. (1978). The structure of educational organizations. From environments and organizations. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Inc. Mizruchi, M. S., & Fein, L. C. (1999). The social construction of organizational knowledge: A study of the uses of coercive, mimetic, and normative isomorphism. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44, 653–683. Nelson, J. I. (1995). Post-industrial capitalism: Exploring economic inequality in America. California, CA: Sage Publication Inc. Perrow, C. (1985). Review essay: Overboard with myth and symbols. American Journal of Sociology, 91(1), 151–155. Ramirez, F. O. (2004). The rationalization of universities. Unpublished manuscript, Stanford University. Rowan, B. (Forthcoming). The new institutionalism and the study of education: Changing ideas for changing times. In: H. Meyer & B. Rowan (Eds), Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Schofer, E., & Meyer, J. W. (2004). The world-wide expansion of higher education in the twentieth century. Unpublished manuscript, Stanford University. Scott, W. R., & Meyer, J. W. (1991). The organization of societal sectors: Propositions and early evidence. In: W. Powell & P. DiMaggio (Eds), The new institutionalism in organizational analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Stevenson, D. L., & Baker, D. P. (1992). Shadow education and allocation in formal schooling: Transition to university in Japan. American Journal of Sociology, 97(6), 1639–1657.
THE NORMATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF MODERN STATE SYSTEMS: EDUCATIONAL MINISTRIES AND LAWS, 1800–2000 Jong-Seon Kim INTRODUCTION More than 80 percent of contemporary nation-states have founded educational ministries and compulsory education laws over the past two centuries (UNESCO, 2000). How modern state systems originated and have expanded is one of the classic questions of cross-national studies. A major reason, apart from structural variation that many social scientists observe, is that modern state systems are nearly universal. For instance, the structural arrangements of educational ministries and legal elements of compulsory education laws are fairly similar across nations, though the ages for free compulsory education vary and the names of educational ministries have changed over time (e.g. ministries of vocational education and training, secondary and special higher education, and adult education). The historical construction of educational ministries and laws are critical instances to illuminate the organizational reality of state action, reflecting modern state systems that have been deeply institutionalized throughout the world.1
The Impact of Comparative Education Research on Institutional Theory International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 7, 137–156 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3679/doi:10.1016/S1479-3679(06)07007-1
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Much of the literature assumes that educational ministries and laws originated and have expanded as reactions to the expanding system of economic exchange or political competition. These views see national needs for economic development or social progress as driving forces that lead to modern education systems. The other line of thinking moves away from the societal-level factors, and stresses transnational forces generating standardization of educational and related institutions. The argument suggests that nation-states obtain the constitutional authority and normative legitimacy of national education systems in international contexts, expanding educational ministries and laws. Considering these arguments, I attempt to make my analyses broadly applicable to cross-national studies of the formation and expansion of modern state systems. In the following sections, I discuss two theoretical frameworks which seek to account for the durability and ubiquity of modern education systems. The theoretical views are, on the one hand, a perspective in which the educational systems are driven by functional needs for individual and national development, and on the other hand, a perspective in which the educational systems are artificially imposed or inculcated by dominant groups. These views emphasize societal-level factors. I then consider world-institutional perspectives as an alternative in which state systems are seen as enactments of transnational cultural models. The aim of the discussion is to bridge a divide between society-specific ideas and transnational perspectives. Following this theoretical consideration, I analyze cross-national data on the worldwide construction of educational ministries and laws from 1800 to 2000. This analysis will lead us to see the evidentiary basis for the theories. A range of cross-national studies suggests that societal-level factors are more influential earlier on and transnational ones matter more in the post World War II era, a period of growing standardization of political and educational systems.
MODERN STATE SYSTEMS FOR DEVELOPMENT AND PROGRESS The first, which may be termed the technical functionalist or modernization framework, presupposes that modern education systems have been built to socialize students to high levels of technical skills and modern attitudes, knowledge, and values for national development and social progress. Modern education systems become essential, as societies are industrialized and social organizations and technical skills are more complex.
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During the late 18th and 19th centuries, nations made an effort to authorize, fund, and manage national education as part of a state-building project to construct a unified national polity (Ramirez & Boli, 1987). The French revolution, progressive ideas of the Enlightenment, and Napoleonic wars stimulated nationalism, patriotism, and desires for national unification. Military defeats or failures motivated states to boost national education as a means of national revitalization to gain power and prestige in interstate systems. Educational ministries were constructed for financial and administrative coordination for the national unification of education. The underlying assumption is that the educational unification would facilitate ‘‘modern attitudes, civic responsibility, and patriotic feelings’’ (Szreter, 1974, p. 183). Building educational ministries has been seen as a strategic solution to the lack of social agreements on civic and cultural standards, national curricula and textbooks, teacher licensing and training, and so on (Boyd, 1964). The idea of compulsory education had been widely accepted in Protestant countries since the Age of Reformation (Kleinberger, 1975). The compulsory education laws were applied only to very restricted classes (Dore, 1964). Throughout the 19th century it became implemented de jure across Western nations. The idea is that ‘‘the individual is to know, to understand, to explain, to choose, and ultimately to become an effective person capable of making suitable choices and engaging in proper action’’ (Boli, Ramirez, & Meyer, 1985, p. 148). Within a unified national polity, individuals were expected to identify as citizens, and it was presumed that national unification would be enhanced by the universal participation of citizens in national projects (Reinser, 1922; Bendix, 1964). Burton Clark (1962) argues that the educational expansion was an inevitable outcome of the need for skilled workers following technologically determined changes in the industrial structure that required ever more complex and sophisticated skills. In the technical functionalist framework, nations have founded educational ministries and laws because and to the degree that these systems contribute to national unification and development. Although this view is dominant in economics (Schultz, 1961; Becker, 1964), it has also many proponents in education and sociology (Dreeben, 1968; Clark, 1962).
EDUCATION SYSTEMS AS OUTCOMES OF CLASS CONFLICTS The second broad framework, which finds most of its proponents within sociological studies, ascribes modern state systems not to their technical
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functions but rather to the reproduction of dominant power and ideology. Tilly (1992, 1998) has noted that modern state systems in general result from political struggles in which dominant individuals or groups have managed to maintain exclusively their status and classes at the expense of other, weaker individuals or groups. The critical educators find the evidence in structural inequality of modern education systems, such as the enrollment gap in gender (Rix, 1990; England & Farkas, 1988) and race (Chiswick, 1988; Darity & Myers, 1980), the difference in academic tracks by family background of children (Bowles & Gintis, 1976), and school textbooks and curricular reflecting the knowledge and culture of middle- and upper classes and status groups (Lareau, 1990; Bourdieu, 1977; Bernstein, 1973). According to this view, nations have constructed educational ministries to reinforce state regulations for the distribution of skills and knowledge that need to reproduce the social division of labor and maintain class structure. Bowles and Gintis (2002) suggest that ‘‘the evolution of modern education system is not accounted for by the gradual perfection of a democratic or pedagogical ideal. Rather, it was the product of a series of conflicts arising through the transformation of the social organization of work and the distribution of its rewards’’ (p. 2). In the literature on conflict, educational controls are usually emphasized as a requirement for industrialized societies or ethnically fragmented ones (Collins, 1979). That is, industrialization and urbanization are potential factors of intergroup conflicts, which are directly linked to a need for educational ministries. The same conflict-ridden evolution of compulsory education rules is driven by the need for dominant groups to instill particular status cultures and to allocate individuals into fixed positions within occupational status hierarchies, based on their educational credentials. Bourdieu (1981), in his account of domination and learning, argues that certain values and ideologies inculcated by schools can predispose young workers to accept and even wish for entry into a world of manual labor which they identify with the adult world (p. 314). Domination proceeds through a correspondence between the tacitly inscribed values and ideologies that create the individuals’ dispositions and the norms and ideologies embedded in the positions of specific institutions.2 In this view, compulsory education rules are artificially imposed or enacted by interest groups and as a result accords benefits to incumbents of privileged positions. A central conclusion from all of these lines of thought is that modern education systems are a major functional mechanism to facilitate development and progress or to legitimate social hierarchy and stratification.3 These current accounts have implications about the genesis and expansion of
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modern education systems. The functional accounts also offer a convincing explanation for why modern education systems have become central to sustain modern states. However, the application of their implications to studies of contemporary state systems is limited to the extent which the construction of modern education systems become a worldwide phenomenon despite nations’ different political and economic conditions.
THE ISSUES Early models of educational expansion have explored the impacts over time of fluctuating actions of specific actors, such as educational demands of industry and family. The studies rarely look at deeper and broader institutional conditions under which nation-states boost consistently modern education systems. The imagery of state action, from these views, is to manipulate school enrollment levels by enacting compulsory education laws and to regulate educational arrangements through educational ministries in response to the changing demands of industry (Walters & O’Connell, 1988; Duncan, 1989; Hyde, 1979) and family (McMahon, 1970; Dreeben, 1968).4 However, in a pure logic, it is not reasonable to assume that modern education systems return to nations precisely what they put in. Nor is it reasonable to assume that education systems are a straightforward reflection of dominant power and ideology. I argue that nation-states construct educational ministries and laws, independent of fluctuating needs of local actors. Once modern educational systems are established, fluctuations in state action hold little effect. There are empirical considerations as well. Modern education systems are simply more widespread, durable, and free of conflict than the functional views contemplate. Switzerland founded an educational ministry in 1798. But the centralized education system did not contribute substantially to Switzerland’s unification, and the nation broke down into a set of dispersed units controlled by France. Nevertheless, the idea of educational unification became global, diffusing to countries such as Denmark (1814), France (1824), Greece (1828), Egypt (1837), and Chile (1837). Several other historical facts are also inconsistent with the arguments emphasizing development and progress. The U.S. Department of Education was founded in 1954. Despite the high levels of political and economic development, the U.S. is one of the latest countries in the world to found an educational ministry. Singapore adopted a global model of contemporary education law in 2000, though the enrollment ratio for all education levels (% age 6–23) is 82
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Cumulative Proportion of Countries Founding Educational Ministri and Laws
1 0.9 0.8
Educational Ministries Compulsory Education Laws
0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1
18 00 18 10 18 20 18 30 18 40 18 50 18 60 18 70 18 80 18 90 19 00 19 10 19 20 19 30 19 40 19 50 19 60 19 70 19 80 19 90 20 00
0
Year
Fig. 1.
Cumulative Proportion of Countries Founding Educational Ministries and Laws, 1800 to 2000.
percent (UNESCO, 2000). Fig. 1 describes the rise and expansion of educational ministries and compulsory education laws from 1800 to 2000.5 Modern education systems emerged in Western Europe in the late 18th century, and expanded gradually over the 19th and 20th centuries. They diffused later to the Americas, the Middle East, and Oceania; and spread rapidly to Asia and Africa in the 20th century, as shown in Fig. 2. These findings suggest that educational ministries have been established independently of regional conditions. Taking into consideration the observed isomorphic phenomenon, a core argument is that nation-states have built modern education systems through world-cultural and associational processes beyond the considerable variation in local circumstances. By so doing, the nation-states gain their authority and legitimacy in an international context to regulate and develop modern education systems. The systems have been created and maintained through processes that are more decentralized and less coercive than the theories reasoning from economic utility or political conflict propose. National development and progress are the most legitimate objectives of the construction of education systems (Ramirez & Boli, 1987). These objectives have become world-cultural components along with the
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Count (N. of Countries)
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The Founding of Educational Ministries, 1800–2000, by Region.
taken-for-granted belief in education, and have motivated state-building through centralized education systems. Modern education arose and has expended over the past two centuries throughout the world, despite its uncertain and inconsistent outcomes. But, the hopes, beliefs, values, and expectations pertaining to education are built into the current understanding of what education is and should be far more concretely than schools’ bricks. I argue that the construction of educational ministries and laws is driven not only by national desires for development and progress but also by what the state is and should do. In the next section, I offer a more elaborate sketch of this argument, along with world-institutional perspectives lending plausibility to this account.
THE NORMATIVE LEGITIMACY OF STATE SYSTEMS A recurrent theme of sociological studies of states is isomorphic developments of state systems. Whether the state systems are economically inefficient or politically unstable, there is strong evidence that they are structurally similar in many dimensions and changes in similar ways:
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universalistic mass schooling systems (Ramirez & Ventresca, 1992; Meyer, Ramirez, & Soysal, 1992), expansive environmental policies (Frank, Hironaka, Meyer, Schofer, & Tuma, 1997), and rationalized welfare systems (Strang & Chang, 1993). This line of studies posits that state systems are constructed and propagated through world-cultural processes rather than built up in local circumstances or from distinctive histories. The claim, which is central to the world-institutionalist tradition, is that cultural legitimacy and institutional rationality, instead of either efficiency or ideology concerns, lead to the rise and expansion of state systems (Meyer, Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997). Institutionalist analyses view educational ministries as the enactment of a world-cultural model that provides nation-states with legitimate authority over national educational policies and practices. Nation-states are culturally rooted, and act in a rationalized institutional and cultural order that includes the world-cultural models of politics, sovereignty, identity, and goals. The institutionalized cultural models link local actors to global environments, and further offer their authority and legitimacy. John Meyer and his colleagues portray the inherent features of culture: Culture includes the institutional models of society itself. The cultural structure of these models defines and integrates the framework of society, as well as the actors that have legitimate status and the pattern of activity leading to collective goods. y Culture has both ontological aspect, assigning reality to actors and action, to means and ends; and it has a significatory aspect, endowing actor and action, means and ends, with meaning and legitimacy. (Meyer, 1987, p. 21)
Institutionalists note that the expansion of compulsory education laws reflects a world-cultural emphasis on mass education and expansive jurisdictional authority of states. This line of studies of educational expansion concludes that ‘‘once countries enter the world of mass education, reporting some level of enrollment, growth is general – modified by floor and ceiling effects’’ (Meyer et al., 1992; see, for similar findings, Boli et al., 1985). Even in Nazi Germany, compulsory attendance was observed at a publicly controlled school, in a prison, and in a concentration camp (Kleinberger, 1975, p. 219). The studies further suggest that the educational expansion have been accelerated since World War II. The principle of universal compulsory education was embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948: ‘‘Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory’’ (Article 26). The international agreement on the importance of education added force that facilitated the construction of modern education systems.6
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For an explanation for the mechanism in which world culture influences the construction of state systems, institutionalists offer critiques of functional accounts for the origins and expansion of modern education systems. Functionalist analyses of state systems are highly rationalized and universalistic, emphasizing functioning, rational, realistic actors. That actor-centric rationality is rarely questioned and inscribed in social-scientific theories of ‘‘the way things work.’’ Institutionalists assert that these accounts often face evidential problems. For instance, research on educational expansion suggests that the impact of education on economic development varies (Rubinson & Browne, 1994). Though the enactment of compulsory education rules across nations is distinctively observed after World War II, many studies find that school enrollment levels were already high by the mid-1800s, and were often higher in agricultural states than in more urban states (Meyer, Tyack, Nagel, & Gordon, 1979; Soltow & Stevens, 1977, pp. 232–234). Conflicts, in institutionalist views, are understood to emerge and persist spontaneously rather than by conscious creation. Conflicts or hierarchies are rampant even in the face of determined efforts, on the parts of elites and nonelites, to eradicate them (see e.g., Dumont, 1970; Milner, 1994). The expanding and changing world culture provides nations, organizations, and individuals with highly rationalized knowledge, values, and moral standards that justify and motivate protests, complaints, innovation, and mobilization. Institutionalists deem conflicts a dynamic property of world culture. In sum, modern education systems are not traceable to the conscious efforts of particular interest groups. Nor can they be described adequately by simple aggregation of economic or technical improvement. Modern education systems are fairly consistent despite considerable turnover among power groups and the idiosyncratic demands of those who wish to influence them.
A NECESSARY CONDITION OF NATION-BUILDING A considerable body of evidence is consistent with the institutionalist argument that world-cultural models construct nation-states systems, identities, and behaviors. More than 90 percent of new nation-states formed after World War II and the collapse of communism have founded educational ministries and laws. Korea, Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam founded educational ministries immediately after independence from colonial powers. Small island countries also are not exceptional (e.g. Martinique in 1946). This nation-building process was observed as well in 1992 in 15 former Soviet Union countries. The external recognition of states is a critical
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national project of new independent nation-states. Meyer et al. (1997, p. 158) explain: With the anticolonial and self-determination movements of the 20th century, all sorts of collectivities have learned to organize their claims around a nation-state identity, and the consolidation of the United Nations system has provided a central forum for identity recognition that diminishes the importance of major states. Entry into the system occurs, essentially, via application forms (to the United Nations and other world bodies) on which the applicant must demonstrate appropriately formulated assertions about sovereignty and control over population and territory, along with appropriate aims and purposes.
New independent countries adopt the world models of educational ministries and laws to legitimate themselves and to intensify their authority over educational systems and activities. Throughout modern history, the rationality of state identity and authority has been culturally constructed at a global level steadily, and rapidly in the postwar period. In the 19th century, nations incorporated educational ministries and laws for national unification and development, secularizing earlier religious ideas and institutions. The normative construction of modern society was central to nationbuilding, as was the destruction of old regimes.7 Without doubt, the early models of educational ministries and laws have transformed over a century, and global political and economic circumstances in the postwar era are substantially different from those of the early modern period. But despite these changes, the objectives and methods of nation-building have become a world-cultural component. The new independent nation-states have learned the national objectives and adopted the world models of educational ministries and laws, which creates their national identities and legitimates their educational policies and practices. Nation-states renovate consistently their identities and goals to react and adapt to internal and external changes in their environments. Nation-states that have conformed to world culture are likely to follow the rationalized institutional order, incorporating the world models of national education systems. The 78 percent of the countries that have constructed educational ministries have enacted compulsory education laws. The enormous expansion of nation-state structures, bureaucracies, agendas, revenues, policies, and laws in the modern era indicates the expanded authority and responsibilities of nation-states. This expansive modernity increases the rate at which nation-states adopt other prescribed educational organizations of modernity, and as a result revamp their legitimized identity. So far, I have discussed several lines of argument, singly or in combination, to illuminate the driving forces that lead to the construction of
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modern education systems. My discussion has focused on how these arguments are theoretically connected and integrated rather than how they are competitive or inherently different. That is, functionalism of the state systems is part of world culture. While world culture may indeed often be a necessary condition for state policies and practices, it is not sufficient to account for state behavior, and may facilitate development and progress or may even provide occasion and means for conflict and resistance on a large scale. Taken as a whole, core propositions follow: Proposition 1. The legitimate objectives of national integration and development motivate nation-states to construct educational ministries and compulsory education laws. Proposition 2. The expanded world culture enhances the founding rates of educational ministries and compulsory education laws across nations. Proposition 3. National independence increases the founding rates of educational ministries and compulsory education laws. Proposition 4. The nation-states that enacted compulsory education laws build educational ministries at a faster rate, and vice versa. Nation-states would construct educational ministries and laws, although world culture would be absent. But the level of isomorphism would be very low; the instances would be episodic, unconnected, and small scale. This possibility is already entailed in my earlier discussion that functional accounts for the origins and expansion of education systems are limited to the degree that the systems are worldwide across societies. On the other hand, the models of educational ministries and laws would have not been worldwide without the legitimate objectives of development and progress. A nation’s founding of ministry of education or compulsory education law is an event in which both historical and societal conditions should be considered broadly at the same time. The appropriate analytical tool has not been developed in previous studies, so that both factors have been treated separately. Quantitative event history models are suitable to take into account a nation’s historical trajectory and social change simultaneously (Tuma & Hannan, 1984). The models estimate effectively the possibility that nation-states construct educational ministries or laws in certain historical, societal conditions. In the next section, using this event history analysis, I examine the founding rates of 248 countries’ educational ministries and laws during the period, 1800–2000.8 Data on the historical founding dates of educational ministries and compulsory education laws are assembled from
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many sources: The Statesman’s Yearbook (Martin et al., 1864–2000), Ramirez and Ventresca’s (1992) article, Flora and Albert’s (1983) historical compendium, World Data on Education Report (UNESCO, 2003), and Kurian’s (1988) encyclopedia.
EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE
NA Estimate of Integrated Hazard Rate The Cumulative Founding Ratesof Educational Ministries
Empirical observations suggest that the worldwide institutionalization of modern education systems have expanded dramatically since World War II, and that almost all of modern states adopt and implement educational ministries and laws. The analysis of founding rates of educational ministries in Fig. 3 shows that the historical construction and expansion of modern education systems are consistent with the formation and expansion of world society, as Meyer et al. (1997). Nelson-Aalen estimate of hazard rate indicates the measure of probability that an educational ministry is founded at time t, on condition that the event has not occurred before t. The curve increases gradually, becomes distinctively steeper after World War II, and reaches nearly at a state of dynamic equilibrium in the late 1990s. The Nelson-Aalen cumulative hazard Nelson-Aalen 95% lower bound Nelson-Aalen 95% upper bound
1.4
1.06
0.72
0.38
0.04 1800
Fig. 3.
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2000
The Cumulative Founding Rates of Educational Ministries, 1800–2000.
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expansion of educational ministries shows an S-shaped diffusion pattern. Educational ministries diffused with taken-for-granted beliefs in education, and the diffusion accelerated exponentially after World War II. The diffusion is limited by a ceiling effect, because educational ministries have become worldwide over time. Governmental and nongovernmental voluntary organizations have contributed to political and educational rationalization and standardization, developing and diffusing global models of progress (e.g. economic development) and justice (e.g. human rights). The worldwide expansion of educational ministries, too, results in part from the organizational expansion. International educational organizations provide new independent countries and less developed countries with knowledge and counsel on almost every aspect of the educational system, such as educational objectives, ministries, laws, data, programs, curricular, teaching methods, and technical devices. In brief, the founding rates of educational ministries reflect social, cultural integration of nation-states to world society, accelerating exponentially after World War II with the emergence and expansion of international organizations. Fig. 4 shows the founding rates of compulsory education laws from 1800 to 2000. The founding rates increase around 1850, then reaching its peak after World War II. Many western countries enacted compulsory education laws around 1850, which is consistent with the argument that an emphasis on the importance of national education was influenced by the French revolution (1789–1799) and Napoleonic wars (1799–1815). The majority of new independent countries, as emphasized earlier, conform to world culture and polity, enacting educational laws after World War II. The curve increases again around 1960 and 1990. Many colonies in Africa were independent around 1960 (e.g. Gabon, Guinea, Congo, and Kenya), and in the early 1990s the collapse of communism also accelerated the enactment of compulsory education laws. Together, these observations suggest that taken-for-granted beliefs and expectations pertaining to education motivated early modern nations to construct national educational systems, and the beliefs and expectations have become a common world-cultural component that nation-states culturally embedded deploy to be seen as modern states. The worldwide diffusion of both educational ministries and compulsory education laws shows S-shaped patterns. Modern education systems are adopted and implemented through rationalized functional analyses where benefits from the systems are indeed uncertain. Nation-states take up the world models of educational ministries and laws because they believe the education systems would enhance their economic development and social
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progress. That is, nation-states presume that modern education systems may yield some relative advantage to the existing systems they supersede, though the newness and unfamiliarity of systems infuse the functional analyses with a large dose of uncertainty. International ties are influential in the formation and changes of state systems. Nation-states are encouraged to adopt the world models of state systems by the opinion leaders, international organizations, and professionals, offering the efficacy and validity of the systems. Majority of nationstates do not have the inclination or capability to remain abreast of the most recent information about world models of state systems, so that they instead trust information and knowledge provided by the opinion leaders. The early adopters, western countries, too, give a credit to modern state systems. Those who have not adopted lose social status or economic validity in the international context, and this contextual pressure motivates adoption. Similarly, DiMaggio and Powell (1983) develop a typology of institutionalization, emphasizing that organizational isomorphism tends to occur due to political influences (coercive process), standard responses (mimetic process), and cultural legitimacy (normative process).
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World War II is a ‘‘tipping point’’ at which the dramatic diffusion of educational ministries and laws starts to take place. The concerted efforts of international organizations and professionals pushed nation-states to the tipping point, and once the models gained social, cultural agreements and supports in international society, the diffusion of models accelerated. The expansion slows in the late 1990s, because the education-building reached almost full participation throughout the world. A complete worldinstitutionalization follows an S-shaped diffusion curve over time.
CONCLUSION A state system, a web of social arrangements institutionally defined and regulated, is constructed by a variety of social forces invoking nations’ motivation and action. In the 19th and 20th centuries, industrial development engendered various kinds of social problems. Civic and political leaders conceived of national education as a solution to crimes, riots, protests, strikes, and other social disorder. They believed that national education would diminish social deviation and other actions inimical to political and economic order by socializing working classes to moral and civic norms and values. Similarly, national education was thought to help lower classes understand their status and position, and thus forsake their unrealistic aspiration for upward mobility. The link between these conjectures and nations’ efforts to found modern education systems is evident in many studies of education (see e.g., Smelser, 1991). The societal agreement is that education should be integrated and extended to sustain and develop industry and society. In the early industrial society, the social forces and aspirations for development and progress provoked nations to construct national educational systems through educational ministries and laws. The necessity and importance of national educational systems are legitimated internally within society, as such. The internal legitimacy is built around highly rationalized and scientized accounts that include a variety of organized interests and functions. Once a system is legitimized, societal supports continues. The political, economic, moral, and legal foundations of the system become consolidated. The legitimate accounts often flow over national boundaries, and become a world-cultural component over time. Then they are rarely challenged and disputed. Few contemporary nation-states seek completely different alternatives to modern education systems despite the different outcomes from them. National modernity is linked directly to modern education systems, though
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historical evidence suggests that many European countries founded national educational systems prior to modernization and industrial development (e.g. Prussia, France, and Holland). Further, it is difficult to imagine that all the educational ministries and laws constructed across societies function effectively. Educational ministries of some countries (e.g. Switzerland and the U.S.) have functioned effectively to neither integrate national education nor unify state systems. Nevertheless, nation-states, as far as they exist, are unlikely to abolish educational ministries or abrogate compulsory education rules. Rather, new independent countries and less developed countries call for international consultants who can advise on systemic arrangements of national education to construct modern education systems. World-cultural forces for the expansion of modern state systems impel nation-states to incorporate educational ministries and laws. The cultural forces create and define basic tenets of systemhood, which amplifies modern identity of state. Educational goals, values, arrangements, rules and regulations lead nations to be structured and organized in modern ways. Nationstates adopt world models of state systems, so that the models integrate them into their external environments. That is, nation-states are legitimated externally by world-cultural models that categorize individual and organizational behaviors and infuse them with values and meanings in broad contexts. It is important to note that the presumed functional necessity and importance of world models embody the external legitimacy. In pursuing their external legitimacy, nation-states also have shared beliefs, values, and understandings, and as a result, harmonize and cooperate with each other. A state system is essentially a locus of legitimacy. This legitimacy is built around a rationalized cultural order. Understanding the historical, cultural contexts in which modern education systems have been constructed helps to illuminate the organizational reality of the state system, and further to predict institutionalization of other state systems.
NOTES 1. Modern education systems include a variety of school arrangements, such as curricula, the licensing of teachers, school expenditures, and admission and graduation standards as well as compulsory laws mandating mass schooling and educational ministries. Since my interest lies in the state behavior incorporating educational ministries and laws, I limit this paper’s focus to the educational systems which have become institutionalized considerably from 1800 to 2000.
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2. Pierre Bourdieu sees the educational system as a major institution through which symbolic domination is practiced on people. Showing the cultural mechanism of domination process, he stresses the possibility of strategic calculation on the parts of agents (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 5). Though Bourdieu illuminates the linkage between culture and agency, his account is not complete in terms of cultural reproduction. Henry Giroux (1983) offers a critique: Bourdieu overemphasizes a one-way process of domination in his analysis, and fail to explain how human agents come together. Working-class cultural production through the dynamics of resistance, incorporation, and accommodation should be equally emphasized. 3. Both technical-functional and conflict perspectives focus on the functions of educational systems in technical or ideological terms. The differences are: (1) while functionalists provide a description of the relations existing between education and society, conflict theorists explain why these relations exist and how they change over time; (2) functional theories tend to see socialization as the process by which social members share common functional values that hold a society together, whereas conflict theories examine the interests that underlie these values and emphasize that socialization proceeds differently by social class; and (3) finally, functionalists view educational systems as a mechanism for social mobility, while conflict theory sees them as an agency legitimating existing social inequality. 4. In their study of 19th century European educational systems, Soysal and Strang (1989) argue that an official state church increased the state’s authority over mass education. This argument suggests that a historical relationship between a state and a church (e.g. Christian heritage) also may increase the likelihood of education-building. 5. The denominators employed for the proportion change over time, because the total number of countries is different by the time periods. Many countries, for instance, enter the data set, when they become independent. 6. Institutionalists claim that modern education enhances citizenship to integrate new societies. A good citizen suggested by institutionalists is different from a modern person with modern attitudes, values, and skills as defined by functionalists. Institutionalists assert that an educational system is a public system defining new statuses and roles for both the educated and non-educated. On the basis of their education, the educated expect certain roles and the non-educated expect their social roles as well. For example, modern education has brought forth various educational credentials and licenses for employment in civil service and professional positions such as medicine, law, business, and teaching. With increasing occupational specialization, the non-educated have come to attend to the advice of the more educated people. Institutionalists, therefore, see education as an institution that can expand and change the role structure of society, and define proper relations with the rest of society (Meyer, 1977). 7. A great deal of modern values and knowledge has been institutionalized across nations, probably independent of their immediate efficiencies or benefits. Nations that pursue state-centered educational policies and economic coordination tend to adopt vigorously new knowledge and technologies which are associated with broad visions of development and progress. The expansion of modern education systems are not driven by their immediate benefits. Rather, the systems have been spread worldwide as a critical institution that facilitates broad social rationalization, altering and reconstructing the goals and interests of national activities.
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8. Here, I present descriptive statistics and hazard rate plots that estimate the timing and temporal patterns of the founding of educational ministries and laws. It would be worth investigating multivariate event history models, looking at the effects of independent variables discussed in this article: principally, indicators of worldhistorical influences (the impacts of the World Wars I and II), expanded international organizations, and national independence.
REFERENCES Becker, G. S. (1964). Human capital. New York: Columbia University Press. Bendix, R. (1964). Nation-building and citizenship. New York: Wiley. Bernstein, B. (1973). Social class, language, and socialization. Current Trends in Linguistics, 12, 473–486. Boli, J., Ramirez, F. O., & Meyer, J. W. (1985). Expanding the origins and expansion of mass education. Comparative Education Review, 29, 145–170. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. London: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1981). Men and machines. In: K. Knorr-Certina & A. V. Cicourel (Eds), Advances in social theory and methodology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production: Essays on arts and leisure. New York: Columbia University Press. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. New York: Basic Books. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (2002). Schooling in capitalist America revisited. Sociology of Education, 75, 1–18. Boyd, W. (1964). The history of Western education (7th ed.). London: Macmillan. Chiswick, B. (1988). Differences in education and earnings across racial and ethnic groups: Tastes, discrimination, and investment in child quality. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 103(3), 571–597. Clark, B. R. (1962). Educating the expert society. San Francisco: Chandler. Collins, R. (1979). The credential society: A historical sociology of education and stratification. New York: Academic Press. Darity, W., Jr., & Myers, R. (1980). Changes in Black–White income inequality: A decade of progress. Review of Black Political Economy, 11, 355–379. DiMaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited. American Sociological Review, 48(2), 147–160. Dore, R. (1964). Education in Tokugawa Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dreeben, R. (1968). On what is learned in school. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Dumont, L. (1970). Homo Hierarchicus: The cast systems and its implications. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Duncan, W. (1989). Engendering schooling learning: Science, attitudes and achievement among girls and boys in Botswana. Stockholm: Institute of International Education, University of Stockholm. England, P., & Farkas, G. (1988). Explaining occupational sex segregation and wages: Findings from a model with fixed effects. American Sociological Review, 53, 544–558.
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Flora, P., & Albert, J. (1983). State, economy, and society in Western Europe, 1815–1975. Chicago: St. James Press. Frank, D., Hironaka, A., Meyer, J., Schofer, E., & Tuma, N. (1997). The rationalization and organization of nature in world culture. In: J. Boli & G. M. Thomas (Eds), Constructing world culture: International non-governmental organizations since 1875 (pp. 81–99). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Giroux, H. A. (1983). Theories of reproduction and resistance in the new sociology of education: A critical analysis. Harvard Educational Review, 53(August), 257–293. Hyde, J. K. (1979). Some uses of literacy in Venice and Florence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (5th ser., Vol. 29, pp. 109–128). London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society. Kleinberger, A. F. (1975). A comparative analysis of compulsory education laws. Comparative Education, 11, 219–230. Kurian, G. T. (1988). World education encyclopedia. New York, NY: Facts on File. Lareau, A. (1990). Home advantage: Social class and parental intervention in elementary education. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Martin, F., Scott-Keltie, J., Sir, Epstein, M., Steinberg, S. H., Paxton, J., & Hunter, B. (1864–2000). Statemans yearbook. London: Macmillan. McMahon, W. W. (1970). An economic analysis of the major determinants of expenditures on public primary and secondary education. Review of Economics and Statistics, 52, 242–252. Meyer, J. W. (1977). The effects of education as an institution. American Journal of Sociology, 83, 55–77. Meyer, J. W. (1987). Ontology and rationalization in the Western cultural account. In: G. M. Thomas, J. W. Meyer, F. O. Ramirez & J. Boli (Eds), Institutional structure (pp. 12–37). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Meyer, J. W., Boli, J., Thomas, G. M., & Ramirez, F. O. (1997). World society and nation-state. American Journal of Sociology, 103(July), 144–181. Meyer, J. W., Ramirez, F. O., & Soysal, Y. N. (1992). World expansion of mass education. Sociology of Education, 65, 128–149. Meyer, J. W., Tyack, D., Nagel, J., & Gordon, A. (1979). Public education as nation-building in America: Enrollments and bureaucratization in the American states, 1870–1930. American Journal of Sociology, 85, 591–613. Milner, M., Jr. (1994). Status and sacredness: A general theory of status relations and an analysis of Indian culture. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press. Ramirez, F. O., & Boli, J. (1987). The political construction of mass schooling: European origins and worldwide institutionalization. Sociology of Education, 60, 2–17. Ramirez, F. O., & Ventresca, M. J. (1992). Building the institution of mass schooling: Isomorphism in the modern world. In: B. Fuller & R. Rubinson (Eds), The political construction of education: The state, school expansion, and economic change (pp. 49–59). New York: Praeger. Reinser, E. (1922). Nationalism and education since 1789. New York: Macmillan. Rix, S. E. (1990). The American women: A status report. New York: W.W. Norton. Rubinson, R., & Browne, I. (1994). Education and the economy. In: S. Neil & R. Swedborg (Eds), Handbook of economic sociology (pp. 583–599). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schultz, T. W. (1961). Investment in human capital. American Economic Review, 51, 1–17.
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Smelser, N. J. (1991). Social paralysis and social change: British working-class education in the nineteenth century. Oxford, England: University of California Press. Soltow, L., & Stevens, E. (1977). Economic aspects of school participation in mid-nineteenth century United States. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 8, 221–243. Soysal, Y. N., & Strang, D. (1989). Construction of the first mass education systems in nineteenth century Europe. Sociology of Education, 62, 277–288. Strang, D., & Chang, P. (1993). The institutional labor organization and the welfare state: Institutional effects on national welfare spending, 1960–1980. International Organization, 47, 235–262. Szreter, R. (1974). Europe’s first ministry of education and the problem of the supply of teachers. British Journal of Educational Studies, 22, 182–190. Tilly, C. (1992). Coercion, capital, and European states, A.D. 990–1992. Cambridge: Blackwell. Tilly, C. (1998). Durable inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tuma, N., & Hannan, M. (1984). Social dynamics: Models and methods. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. United Nations Education, Science, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). (2000–2003). World data on education report. Paris, France: UNESCO. Walters, P., & O’Connell, P. J. (1988). The family economy, work, and educational participation in the United States, 1890–1940. American Journal of Sociology, 93, 1116–1152.
THE CHANGING NATURE OF TERTIARY EDUCATION: NEO-INSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON CROSS-NATIONAL TRENDS IN DISCIPLINARY ENROLLMENT, 1965–1995$ Gili S. Drori and Hyeyoung Moon Cross-national studies point to two central trends of change in the field of education. First, they note the worldwide institutionalization of education: education is accepted as a necessary element of national planning and education systems are emerging in countries worldwide (see Ramirez & Boli, 1982; Meyer & Ramirez, 2000). In this sense, education has become a core component of nation-statehood, defining one of the elementary features and customary systems of nation-states of all developmental stages. Second,
$
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2001 annual meetings of the American Sociological Association (August, Anaheim) and the Society for Social Studies of Science (October, Boston).
The Impact of Comparative Education Research on Institutional Theory International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 7, 157–185 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3679/doi:10.1016/S1479-3679(06)07008-3
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there is a parallel expansion of access to education: education has come to be conceptualized as a human right, thus a basic entitlement for all (see Chabbott, 2002). These two trends, carried by international organizations of both education and development, have converged to create a worldwide ‘‘boom’’ in education. This tidal wave of education institutionalization first ‘‘swept’’ mass education during the 1950s–1960s,1 resulting in massive institutionalization and expansion of primary and secondary education; and, is currently reaching the system of tertiary education. Over time, universities – being the locus of tertiary education – emerged in countries worldwide, regardless of their national features or resources (Riddle, 1989). As of 1995, universities were established in more than 170 countries worldwide, a dramatic increase from around 110 countries in 1950. Also, tertiary education has been growing in terms of enrollments: by 1995 more than 20 percent of population of age 20–24 were enrolled in tertiary education institutions on average worldwide, while in 1965 it was less than 6 percent (also see Schofer & Meyer, 2005). In this sense, the worldwide wave of education institutionalization fully reached the tertiary sector, intensifying its activity and expanding its access. Lately, cross-national studies of education re-orient their research agenda: from describing and analyzing these trends of worldwide expansion in sheer magnitude to considering the trend in terms of scope. Focusing primarily on curricular changes, such studies tell of a change in the nature of the primary and secondary education systems: what counts as education in terms of inclusion in the school curriculum, what are the core curricular subjects and which are the peripheral themes, and what are the changes to this model of education over time (see Benavot, Cha, Kamens, Meyer, & Wong, 1991; Kamens & Benavot, 1992; Kamens, Meyer, & Benavot, 1996; McEneaney & Meyer, 2000). Our study sets to evaluate similar trends in the tertiary education system. Relying on UNESCO data on tertiary education enrollments by disciplines compiled for the years 1965–1995, we evaluate the worldwide trends of discipline-specific expansion within tertiary education. We note a general trend of expansion of enrollment in the absolute amount across all disciplines. Our main finding is, however, that such an expansion occurs at different rates in different disciplines. We find that while some disciplines (most dramatically agriculture, art and the humanities) are barely keeping up, or even shrinking, compared to their 1960s share of higher education, other disciplines (namely the social sciences) are experiencing dramatic rates of expansion. These findings imply that the tertiary education system is going through dramatic structural and substantive changes: most
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dramatically, there is a sharp decline in the appeal of the humanities and a sharp expansion of the social sciences. We stipulate that such changes are linked with substantive alterations to the world polity and to its models of nation-statehood and citizenship. In this way, our work here relates the world society tradition of neo-institutional with comparative education research.
BETWEEN COMPARATIVE TERTIARY EDUCATION RESEARCH AND NEO-INSTITUTIONALISM Education has become an important and frequently studied field for neoinstitutional scholars. Undoubtedly, some of the oldest and now canonized neo-institutional works were written about education: clearly John Meyer’s (1977) work on education as an institution, but also the work of Robert K. Merton (1938/1970) on early modern science. Our work here on global tertiary education intends to add to this now rich body of institutionalist literature on education on both empirical and theoretical grounds by studying cross-national trends in tertiary education. On methodological matters, our work here fits with the rich empirical tradition of comparative institutional analysis, or world society theory. This tradition has been to rely on comparative data, mostly using national-level statistics, to describe global historical trends. This method is clearly evident in studies of education (see Drori, Meyer, Ramirez, & Schofer, 2003; Schofer & Meyer, 2005) and many of such studies also utilize a historical causal analysis to decipher the antecedents of educational change worldwide or the effects of such educational change worldwide.2 Some such data are derived from the relevant international agencies (mostly UNESCO and IBE), all of which were compiled for purposes other than comparative research and once compiled are treated as secondary data (e.g., Schofer & Meyer, 2005); other data, even if keeping with the same logic, were compiled from original material and thus labeled primary data (e.g., Frank & Gabler, 2006). Indeed, UNESCO, with a zeal for comparative data compilation and a professional approach to the issue of the quality of such data, has allowed for rich use of data to map the world over time. The data are not without fault and they report more of value or quantity than of quality of education; still, their availability allowed for a spring of comparative research to complement the more traditional study of education. Our work here is clearly an extension of this tradition: we rely extensively on quantitative methodology,
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but at the same time acknowledge that all they provide us with is a legitimate map of social processes. This empirical legacy has substantive dimensions too and those are evident in regards to the study of education. For one, we regard the world as the relevant boundary for contemporary society, assuming that isomorphic processes have established comparable units across the globe: nation-states, education systems, students, etc. At the same time, we also treat these social units with some justified caution, seeing their evolution over time and observing the influence of their environment on their form and content. This is an on-going tension between the social world as essentially constructed yet heavily relying on reality-reifying methods and measures; it is resolved by acknowledgment. Substantively, our work on global changes in tertiary education field related to core matters for world society scholarship: we address the matters of global isomorphism, contemplate the possibility of worldwide convergence, and identify transformation processes by investigating both the content and the context of such transformation; we also talk in terms of conformity with normative models of appropriatedness and of embeddedness in a cultural context. These matters are essential hypotheses for world society theory and anchored in neo-institutional theory of organizations. The argument of our paper is, therefore, a clear extension of world society claims: the similarity in empirical trends of tertiary education worldwide requires a basis in a vision of a rising world society; this imagery of a world society, with its universalistic and rationalized mythology, makes the humanities less relevant and supports the expansion of the social sciences. It is global cultural trends, then, that are reflected in the changing nature of tertiary education systems worldwide.
CHANGES TO THE UNIVERSITY Current literature on the changes to tertiary education describes the ‘‘ivory tower’’ of academia as being re-molded to correspond to current notions of knowledge and of its utility to social development. Such notions proclaim universities to be a necessary component of the national development plan – namely, a ‘‘triple helix’’ connection among academia, industry, and government (Etzkowitch & Leydesdrof, 1997). They rightly point out that while universities are named ‘‘the home of science’’ (Wolfe, 1972), only half of all American basic science research is conducted within universities (Wittrock & Elzinga, 1985). They also show that while academic freedom is still a
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valued principle in universities, the extent of government- and industry-sponsored research executed by university researchers is expanding (Gibbons, Limoge, & Nowotny, 1994; Nowotny, Scott, & Gibbons, 2000). The university, thus, is becoming an ‘‘entrepreneurial university’’ (Clark, 1998), soliciting funding from external sources, engaging in industrial agenda, and – most importantly – transforming its structures to accommodate such new capitalist linkages (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Aronowitz, 2001). The university is adding a ‘‘third academic mission’’ of engagement in economic production to its traditional missions of teaching and research (Gibbons et al., 1994), reorienting its mission towards marketability of its curriculum (Kirp, 2004), and thus becoming a ‘‘multiversity’’ (Kerr, 2001). In these terms, the boundaries of the university have become more porous to social, mainly economic, demands. These demands for commercialization and relevancy alter the substantive boundaries, or content, of tertiary education. Universities worldwide are changing their structures to reflect the change in what accounts for higher education. They add new curricular themes (gender or environmental studies) and change their teaching structures accordingly.3 American universities, for example, influenced by the ethos of consumerism and entrepreneurship, have experienced a ‘‘rise of the ‘practical arts’’’ (Brint, 1999): university programs are expected to lead to a ‘‘useful’’ degree and, therefore, even the liberal arts have become ‘‘professionalized.’’ Similarly, there is a worldwide rise of professional education of a modern sort, such as business education in the form of MBA (Moon & Wotipka, 2006). These trends imply a change to the contours of tertiary education, through the expansion of the system’s boundaries and the academization of new fields of study.4 A review of this body of literature suggests that two issues are of particular concern. First, the main focus lies in changes to the university, rather than to the field of tertiary education as a whole. Clearly, the university, being the core (and oldest) institution of tertiary education, is where changes are most dramatic; nevertheless, much ‘‘action’’ is occurring outside the boundaries of the university as well, in the addition of various accredited institutions and the expansion of enrollments in them. In this sense, our work aims to broaden the discussion and to ‘‘map’’ the field of tertiary education in general. Second, much of this work relies on evidence from particular countries, all of which are Western and affluent countries; with a few exceptions,5 tertiary education in developing countries is neglected. The goal of our paper is, hence, to assess cross-national trends of disciplinary change in tertiary education over time.
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DESCRIBING GLOBAL CHANGES IN DISCIPLINARY TERTIARY ENROLLMENT To assess cross-national trends of disciplinary changes in the tertiary education system over the past few decades, we raise the following two questions. First, have different disciplines been experiencing unique trends of change over time? We address this question first by examining whether the rates and directions of change are uniform over time to the extent that it can establish a trend. Next, we examine whether and to what extent each discipline is moving into a certain direction. Second, once we identify the over-time trends of disciplinary changes in tertiary education, we explore cross-national patterns in these trends. That is, we examine whether the rates and direction of change are uniform across groups of countries based on political regime (communist versus non-communist), on the level of economic development (developed versus developing) or on geographical location (world region).
Dependent Variables Current research on changes to higher education is rather limited in its empirics: it applies to a limited number of cases6 and it rests on limited comparative indicators.7 A few broad indicators do exist, indicating substantive changes by (a) disciplinary output measures or (b) size of disciplinary units or structures. The Institute for Scientific Information compiles data on scientific paper publications per disciplines8 and Frank and Gabler (2006) compiled data identifying the size of university faculty per department, or discipline.9 These only two available indicators, while classifying a substantial number of countries and offering valid cross-national measures, are either limited in time scope10 or potentially biased by their sampling technique.11 Alternatively, one can rely – as we do in this paper – on enrollment information per discipline. We employ enrollment data gathered and compiled by UNESCO, as published annually in UNESCO’s Statistical Yearbooks. Such UNESCO data on tertiary education enrollments per discipline, in contrast to currently available indicators, offer a complementing cross-national indicator that suffers from no such shortcomings: the data are gathered by a single source and continuously over five decades. In addition, UNESCO has maintained a relatively consistent set of disciplinary
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categories over time, which makes a good source for historical analysis. The substantive fields are categorized as education, humanities, art, law, natural sciences, engineering, medical sciences, agriculture and social sciences.12,13 The data required a few manipulations to be ready for rigorous empirical research. First, because UNESCO changed its disciplinary classification scheme in the late 1970s,14 a re-calibration of the pre-1980 and post-1980 classifications was necessary to enable a continuous charting of patterns.15 This resulted in comparable and continuous data for the 1965–1995 period. Second, to increase the number of countries included in the analysis, we gather information for a two-year span before or after the target year.16 This resulted in a substantial increase in the number of countries included, especially in the early years, without substantively corrupting the data. We employ two types of dependent variables to assess the change in disciplinary enrollment at the tertiary level: tertiary enrollment by discipline (a) as a proportion of age group 20–24 and (b) as a proportion of total tertiary enrollment. The former measures the absolute size of disciplinary enrollment standardized by the relevant age cohort and thus corrected for the cross-national variation in the population size, while the latter is an indicator of the relative size of disciplinary enrollment.
Trends of Cross-Disciplinary Change We begin by investigating changes in the absolute size of disciplines, measured by enrollment in each discipline as a proportion of the age group 20–24. Fig. 1 shows dramatic rates of expansion in the absolute size of enrollments across all nine disciplines. The rates of expansion are most dramatic for the social sciences: the proportion of the 20–24 age group enrolled in social sciences in 1995 is almost seven times higher than the proportion in 1965, mere three decades earlier. Although not as dramatic as social sciences, the enrollment sizes of engineering, medical sciences and natural sciences have grown almost threefold. The rates of expansion in humanities, education, law, agriculture and art are much lower: the enrollment sizes only doubled up over the past three decades.17 This evidence suggests that the overall expansion of tertiary education enrollment takes place in all kinds of disciplines, while the rates of expansion vary among different disciplines. Now we turn to changes in the relative size of each discipline, measured by enrollment in each discipline as a proportion of total tertiary enrollment. Although in the absolute terms, all the disciplines have moved in the same
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Proportion of Age Group 20-24
0.08 0.07 0.06 0.05 0.04 0.03 0.02 0.01 0
1965
1975
1985
1995
Year Education Engineering
Humanities Medical Sciences
Art Agriculture
Law Social Sciences
Natural Sciences
Fig. 1. World Average Tertiary Enrollment by Discipline as a Proportion of Age Group 20–24, 1965–1995 (N ¼ 84 Countries; for Art and Agriculture, N ¼ 66).
direction of expansion between 1965 and 1995, the rates of change in relative terms are certainly different across disciplines. The examination of the relative sizes of disciplines reveals that disciplines differ not only in rates of growth but also in the direction. First, as suggested in Fig. 2, the field of social sciences has dramatically increased its relative share in tertiary education between 1965 and 1995. In 1965, enrollment in social sciences accounted for about 15 percent of total tertiary enrollment, whereas in 1995 it changed to about 30 percent.18 Second, education and engineering are two disciplines that have maintained their relative share for this period. Third, six of the disciplines – humanities, natural sciences, medical sciences, law, agriculture and art – have lost their relative share in tertiary enrollment. Among these disciplines, the decrease of humanities is most prominent from around 20 percent of total tertiary education enrollments to 12 percent. For other disciplines, the rates of decrease are rather gradual and less dramatic. The dramatic expansion in the social sciences is not directly attributable to the move toward the ‘‘practical arts.’’ As presented in Fig. 3, different sub-fields of the discipline of social sciences experience somewhat unique trends of change between 1985 and 1995.19 The category of social and behavioral sciences within the general discipline of social sciences experiences a mild contraction, while the category of business experiences a mild expansion and the ambiguous category of ‘‘other’’ experiences the most dramatic
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Proportion of Total Tertiary Enrollment
The Changing Nature of Tertiary Education 0.35 0.3 0.25 0.2 0.15 0.1 0.05 0
1965
1975
1985
1995
Year Education Engineering
Humanities Medical Sciences
Art Agriculture
Law Social Sciences
Natural Sciences
Fig. 2. World Average Disciplinary Enrollment as a Proportion of Total Tertiary Enrollment, 1965–1995 (N ¼ 84 Countries; for Art and Agriculture, N ¼ 66).
Proportion of Total Tertiary Enrollment
0.35 1985
1995
0.3 0.25 0.2 0.15 0.1 0.05 0
Fig. 3.
Social Science
Social and Behavioral Sciences Field
Business
Others
World Average Tertiary Enrollment of Social Sciences by Subfields as a Proportion of Total Tertiary Enrollment, 1985–1995 (N ¼ 84).
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expansion. Several sub-fields of social sciences included in ‘‘other’’ category are home economics, service and trades, communication and documentation, and trade, crafts and industry. The expansion of the social sciences and the contraction of enrollment in many other disciplines of tertiary education seem to confirm recent worries about disciplinary ‘‘brain drain’’ and its consequences (see Holmstrom, Gaddy, & Van Horne, 1997; Kernan, 1997). The data are inconclusive, though, in addressing the debate surrounding the move toward the ‘‘practical arts.’’ Studies of American higher education demonstrate a general move of expansion of the ‘‘practical arts’’ (Brint, 1999), which is fueled by the expectation of utilitarian benefits from the emphasis on practical sciences (Sarewitz, 1996). Worldwide, however, the fields of agriculture, law and medicine are contracting, and the fields of engineering and education are barely holding their own. Let us comment on the discipline of education in particular, since it is the obvious intellectual common grounds for those reading this volume. We know from our own work how the scholarly field of, and about, education is expanding; this is confirmed here, in Fig. 1. Still, in relative terms education does not gain volume (see Fig. 2) and it remains a rather varied field crossnationally (see Fig. 4). And, clearly, the field of tertiary education does not match with the well-documented rapid expansion of primary and secondary 1.2
Coefficient of Variation
1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 1965 Education Engineering
Fig. 4.
1975 Humanities Medical Sciences
Year Art Agriculture
1985 Law Social Sciences
1995 Natural Sciences All
Coefficients of Variation for Relative Size of Disciplinary Enrollment at the World Level, 1965–1995.
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education worldwide. We suspect that the academization of education and the expansion of the field beyond pedagogy and teachers’ training has allowed other professionals to study education: we, for example, are sociologists of education and others come to education research from the fields of economics, organizational studies, and policy studies. In this sense, the move toward the practical is not experienced in a similar fashion worldwide, maybe because the definition of what is practical still varies across countries. And, the massification of tertiary education accompanied by fluidity of the definition of the practical profession may have allowed the social sciences to take the role of the comprehensive track in secondary schools, namely offer a general and broad education that is a solid basis for almost any nontechnical profession. So, while the overarching myth of disciplinary emphasis may call for education choices to reflect national planning priorities, this may say more about the role of economic legitimation in tertiary education than about the actual contribution of this or that tertiary education discipline to the bottom-line of economic growth. Overall, clearly the trend of changes in tertiary education cross-nationally is characterized by (a) overall massification of higher education in all disciplines between 1965 and 1995 and (b) the rapid expansion of the relative share of enrollments in the social sciences and the corresponding decrease of humanities. Still, why are some disciplines experiencing a decline in enrollment? What singles the arts, law and, most dramatically, the humanities? Our answer rests on the nature of world society. The relation of particular disciplines to the universalistic legacies of current world society makes them to be more accessible to expansion in the age of globalization. With world culture emphasizing the themes of justice and progress and focusing on the universalistic features of even cultural traditions (see Drori, 2005), certain themes (like art, humanities, and law, to name the few disciplines in this study) are highly contentious and subjective (hence, non universalistic). This impression limits access to them and their public support, labeling them particularistic, if not outright elitist. Why are most of the expansion in tertiary education concentrated in the wide-ranging discipline of social sciences? We attribute this change to the powerful process of change in universities to open up to social demands, pressures and criteria of desirability. As described earlier, in reviewing the changes to the university system, tertiary education serves as a site for the dual processes of the socialization of science and the scientization of society (Drori et al., 2003). In this complex set of processes, tertiary education institutions become attune to social demands for applicability, as society is
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relying more and more of scientized expertise to make social policy and decisions. The social sciences are the nexus of these dual processes, in their ability to bridge society and ‘‘ivory tower.’’ It is therefore in modern society, where the process of socialization of science and the scientization of society are at their height, that the social sciences are to experience a particularly dramatic expansion. And, the social sciences are essentially constructed around universalistic mythology, primarily a developmentalist one, thus enabling further support for their expansion from global culture and its carriers (see Drori, 2005). With this in mind, it is important to consider where is this change occurring and to see if it does indeed occur so worldwide.
Patterns of Cross-National Change In this section we turn to the second research question: Are all countries experiencing similar trends of disciplinary contraction and expansion in tertiary education? That is, are these trends global or are they unique to particular group of countries? We will answer this question in two ways: (a) by exploring the variation in disciplinary emphasis across all countries and (b) by comparing rates of change in disciplinary emphasis among groups of countries categorized by their political, economic, geographical and historical features. Finally, we test whether worldwide trends of changes in tertiary education is overwhelmed by the magnitude of American trends by comparing trends in American tertiary education to that of (a) other Western countries and (b) non-Western countries.20 It has long been confirmed that in spite of similarity in the format set-up of their science base, countries differ greatly in the capacity of their sciences (Frame, Narin, & Carpenter, 1977; Ben-David, 1990; Drori et al., 2003). Countries differ from each other in the intensity of scientific work, the level of governmental commitment to science affairs, and the organizational base of science, as well as in the openness of their higher education systems and the effect such education has on the local economy (e.g., Benavot, 1992). These differences capture the notion of ‘‘science styles,’’ acknowledging that different countries have unique patterns of structure and relations for science and tertiary education (Drori et al., 2003). The following section explores this notion of ‘‘national-’’ and ‘‘geopolitical style’’ in regards to tertiary education, building upon earlier work here. Still, while the focus is on difference and variation in the disciplinary composition of tertiary education systems worldwide, the evidence does not
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contradict neo-institutional tales of global models and their diffusion. Rather, we argue that the observable differences in ‘‘style’’ are evidence of the existence of variants of the global model of tertiary education and the university. As we argue, these variations are not unique forms of tertiary educations that are disconnected from the global model, but rather reflect variations in institutionalization due to particular regional or political processes. The global model of tertiary education is rather defined: it includes a university, a certain set of academic disciplines, students, classrooms, entry exams and professional or academic credentials, etc. On the whole, variation in this global model is relatively small and, most importantly, this variation in the disciplinary composition of tertiary education is declining over time. Fig. 4 graphs coefficients of variation for tertiary enrollment by field in the relative terms at the world level over the past three decades. First, overall coefficient score is moving in the direction of gradual decrease. This implies that national tertiary education systems seem to change toward a similar composition, however gradually. Second and specific to disciplinary change, the humanities and art are the only disciplines where national tertiary enrollment systems show an increasing level of diversity. The cross-national variation in regards to other fields has been decreasing over time. The result here, combined with Fig. 2, suggests that the shift to social sciences-dominant pattern of tertiary enrollment is taking place across all countries rather than driven by a few countries. The variation on this global legitimated model of tertiary education is, however, not random; rather, the variation follows patterns of geo-political distribution. Next we turn to a series of analyses of trends in the relative emphasis in tertiary disciplinary enrollment across groups of countries, distinguished by political, economic and geographical characteristics. First, Figs. 5a, b show the results of comparison between Western and NonWestern countries, where Western and Non-Western grouping categorizes countries according to both economic and geographical distinctions.21 In the disciplines of law, engineering and social sciences, these two groups of countries do not show any statistically different trends. While Western countries tend to have stronger emphasis in humanities, art, natural sciences and medical sciences than Non-Western countries, the latter has relatively more tertiary students enrolled in education and agriculture. However, these differences do not seem dramatic. Specifically, the results show similar overall contraction in the humanities and the natural sciences in both groups of countries, while other disciplines similarly maintain or slightly reduce their relative share.22 These findings somewhat contradict earlier conclusions: Lydia Lange (1985) finds that the social sciences are the marker of
Proportion of Total Tertiary Enrollment
170
GILI S. DRORI AND HYEYOUNG MOON 0.25 0.2 0.15 0.1 0.05 0
1965
1975
1985
1995
Year Humanities(W) Natural Sciences(W)
Proportion of Total Tertiary Enrollment
(a)
Humanities Natural Sciences
Art(W) Medical Sciences(W)
Art Medical Sciences
0.18 0.16 0.14 0.12 0.1 0.08 0.06 0.04 0.02 0
1965
1975
1985
1995
Year (b)
Fig. 5.
Education(W)
Education
Agriculture(W)
Agriculture
Proportion of Disciplinary Enrollment for Western (N ¼ 20) and NonWestern Countries (N ¼ 46).
Western countries. The discrepancy between the findings may be explained by the nature of the specific indicators: Lange uses on counts of academic disciplinary paper publications, while here we rely on student enrollment data. Publications, more subject to censorship and depending thus on
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society’s openness, are historically a feature of liberal and open societies more than of closed and totalitarian societies (which parallel our distinction here between Western and non-Western countries), especially in the social science disciplines. In general, then, these trends in disciplinary emphasis are not a feature of changes driven by magnitude of these trends in the developed core countries in particular, but rather are experienced worldwide at the same time and rate. This is a rather astonishing fact: in spite of obvious differences in scale, support, resources and historical legacies between rich developed countries and poor developing countries (documented in such works as Eisemon & Davis, 1992; Gaillard, 1991), they do not much differ in the historical change in the disciplinary composition of their higher education. Second, trends of disciplinary change occur at similar rates at both socialist and non-socialist countries. Figs. 6a, b show that it is in the disciplines of social sciences, humanities and engineering that socialist and non-socialist countries show the most dramatic difference. As observed in earlier studies (that rely on a variety of measures of academic work; Frame et al., 1977; Schubert, Zsindely, & Braun, 1983; Lange, 1985; Schott, 1992; Lubrano, 1993), socialist countries have stronger emphasis on engineering, whereas non-socialist countries have stronger concentration in humanities and social sciences. The cross-group variation exists in natural sciences and agriculture, although to a much less extent. The variation among these groups is, however, certainly decreasing over time, affirming the earlier findings that trends of change in tertiary education system are experienced worldwide. Moreover, in the fields of law, medical sciences, art and education, these two groups of countries experience almost identical changes at similar rates. Here, again, comes the issue of variation and its trajectory: considering how different these sets of countries are on most social aspects, the variations in the disciplinary composition of their tertiary education and the trend of convergence, especially after the systemic shock of the collapse of the Communist bloc, are particularly striking. Third, the end of the Cold War and the era of hyper globalization call into discussion the proposition that such global trends are driven by, and reflective of, the overwhelming changes in the American tertiary education system. Table 1 confirms that the American tertiary education system is different than that of other Western countries. For example, in the U.S. there is a dramatic decline in enrollments in education and engineering, while the general trend in other Western countries is of maintaining their share. In contrast, the humanities are experiencing dramatic contraction in Western countries, while in the U.S. the decline in enrollment in the
Proportion of Total Tertiary Enrollment
172
GILI S. DRORI AND HYEYOUNG MOON 0.35 0.3 0.25 0.2 0.15 0.1 0.05 0
1965
1975
1985
1995
Year Humanities(S) Natural Sciences
Proportion of Total Tertiary Enrollment
(a)
Humanities Social Sciences(S)
Natural Sciences(S) Social Sciences
0.35 0.3 0.25 0.2 0.15 0.1 0.05 0 1965
1975
1985
1995
Year (b)
Fig. 6.
Agriculture(S)
Agriculture
Engineering(S)
Engineering
Proportion of Disciplinary Enrollment for Socialist (N ¼ 8) and Non-Socialist Countries (N ¼ 58).
humanities is dramatically milder. The most striking feature of American tertiary education is undoubtedly the expansion of enrollment in medical sciences and, to some degree, the expansion of enrollments in law. Confirming Frame et al.’s (1977) finding that American scientific output23 is
Comparing the U.S. and Western and Non-Western Countries: Disciplinary Enrollment as a Proportion of Total Tertiary Enrollment, 1965–1995a.
Field
Education Humanities Art Natural Sciences Medical Sciences Law Engineering Agriculture Social Sciences a
1965
1975
1995
U.S.
Western
Non-Western
U.S.
Western
Non-Western
U.S.
Western
Non-Western
0.2837 0.1419 0.0356 0.1582 0.0168 0.0047 0.1086 0.0121 0.2384
0.1115 0.2275 0.0330 0.1287 0.1176 0.0686 0.1289 0.0262 0.158
0.1461 0.1381 0.0286 0.0849 0.1189 0.1050 0.1557 0.0614 0.1615
0.2047 0.0989 0.0529 0.1035 0.0790 0.0355 0.0579 0.0212 0.3465
0.1397 0.1907 0.0324 0.1018 0.1249 0.0643 0.1299 0.0227 0.1936
0.1549 0.1523 0.0203 0.0782 0.1081 0.0701 0.1599 0.0576 0.1987
0.0924 0.1257 0.0454 0.0982 0.1353 0.0293 0.0770 0.0085 0.3882
0.1095 0.1165 0.0281 0.1012 0.1115 0.0649 0.1269 0.0224 0.3188
0.1557 0.1012 0.0188 0.0745 0.0883 0.0711 0.1474 0.0453 0.2977
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Table 1.
In 1985, the U.S. data is missing in UNESCO Statistical Yearbook.
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distinguished by its concentration on the medical sciences, we also see a dramatic increase in the rate of enrollment from less than 2 percent in 1965 to around 13 percent in 1995. In regards to law, American enrollments grew from only 0.5 percent in 1965 to 3 percent in 1995. In other Western countries, in contrast, enrollments in both law and medical sciences stayed at similar levels throughout the 1965–1995 period. Overall, then, the patterns of U.S. and other Western countries seem very different, thus doubting the claim that trends among the developed countries are either a reflection of the Americanization of tertiary education systems worldwide or that the numbers of the West are overshadowed by its sheer size. Similarly, it seems that the American tertiary system is also quite distinct from tertiary education systems of non-Western countries. The difference is most clear in the disciplines of education and medical sciences: the emphasis on education has been decreasing dramatically and that on medical science has been increasing in the U.S., whereas it remains rather stable in NonWestern countries. In other fields, the difference between American and non-Western countries seems to be decreasing over time. The general trends – rise of social sciences and decrease of humanities – are true of the U.S. and Non-Western countries. In this sense, we find no support for the claim that global trends are a reflection of the Americanization of tertiary education systems worldwide.
Summary of Findings Our analyses concentrate on the description of cross-national disciplinary change over time. We clearly identify cross-national longitudinal trends: most dramatically, tertiary education enrollments worldwide are contracting in the humanities and expanding in the social sciences. Also, we find that in spite of initial differences in disciplinary emphasis across developed and developing countries and across communist and non-communist countries, there is a striking similarity in trends across these groups of countries. Last, we find no evidence that (a) global trends reflect an Americanization of tertiary education worldwide, nor that (b) social science enrollments and overall enrollments are driven by the rise of professional education in general or of business education in particular. In all, our findings indicate that while the overall tertiary education system is expanding worldwide and while all disciplines are experiencing general trends of expansion, the core traditional disciplines are contracting their relative share within the tertiary education sector.
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CONCLUDING COMMENTS: WORLDWIDE EDUCATION EXPANSION – BEYOND DIFFERENTIATION Education styles are commonly accepted as unique to groups of countries, even in the age of globalization pressures toward homogeneity (Ramirez & Ventresca, 1992; Bradley, 2000; Drori et al., 2003). There is no evidence, however, that such style of tertiary education stays stable over time. Rather, it is most probable that the style of tertiary education changes its character with changing conditions: replacement of the world hegemon, break of colonial ties, or change in funding patterns. For example, the various chapters in Home and Kohlstedt (1991) describe Australian science, changing its reference point from Britain to the U.S., changing its conception of itself from being a laboratory and research field for British science to gaining prominence and visibility of its own, changing the nature of its work from marginalized, mainly taxonomic work to an integration into the international web of professional science with some notable achievements in certain disciplines. Similarly, the collapse of the Soviet bloc caused the reorientation of science in the previously communist countries toward the Western Core (Kristapsons et al., 1998; Dezhina & Graham, 1999). Our work here, on the other hand, reveals cross-national differences, identifying some markings of unique styles in higher education. For example, tertiary education systems in Communist countries tend to emphasize more engineering, while in Western countries they emphasize more medical sciences and law. Indeed, the existence of distinct styles is validated by findings of other studies: Frank and Gabler (2006) identify cross-national trends of disciplinary expansion and contraction based on faculty appointments in universities and Drori et al. (2003) and Frame et al. (1977) identify such ‘‘styles’’ based on paper publication counts. At the same time, however, our most dramatic finding is not how different education systems worldwide are in enrollment levels but rather how much similarity there is across education systems in the nature of their disciplinary breakdown. Such similarity is observed in both the scope of tertiary education and in the trends, or direction, of change. We find that all tertiary education systems offer the complete set of disciplines, all tertiary education systems are expanding, and they become more similar in their relative composition of disciplines over time. As much as the relative share of the four traditional core disciplines is contracting, they account for all enrollments in tertiary education even at times of severe decline. In this sense, these disciplines form the core of
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tertiary education, the un-disputed essential elements of this institution; they still delineate the model of tertiary education. This similarity across tertiary education systems implies that the institution of tertiary education draws from a common source: the model of education, of the university and of science. This model is currently organized as a world institution, rooted in the Western core yet spread across the globe, into even the most peripheral segments of the world polity. It consolidated a particular image of higher education and a particular definition of its social role as the vocational training grounds. Most importantly, this model and its spirit are carried by international organizations of various sorts and goals – development or education international organizations, science and planning international organizations, governmental or nongovernmental international organizations, etc. The structure of academic work also identifies the ‘‘content’’ of the global model of science: what disciplines are recognized as ‘‘units’’ in these structures in the form of departments, schools or faculties? Clearly, all universities, as if by definition, arrange their work into separate faculties: arts and humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, with some distinct professional schools (medicine, engineering, law, education, and more recently business). Also as if by definition, each faculty is composed of a recognized set of scientific disciplines: archeology, history, literature, philosophy and the arts are part of the faculty of the humanities, the natural sciences include chemistry, mathematics, geology and zoology, while the social sciences incorporate anthropology, political science and sociology. A few universities ‘‘pepper’’ this recognized format with avant guard disciplines or indigenous science (such as gender studies or Islamic math). Overall, then, this organizational structure reveals the general and broad nature of the model of science: a wide range of scientific fields, extending from the social to the natural to the humanities and including a prescribed combination of disciplines within each faculty. In general, therefore, the disciplinary structure of universities mirrors the outline of the global model of higher education, demarking the boundaries of the institution of higher education.24 The global model of the university is, thus, rather clear: a recognized set of core scientific disciplines, organized into a recognized set of core organizational formats, producing a recognized set of scientific outputs, and performed by people carrying recognized titles. Others have interpreted the global character of such changes to the university (even if mostly not directing their commentary specifically toward disciplinary ‘‘styles’’ in tertiary education) and the trend of their convergence differently, highlighting rampant Americanization (e.g., Nelson, 1992;
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Etzkowitz, 1997) or pointing to modern forms of capitalist coercion (e.g., Mazuri, 1975; Nagel & Snyder, 1989; Aronowitz, 2001). These explanations are unconvincing, considering the conditions of current world polity. First, in a decentralized world, lacking anything like an authoritative world state and wrapped in cultural justifications for inclusion and rights, it is unclear what is the center of power over education, what are the interests served by coercion to comply with the model of education, and how the results of such massification of education serve the powerful. Also, had the education trends designed to serve such capitalist centers of power, why is the system ever so isomorphic (rather than tailored toward unique labor roles) and why is it highly decoupled (rather than tightly related to labor needs). On the issue of hegemonic world power, many point to the U.S. and thus equate globalization with Americanization. Yet, in spite of the intensifying centrality of American science, studies fail to confirm that it is the American form of higher education that is being globalized; if anything, ‘‘American exceptionalism’’ is obvious on many dimensions of tertiary education. Therefore, while many countries turn to the U.S. higher education for training and recognition, fewer emulate American tertiary education in their own countries. So, while American academia is highly attractive in terms of training and publications, few countries expanded their private tertiary education sector to anything like the American one. And, American reluctance to commit to international organizations as tools of international policymaking, most relevantly here in regarding to UNESCO, show that coercion is replaced by isomorphism (see Finnemore (1993) regarding UNESCO and science policy). Second, the notions of isomorphism and emulation of a common theme help to explain the process, by drawing attention to the a-rational elements in policy-making. Countries, then, are driven by a global normative pressure, magnified by their level of embeddedness in world society (see Shenhav & Kamens, 1991). These tendencies result in massive decoupling, explaining the gap between enrollments in tertiary education and their disciplinary re-arrangement worldwide, on the one hand, and variations in the quality of tertiary education or in its matching to local economic conditions. This gap is most obvious in sub-Saharan Africa: while the build-up of university sector in Africa seems impressive at first glance (showing several Pan-African scientific associations, national universities and scientific publications), there is little action behind this ‘‘fac- ade’’ (Forje, 1988, pp. 242, 245). Thus, third, the global reaches of the isomorphic change in tertiary education, to locales that vary by any imaginable dimensions and thus where the relevance of such changes to local needs or to capitalist hopes are unclear, confirm the ritualized nature of this globalization trend.
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Are the patterns of disciplinary concentration merely ‘‘glocalized’’ forms25 of the global model of tertiary education and thus variations of a general model? This intriguing puzzle of the tension between the local and the global is hard to solve. Most obviously, the problem lies in the fact that education in general and higher education in particular are by definition Western institutions. To a certain degree, therefore, all educational activities worldwide are glocalized forms of science, presenting the adaptation of modern Western science into a local mold.
NOTES 1. See Meyer, Ramirez, and Soysal (1992) and the various contributions to the edited volume by Fuller and Rubinson (1992), particularly Ramirez and Vetresca’s chapter. 2. For a review of the empirical tradition, see Schofer and McEneaney (2003). 3. See, for example, Rauner’s (1998) study of the addition of civic education to school curriculum. 4. Additional challenges to higher education come from pressures to expand access to education. Paralleling demands to expand access to other social resources, education and tertiary education are becoming more reflective of demographic characteristics. In the past 30 years, higher education systems dramatically incorporate more women and minorities, even in developing countries (Beoku-Betts, 1998; Bradley, 2000) and even in traditionally exclusionary disciplines such as the natural sciences (Hanson, Schaub, & Baker, 1996; Ramirez & Wotipka, 2001). In these terms, access to tertiary education is re-shaped to reflect the current-day notions of the nation and the current-day ideals of ‘‘education for all’’ (Chabbott & Ramirez, 2000). These changes to tertiary education, while important for the future of the system, are beyond the scope of our interest in disciplinary emphasis. 5. For example, Stromquist and Basile (1999) and Welch (2000), none of which focuses on disciplinary changes. 6. Clark (1998), for example, generalizes his arguments regarding the rise of entrepreneurial universities from five universities in five European countries. 7. Slaughter and Leslie (1997), for example, rely on interviews of faculty members to make their point about the swelling of ‘‘academic capitalism.’’ 8. Commonly known as Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), these measures are routinely used to identify scientific publications by national origin, discipline, year of publication and other features. See Drori et al. (2003) and Frame, Narin, and Carpenter (1977). 9. Gathered for four time points during the 20th century; see also Frank and Gabler (2006). 10. ISI disciplinary data are available from 1973 and on. 11. The researchers gather data from a careful sample of universities within each country (for example, in countries with a broad university system, they sample one
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private university and one state, or public, university), still raising the problem of potential sample bias. 12. A tenth category in UNESCO’s reporting of disciplinary enrollments in tertiary education is ‘‘not specified.’’ This category, because of its lack of substantive tone, is excluded from our analyses. Enrollment ratios in this category are marginal and thus do not alter our substantive findings: ratios vary between 0 and 0.09, with averages of 0.0009 in 1965 and 0.0117 in 1995. 13. See Appendix B for listing of sub-fields included within each UNESCO discipline. 14. UNESCO invested substantial efforts in the revision and standardization of its data-gathering project. Whereas the standardization of cross-national statistics was a UNESCO concern since 1958 (the date of the first General Conference of UNESCO recommendation on this matter), only in 1975 did UNESCO adopt the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), based on the recommendations of the International Conference on Education. This standard was revised in 1978 and then implemented by UNESCO members worldwide. 15. Such re-calibration is made possible by UNESCO’s continuous detailing of their data schemes: based on the lists of specific fields included in each disciplinary category in each Yearbook, we made sure that the re-calibrated categories matched in disciplinary content. In this re-calibration in few minor sub-fields were excluded: architecture and town planning (because architecture was included as part of art in pre-1980 data gathering, while town planning was a sub-discipline in engineering) and transportation and communication (to be distinguished from mass communication; because it has no pre-1980 parallel). Appendix B lists the re-calibration. 16. For example, if a country did not report to UNESCO its disciplinary enrollments for the year 1965, we traced its annual reports and gathered information for one year between 1963 and 1967. This missing value substitution did not change the character of the distribution nor of the trends. 17. The proportion of enrollment in humanities indeed shrunk between 1965 and 1975. 18. We can take a further look at sub-fields within social sciences to pinpoint where this dramatic growth is taking place for 1985 and 1995. Such increase is partly explained by the relatively faster growth of enrollments in business as well as other sub-fields such as home economics and mass communication. The relative share of enrollment in social and behavioral sciences is also holding its own (see Fig. 3). 19. This examination is possible only for the post-1980 UNESCO ISCED classification, when such sub-fields of social sciences are compiled separately. 20. Here, we distinguish between Americanization of education (which refers to the growing similarity between education systems worldwide and the American higher education system) and the influence of American patterns over global data trends. We address the latter. 21. Western countries refer to those economically developed as well as located in widely defined Europe. These countries are often considered as sharing relatively similar historical and cultural backgrounds. Hence Australia, Canada and New Zealand are included in this group.
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22. The separation between two figures (for example, Figs. 5a, b) has two reasons: (a) to allow a reasonable number of lines in each figure and (b) to distinguish disciplines by groups of countries that have stronger emphasis in each (for example, Fig. 5A contains only those disciplines where Western countries have stronger emphasis than Non-Western countries). Also only disciplines where there is a statistically significant difference between the blocs of countries based on t-test are included in these figures. 23. Measured in terms of paper publications in the sciences. 24. On boundary work, see Gieryn, 1983. Specifically about such ‘‘turf wars’’ in universities, see Anderson, 1992. 25. See Robertson (1994).
ACKNOWLEDGMENT We thank John W. Meyer, Francisco O. Ramirez, Evan Schofer, David Frank, Jay Gabler, Marc Ventresca and the members of Stanford University’s Comparative Workshop for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. We also thank David Suarez for assisting with data compilation. Finally, we thank the editors of this volume, David Baker and Alex Wiseman, for encouraging us to compose and improve this research and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
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Chabbott, C. (2002). Constructing educational development. New York: Taylor and Francis. Chabbott, C., & Ramirez, F. O. (2000). Development and education. In: M. Hallinan (Ed.), Handbook of sociology of education (pp. 163–187). New York: Plenum. Clark, B. (1998). Creating entrepreneurial universities: Organizational pathways of transformation. Oxford, UK: IAU Press and Elsevier Science. Dezhina, I., & Graham, L. (1999). Science and higher education in Russia. Science, 286(5443), 1303–1304. Drori, G. S. (2005). United Nations’ dedications: A world culture in the making? International Sociology, 20(2), 177–201. Drori, G., Meyer, J. W., Ramirez, F. O., & Schofer, E. (2003). Science in the Modern World Polity: Institutionalization and Globalization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Eisemon, T. O., & Davis, C. H. (1992). Universities and scientific research capacity. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 27, 68–93. Etzkowitz, H. (1997). Chapter 13: The enterpreneurial university and the emergence of democratic corporatism. In: H. Etzkowitz & L. Leydesdroff (Eds), U.S. and the global knowledgeeEconomy: A triple-helix of university–industry–government relations (pp. 141–152). New York: Pinter. Etzkowitz, H., & Leydesdroff, L. (1997). U.S. and the global knowledge economy: A triple-helix of university-industry-government relations. New York: Pinter. Finnemore, M. (1993). International organization as teachers of norms: The United Nations educational, scientific, and cultural organization and science policy. International Organization, 47(4), 567–597. Forje, J. (1988). In search of a strategy for national science and technology policy in Africa. In: A. Wad (Ed.), Science, technology, and development. Boulder: Westview Press. Frame, J. D., Narin, F., & Mark, P. C. (1977). The distribution of world science. Social Studies of Science, 7(4), 501–516. Frank, D. J., & Gabler, J. (2006). Reconstructing the university: Worldwide changes in academic emphases over the 20th century. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fuller, B., & Rubinson, R. (Eds) (1992). The political construction of mass education: School expansion, the state, and economic change. New York: Praeger. Gaillard, J. (1991). Scientists in the third world. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Gibbons, M., Limoge, C., & Nowotny, H. (1994). The new production of knowledge: The dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Gieryn, T. (1983). Boundary work and the demarcation of science from nonscience: Strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists. American Sociological Review, 48, 781–795. Hanson, S. L., Schaub, M., & Baker, D. P. (1996). Gender stratification in the science pipeline: A comparative analysis of seven countries. Gender and Society, 10(3), 190–271. Holmstrom, E., Gaddy, C., & Van Horne, V. (1997). Is there a brain drain from science and technology? Issues in Science and Technology, 13(3), 86–87. Home, R. W., & Kohlstedt, S. G. (Eds) (1991). International science and national scientific identity: Australia between Britain and America. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer. Kamens, D., & Benavot, A. (1992). A comparative and historical analysis of mathematics and science curricula, 1800–1986. In: J. Meyer, D. Kamens & A. Benavot (Eds), School knowledge for the masses (pp. 101–123). London: Falmer.
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Kamens, D., Meyer, J. W., & Benavot, A. (1996). Worldwide patterns of academic secondary education curricula. Comparative Education Review, 40(2), 116–138. Kernan, A. (Ed.) (1997). What’s happened to the humanities? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kerr, C. (2001). The uses of the university (5th ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kirp, D. L. (2004). Shakespeare, Einstein, and the bottom line: The marketing of higher education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kristapsons, J., Dagyte, I., & Martinson, H. (1998). The Baltic way of science system transformation: Methods and results. Paper presented in EASST meeting, October 1998, Lisboa, Portugal. Lange, L. (1985). Effects of disciplines and countries on citation habits: An analysis of empirical papers in behavioral sciences. Scientometrics, 8, 205–215. Lubrano, L. L. (1993). The hidden structure of Soviet science. Science, Technology and Human Values, 18, 147–175. Mazuri, A. A. (1975). The African university as a multinational corporation: Problems of penetration and dependency. Harvard Educational Review, 45, 191–210. McEneaney, E., & Meyer, J. (2000). The content of the curriculum: An institutionalist perspective. In: M. Hallinan (Ed.), Handbook of sociology of education. New York: Plenum. Merton, R. K. (1938/1970). Science, technology, and society in seventeenth century England. New York: Ferting Howard. Meyer, J. W. (1977). The effects of education as an institution. American Journal of Sociology, 63, 55–77. Meyer, J. W., & Ramirez, F. O. (2000). The worldwide institutionalization of education. In: J. Schriewer (Ed.), Discourse formation in comparative education (pp. 111–132). New York: Peter Lang. Meyer, J. W., Ramirez, F. O., & Soysal, Y. (1992). World expansion of mass education, 1870–1980. Sociology of Education, 65(2), 128–149. Moon, H., & Wotipka, C. M. (2006). The globalization of professional management education, 1881–2000: Its rise, expansion and implications. In: G. S. Drori, J. W. Meyer & H. Hwang (Eds), World society and the expansion of formal organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nagel, J., & Snyder, C. W., Jr. (1989). International funding of education development: External agendas and internal adaptation, the case of Liberia. Comparative Education Review, 33, 3–20. Nelson, R. R. (1992). U.S. technological leadership: Where did it come from and where did it go? In: F. M. Scherer & M. Perlman (Eds), Entrepreneurship, technological innovation, and economic growth. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Nowotny, H., Scott, P., & Gibbons, M. (2000). Re-thinking Science: Knowledge and the public in an age of uncertainty. Oxford, UK: Polity Press. Ramirez, F. O., & Boli, J. (1982). Global patterns of educational institutionalization. In: P. Altbach, R. Arnove & G. Kelly (Eds), Comparative education (pp. 15–36). New York: McMillan. Ramirez, F. O., & Ventresca, M. (1992). Institutionalizing mass schooling: Ideological and organizational isomorphism in the modern world. In: B. Fuller & R. Rubinson (Eds), The political construction of education: School expansion, the state, and economic change (pp. 47–60). New York: Praeger.
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Ramirez, F. O., & Wotipka, C. M. (2001). Slowly but surely? The global expansion of women’s participation in science and engineering fields of study. Sociology of Education, 74, 231–251. Rauner, M. (1998). The worldwide globalization of civics education topics, 1955–1995. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University. Riddle, P. (1989). University and state: Political competition and the rise of universities, 1200–1985. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University. Roland, R. (1994). Globalization and glocalization. Journal of International Communication, 1, 33–52. Sarewitz, D. (1996). Frontiers of illusion: Science, technology, and the politics of progress. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Schofer, E., & McEneaney, E. H. (2003). Methodological strategies and tools for the study of globalization. In: G. S. Drori, J. W. Meyer, F. O. Ramirez & E. Schofer (Eds), Science in the modern world polity: Institutionalization and globalization (pp. 43–75). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Schofer, E., & Meyer, J. W. (2005). The world-wide expansion of higher education in the twentieth century. American Sociological Review, 70, 898–920. Schott, T. (1992). Soviet science in the scientific world system: Was it autarchic, self-reliant, distinctive, isolated, peripheral, central? Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization, 13, 410–439. Schubert, A., Zsindely, S., & Braun, T. (1983). Scientometric analysis of attendance in international scientific meetings. Scientometrics, 5, 177–188. Shenhav, Y., & Kamens, D. (1991). The ‘costs’ of institutional isomorphism in non-western countries. Social Studies of Science, 21, 427–545. Slaughter, S., & Leslie, L. (1997). Academic capitalism: Politics, policies, and the entrepreneurial university. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Stromquist, N. P., & Basile, M. L. (Eds) (1999). Politics of educational innovations in developing countries: an analysis of knowledge and power. New York: Falmer. Welch, A. R. (Ed.) (2000). Third world education: Quality and equality. New York: Garland. Wittrock, B., & Elzinga, A. (Eds) (1985). The university research system: The public policies of the home of scientists. Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell. Wolfe, D. (1972). The home of science: The role of the university. New York: McGraw-Hill.
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APPENDIX A. WORLD AVERAGE RELATIVE SHARES OF DISCIPLINES IN TERTIARY ENROLLMENT, 1965 AND 1995 Appendix A-1. World Average Relative Shares of Disciplines in Tertiary Enrollment, 1965. Education
Social Sciences
Agriculture
Humanities Medical Sciences
Art Engineering Law Natural Sciences
Appendix A-2. World Average Relative Shares of Disciplines in Tertiary Enrollment, 1995. Education
Social Sciences
Humanities
Art
Law
Agriculture
Medical Sciences
Natural Sciences Engineering
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APPENDIX B. SUB-FIELDS INCLUDED IN UNESCO DISCIPLINES AND RE-CALIBRATION OF UNESCO DISCIPLINARY CLASSIFICATION Discipline, pre-1980
Disciplines, post-1980
Humanities
Humanities Religion Theology Education Teacher training Art Applied art Law Social and behavioral sciences Trade, craft and industry Mass communication and documentation Commerce and business Home economics Service trades Natural sciences Math and computer sciences Engineering Medical and health-related sciences Agriculture
Education Fine art Law Social sciences
Natural sciences Engineering Medical sciences Agriculture
Note: Excluded sub-fields of the post-1980 ISCED categorization are: 1. Architecture and town planning, because in UNESCO’s pre-1980 classification architecture is classified within the discipline of art, while town planning has its parallel in construction and surveying which is a part of the discipline of engineering. 2. Transportation and communication, because it has no pre-1980 parallel.
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PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT AND EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS OF EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM Hyunjoon Park INTRODUCTION Numerous studies in the United States have found that various forms of parental involvement in children’s education positively affect children’s educational outcomes such as high school dropout (McNeal, 1999; Teachman, Paasch, & Carver, 1997), post-secondary educational attainment (Sandefur, Frisco, Faulkner, & Park, 2004), and academic achievement (Epstein, 2001; Ho Sui-Chu & Willms, 1996; Muller, 1993, 1995). Researchers distinguish two dimensions of parental involvement depending on the context in which parents become involved (Downey, 2002; Ho Sui-Chu & Willms, 1996; Muller & Kerbow, 1993).1 The first dimension of parental involvement represents what parents do at home and studies particularly have focused on the extent to which parent–child discussion on children’s schooling, parenting style, and parents’ monitoring or rule-setting affect student’s academic
The Impact of Comparative Education Research on Institutional Theory International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 7, 187–208 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3679/doi:10.1016/S1479-3679(06)07009-5
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achievement and behavior. The other dimension of parental involvement includes parent participation in school activities and parent–teacher interaction. In particular, the literature has extensively examined the effects of attending parent–teacher organization (PTO) meetings or school events, and contacting teachers and school officials. Evidence of positive association between parental involvement, especially home-based involvement, and children’s school performance has led American policy makers to recommend more parental involvement in the educational activities of their children as a way to enhance educational performance of children.2 Furthermore, it has been recognized that parental involvement becomes more important for children’s well-being compared to income inequality in developed societies where social policy programs help reduce serious material deprivation and thus reduce the influence of family income (Mayer, 1997). In other words, rather than money, what parents do at home for their children’s development (for instance, how frequently parents talk to their kids about their school experiences or whether parents help children do math homework) becomes more relevant to explain variation in the success of children. The growing relevance of parental involvement for the variation in children’s educational outcomes requires us to examine in detail the distribution of parental involvement across different demographic groups and the extent to which the effects of parental involvement vary across different populations. However, most evidence on parental involvement and children’s schooling is based on American education. Very limited literature has examined the effects of parental involvement on educational outcomes outside of the United States. There is little known about cross-national variation in the relationship between parental involvement and children’s educational success. With the lack of comparative studies across countries having different institutional features of educational systems, we know little about the extent to which the findings of the effect of parental involvement in the US are conditioned by the American educational system. A growing body of comparative research is increasingly interested in understanding how institutional features of educational systems shape educational stratification processes (Allmendinger, 1989; Kerckhoff, 1995, 2001; Buchmann & Hannum, 2001). Since Kerckhoff (1995) presented some hypotheses about the roles of institutional arrangements of educational systems in shaping the relationship between social origin and educational attainment, the school-to-work transition, and work career processes, several cross-national studies have extended our understanding of how institutional contexts alter these stratification processes. Comparative studies of
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the relationship between education and occupational attainment have linked cross-national variation in the relationship to institutional differences in educational and labor market systems (Allmendinger, 1989; Shavit & Mu¨ller, 1998). Baker, Akiba, LeTendre, and Wiseman (2001) tested several hypotheses linking cross-national differences in prevalence and function of outside-school learning activities (such as cram schools or private tutoring) to variations in schooling practices across national educational systems. Recent reviews on the effects of family background on educational outcomes emphasize the importance of studies addressing how macro contexts such as educational policy and institutional contexts influence the way in which family background affects children’s education (Powell, Werum, & Steelman, 2004; Buchmann & Hannum, 2001). In short, these comparative studies show the significant differences in the structure features of educational systems. As Kerckhoff (2001) pointed out, educational systems significantly vary in their institutional arrangements even within industrialized societies, especially in the way in which students are sorted into different educational institutions that award the credentials with different levels of social recognition. Furthermore, by showing that the structural variations in educational systems are systematically related to cross-national variations in educational stratification processes, the literature of comparative education highlights the importance of understanding institutional contexts of educational systems. However, there have been relatively less efforts to apply the institutional perspective to examine cross-national variation in the level and effectiveness of parental involvement. We know little about the extent to which institutional features of education systems account for cross-national variation, if any, in the way in which parental involvement influences children’s education. More comparative studies of the linkage between the effect of parental involvement on children’s schooling and institutional characteristics of educational systems will be of significance in developing institutional perspectives on education and society. By highlighting the significance of institutional contexts that constrain or facilitate the effectiveness of parental involvement on children’s education, furthermore, international comparative studies will provide important implications for educational researchers and policy makers that they should take into account institutional bases of their educational systems in order to better understand how parental involvement works in their specific contexts. In this line of comparative research, the current review summarizes the findings about cross-national variation in the effect of parental involvement on educational achievement from my two studies using international data
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on reading literacy among 15-year-olds from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) (Park, 2004a, 2005). The two comparative studies highlight that the way in which the frequency of communication between parents and children, which is one aspect of parental involvement, is associated with educational performance, varies across countries according to institutional features of educational systems. Specifically, in the first study I compare the extent to which the frequency of parent–child communication is related to student reading performance across three groups of countries distinguished by their institutional features of educational systems: East Asian (Hong Kong, Japan, Korea), Germanic Continental (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland), and Anglo American education (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, US) (Park, 2005). A major hypothesis tested is that the impact of parent–child communication on children’s education is stronger in educational systems with the features of low degrees of differentiation and high degrees of academic pressure. In the second study, I compare the ways in which the effect of parent– child communication on student performance varies between families with high socioeconomic status (SES) and low SES in South Korea and the United States (Park, 2004a). The result indicates that in Korea low SES students benefit more from parent–child communication, while high SES students benefit more in the United States. I attribute the different pattern between the two countries to the difference in the degree of standardization between Korean and American education. Before moving to examine the two studies, I first review previous studies of parental involvement in children’s schooling conducted in contexts other than the United States in comparison to the findings from the American context. Given that the literature on parental involvement outside of the United State is rare, I focus on a few of international studies available and some selected studies in the United States. I particularly pay attention to what the results of those international studies suggest for possible linkages between distinctive patterns of parental involvement in a particular country or a group of countries and institutional arrangements of their educational systems. The review of previous literature will reveal research motivation for my two comparative studies of parental involvement. In the conclusion, I discuss the implications of cross-nationally varying roles of parental involvement on children’s education for educational inequality within and across countries. The significance of institutional perspective for understanding of the relationship between family and children’s education is discussed. Finally, I conclude the paper with some suggestions
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for future data collection and theoretical efforts in comparative research on parental involvement.
PREVIOUS LITERATURE A wealth of studies exist regarding the influences of home-based parental involvement on children’s schooling across various disciplines such as sociology, educational psychology, children development, family therapy, and social works, among others (Ryan & Adams, 1998). Among those studies, however, only a handful of studies have explored the effect of parental involvement in contexts other than the United States (or a few other Western societies). For instance, in the extensive reviews of various forms of parent–child interaction and their impacts on children’s education by Ryan (1994) and Scott-Jones (1995), we can find only a very small number of international studies. Furthermore, most of those studies conducted outside of the United States examined a single country or included only one or two countries in comparison to the United States. For example, Barber (1988) found that parent teaching practices at home are positively associated with children’s academic achievement in three regions of Peru. Chen and Uttal (1988) compared the extent of helping kids with homework between American and Chinese mothers. Another comparison between American and Japanese mothers showed significant difference between mothers of the two countries in their extent of teaching their kindergarten children reading and mathematics skills (Bacon & Ichikawa, 1988). An important limitation of these comparative studies of parental involvement is that they mostly focus on children in primary schools or in kindergarten. Considering relatively homogenous structures of primary or kindergarten education across countries compared to secondary education, the exclusive focus on children in primary or kindergarten education makes it difficult to address how cross-national differences in institutional characteristics of educational systems mediate the effect of parental involvement on children’s education. Therefore, it is natural that these studies of young children often rely on the vague notion of ‘‘cultural’’ difference in order to explain cross-national variation in the patterns of parental involvement rather than they try to explore the relevance of institutional characteristics of educational systems. In order to examine the mediating role of national differences in educational institutions, we need to look at children in secondary education where countries show more heterogeneity in the structure of educational systems.
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Institutional Features of Educational System as a Determinant of Parental Involvement Most relevant for the current paper reviewing the impacts of institutional features of educational systems on parental involvement is Oswald, Baker, and Stevenson’s (1988) study that examines the degree and type of parental management of children’s schooling across different types of German secondary schools. Their regression analysis provides evidence that the type of secondary school their children attend is an important determinant of parental management, even after parents’ and children’s individual characteristics are taken into account. Specifically, they found that parents of students attending Gesamtschule schools are more likely to discuss course selection with their children, help children’s homework and speak with their children’s teacher than do parents of students in the two traditional types of secondary schools – Gymnasium and Realschule. On the other hand, parents with children in the latter two types of schools are more likely to participate in school activities such as attending PTA (parent–teacher association) meetings or being a parent–school representative. They attributed the difference across different types of schools in the degree and kind of parental involvement in children’s schooling to the variation in institutional characteristics of school, especially the feature of school charter.3 As a most prestigious institution of secondary schooling in Germany, the Gymnasium has a rigorous academic curriculum to prepare students for post-secondary education awarding the Abitur degree. The Realschule offers a mixed curriculum that emphasizes academic, vocational, and business skills mostly for skilled manual occupations and business apprenticeships. On the other hand, the Gesamtschule is based upon a comprehensive high school model where students can take any of the traditional curricula and obtain any of the traditional degrees awarded after completion of secondary education. In other words, similar to American secondary schools, the Gesamtschule has a much less distinct school charter, especially compared to the Gymnasium. In the comprehensive and less-distinctive charter of the Gesamtschule, students have a wide range of options in the selection of courses and curriculum, which leads to substantially different educational degrees linked to different labor marker outcomes. In this situation, parents are more likely to manage children’s schooling to help determine which educational path their children will choose. On the contrary, parents whose children attend the Gymnasium, which as the elite form of secondary school, guarantees clear educational and occupational prospects leading to professional, political,
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and academic occupations, may not need strong involvement in influencing children’s day-to-day schooling. By comparing the patterns of parental involvement in the different types of school, this study successfully demonstrates the influence of institutional characteristics of schooling on parental involvement. However, the study limits its focus to institutional features of school system as a determinant of parental involvement, but it does not address different patterns in the effect of parental involvement across different types of schools. For example, we know little about to what extent the effect of parental involvement on children’s educational outcomes differs across the three types of secondary schools in Germany. Does the higher degree of parental management among parents of students in the Gesamtschule than parents in the Gymnasium mean that parental involvement is more consequential to children’s educational achievement in the former than in the latter? Which characteristics of educational institutions explain variations in the effects of parental involvement on children’s educational outcomes?
The Effects of Parental Involvement Examining variation across 12 countries in the effect of mother’s and peers’ attitudes toward academic performance on educational aspiration among middle-school (lower secondary school) students, Buchmann and Dalton (2002) suggests a possible linkage between differences in institutional contexts of educational system and variation in the effect of parental involvement on children’s educational outcomes. It may be argued that the concept of parental attitude regarding children’s academic performance (i.e., attitude toward the importance for their children to do well in school) examined in their study should be distinguished from the concept of parental involvement in children’s schooling. However, given that parents who think it is important for their children to do well in school are more likely to be interested in children’s progress in school and thus they are more likely to be involved in children’s education than their counterparts who value much less the importance of their children’s success in school, Buchmann and Dalton’s study of parental attitude is a still useful reference for research on parental involvement especially in the absence of cross-national comparative studies of parental involvement. As the authors highlight, our knowledge on the effect of parental attitude on educational aspiration has mainly relied on the findings in the United States, which limits our understanding of the ways in which institutional
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contexts of educational system mediate the relationship. The comparisons across 12 countries indicate significant variation in the influence of parental attitude on children’s educational aspiration across countries with different structural features of educational system. Specifically, countries with relatively comprehensive, undifferentiated educational systems (such as the US and East Asian countries) show stronger effects of parental attitude than do countries with highly differentiated educational systems (such as Germany, Austria, and Switzerland). In the latter system, students are sorted into different types of schools at earlier ages. Since different types of schools are clearly distinguished in their students’ educational and occupational trajectories, in the highly differentiated system the type of school the student attends plays an important role for determining the student’s educational aspiration, leaving little room for parental attitude to influence.4 This study is a significant extension of institutional perspective on educational stratification in that it examines the impact of institutional arrangements of educational system on the relationship between parental attitude and children’s educational aspiration, which is an important aspect of educational stratification that has not been seriously investigated in comparative perspective. The study provides a useful framework that can be applied to the examination of cross-national variations in the effect of parental involvement on children’s educational outcomes and the significance of institutional characteristics of educational systems for understanding the cross-national variations in the effect. For instance, we may expect the pattern of cross-national variation in the effect of parental involvement similar to cross-national differences in the effect of parental attitude revealed in Buchmann and Dalton’s (2002) study. In other words, parental involvement may be expected to have stronger impacts on children’s education in relatively undifferentiated education systems than in highly differentiated systems. In undifferentiated systems characterized by the general nature of schooling and more options in course selection and curriculum, there is more room for parents to exert influence on students in order to ensure children’s educational success. On the other hand, the diffuse charter of schools in undifferentiated systems indicates that schools do not affect students’ educational motivation and aspiration (Buchmann & Dalton, 2002). In this situation, parents’ interest and engagement in their children’s schooling should be more likely to be an important determinant of students’ success in schools.
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Differential Effects of Parental Involvement by SES An important extension of Buchmann and Dalton’s (2002) cross-national study would be an exploration of whether the effect of parental involvement on children’s education differs by family socioeconomic status (SES) within countries and how countries with different educational systems differ in this pattern of the interaction between parental involvement and family SES. Buchmann and Dalton (2002) did not consider the differential effects of parental attitude between higher SES and lower SES students. However, some studies in the United State have found that parental involvement has a stronger effect among higher SES students than lower SES students. Not only lower SES parents are less likely to participate in educational activities for their children than are higher SES parents, but a comparable amount of parental involvement produces more benefits for higher SES students than for lower SES students. For example, Teachman et al. (1997) show that the two types of parental involvement – discussion between parents and children about educational activities and parental participation in school-related activities – interact with parental income resulting in greater effectiveness of parental involvement for reducing the likelihood of high-school dropping out among students from higher SES families than their counterparts from lower SES families. The differential pay-off of parental involvement by SES is also observed in another study by McNeal (1999). Compared to higher SES students, lower SES students gain much less from parent–child discussions even when comparable levels of discussion occur. Specifically, parent–child discussion significantly reduces the likelihood of dropping out of high school for higher SES students, while such a beneficial effect of parent–child discussion does not exist for lower SES students. Parents’ participation in PTO meetings has a similar pattern of differential effects by family SES. An important implication of the existence of the interaction between family SES and parental involvement is that it results in exacerbating the achievement gap between higher and lower SES students as the amount of parental involvement increases. As far as I am aware, no study has examined the variation in the effect of parental involvement by family SES in contexts other than the United States. It is interesting to examine whether the American pattern of the interaction between parental involvement and family SES can be generalized to other countries with different institutional features of educational systems. The findings observed in the American context may reflect its unique institutional arrangements.
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TWO CROSS-NATIONAL STUDIES OF PARENT–CHILD COMMUNICATION Cross-National Variation in the Effect of Parent–Child Communication In this section, I summarize findings from my recent two studies of crossnational variation in the effect of parent–child communication on reading literacy among 15-year-olds. As a form of home-based parental involvement, parent–child communication indicates the frequency of parental engagement with their children to discuss specific issues related to schooling or more general issues in everyday life. The first study compares the extent to which the frequency of parent–child communication is associated with student reading performance across 12 countries classified into three groups by their distinctive institutional features of educational systems: East Asian (Hong Kong, Japan, Korea), Germanic Continental (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland), and Anglo American education (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, US) (Park, 2005). The three groups of countries significantly differ in the extent of differentiation among secondary schools. The number of different types of secondary school available to 15-year-olds in each country is an indicator of the differentiation of secondary education. All countries with the Germanic Continental system have four different types of school, while all countries with the Anglo-American system have only one type of school. While the three East Asian countries have two different types of secondary school (academic vs. vocational), the level of differentiation among the East Asian countries is considered as low as the level among Anglo-American countries considering that majority of students go to academic schools. Another important factor to differentiate the three educational systems is the level of academic pressure on students. I measure the level of academic pressure by the proportion of 15-year-olds who attend any kind of outof-school classes (intended for enhancing academic performance) such as private tutoring or language classes in cram schools. Calculated directly from the PISA data, the statistics indicate that East Asian countries show the highest level of academic pressure, while the countries with the Germanic Continental system show the lowest level. Intermediate is the Anglo-American system.5 In sum, East Asian countries have high levels of academic pressure and undifferentiated secondary schooling, while Germanic Continental education is characterized by low levels of academic pressure and highly
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differentiated school systems. The education system in Anglo American countries is undifferentiated like East Asia’s but has less academic pressure, like the Germanic Continental system. A major hypothesis tested in the study is that these three groups of countries differ in the magnitude of the parent–child communication effect on reading literacy and the difference can be attributable to institutional variations of educational systems, particularly the extent of differentiation of secondary education and the level of academic pressure. It is hypothesized that the effect of parent–child communication should be stronger in societies with relatively undifferentiated educational systems than with highly differentiated systems. In highly differentiated systems where students are sorted into different educational trajectories at an early age, students’ educational and occupational prospects are in large parts predetermined by the type of school (Buchmann & Dalton, 2002). In this situation, parental encouragement for higher achievement may not have substantial impacts on students’ motivation for schooling success. In relatively undifferentiated system, on the contrary, a range of educational and occupation trajectories are open to all students until late and thus there is much large room for parental encouragement to influence children’s motivation for hard work and good grade. Concerning the institutional variable of academic pressure, it is expected that the effect of parent–child communication should be stronger in countries with high levels of academic pressure. The expected effect of academic pressure is based upon the reasoning that in societies with high levels of academic pressure for academic achievement, parent–child communication should be more likely to be directed toward explicitly or implicitly education-related issues. For example, parents in those societies may influence students not only by frequently discussing how students are doing in school but also by trying to convey the importance of education in student’s life chances. The education-focused communication between parents and a child in societies with high levels of academic pressure should be more effective for influencing children’s education than parent–child communication in societies with relatively low levels of societal pressure where parent–child communication should be much less likely to be focused on children’s education. These expectations of the influences of educational differentiation and academic pressure suggest that the effect of parent–child communication on reading literacy should be strongest in East Asian education, which has relatively undifferentiated schooling and high levels of academic pressure,
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while the effect should be weakest in the Germanic Continental system, which has highly differentiated schooling along with low levels of academic pressure. In Anglo-American education with undifferentiated school system but low levels of academic pressure, the effect should fall between. In order to test the hypothesis, I compare the effect of parent–child communication on student reading performance across the three groups of countries using the data of reading literacy from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA was collected in 32 countries by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) in 2000.6 The primary focus of PISA 2000 was to assess reading literacy of young people at age 15, though mathematical literacy and scientific literacy were also tested. PISA is particularly useful in that it is one of the rare data sets that include comparable measures of parent–child communication across many different countries. For example, TIMSS (Third International Mathematics and Science Study), which has been widely used for comparative research on student achievement, does not contain relevant measures of parental involvement (Buchmann, 2002). PISA created an index to measure the frequency of parent–child communication using students’ responses to questions about how often their parents engage in the following acts: discuss how well they are doing at school; eat the main meal with them around a table; and spend time simply talking to them. Possible responses were ‘‘never or hardly ever,’’ ‘‘a few times a year,’’ ‘‘about once a month,’’ ‘‘several times a month,’’ and ‘‘several times a week’’ to each question. A standardized summary index was created to have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1 for the OECD student population.7 The reliability of the index is 0.58 on average across OECD countries. I employ two-level hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) technique to take into account the nested structure of data (students are nested within a country) (Bryk & Raudenbush, 1992). At the student level, student’s reading literacy is predicted by parent–child communication, family SES, and other control variables.8 At the country level, the slopes of parent–child communication derived from student-level equation are modeled to be a function of the dummy variables of ‘‘East Asian’’ and ‘‘Germanic Continental’’ with ‘‘Anglo America’’ as a reference. The coefficient of the dummy variable of East Asian education indicates the difference in the magnitude of the parent–child communication effect between the East Asian system and the Anglo-American system. Similarly, the coefficient of the Germanic Continental dummy variable indicates the difference between the Germanic Continental system and the Anglo-American system.
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The empirical results in general support the hypotheses. The influence of parent–child communication on reading literacy is strongest in East Asian countries, which have high levels of academic pressure and undifferentiated secondary schooling, while the effect is weakest in Germanic Continental education, which is characterized by low levels of academic pressure and highly differentiated school systems. The magnitude of the communication effect is somewhere in between for Anglo-American countries. Their education system is undifferentiated like East Asia’s but has less academic pressure, like the Germanic Continental system. The findings highlight the relevance of institutional characteristics of educational systems for explaining cross-national differences in the degree to which parent–child communication is associated with children’s education.
Variation in the Effect of Parent–Child Communication by SES In the second study, I examine variation in the effect of parental involvement on student reading performance by family SES in South Korea and the United States (Park, 2004a). As explained earlier, studies in the United States have found stronger effects of parental involvement among higher SES than among lower SES students. Thus, the focus of the paper is to examine whether the US pattern of the interaction between parental involvement and family SES is generalized to other contexts, especially in South Korea that has very distinct features of educational system from those of American system. I pay particular attention to the difference in the degree of education standardization between Korea and the United States and its implication for the different pattern in the SES–parental involvement interaction. Standardization refers to ‘‘the degree to which the quality of education meets the same standards nationwide’’ (Allmendinger, 1989, p. 233). Korea has a very high level of standardization so that teachers’ training, school budgets, and even the number of college students are determined by government guidelines (Park, 2004b). A nationwide entrance examination for high schools and colleges, and a common curriculum designed to prepare students for the entrance examinations are apparent indicators of the high level of standardization of Korean educational system. This is in sharp contrast to the more localized and less standardized system in the United States. I hypothesize that there should be much smaller or even nonsignificant variation in the effectiveness of parent–child communication between higher
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SES and lower SES students in Korea, which is in contrast to greater effectiveness for higher SES students in the United States. This expectation of the different pattern in the way in which parent–child communication interacts with SES in Korea and the United States is based on the examination of the different structural features of the two educational systems. The more localized and unstandardized system in the US requires relatively high levels of knowledge about and understanding of educational system if parents want to effectively engage with schools and teachers to improve their children’s educational achievement. Ethnographic studies of American education have shown how the lack of knowledge on educational system and less confidence in interactions with teachers among lower SES parents make ineffective their influences on their children’s schooling (Lareau, 1989, 2003). Thus, even if lower SES parents have comparable levels of communications with their children and interests in children’s educational success as do higher SES parents, their communication is not easily translated into the substantial effect for enhancing children’s education. In addition, in the nonstandardized US system, students and parents tend to have more control over students’ educational careers (such as retention, track placement, school choices, and participation in extra-curricular activities). Along with relatively high levels of confidence in the interaction with teachers and knowledge about educational processes among higher SES parents, opportunities for parents’ intervention in educational processes are more likely to yield significant differences between higher and lower SES parents in the effectiveness of parental involvement on children’s education. Higher SES parents ‘‘customize’’ school curriculum and programs to meet their children’s needs and paces, while lower SES parents, who often lack educational competence, do not know how to help their children, but have to rely on schools and teachers (Lareau, 1989). In a highly standardized educational system like the one found in Korea, in contrast, lower SES parents may have less difficulty in engaging with schools and teachers. The system is relatively straightforward so that specific knowledge about educational processes may not be required as much as it is in the American system. In addition, all the major educational decisions are made mainly on the basis of scores on standardized tests. Therefore, even lower SES parents easily monitor their children’s progress in schools without detailed understanding of the system and concentrate their efforts on boosting children’s achievement on standardized tests. On the other hand, higher SES parents in Korea have much less room than their counterparts in the United States to affect what happens to their kids in schools because of the established standardization of learning
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process in schools and often strong dependence on achievement tests as a major mechanism for educational decisions. This is in sharp contrast to active interference of higher SES parents on schooling processes in the United States for influencing school curriculum and teachers’ instruction in order to meet their children’s unique needs. In addition to the high level of standardization, the distinctive mechanism through which Korean students are distributed between private and public schools also reduces the opportunities for higher SES parent to affect children’s schooling. Higher SES parents in Korea even do not have a choice for sending their kids to private schools. Once students graduate from middle schools, applicants for academic high schools are randomly assigned to a high school within a residential district. This random assignment is applied to both public and private schools. That is, private academic high schools in Korea do not have the right to select students. Nor do students and parents have a choice for high schools.9 This is clearly different from the United States, where parents and students can decide to apply to attend a private school rather than a public school, and private schools can select students from among those who apply. To examine the extent to which the effect of parent–child communication varies between higher SES and lower SES students in Korea and the United States, I conduct the ordinary least-square (OLS) regression analysis predicting student reading performance by parent–child communication, family SES, an interaction between parent–child communication and family SES, and other control variables for each country. I extracted the data for the two countries from PISA 2000. In this study, I distinguish two kinds of parent– child communication: social communication and cultural communication. The former indicates the overall extent of social interaction through communications between parents and children, while the latter pertains to parent–child communication specifically surrounding cultural issues. Social communication indicates the same measure as used in my cross-national study of 12 countries. Cultural communication is measured as an index created from students’ self-reports to the following three questions: how often their parents discuss political or social issues with them; discuss books, films, or television programs with them; and listen to classical music with them.10 As in the first study (Park, 2004a), family SES is measured with a composite index (see note 6). Other independent variables include gender, number of siblings, family structure (intact vs. others), language minority status, school type (vocational vs. academic high schools), school sector (private vs. public schools), and school location (city vs. noncity).11 The OLS regression of student reading performance is conducted separately
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between social communication and cultural communication to highlight potential similarity or dissimilarity in the pattern of the interaction between each parent–child communication measure and family SES. The empirical findings overall support the hypothesis showing that parent–child communication interacts with family SES in different ways in Korea and the US. In the former, the effect of the interaction between social communication and family SES is significantly negative, which indicates that parent–child communication in social aspect is more beneficial for lower SES students to raise educational achievement. In contrast, the interaction term between family SES and social communication in the United States shows a statistically significant positive impact on student reading performance suggesting that higher SES students benefit more from social communication with their parents than do lower SES students. The results of the OLS regression analysis examining the effects of cultural communication are similar to those for the effects of social communication. Although not statistically significant, the effect of the interaction between family SES and cultural communication is negative in Korea. Contrastingly, the interaction in the United States is statistically positive indicating that parent–child communication in cultural aspect is more beneficial to higher SES students than to lower SES students. An important implication of the finding is that the educational gap between higher SES and lower SES students changes differently in Korea and the United States, along with the increase of parent–child communication. Since parent–child communication is more effective for higher SES students in the United States, the educational gap between higher SES and lower SES students increases as the frequency of parent–child communication increases. In contrast, the education gap between higher SES and lower SES students in Korea decreases along with the increase of parent–child communication because lower SES students benefit more from parent–child communication. In other words, the negative interaction between parent– child communication (especially social communication) and family SES for affecting reading literacy suggests that parent–child communication compensates for disadvantages associated with lower family SES in Korea.
CONCLUSION Comparative studies reviewed in this paper and my two empirical works on the cross-national variation in the effect of parent–child communication indicate that the relationship between parental involvement and children’s education
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significantly varies across countries having different institutional features of educational system. It suggests that the findings of parental involvement in a particular society cannot be generalized to other contexts without taking into account institutional bases of their educational systems. This implies for American education policy makers that various educational programs for increasing parental involvement in children’s education should be evaluated in the context of the overall features of American educational system. In particular, the finding that parent–child communication compensates for lower SES in Korea deserves serious attention from the perspective of American education where parent–child communication actually increases educational gaps between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. As McNeal (1999, p. 136) pointed out, this pattern in American education indicates that educational inequalities are deeper than just different levels of parental involvement between higher and lower SES families. Students from lower SES background are disadvantaged in two ways. Their parents usually have lower levels of parental involvement than higher SES parents. But even at a comparable level of involvement, parental involvement is much less effective for lower SES students than for higher SES students. As other researchers emphasize, family’s intellectual, emotional, and social environment becomes more important to make difference in children’s life chance, compared to family’s economic conditions (Mayer, 1997). It means that if parental involvement in education continues to be more effective for enhancing children’s education for higher SES than lower SES students, we will encounter increasing educational inequality in American education. Of course, the different pattern of the interaction between SES and parent–child communication found in my comparison between Korean and American education is not conclusive given that the comparison cannot rule out other alternative explanations that emphasize differences between the two countries other than the degree of educational standardization. More studies are needed to compare the pattern across countries with different degrees of educational standardization. In this aspect, comparisons between East Asian education (especially in Japan, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan) and American education would be interesting. Those East Asian countries share many similarities in structural features of educational system of which the high level of standardization is apparent. Thus, comparative studies of East Asian education will assess the extent to which the compensating role of parental involvement for lower socioeconomic background found in Korea can be generalized to other East Asian countries with high levels of educational standardization.
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Considering that in international surveys involving many countries it is often difficult to collect comparable measures of various forms of parental involvement in children’s education, PISA’s collection of parent–child communication measures is significant improvement over previous international surveys (Buchmann, 2002). International efforts should continue to collect information on parent–child communication so that the results can be compared across many different countries and across different data sets. At the same time, efforts should be made to gather information on various aspects of parental involvement beyond parent–child communication. For instance, measures of parenting style (e.g., authoritative/permissive/authoritarian parents, see Dornbusch, Ritter, Leiderman, Roberts, & Fraleigh, 1987; Steinberg, Lamborn, Dournbush, & Darling, 1992) and parental supervision or monitoring (such as checking homework, limiting TV time, or limiting going out) have been widely used in literature in the United States (McNeal 1997; Ho Sui-Chu & Willms, 1996). It is important to note that the current review on parental involvement has restricted its interest to home-based parental involvement. As pointed earlier, however, parent–school relationship and parent–parent relationship are other important aspects of parental involvement in children’s education. Future data collection and research on these dimensions of parental involvement across a variety of societies would enhance our understanding of the complicated processes through which parents influence children’s educational success and cross-national variation in the processes. Given required efforts and costs involved in cross-national surveys, the cross-sectional feature of cross-national surveys including many countries is understandable. It would be simply infeasible to conduct longitudinal studies for 40 countries in PISA, for example. However, it is still necessary to take into account the limitation of cross-sectional data to establish the relationship between parental involvement and children’s educational outcomes. For example, parent–child communication on students’ educational activities can be initiated by students’ lower achievement rather than it influences student achievement. Although not for all countries included in international surveys, educational longitudinal surveys of high quality are available in some countries – such as the NELS (National Educational Longitudinal Study) in the United States and the NLSCY (National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth) in Canada. Therefore, comparisons of the results from international cross-sectional surveys and from longitudinal studies in some particular countries will be useful exercises for better understanding the effects of parental involvement.
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NOTES 1. Muller and Kerbow (1993) distinguish an additional dimension of parental involvement in children’s education, which occurs in the context of community. 2. However, some studies report the inverse relationship between parental involvement, particularly school-based involvement, and children’s educational outcomes. For example, some studies cited in Downey (2002) showed that parental contact with school for their children’ academic matters was found to be negatively associated with students’ test scores. The inconsistent findings regarding the effects of parental involvement may be due to many reasons including different data, methods, or variables used. The feature of cross-sectional data that some studies employed might cause the inconsistent results as well. With the cross-sectional data, it is difficult to assess the direction of the relationship between parental involvement and children’s education. For instance, parents whose children are in trouble in schools may be more likely to contact schools, which suggests the negative relationship rather than the positive effect of school contacting (see Downey, 2002, p. 115 for this explanation). 3. The type of secondary schools not only significantly influenced the level of parental involvement but its effect was also found to be stronger than the effect of family SES. Family SES has much limited influences on the level of parental involvement. The authors compared the results of US studies that consistently show substantial impacts of family SES (cf. Baker & Stevenson, 1986). To investigate the weak effect of family SES, they conducted an additional analysis predicting parental involvement by student and family characteristics without the variation of school type. Family SES might have an indirect impact on parental involvement through its influence on the placement of the student in secondary school. However, their additional analysis showed that even without school type, the effect of family SES on parental involvement was substantially weak. 4. However, interpretation of the finding needs some cautions. As the authors themselves pointed out, it is possible that in highly differentiated systems parental attitude still matters before students are sorted into different types of schools, even though it was found to have a weak impact at the level of lower secondary education (where between-school tracking already occurred). In other words, the effect of parental attitude can vary in different stages of education. 5. The statistics of attending out-of-school classes for the countries are presented in Table 3 in Park (2004a) or may be obtained from the author upon request. 6. For detailed information on PISA, see the report of the first results of PISA 2000 (OECD, 2001). For sampling, survey procedures, and methods, in particular, see the technical report (OECD, 2002). 7. The item response theory (IRT) techniques were used to produce the scale score of the index. For more information on the methodology for creating the index, see OECD (2002). 8. Family SES was measured by a composite index created on the basis of the factor analysis using five different variables of family socioeconomic background: parental occupation, parental education, family wealth, home possessions of educational resources (e.g., a dictionary, a quiet place to study, a desk for study), and
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home possessions of ‘‘classical’’ culture (e.g., classical literature, books of poetry and works of art). In addition to parent–child communication and family SES, gender, number of siblings, and family structure (intact family vs. others) are included as control variables. For more information on each variable, see Park (2005). 9. Although some residential districts do not follow this policy, called the ‘‘equalization policy’’ (P’yoˇongjunhwa Choˇngch’aek), most major cities including Seoul (the capital of Korea) and major provinces assign students to schools via a lottery. This policy is not applied to vocational high school. Applicants for vocational high schools can choose their schools. Currently, about 35 percent of high school students in Korea attend vocational high schools. 10. Similar to the index of social communication, the index of cultural communication was scaled on the basis of the item response theory (IRT) techniques. For more information on the methodology for creating the index, see OECD (2002). 11. Language minority status as a dummy variable separates students whose spoken language at home is not English from those who speak English at home. This variable was included in the analysis only for US. School type, which indicates whether students attend vocational high school or academic high school was included in the analysis only for Korea.
REFERENCES Allmendinger, J. (1989). Educational system and labor market outcomes. European Sociological Review, 5, 231–250. Bacon, W. F., & Ichikawa, V. (1988). Maternal expectations, classroom experiences, and achievement among kindergartners in the United States and Japan. Human Development, 31, 378–383. Baker, D. P., & Stevenson, D. L. (1986). Mothers’ strategies for children’s’ school achievement: Managing the transition to high school. Sociology of Education, 59, 156–166. Baker, D. P., Akiba, M., LeTendre, G. K., & Wiseman, A. W. (2001). Worldwide shadow education: Outside-school learning, institutional quality of schooling, and cross-national mathematics achievement. Educational Evaluation & Policy Analysis, 23, 1–17. Barber, B. L. (1988). The influence of family demographics and parental teaching practices in Peruvian children’s academic achievement. Human Development, 31, 370–377. Bryk, A. S., & Raudenbush, S. W. (1992). Hierarchical linear models: Applications and data analysis methods. Newbury, CA: Sage Publications. Buchmann, C. (2002). Measuring family background in international studies of education: Conceptual issues and methodological challenges. In: A. C. Porter & A. Gamoran (Eds), Methodological advances in cross-national surveys of educational achievement (pp. 150–197). Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Buchmann, C., & Dalton, B. (2002). Interpersonal influences and educational aspirations in 12 countries: The importance of institutional context. Sociology of Education, 75, 99–122. Buchmann, C., & Hannum, E. (2001). Education and stratification in developing countries: Review of theories and research. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 77–102. Chen, C., & Uttal, D. H. (1988). Cultural values, parents’ beliefs, and children’s achievement in the United States and China. Human Development, 31, 351–358.
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Dornbusch, S. M., Ritter, P. L., Leiderman, P. H., Roberts, D. F., & Fraleigh, M. J. (1987). The relation of parenting style to adolescent school performance. Child Development, 58, 1244–1257. Downey, D. B. (2002). Parental and family involvement in education. In: A. Molnar (Ed.), School reform proposals: The research evidence (pp. 113–134). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Pub. Epstein, J. L. (2001). School, family, and community partnerships: Preparing educator and improving schools. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Ho Sui-Chu, E., & Willms, J. D. (1996). Effects of parental involvement on eighth-grade achievement. Sociology of Education, 69, 126–141. Kerckhoff, A. C. (1995). Institutional arrangements and stratification processes in industrial societies. Annual Review of Sociology, 15, 323–347. Kerckhoff, A. C. (2001). Education and social stratification processes in comparative perspective. Sociology of Education, Extra Issue, 3–18. Lareau, A. (1989). Home advantage: Social class and parental intervention in elementary education. New York: The Falmer Press. Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhood: Class, race, and family life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mayer, S. (1997). What money can’t buy: Family income and children’s life chances. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McNeal, R. B., Jr. (1999). Parental involvement as social capital: Differential effectiveness on science achievement, truancy, and dropping out. Social Forces, 78, 117–144. Muller, C. (1993). Parent involvement and academic achievement: An analysis of family resources available to the child. In: B. Schneider & J. S. Colemen (Eds), Parents, their children, and schools (pp. 77–113). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Muller, C. (1995). Maternal employment, parent involvement, and mathematics achievement among adolescents. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 57, 85–100. Muller, C., & Kerbow, D. (1993). Parent involvement in the home, school, and community. In: B. Schneider & J. S. Colemen (Eds), Parents, their children, and schools (pp. 13–42). Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2001). Knowledge and skills for life: First results from PISA 2000. Paris: OECD. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2002). PISA 2000 technical report. Paris: OECD. Oswald, H., Baker, D. P., & Stevenson, D. L. (1988). School charter and parental management in west Germany. Sociology of Education, 61, 255–265. Park, H. (2004a). Differential effects of parent-child communication on reading literacy by SES in Korea and the United States: The significance of the educational system. Paper presented at the annual meeting of American Sociological Association, San Francisco, CA, August 2004. Park, H. (2004b). Educational expansion and inequality in Korea. Research in Sociology of Education, 14, 33–58. Park, H. (2005). The effects of parent-child communication on educational achievement: A study of 12 countries. Working paper. University of Wisconsin-Madison. Powell, B., Werum, R., & Steelman, L. C. (2004). Linking public policy, family structure, and educational outcomes. In: D. Conley & K. Albright (Eds), After the bell: Family background, public policy and educational success (pp. 111–144). New York: Routledge.
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Ryan, B.A. (1994). The family school connection: A research bibliography. Unpublished Manuscript. Department of Family Studies, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario. Ryan, B. A., & Adams, G. R. (1998). Family relationships and children’s school achievement: Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. Working Paper Series 98-13E. Applied Research Branch Strategic Policy, Human Resources Development Canada. Sandefur, G. D., Frisco, M., Faulkner, C., & Park, H. (2004). Parental involvement in education: Another form of social exclusion for poor families in the United States? Unpublished manuscript, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Scott-Jones, D. (1995). The family–school relationships model. In: B. A. Ryan, G. R. Adams, T. P. Gullotta, R. P. Wessberg & R. L. Hampton (Eds), The family school connection: Theory, research and practice (pp. 3–28). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Shavit, Y., & Mu+ ller, W. (Eds) (1998). From school to work: A comparative study of educational qualifications and occupational attainment in thirteen countries. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Steinberg, L., Lamborn, S. D., Dournbush, S. M., & Darling, N. (1992). Impact of parenting practices on adolescent achievement: Authoritative parenting, school involvement, and encouragement to succeed. Child Development, 63, 1266–1281. Teachman, J. D., Paasch, K., & Carver, K. (1997). Social capital and the generation of human capital. Social Forces, 75, 1343–1359.
INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE IN POSTSOCIALIST EDUCATION: THE CASE OF POLAND Edward F. Bodine Institutional research on education has been concerned mainly with explaining how educational development is marked by convergence within and across national systems. The works of Meyer and Rowan (1977, 1978) and Meyer, Scott, and Deal (1983), in particular, have strongly influenced the study of how institutional mechanisms compel schools to adopt the rules, categories, and procedures that have come to define the formal structure of the modern school. This perspective, which is closely identified with the ‘‘neo-institutional’’ school of sociology that emerged in the 1980s, holds that schools in the same environment1 compete for resources and public acceptance by aligning themselves to this formal structure, embodied not in any one-model organization but through organizational practices widely perceived as legitimate. Neo-institutionalists define this jockeying for legitimacy among schools as ‘‘institutional isomorphism,’’ which they characterize as the tendency of organizations to progressively structure themselves in relation to one another. In the aggregate, this leads to convergence toward a limited set of organizational features that define the cultural ideal of what a school should look like and how it should behave in any particular system. Isomorphism is also important for understanding institutional change (neoinstitutionalists use the term ‘‘institutionalization’’) across educational
The Impact of Comparative Education Research on Institutional Theory International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 7, 209–238 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3679/doi:10.1016/S1479-3679(06)07010-1
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systems. At the global level, the study of isomorphism is associated with world institution theory, which combines neo-institutional theory with historical and comparative research on educational development. At the heart of this theory is a belief that the emergence of mass schooling everywhere can be understood in terms of a set of core universal values or ‘‘myths’’ that place the state at the center of education (Boli, Ramirez, & Meyer, 1985; Ramirez & Boli, 1987; Ramirez & Ventresca, 1992). From this perspective, the institutionalization of schooling is a development being advanced throughout the world by modern states and states that aspire to be modern. In short, world institutional theorists see the progress of mass schooling in direct relation to the progress of the modern state. Despite its currency in comparative education, the neo-institutional and world institutional theoretic perspectives offer only limited explanatory value in the context of postsocialist Europe. Throughout this region, the state, which was centralized and dominant under socialism, has been rendered weak. Its role in education has been significantly reduced through wide-ranging but poorly managed national reforms and restructuring. At the same time, powerful nonstate actors have risen to challenge state authority in education and pursue their own agendas for decentralizing the control of schools. The outcomes of these developments deviate from neoinstitutional predictions about institutionalization in education. The fact that school systems that were highly institutionalized under socialism have tended toward significant variation under postsocialism highlights important limitations of neo-institutional theory for comparative analysis. Understanding why variation instead of isomorphism has marked educational change requires understanding the impact of particular societal, cultural, and historical factors on this process. Neo-institutional theory is not well suited to this analytical work because of its paradigmatic modernist assumption that education is rationally structured by centers of political authority and administered by bureaucracies that ‘‘present themselves not as units servicing education but as organizations that embody educational purposes in their collective structure’’ (Meyer & Rowan, 1978, p. 92). Likewise, world institutional claims for the global expansion of mass schooling are premised on the idea of strong rational states competing in a transnational state system. In short, the neo-institutional view cannot successfully account for educational change in national contexts marked by a weak state and strong decentralization because it ‘‘favors the center.’’2 By positioning the state at the center of institutional life, this view can only have limited explanatory power in contexts where the state has been ‘‘decentered.’’3
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This chapter examines institutional change in education in one such context, namely Poland. The transformation of this system after socialism is remarkable for its degree of decentralization and the rapid expansion of the nonstate educational sector. The departure point for my analysis is the postsocialist state’s particular crisis of legitimacy. The weakness of the state and years of poorly managed national reforms to decentralize schools have contributed to the destabilization of older institutional structures in education and facilitated the rise of new educational logics, actors, and organizations. This chapter is divided in three parts: the first part frames the study of institutional change, drawing a contrast between the neo-institutional focus on homogeneous change and newer institutional perspectives on heterogeneous change; the second part examines the problem of control versus legitimacy for the weak state and its impact on education; and the last part looks at the role of nonstate actors in their attempts to weaken state influence, redefine education, and advance their own organizational agendas. The findings of this study suggest that educational contexts defined by weak states and strong nonstate actors pose unique challenges that neo-institutional theory, as a coherent analytical framework, as cannot address. Emerging ‘‘heterogeneous’’ institutional models are better attuned to understanding organizational variation and contradiction and offer comparative researchers new ways of thinking about the relationship between the school and the state. In turn, comparative researchers have an important role to play in testing new theoretical claims and assisting in the further construction and refinement of institutional theory.
FRAMING INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE In the early 1980s, institutional and development researchers began to question why schools in different countries around the world increasingly appeared alike in formal design, organization, and function. Boli, Ramirez, and Meyer (1985) offered a seminal neo-institutional argument that schools around the world are increasingly drawn up by the global sweep of modernization. A prerequisite for any country wishing to engage with and compete in the modern world, the authors argued, is establishing a system of mass schooling based on a set of core institutional standards and values that originated in the west but have since expanded around the globe. These standards and values require that schools be universally accessible and socially progressive, capably of equally and equitably integrating a citizenry – regardless of racial, ethnic, and gender-related distinctions – into the
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nation-state. The world model of education described by these theorists provides not so much an organizational blueprint for building modern school systems as a cultural schema for defining the national polity and forging a modern society through education. What makes schools everywhere look and act the same, they claim, is the utter invariability of this schema. [T]he striking thing about modern mass education is that everywhere in the world the same interpretative scheme underlies the observed reality. Even in the most remote peasant villages, administrators, teachers, pupils, and parents invoke these institutional rules and struggle to construct schools that conform to them. (p. 147)
At the heart of institutionalization, then, is a universal schema or logic that encapsulates what it means to be modern and prescribes the cultural forms through which individuals and societies are to pursue this end. Just as schools in a single-system converge around a cultural ideal for how schools should look and behave, so do schools around the globe converge around a world cultural model of schooling. ‘‘[A]dherence to world models of national mass schooling has yielded ideological and organizational isomorphism. Despite much variation in many endogenous characteristics of national societies, mass schooling has been globally institutionalized’’ (Ramirez & Ventresca, 1992, p. 47). This is only part of the neo-institutional explanation for the convergence in education, however. The ways in which institutionalization unfolds across national settings is powerfully tied to the stability and authority of the modern state. No public agent in society possesses the authority, institutional resources, or the political rationality of the modern state. Ramirez and Boli (1987) see the authority of the state over education in terms of the historical role it has assumed in advancing national society: ‘‘Since the national welfare was believed to be influenced by the character instilled in the nation’s children, the state was impelled to play a role in the socialization of children’’ (p. 11). Compulsory schooling laws as early as the late 18th century were clear attempts by modern states to wrest the rights of child socialization from traditional bodies of authority, including parents, church, and local community. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, national societies invested progressively more social value in the state (Meyer, 1980), resulting in the expansion of the state’s influence over public education and deepening the myth of state authority that allowed the influence in the first place. In many contemporary school systems, the central state tightly defines and standardizes the formal content and structure of schools – what Meyer
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and Rowan (1978) refer to as ‘‘ritual classifications’’ (1978). These include the credentialing and hiring of teachers, the assignment of students to classes and teachers, and scheduling. As the authors note: ‘‘there seem to be centralized and enforced agreements about exactly what teachers, students, and topics of instruction constitute a particular school’’ (p. 84). Schools that incorporate these classifications maximize their legitimacy and increase their resources and ability to survive as organizations. Because of its authority in regulating these classifications, the state functions as an ‘‘externally fixed institution,’’ reducing turbulence and maintaining stability across the educational system and through time (Meyer & Rowan, 1977, p. 340). The isomorphic diffusion of these classifications and the cultural values that underlie them would be impossible in the absence of the strong state. Mass education systems, irrespective of the societies that build them, are bound to the modern state. This state-centered perspective assigns great value to the rational capacities of central state actors to plan for society. Indeed, the statecraft of rational bureaucratic planning is the hallmark of what Scott (1998) calls 20th century ‘‘high modernism,’’ whose seeds can be found in Weber’s work on bureaucratic organization. One can say that neo-institutionalists have been inclined to take their own high modernism for granted. While neo-institutional theory has had a profound impact on how comparative educationists think about the field, a number of its underlying theoretical commitments have been criticized in recent years. Powell (1991) has acknowledged that the work of neo-institutionalists has generally been more attentive to sources of institutional homogeneity and persistence than heterogeneity, change, and transformation. Handler (1996) calls the neoinstitutional view passive and overly deterministic in its treatment of organizational behavior. Hensmans (2003) contends that ‘‘neo-institutional theory’s main interest lay in showing that dominant organizational archetypes were reproduced in a collective, interorganizational way, rather than in examining how new archetypes are built in fields through diverse strategic agency’’ (p. 355). Contemporary advances in institutional theory suggest a shift of perspective toward heterogeneous aspects of institutional change. For example, Friedland and Alford (1991) argue that, far from conformity, organizational life is rife with conflict over institutional meaning and power. Greenwood and Hinings (1996) suggest that organizations at times shift from dominant to alternative or competing institutional archetypes. In their exhaustive empirical study of institutional change in the health care industry, Scott, Ruff, Mendel, and Caronna (2000) argue that organizational fields undergoing ‘‘profound change’’ may experience radical redefinitions of organizational structure and practice that may ultimately lead to a new
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institutional order. Collectively, these alternative perspectives have widened the focus of institutional theory beyond isomorphic convergence to include variation, diversity, and contradiction. In the following sections, I draw on these perspectives – particularly Friedland and Alford (1991) and Scott et al. (2000) – to examine the dynamics of change in Polish education. Because of the distinctiveness of the postsocialist context, I also draw on a number of sociopolitical theories that help to explain the nature of the weak state after socialism and its impact on the institutional environment of education.
THE WEAK STATE UNDER POSTSOCIALISM The weak state is pivotal to understanding educational change after socialism. Yet, the concept of the weak state in academic literature generally has been defined in the context of the postcolonial Third World. Migdal (1988), in his classic study Strong Societies and Weak States, identifies the problem of how underdeveloped countries under weak states are to develop the strong modern institutions that their populations demand. Fuller (1991, 1992) has addressed this problem in terms of educational development, remarking that the Third World ‘‘political actors often live within fragile state organizations’’ (1992, p. 135). According to Fuller, the weak state in the developing world faces serious challenges to centralizing education through modern bureaucratic management. The dilemma of the weak state under postsocialism, however, is different. By 1989 the countries of the Soviet East Bloc had already developed modern, institutionalized systems of education administered by highly centralized states. Access to schooling was universal, and national literacy rates were higher than in many countries throughout the industrialized West. In degree of bureaucratic rationalization, these socialist school systems were arguably more modern than were their western counterparts. Mass schooling was an extraordinary achievement under Soviet modernization, primarily due to the strong position of the central state. 1989, however, ushered in an era of the weak state across Eastern Europe. To understand the roots of this weakness and its influence on education, one must recognize that the collapse of the state socialist system in Eastern Europe was precipitated by a legitimation crisis of massive proportions. Driving this crisis was the widespread sentiment that the socialist modernization of society had not only failed to advance society in key respects but was inimical to it. This sentiment and the reforms it spurred have had important implications for education under postsocialism.
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Legitimation Crisis and the Collapse of State Socialism The collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe has been popularly understood as revolution, entailing radical change in the political order. Social scientists, however, have described this event in terms of legitimation crisis, entailing steep erosion of the state’s normative basis of support. Wedel (1992), for instance, argues that ‘‘[u]nder Poland’s Communists, government after government was toppled by social crises of legitimacy, entailing disorder, and not crises of power, threatening revolutionary overthrow’’ (p. 19). The notion of legitimation crisis was first introduced by Habermas over three decades ago and has since found a prominent place in social and political theory. Habermas (1979) characterizes legitimacy as a political order’s ‘‘worthiness to be recognized’’ (p. 178). A crisis of legitimacy, he explains, stems from the state’s inability to control severe fluctuations in the market economy. Over time, a cycle of economic crises undermines public faith in the state’s stewardship of the economy, which in turn reduces the resources the state needs to manage the economy. This downward spiral leads to a loss of legitimacy for the state and eventually a broad withdrawal of cultural support for its institutions and mandates. While Habermas (1973) was primarily concerned with understanding the inherent contradictions of advanced capitalist systems, his thesis has been extended and reworked to explain the behavior of a variety of national state types, including the capitalist welfare state (Offe, 1984) and the socialist welfare state (Kamin´ski, 1991). For Kamin´ski, the concept of legitimation crisis is important to understanding the collapse of the state socialist system. Examining this collapse through the case of Poland, Kamin´ski proposes from three main institutional factors for the failure of state socialism: (1) continued reliance on the flawed logic of a closed economic system, leading to market stagnation; (2) erosion of state legitimacy, leading to distrust in state institutions; and (3) cultural withdrawal from and opposition to the state, leading to the breakdown of the socialist system. Why and how the socialist state suffered such a critical loss of normative support has been the subject of a great deal of sociological research. Nowak (1981) suggested that socialist society was beset by a ‘‘sociological vacuum’’ separating the illegitimate realm of public life, subject to state monitoring and regulation, from the legitimate realm of private life, defined by family and close personal contacts. More recently Sztompka (1999) has pointed to a syndrome of distrust. ‘‘There was a deep decay of trust in the public sphere y with a complete shift of trust to the private domain (the primary groups – family, friends, neighbors). An escape
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into the private domain was a typical reaction to the situation’’ (p. 156). The cultural impact of this distrust meant that ‘‘loyalties and commitments were withheld from public institutions and turned exclusively toward families and private networks’’ (ibid.). Kamin´ski (1991) has similarly referred to a syndrome of ‘‘withdrawal’’ from the state, which can be ‘‘either to the opposition or to private life. It is reflected in a decision to leave (or not to join) core political institutions, or in the refusal to participate in political rituals, for example, referendums or elections’’ (p. 168). When compounded by the uncertainties of economic and political transition, the legacy of state illegitimacy and the cultural persistence of distrust have had far-reaching consequences for the reconstitution of the state after socialism. In particular, they contributed to the drive to deregulate the economy, decentralize governance structures, and devolve institutional authority throughout society.
Decentralization and the State’s Persistent Deficit of Legitimacy While decentralization is often evoked as a strategy to streamline or democratize public institutions, it also has a strategic political function for the state. Weiler (1993) has proposed that the modern state has two contradictory interests in exercising power over society: ‘‘ensuring effectiveness and maintaining control, on the one hand, and enhancing and sustaining the normative basis of its authority (its legitimacy), on the other’’ (p. 55). These interests are contradictory because maintaining control tends to erode the state’s legitimacy, and measures for shoring up legitimacy tend to undermine the state’s control. Weiler notes that these interests become institutionalized through policies that aim to centralize or decentralize state control. Social crises that cannot be managed through centralized measures ultimately threaten the state’s critical reserve of legitimacy. Decentralization provides a means of managing conflict by transposing political struggles to lower institutional levels and multiple organizational units; by doing so, it localizes conflict and insulates the central state from its fallout. At the same time, the state signals its commitment to extending popular control, thereby strengthening its legitimacy – albeit, at the cost of central control. Through decentralization, the state gains what Weiler calls ‘‘compensatory legitimation.’’ The author claims that this framework is well suited to understanding the modern state’s often paradoxical role in education, which more than any other public institution is a constant site of political conflict. Because modern states tend to administer education through bureaucracies whose
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impersonal and distant character erode state legitimacy, decentralization offers an attractive compensatory strategy. Reform of Polish education after socialism offers an extreme case of Weiler’s thesis. Faced with a catastrophic loss of legitimacy, the Polish state embarked on an extensive course of decentralization. Restructuring the system of educational governance paralleled a broader administrative reconfiguration of the Polish state. Powers that once belonged to the central state were devolved to regional and local governments, many of which were ill-equipped to take on new powers due to their long dependency on the central state. Jurisdictions were comprehensively redrawn according to new territorial boundaries. Education reform formally began in 1991 with the Parliamentary Act on the System of Education and resulted in a downward shift of authority and administrative responsibility from the Ministry of Education to regional and local governments. Postprimary schools and institutions as well as child welfare agencies were first slated for decentralization. Over time, however, the administration of all primary schools and preschools was decentralized as well. Decentralization also included moderate deregulation and privatization. In 1990, the Ministry of Education established the Office of Innovation and Independent Schools to oversee the nonstate sector, facilitate its expansion, and learn from its organizational and pedagogical innovations. The 1991 Parliamentary Act formally granted the right to establish nonstate schools and set down a set of permissive rules for state recognition and subsidy. With a view toward rebuilding its legitimacy, the Polish state advanced decentralization not only to eliminate administrative inefficiency but also to demonstrate its commitment to democracy and the localization of control over schools. Decentralization did not gain the Polish state much compensatory legitimation, however, largely because its reforms were poorly managed and resulted in a great deal of confusion. By 1997, OECD (2000) reports that Polish education had devolved into an ‘‘administrative mosaic’’ (p. 2). Throughout the system, schools, administrative personnel, and local officials were unclear about the boundaries of regulatory authority and financial responsibility. Some of poorest regions in the country discovered that they had fewer resources for schools after decentralization. Schooling in these largely rural regions typically encounter high per pupils costs (as high as three times that of urban areas) and low revenue levels (lack of industrial and modest tax bases). As a consequence, many rural school districts opposed decentralization efforts and called on national leaders to recentralize education. This prompted the central government to effectively ‘‘re-nationalize’’ certain regions, which only exacerbated the coherence problem for the
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state in its approach to educational reform. At the national level, alternating ruling parties in Parliament throughout the 1990s carried out divergent reform agendas, resulting in the long run in the formulation of inconsistent and often contradictory policy objectives. Tomiak (2000a) has traced the lack of political consensus over educational reform to the distinctive visions and reform platforms of various political coalitions (including Solidarity, Nationalist, Liberal Democratic, and Democratic Left) throughout the 1990s. These political discontinuities have helped undermine the coherence of education reform. As Tomiak (2000b, p. 141) suggests, ‘‘The swinging political pendulum over the course of the last 10 years made a more fundamental and thoroughgoing educational reform of state schools difficult.’’ These problems in education have been impacted by broader institutional dysfunctions in the state’s handling of postsocialist reform. Sztompka (1999) has observed that the Polish legal system ‘‘is a fragmented mosaic of partial regulations, old and new, often inconsistent, repeatedly changed, and arbitrarily interpreted. The overload of rules, regulations, administrative codes, and conflicting interpretations of laws makes them incomprehensible’’ (p. 177). Adding to this incoherence is a culture of poor and often corrupt enforcement. For the individual, there is not only widespread confusion about values and boundaries – about what is acceptable and what is unacceptable behavior – but also a disincentive to follow the rules. Scho¨pflin (2000) blames this problem on the failure of the state. The trouble with the post-communist state is that, because it has failed, it lacks the legitimacy to create a relatively neutral space within which individuals can function on more or less equal basis. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: as individuals distrust the state – they can ignore procedures, for example, because they are certain that they can only be disadvantaged by doing so – this attitude acquires a widespread, universal value. (p. 68)
Ultimately, the weak state signals that it does not have the capacity to ensure the stability and continuity of institutional life; consequently, individuals look elsewhere for these things. For this reason, the strategy of decentralization has not bought the state much compensatory legitimacy. Rather, it has only added to public distrust and confusion, which in turn have prevented the state from shoring up its normative foundation through democratic reform. The postsocialist state’s dilemma is the loss of both rational control and cultural legitimacy. Expectations of democracy has demanded that the state should ‘‘preside over its own dismantling,’’ while persistent the instability of transition has made it difficult for the state to reconsolidate its powers; these conditions have locked it into a condition of
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‘‘low-capacity’’ (p. 67–78). According to Scho¨pflin, the most critical challenge facing the postsocialist state is establishing and maintaining coherence. The relationship between the strength of the state and the stability of the educational system is not incidental. As neo-institutional theorists remind us, the stability and coherence of education depends on an ‘‘externally fixed institution,’’ a role historically played by the state. In Poland, however, the weak state and layers of disjointed reforms have contributed to a fragile, unstable environment for education. Scott et al. (2000) call the process that leads to this condition destructuration, characterized as a progressive breakdown in the dominant institutional rules and procedures established in a previous era.
Destructuration in Education The idea that structuration can involve breakdown of institutional structure is a fairly new and radical idea. Since the term was coined by Giddens (1984), neo-institutional theorists have tended to describe structuration only in terms of organizational convergence. DiMaggio and Powell (1991), for example, characterize structuration as the primordial formation of collective rules, standards, identities, etc. that define an organizational field. However, Scott et al. (2000) argue that institutional theory must also account for how fields undergo important redefinitions during later stages of their evolution. An important condition for such change, they propose, is a breakdown – or destructuration – of the dominant institutional order. Destructuration creates spaces in the institutional fabric for new actors to influence how organizational life is redefined and restructured. The weak Polish state and its efforts to decentralize education have contributed to destructuration in two important ways: diminished legitimacy for state schooling and the fragmentation of educational governance. Diminished Legitimacy for State Schools Because socialist education in Poland was highly centralized, entailing a tight coupling between the school and the state, it was perhaps inevitable that the state’s legitimation crisis would be transferred to its system of schools. Even where schools were decoupled through decentralization, they continue to be defined by the ‘‘ritual classifications’’ of mass schooling. In this sense, the idea of legitimacy links two levels of analysis. Legitimacy is an important symbolic resource for schools, but the availability of this resource depends on the presence of a strong state capable of rationally defining the
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institutional rules and instilling them with authority. The central state may attempt to buffer itself from conflict through decentralization. But as institutional theorists understand well, the behaviors and expectations that shape organizational life are enduring. In the postsocialist context, while decentralization has resulted in a reorganization of educational administration, the basic institutional structure within schools has been far more resistant to change. State-led decentralization has not fundamentally altered the older, institutional template for what schools should look like or how they should be internally run. But schools have not been exceptional in this respect. Many public institutions have resisted change despite efforts to restructure them. Some researchers have attributed this to a persistent ‘‘socialist mindset’’ that continues to influence the work of civil servants and public officials (Michta, 1997). Even where decentralization, autonomy, and choice are recognized as the ‘‘new values,’’ well-wore institutional habits of hierarchical control and directive contribute to resistance to change. The persistence of the formal structure of the state school has made it difficult for schools themselves to acquire the legitimation necessary for robust public support and participation. While postsocialist transition has been associated with an explosion of local economic enterprise, civic activity, and organizational innovation, state schools generally have been seen as outside these developments. In Poland, parents have increasingly expressed a desire for greater involvement in and authority over the children’s education. A survey conducted in the mid 1990s found that 90% of public school parents believed that they should be actively involved in addressing educational problems, 77% that they should decide on the nature of moral values passed on by the school, 79% that they should have a role in determining the appropriate conditions for learning (Zielin´ska, 1999). Yet to a large extent, state schools have resisted greater parental involvement in decision-making and school life. Many schools, for example, have resisted the establishment of community oversight boards that by law have the right to inspect and review both the pedagogical and financial performance of schools and to make policy recommendations to school directors and local governments. Perhaps the clearest signal that parents are discontented with the performance and culture of state schools is the expansion of the nonstate educational sector. Interviews with parents whose children have exited the state system to enroll in nonstate schools indicate frustration with a number of aspects of the system: the large size of schools and density of students per classroom, the impersonal atmosphere of the learning environment, student classifications which largely ignore special abilities and needs, instructional
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approaches that rely on excessive routinization, and the lack of consideration for parental concerns and family interests. The exit of families from state schools has not been large enough to appreciably affect their enrollments (less than 7% of school children attend nonstate institutions, according to the Ministry of National Education, 2003). It has also been constrained by the limited supply of quality nonstate institutions. At the same time, however, this exit has influenced state schools in two significant ways. Since both state and nonstate schools receive state per pupil funding, the transfer of students out of state schools has negatively impacted their operating budgets in an era when much of the financial responsibility over education has shifted to local governments. The departure of families to the nonstate sector has also had a symbolic influence. Reasons for leaving nonstate schools in favor of private or alternative schools have often been favorably covered in the popular press. Likewise, the methods and conditions of state schooling have been condemned by prominent educational activists in terms that evoke memories of the bureaucratic excesses under state socialism. Thus, the withdrawal from state education has become something of a public ceremony meant to highlight the shortcomings of the system against new educational alternatives. It is difficult to gauge how much the legitimacy of state schools have been undercut in this process. However, it is important to recognize that like voting in popular elections, enrolling one’s child in public education is as much a symbolic act as it is an individual decision. Withdrawal from the public system, particularly when it is well and sympathetically publicized, sends the signal that state schools lack strong normative support. Finally, while the central state’s financial support of the nonstate educational sector may enhance its civic-democratic image, paradoxically it may undercut the legitimacy of state schools by raising fundamental questions about which organizational models and approaches the state is committed to. Meyer and Rowan (1977) have argued that modern educational systems are essentially based on collectively granted monopolies. Funding of minimally regulated nonstate institutions with public money in the name of decentralization contributes to the perception that the state no longer possesses the collective support and political will to maintain a ‘‘monopoly’’ over how schools should look and behave. Fragmentation of Educational Governance Another aspect of destructuration is fragmentation. As Scott et al. (2000) note, the integration of an organizational field is essential to its long-term survival. A field will fragment when its system of governance loses
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rationality and coherence. This loss tends to result in ambiguity and contradiction between jurisdictional boundaries, regulatory, and financial responsibilities. To understand the scope of this fragmentation in Polish education, one must recognize that the national project of decentralization entailed an extensive reorganization of the administrative map of Poland. The socialist state was defined by 49 regional areas (voivodships), whose respective governments had little authority on their own and were basically extensions of the central government; administrative control was highly vertical. After 1990, thousands of local or municipal divisions (gminas) were established. In 1998, hundreds of district divisions (powiats) were established and the number of regional divisions reduced to 16. This radical localization of administration across Poland, along with the new decentralized regulatory and financing system for schools created by the Ministry of Education, contributed to widespread confusion in educational governance: [T]he assignment of managerial and financial responsibilities to local governments remains confused. It is unclear who is responsible for setting and financing teachers’ wages, the national government or local governments, and who is responsible for hiring and firing them, local governments or school directors. And it is unclear who is responsible for monitoring school performance and intervening when they fail. (Levitas & Herczynski, 2001)
As Scott et al. (2000) suggest, fragmentation has real consequences for organizational actors, who are often confronted ‘‘with multiple and often incompatible demands and expectations’’ (p. 317). In the Polish system, this confusion has impacted local educators and officials as well as national planners, frustrating progress toward important educational goals. The lack of clearly defined roles with respect to both teachers’ pay and employment and the monitoring of school performance, has reduced the willingness and ability of local governments to squarely address many of the challenges that face their school systems. It has also made it difficult to determine how the national government should help them meet these challenges. (Levitas & Herczynski, 2001, p. 1)
Fragmentation has also resulted in conflict between administrative units and levels, particularly over financial resources and responsibilities. From the perspective of local governments, decentralization of school finance has been an ‘‘unfunded mandate’’ (p. 23). In the mid-1990s, resource disparities between municipalities and districts (particularly between urban and rural areas) resulted in tensions over the direction of reform, with wealthier areas calling for greater decentralization and poorer areas calling for recentralization. The central government sought to appease both calls through a set of complicated compromises. There has also been conflict over the state’s
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role in supporting nonstate schools. Under the 1991 Law on the Education System, individuals, groups, and associations could establish their own schools, with guaranteed per pupil funding in exchange for meeting certain criteria, such as hiring only certified teachers and following a minimal set of curricular standards. However, the funding and regulation of nonstate schools was never well defined. As a result, the Ministry has found itself in continual conflict with both local governments and nonstate schools over how much to fund the latter (p. 40). In some sense, the Ministry itself has become fragmented in its dual commitments to supporting state schools on the one hand and promoting choice and innovation through nonstate schools on the other. In summary, the postsocialist state is frustrated in its attempts to secure compensatory legitimacy in education through decentralization. The reorganization of educational governance, intended to extend popular control to lower levels at the expense of central control, has led to both fragmentation and diminished legitimacy for mass schooling. The inability to penetrate and transform the institutional culture inside schools has undercut public faith in the state’s ability to foster democratic change in education; it has also advantaged the nonstate sector by virtue of it being regarded as the ‘‘alternative.’’ In taking account of these changes, one must recognize that an important shift has occurred in the relationship between the state and the school. From an institutional perspective, it is difficult to imagine that such loosening of the institutional fabric of education could take place in a system grounded on a strong rational state. But the weak state is only part of the story of radical change in Polish education. In the next section, I examine the influence of nonstate actors in their attempts to shift control away from the state.
THE POWER OF NONSTATE ACTORS While the Polish central state has used decentralization to regain legitimacy, nonstate actors have used decentralization to undermine its legitimacy and wrest from it increasing amounts of control in order to advance their own organizational goals. Radical forms of decentralization, such as privatization and market choice, have devolved state authority to nonstate agencies and organizations. At the same time, ‘‘radical decentralization’’4 has provided a set of strategies for those opposed to centralized control, particularly where the competence of state administration of education is questioned or contested. More than simply a course of reform, radical decentralization can
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be said to constitute an institutional logic for how organizational life should be structured and governed. In this section, I trace the evolution of radical decentralization in Polish society. I first examine how, through this logic, nonstate actors and organizations have exploited the state to advance their own educational goals. I then consider how radical decentralization has impacted the Polish school system more broadly.
The Logic of Radical Decentralization Institutional theorists have employed such terms as logic, template, or scheme to refer to the cognitive maps that guide individual and organizations and help shape the fields in which they operate. Organizational fields that are institutionalized and stable tend to follow a dominant logic or set of logics that shaped their original formation (Scott et al., 2000). This has been a central assumption for neo-institutionalists. However, in contexts of profound change – e.g., state socialism to liberal democracy – societies may experience important shifts in and/or conflicts between the cultural meanings and symbols that underlie institutional life, with important implications for how individuals and organizations behave. Friedland and Alford (1991) have argued that these shifts and conflicts result from an ongoing struggle between the different ‘‘institutional logics’’ that define modern societies. The authors discuss a number of generic logic types: The institutional logic of capitalism is accumulation and the commodification of human activity. That of the state is rationalization and the regulation of human activity by legal and bureaucratic hierarchies. That of democracy is participation and the extension of legal and popular control over human activity. That of family is community and the motivation of human activity by unconditional loyalty to its members and their reproductive needs. (p. 248)
These logics are not strictly delimited by organizational type. For example, a state school does not necessarily or exclusively follow the institutional logic of the state, though – depending on the societal and historical context – it may be compelled to do so. As Friedland and Alford explain, these logics are cultural in that they consist of a ‘‘set of material practices and symbolic constructions y which is available to organizations and individuals to elaborate’’ (p. 248). Logics provide a sense of identity, a basis for action, and help to specify what goals and values are to be pursued and what means for pursing them are appropriate (Scott et al., 2000). Moreover, institutional logics underlie the politics of a society. ‘‘Some of the most important struggles between groups, organizations, and classes are over the appropriate
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relationships between institutions, and by which institutional logic different activities should be regulated and to which categories or persons they apply’’ (p. 256). At the core of the logic of radical decentralization is the belief that the organization and control of social life should be highly localized and based on the principle of autonomy. This logic may be elaborated in terms of market-based rational choice, or some form of communitarianism, or a combination of the two. Generally, those who push hardest for policies and reforms framed by radical decentralization are distrustful of and/or frustrated with state-led approaches to social service provision, such as education and welfare. Reformers typically cast the state as bureaucratic and often monopolistic. When they do so, it is not so much a particular policy regime or government administration that is being assailed but the underlying logic of state action itself. Only through radical decentralization, they argue, can the autonomy of society be restored, whether it is through the free choice of the market or the free will of self-sustaining communities. When the logic of radical decentralization is aligned with powerful cultural and historical symbols, it can be used to challenge the dominant order and legitimate competing organizational goals and social agendas. In Poland, the origins of radical decentralization can be traced to Solidarity and its early position on the relationship between labor and management under the socialist system. For Solidarity activists, economic self-determination was tied to a broader sense of freedom. Key words in the Solidarity ideology were ‘independence’, ‘autonomy’, and podmiotowos´c´. The last word is difficult to translate: etymologically related to the word ‘subject’, it was used in the sense of ‘sovereignty’, ‘being one’s own boss’, ‘being an agent in every action one takes part in’. The word meant an individual’s ability to make decisions in matters concerning them as well. Podmiotowos´c´ was thought of as a natural right of every human being. It was a value that needed no external justification, but it was also a prerequisite for fulfilling society’s economic needs. (Podemski, 1995, p. 178)
Solidarity extended the principle of sovereignty to the realm of labor rights, arguing that workers needed a greater stake in their own work through selfmanagement and organizational autonomy. As a Solidarity position paper states: ‘‘Self-management in an enterprise means making its employees and their representative, the workers’ council, the highest managing authority’’ (Persky & Flam, 1982, p. 182). Calls to decentralize management were part of Solidarity’s strategy to ‘‘take enterprises out of the hands of central planners by strengthening the powers of factory managers while at the same time subordinating them to newly formed employee councils’’ (Levitas & Herczynski, 2001, p. 6). By the late 1980s, Solidarity was itself a highly
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decentralized organization. As Crow (2002) notes, ‘‘the decentralized nature of the movement was a prized and jealously guarded feature of Solidarity y . [Its] organizational structure had been established, whereby the union was designed as a federation of largely autonomous regional chapters coordinated by the National Coordinating Committee’’ (p. 97–98). Autonomy was a key organizational value of Solidarity, one which political reformers sought to extend throughout Polish society after the collapse of state socialism. Originally believing that it could reform the socialist system through decentralization, by the start of the decade Solidarity saw decentralization as the ‘‘fastest way to dismantle the Communist state’’ (Levitas & Herczynski, 2001, p. 4). Solidarity was not interested in economic reform alone; it also had a keen interest in radically decentralizing other institutions, including education. As Levitas and Herczynski (2001) observe, its attitudes toward school reform in the 1980s paralleled its views on restructuring industry through selfmanagement. In its early initiatives for reform, it called on the communist government to sanction ‘‘self-governing schools,’’ where directors would be elected by local teachers councils. Eight years later, Solidarity would make more radical demands, calling for the government to authorize the creation of ‘‘community schools,’’ which could be established and operated by any group or organization. The ultimate objective of Solidarity’s reform initiatives was not partial change but a broad, radical transformation of the economy, education, and other key institutions. Solidarity activists ambitiously sought to liberate and renew the Polish nation: ‘‘We seek a true socialization of our government and state administration. For this reason our objective is a self-governing Poland y . We hold dear the idea of freedom and total independence’’ (Persky & Flam 1982, p. 206). In the early years following the collapse of socialism, Solidarity attempted to implement this vision for society through national and local political action. As Bukowski (1996) notes, ‘‘The new power elite tried to ensure that the old political class disappeared from the scene – local, as well as national’’ (p. 146). Solidarity also tended to monopolize the local Citizens’ Committees that had a strong hand in the formation of new local governments and social policies. Institutional Contradictions: ‘‘Freedom’’ versus ‘‘Monopoly’’ While cognitive in nature, institutional logics are not limited to unconscious schemes that invisibly shape individual and organizational behavior. They are also serve as tools with strategic political value. In contexts where there is competition between value systems, Friedland and Alford (1991) suggest
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that ‘‘institutions are potentially contradictory and hence make multiple logics available to individuals and organizations. Individuals and organizations transform the institutional relations of society by exploiting these contradictions’’ (p. 232). Scott et al. (2000) have argued that newer logics can be used against older institutional orders in ways that discredit them while helping to advance and legitimate alternative meanings and symbols. As an institutional logic, radical decentralization provides those opposed to state control a coherent language and set of strategies for doing this. Throughout Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, activists framed state control over education as a ‘‘monopoly.’’ Czech philosopher Oldrˇ ich Botlik (Glenn, 1998) famously declared that ‘‘[s]ince the State claims an absolute monopoly over all education y qualified and committed individuals must abandon the educational system altogether so as to avoid the bitter frustration of bureaucracy’’ (pp. 85–94). Polish educational activists similarly employed the term ‘‘state monopoly’’ against the central state. Members of the Civic Educational Association (CEA), the main oppositional group in the fight for school choice and autonomy in the early 1990s, have explained that their organization’s founding mission was ‘‘to break the monopoly of the communists in education’’ (Krawczyk, 1990). In counterpoint, activists spoke of the power of new educational ideas and reforms to liberate schools, teachers, and students from the constraints of an impassive central state bureaucracy. The choice of language is historically significant and speaks to the political strategies at the time. Invariably, the problem of state power was cast as a conflict between freedom and monopoly. Framing the state in these terms allowed activists to evoke at once the emancipatory logic of the free market and the historical failure of the state’s centralized, top-down approach to economic planning and management. By extending this association to noneconomic areas, such as education, activists were able to politicize and exploit the institutional contradiction between democracy and bureaucracy (Friedland & Alford, 1991). Since the institutional distinctions between democracy and bureaucracy were understood – and articulated by Solidarity elites – in terms of localized versus centralized control, fundamental reform of education meant radically decentralizing it. In this sense, radical decentralization became a strategy not only for undermining central state power in education but also legitimating the localization of control. New Actors, Organizations, and Agendas The most politically influential of the new educational reform groups to emerge after socialism was CEA. The case of CEA and its network of
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affiliated ‘‘community schools’’ serves as a compelling case for illustrating the power of nonstate educational actors and organizations in the postsocialist era. CEA started out in 1988 as a collection of activists who petitioned the Warsaw city government for the right to establish and operate its own school. The group deplored the conditions in state schools and accused the national government abandoning its constitutional duties in education (Paciorek, 1990). Challenging that it could provide better schooling than the state, CEA offered the blueprint of the ‘‘community school,’’ an alternative, participation-based organization conceived by activists in the mid-1980s. Yielding to pressure from the Ministry of Education, however, the city government rejected the petition, citing the group’s lack of legal authority to administer schools (Osiatyn´ski, 1995). CEA appealed the decision to the Ministry of Domestic Affairs, arguing that ‘‘the rejection of [its] right to register its association as a legal entity constituted an illegal infringement of those principles established in the original law,’’ referring to a recent national law recognizing the right of civic associations to assemble (Civic Educational Association, 2002). After a protracted struggle, accompanied by extensive media coverage and grassroots politicking, CEA finally won the right to create its own schools, becoming the first official nonstate sponsor and operator of schools in Poland. Soon after, the Polish Supreme Court, declaring the Education Ministry’s funding policy unconstitutional, granted CEA the right to state financial support for its schools. Since its founding, CEA has grown into a politically adroit interest group in Polish education. In 1989, the organization successfully lobbied Solidarity negotiators to include a provision guaranteeing citizens’ right to establish and operate community schools in the historic Round Table agreement that effectively ended communist rule. Perhaps its most celebrated legislative victory relates to the passage of a tax law in the mid-1990s. Faced with a large projected state budget gap in 1995, a Parliamentary finance commission eliminated a tax break in its draft budget for parents of children at nonstate schools. The tax break was originally intended to offset school fees and home-school transportation costs. When CEA learned of the elimination, it initiated a grassroots campaign, quickly gathering thousands of parent signatures while lobbying members of Parliament to oppose the changes. Within months, the original tax provision was reinserted into the legislation. In addition to this, CEA managed to win an additional concession of state subsidies for the construction and renovation of community schools. Osiatyn´ski (1995) notes that CEA’s maneuvering on this issue represents ‘‘one of the first examples of successful social pressure of civic, nonprofit interest groups on the law-making process in Poland’’ (p. 167).
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Today CEA is known primarily as an advocate for parent rights in education and the predominant sponsor of community schools in Poland. It claims over 10,000 members, 90% of whom are parents, and works to educate the public about the values of community and family in schooling. Despite CEA’s exclusive focus on education, the parallels between it and Solidarity are instructive. Indeed, CEA’s original executive members hailed from the ranks of the trade union, which itself had a wing devoted to educational reform issues; a number of these members continue to serve on the board. Like Solidarity before it, CEA might be characterized most accurately as a decentralized network, with a small politically active central office in Warsaw connecting hundreds of self-governing ‘‘chapters’’ around Poland. CEA does not run schools; it serves to coordinate and link schools with resources on the one hand and lobbies for policies and favorable legislation on the other. At times, it resorts to grassroots action, often calling on members and supporters from around Poland to petition the central government on particular issues. CEA’s role is both technical and political in this sense. More than this, however, CEA advocates not just for its own schools but for a new type of schooling in Polish education in which parents are active, schools are small, and communities are involved. Like Solidarity before it, CEA defines its mission in terms of ‘‘sovereignty,’’ entailing the recognition of individual rights and the autonomy of organizations in education. Where Solidarity sought to ‘‘socialize’’ the government and state administration, CEA has sought to ‘‘socialize’’ the public school system. In the early 1990s, CEA called for ‘‘emancipating’’ the system from the state and ‘‘empowering’’ those stakeholders in education who traditionally had been left out of decision-making, including: teachers’ right to take their own decisions concerning didactics and methods of teaching; pupils’ right to define their own role and position in the school, and to modify the educational patterns offered to them; parents’ right to set up an [organization] independent of school authorities. This [organization] ought to be authorized to deal with the vital problems of school. (Civic Educational Association, 2002)
For members of CEA, the individuals’ rights and school autonomy are closely linked. Individuals should be free to work together and start their own schools when they feel that the state system does not address their needs. To ensure that these rights are respected, CEA calls for the decentralization of education based on the principle of autonomy. ‘‘The development of a model of site-based school management that allows the school an important degree of autonomy from local, municipal regional and state educational bureaucracies, and in doing so enables the school to be more
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responsive to the concerns of parents, teachers and students’’ (ibid.). Throughout the course of its history, CEA has worked to defend and extend educational rights and school autonomy while assisting with the financial sustainability of its community schools. To its credit, in 2002 the Ministry of Education granted community schools 100% per pupil funding, on par with state schools. While CEA and its members have utilized the logic of radical decentralization originally developed by Solidarity, the organization has formulated the logic in its own particular ways. As Friedland and Alford (1991) suggest, institutional logics are adapted and elaborated according to specific organizational contexts and agendas. In addition to autonomy, the principle of community is central to CEA’s educational philosophy and mission not only in terms of supporting community schools but also influencing the national education system at large. ‘‘The Association strongly believes that schools should be small in scale, situated in a local community and make the most of the very best social environments’’ (Civic Educational Association, 2002). CEA characterizes community as a ‘‘partnership between family and school’’ that facilitates the emotional, moral, and intellectual development of the child. The involvement of family is essential to this process. ‘‘The family, with its specific interpersonal relationships and, in particular, its tactfulness, trust, and security is the optimal place in which the child’s personality can develop to its full capacity’’ (Nowicka, 1993, p. 20). Parents play a particularly important role in the school–community partnership: Parents should participate actively in school life. Through their delegates to the School Advisory Committee, parents will influence the process of teaching and education and the welfare of their children. The school treats parents as advocates of the family, it respects parental power and the right of parents to supervise school activities. (Paciorek, 1990, p. 10)
CEA claims that parents should have the right to choose schools as well as to take part in school decisions that bear on the education of their children. In the context of its mission, CEA’s community schools serve as an example for how community should be integrated through education and the vital role of parents – as ‘‘advocates of the family’’ – in this process. In this way, CEA has developed the logic of radical decentralization in an indistinctively communitarian way. The belief that community, particularly in relation to the family, should guide the educational socialization of children is a fundamental communitarian belief (Etzioni, 1993). Communitarians also tend to espouse radical autonomy and freedom from ‘‘government interference’’ (Selznick, 2002). Weso"owski (1995) has recognized that the development of
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Polish communitarianism after 1989 involved a particular blending of Solidarity’s ethos of sovereignty and autonomy with an emphasis on communal relations and responsibilities.
Restructuration in Education Scott et al. (2000) suggest that contexts of profound transition, where the older institutional order has been destabilized, present opportunities and resources for new types of organizational actors to ‘‘compete and struggle to create a new social order’’ (p. 27). This process, which they term restructuration, involves attempts to redefine the rules, redraw the boundaries, and resignify the meanings that constitute the institutional environment in which they operate. In terms of institutional change, restructuration follows or accompanies destructuration; the two processes work hand in hand. The influence that nonstate actors and organizations have had in the restructuration of Polish education is particularly evident through the case of community schools. The growth and legitimation of these schools serve to illustrate how certain institutional rules and definitions have shifted or become ambiguous. Community schools represent a new organizational type in Polish education. They are established and operated by private groups but are state supported and, in principle, publicly accountable. Furthermore, advocates argue that while schools offer the flexibility of market choice, the communities they are based on help instill civic values and foster democratic participation better than schools administered by local governments. In this sense, community schools are institutionally hybrid, serving public interests through private means.5 This hybridity underscores what Scott et al. (2000) observe are the ‘‘blurring’’ of boundaries that often result in destabilized organizational fields. One may argue that community schools, as an organizational type, exploit this structural ambiguity between the boundaries of public and private social provision. This ambiguity, however, is also likely to have roots in a broader cultural ambivalence in Poland about how to define public versus private goods in a rapidly changing society. Restructuration can also be seen in how new logics are used to tap into alternative sources of legitimation. Logics that are able to resonate with important cultural meanings and symbols (e.g., Poles’ historical sense of self-determination; the emancipatory legacy of grassroots political action) can serve to legitimate alternative organizational forms while providing ways to bypass traditional rules and procedures of the field. In the case of
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CEA and community schools, the logic of radical decentralization is enacted through the rituals of democratic localism and market choice. In the aggregate, this has served to align with ‘‘community school model’’ with the new cultural values of the choice and civic responsibility. In this way, schools are legitimated not by complying with the ritual classifications of state schools (i.e., isomorphism), as institutional theory would have us believe, but by displaying agreement with a powerful new set of cultural symbols. Evidence of their legitimation can be seen in a number of ways: full per pupil state funding, various national and local legislative concessions, a strong image in the media, and minimal state regulation. Scott et al. (2000) suggest that this countertrend against isomorphism in institutionalized fields indicates the advantages and disadvantages of congruence, defined as ‘‘the extent to which a social actor embodies or reflects the rules, norms, and beliefs extant to its context’’ (p. 26). Congruence in poorly integrated fields offers conventional actors few benefits because the rewards are low and/or unpredictable. Because the system of rules is ambiguous and often contradictory, such ‘‘fields provide less support and guidance to social actors than more highly structured fields’’ (p. 27). However, the same conditions may benefit those organizations and actors who are incongruent with this system. Because such fields impose few constraints, they allow more autonomous and innovative behavior (p. 26). Put another way, incongruent actors do not encounter the same coercive and normative pressures that keep conventional actors congruent. In this sense, community schools have enjoyed distinct advantages over state schools, though the logic of radical decentralization and the ways it has been institutionalized in the nonstate sector also imposes specific constraints on organizational behavior. Since its founding, CEA has learned that defending the ideals behind its mission are critical to sustaining not only community schools but also its own legitimacy. To this end, CEA has worked to ensure that its schools reflect the communal model of schooling it promotes. At times, however, this has been problematic. Several years ago, a parent-dominated board at one of its schools demanded its principal and teachers be held accountable directly to parents, prompting a breakdown in school relations. The event threatened not only to unravel the school’s community but also to undermine the image of community schools collectively and, by extension, CEA’s reputation for promoting community in Polish education. After unsuccessful attempts at mediation, CEA’s executive committee intervened, dissolving the governing board and replacing it with its own appointments (Kr˛eglewski, personal communication, January 29, 2003). In doing so, CEA chose to violate one
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basic principle of radical decentralization – autonomy – to defend another – community. In such cases, CEA has had to act in a highly centralized manner, overriding local decision-making powers in order to safeguard the type of social organization that makes these schools distinctive. This illustrates that institutional contradictions occur not only between organizations but also within them, as different groups or constituencies struggle over which values and interests the organization will serve. The question remains what broader impact these restructuration processes have had on Polish education. Have nonstate educational actors, in particular, influenced the direction of the national educational system itself? For more than 15 years, the state has supported and expressed its commitment to the nonstate educational sector. In the early 1990s the Ministry of Education established a department for the sole purpose of learning from nonstate organizational and pedagogical innovations. A 1994 Ministry opinion presented to the Parliament stated that ‘‘the existence of a nonpublic sector is beneficial for the development of the Polish educational system. The Ministry, which is open to alternative pedagogy, follows with great interest the innovations implemented by non-public schools’’ (Osiatyn´ski, 1995, p. 164). These statements, when viewed in the context of increased subsidies and legal concessions for community schools, are significant. Perhaps the clearest sign that the educational values and practices championed by CEA and community schools have been legitimated are the following elements contained in the Ministry’s strategic plan for comprehensive educational reform: Expanding of the autonomy of schools. Building stronger bonds at every level between the school, the family, and the local community. Acculturating students to the norms of community life (Ministry of National Education, 1998). This leads to the question of why the state would adopt the kind of initiatives and subsidize a type of school that undermine what neo-institutional theorists call the myth of the state authority in national educational systems. What national interests are served by structuring education around community and local control as opposed to the nation-state? As Kruszewski (1994) notes, throughout Polish history, education had always been a centralized and hierarchical institution. Before 1989, schools, he argues, had never served the particular interests of local community or family. To make sense of this puzzle, neo-institutional concepts can prove to be useful, but only if they are decoupled from the high modernist framework
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through which they have typically been applied. If one regards the postsocialist innovations of autonomy and community in schooling in terms of their symbolic value and their potential to generate legitimacy for certain organizations, the state’s rationale for supporting nonstate schools and adopting (at least ceremonially) these innovations becomes more transparent. As neo-institutionalists argue, an innovation that becomes institutionalized in an organizational environment gains symbolic value that often eclipses its technical value. The ceremonial adoption of such innovations, which is often uncritical, stems primarily from a need for institutional legitimacy, not technical efficiency (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). In its chronic low-capacity, the postsocialist state has a need to signal compliance with the new institutional value of local control, even as this value contradicts its own imperatives to reestablish central control. While nonstate organizations, such community schools, depend on the state for financial support, the state in turn depends on the nonstate organizations for the model of community and civic participation they offer and as a symbolic measure of the state’s commitment to democratic localism. It can be said that the weak state and radical decentralization exist in a symbiotic relationship.
IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH AND THEORY This paper started by questioning the value of isomorphism for understanding the contexts of radical change in education. Yet by itself, the concept remains a useful tool for organizational analysis. Rather, it is the neoinstitutional tendency to ‘‘favor the center’’ and regard isomorphism through a state modernist framework that serves to limit its vision on educational change in transitional settings. As a consequence, the formulation of isomorphism that comparative educationists generally recognize and apply is based on the understanding that public schools are dependent on the state in terms of its rational capacity in defining, standardizing, and enforcing the institutional rules to which schools are expected to conform. The comparative evidence offered in this chapter suggests that isomorphism may also appear in an inverted form whereby nonstate actors and organizations exert pressure on a weak, decentered state in ways that undermine institutional rules and exploit public mandates. This encourages a rethinking of institutional power relationships as well as the ways in which organizations seek legitimation. As I have argued, the dilemma of the postsocialist state is its persistent inability to generate legitimation through centralized reform. Because neo-institutional theory takes the legitimacy of the
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state as a fact of modernization, it is less robust for understanding education in settings marked by weak state legitimacy and institutional fragmentation, such as we see in the transitional states of postsocialism. While weak states in the developing world struggle to build mass schooling and bring about the transformations of modernization primarily because they are not led by rational, bureaucratically sophisticated states, weak postsocialist states present a different set of challenges that stem in large measure from the legacy of an older institutional order. Fuller (2000, 2003) has argued that postmodern shifts in liberal-democratic societies in the west have ‘‘decentered’’ the state, undermining its historical mandate to integrate and shape the national citizenry through education. Through its own particular set of historical and cultural circumstances, the postsocialist state is also decentered, trapped in its low-capacity, and compelled to adopt reforms that only reinforce its own limitations. These shifts make it imperative for comparativists to apply and test the claims of institutional theory in contexts characterized by not only by centripetal but also centrifugal institutional forces. To do this, researchers will need to employ analytical tools suited to studying variation, contradiction and divergence in organizational behavior. In a time when decentralization has become a world value and governments are departing from the universalist models that defined state modernism, this task is more vital than ever.
NOTES 1. According to Scott (1995), an institutional environment comprises the regulative, normative, and cultural structures that lend coherence, meaning, and stability to a field. 2. Refer to Cummings (2003). 3. Refer to Fuller (2000, 2003). 4. In the context of American schooling, Fuller (2000) has questioned whether the radical decentralization of education (in the form of vouchers and public schools of choice) may ‘‘aid and abet those who simply wish to disassemble the modern state y’’ (p. 5). 5. Miron and Nelson (2002) have referred to American charter schools as hybrids, blending public purposes and private means.
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HOW STATUS COMPETITION COMPLICATES INSTITUTIONAL EXPLANATIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATIONAL EXPANSION: A CARIBBEAN CASE STUDY$ Regina E. Werum and Lauren Rauscher INTRODUCTION This chapter is part of a larger project that examines recent educational expansion efforts in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, a nation that provides a valuable case study of challenges shaping higher educational expansion efforts in developing countries. The initial goal of the project was to identify supply and demand issues in postsecondary training. Though we did not collect data with the intent to examine neo-institutional or status competition dynamics, this theme emerged inductively from a series of interviews conducted with individuals and focus groups, making it an ideal case study for this volume.
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The findings, interpretations and conclusions expressed in the paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the view of the Inter-American Development Bank, its executive directors, or the countries they represent.
The Impact of Comparative Education Research on Institutional Theory International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 7, 239–280 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3679/doi:10.1016/S1479-3679(06)07011-3
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Institutional Theory has emerged as a leading framework in comparativeinternational and -historical research. Researchers often rely on it to examine the growth of mass schooling and to explain seemingly increasing isomorphism regarding the social organization of schooling as well as its curricular content (Boli et al., 1985; Kamens, Meyer, & Benavot, 1996; Meyer, 1977; Meyer, Scott, Strang, & Creighton, 1994; Ramirez & Boli, 1987). Ideally, this framework is designed to examine macro-level, long-term and cross-national patterns. In its most abstract form, neo-institutionalism argues that educational expansion at all levels results from states’ effort to engage in nation-building projects that stress the principles of citizenship, individualism, and human rights. While these efforts began in Europe and the U.S. during the 19th century, the ideological basis for educational expansion increasingly has become tied to a global culture and global norms in the 20th century. Several researchers have tested the main tenets of NeoInstitutionalist Theory as first developed by Meyer (1977). Most of these studies have focused on changes in enrollments and curricula at elementary and secondary levels, especially in industrialized countries. At the same time, critics have pointed out that the focus of the framework on abstract processes and isomorphic trends makes it difficult to subject the theory to empirical tests. To quote one of the reviewers for this chapter who, albeit sympathetic to the framework, nonetheless commented: ‘‘In the heights of abstraction of the Stanford brand of Institutional Theory, the air gets so thin that most other researchers find it difficult to breathe.’’ In other words, the macro-level trends and outcomes identified by Institutional Theory do not occur automatically. To unravel the processes and mechanisms that shape educational expansion, it may indeed be helpful to shift levels of analysis. For instance, Arnove and Torres (2003) suggest doing this in a way that allows us to embed our research in case studies. Rather than ‘‘testing’’ neo-institutionalism, this case study illustrates the importance of local and temporal context, including short- to medium-term policy developments, on educational expansion. In the context of evaluating the potential comparative education research has for Institutional Theory, case studies like these are important for several reasons: First, Meyer himself stresses the need to focus on expansion as such, rather than on ‘‘the margins where social uncertainty and conflict appear’’ (McEneaney & Meyer 2000, p. 191). In other words, he suggests focusing on the smoothness of a process best observed dans la longue dure´e, rather than on the conditions shaping struggles over control of the expansion process. He considers those (presumably short-term) conflicts mere tempests in a teapot. But this bird’s eye perspective can render invisible important dynamics that take place at a
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different level of analysis, or in a shorter time frame. As primary and secondary data presented here show, actors on the ground view conflicts over resources and legitimacy as central and pervasive. On a related note, scholars have begun to examine the degree to which expansion itself relates to social stratification outcomes, for instance by gender (Charles & Bradley, 2002; Bradley & Charles, 2004; Werum, 2002), by ethnic group (Shavit, 1989; Werum, 2001), and by social class (Blossfeld & Shavit, 1993). Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data to document status competition dynamics in educational expansion (Ralph & Rubinson, 1980; Reese, 1986; Tyack, 1974), this existing body of research shapes the chapter at hand and complements existing case studies on other Caribbean nations with similar institutional and political legacies (e.g., see work by Arnove, 1994; Lobban, 2002; London, 1991, 1996, 1997; MacKenzie, 1990; Parris, 1985). Thus, we hope that this snapshot of higher educational expansion in a developing nation will help make tangible both the strengths and some of the limitations of neo-institutionalism. Second, most institutionalists continue to focus on the evolution of mass education in industrialized countries, paying scant attention to dynamics in developing nations. This is particularly puzzling considering that most governments are keenly aware that global economic competition means that, in the absence of natural resources, their labor force/human resources become the nation’s main asset. Chabbott and Ramirez (2000) show how this has given rise to a strong focus on ‘‘human capital’’ development via educational policy. Moreover, many developing countries achieved political independence only within the last 40 years or so. Presumably, this should make the pursuit of postcolonial nation-building projects – including educational expansion – much more salient, and should inspire researchers interested in institutional dynamics to focus on such developing nations. In fact, Fuller and Rubinson (1992, p. 59) ask whether ‘‘an increasingly competitive world environment [will] lead to an even greater national preoccupation with ensuring that the next generation gains the educational edge?’’ The data suggest that case studies of developing countries can indeed shed light on factors that create variation in policy outcomes, i.e., factors that shape the effectiveness of national policies aimed at educational expansion. Using Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) as the reference point it appears that, at least in the Caribbean, public discourse regarding educational expansion is more fragmented than Institutional Theory might lead us to expect. Third, researchers have observed increasing commonalities across countries in the arts and science focus of secondary curricula, concomitant with a decline of secondary-level vocational education (Benavot, 1983; Werum,
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2003; for exceptions see Shavit, 1989; Blossfeld & Shavit, 1993). Even studies in higher education have paid a lot of attention to commonalities in arts & science curricula. We find this perplexing too, given that growth in postsecondary enrollments has taken place disproportionately in nonelite institutions offering vocational and professional credentials, a trend not limited to the United States (Brint & Karabel, 1989, 1991; Dougherty, 1988a, 1988b; Lobban, 2002; McGill, 2002; Rieble-Aubourg, 1996). It is time to turn our attention to this stepchild in the sociology of education, by highlighting the interplay between national policy goals aimed at expanding higher education and the dynamics observed at a broad spectrum of institutions providing postsecondary technical/vocational education and training (TVET).1 In essence, our inquiry is motivated by the assumption underlying NeoInstitutionalist Theory that educational expansion occurs unrelated to local power structures and interests (Meyer, 1977). Therefore, we focus on the following interrelated questions: First, how can the (neo-) institutional framework help explain patterns regarding access to postsecondary training in T&T, and policy efforts to expand such access? Conversely, to what degree can status competition theory improve our ability to explain current policy directions (see Collins, 1979; Cross, 1979; Matlhako, 2002; Rubinson & Hurst, 1997; Windolf & Haas, 1993)? Second, what role do nation-building arguments and the growing importance of world cultural norms play in public discourse regarding efforts to expand the TVET sector? This gets at the core of the neo-institutional assertion that educational expansion reflects ‘‘evolving models in world society’’ (McEneaney & Meyer, 2000, p. 194), in particular as it reflects government commitment to values of citizenship, individualism, and human rights (Ramirez & Meyer, 1980). To address these questions, we rely mostly on primary data obtained from individual and focus group interviews that involved 255 adults representing various interest groups in T&T: government, NGO and business leaders as well as institutional representatives (students, staff, faculty, administrators). These sources are supplemented with secondary data from a broad sample of higher educational institutions in the TVET sector, including information about institutional history and infrastructure (facilities, resources, staff/faculty).
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND T&T is typical of many developing countries, not only in the Caribbean but also in a more global sense: Like many of its peers it has a long and complex
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colonial history (Campbell, 1992; Cross, 1979; Parris, 1985). After initial absorption into the Spanish and French empires, it became part of the British Commonwealth in 1763, and it achieved independence as a Republic in 1976.2 Since the mid-20th century, it has dealt with a strong U.S. military presence, especially since 1941, when the U.S. government established a base near the capital, Port of Spain. During colonial times, T&T was known as a British ‘‘sugar colony.’’ Since the mid-20th century, it has become a major regional oil exporter, just like its immediate neighbor Venezuela. Like other countries of its kind, T&T continues to rely on revenues from this single export product to finance much of its infrastructural expansion – including expansion of its higher education sector. Consequently, T&T’s economic development has been closely tied to the energy sector, as the island nation and the surrounding ocean are rich in oil and gas. Despite a limited and short-lived experiment with socialism in the 1960s, the energy sector is privatized, and multinational corporations with ties to the U.S. and to Britain play a key role (BP/Amoco). While the energy sector has not played a major role in terms of labor market dynamics – and if so, mostly at low-skill levels3 – it provides the basis for T&T’s largest export industry. Government statistics report that the energy sector (including petrochemicals) accounts for almost a quarter of the country’s GDP, a fifth of government revenues and three quarters of the country’s exports. In other words, this sector infuses the national economy with a steady stream of hard currency. In that sense, all educational expansion that has occurred in the postcolonial era (especially post-1976) remains inextricably tied to the volatility of petrodollars. This observation is significant because its reliance on a single export product for long-term infrastructural improvements makes T&T resemble many other developing nations in Central/South America and elsewhere. Yet, a combination of factors suggests that a case study of T&T provides a unique opportunity to study how educational institutions come to be viewed as contested terrain in new nations with ‘‘fragile states,’’ to borrow a term from Bruce Fuller (1991). The country’s relative (and recent) wealth does not just create the possibility to invest in educational infrastructure but is bound to involve difficult choices regarding which educational sectors to favor. Caribbean countries are known for high levels of class and social inequality, a concern often voiced by the United Nations’ Economic Commission on Latin American and the Caribbean (ECLAC). In addition, T&T is ethnically heterogeneous. With a population of approximately 1.3 m, it is about the same size as New Hampshire and is largely comprised of two major ethnic groups.4 While intermarriage is common, ethnic identities
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remain strong, even finding their reflection in the political party system (Premdas, 1996; Premdas & Ragoonath, 1998). In other words, one should expect higher education expansion to be shaped by status competition dynamics that lead population segments to view each other as competing for resources during T&T’s educational expansion process – even for resources aimed at generally low-status postsecondary TVET programs (London, 1997, 2002).5 T&T performs well in international comparisons regarding educational indicators. Over the last decades, the government of T&T has made great progress in expanding access and quality of education at both the primary and secondary level. Access to both primary and secondary education is almost universal. Primary and secondary education is provided by both public schools and denominational schools that receive government support. Secondary education includes Forms 1–5 and the advanced proficiency levels (A-levels/Cape). Of the current 115,000 secondary students (in 2004), about 8,000 are at the Advanced Proficiency level (a number that the government wants to double in order to meet the national goal of increasing enrollment in tertiary education). After completion of secondary education (Form V), students can move on to a variety of both public and private training providers offering a range of programs leading usually to diplomas/ certificates. A-level graduates can enroll directly at the national/regional university (University of the West Indies) or study abroad.6 This leads to the connection between educational expansion and macroeconomic trends. Many economists and educational researchers have addressed whether educational expansion has ever been or should be closely tied to economic trends or labor market dynamics (see e.g., Hodson, Hooks, & Rieble, 1994; Liu & Armer, 1993; Matlhako, 2002; Rubinson & Hurst, 1997; Windolf & Haas, 1993). In general, they have found weak links at best, especially regarding the curricular correspondence between labor market structures and vocational training programs (which are notoriously underfunded and anachronistic7). Thus, economists and educational researchers, among others, have long employed the term ‘‘loose coupling’’ to describe the fact that educational/training patterns typically reflect broad labor market dynamics (e.g., focus on white-collar vs. blue-collar jobs; foreign languages) but rarely tie to specific industries or employment sectors. In fact, labor market flexibility can be said to benefit employers and workers alike, as it helps them to adapt to changing economic conditions. Recent labor market reports (Downes & Henry, 1998; Hamilton & Associates, 2000; National Training Agency (various reports) reveal that most newly created jobs in T&T have been located at lower to medium skill levels,
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a pattern consistent across sectors ranging from white-collar to blue-collar occupations. Sectors benefiting from job growth include the construction industry, the energy sector (where most employees work as laborers) and their respective service contractors, as well as the service sector (financial, tourism/real estate, sales, clerical). In contrast to these economic trends, governmental expansion goals in T&T focus more on high-level training programs with large science and technology components. The fact that these expansion plans occur decoupled from actual labor market trends in T&T will delight not only neo-institutionalists in the field of education, but also theorists of the state who stress that governments and agencies therein are bound to pursue policy interests of their own.8
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND Even among sociologists and historians of education, the term Institutional Theory carries a broad range of connotations. In essence, two strands of institutionalism exist, both of which are strongly identified with researchers at Stanford University (and elsewhere). We will treat them in an ideal– typical manner, highlighting differences rather than commonalities. On the one hand, historians and historical sociologists like David Tyack, David Labaree, and their research associates typify the Weberian tradition inherent in Institutional Theory. That is, much of their work focuses on the role of state agents and other elites (especially professional elites viewed as (semi-) autonomous from economic elites) in educational reform and expansion over the last 150 years or so. They have examined struggles over curriculum control, finance, and the social organization of schooling at large. They stress usually well-intentioned but arguably unsuccessful efforts to build the ‘‘one best system’’ (Tyack, 1974; Labaree, 1990). This version of Institutional Theory is closely related to theories of the state, in particular the state-centered perspective represented by the work of Skocpol and others (Bright & Harding, 1984; Finegold & Skocpol, 1984; Mettler, 1998; Orloff, 1993; Skocpol, 1992). Using that terminology, we are not suggesting that a form of egalitarian pluralism prevails in T&T, in which all interest groups are equally endowed with resources and political power. But it allows us to talk more specifically about what it means to be a ‘‘fragile state’’ by discussing the effects of vertical as well as lateral state fragmentation (Alford & Friedland, 1985; Gamson & Meyer, 1996; Kitschelt, 1986; Tarrow, 1996; Weber, 1968), as well as status competition dynamics between population segments.
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On the other hand, in the neo-institutionalist tradition associated with researchers John Meyer, Francisco Ramirez, and others, long-term educational change is more explicitly tied to the Durkheimian tradition. Consequently, questions raised by neo-institutionalists tend to focus on the evolution of national and, in recent decades, global norms regarding the purpose of education and the role of the state and NGOs in expanding access to education (Boli, 1992; Boli et al., 1985; Bradley & Charles, 2004; Chabbott & Ramirez, 2000; Charles & Bradley, 2002; Labaree, 1997b; Fuller & Rubinson, 1992; Ramirez & Meyer, 1980). Despite some commonalities regarding the long-term trajectory of educational systems, the two strands differ markedly in their causal attribution of social change and in their view of agency by elites and nonelites. Most notably, institutionalists describe educational policy reform, expansion, and bureaucratization (in all its complexities) as the result of struggles between fragmented state and professional elites. In contrast, neo-institutionalists describe these processes as the result of long-term cultural changes reflecting a consensus among policy makers of all kinds. As other researchers have noted, neither tradition places direct emphasis on social stratification, either as a causal factor shaping educational expansion, or as a consequence thereof. Yet, generations of educational researchers have examined this issue, e.g., by focusing on status competition dynamics (Brint & Karabel, 1989; Collins, 1979; Fuller & Rubinson, 1992; Labaree, 1997a; Matlhako, 2002; Reese, 1986; Ralph & Rubinson, 1980; Rubinson, 1986; Rubinson & Hurst, 1997; Windolf & Haas, 1993).
METHODS AND DATA Data collection occurred during two field trips to T&T in 2003, as part of a consultancy commissioned by a regional international financing institution (IFI) and the government of T&T. Funding came from the IFI, though the goals of the study were worked out collaboratively by government and IFI officials. IFI personnel played a key role in this process, identifying and setting up ties to the postsecondary institutions included in this study, and establishing key contacts to members of the government and business world interviewed. We had considerable autonomy in designing the content of surveys aimed at collecting institutional information, surveys distributed in focus groups, and interview questions asked. But we did not have any influence on the selection of individuals participating in focus groups. While public and IFI officials were invited to provide feedback on the original
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Table 1.
Sample of Postsecondary TVEP Providers. Public Providers
Mixed Providers
Private Providers
University of the West Indies (UWI); Institute of Business (IOB)
Trinidad and Tobago Institute of Technology (TTIT)
Medium
Cipriani Labour College (CLC); College for Applied Arts, Science and Technology (COSTAATT)a
Low
Youth Training and Employment Partnership Programme (YTEPP)
Trinidad and Tobago Hospitality and Tourism Institute (TTHTI); Metal Industries Company (MIC) National Energy Skills Centre (NESC)
Royal Bank Institute of Business and Technology (ROYTEC) Caribbean Union College (CUC)
Training level High
Service For All (SERVOL)
a
Two COSTAATT campuses participated. One concentrated on blue-collar training, the other on nursing/service sector occupations.
report (which focused on supply and demand issues in postsecondary training), the issues examined here solely reflect our own interpretation and were not raised as part of the original study (Table 1). We collected secondary, institutional-level data to gain insights into infrastructural dynamics affecting higher educational expansion in T&T. Most notably, these data sources shed light on the challenges that arise when governmental reorganization, coupled with agency proliferation, meets a largely unregulated, rapidly proliferating industry with private- and publicsector providers competing over a relatively small enrollment base (see Brint & Karabel, 1989 on the importance of organizational niches). Faced with time constraints, we limited the sample to 13 TVET institutions and hired a research assistant to help conduct site visits and to systematize and quantify institutional data after the first author’s departure. As Table 1 shows, training providers ranged from public to privately funded institutions (commercial as well as denominational, for profit and nonprofit), plus ‘‘mixed’’ training providers relying on public and private funding. Some institutions had been newly founded, as part of ongoing expansion efforts, while others were known as traditional, flagship institutions. Moreover, institutions selected differed in terms of the level and
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length/intensity of training programs offered. In retrospect, analyses of student and staff data collected also revealed important differences across institutions regarding their demographic profile (age, gender, ethnicity, SES), and regarding student participation in government loan programs, which strongly influenced their views of existing educational expansion policies.9 Focus Groups We supplemented the institutional data with ‘‘bottom-up’’ information on postsecondary training opportunities currently available in T&T. Focus groups and interviews helped elicit information about strengths and weaknesses of the existing TVET system from the points of view of students, teachers/staff, administrators, and business and government leaders. Focus groups with staff, teachers, and students also provided an opportunity to collect individual-level demographic data on study participants and enabled us to collect data from a large number of people regarding their views of the existing TVET system. Group interviews with members of educational institutions helped gauge perceptions regarding existing TVET policies and plans to reform/expand the existing TVET system. Although each focus group had its own dynamics, overall they proved useful in pinpointing commonly held perceptions regarding competition over resources, in particular public funding and the reorganization of existing institutions. Two extended field trips yielded a total of 23 focus groups. As a rule, they lasted from 45 min to 2 h, during which the first author took extensive field notes. In addition, several visits were made to institutions without conducting formal focus groups. This included training providers at the high end of the TVET continuum and several satellite campuses of training providers where focus groups had been conducted on another site/campus. It appears that participants were more or less randomly selected by institutional leaders.10 High-ranking administrators did not participate in the focus groups, but instead were interviewed separately. The list of group interviews included seven staff and faculty focus groups at five different educational institutions, plus two additional staff focus groups involving an institution with several campuses. In some locations, focus groups with teaching and nonteaching staff were conducted separately, in other places all staff members were combined. Group dynamics of staff focus groups differed noticeably depending on the degree of staff heterogeneity in terms of rank/status or seniority. The nine staff focus groups ranged in size from 9 to 12 participants, for a total of 93 participants
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(53 males, 40 females). Groups were age heterogeneous (range 24–62) with a mean age of 41 years. In addition, a total of 12 student focus groups were conducted at nine different institutions, plus two focus groups involving students from an institution with multiple campuses. These 14 student focus groups ranged in size from 6 to 12 participants, for a total of 119 students (75 males, 44 females). Participating students ranged in age from 16 to 54, mean age was 22.5 years11 Tables 2a and 2b contain more detailed information. Because we had no influence in selecting focus group participants, participants were asked whether they considered the makeup of their particular group of people to be ‘‘typical’’ of the institution and noted where this was not the case. Based on their responses, we noted composition patterns regarding gender, ethnicity, age, and educational background, plus position held and tenure with organization (staff only). All focus group participants were asked to complete a survey concerning basic demographic information of focus group participants. Given that the first author was present at the time, the overall response rate was nearly 100%, though respondents sometimes chose not to answer specific questions. Participants were informed at the beginning of each session that the purpose of the anonymous survey was to inform the overall data analysis and to help assess to what degree we had indeed talked to a representative sample of the general (student/staff ) population. Focus group participants were informed verbally and in writing to feel free to skip questions; they received snacks as well as minor gifts for their participation (pens, key chains, office supplies).12
Interviews Individual interviews initially served purposes similar to the focus groups. That is, we strove to gauge views of the existing TVET system as well as government and alternative proposals regarding plans to reform/expand the existing TVET system. But the most striking difference in outcome observed deals with the prominence nation-building rhetoric achieved in these interviews. Interestingly, these interviews were held with a completely different target group. In all, a total of 46 interviews took place: 25 interviews with key administrators, 9 interviews with representatives from various ministries and public service agencies, and 12 interviews with representatives from industry/commerce. Of the interviews, 17 were conducted with women. Most women interviewed were government officials; program administrators interviewed were disproportionately male.
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Table 2a.
Student Characteristics (Focus Groups).
Gender
Ethnicity
Average ] Years of Schooling (st. dev.)c
22.5 (7.9)
11.6 (2.4)
23.3 (7.2) 38.6 (12.5) 22.2 (8.7)
11.3 (2.0) 14.6 (2.0) 9.7 (1.8)
na
Male
Female
nb
Indian
Afro-Carib.
Other
119
75
44
96
28
44
24
Public: COSTAATT Cipriani Labour College YTEPP
21 7 12
15 2 9
6 5 3
14 7 10
2 0 0
11 7 6
Mixed: Metal Industries Company National Energy Skills Centre T&T Institute of Technology
16 8 15
15 8 8
1 0 7
12 8 15
7 5 9
3 2 3
2 1 3
20.7 (2.3) 24.6 (12.9) 19.5 (1.6)
12.6 (1.6) 9.8 (0.7) 12.1 (1.1)
Private: ROYTEC Caribbean Union College Servol
18 11 11
8 5 6
10 7 5
12 10 8
1 4 0
6 6 0
5 0 8
21.6 (6.4) 22.6 (3.5) 18.2 (1.2)
11.7 (1.5) 14.2 (0.9) 8.1 (3.4)
Overall
a
1 of the 120 participating students chose not to answer this question. 24 of the 120 participating students chose not to answer this question. c Calculations based on number of students who answered this question. b
REGINA E. WERUM AND LAUREN RAUSCHER
Average Age (st. dev.)c
Gender n
a
Indian
Afro-Carib.
Other
Average ] Years at Institution (st. dev.)c
Ethnicity
Male
Female
n
b
Average ] Years of Schooling (st. dev.)c
] Staff with Foreign Degreesc
Overall
93
53
50
81
20
47
14
8.1 (8.4)
14.1 (3.3)
26 out of 77 [17 missing]
Public: COSTAATT
25
12
13
23
9
11
3
11.0 (9.2)
13.5 (2.5)
22
11
11
17
2
13
2
9.0 (3.6)
13.8 (3.6)
3 out of 22 [3 missing] 5 out of 15 [7 missing]
13
13
0
12
0
7
5
7.0 (5.9)
14.3 (2.3)
12
7
5
9
7
0
2
2.4 (1.5)
14.3 (2.6)
12
4
8
11
2
8
1
6.2 (4.0)
16.4 (2.5)
9
6
3
9
0
8
1
9.9 (10.2)
12.9 (5.9)
Cipriani Labour College Mixed: Metal Industries Company T&T Institute of Technology Private: ROYTEC Caribbean Union College
5 out of 11 [2 missing] 3 out of 10 [3 missing] 5 out of 10 [2 missing] 5 out of 9 [0 missing]
How Status Competition Complicates Institutional Explanations
Staff Characteristics (Focus Groups).
Table 2b.
a
1 of the 94 participating staff members chose not to answer this question. 21 of the 94 participating staff members chose not to answer this question. c Calculations based on number of staff members who answered this question. b
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While most interviews involved only one participant, several interviews involved small groups ranging from 2 to 5 participants. As a rule, these interviews lasted between 30 min and 2.5 h each. In many cases the first author followed up with emails, phone calls, or a second interview to clarify remaining issues. In most cases, informants consented to taping the interview, and an electronic audiofile exists. In addition, extensive handwritten notes exist, taken during each interviews. Interview questions available on request; more details in Table 3.
ANALYSIS To reiterate, this case study addresses two issues central to Neo-Institutionalist Theory: First (contrary to class conflict theories), the idea that educational expansion occurs unrelated to local power structures and interests. Second, the idea that educational expansion reflects ‘‘evolving models in world society’’ (McEneaney & Meyer, 2000, p. 194), in particular as it reflects government commitment to values of citizenship, human rights, and individualism. But we need to begin by discussing the complexities behind the seemingly simple term ‘‘educational expansion.’’ This helps foreshadow key issues regarding status competition dynamics and state fragmentation that the subsequent sections address in detail. Most institutionalists have examined educational expansion in terms of enrollment trends over time (absolute or as % changes). Indeed, the government of T&T has the explicit goal to expand tertiary education from roughly 8% to 15–20% in the near future (by the year 2010). And at face value, it appears that T&T’s postsecondary sector is indeed bursting at its seams. Statistics on the largest public and private institutions demonstrate consistent enrollment increases starting in the late 1990s (see Fig. 1). But the data reveal considerable ambiguity about the meaning of this term. For instance, many informants – including government representatives from various ministries involved in educational expansion efforts – noted that the calculation basis for these frequently cited percentage goals remains unclear to them. Some thought it referred to the percentage of all secondary school graduates, but given that the Trinidadian school system is modeled after the British system, they raised the question of how do define ‘‘secondary school graduate’’ (at O-levels or A-levels). Others thought expansion goals were based on the percentage of a particular age cohort or demographic group. In other words, while participants in focus groups as well as employer and government representatives expressed familiarity with
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Table 3.
List of Interviews.
Affiliation Government Officials Ministry of Labour National Training Agency SEMPCU Ministry of Education, TVET Division Tobago House of Assembly, Division of Education and Culture Ministry of Science, Technology and Tertiary Education
] People Interviewed 9 3 2 1 1 1 1
Industry & Commerce Atlantic LNG (energy sector) Sagicor (financial services sector) Employers’ Consultative Association (HR) RGM (real estate/construction) British Petroleum TT (energy sector) MIC (manufacturing sector) T&T Manufacturers’ Association T&T Chamber of Commerce Hilton Hotel (tourism) Institute of Training and Development Regency Recruitment Agency (HR)
12 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1
TVET Providers Institute of Business UWI Continuing Studies T&T Institute of Technology COSTAATT TTHTI MIC Teacher’s College (Valsayn, Trinidad) NESC YTEPP Servol Life Center ROYTEC UWI (main campus) Caribbean Union College Cipriani Labour College
25 1 2 2 5 2 2 1 2 2 2 1 1 1 1
the government’s expansion goals, no consensus existed on the meaning of these goals. We also need to consider alternative ways of gauging educational expansion. A second way in which the state can signal its commitment to educational expansion is to increase the number of institutions providing postsecondary training, e.g., by implementing policies that facilitate the
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# students enrolled
7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 0 1996
1997 CLC IOB
Fig. 1.
1998
1999 year
2000
COSTAATT TTHTI
2001
2002
TTIT UWI
Tertiary Enrollments in Trinidad and Tobago, 1997–2003: Selected Institutions.
establishment of public or even private-sector TVET providers. Data collected reveal that government investment into new institutions and subsidies to expand the tertiary sector largely have been aimed at institutions offering professional degrees (bachelors, masters, doctorates), especially those connected to the energy and high tech sectors. The bulk of funding from these government programs goes to mixed- and private sector TVET providers, who provide advanced training and charge much higher tuition than public providers. This suggests that, widely expressed concerns over the lack of skilled workers notwithstanding, most public resources are being invested into high-end training in technology, engineering, and business. This has two important implications. First, the fact that the government of T&T provides fiscal support for increasing curricular focus on science, math, and the professions even in TVET programs will resonate with institutionalists, who have documented this trend in both developed and developing nations (Benavot, Cha, Kamens, Meyer, & Wong, 1991; McEneaney, 1998). In that sense, findings support the idea that even postsecondary curricula increasingly are subject to a global ideology that values a scientific model of the world, bound to notions of increasing rationality, secularization, and professionalization (Weber, 1946). However, the second implication is that T&T government policies intended to stimulate postsecondary expansion disproportionately benefit students from higher
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socio-economic backgrounds, who leave secondary school with several O-levels or even A-levels (just a small fraction of students in T&T). As a private-sector HR specialist said: ‘‘You just know the kids who go [to the community college] couldn’t afford to go to [private institutions like] ROYTEC etc.’’ And a top administrator at a tertiary institution derided efforts to build the community college mentioned earlier, calling it ‘‘utterly failed, y symptomatic of drift in the tertiary educational system.’’13 A third way of thinking about educational expansion centers around curricular differentiation, i.e., expanding the range of programs offered. Participants disagreed on what types of programs needed to be expanded. Highranking government and institutional representatives stressed the need to keep expanding high-level training programs (at B.A. levels and above). But participants in student focus groups as well as employer interviews expressed great concern about what they perceived as lack of access to mid-level programs, especially in the public sector (certificates, diplomas/associate degrees). This, in turn, also has theoretical implications: neo-institutionalists are right when they assert that states increasingly pursue expansion efforts aimed at developing curricula and educational structures that broadly mirror a ‘‘global model.’’ They are also correct in pointing out that states pursue policy interests of their own that may not reflect the interests of economic elites or other players – a point more frequently raised by state theorists rather than educational researchers. But one can also detect a key weakness in this particular institutionalist argument. Relying primarily on documents about policy goals provided by governments and international NGOs may predispose researchers to overestimate the degree to which consensus exists regarding educational expansion and the curricular content of TVET and other educational programs (also see London, 1997). In other words, only triangulating data sources enables us to gauge the level of discontent and open conflict over the direction postsecondary expansion should take.14 In short, far from finding stratification, uncertainty and conflict only at the margins of the educational expansion process, as McEneaney and Meyer (2000, p. 191) suggest, qualitative data indicate that these phenomena are integral to the educational expansion process.
Is Educational Expansion Unrelated to Local Power Structures and Interests? One of the key strengths of Neo-Institutional Theory lies in its focus on macro-structural trends that can best be observed in cross-national or
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longitudinal studies. As such, the theory provides a much needed corrective to the micro-level emphasis that characterizes generations of status attainment studies. The flipside of this strength is that the approach can mask central dynamics that inform educational expansion at a different level of analysis – e.g., debates and conflicts at subnational levels, or short to medium term political trends. Of course, Neo-Institutional Theory does not posit that power struggles and interest group politics are nonexistent. Rather, it posits that such dynamics ultimately have no impact on educational expansion. Case studies like this one, which provides a snapshot of one country at a time point when it is just engaging in massive postsecondary educational expansion, prove crucial in addressing this question. The short answer is that the situation in T&T provides an excellent example of a process Meyer et al. (1994) describe as ‘‘bureaucratization without centralization.’’ In fact, bureaucratization exists in terms of only one of five dimensions identified by Meyer et al. (1994) – i.e., expanding scale of administration (proliferation of agencies, programs, personnel). Among state theorists, this phenomenon is also called lateral state fragmentation. And in T&T it is so pervasive that it affects the state’s capacity to design and implement official policies in a timely manner. In that sense, empirical data challenge the neo-institutionalist assumption that internal power structures have no effect on educational expansion. Below, we provide examples of interministerial competition, administrative decentralization, and fiscal policies as ways in which local power structures and interest groups affect the educational expansion process.
Interministerial Competition This aspect of state fragmentation is also known as ‘‘bureaucratization without centralization’’ (Meyer, 1994). Interviews with training providers (administrators, academic and nonacademic staff) and ministry officials revealed competition regarding lines of authority and chains of command.15 In no small part this resulted from the fact that the country has two education ministries in charge of TVET institutions, and multiple ministries in charge of targeted training programs. For instance, the merger of several existing schools into a U.S.-style community college complicated the chain of command regarding hiring and budgetary issues at the time: Budgets of its member campuses were under the purview of the Ministry of Higher Education (called ‘‘Science, Technology and Tertiary Education’’), but staff decisions (including hiring/promotions) remained tied to the Ministry of Education (in charge of primary and secondary education).
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Additional sources of interministerial competition resulted from the fact that some public and mixed-sector postsecondary providers had the capacity to hire their own staff/faculty, while the hiring process at other providers went through the Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Higher Education’s administrative capacity was further curtailed because it lacked budgetary control over several public institutions, whose budgets were at least partly determined by other ministries – including the ministries of Labor, Energy, Planning, Finance, and Education. In yet another twist, election cycles have been known to influence line ministry shifts for specific public institutions from one year to the next, further complicating efforts to expand infrastructure and enrollments at public TVET institutions. Less formal school-to-work programs, which interviewees largely described as warehousing unemployed youth, also operated from a variety of ministries, prompting on official to note: ‘‘With respect to the lack of co-ordination of the multiple school-to-work programmes that exist in the various ministries, y [officials have] been reviewing these programmes with a view to rationalizing/restructuring’’ (exchange with author, dated 4/8/03). In other words, the examples above demonstrate that bureaucratization and rationalization (however defined) do not necessarily go hand in hand, or that bureaucratization can occur without formalization or rationalization, as Meyer et al. (1994) would say. To summarize, shifts in ministerial authority and ambiguity regarding decision-making powers contributed to confusion on matters of finance and to discontent among public officials as well as institutional staff, thus producing inertia among public providers and government agencies. Such competition between ministries is bound to limit the effectiveness of efforts to increase enrollment and expand universal access to TVET programs. This ministerial competition has already affected public and mixed-sector providers. Interviews and focus groups suggest weakened credibility of the individual ministries in the eyes of their own employees as well as the general public. Administrative Decentralization Lateral and vertical expansion, or what Meyer et al. (1994) call organizational standardization and integration of subunits, respectively, constitute an alternative way to examine the bureaucratization process. Drawing again on their conceptualization, we begin with two examples that illustrate bureaucratization without organizational standardization/homogenization. The complex administrative structures at public TVET institutions further complicate policy implementation. For instance, the board of trustees of one
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public institution, which was also subject to shifts in line ministries, consisted of political appointees, making it difficult to engage in strategic planning efforts and to effectively implement them. More importantly, study participants viewed the establishment of the multicampus community college as highly desirable and expressed strong support for the institution in principle. They repeatedly cited the need to regain a niche and a competitive edge vis-a`-vis other public and private providers, who tend to offer high-level programs (engineering, business). Historically, each of the community college campuses had had its own profile, specializing in training for occupations from car mechanics, over graphic arts, to nursing. But the new institution’s ongoing challenges are related to the original legislative framework that led to the merger. While the law established the community college as such, it did not specify how institution building should proceed. As a result, the law did not contain explicit plans on how to integrate the administrative structures of individual campuses, a task whose design was left instead to a board of trustees that could not convene for two years because of a completely unrelated, national-level political stalemate. Not surprisingly, during this time, leaders of individual member campuses proved reluctant to relinquish autonomy and report to the new board of trusties, which the national government had appointed but not empowered to act. Moreover, the complex administrative structure made efforts to collect secondary data about budgets and personnel composition less successful at the community college institution than at other public or private providers. This combination of lack of integration with a temporary political stalemate complicated efforts to coordinate strategic planning efforts. It halted key educational expansion efforts concerning plant and infrastructure, budget, faculty and student growth, and curriculum development. As a result, a keen sense prevailed among students, staff, and administrators, that the newly merged institution was losing ground in terms of enrollments, staff/faculty retention, and reputation. Other study participants (business, training providers) and descriptive statistics on enrollment growth from 1997 onward confirm this impression. Insofar as postsecondary enrollments in general are growing (see Fig. 1), the community college known by its acronym COSTAATT did not benefit from that expansion in the year 2003. In fact, as Fig. 2 shows, once adjusted for size, the postsecondary institutions benefiting most from educational expansion offered professional or general academic training – like the public flagship University of the West Indies (UWI), and the much smaller Institute of Business/IOB, as well as a newly founded private institution named T&T
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% Changes in Tertiary Enrollments in Trinidad and Tobago, 1997–2003: Selected Institutions.
Institute of Technology/TTIT. Tuition at all of them is considerably higher, and the latter institution is known for its strong ties to the energy sector. Regarding lateral expansion: As it is, some providers structure programs in terms of contact hours, others use credit hours, ‘‘modules,’’ ‘‘courses,’’ ‘‘terms,’’ or ‘‘semesters.’’ Even among those using semesters, variation exists on the number semester/year, courses taken/semester etc. Moreover, each provider employs idiosyncratic definitions of what it means to be a ‘‘full time’’ and ‘‘part time’’ student. Therefore, the creation of an ‘‘articulated’’ system as intended by the Government presents a major challenge for students interested in lateral or vertical transfers.16 Now, let us turn to examples of vertical integration, or rather lack thereof. These also demonstrate that educational systems are contested terrain, in which different groups and organizations engage in politics of exclusion that affect educational expansion efforts in class-specific ways. The disarticulation described above also extended to relations between TVET providers, both public and private. Essentially, students interviewed found it difficult to have any of their academic credentials count when trying to switch TVET providers, even within the public sector.17 They encountered these problems when attempting to change to higher-ranking TVET programs (e.g., from basic to medium-level, or medium to advanced level) in part because no consensus exists on what constitutes a ‘‘certificate’’ or ‘‘diploma’’ in a particular field. This caused especially students from disadvantaged backgrounds to remain in low-skill programs with few prospects for
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advancement. It also caused students who possess more savvy and/or financial resources to engage in practices designed to minimize the number of years spent training while maximizing the status of the credential earned. In addition to effectively subverting the traditional secondary school system, that growing practice benefits elite TVET providers, especially those in the private sector, who draw away qualified students from the public sector. Institutional legacies themselves played an important role in this process. The disarticulation between providers, even among public providers, is itself a legacy of colonial (British) and U.S. influence in T&T. The primary and secondary systems, as well as the campuses associated with the community college and the regional flagship university itself, bear the imprint of the highly stratified British educational system. But other public and private postsecondary TVET providers, especially those founded since independence, are increasingly following the North American model of higher educational organization – which in itself is also highly stratified (see Brint & Karabel, 1989). Chabbott and Ramirez (2000) observe that highly stratified secondary systems typically go hand in hand with nonstratified tertiary systems, and vice versa. But in T&T, as in similar developing countries, the presence of the highly stratified British model at the primary/secondary level combined with efforts to copy the highly stratified U.S. model at tertiary levels may prove to be one of the key impediments to postsecondary educational expansion. As one administrator from the university noted: ‘‘We claim victory y to being able to offer the Associate Degree, which was not easy because of [our] British heritage [regarding Certificates].’’ In other words, countries with mixed colonial legacies may experience unique and exacerbated impediments to higher educational expansion because of the incompatible institutional logics they are asked to emulate. To complicate matters even further, T&T sponsors a well-regarded, substantial set of training programs offered by a provider known as Metal Industries Company (MIC), which has been modeled (in length, intensity, content, and credentials) after German postsecondary craftsmen programs. From its inception, MIC has maintained strong ties to the German firm Fritz Werner GmbH, which itself is part of the multinational steel giant MAN/Ferrostaal. MAN/Ferrostaal has also diversified into the oil and gas sector, providing everything from pipeline systems to ‘‘project development, financing, engineering, project management, construction, and project implementation.’’18 Thus, the situation in postcolonial societies like T&T challenges the assertion made by institutional researchers that ‘‘systems that strongly differentiate at the secondary level are more likely to have a lower degree of
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differentiation at the higher level’’ and vice versa (Chabbott & Ramirez, 2000, p. 172). In this case, postsecondary expansion is hampered by the apparent incompatibility of training systems rooted in different institutional logics. In fact, the problems associated with the community college merger itself, which involves moving from a British-inspired to a North American accreditation system, are also a prime example of how difficult it is to create a well-articulated educational system. While these problems may be resolved in the next few years, thus illustrating the principle of isomorphism over time, these ongoing difficulties likely will affect the process of postsecondary expansion in terms of enrollments as well as institutional and program diversification. Eventually, successful bureaucratization of the community college as well as the TVET sector at large will have to include a measure of (lateral) standardization and (vertical) integration of organizational structures – leading back to the issue of centralization at organizational and policy implementation levels. At least for the public sector, that phase of postsecondary expansion may involve centralizing the planning of some aspects (budget, financial records, curriculum) while decentralizing others (hiring).19 In the meantime, postsecondary educational expansion will continue to be uneven in terms of its most commonly used indicators, i.e., enrollments and programs offered. Fiscal Policies To illustrate how fiscal policies reflect the status competition dynamics ever present in the politics of school expansion, we focus on the ‘‘Dollar-forDollar Program’’ and on plans to establish a new, national university, called the University of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT).20 The Dollar-for-Dollar (DfD) program quickly emerged as a main concern of participants in interviews and focus groups as it was a fairly new initiative at the time of data collection.21 While the discussion of this program mainly reflects their perception of the program, the survey data collected from focus group participants (not presented here) also helped assess the validity of some of the statements made. The DfD program began in 2000 and was designed to provide funding to students pursuing a tertiary degree at a public (or mixed) institution, provided that training occurs at the (North American) Associate Degree level or above. The initial intent of the government was to institute the DfD program at the same time as launching the community college, in the hope that the DfD program would help boost tertiary enrollments among nontraditional students who had previously been excluded from the restrictive higher educational system modeled after
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Great Britain. But when the stalemate slowed down the implementation of the community college idea, the DfD program was initiated anyway. Contrary to its initial intent, the DfD program turned out to be a main promoter of expansion at elite and private institutions and less at public institutions whose programs did not meet the eligibility criteria. Though the DFD program was only a few years old, participants voiced very definite views of it. Even those who benefited the most from it indicated that it suffered from flaws. Many students, educators, and even business representatives viewed it as a politically motivated program reflective of a ‘‘patron–client’’ system they view as marking the political process, regardless of which party is in power. Few thought it could survive in its existing form, as a grant to individuals seeking tertiary training. They favored restricting eligibility to DfD funding depending on all or a combination of factors, making it: means-tested, merit-based, loan-based, and time-limited. They also favored making students pursuing M.A. degrees or higher ineligible for government grants. In contrast, they advocated expanding access to students at private training providers – and most importantly, broadening eligibility to postsecondary programs below the Associate level. Participants perceived DfD as an impediment to long-term tertiary expansion, because its matching funds component largely benefits students whose families already tend to have the financial resources to afford training at the tertiary level. To them, it suggested that the DfD has alleviated the financial burden on this particular group, without leading to a significant increase in postsecondary enrollments overall. Instead, representatives from smaller, rival institutions suspected that DfD encourages students to opt instead to enroll with providers perceived as flagship institutions (UWI, TTIT).22 The recognition that only top-notch institutions have benefited from postsecondary expansion policies is widespread enough to prompt even representatives from the T&T Manufacturer’s Association to comment that ‘‘your educational system is too elitist y priorities are a bit skewed.’’ As the enrollment trends and percent changes in Figs. 1 and 2 demonstrate, their perceptions have empirical support. Contrary to the government’s original policy goal, in its first four years of existence, the DfD program benefited academic institutions catering to the intellectual and professional elite of the country.23 In essence, study participants suggested that the DfD program may have a counter-productive impact on long-term tertiary expansion efforts. They viewed DfD as weakening public institutions and medium-level TVET providers in general, because the vast majority of postsecondary students were not enrolled in associate-level degree programs – and thus not eligible for
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DfD funding. Study participants clearly viewed the struggle over access to DfD funding as a tactic to keep working-class students from attending elite institutions and higher-level programs. They interpreted the eligibility criteria as a source of social inequality, whether intended or unintended as a policy outcome. This type of argument can be considered as evidence of status competition in its purest form. Class-based status competition also comes through in the most recent government’s shift toward advocating strongly in favor of establishing UTT as a national university. Not unlike the recently founded institution known as Trinidad and Tobago Institute of Technology (one of the mixed public/ private sector providers, with strong ties to the energy sector), the UTT’s main purpose would be to serve as ‘‘the’’ national technological university, providing upper-level training in technology and science related occupations. Proposals for a UTT represent a key aspect of postsecondary expansion plans in which science and technology emerge as central to nation-building projects, and educational institutions as means toward that end. For the moment, we concentrate on how this particular expansion plan illustrates status competition dynamics and interest group politics. During data collection, the UTT was a politically hot topic, attracting intense and growing public media attention and being debated around the country. Its salience in public discourse is best illustrated by the fact that it emerged spontaneously, without prompting, in no less than 10 interviews and staff focus groups. The fact that this issue was not specified as part of the consultancy suggests that expansion of the TVET sector was considered unrelated to postsecondary expansion plans at large. Study participants viewed postsecondary expansion as a zero-sum game, in which a finite amount of resources had to be distributed and any redistribution to a new institution would come at the cost of existing programs. Consequently, reactions to the government proposal ranged from a cautious endorsement of the idea to outright consternation. Possibly even more than the DfD program, participants viewed this proposal as a potential drain on already scarce resources for tertiary training and as working against diversification efforts in the nation’s economy and its educational system. Even among providers who, one might assume, would consider themselves peers of and collaborators with the future UTT, the perception prevailed that this policy development would weaken existing institutions without any measurable positive impact on improved access to tertiary education. Perhaps even more importantly, employers and HR specialists in the energy sector voiced strong skepticism regarding the need for a national technological university. Though the government intended the new university to
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contribute to the diversification of the economy by introducing programs in IT/technology (bio-technology), and not only narrowly to the energy sector, this perception does not seem to be widely shared. To quote an employer representative interviewed: ‘‘We can improve a lot more on what we have. Don’t duplicate sources, spread resources too thin. The market [for engineers] is not that big.’’ This takes us back to the well-known decoupling of educational programs from labor market trends, even those in the TVET sector. According to several labor market studies, most job growth in T&T is likely to occur outside of the energy sector and at low to medium skill levels. To tighten those links, the government would need to focus expansion efforts on general liberal arts and para-professional training for blue-collar and whitecollar occupations at existing institutions. One informant put it succinctly: We are a small country; we have a limited pool of human capital. We need a national agenda [that promotes] an educational system y informed by those industries where development takes place y Diversification will require general [TVET] training, not energy sector training. In other words, the people interviewed perceived government plans to expand postsecondary education by investing in a national university devoted to training high-level scientists and technology experts as a way to redistribute public resources to one particular segment of the population (small upper middle class) and one particular employer segment (energy sector). To summarize, we have focused on interministerial competition, administrative decentralization, and fiscal policies to illustrate how status competition dynamics indeed affect postsecondary expansion in T&T. In fact, their concern about difficulties that state agencies faced in implementing expansion policies caused some interviewees to use body language (eyes rolling, grimacing) and to invoke strongly critical language, stating that ‘‘ministries are like little fiefdoms,’’ and describing educational policies and their implementation as driven by ‘‘political motivations’’ marked by ‘‘patron–client relations,’’ ‘‘nepotism,’’ and ‘‘tribal politics.’’ Language that strong from the general public (students, teachers, employers) as well as from public servants signals longstanding status competition dynamics and power struggles within the state. Competition over resources (real or perceived) as well as conflicting lines and levels of authority involving ministries, TVET providers, and government fiscal policies explicitly aimed at expanding high-end science training for occupational cognates relevant to the energy sector illustrate that postsecondary expansion in T&T is inextricably linked to local power structures and interest group politics. The struggles are manifest in competition over resources (real
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or perceived) as well as conflicting lines and levels of authority involving ministries, TVET providers, and government fiscal policies explicitly aimed at expanding high-end science training for occupational cognates relevant to the tightly knit but multinational energy sector. How do these findings inform neo-institutionalist explanations of educational expansion, in particular the assumption that there is little reason to focus on ‘‘the margins where social uncertainty and conflict appear?’’ In essence, results reveal mixed support for this particular neo-institutional premise. Class-based status competition dynamics play a central and fundamental role in postsecondary expansion. Findings for T&T suggest that future comparative-international studies may benefit from concentrating on countries outside the western industrialized world, especially those marked by notable state fragmentation.
Does Educational Expansion Reflect Evolving Models of World Society and Commitment to Values of Citizenship, Individualism, and Human Rights? The ‘‘evolving model of world society’’ embraced by the government of T&T clearly privileges themes related to science and technology. Examples of symbolic politics and plans for postsecondary expansion policies help illustrate this particular issue: The newly developed ministry of higher education carries the official title Ministry of Science, Technology, and Tertiary Education. Just five years ago (2000), the government established a tertiary institution called the T&T Institute of Technology. The planned University of T&T is supposed to focus on training for professions in exactly this field. And Curriculum reforms supported by INGOs are leading the Ministry of Education to phase out traditional vocational programs (agriculture, home economics, industrial arts) at the secondary level and replace them with ‘‘technology education’’ programs. In that sense, the data support research by neo-institutionalists like McEneaney (1998), whose study demonstrates that a growing curricular focus on science and math is not limited to industrialized nations. In fact, she shows that textbooks in developing nations demonstrate the same trend toward making math and science part of the core curriculum, even at lower levels of schooling.
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Neo-Institutional Theory should lead us to expect increasing internationalization regarding educational systems (structure, curricula, credentials) while also observing tendencies to cast educational expansion as a nationbuilding project. We examine these expected simultaneous yet countervailing trends by focusing on internationalization as a way to address how the higher educational system in T&T experiences pressures regarding program accreditation and degree certification. We conclude with a discussion of how participants invoke nation-building rhetoric to justify their view of how educational expansion should proceed. Internationalization Program accreditation and degree certification constitute a key impediment to expansion in the TVET sector, which the government seeks to address through the creation of a national accreditation council and the rather recent establishment of a national training agency. At the time of data collection, confusion existed even among training providers about which government agency was in charge of accrediting TVET providers. In part, this goes back to a lack of a clear division of labor between the ministries and agencies that have traditionally accredited TVET programs at basic/ secondary levels vs. skilled/postsecondary levels. The concomitant red tape experienced by training providers trying to obtain local accreditation, in turn, has weakened the perceived legitimacy of preexisting national accreditation bodies. Not surprisingly, given the weakened state capacity to accredit programs, postsecondary TVET providers are increasingly turning toward regional affiliation sources (e.g., affiliation with UWI). They also rely on a host of international accreditation bodies (including individual schools, professional associations, actual accreditation agencies), in the words of an administrator at a private for-profit institution: ‘‘to ensure [we] meet global standards.’’ This trend toward international accreditation exists among private as well as public sector training providers, and private sector employers interviewed also seem to favor it. To quote a representative from the National Employers Association: ‘‘International accreditation has much more weight with people.’’ Ironically, international organizations, which provide political and financial support for higher education expansion in developing nations, reinforce this message, thus fortifying a trend toward internationalization of the educational system (while also seeking to reinforce the creation of national capacity in this respect). This particular consultancy was no exception. As a way to improve the integration of postsecondary institutions in T&T, the
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first author explicitly suggested that programs seek accreditation with North and South American entities.24 As such, T&T’s internationalization process in the education sector is strongly driven by a combination of factors: weak domestic state capacity and regional (or global) political hegemons. To further alleviate pressures on expanding TVET programs, the consultant also promoted relying on international funding, for instance to help strengthen T&T’s fledgling community college described above. These examples serve as a reminder that internationalization processes are not entirely driven by bottom-up democratic processes. The unintended consequence of this increasing tendency to rely on international accreditation sources relates to the fact that the central government will have to create the capacity to accredit by local standards, never mind enforce international accreditation standards. For instance, the mixed (public/private) provider MIC offers a well-designed, -staffed, and -equipped set of programs for occupations in the metal trades. As mentioned earlier, its program structure and content are modeled after the German postsecondary vocational training system. Moreover, The MIC training programs are accredited by the American Welding Society (AWS), a fact we confirmed with the AWS itself. These steps taken by MIC’s leadership do seem to lend the program legitimacy and a good reputation among students and employers alike. At the same time, other TVET providers were copying MIC’s curriculum, though not necessarily with MIC’s knowledge or consent. In particular, two institutions (one public, the other private) providing low-level training programs perceived as warehousing unemployed young adults seemed under the mistaken impression that they were automatically certified by the AWS because, as program officials stated, they ‘‘use the MIC curriculum.’’ They advertised the program accordingly, and students interviewed were under the mistaken impression that a welding credential from this institution would earn them admission into advanced AWS welding courses, including specialty training like underwater welding, only offered in the United States. Needless to say, the students attending these safety-net programs came from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds and were least equipped to be able to assess the validity of the providers’ claims. The growing power of internationalization also became evident in the credentials earned by teaching and administrative staff interviewed. Overall, 26 of the 77 teaching and other staff who answered this question indicated they had earned a degree abroad. By far the largest proportion of degrees from foreign institutions existed among staff employed at private training providers. Most notably, this included MIC, ROYTEC (private,
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nonsectarian with ties to the banking industry), and Carribean Union College, a denominational institution with ties to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church (and to Andrews University in Michigan). In contrast, only 3 out of the 22 staff members interviewed at the community college (a.k.a. COSTAATT) indicated holding a foreign degree. Together with the above-mentioned accreditation pattern, this suggests that private training providers value foreign degrees. This pattern also reflects the views expressed during interviews with private-sector employers, who indicated they generally consider degrees from foreign institutions more prestigious than domestic ones, especially when earned at a domestic public institution. Tables 2a and 2b contain more details regarding staff and student characteristics at different TVET institutions. Educational Expansion as a Nation-Building Project? Perhaps a direct quote serves best to illustrate how government officials employ nation-building rhetoric in the service of educational expansion politics: The difficulties [we have] experienced y and the seeming government commitment to a university of Trinidad and Tobago point to hesitation at the highest levels in accepting the community college philosophy and model. This is part of a larger problem of the critical absence of vision and philosophy for education at all levels of the educational system in the country y . All stakeholders and particularly governments must understand that the current fragmented approach to tertiary education will not take the country forward. (written communication by administrator in the TVET system; March 2003).
It is quite likely that government policies and other official documents also cast the need to expand postsecondary education, including TVET, in terms of the national interest. However, neither interviews nor focus groups produced much evidence of public discourse invoking nation-building rhetoric, or the ‘‘right to education’’ as part of modern citizenship and human rights standards. However, the government of T&T has since tried to engage the general population in the ‘‘2020 Exercise.’’ This effort entails more definite plans to achieve developed-nation status by 2020, plans that were only finished after the end of this study, in late 2004/2005. As can be expected, education, training, science & technology are major elements in this plan. Nonetheless, it appears that public discourse regarding TVET expansion differs markedly from the typology developed by Chabbott and Ramirez (2000, p. 178), which shows how policy priorities concerning educational expansion presumably shifted away from human capital-based arguments
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common in the 1960s (stressing labor market and economic development related benefits of increased literacy) to a focus on universal mass education, gender equity, and curricular reform in the 1990s. This constitutes one of the most interesting findings of this study, especially because its goal was to elicit information from study participants about how they viewed the current TVET system and how they viewed existing government plans to expand postsecondary education. When participants employed nation-building rhetoric, it tended to consist of comments by public sector officials or official, written communication exchanged between government officials and the INGO commissioning the consultancy. Even then, it appeared more as a call to begin engaging in nation-building, rather than statements describing educational expansion efforts as part of a larger nation-building project. For example: ‘‘There is no clear vision of where we want to go as a society in the next 15 to 20 years [y] Therefore there is no strategy for [postsecondary] expansion.’’25 Neither teachers, nor students, nor employers seemed inclined to invoke nationbuilding language. Nuggets like the one from a private sector informant already quoted above were rare: ‘‘We need a national agenda [that promotes] an educational system y Diversification will require general [professional] training.’’ This serves as a reminder that the data sources used will shape our interpretation of dynamics shaping educational expansion. Yet, consider the following exchange involving a government official with long-standing involvement in secondary education reform. This official discussed the need to strengthen the role of the state in coordinating between TVET providers, noting that he thought both private and public providers fulfilled an important role. PI: ‘‘So what are the benefits of private [TVET] providers?’’ A: ‘‘The private sector is less bureaucratic. It can change to modern demands of the economy quickly. You know, Max Weber was very right – [pauses] – although he said the bureaucracy will win out in the end. [Laughs, then says:] ‘‘You remember Max Weber, right?’’ PI: [Laughs, then says:] ‘‘And he also said there would be rationalization.’’ A: ‘‘And there will be rationalization.’’ PI: ‘‘So what is the benefit of the public sector [TVET providers]?’’ A: ‘‘The benefit of the public sector is that it will always have an inclination to provide a safety net for the poor. The poor cannot afford these [private] programs.’’ PI: ‘‘So what will prevent the TVET system from bifurcating into programs for people with money and people without?’’
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A: ‘‘It will not bifurcate. But there will always be a gap. We will never solve that gap. But as I said, y we will ensure a safety net. The Republic will always support the poorer sector and there will always be a national standard [to which all programs will be held].’’ 26
One can interpret this exchange to mean that the role of the government is to build a nation by creating an educational system that attempts to minimize social inequality (‘‘the gap’’), even though success in that regard will always prove elusive. Finally, we would like to revisit efforts to establish the community college (in process while data collection occurred) as an important example of how institution building itself can be viewed as a nation-building project. Government officials interviewed repeatedly identified foreign institutions, including the regional UWI, as competitors to the nascent community college institution known as COSTAATT. The argument here is that inattention to institution building at the community college level will prove to be harmful to the national interest. Participants indicated that, in their view, the very success of COSTAATT as a national community college would serve as a litmus test for the government’s ability to engage in institution building. A strong sense prevailed among faculty, students, administrators, and ministry officials that, if COSTAATT fails, that failure will come at high cost to its constituents – largely working-class Trinidadians. To quote a major proponent of the community college: The primary beneficiaries of COSTAATT should be the students y because we’ve had a very narrow definition of tertiary education in the country as a result of the kinds of historical development of a colonial, fairly elitist education system. Students in postsecondary education have had really limited options.
Citing that ‘‘upwards of 60-something percent’’ of secondary students do not earn the credentials (i.e., A-levels) necessary to enter the traditional tertiary system, this person noted: there is no formal system within the public education sector to get back into tertiary education y that’s a huge clientele that must be addressed, especially if the government is committed to attaining the 20% participation rate. They will not make that target unless they remediate [this problem by bolstering the community college system]. (Interview conducted on 1/21/03)
Asking the consultant to turn off the tape shortly after this exchange, the official expressed the view that the entrenched system fostered by the political ideologies of both major political parties and the business community operated like a system reminiscent of colonial times, with a small elite in charge that ‘‘likes walls’’ and ‘‘resists structural reform.’’ While the person
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interviewed did not directly employ nation-building rhetoric to defend the community college system, efforts to stifle its expansion are described as contrary to central government goals, and thus presumably the national interest. Moreover, the data clearly indicate that elites are perceived to undermine the community college on purpose in order to preserve quasicolonial class privilege (London, 2002). This constitutes yet one more example of the salience of status competition dynamics, even from the point of view of government officials.
CONCLUSION In this chapter, we apply two theoretical traditions, i.e., neo-institutionalist and status competition arguments, to a contemporary case study in the Caribbean. More specifically, we examine recent efforts in T&T to expand access to postsecondary vocational training programs. This case study of a postcolonial nation undergoing rapid social change – including the institutionalization and expansion of educational opportunities at all levels – provides an ideal opportunity to document the process of educational expansion in a specific temporal and geo-political context not typically examined by neo-institutionalists. In particular, this chapter evaluates two key premises underlying the neoinstitutional strand tradition. Focusing on policies designed to expand access to postsecondary technical and vocational training in T&T, it examines whether neo-institutionalists are correct in assuming that educational expansion (1) occurs unrelated to local power structures and dynamics and (2) reflects growing national and international norms regarding the value of education (in particular science and technology) as part of a nationbuilding enterprise. Results reveal mixed support for these premises. On the one hand, data derived from interviews and focus groups with a broad range of interest groups demonstrate that status competition dynamics play a fundamental role in every aspect of postsecondary expansion in this country. The way educational expansion plans are designed and implemented reflects that T&T remains a ‘‘fragile state’’ (Fuller, 1991) in which educational policies remain fundamentally shaped by well-established elites and conspicuous social stratification patterns. This challenges the neo-institutionalist contention that local power structures have little effect on educational expansion dynamics, or that ‘‘social uncertainty and conflict’’ play only a marginal role in the expansion process (McEneaney & Meyer, 2000, p. 191). Yet, considerable state
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fragmentation – manifest in interministerial competition, administrative decentralization, and fiscal policies – also lends itself to institutional capture by many different interest groups. Neo-institutionalists will point out that, in the long run, this trend toward ‘‘bureaucratization without centralization’’ will produce an overall positive effect on educational expansion. On the other hand, evidence suggests that the increasing focus on science and technology noted by other researchers (e.g., McEneaney, 1998) shapes government policies aimed at expanding the postsecondary training sector. Government officials and representatives from INGOs clearly emphasize treating the institutionalization (and expansion) of higher education as a nation-building project. This is perhaps most evident in efforts underway in the last five years to integrate science and technology components at every level of education, to devote an entire ministry responsible for structuring the tertiary sector around the increasingly global principles of science and technology, and to undertake the Herculean effort to standardize credentials and curricula rooted in at least two, fundamentally different institutional logics (i.e., British and U.S.). Thus, neo-institutionalists are right in predicting a complex relationship between internationalization and nationbuilding endeavors. However, at the time this study concluded, the focus on science and technology remained the only way in which T&T emulated ‘‘evolving models in world society.’’ None of the stakeholders interviewed employed rhetoric about education for citizenship, or the importance of guaranteeing individualism and human rights. These findings suggest that future comparative-international studies in the neo-institutionalist tradition will benefit from concentrating on countries outside the western industrialized world, especially countries marked by notable state fragmentation and social stratification dynamics.
NOTES 1. A note on the use of terminology: While the term ‘‘postsecondary training’’ connotes vocational training at all levels, from low-skill to professional, the term ‘‘tertiary training’’ is usually used in a more narrow sense, denoting only high-end programs (university-level courses). But for the purpose of this paper, we use the term ‘‘postsecondary’’ and ‘‘tertiary’’ interchangeably with respect to TVET programs. 2. The UK granted independence in 1962, but the constitution establishing the Republic of T&T, as a parliamentary form based on the Westminster model, was adopted in 1976. 3. Several labor market reports show that the service sector actually outstrips the energy sector in terms of its % share of GDP and most certainly in terms of its share of jobs: Up to 66% of (non-governmental) jobs are found in the service sector,
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broadly defined, as compared to only 7% in the energy sector at 3% in agriculture (NTA, 2002, p. 3). The government itself is the largest employer in Tobago and a major source of employment on the main island (NTA, 2002, p. 2). Strong job growth predictions exist at skilled levels in construction, transportation, and service sector at large. Job growth in the energy sector exists largely at unskilled levels. 4. Approximately equal proportions of the population consider themselves Afro-Caribbean (40%) or descendents of East Indian immigrants (40%), plus 20% choosing the label ‘‘mixed’’/other. Insofar as ethnic stratification exists, AfroTrinidadians historically have had the upper hand. For instance, after the country achieved political independence, it took 20 years (until 1995) for the majority Indian party to win a national election (see Premdas & Ragoonath, 1998). This electoral upset played a key role in creating the political stalemate that paralyzed the country from 2000 to 2002 (just before data collection began). For further information on social stratification in T&T see e.g., Campbell (1992), Coppin (2000), Coppin and Olsen (1998), Cross (1979), MacKenzie (1990). 5. As publications by Charles and Bradley (2002, 2004) and Bradley and Ramirez (1996) show, tertiary education in core nations remains markedly gender segregated. This raises the question whether policies designed to expand all forms of postsecondary education in T&T benefit women and men equally in terms of enrollments and fields of specialization. Unfortunately, that question remains beyond this chapter. 6. Primary Education covers 7 years, including infant I and II and standards (grades) 1–V. Currently the system has 481 public primary schools (where 342 are denominational/ religious schools) and 139 are governmental schools, and a small number of private schools. The denominational schools receive support from the government for teacher salaries. In addition, current efforts by the Ministry of Education focus on providing universal access to early childhood (children 4–5 years old) by the year 2010 and to pursue more ‘‘inclusive’’ educational strategies for students with special needs. Increased access to secondary education was achieved under the Secondary Education Modernization Program (SEMP) financed by the Government of Trinidad and Tobago and the IADB. Besides increased access, the project strives to improve the quality of secondary education through introduction of a new curriculum, teacher training, new testing/assessments, and institutional strengthening of the Ministry of Education. Main source: Ministry of Education, Division of Educational Planning (2004). For a more detailed description of the Trinidad and Tobago Education system, see Tsang, Fryer, and Arevalo (2002). We thank Dr. Rieble-Aubourg for key details regarding the public educational system. 7. For a review of international research see e.g., Buchmann and Hannum (2001); Chabbott and Ramirez (2000, pp. 164–167); Kerckhoff (1995); Ramirez and Meyer (1980). For U.S. and historically based arguments see e.g., Bowles and Gintis (1976); Collins (1979); Royster (2003); Werum (2001, 2002). 8. While international organizations as well as the government of T&T are aware of this decoupling, both parties actually seek to strengthen such ties to the TVET sector (and postsecondary education at large): This consultancy was commissioned with the explicit premise that it is desirable for T&T to strengthen the connection between the content of TVET programs at the postsecondary level and actual labor market dynamics to support the diversification of its economy to allow less dependence on the oil-and gas sector. More specifically, the language used explicitly invokes
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market based explanations, stressing the need to identify how ‘‘demand and supply’’ factors shape bottlenecks in the vocational system and to recommend solutions to increase efficiency in the system. Unfortunately, the data do not allow us to examine why policy priorities expressed with regard to the TVET sector do not mirror those typically identified with educational expansion. Future analyses employing Institutionalist Theory should perhaps examine whether this continued focus on human capital issues, which Chabbott and Ramirez (2000) identify as more typical of the 1960s, reflects the increasing separation of vocational training from mass education (at all levels). The fact that TVET should have a closer relationship to the labor market does not diminish the argument that general competencies in math, language, science etc. have to be developed, too. The expressed concern over supply and demand issues in TVET might also reflect the hybrid status vocational education has held as both social/educational and labor market policy. 9. We also requested information from all participating institutions regarding the demographic profile of their student and staff body (to ascertain enrollment trends, teaching staff credentials); their curriculum structure and content (to ascertain levels of training provided, substantive focus of programs); their physical infrastructure (to ascertain institutional resources such as classroom space, library resources etc.); and financial information regarding revenue sources plus capital and recurrent expenditures. Efforts to collect these data met with mixed success and are thus excluded from this analysis. 10. We are reasonably confident that administrators recruited whoever was available when the campus visit occurred, in particular as such visits were often arranged on a day-by-day basis. On several occasions, the PI even observed the institutional liaisons put together the focus groups at the last minute. This is important insofar as it suggests that the issues brought up in discussion among faculty/staff and among students arose spontaneously and without instruction from superiors. At the very least the themes emerging in discussions showed that participants felt free to raise controversial issues and make their views known, even those critical of employers, institutional and political leaders. 11. At most institutions, only one student focus group was conducted, usually during the day. This means we over-sampled full-time students, and younger students. In all likelihood, their concerns are different from those of part-time students. In an effort to increase representation of part-time students’ concerns, the PI conducted some evening focus groups and, where feasible, specifically requested that part-time students be recruited during the daytime. 12. Missing data affects some survey questions more than others. The question most frequently left unanswered asked participants to state their ethnic background. In addition, some respondents were unsure how to compute the number of years of education they had completed, asking whether that included pre-primary grades. The PI instructed participants to count starting with ‘‘standard 1’’ (first grade), but throughout the focus groups respondents struggled with this question. In retrospect, coding these answers suggested that some respondents included preprimary schooling as well as years spent in part-time programs, thus unintentionally inflating the level of educational attainment. We also constructed a more objective measure of years of education by adding up the credentials earned, counted in terms of full-time years typically needed for completion.
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13. Interview conducted on 1/28/03. 14. This suggests, not surprisingly, that data sources and collection methods used influence findings – in this case the degree to which academics (and neo-institutionalists in particular) have observed nation-building rhetoric in policy goals and public discourse (World Bank, 1999, 2000). In contrast to most of the large-scale longitudinal studies that prevail in neo-institutional research, this chapter draws on a mix of interviewees from all sectors of society and is not limited to high-ranking representatives from government, local NGOs, and business. In addition, we minimize reliance on government documents and statistics collected by INGOS, which may also help explain why status competition dynamics appear just as central to the educational expansion process as the nation-building discourse. 15. According to IFI officials, the Government of Trinidad and Tobago has since made significant progress in the establishment of the National Accreditation Council, the creation of the University of Trinidad and Tobago, and has addressed some of the issues of ‘‘inter-ministerial’’ competition that will be described later on. 16. Moreover, it creates possible mismatch between skills training and labor market needs (the very policy goal that the government seeks to follow). The weak articulation between tertiary providers also has a detrimental effect on labor force mobility, locking employers and employees alike into distinct (often firm-specific) training/employment paths. 17. To address this problem, T&T and its neighbors have agreed to create national training agencies responsible for quality assurance. In addition, CARICOM nations plan to establish National Accreditation Councils in charge of accrediting programs/providers, ensure articulation and program quality, and adhere to specified standards. 18. In fact, even the company’s own website, http://www.fritz-werner.com/, takes visitors directly to MAN/Ferrostaal. The above quote also stems from this site. 19. As one key official put it: ‘‘More importantlyy, none of the [community college] campuses on their own currently has critical mass in terms of leadership, management, administrative systems, technology, enrollment, faculty and learning resources to be economically viable within the emerging local and international higher education landscape. We are clear that desires for autonomy at the campus level cannot take precedence, at this juncture, over the national need for quality and improved outputs at the campuses. As such, in the short term, the centralized policy and planning/decentralized operations design of the College is intended to ensure that [it] can attract and optimize its resources based on economies of scale and develop a real capacity for institutional strengthening which can serve as the basis for a decentralized college system in the medium to long term.’’ 20. UWI itself is not a national university but, as its name suggests, a regional, publicly funded university with campuses throughout the Caribbean in Barbados, Jamaica and T&T. It was founded in 1948, while the region was still under British colonial rule. It is considered the premier regional tertiary institution. 21. Since then, DFD has been renamed as GATE (government assistance for tuition expenses). GATE has modified the eligibility criteria to obtain funds from the program. For more information see, http://www.gate.gov.tt. 22. One government official also alleged that the way in which DfD funding was disbursed could lead working-class students, who typically leave secondary school
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after completing O-levels, to end up with higher out-of-pocket tuition at the community college than a (middle-class) student who completed A-levels might pay at an elite institution like UWI or TTIT. Unfortunately, lack of systematic data on tuition charged at various institutions meant we could not follow up on this assertion. 23. Fig. 1 shows annual increases in enrollments for a selected number of institutions. These data corroborate statements made by administrators during interviews conducted at the sampled institutions. Clearly, UWI has been the largest training provider, and its enrollments began increasing sharply starting in 2000. In terms of sheer size of institutions, UWI is followed by COSTAATT, whose student body currently comprises about one quarter of UWI’s student body. For COSTAATT, nominal enrollments also picked up since the inception of the DfD program in 2000, thought not at as rapidly as UWI’s enrollments. TTIT, a new institution for which enrollments exist only starting with the year 2000, the rate of increase has been faster than for COSTAATT. If the current trend continues, TTIT’s student body will surpass that of all COSTAATT institutions combined within a few years. Because of the comparatively small size of the remaining three institutions, it appears from Fig. 1 as if enrollments have been stagnant or have increased only moderately for CLC, the IOB, and TTHTI. However, the scale of their enrollment increases is simply dwarfed by the inclusion of UWI in the sample. In order to adjust for the absolute size of each institution, Fig. 2 illustrates the annual percentage change in enrollments for each of these six institutions. The adjusted enrollment figures demonstrate that TTIT and TTHTI – two quasi-private institutions have experienced the greatest percentage boost in enrollments. Taken together, both figures suggest that enrollments at elite institutions like UWI, TTIT, and the IOB have grown the most since 2000, whereas the evidence remains decidedly mixed for COSTAATT and TTHTI, and the CLC clearly finds itself at the bottom. 24. Specifically, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (U.S.); Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (U.S. and Latin America); Association of Specialized and Professional Accreditors (U.S.); Association of Canadian Community Colleges; and the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. 25. Interview conducted on 2/4/03. 26. Interview conducted on 1/23/03. Interestingly, the topic and terminology of ‘‘rationality’’ and ‘‘rationalization’’ came up frequently in discussions. But little consensus seems to exist on what this meant and instead the term was used to signal the need to reform, streamline, and centralize responsibility for the TVET sector, with most respondents identifying the MSTTE (Ministry of Higher Education) or one of its agencies as the most rational choice.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT We thank Dr. Sabine Rieble-Aubourg from the American Development Bank, Ms. Oosha Chunilal for her research assistance, and the IADB staff in Trinidad and Tobago for their logistical support. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the original chapter draft. An earlier draft was presented at the Indiana University,
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Bloomington, Center for Education and Society Colloquium Series (March 31, 2005).
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THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF EDUCATION IN LATIN AMERICA: LOCI OF ATTRACTION AND MECHANISMS OF DIFFUSION Jason Beech Educational systems in Latin America have been constructed and developed through the flow of educational institutions and ideas across international borders. Not even 50 years had passed from the arrival of Columbus to the Americas when the first Latin American university was established in Santo Domingo in 1538 (Brunner, 1990). The Spanish (and the Catholic Church) considered education as a fundamental part of their colonizing strategies. It was mainly the Jesuits who developed the first educational institutions in what is currently known as Latin America, based on the ideas of the counter-reform that they brought from Southern Europe (Cano, 1985). As the Spanish were defeated in the independence wars during the early nineteenth century, the leaders of the independence movements in South America became fascinated by the Lancaster method that had developed in England (Narodowski, 1994). These types of schools were institutionalized in Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela, and in many other parts of the Continent. Later in that same century, as Nation-States started to consolidate, mass elementary education systems were constructed on the basis of positivistic influences, coming especially from France. This (hi)story could continue
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with many other influences that shaped educational practices in Latin America, ending with almost simultaneous and similar educational reforms implemented in most countries of the region in the 1990s, following the ‘universal model of education for the information age’ promoted by international agencies (Beech, 2005). From the perspective of institutional theory, these foreign influences have made educational systems in Latin America (and in other parts of the world) increasingly similar. As Meyer and Ramirez say, when referring to the ‘‘world institutionalization of education’’: The logic of rationalized modern mass and elite education has always meant that a high degree of international homogenisation was involved. Within the framework of a world society the process of becoming a nation-state and of competing with other nation-states led to the adoption of remarkably similar technologies, such as education. This process has produced pressures towards institutional isomorphism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (Meyer & Ramirez, 2000)
Thus, from these authors’ point of view, patterns of educational systems (and especially their similarities) cannot be explained by national sociohistorical characteristics. They are rather the result of an existing ‘world culture’ (ibid.). This position has had several critiques in the field of comparative education. Dale suggests that the evidence that these authors use to arrive to their conclusions is based on categories set at a high ‘‘level of generality’’, and that they present little evidence of how these categories are nationally interpreted (Dale, 2000). Furthermore, what is most systematically criticized in the work of Meyer and Ramirez (and other authors who have put forward similar arguments) is that they fail to capture processes of indigenization (Schriewer, 1992, 2000a, b) or recontextualization (Steiner-Khamsi, 2000) through which, in the course of institutional implementation, these trans-nationally disseminated models are ‘‘interwoven with previous layers of political behavior, social meanings and culture-specific patterns y [that] change their significance and the way they function’’ (Schriewer, 2000a). The two sides of this debate can be identified in the work of John Meyer and Francisco Ramirez (Meyer & Ramirez, 2000) in Stanford, who represent the position that stresses similarities in educational systems around the world, and in the work of Jurgen Schriewer and other scholars from the University of Humboldt in Berlin (Schriewer, 2000a, b; Waldow, 2002), who represent the perspective which emphasizes the indigenization of foreign ideas. The impressive amount of scholarly work that has derived from this discussion has been the main contribution of comparative education to institutional theory.
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In this chapter I suggest that comparative education can further contribute to institutional theory by moving on from this debate, and by addressing foreign influences in education from a slightly different perspective; looking at how the loci of attraction and the mechanisms of diffusion of educational ideas shifted throughout different historical periods. Thus, this chapter will analyze the historical institutionalization of educational systems in Latin America by addressing questions such as, ‘Where did these influences come from?’ and ‘How were these influences disseminated?’ These questions will be explored through a comparative view over time of educational systems in Argentina and Brazil. The first section will analyze the construction of ‘modern’ educational systems in Argentina and Brazil, showing how Positivistic influences and ‘The New Education Movement’ have been adopted and adapted differently in these countries. I will argue that the incorporation of these foreign influences depended on identified internal needs. Thus, the ways in which these influences were adopted depended on specific socio-political characteristics in these countries, resulting in particular patterns in each of these educational systems. The second section will consider the period after the 1950s, when international agencies shifted their focus from the reconstruction of Europe to the ‘development of the world’. It was during this period that international agencies started to have a strong influence on education policies in Latin America. It will be argued that these influences were not incorporated as a consequence of specific local problems that were previously identified in Latin American educational systems. Rather, international agencies defined the problems with these educational systems and at the same time offered the solutions to these problems. In the last part of this section, the period in which educational systems in Latin America were constructed will be compared with the period after the 1950s. It will be suggested that not only the loci of attraction, but also the mechanisms of diffusion have changed since international agencies became fundamental actors in the global educational field. The chapter will end with a reflection upon a research agenda that derives for institutional theories in education from the shifts mentioned above.
THE ORIGINS OF EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS IN ARGENTINA AND BRAZIL I suggest in this section that throughout their formation processes, Argentine and Brazilian educational systems have been subject to similar
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influences. However, it will also be suggested that these influences have been interpreted differently, resulting in particular patterns in each of these systems, since ‘‘Educational ideas do not just migrate; in speaking to different cultural histories and conditions they also change’’ (Alexander, 2000). Thus, in this section Argentine and Brazilian systems of education will be analyzed as contexts of reception and adaptation of two major international influences: Positivism and The New Education Movement. Auguste Comte, who coined the term ‘positive philosophy’, understood that human thought had gone through three clearly discernable stages: the theological stage and the metaphysical stage were necessary steps in the evolution of human thought, but both were dissolved with the triumph of Positivism (Giddens, 1995). This philosophy trusted scientific knowledge as the unique way of attaining truth through observation, experimentation and comparison. Sociology, the new science of society founded by Comte, should share the same logical form as the natural sciences once it was freed from metaphysics (ibid.). Social facts had to be treated as ‘things’, as natural objects. ‘‘The aim of sociology was to arrive at the formulation of principles that had the same objective status as natural scientific laws’’ (ibid.). Progressive social change could only happen cumulatively and, thus, ‘order and progress’ was the fundamental slogan of Positivism, which also established a tight mutual dependence between these two concepts. Positivism became very influential in Europe, in the USA and, especially, in Latin America (ibid.): the slogan in the Brazilian flag (order and progress) is the most visible example of this influence. In this context, Pedagogy (understood as the science that studies education) was seen as one of the extensions of natural sciences applied to the study of humans (Gvirtz, 1991). Pedagogy had its foundations in Biology and, more specifically, in the study of the nervous system. In this way, it was possible to discover certain scientific laws that could explain the way in which the processes of teaching and learning worked. Thus, the aim of Pedagogy was to discover these laws, and to derive from them certain methods that would make the education of the new generations more efficient (ibid.). This view of education was very influential in Brazil and Argentina, where the French educational system and the Normal School were taken up as models. The creation of the Argentine educational system was part of the State-led project of building a ‘modern’ Argentine Nation. Within this project, a ‘modern’ educational system was seen as the most adequate social technology to give rise to cultural unity out of a vast territory with intense regional
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disparities. This cultural diversity was considered to be a threat for the central power (Tedesco, 1986; Gvirtz, 1991). The intention of the Argentine elite was to shift from a ‘traditional’ scattered society to a united ‘modern’ Nation integrated into the rest of the world. This project required new men and women who would be united by their common feeling of love for the Patria (Nation). ‘‘Civilizacio´n o barbarie’’ was the slogan of Sarmiento, who is considered the founder of the Argentine educational system. Two strategies were mainly used in the quest for civilizing the country: education and the promotion of European immigration (Tedesco, 1986). European immigrants were seen as ‘civilizing’ agents that would bring with them their culture, order and attitude toward work, serving as a model for the Argentine population. As one of the most important Argentine intellectuals of the time, J. B. Alberdi, said: ‘‘Each European who arrives at our shores brings more civilization in his habits – which he then communicates to our inhabitants – than many books of philosophy’’ (cited in ibid.). However, immigrants became another obstacle in the homogenizing project. The newly arrived introduced many different cultural traditions, languages and values, adding to existing cultural diversity. Thus, the new immigrant groups reinforced the need for a public primary school that would ‘convert’ all of the population into a common culture and guarantee political stability, legitimizing the power of the central State (ibid.). In 1884, a law was passed establishing that primary schooling should be compulsory, free of cost for the pupils, and that no religious contents should be taught in schools. Primary schools expanded rapidly throughout the Argentine territory. However, there was a problem with the strategy of the State. The Argentine elite had quite an ambiguous position toward the culture that should be transmitted in schools: they promoted a ‘European way of life’, but at the same time they struggled against the perpetuation of the ways of life of each of the particular foreign communities (ibid.). Consequently, finding the agents that would transmit the dominant culture – which was foreign to them – was a problem for those in charge of the educational system. It was necessary to create an ‘army’ of specialists that would perform a fundamental task in the nation-building project (Alliaud, 1993). The State assumed the responsibility for the training of teachers borrowing the French model of the Normal School. In 1869, the first Normal School was funded in the City of Parana´, by 1885 the National State had funded 18 of these teacher-training institutions (at least one in each of the
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14 Argentine provinces), and by 1889 there were 34 Normal Schools in Argentina (ibid.). Positivism had a strong influence on the kind of education that took place in the Normal Schools (and in the educational system at large) (Gvirtz, 1991; Alliaud, 1993; Tedesco, 1986). When the National State created the educational system in Argentina it had to displace the Catholic Church, which had been in charge of most educational practices up to that time (Oszlack, 1997). Unquestioned faith in God and in the moral principles of the Church was replaced by secular faith in Science and in natural laws (Alliaud, 1993). However, even though the contents of the moral principles of the Church were displaced, its forms were kept. The previously unquestioned love for the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit was displaced by love for the school, science and the Patria. Schools became the ‘temples of knowledge’, and teachers the ‘priests of civilization’: The duties of the teacher are hardly less sacred and delicate than those of the priest. In many important aspects they have a similar relation with society y . (Varela, J. P. cited in Alliaud, 1993)
Thus, the State promoted amongst teachers a clearly defined professional identity: their role was to transmit the dominant culture and to fight against ‘ignorance’ (defined as the perpetuation of any culture that was different from the one promoted by schools). As a result of the efforts of the federal government, by the 1930s, Argentina had a highly centralized and consolidated national educational system that had been notably successful in attracting about two thirds of school-aged population to schools and in promoting an homogeneous national identity. Initial teacher education emphasized the role of teachers as agents of construction of national identity, and by the 1940s graduates of the Normal Schools in Argentina outnumbered available posts in the educational system (Tedesco, 1986; Gvirtz, 1991). Meanwhile, in Brazil, the Imperial Court assumed the responsibility for the education of the elites and civil servants for the state bureaucracy that was being created with the Empire (1822–1889). All responsibility for elementary, secondary and teacher education was delegated to the provinces (later states). In a slave society with deep social inequalities the provincial governments did not allocate much efforts or resources to public education. Rather, the strategy that was emphasized to attain the ‘civilization’ of Brazil was the promotion of European immigration (Skidmore, 1999). Nevertheless, Positivism did influence the development of school systems in most provinces and the French Normal School was taken as a model for
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the construction of teacher education institutions in Brazil. But the development of these systems was slow and very uneven in the different provinces. Furthermore, since the education of the masses was not considered to be important by the Imperial authorities, nor by the provincial governments, the school itself lacked social legitimation (Mendes Faria Filho, 2000). The advent of the Republic (1889) did not bring much educational change (Berger, 1977). In 1900, 58.8% of the Brazilian population were considered to be illiterate, by 1920 the proportion was essentially the same (60.1%) (de Azevedo, 1964; Santos Ribeiro, 1979; Skidmore, 1999). The principle of decentralization was maintained, keeping the responsibility for primary and teacher education in the hands of the states (former provinces). This resulted in considerable inequalities in how each state organized its educational system (Catani, 2000). Thus, although foreign influences in Argentina and Brazil were similar, results in practice were very different. In Brazil, the educational system was decentralized, resulting in enormous regional disparities in the development of educational systems in the provinces (later states), and approximately two thirds of the population was illiterate. As will be explained later in this section, the education of the masses and the construction of a national identity only started to become a ‘national issue’ in the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, although there is no available data on the number of graduates of Normal Schools in Brazil in the 1930s, it is clear that Brazil had not achieved at those times the qualitative expansion of teacher education required for its educational system.1 These considerable differences in the way that Positivism, and other ‘foundational’ foreign influences were interpreted and acted upon, are essential to understand how later influences were recontextualized differently as they met diverse contexts in Argentina and Brazil. This will be illustrated by the analysis of how the ‘New Education Movement’ was interpreted differently in Argentina and in Brazil, resulting once again in very different practical effects. It was during the end of the nineteenth century that the notion of New Education (Education nouvelle or Reformpa¨dagogik) was created to designate, ‘‘in various parts of the world, the pedagogical and educational revival that appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century and gained strength after the First World War’’ Adolphe Ferriere, one of the founders of the movement, defined the type of education promoted as one in which ‘‘the experience of the child serves as a base for intellectual education through the appropriate use of manual work and moral education, and through the practice of a system of relative autonomy of students’’.
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The ‘movement’ was interpreted differently in parts of Europe and America resulting in diverse pedagogical movements, reforms and new schools that followed a ‘child-centered’ education (cited in Menin, 1996). As will be shown, different interpretations of these movements also took place in Argentina and Brazil. By 1930 the social and economic conditions in which the Republic had been established in Brazil had changed. The power of the landowning elite had diminished with the growth of industrialization. An industrial bourgeoisie was formed, the urban middle classes were strengthened in numbers and political formation, and an organized working class movement began to emerge, experimenting with unions and strikes (Cowen & Figueiredo, 1992). Another significant change at those times was a new attitude toward Afro-Brazilians. The strategy of ‘whitening’ the population that had dominated the early years of the Republic was abandoned. This strategy was based on the elite’s acceptance of the ‘scientifically proven’ superiority of the white race. Following this belief, the Brazilian elite assumed that by promoting European immigration they could ‘‘virtually ‘bleach out’ the non-white element’’ (Skidmore, 1999). On the contrary, from the late 1920s and 1930s, the non-whites – especially those of African origin – started to be seen as a positive factor in Brazilian society (ibid.). In this context of change and growing concerns about the creation of a ‘modern’ nation, racist conceptions were replaced (or at least weakened) by an emphasis on health and education as means for countering the ‘backwardness’ of non-whites. The construction of a Brazilian Nation that would be a melting pot of whites, blacks and immigrants posed the challenge of ‘social regeneration’, particularly of those groups that had been traditionally left out of any meaningful social participation. Health and education would become the focus of the strategies employed to produce a ‘new Brazilian citizen’ (Goncalves Vidal, 2000). For the first time in Brazilian history the education of the masses became a national issue. Public opinion was alarmed by the results of the census of 1920; the number of illiterates had almost doubled since previous measurements.2 Social changes in Brazil at the time were reflected on an educational ‘revolution’ in which the massification of basic education was sought. The dominant belief amongst the reformers was that if a new society was wanted, it was not enough to expand the kind of schools that had existed up to that time. These had clearly not been designed for the education of the masses. As Teixeira noted, a complete reformulation of the educational system was necessary:
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Taken by surprise, and without the necessary resources for the new educational enterprise, Brazilian society has not noticed that it would be a negligent alternative to expand the existing educational system to the new ascending social classes. This system, which was designed for the middle and higher classes, was maybe satisfactory for the stabilized, or rather stagnant, society of the 1920s, but is absolutely inadequate for the new social conditions. (Teixeira cited in Berger, 1977)
A new pedagogic theory was sought, once again, outside of Brazil. The reformists appropriated the movement known as ‘New Education’, which was at the peak of its international popularity (1920s–1940s). Missions of European pedagogues were brought to Brazil, while a number of Brazilian educators were sent on study trips to Teachers College, Columbia (Goncalves Vidal, 2000; Batista da Silva, 2002). There was an effort to make the international pedagogic discussions available to Brazilian teachers by creating several editorial series, which translated foreign texts. In addition, Brazilian scholars often cited authors such as Dewey, Decroly, and Ferriere (ibid.). In this context, New Education was read as a foundational pedagogic movement that encountered a weakly-developed educational system as it moved into Brazil. Thus, the movement was officialized in several educational reforms, it was captured by publishing companies and entered schools and the curricula for elementary, secondary and teacher education. Within the new attitude toward non-whites, the moral message of the state promoted among teachers in Brazil a professional identity in which the role assigned to teachers was to collaborate with the progress of the country by civilizing the masses, promoting ‘work habits’ and a Brazilian identity. The New Education Movement in Brazil involved a significant rupture with Pestalozzi’s intuitive method that had dominated pedagogic theory and practice. While the intuitive method was based on observation as the most significant educational experience for the child, New Education was based on the child’s actions. Observation was still important, but only as a preparation for the child’s experimentation. It was the child who constructed his or her knowledge. Learning became more important than teaching, and a new relation between teachers and students was promoted (Goncalves Vidal, 2000). The new method questioned and changed the traditional use of time and space in school. The child’s ‘‘psychological’’ interest became the crucial element in deciding the use of school-time and space. A text by de Azevedo in 1930 stated: It is not the hour that irremediably fixes the limits of the lesson, it is the psychological need of the awakened interest that the teacher must draw upon, continuing, without time limit, with the subject or work that was being carried out y . (de Azevedo, cited in ibid.)
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Similarly, the use of space within the classroom was altered. The fixed organization of desks in rows was displaced by an approach that emphasized group-work and the organization of the classroom according to the different ‘‘projects’’ undertaken by the students (ibid.). Meanwhile, in Argentina, there were many socio-political changes between the 1890s and the first decades of the twentieth century, such as massive immigration, the emergence of the middle class and its arrival to power (Tedesco, 1986). The educational system had been (and was still being) very successful in fostering a national identity. Thus, these changes mostly affected the university, but as the middle classes arrived to power they did not review other levels of the educational system. Having no space in official rhetoric, the ‘New Education Movement’ was only picked up in Argentina by some private publications aimed at teachers (Gvirtz, 1996). It is difficult to assess the extent to which these publications actually changed the type of education offered in Argentine schools. Nevertheless, what is clear is that the adoption and the adaptation of the ‘New Education Movement’ in Argentina was very different when compared to Brazil, where this movement had a strong influence on State-centered educational reforms and on official curricula. Therefore, in the analysis of Positivism and The New Education Movement it was clear how trajectories of teacher education reflected (and at the same time contributed to) changes in Argentine and Brazilian societies at large. Socio-political variations between these two countries resulted in different interpretations of Positivistic influences. These considerable differences in the way that the Normal School, and other ‘foundational’ foreign influences were interpreted and acted upon, partly explain how later influences were recontextualized differently as they met diverse contexts in Argentina and Brazil. This was illustrated by the analysis offered about how the ‘New Education Movement’ was interpreted differently in Argentina and in Brazil, resulting once again in very different practical effects. When the Argentine elite decided in the late nineteenth century that they would construct an educational system as a strategy to homogenize the population and legitimize the power of the central State, they found a clear problem within their plan: the need to train teachers that could transmit this unifying culture. They appropriated the French model of the Normal School that had been used in post-revolution France and had moved to many parts of the world. Meanwhile in Brazil, where there was no clear project to unify the population under a homogenizing culture, similar influences were weak and dispersed.
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Similarly, when socio-political changes in 1930s Brazil resulted in the education of the masses becoming a national issue, those in charge of educational policies conceptualized the problem as the need to have a complete reformulation of the educational system that was considered to be inadequate for the new social conditions. They found the ‘solution’ in the ‘New Education Movement’ that was at the peak of its international popularity at that time. Consequently, the ‘New Education Movement’ was used as the basis for a number of official reforms in Brazil. However, in Argentina, where the educational system was consolidated and no reformulation of the system was sought, the ‘New Education Movement’ was ignored at the official level. Thus, in both cases foreign influences were similar, but the way in which they were appropriated and adapted depended significantly on specific socio-political and educational circumstances. This clear relation between socio-political characteristics and the way in which each of these countries appropriated foreign influences to construct their teacher-education systems diminished with the next influence that will be analyzed: Desarrollismo.
DEVELOPMENTAL AND TECHNOCRATIC VIEWS IN ARGENTINA AND BRAZIL When compared with the other two sets of influence analyzed, the particularity of Desarrollismo is that it was mainly promoted by international agencies, as they emerged as fundamental actors in the educational field in the late 1950s – once the reconstruction of Europe was attained and they re-oriented their efforts toward the ‘development’ of the world (Beech, 2005). Under the influence of developmental and technocratic views, both in Argentina and Brazil education started to be justified in economic terms, as a means for the training of ‘human resources’ (Southwell, 1997). The final aim of education – as stated in official rhetoric – was to attain the development of the country. Development was seen as a linear process in which different preconceived stages had to necessarily be passed in order to shift from a traditional to an industrialized society (ibid.). This was seen as the guarantee of a better future. Following this technical rationality, the concept of educational planning was introduced as a fundamental social technology for development, which
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would guarantee the prediction and solution of a wide range of social, economic and political problems (Davini, 1995). The use of standardized diagnostic tests, followed by strategic planning and the implementation of technical solutions were seen as the most neutral and rational way of making decisions (Southwell, 1997). ‘‘Planning and Development’’ were the governing words. The emphasis on planning and development had been promoted by international agencies in Latin America since the 1950s. UNESCO and OEA (Organizacio´n de Estados Americanos) organized a ‘‘Conference of Ministers of Education’’ in Lima in 1956, there was an ‘‘Inter-American Seminar of Integral Planning’’ held in Washington in 1958, and in that same year UNESCO organized the ‘‘Inter-American Conference on Education and Economic and Social Development’’ (ibid.). The influence of international agencies resulted in similarities at the level of official rhetoric in Argentina and Brazil. In both countries the economic motif was introduced into the moral message that defined the role of teachers as trainers of human resources with the ultimate aim of attaining the ‘development’ of their countries. Teaching was seen as a question of techniques, and emphasis was placed on using the ‘latest’ didactic methods and applying new technologies to the teaching process. Similarly, with the introduction of social technologies such as ‘educational planning’ and ‘curriculum’ there was a tendency to increase the bureaucracy and division of labor in the educational system. Consequently, in the case of developmental and technocratic views that moved into Argentina and Brazil, it is not so clear that they were incorporated as a result of identified internal needs. Rather, the simultaneity and similarity in how these influences were incorporated at the official level in Argentina and Brazil suggests that it was international agencies that read the Argentine and Brazilian educational systems as lacking, for example, educational planning, and promoted this social technology, and others, as a universal elixir that would solve a number of educational problems in these (and other) contexts. Thus, some shifts in the loci of attraction and the mechanisms of diffusion of foreign influences in Latin American education start to become apparent with the promotion of developmental and technocratic views. The transfer of developmental and technocratic views into Argentina and Brazil did not take place from one educational system to another, but from international agencies to specific educational systems. The distinctiveness of international agencies when compared with other actors in the educational field – such as, national states, provincial states, municipal states, institutions and teachers
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– is that they do not act upon a particular educational context, they are abstracted from practice, and this has some significant consequences. International agencies do not seek to solve context-specific educational problems. Rather, they seek to identify some universal educational principles that could be applied in most educational systems to ‘improve’ education (Beech, 2005). This search for universal principles is implicitly based on the assumption that education can be seen as an independent aspect of social reality, and that, as a consequence, universal principles in education can be designed. Thus, when promoting developmental and technocratic views international agencies were not trying to solve a context-specific educational problem, they were promoting a number of abstract universal social technologies (such as educational planning) that – in the logic of these agencies – could be used to improve education in most contexts. There was also a shift in the mechanisms of diffusion of foreign influences. This shift is related to the sequencing of the process. When the Normal School and the New Education Movement were adopted in Argentina and Brazil, following a chronological order, a problem was identified, then a solution was searched in a foreign system, and finally a ‘tested’ social technology was transferred. On the contrary, as international agencies promote certain universal educational principles, they simultaneously define the problems of an educational context and offer the solutions to these problems. Thus, the movement of developmental and technocratic views into Argentina and Brazil was not a consequence of specific problems that were previously identified in each of these educational systems. Rather, international agencies constructed the problems and at the same time offered the solutions to these problems. These shifts, that started to become apparent with the promotion of developmental views, were consolidated in the 1980s and 1990s when international agencies such as UNESCO, the World Bank and OECD promoted a Universal Model of Education for the Information Age (Beech, 2005). The proposals of these agencies were based on the assumption that the future will present a ‘forever rapidly changing world’ influenced by the rhythm of technological ‘progress’. Of course that if the world will be ceaselessly changing in the future this has effects for education. Thus, the selfproclaimed task of these organizations was not only to look for solutions to existing educational problems, but also to identify – or rather predict – the problems that will arise in the future. In this way, OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank positioned themselves as the ‘scientific experts’ that can predict the future, and also as those that can design universal educational solutions that adapt to this (imagined) future (ibid.).
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The Universal Model of Education for the Information Age promoted by these agencies was based on: Decentralization/school autonomy Lifelong learning Centralized curriculum based on competencies: Communication skills Creativity Flexibility Learning to learn Ability to work in groups Problem solving Central evaluation system(s) Professionalization of teachers (ibid.) Both Brazil and Argentina implemented in the 1990s a complete reform of their educational systems, meaning that the governments’ intention was not only to change some aspects of these educational systems, but rather to implement an all-embracing reform. The justification for such an important shift was found mainly in the need to adapt to globalization and the information age. This all-embracing reform followed the principles promoted by international agencies in their universal model of education. Thus, for example, Argentina’s highly centralized educational system was decentralized, delegating most educational responsibilities from the National State to the provinces. Meanwhile, in Brazil, where most educational responsibilities were in the hand of the states, the delegation was made to municipalities. In addition, both Brazil and Argentina abandoned their encyclopedic and prescriptive curricular traditions, replacing them by centralized curricula based on the transmission of competencies (including those competencies that were promoted by international agencies). Furthermore, most Latin American countries adopted this Universal Model. Most countries in the region had initiated educational reforms between the 1980s and the early 1990s. Ecuador passed its Ley de Educacio´n in 1983. In Uruguay the Ley de Educacio´n was sanctioned in 1985. In Chile the Ley Orga´nica Constitucional de Ensen˜anza [Organic Constitutional Law of Teaching] was approved in 1990. In that same year an educational law was passed in El Salvador. In 1992, a 10-Year Educational Plan was established in the Dominican Republic. In 1993, the Ley Federal de Educacio´n was passed in Argentina and a new educational law was sanctioned in Mexico. Bolivia approved its Ley de Reforma Educativa in 1994 and in the same year the Colombian Ley General de Educacio´n was passed. In 1996, the Lei de
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Diretrizes e Bases da Educac- a˜o [Law of Guidelines and Foundations of Education] was approved in Brazil (Braslavsky & Gvirtz, 2000). Thus, in a 13-year period many countries in Latin America established new laws that regulate their educational systems. Furthermore, the reforms initiated with these laws were based on similar principles: decentralization, school autonomy, the professionalization of teachers, a curriculum based on competencies, and the setting up of central evaluation systems (Braslavsky & Gvirtz, 2000; Martinez Boom, 2000). For example, in an 8-year period central evaluation systems were established in 11 Latin American Countries. In 1986 the Programa de Pruebas Nacionales del Ministerio de Educacio´n Pu´blica was set up in Costa Rica. In 1988, the Sistema de Medicio´n de la Calidad de la Educacio´n was established in Chile. In Brazil, the Sistema Nacional de Avaliac- a˜o Ba´sica was founded in 1990, and in the same year a National Evaluation System was created in Colombia. In 1992 similar systems were established in Paraguay and Mexico. The Sistema Nacional de Evaluacio´n de la Calidad in Argentina was set up in 1993. Uruguay and Bolivia started their own National Evaluation Systems in 1994. Similar centralized systems were established in Ecuador in 1995 and in Peru in 1996 (Gvirtz & Larripa, 2002). Thus, the shift in the loci of attraction that started to become apparent with the influence of developmental views is even clearer when analyzing the movement of the Universal Model of Education for the Information Age promoted by international agencies. Since these agencies are actors in the educational field that are abstracted from practice, their model is not taken from a specific practice-bound educational context. The model has not been ‘tested’ in a given context. Rather it is an imagined abstract model that has been designed according to a series of predictions about the future, which are legitimized by their ‘scientific’ status. The second shift identified while analyzing developmental influences also becomes clearer when examining the movement of the Universal Model of Education for the Information Age promoted by international agencies into Argentina and Brazil. The simultaneity and similarity in the all-embracing reforms implemented in Argentina and in Brazil – two countries with very different educational trajectories – suggests that these reforms were not triggered by a detailed analysis of the specific problems of these educational systems. On the contrary, these similarities suggest that one of the distinctive characteristics of this Universal Model of Education is that it not only includes ‘the solutions’ to most educational problems, but it also constructs these ‘problems’. This abstract universal model is offered as a norm against which the adequacy of existing educational practices in a given context can
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be measured. Thus, by defining the ‘problems’ in a given educational context, international agencies set the agenda for discussions about how to ‘improve’ education. Then, once the ‘problems’ have been identified, there are only a limited number of themes that can be discussed, and a limited number of policy options that can ‘solve’ these ‘problems’. These possible solutions are also offered in the Model. Consequently, it is by defining the problems of an educational context and simultaneously offering the solutions to these problems that the Model promoted by international agencies narrows the discursive space of possibilities in educational contexts to which it moves. However, even though at the level of official discourse educational reforms in Argentina and Brazil (and in other countries of Latin America) seem to be very similar, an exploration of how these reforms were implemented in practice showed several unexpected consequences of the localizing of the proposals of international agencies in practice (Beech, 2005). An example of this can be seen in the practical effects of the reform of curricular regulations in Argentina. As has been shown in the previous section, teachers in Argentina were not expected to have any participation in decisions related to the contents they had to transmit. Influenced by international agencies, the reform emphasized autonomy and creativity on the side of teachers who should be able to have freedom to choose the specific contents of the lessons according to local context and students’ characteristics, but respecting general guidelines from the central agencies of the State. However, a series of interviews with teachers and teacher educators showed that many Argentine teachers, as they were faced with an autonomy for which they were not prepared, started using the indexes of the manuals that publishing companies produce for students to structure their lessons (Beech, 2005). Thus, since the new curricular documents do not provide a detailed guide to which contents should be included, (some) teachers looked for another guide that could replace the prescriptive curriculum that they had in the past. They found the guide in the manuals that editing companies produce for students. Therefore, an idea that is acceptable as an abstract ideal (that teachers should have autonomy to decide on the contents of lessons) results in unexpected consequences as it is localized in practice and recontextualized. Furthermore, the consequences of similar policies were very different in different contexts. An example of how an abstract ideal model can have different effects in different contexts of reception can be seen in how the specific recommendation about the use of time contained in the proposals of international agencies and adopted by both Brazilian and Argentine policies – that practice-based training in schools should become a major part of the
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training of teachers – was interpreted in each of these countries. In Brazil, definitions of pedagogic knowledge in Escolanovismo included the idea that future teachers should experiment with real classes, constructing their own pedagogic knowledge. Consequently, trainees already spent a great part of time in practice-based activities, and therefore interviewees considered the extension of time spent in these activities as delirious and impossible to administer. In Argentina, from the perspective of teacher educators, trainees spent very little time in practice-based training and, therefore, the extension of time spent by trainees in schools was seen as a positive aspect of the reform and, as a response to a historical demand of teacher educators (Beech, 2005). As this abstract proposal of international agencies was localized in different contexts the practical effects were very different in each of these specific localities. Thus, although the model promoted by international agencies is universal (it does not consider the specificities of each context to which it moves), the way in which the model is adopted and adapted depends on the characteristics of the contexts of reception.
A RESEARCH AGENDA Throughout this chapter, I have made an attempt to show that the debate on whether educational systems have become increasingly similar or not needs to be historically grounded because the origins of ‘‘trans-nationally standardized educational models’’ (Schriewer, 2000b) and the way in which these systems were disseminated have changed in different periods. These shifts in what I have called loci of attraction and mechanisms of diffusion are fundamental for comparative education and for institutional theory because they result in significant differences in the practical effects of the localizing of these models. It is quite clear, and established in the literature by the work of Meyer and Ramirez, that there are certain educational ideas and institutions that have acquired through different historical periods a supranational entity. That is, although these ideas or institutions were developed in a specific context, they have become universal as they were disseminated through different locations. The dissemination of these ideas resulted in the homogenization of educational systems around the world. However, Schriewer and SteinerKhamsi (among others) have also shown that when analyzing in detail the policies and practices that derive from these similar foreign influences it is possible to discern significant differences in the way in which these transnational ideas are put into practice.
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I would like to suggest that these two apparently conflicting points of view can be reconciled by borrowing from Ball’s (2000) conception of policy both as text and as discourse. Ball’s conception of policy as text stresses agency and interpretation, noting that for any text ‘‘a plurality of readers must necessarily produce a plurality of readings’’ (ibid.). As policies move from formulation into practice, gaps and spaces for action and response are opened up. Policies are not transmitted into a vacuum, there are social, institutional and personal circumstances that will affect the way in which policies are understood by those who (are supposed to) put them into practice. When practitioners are faced with a given physical text (i.e. a curricular document), they are confronted with a number of problems that are involved in the ‘‘translation of the crude, abstract simplicities of policy texts into interactive and sustainable practices’’ (ibid.). These problems must be addressed in context. Thus, the ways in which these problems are approached are localized: according to the context, different solutions will be offered to the problem of implementing in practice a given policy. Furthermore, Ball notes that: the more ideologically abstract any policy is, the more distant in conception from practice y , the less likely it is to be accommodated in unmediated form into the context of practice; it confronts ‘other realities’, other circumstances, like poverty, disrupted classrooms, lack of materials, multi-lingual classes. Some policies change some of the circumstances in which we work, they cannot change all the circumstances. (ibid.)
Thus, taking up Ball’s conception of policies as texts could suggest that, the adoption of certain ‘transnational’ educational ideas would have different practical effects in different contexts. In other words, in an analysis that stresses agency and interpretation, it would be expected that different practitioners would interpret a given educational idea in different ways. However, such an analysis might be ‘‘caught within an ideology of agency: by dealing with what is or can be done it misses the big picture’’ (ibid.). Conflict, struggle and interpretation take place over a pre-established terrain. It is at this point that Ball introduces the notion of policy as a discourse. Discourses are a system of possibility for knowledge: by creating the possibility for certain meanings and interpretations of the world, they constrain the possibilities for other meanings and interpretations to arise. In this sense, discourses disrupt or maintain power relations by defining certain ‘‘discursive limitations’’ (ibid.), demarcating the pre-established terrain within which interpretations can take place. Practitioners may only think of
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possibilities of response and interpretation within the ‘‘language, concepts and vocabulary, which the discourse makes available’’ to them (Ibid.). Ball notes that the essence of this dual conceptualization of policies both as text and as discourse is that: there are real struggles over the interpretation and enactment of policies. But these are set within a moving discursive frame which articulates and constrains the possibilities and probabilities of interpretation and enactment. We read and respond to policies in discursive circumstances that we cannot, or perhaps do not, think about. (ibid.)
Thus, if we adopt Ball’s interpretation of policy to understand the effects of foreign influences, we can make sense of both Meyer and Ramirez and Schriewer’s position: transnational educational ideas establish a discursive frame in the contexts to which they move, but within this frame there are different interpretations and enactments of these ideas depending on the existing culture in the contexts of reception. If we can agree on the point made above (which of course I believe that we should), I suggest that comparative education should move into a more detailed analysis of how certain ideas have become part of ‘‘transnational models’’ (Schriewer, 2000a), and of the processes through which these models have been disseminated in different historical periods. For example, the loci of attraction during the nineteenth century were the countries that were seen as having developed ‘advanced’ educational systems: mainly Prussia, France and, later, some US states such as Massachusetts. Later, during the second half of the twentieth century, and especially after the launch of the Sputnik by the USSR, US educators were attracted by Soviet education, as represented by books such as Trace’s (1961) What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn’t; and by the English infant schools (Ravitch, 1983). Some years later, it was Asian education that became attractive for Western educators, as exemplified by the United States, Office of Educational Research and Improvement’s (1987) report on Japanese Education Today, and Stevenson and Stigler’s (1993) The learning gap: Why our schools are failing and what we can learn from Japanese and Chinese education. Meanwhile in Latin America, and in most of the so-called ‘developing world’, international agencies have become the main loci of attraction for educational reformers. This can be partly explained by the conditionalities that some international financial organizations place on countries with huge external debts. However, other international agencies, such as UNESCO, do not have the formal (or financial) power to impose their ideas. Nevertheless, they are extremely influential because the ‘magical’ and over simple solutions that these agencies offer as an elixir that could solve most educational
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problems in most contexts become extremely attractive for some governments in times of uncertainty (Ball, 1998). Similarly, the mechanisms of diffusion of transnational ideas have shifted through out time. During the nineteenth century, ideas about education were disseminated mainly through a number of travelers who were in most cases appointed by their governments to develop their own systems of education as exemplified by the works of administrators such as, Horace Mann, John Griscom and William T. Harris from the USA, Mathew Arnold and J. P. Kay-Shuttleworth from England, and Leo N. Tolstoy from Russia, amongst many others (Noah & Eckstein, 1969). However, in the current world, the mechanisms of diffusion of educational ideas have become much more complex, not only because of the revolution in information technology, but also because there are new (or increasingly more powerful) players in the global educational field that disseminate educational ideas: international agencies, regional blocks, virtual universities, internationally mobile consultants and many others. Thus, a clear research agenda derives from the evidence presented in this chapter. In the first place, when analyzing the diffusion of transnational models, comparative education should address questions such as: How was the model constructed? and How was the model disseminated? Secondly, this type of analysis should be historically grounded to capture shifts over time. Finally, it is fundamental to examine how these transnational models affect actual pedagogic practice in the contexts of reception. This has been a problem with comparative education, that by mainly concentrating on the analysis of education policy at the macro level, has many times neglected the complex relation between educational policies as a construction of the State and the effects of these policies in practice. Hopefully, this kind of research could add to the contribution of comparative education to the development of institutional theory.
NOTES 1. In 1964, the Censo Escolar revealed that only 56% of Brazilian primary teachers had had a professional education. Out of the 44% of teachers with no professional training, 71.6% had only finished primary education (Tanuri, 2000). 2. The proportion of illiterates was the same as in 1900 (about 60%). However, population in Brazil had almost doubled, passing from 17,438,434 in 1900 to 30,635,605 in 1920. Thus, the number of illiterates had almost doubled in 20 years. (Berger, 1977; Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Esadistica [Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics]).
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REFERENCES Alexander, R. (2000). Culture and pedagogy: International comparisons in primary education. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Alliaud, A. (1993). Los maestros y su historia: los origenes del magisterio argentino [Teachers and their history: The origins of the Argentine teachers]. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de America Latina. Ball, S. J. (1998). Big policies/small world: An introduction to international perspectives in education policy. Comparative Education, 34(2), 119–130. Ball, S. J. (2000). What is policy? Texts, trajectories and toolboxes. In: S. Ball (Ed.), Sociology of education: Major themes (Vol. IV, pp. 1830–1841). London: Routledge Falmer. Batista da Silva, V. (2002). Uma Historia das Leituras para Professores: Analise da producao e circulacao de saberes especializados nos manuais pedagogicos (1930–1971) [A history of readings for teachers: Analysis of the production and circulation of specialised knowledge in pedagogic manuals]. Paper presented at the 25th annual meeting of ANPED, Caxambu, Brazil. Beech, J. (2005). International agencies, educational discourse, and the reform of teacher education in Argentina and Brazil (1985-2002): A comparative analysis. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Institute of Education, University of London. Berger, M. (1977). Educacao e Dependencia [Education and dependency] (2nd ed.). Rio de Janeiro–Sao Paulo: DIFEL. Braslavsky, C., & Gvirtz, S. (2000). Nuevos desafı´ os y dispositivos en la polı´ tica educacional latinoamericana de fin de siglo [New challenges and devices in Latin American educational policy at the end of the century]. In: Cuadernos de la OEI. Serie Educacio´n Comparada (Vol. 4, pp. 41–72). Madrid: Organizacio´n de Estados Iberoamericanos para la Educacio´n, la Ciencia y la Cultura (OEI). Brunner, J. J. (1990). Educacio´n Superior en Ame´rica Latina: Cambios y Desafı´os. Santiago– Chile: Fondo de Cultura Econo´mica. Cano, D. (1985). La educacion superior en la Argentina [Higher education in Argentina] (1st ed.). Buenos Aires: FLACSO/Grupo Editor Latinoamericano. Catani, D. B. (2000). Estudos de historia da profissao docente [Studies on the history of the teaching profession]. In: E. M. Teixeira Lopes, L. Mendes Faria Filho & C. Greive Vega (Eds), 500 anos de Educacao no Brasil [500 years of education in Brazil] (2nd ed., pp. 585–600). Belo Horizonte: Autentica. Cowen, R., & Figueiredo, M. (1992). Brazil. In: P. W. Cookson, Jr., A. R. Sadovnik & S. F. Semel (Eds), International handbook of educational reform (pp. 51–68). London: Greenwood Press. Dale, R. (2000). Globalization: A new world for comparative education? In: J. Schriewer (Ed.), Discourse formation in comparative education (pp. 87–110). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Davini, M. C. (1995). La Formacion Docente en cuestion: politica y pedagogia [Questioning teacher education: Politics and pedagogy]. Buenos Aires & Mexico DF: Paidos. de Azevedo, F. (1964). A Cultura Brasileira: Introducao ao estudo da cultura no Brasil [Brazilian culture: Introduction to the study of culture in Brazil]. Sao Paulo: Melhoramentos. Giddens, A. (1995). Politics, sociology and social theory: Encounters with classical and contemporary social thought. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goncalves Vidal, D. (2000). Escola Nova e processo educativo [The new school movement and the educational process]. In: E. M. Teixeira Lopes, L. Mendes Faria Filho & C. Greive
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Vega (Eds), 500 anos de Educacao no Brasil [500 years of education in Brazil] (2nd ed., pp. 497–517). Belo Horizonte: Autentica. Gvirtz, S. (1991). Nuevas y viejas tendencias en la docencia (1945–1955) [New and old tendencies in the teaching profession]. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de America Latina. Gvirtz, S. (1996). Estrategia de la Escuela Nuvea a trave´s de la revista ‘‘La Obra’’ y sus propuestas dida´cticas [Strategies of the new school through the journal ‘‘La Obra’’ and its didactic proposals]. In: S. Gvirtz (Ed.), Escuela Nueva en Argentina y Brasil: visiones comparadas (pp. 73–88). Buenos Aires: Min˜o y Davila. Gvirtz, S., & Larripa, S. (2002). Reforming school curricula in Latin America: A focus on Argentina. In: S. Tawil (Ed.), Curriculum change and social inclusion: Perspectives from the Baltic and Scandinavian countries (pp. 26–37). Geneva: IBE-UNESCO. Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Esadistica [Brazilian institute of geography and Statistics]. Retrieved March 2004, http://www.ibge.gov.br/home/estatistica/populacao/censohistorico/1872_1920.shtm. Martinez Boom, A. (2000). Polı´ ticas educativas en Iberoamerica [Education policies in Iberoamerica]. In: Cuadernos de la OEI. Serie Educacio´n Comparada (Vol. 4). Madrid: Organizacio´n de Estados Iberoamericanos para la Educacio´n, la Ciencia y la Cultura (OEI). Mendes Faria Filho, L. (2000). Instruccao elementar no seculo XIX [Elementary schooling in the nineteenth century]. In: E. M. Teixeira Lopes, L. Mendes Faria Filho & C. Greive Vega (Eds), 500 anos de educacao no Brasil [500 years of education in Brazil] (pp. 135–150). Belo Horizonte: Autentica. Menin, O. (1996). Encuentro Binacional ‘‘Escuela Nueva en Argentina y Brasil’’. Estado del arte y perspectiva de investigacio´n [Binational seminar ‘‘New School in Argentina and Brazil’’. State of the art and research perspective]. In: S. Gvirtz (Ed.), Escuela Nueva en Argentina y Brasil: visiones comparadas [New school movement in Argentina and Brazil: Comparative visions] (pp. 7–12). Buenos Aires: Min˜o y Davila. Meyer, J., & Ramirez, F. (2000). The world institutionalization of education. In: J. Schriewer (Ed.), Discourse formation in comparative education (pp. 111–132). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Narodowski, M. (1994). La expansio´n Lancasteriana en Iberoame´rica. El caso de Buenos Aires [The expansion of the Lancaster method in Iberoamerica The case of Buenos Aires]. Anuario del IEHS, 9, 255–277. Noah, H., & Eckstein, M. (1969). Toward a science of comparative education. London: Macmillan. Oszlack, O. (1997). La conformacio´n del Estado Argentino [The formation of the Argentine State]. Buenos Aires: Ariel. Ravitch, D. (1983). The troubled crusade: American education, 1945–1980. New York: Basic Books. Santos Ribeiro, M. L. (1979). Historia da Educacao Brasileira: A Organizacao Escolar [History of Brazilian education: The organisation of schooling] (2nd edn.). Sao Paulo: Cortez & Moraes. Schriewer, J. (1992). The method of comparison and the need for externalization: Methodological criteria and sociological concepts. In: J. Schriewer & B. Holmes (Eds), Theories and methods in comparative education (pp. 25–83). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Schriewer, J. (2000a). Comparative education methodology in transition: Towards a science of complexity? In: J. Schriewer (Ed.), Discourse formation in comparative education (pp. 3–48). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
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Schriewer, J. (2000b). World system and interrelationship networks: The internationalization of education and the role of comparative inquiry. In: T. S. Popkewitz (Ed.), Educational knowledge: Changing relationships between the state, civil society, and the educational community (pp. 305–344). Albany: State University of New York Press. Skidmore, T. E. (1999). Brazil: Five centuries of change. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press. Southwell, M. (1997). Algunas caracteristicas de la formacion docente en la historia educativa reciente. El legado del espiritualismo y el tecnocratismo (1955–76) [Some characteristics of teacher education in recent history of education. The legacy of spiritualism and tecnocratism]. In: A. Puiggros (Ed.), Dictaduras y utopias en la historia reciente de la educacion argentina (1955–1983) [Dictatorships and utopies in recent history of education in Argentina]. Buenos Aires: Editorial Galerna. Steiner-Khamsi, G. (2000). Transferring education, displacing reforms. In: J. Schriewer (Ed.), Discourse formation in comparative education (pp. 155–188). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Stevenson, H. W., & Stigler, J. W. (1993). The learning gap: Why our schools are failing and what we can learn from Japanese and Chinese education. New York: Summit Books. Tanuri, L. M. (2000). Historia da formacao de professores [History of teacher education]. Revista Brasileira de Educacao Numero especial ‘500 anos de educacao escolar’, 14, 61–88. Tedesco, J. C. (1986). Educacion y sociedad en la Argentina (1880–1945) [Education and society in Argentina (1880–1945)]. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Solar. Trace, A. (1961). What Ivan knows that Johnny doesn’t: A comparison of Soviet and American school programs. New York: Harper. United States, Office of Educational Research and Improvement. (1987). Japan study team. Japanese education today. Washington DC: United States Department of Education. Waldow, F. (2002). The neo-institutionalist account of the emergence of mass schooling: Some remarks on the Swedish case. In: M. Caruso & H.-E. Tenorth (Eds), Internationalisierung: Semantik und Bildungssystem in vergleichender Perspektive [Internationalisation: Comparing Educational Systems and Semantics] (pp. 109–124). Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang.
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POLICY ENACTMENT AND ADAPTATION OF COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION IN EDUCATION: THE CASE OF ARGENTINA M. Fernanda Astiz INTRODUCTION Sociological neoinstitutional approaches indicate that nation-states follow ‘‘worldwide models constructed and propagated through global cultural and associational processes’’ (Meyer, Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997, p. 144). These worldwide-legitimate models affect every single aspect of social life, molding national policy agendas. Pushed by pressures to conform to global forces, money borrowing, and professionalized knowledge, transitional nations enact models of progress through national planning that may be inconsistent with local practice and requirements (Ramirez & Rubinson, 1979). The analysis presented in this chapter builds upon previous comparative education research by discussing one of those current models: education decentralization. This study centers around one specific aspect of recent decentralization efforts: community participation. During the 1990s almost every country in Latin America (LA), and around the globe, incurred in some form of education decentralization and school reform. While the rationale provided for education decentralization The Impact of Comparative Education Research on Institutional Theory International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 7, 305–334 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3679/doi:10.1016/S1479-3679(06)07013-7
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and the discourse that supported such endeavors were similar, the implementation process and subsequent outcomes differed across countries and even between subnational units within countries. This chapter illuminates this situation through the analysis of Argentina’s decentralization and community participation reform. The chapter is organized as follows: first, it briefly reviews the comparative education literature on decentralization and neoinstitutional contributions to the field. While doing this, I revisit the ‘‘decoupling’’ concept and suggest ways for its reconceptualization in an effort to better articulate its meaning and highlight its centrality within the neoinstitutional paradigm. Second, it looks at decentralization and community participation as global trends. Third, the chapter focuses on Argentina’s enactment of decentralization and community participation in education. Specifically, using an interdisciplinary approach that blends different versions of neoinstitutional theory, this section discusses the factors that shape subnational policy adaptation and implementation in the province of Buenos Aires. Although the paper empirically addresses Argentina’s case to illuminate both the enactment of worldwide trends and the adaptation process that takes place at a subnational level, it also provides inferences that shed light into the discussion of these topics within LA and the world system.
THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE LITERATURE: MAKING THE CASE FOR AN INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS Previous studies on decentralization and community participation contributed important knowledge to the field of comparative education. Explanations that use managerial public administration arguments are mainly concerned with the way in which educational resources are distributed and managed. In general, these explanations claim the need to reform the state’s administrative and governance structures under cost-efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and education quality arguments. According to this view, some common decentralization typologies are created depending upon who has the right to decide and what ideas support the decision to decentralize (Bray, 1984; Hanson, 1989, 1997; Lauglo & McLean, 1984; Prawda, 1993; Rondinelli, McCullough, & Johnson, 1989; Rondinelli, 1990; Winkler, 1993). Usually, administrative studies illuminate the way an educational system is structured and how education is delivered, but fail to account for power distribution and the context in which change takes place. Additionally, they
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fail to differentiate between policy enactment and actual implementation, and assume that once policy is enacted change will follow. Another line of study looks at the political aspect of decentralization and involvement in education (e.g., Arnove, 1997; Bray, 1999; Elmore, 1993; Fiske, 1996; Garrido Perez, 1996; Hannaway, 1993; Hanson, 1995, 1996; Lauglo, 1996; McGinn & Street, 1986; Weiler, 1993). Studies of this kind provide explanations on how decentralization reforms redistribute, share, and extend power and questions whether they enhance participation by removing centralized control over educational decision-making. In addition, this approach discusses what form of democracy is being promoted when education is decentralized. Many educational decentralizing practices are seen as instruments to increase certain levels of authority while banning some groups and favoring others. In many cases, decentralizing steps are used as a way to reducing conflict, showing modernization and democratization under external pressures, and gaining legitimacy while centralism is re-institutionalized. For this analytical perspective the main causal force behind decentralization is the impact of specific qualities of individual nations, such as intranational political competition or the strategic goals of a polity. While this approach to the analysis of decentralization provides understanding of the characteristics and contradictions of a political system, it falls short to provide insights of the characteristics of subnational political contexts and the goals and expectations of those individuals who are involved in the process of decision-making. Moreover, because for this line of argumentation the rationale for decentralization tends to be rooted within the boundaries of nation-states, the effects of globalization on the politics of education reform are usually not addressed. When linkages between globalization and national educational agendas are established (e.g., Arnove & Torres, 1999; Burbules & Torres, 2000; Gorostiaga Derqui, 2001; Torres & Puiggros, 1997; Stromquist & Monkman, 2000; Went, 2000), these approaches articulate their argument around the idea that this link is escorted by neoliberalism and the rules of global capital. This worldview emphasizes the control power of intergovernmental and lending organizations in dictating structural adjustment policies to national elites, but miss seeing the effect of world culture in the validation and sustenance of those policies both in international and domestic arenas. Generally, these scholars discuss the dynamic interaction between the ‘‘global and the local’’ in terms of contradictions that end in diverse regional and national responses. The diversity in policy implementation is usually explained in terms of local resistance to external models.
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Moreover, in spite of multiple calls for comparative education frameworks linking different geographical locations, varied methods and as many levels of analysis as possible (e.g., Arnove, 2001; Ball, 1990; Bray & Thomas, 1995; Hargreaves, 1985; Levin, 2001), few scholars have attempted to empirically do so. Challenging both administrative and political approaches, interpretative studies that use both policy and actors’ narratives in the analysis of decentralization policies in LA make important advancements in these areas. Some look at the effects of decentralization and participation at subnational and local levels (e.g., Cigliutti, 1993; Dussel & Thisted, 1995; Fuller & Rivarola, 1998; Munı´ n, 1994; Pini & Cigliutti, 1999; Tiramonti, 1992), others go further by setting frameworks that entail a comprehensive multilevel analysis of the mechanisms by which globalization affects national policy formulation and the conditions that shape subnational policy interpretation and implementation (Rhoten, 2000; Dussel, Tiramonti, & Birgin, 2000). For example, Rhoten’s (2000) study on education decentralization observes the variation in policy interpretation and implementation across three provinces in Argentina. Her results show that the processes and outcomes of the internationally originated decentralization policy are not universal, and that policy interpretations and actions depend on the local geo-economic conditions, administrative capacities and the provincial state–society relations of power and authority, respectively. This chapter analytically builds upon both the political and interpretative approaches mentioned above, but divert from them by setting the discussion within institutional theory.1 Situating this study within this framework allows for a more powerful explanation of the enactment of community participation policies in Argentina. The explanatory power comes from articulating the idea of a global culture with implications for movements toward decentralization and community participation, and a world system approach in which national institutions coexist with and become legitimized by strong global cultural norms that supersede the rhetoric of multilateral lending agencies. Furthermore, previous studies downplay the fact that political and technocratic elites not only play an important role as diffusers of global cultural norms (Meyer et al., 1997), but also legitimate themselves in their role by adopting worldwide-validated educational agendas.2 In addition, both rational choice and sociopolitical cultural variants of neoinstitutional theory provide a better grasp of subnational policy variation as found in Argentina by Astiz (2002, 2004), Dussel and Thisted (1995), Munı´ n (1994), and Rhoten (2000). Beyond policy interpretations, leaders adapt education reform based on their future career success and the
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characteristics of the sociopolitical environment in which implementation takes place. The following sections of this chapter will address these points in further detail.
CONTRIBUTIONS OF COMPARATIVE EDUCATION TO INSTITUTIONAL THEORY: RECONCEPTUALIZING THE ‘‘DECOUPLING’’ CATEGORY Through the discussion of the rise of mass education, the structure of the curriculum, and teacher beliefs and practices, international comparative studies contributed to the refinement of new institutional theory (Baker & LeTendre, 2005; Benavot, Cha, Kamens, & Meyer, 1991; Boli, Ramirez, & Meyer, 1985; Kamens, Meyer, & Benavot, 1996; LeTendre, Baker, Akiba, Goesling, & Wiseman, 2001; Meyer, Ramirez, & Soysal, 1992; Ramirez & Boli, 1987). Generally, these studies show that national indicators such as administrative, social, cultural, and political fall short for understanding educational change and suggest that nations around the world embarked in similar models of modernity rooted in standardized worldwide cultural scripts. Moreover, some studies have shown the impact of world culture on national policy (Meyer et al., 1997), but suggested that since those policies are planned and developed on external models, implementation may frequently become problematic or inconsistent with its design. According to Ramirez and Rubinson (1979), this holds true particularly for transitional societies. However, Astiz, Wiseman, and Baker (2002) show that when it comes to decentralization policies in education, inconsistency in policy implementation is evident in developed nations too. In general, institutional comparative studies are primarily concerned with the diffusion of global models and the isomorphism of nation-states’ structures and policies (in this case the enactment of decentralization and community participation policies), and show the lesser degree of national indicators in that process. Indeed, the inconsistency in policy adoption or implementation, what Meyer et al. (1997) call decoupling is assumed as a residual category and an area in which students of institutional comparative education analysis usually do not engage. In short, the contribution of this paper to institutional theory is to bring the decoupling category back into the analyses of world systems, and, in doing so, to place special emphasis on politics and the sociopolitical characteristics
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of the context in which policy adaptation and implementation take place. To accomplish this it requires blending a soft rational choice variant in neoinstitutionalism with a sociopolitical cultural perspective as well as shifting the analytical focus from the nation-state as a unity to the view that identifies state–society relations (Migdal, 1997).3 Qualitative methodological techniques are the analytical tools used to achieve the chapter’s purposes.4 The point to be discussed here is that nation-states are not mere receptors of common world culture; rather, they possess relative autonomy that stems from state–society relations and the role of historical and cultural processes that determine change or reform outcomes (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991; Jepperson & Meyer, 1991; March & Olsen, 1984). Nation-states are not homogenous actors; they are composed of people, groups, organizations, and agencies with individual or group goals, but mutually linked by the incentive bundle of those global norms and the socio-political context in which they are immersed. This context includes the web of formal and informal state–society institutions.5 It is important to note here that these individuals, groups, or agencies are not always in agreement and tensions among administrative levels, groups, offices, and individuals are possible. Geddes (1994) suggests that by virtue of their position in government, political leaders and technocrats use state power to pursue their own political interests. In this regard, she argues that state officials have a great margin in choosing how to respond to international policy trends while at the same time pursuing their own career success. Their choices have a heavy reliance on the structure of the specific situation and an artful use of the nested rules that dominate a certain environment. Choices are not clearly laid out for policy actors as rational choice scholars suggest, they must be sorted out in a complex environment that includes institutional opportunities and constraints (March & Olsen, 1984, p. 740). It is particularly in this sorting-out process where policy adaptation takes shape. The difference between those worldwide cultural scripts that enact policy at the national level and the policy adaptation process that takes place within a certain environment is what in the context of this chapter is considered the root of Meyer et al. (1997) decoupling. Since policy adoption, as well as diffusion, works at different levels and through a variety of linkages, what may be viewed as an incoherent, eclectic, or decoupled practice may well serve to not only expand those world cultural precepts but to foster personal or group goals as well. These analytical distinctions become alive through the Argentine case.
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WORLDWIDE MODELS: DEMOCRATIZATION, DECENTRALIZATION AND COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION IN EDUCATION The return of civilian rule in many LA countries during the 1980s and the developments in the Soviet Union and Asia in the early 1990s led to a worldwide revival of political and economic liberalization. In the political realm, the emphasis was on democratization.6 Like the notion of decentralization, the concept of civil society and participation witnessed a significant revival in the social sciences over the past decade (e.g., Cohen & Arato, 1992; Diamond, 1994; Fukuyama, 1995; Hall, 1995; Putnam, 1995a, b). It was believed that the lack of both citizen participation and a strong civil society was incompatible with democracy and the politics of globalization. Following this belief, governments began to limit the role of the state in the economy while shifting social rights such as education and health from national to subnational or private entities (e.g., communities, schools, nongovernmental organizations) through policies of decentralization, autonomy, privatization, and deregulation (Almond & Powell, 1996; Diamond & Linz, 1989). During the 1990s, education decentralization became equated with democratization on the basis of greater local sovereignty and increased responsiveness to the needs of diverse actors. Decentralization was presented as a win–win situation helping ‘‘to maintain political stability and democratize while at the same time, improve efficiency of public services, preserve macro economic stability, and respond to the interest of all groups’’ (Burki, Perry, & Dillinger, 1999, p. 17). This view was clearly stated in the policy discourse adopted by regional, governmental, multilateral lending, intergovernmental, and non-governmental organizations which, along with academia, have been carriers and diffusers of decentralization models. What follows are some examples of this worldwide-acclaimed discourse. In the education field, different actors must play an increasingly dynamic role in administration at the central and regional ministerial levels. y Centralization can impede the development of diverse educational models and discourage local support and involvement. It is imperative to endow school, local groups with both the power and the means to implement educational reforms. Multinational organizations, such as NGOs and the private sector, must coordinate to establish complementary policies. Broad social consensus is needed to respond effectively to contemporary social demands: international competition [and] democracy building. (UNESCO/OREALC, 1996, in Organization of American States, 1998, p. 41)
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The same argument was used at the 1994 and 1998 Summit of the Americas. In this regard, the 1998 declaration stated: The strength and meaning of representative democracy lie in the active participation of individuals at all levels of civic life. The democratic culture must encompass our entire population. We will strengthen education for democracy and promote the necessary actions for government institutions to become more participatory structures. We undertake to strengthen the capabilities of regional and local government, when appropriate, and to foster more active participation by civil society y . (Feingberg & Rosenberg, 1999, p. 4)
And continued saying, [At the same time, governments should] strengthen educational management and institutional capacity at the national, regional, local, and school levels, with progress towards decentralization and promotion of community and family involvement. (Feingberg & Rosenberg, 1999, p. 223)7
As shown in the above citations, the triad democratization, civil society, and participation became the ‘‘stars’’ of the decade and the new millennium. Besides the lack of specificity of these terms in the policy rhetoric, decentralization and participation were the principal sociopolitical challenges worldwide as well as for the creation of national polities. The suggested reforms initiatives assume that schools, which are more accountable to the community, would need to provide the type and quality of schooling that the community desires. In addition, it assumes that schools and their communities would have a greater incentive to use resources efficiently if the cost is shared (Jimenez & Paqueo, 1996). It is also argued that external efficiency could be enhanced as a result of community support as compensatory resources would be raised for education. Table 1 illustrates the extent to which this worldwide model diffused across countries and affected education policy at the national level.8 According to the comparative education literature, during the 1990s a significant number of countries around the world enacted models of modernity that entailed some sort of decentralization and community participation in education. However, while rationales (Lauglo, 1996) and discourses (Rhoten, 2000; Dussel et al., 2000) given for decentralization were similar, the actual policies implemented differed across countries and even within countries as indicated in the literature. Argentina is among the countries listed in Table 1. It is a case in which within-country variation in implementation and a mismatch between policy and practice are observed. While the influence of global democratizing trends is evident on education reform among all LA
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Table 1.
Decentralization/Participation Studies by Country/Region.
Country Argentina Austria Botswana Brazil Cambodia Chile China Colombia Cyprus Czechoslovakia Egypt El Salvador England Ethiopia France Ghana Guatemala Haiti Hong Kong Hungary India Iran Ireland Madagascar Malawi Mali Mexico Namibia New Zealand Nicaragua Peru Poland South Africa South Korea Spain Swaziland Switzerland Taiwan Tanzania Thailand The Netherlands Uganda USA Venezuela
No. of Studies 4 1 3 3 1 2 3 2 1 2 1 2 2 1 2 3 1 1 3 1 2 1 1 1 2 1 3 1 1 4 1 1 4 1 2 1 1 2 1 3 3 2 3 1
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Table 1. (Continued ) Country
No. of Studies
Vietnam
1
Regions Africa Asia Caribbean/Central America Former Soviet countries Latin America Nordic countries
1 1 2 1 4 1
Total no. of studiesa
91
a
The sum of the no. of studies by country/region column does not match the total, since one study may address more than one country at a time.
countries represented in this table, there is still room for politics at the subnational level that shape severely policy implementation.
ARGENTINA’S TRANSFORMATION IN THE 1990S: STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT POLICIES AND CENTRALIZED DECISION-MAKING In 1989, Carlos S. Menem and Eduardo Duhalde won the presidential election with a populist rhetoric of ‘‘justicia social, salariazo, and revolucio´n productiva’’ – social justice, huge salary increase, and productive revolution – (Menem & Duhalde, 1989, p. 19).9 These promises, in line with the Peronist doctrine, were never accomplished during his administration and an opposite plan was established.10 Once in office, Menem surprised his supporters with a program of market reforms, which according to Palermo (1994) was a strategy for political survival rather than Menem’s conviction. With market reforms the administration attempted to overcome the legacy of the previous decade characterized by a fragile economy, external debt, inflation, high interest rates, growth of the state, and limited public expenditures. Moreover, structural adjustment policies were the legitimate international discourse of the time to achieve modernization.11 Menem’s approach for modernization was multistage and multifaceted. The first steps to achieve this goal were done in foreign policy. A central piece of Argentina’s transformation was to enter into partnership with the United States and advanced United State’s goals in regional forums such
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as the Summit of the Americas. In order to get closer ties to developed nations, Argentina pursued relationships with the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and restored diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom.12 This approach to foreign policy was an important move to put Argentina back into the global scene. It gave the administration the ability to make long-term decisions and gained the confidence of international financial markets, which ultimately reestablished creditworthiness.13 In need of foreign capital, the Argentine government accepted recommendations from international financial agencies resulting in the adoption of a number of policies such as the reduction of government expenditures, currency devaluation to promote exports, and the reduction in import tariffs (Gerchunoff & Torre, 1998). These measures were accompanied by substantial reform and reorganization of public administration, including the decentralization of the delivery of public services to the provincial governments. Austerity, privatization, and the withdrawal of the state from social policy, in addition to the increased power of the international financial agencies monitoring government performance, coincided with an incipient process of democratization. As declared by the Argentine Minister of Foreign Relations, Guido Di Tella, ‘‘we want to belong to the first world, to the western alliance y we are implementing the same policies, policies that have led [many countries] to prosperity.’’14 Another step taken to carry on with the reforms was to establish the necessary legal framework that swept away the previous state-inward developmental model (Llanos, 2001). The executive office foresaw that market reforms could generate discontent, particularly from those sectors that benefited from the previous model. So to avoid the obstacles faced by the previous administration, Menem not only enacted a bill to create a favorable majority in the Supreme Court (Margheritis, 1997 in Murillo, 2001), but also granted super powers to his economic minister, which enabled him to take control of the Argentine central bank and to cut the expenditure of federal agencies, state enterprises, and transfers to the provinces.15 This new regulatory framework centralized decision-making around the president and his cabinet, and made of the finance minister a de facto super minister (Keeler, 1993; Llanos, 2001).16 During this period, the function of congress was to enact into legislation presidential mandates. The reflection of one of the interviewees for this study captures this idea, ‘‘if something gets done in Argentina, if things get done at all, it is by its executive offices; no one has more power than they do’’ (interview, provincial official, 2000).
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It is important to point out here that the increasing technocratic orientation of public administration gave legitimacy to the structural adjustment reform package. As Silva (1998) suggests, the strengthening of technocratic orientation in public administration in LA contributed to the growth of a Weberian state that can resist special interests or coalitions. This apparent neutrality in the process of decision-making became part of the new way of doing politics in the region, which allowed the implementation of structural adjustment policies under a modernization rationale (Geddes, 1994). Technocrats gained legitimacy and power because they were the intellectual brokers between their governments and international capital, and were responsible for the definition and implementation of the institutional reforms that fostered investors’ confidence. For this reason they became the best allies of politicians. During the 1990s, ministries and their technocratic leadership became more important than ever before in policy-making, often to the detriment of the legislative bodies. Technocrats became the liaison with foreign financial experts from intergovernmental and lending institutions, and accepted recommendations but not without certain autonomy.17 As a ministry of education official suggests, There are always pressures; particularly if foreign capital is involved, but we design the policies y there is always space for negotiation. The autonomy from the banks can only be reached with a solid technical advisory group, a group of professionals, y we discuss the issues y even in some cases we call economy [Ministry of Finance] to tell them that the delegation [the World Bank’s delegation] should leave because we won’t take what we do not want to; soon the bank agrees [laughs]. We know them well y we know how to negotiate y we think we know more, probably a porten˜o thing.18 (interview, ministry official, 1998)
Although international political and economic factors played an important role in the rise and consolidation of technocratic ascendancy, it is not the only reason. Domestic and personal aspirations have much to do with this process as well.19 Leading a controversial agenda, President Menem was not reluctant to use the presidency’s extensive powers to issue presidential decrees when congress was unable to reach consensus on his proposed reforms. Another way to impose political limits to the reform was the control exercised over the provinces through tax revenue agreements (the so-called Fiscal Pacts signed in 1992). The purpose of this agreement was to gain consent for Menem’s reform priorities (Gerchunoff & Torre, 1998). His presidential style combined the use of public resources and arbitrary utilization of constitutional powers.
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Another component of this model was Menem’s capacity to get rid of the traditional peronista ideology without losing political support. Historically, organized labor, largely tied to Menem’s party, has played a significant role in Argentina’s political life, but that has been significantly weakened with the implementation of free market reforms (Murillo, 2001). McGuire (1996) identified several policies used by the Menem administration to diminish unions’ capacity to oppose his reforms. First, as a result of privatizations and the downsizing of the public sector, labor membership rolls diminished. Second, Menem passed a decree limiting the rights of public sector unions to strike. Third, in what is called labor flexibility, Menem included a series of regulations that facilitated collective bargaining at the company and subnational levels, limiting the power of national-level labor leaders. The law also introduced temporary hiring contracts.20 Finally, he threatened legislation that could cut the unions’ source of enrichment: their control of employees’ and employers’ contributions to health insurance coverage. In education, two crucial initiatives took place: first, the Ley de Transferencia de los Servicios Educativos No. 22.049 (1992) (law for the transfer of education services) that transferred secondary and tertiary education services to the provincial administration; and second, the passage of the comprehensive Ley Federal de Educacio´n No. 24195 (1993) (federal education law, LFE). These are going to be discussed in the following section.
ARGENTINA’S CASE: THE ENACTMENT OF DECENTRALIZATION AND COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION IN EDUCATION Following the global pattern stated above and in a context of structural adjustment policies, the Argentine government began the process of education transformation, as the process of education reform and decentralization was addressed in governmental documents.21 By the 1990s the Ministry of Education was aware of the inefficiency of Argentina’s national education system, characterized as disarticulated, bureaucratized, and as an overly regulated organizational structure. The problems identified included ‘‘distant management, lack of supervision, overlapping educational systems – national and provincial – and inefficient allocation of resources’’ (interview, national ministry official, 1998). As a result of recommendations made by international aid organizations, regional agreements, a disarticulated teacher union (Murillo, 2001), and under the leadership of the president and his entourage the Ley de Transferencia
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de los Servicios Educativos was passed by congress in December 1991.22,23 The process that ended in the transfer law started back in 1989, when the national and provincial executives, 14 of which were governed by the Justicialista party, held the 10th assembly of the Federal Council of Education. This meeting was an attempt to establish a negotiation arena that facilitated the future implementation of the transfer of national secondary and tertiary education services to the provinces. Since the beginning of the negotiation process, the discussion revolved around finances and fiscal federalism rather than education (Bravo, 1994; Sene´n Gonza´lez & Kisilevsky, 1993; Kisilevsky, n.d.). However, since the decentralization discussions had started, it was presented as a multidimensional and multistage process with the transfer of services to the provinces as the first stage. ‘‘Other stages of the process of decentralization include political, normative and institutional decentralization.’’ (Resolucio´n No. 2165, 1990, p. 19) An agreement between the national and provincial administrations was finally reached in late 1991, after an increase in tax revenues that enlarged the total amount of the federal revenue-sharing system.24 This situation enabled the Minister of Finance, Domingo Cavallo, to argue that the provinces would have enough resources to manage the transfer of secondary education services.25 Thus, with a significant increase in the federal revenuesharing system in the proposed 1992 budget bill, which excluded the funds traditionally allotted for the administration of secondary and tertiary education services provided by the National Ministry of Education, Cavallo forced the transfer of services to the provinces (interview, national ministry official, 1998). However, the passing of the law did not translate into an immediate transfer (Sene´n Gonza´lez, 1989). Still, the national and provincial administrations were to come to specific accords that detailed the timing and funds involved in the transfer process. Those agreements illuminate the pace of the transfer process and provide an account of the political negotiations and tensions that this process generated.26 After the transfer process became law and the majority of the agreements with the provinces were signed, the national administration engaged in the second stage of the educational transformation plan. As mentioned in the previous section, congress passed in 1993 the comprehensive LFE. Besides regulating the distribution of responsibilities between the central and subnational governance levels, the law introduced a curricular reform and a new schooling organization, which consists of a three-level system of oneyear compulsory initial education, a nine-year compulsory basic education (EGB), and a three-year optional high school education (polimodal).
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In contrast to previous reforms, this one advanced democratization by fostering local sovereignty and increasing responsiveness to the needs of diverse school communities. This law complemented the transfer process. Consequently, the decentralization process involved not only delegating the financial responsibility of public and privately subsidized secondary and tertiary schools to the provincial governments and the city of Buenos Aires, but also some decision-making over the management and service delivery to the new provincial education systems and the schools themselves. The central government, however, kept control as policy maker, coordinator, and controller of the national educational design.27 In the words of the reform leaders, this transformation included the following priorities: (1) equity and quality – equitable access and quality education for all; (2) decentralization and participation – an education system defined from the school unit; and (3) the transformation of the schooling system – a dynamic and efficient model of organization and management. These priorities were meant to be reached through the participation of three main actors – the national government, the provincial governments, and society (interview, national ministry official, 1998). The literature indicates that these priorities were present in other LA countries as well and resembles the international discourse presented in a previous section of this chapter. Besides the curricular reform and the education system restructuring launched by the LFE, a key reform initiative for the improvement of education quality was meant to be implemented at the school level. The law clearly states that the school and its community – school administrators, school staff, teachers, parents, students, alumni, and representative organizations (e.g., unions, asociacio´n cooperadora escolar, etc.) – are at the center of the reforming efforts (Ley Federal de Education, Art. 41, 42, 1993).28 In this regard, the law introduces a new school management practice that all schools should put in place to promote democratic institutional and educative practices. This new school management model is to be implemented through the development of a proyecto educativo institucional or school institutional project (PEI) (Ley Federal de Educacio´n, Art. 41, 1993). The development of the school institutional project is a vital element of Argentina’s decentralization reform, and as a pedagogical and school management tool should ensure that the school organization is in tune with the restructured system (Zona Educativa, 1998).29 Its purpose is to adapt national and provincial directives and curricular frameworks to the school environment. The participation of school community actors (other than school administrators and teachers) in the design of the PEI is primarily intended to support and improve
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education quality. However, according to the law the involvement of the school community must not hinder the actions and responsibilities of school administrators and teachers (Ley Federal de Educacio´n, Art. 42, 1993).30
POLICY ADAPTATION AND IMPLEMENTATION IN THE PROVINCE OF BUENOS AIRES: A NEOPOPULIST STYLE During Eduardo Duhalde’s administration in the province of Buenos Aires (1991 1999), a process of education reform was implemented.31 In 1995, two years after the LFE was passed at the national level, the provincial legislature passed the Ley Provincial de Educacio´n No. 11.612 (provincial education law, LPE). While the previous administrations had been concerned with the removal of long term and heavy authoritarian legacies from Buenos Aires’ institutions and society, in an attempt to distinguish himself from the unpopular neoliberal turn of the national administration, Duhalde’s administration emphasized equity, administrative efficiency, and work ethics (Programa de Desarrollo Social, 1994).32 Various reasons allowed Duhalde to act with substantial autonomy from the national government and the national party leadership to implement a robust social program tied to educational reform and decentralization initiatives in the province of Buenos Aires. Among those reasons are: his strong ties with the provincial peronista chapter, the resources the province receives from the central administration through the Fondo de Reparacio´n Histo´rica (historical compensatory fund), and external loans. As a local party member said, ‘‘Duhalde is the boss, he has the money y’’ (interview, community leader, 2001). Indeed, Eduardo Duhalde was the boss; he was and still is the president of the Buenos Aires peronista chapter, which controlled the provincial legislature from 1991 to 1997. Therefore, with the control of the bureaucracy, which means control over state resources and job posts used for patronage, the provincial peronista chapter on his side, a discretionary use of public funds, and a provincial public debt that increased over the years (Evolucio´n Gasto Pu´blico Social, 1997; Direccio´n Provincial de Planeamiento, 2000), governor Duhalde was able a Plan Social (social plan) side-by-side structural adjustment reforms. The provincial administration adopted the federal education reform and adjusted it to promote the following goals: equity, decentralization, participation, solidarity, and social justice.33 Definitely, the provincial education reform was in tune with the social role Duhalde assigned to education and the
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purported spirit of his administration. These goals were to be achieved by the reorganization of the provincial educational governance structure, the implementation of social welfare-oriented programs to guarantee access for all, and the participation of the family, community, and legally recognized teacher associations in schooling (Programa de Gobierno, 1994).34 Accordingly, the provincial administration followed the general national and international pattern of state reform, not without a quota of pure Peronista lineage.35 The Reorganization of the Provincial Educational Governance Structure The provincial educational governance structure was reorganized on the basis of a regional administrative decentralization to the level of 16 Jefaturas Regionales (regional units) appointed by the Direccio´n General de Educacio´n y Cultura (general directorate of education and culture, DGCE).36 Jefaturas Regionales oversee the operation of the Secretarı´as de Inspeccio´n (inspection secretariats) at the district level. Secretarı´as de Inspeccio´n, through districts’ supervisors, are responsible for carrying out the reform at the district level and of the bulk of administrative work in relation to the technical and pedagogical functioning of the provincial education system. For example, district supervisors are responsible for filling teaching vacancies and for providing statistical information to the DGCE (Ley Provincial de Educacio´n, Art. 48, 1995). At the district level, local elected school councils, originally created to be political participatory units, became administrative intermediaries vis-a`-vis the municipal administration and school cooperatives, mostly to mobilize resources for schools within their district. Local school councils do not have budgets of their own, but they are in charge of the processing of funding requests for school lunches and the renovation of school buildings. Municipalities, in an attempt to adapt themselves to the new provincial organization, have set up education and culture secretariats that, in some cases, have started to play an active role within their limited administrative authority; they provide additional funding sources for the schools, mostly to be used for infrastructure work and other minor expenditures.37 Still, the bulk of the funding for public schools comes from the provincial level (Evolucio´n Gasto Pu´blico Social, 1997; Ministerio de Economı´a, Buenos Aires, 1995, p. 42). Additional funding sources come from school cooperatives. Each school in the province has a school cooperative to which parents voluntarily contribute with an optional monetary amount. The contribution amount varies across school districts and the socioeconomic status of the family. Since parents’ contributions are usually insufficient to support the school, cooperadoras organize fund-raising events or look for private contributions.
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Collected funds are usually used to cover some school expenses and extracurricular activities. Although considered a participatory institution, ‘‘the associacio´n cooperadora must not be involved in technical, administrative, or disciplinary issues unless the school requires it to do so’’ (Ley Provincial de Educacio´n, Art. 4, 1995). Paralleling the LFE, the school unit is at the center of the reform process in the province (Ley Provincial de Educacio´n, Art. 19, 1995). By law, schools should follow an administrative model that promotes democratic educative practices, efficiency and efficacy in its management, ties with community organizations, and the design of the PEI. Thus, the LPE calls for the support of the school community in the organization and management of the school unit, but its support is limited to what is specified in the PEI (Ley Provincial de Educacio´n, Art. 20, 1995). Unlike the LFE, the provincial law encourages civil society involvement in formal and non-formal education. Specifically, it promotes agreements between the DGCE and community associations for the delivery of nonformal education programs (Ley Provincial de Educacio´n, Art. 3, 16, 1995). This policy proviso calls for the participation of the broad community in the delivery of education. In the needy areas of the Greater Buenos Aires, this was instrumented through a social welfare program carried out by the Peronista grassroots network that used the school as a linkage between social welfare providers and beneficiaries. As expressed by a provincial official, ‘‘Duhalde could not get rid of traditional populist practices while implementing liberal type of policies, he needed them if he wanted to be reelected or for his future presidential aspirations’’ (interview, school supervisor, 2001). It is particularly in this point that the adaptation of the community involvement ideal takes its own form at the provincial level. Social Programs and Participation The Plan Social, as the social welfare program was called, was a central piece of the school restructuring process in Buenos Aires.38 According to official documents, the provincial Plan Social was based on three pillars: (1) active participation of the community; (2) creation of social welfare networks or solidarity networks at all administrative levels: provincial, regional, municipal; and (3) decentralization and regionalization of the development and implementation of social programs. Education, of course, was at the center of the provincial social development program (Programa de Gobierno, 1994), and schools were an important piece in the distribution chain (interview, provincial teacher, 2001). In some cases, the implementation
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of this plan was through an asistencialista network (social welfare network) run by Duhalde’s wife and a group of female party brokers widely known as manazaneras (Auyero, 2000).39 In a context of economic hardships, the social welfare programs took different forms at the school level such as food programs for EGB schools and fellowships for students in polimodal education. These compensatory programs were financed through alternative channels that used extraordinary funds from national transfers and external loans. These funds were subject to discretionary use, as was the case with the Fondo de Reparacio´n Histo´rica (historical compensatory fund). Instead of being distributed through the established channel (from the DGEC to local school councils, and finally to schools), funds were transferred directly from the provincial administration to either the school or even individuals (Astiz, 2004). The Plan Social was clearly an exchange of favors for votes and shed light on the convergence of patron–client relations and the social welfare policies implemented by the Peronista party in the province of Buenos Aires. This plan linked state funding, local political leaders, non-governmental organizations, party brokers, and in some cases the school and local school councils (interview, local party leader, 2001). Its implementation was indeed decentralized and each unit of the implementation chain acted autonomously, but under control of the provincial executive. Duhalde and his wife soon became synonymous with the benefits distributed. The organizational structure established helped the governor to act, ignoring the party’s national-level leadership and to informally integrate its constituency to the provincial party structure in a disciplined manner (Levistsky, 2001). In sum, Duhalde’s administration was able to adapt policy purpose to his personal political aspirations. As stated by an interviewee, ‘‘social plans were the direct connection between the government, well, Duhalde, and the poor y’’ (interview, local party leader, 2001); they have been used as a patron–client method to link the masses with the leader. The school autonomy reform opened the game for community participation, albeit in a very different way than what international organizations and the national administration envisioned. The school was a central piece in the process of allocating social welfare programs that were used for political clientelism.
CONCLUSION This chapter has two main goals. First, building on previous comparative education research, it contributes to the refinement of neoinstitutional theory.
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Particularly, it brings the decoupling category back into the analyses of world systems by paying special attention to the politics and sociopolitical characteristics of the context in which policy implementation takes place. To accomplish this, the chapter not only blends variants of neoinstitutionalism, but also shifts the analytical focus from the nation-state as a unity to the view that identifies and pays serious attention to otherwise neglected subnational differences. Second, while doing the above, the chapter broadens and enhances comparative education research by situating the discussion of recent decentralization and community participation reforms in education within the neoinstitutional paradigm. Situating this study within this framework allows for a more powerful explanation of the enactment of community participation policies in the case study presented in this chapter: Argentina. The explanatory power comes from articulating the idea of a global culture with implications for movements toward decentralization and community participation, and a world system approach in which national institutions coexist with and become legitimized by strong global cultural norms. Furthermore, the analysis centered around the argument that political and technocratic elites not only play an important role as diffusers of global cultural norms, but also legitimate themselves in their role by adopting worldwide validated educational agendas. The first goal is achieved by using the case of Argentina as an example of a country enacting worldwide legitimate models of modernity. In the 1990s, following worldwide forces, Argentina enacted decentralization and community participation policies. Pushed by pressures to conform, money borrowing and professionalized knowledge, a model of progress was put into place under the leadership of President Menem and his entourage. Through national planning that led to a mixture of centralized and decentralized procedures, decentralization policies were designed under the premise that reform will result in uniform implementation patterns.40 However, the chapter shows that nation-states are not mere receptors of common world culture; rather, they possess relative autonomy stemming from state–society relations and the interest of the political elite to determining policy adaptation and adoption. Using the case study of the province of Buenos Aires, the chapter explains a decoupling process between national policy enactment and implementation. It shows that nation-states are far from being homogenous entities; instead, they are composed of groups, offices, and people with different or conflicting interests. Tensions between national and provincial political leaders, differences in technocratic advice, the sociopolitical context in
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which implementation takes place, and the aspirations of the political elite significantly influence policy adaptation. All these factors are indeed at the heart of the decoupling idea advanced by Meyer et al. (1997) and are extremely helpful in providing richer accounts of this complex process. While shifting the analytical focus from the nation-state as a unity to the view that identifies state–society relations, qualitative studies that blend a rational choice variant in neoinstitutionalism with a sociopolitical cultural perspective will keep bringing the decoupling category back into the analyses of world systems. And, in doing so, these studies will shed light on the complexities of policy enactment, adaptation, and implementation.
NOTES 1. For a detailed description of the interdisciplinary nature and diversity of neoinstitutional theory see DiMaggio and Powell (1991) and Hall and Taylor (1996). 2. Technocracy stands for individuals with a high level of specialized academic training that occupy key decision-making roles in large complex organization, both private and public (Collier, 1979). 3. I call this variant of rational choice ‘‘soft’’ because it does neither include the use of game theory nor the prisoner’s dilemma. 4. The work reported here comprises the content analysis of comparative education literature, international and national policy documents, and decentralization legislation both at national and provincial levels. Additionally, the author interviewed national and provincial ministry officials, school administrators, school supervisors, teachers, and community members over a period of six non-consecutive months from 1998 to 2001. 5. By state–society institutions I mean the socioeconomic context and political culture that dominate a certain environment. Following the sociological neoinstitutional approach and social movements’ literature (Tarrow, 1994), political culture is defined here as the legitimate way of doing politics in a particular context—the rules of the game of a certain polity. Unlike the civic culture tradition (Almond & Verba, 1963) that defines political culture as individual level attitudes, the approach taken here is broader in scope. 6. Democratization is the process that involves the ‘‘movement from authoritarian to democratic forms of rule’’ (Sorensen, 1998, p. 1). It is known that this process has different phases (background condition, preparation phase, decision phase, and consolidation phase, (Rustow, 1970 in Sorensen, 1998), which most often overlaps in the real world. It is after the establishment of the democratic rule – decision phase – that the ideas of participation and civil society play an important role to further democratic development. As Sorensen (1998) suggests, ‘‘[i]t is important to realize that the phases outlined here are not necessarily negotiated in a sooth, and linear manner’’ (p. 39). Moreover, not every regime change will necessarily pass through all these stages and with the same outcome. For further information about this topic, see also Dahl (1971).
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7. The Summit of the Americas gathers all democratically elected heads of governments from the American Continent. The meeting’s declaration establishes the region’s common commitments. The 1998 meeting considered, among others, the following themes: the strengthening of democracy and civil society, political dialogue, economic stability, progress toward social justice, and trade liberalization policies for hemispheric integration. However, education was considered the key theme. 8. The sources for Table 1 were gathered from four comparative education journals: Comparative Education Review, Comparative Education, Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education and the International Journal of Educational Research. The search covered the period 1997 to 2000. The keywords used for the search were: decentralization, community participation/involvement, school democratization, and autonomy. The list of countries illustrated in this table is not meant to be comprehensive; most probably there are more countries that incurred in some sort of education decentralization form not represented in it. 9. Eduardo Duhalde was Argentina’s vice president from 1989 to 1991. He left the vice presidency for the Buenos Aires governorship in 1991. His presidential aspirations made him break with President Menem, who had the intention to run for a second term in 1994. 10. These ideas were at the core of their platform to win the presidential election. By productive revolution and salariazo they meant to situate the country among the highest productive countries in the world and to redistribute the overall gains among wage workers; Menem and Duhalde even suggested a five-year moratorium of the repayment of the country’s external debt as a first step to achieve those goals. With such a rhetoric, they gained not only the support of traditional peronistas but also of a sector of the middle class that in 1983 voted the Radical party’s presidential candidate, Rau´l Alfonsı´ n, and felt betrayed by his poor administration and unfulfilled promises. 11. As an Argentine education ministry official pointed out, ‘‘there are pressures from international funding agencies, particularly when a country is in desperate need for resources; however, recent policies are also the result of a sort of contagious strategy across countries’’ (interview, national ministry official, 1998). 12. Argentina–United Kingdom diplomatic relationship was interrupted after the 1982 Malvinas/Falklands Islands war. 13. The general information presented in this paragraph has been obtained from Buenos Aires’s dailies La Nacio´n and Cları´n from 1990 to 1997. 14. La Nacio´n, Buenos Aires, September 23, 1991. 15. Ley de Emergencia Econo´mica No. 23697 (Economic Emergency Law) and Ley de Reforma del Estado No. 23696 (State Reform Law). The former suspended the industrial and export promotion subsidies and the preferences to local manufacturers and provided the framework necessary for personnel’s dismissal in the public sector; the latter set the regulation needed to privatize public companies. 16. This centralization of decision-making is a long-standing practice in Argentina and made scholars characterize Argentina’s political system as a hyperpresidentialist democracy (Linz, 1994) and of a delegative democracy (O’Donnell, 1994). 17. The liaison between national and foreign technocrats was facilitated by their common academic backgrounds, particularly US institutions of higher education. This was the case of Domingo Cavallo, the fourth Minister of Finance of the Menem administration. Cavallo received his doctorate in economics from Harvard University during the 1970s. 18. Porten˜o refers to those who are born in the city of Buenos Aires.
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19. After Domingo Cavallo was forced to resign, he created a conservative political party called Accio´n para la Repu´blica, his platform for presidential aspirations. This party was basically based on Cavallo’s achievements while he was the finance minister. 20. Argentina’s labor market was very rigid. During Juan D. Peron’s first two administrations (1946–1955), several laws were passed that regulated individual and collective work conditions by establishing compulsory collective bargaining and indefinite duration of collective and individual working contracts (Murillo, 2001, p. 145). 21. Ministerio de Cultura y Educacio´n de la Nacio´n, Resolucio´n 2165, Buenos Aires, Noviembre 1990. 22. During a Mercado Comu´n del Sur (MERCOSUR) meeting, called ‘‘El Mercosur Educativo’’, Ministers of Education of all MERCOSUR member countries agreed to create education systems under these main principles: regional integration, citizenship ideals, human resources training, and decentralization, among others things (La Nacio´n, Buenos Aires, December 14, 1991, p. 5). 23. During the same month when congress passed the law the Minister of Finance, Dr. Domingo Cavallo said in a meeting organized by The Forum of Science, Corporation and Policy that, ‘‘The provinces need to implement adjustment policies due to the fact that they are not only going to be in charge of health and education expenditures, but also of planning social welfare y . We need to do with the provinces the same as the international credit institutions do with the countries’’ (La Nacio´n, Buenos Aires, December, 4, 1991, p. 18). For full details of the recommendation made by the World Bank, see Kugler and Mc Keekin (1991). 24. In 1990 the total amount transferred to the provinces in concept of coparticipacio´n (revenue-sharing) was $4.8 billon pesos. This amount increased during the following years to a $8.8 billon pesos in 1992 (Secretarı´a de Relaciones Fiscales y Econo´micas con las Provincias, 1994, p. 15). 25. One of Cavallo’s most well-known policies was an anti-inflation shock that included the enactment of the Convertibility Plan Law 23.928 (1991), which fixed Argentine peso to the U.S. dollar and prohibited any currency emission. With his convertibility plan, Cavallo became a technocrat hero and was finally able to renegotiate the external debt and Argentina’s inclusion in the Brady Plan for alleviation of its external debt. This gave Cavallo not only popularity but also the possibility to think about his political future as a presidential candidate. 26. See Convenios de Transferencias a las Provincias (1992–1993) and Actas Complementarias (1992–1998), Buenos Aires, Argentina. 27. Some of the responsibilities maintained at the central level are: national testing and system evaluation, core curriculum standards, compensatory education programs, and technical assistance, among others. 28. Asociacio´n cooperadora escolar (school cooperatives) are analogous to parent– teacher associations (PTA) in the United States. They are the institutionalized channels for parents’ participation at the school level. The role of the school cooperative is ‘‘to assist the school in eliminating all causes that may have a negative affect on students’’ (Manual para Cooperadoras Escolares, Art. 1, 1994). 29. The national administration proposed some basic institutional guidelines that all schools in the country should follow. Also, in 1994 the national administration stated a program called Nueva Escuela. This program was intended to provide technical assistance to the schools in the design of their institutional projects.
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30. This new school management model is similar to what in other contexts is called school autonomy or school-based management. 31. Since 1988 the Peronista party has dominated the province of Buenos Aires’s political scene. 32. For details on Duahalde’s attacks on Menem’s administration see El Duhaldismo le apunta a Menem, La Nacio´n, Buenos Aires, Julio 7, 1996. 33. The three-level organizational system suggested by the LFE was not adopted in the province of Buenos Aires until later on and is currently under review. It is worth noting that in this province high school education is compulsory. 34. It is important to note here that many of Duhalde’s political advisers share The Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) (the Spanish acronym is CEPAL) and UNESCO ideals. Both organizations are under the umbrella of the United Nations. For more than a decade, these organizations have been advancing equity as a precondition for democratic development in the region. Menem’s technical advisers on the other hand, ascribed to the neoconservative orthodoxy. 35. The Peronista or Justicialista party was born in the early 1940s to provide a popular base to Juan D. Pero´n. Although considered originally as an electoral machine or movement (Murmis & Portantiero, 1971), it acquired permanency and party status far beyond its caudillo or leader. Lacking a coherent ideology, Pero´n used a variety of means to reach support among his varied constituency, the most important ones were nationalism and an anti-oligarchy rhetoric, mass rallies, economic policies that addressed income distribution, labor laws, the expansion of the public sector, and political participation of previously excluded sectors. Moreover, he used his charismatic leadership in a direct connection with his followers without any party or congress mediation. Lacking a disciplined and bureaucratic structure, its organization depends today on charismatic leadership and an extensive informal network of neighborhood organizations working jointly with the party local unidades ba´sicas (base units, UBs) (Levitsky, 2001). 36. The DGCE unit, with ministerial hierarchy, has the overall responsibility of the provincial education system. 37. Municipalities have an insignificant participation in the delivery of education services. Their impact is primarily seen at the pre-school level. 38. Students of recent neopopulism in Latin America agreed that although governments faced fiscal constraints in state-spending they managed to create material benefits to their constituency by, among other tactics, targeting social programs for the poor (Weyland, 1996). Buenos Aires’ social plan was initially implemented in La Matanza and later on in other poor districts officially declared as bolsones de pobreza (poor areas) in the Greater Buenos Aires. 39. Manzaneras stands for block (manzana in Spanish) party brokers. 40. Various scholars discussed this paradigmatic outcome of recent decentralization policies. See, for example, Astiz et al. (2002), Astiz (2004), Hanson (1995), McGinn & Street (1986), and Weiler (1993).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank David P. Baker, Francisco O. Ramirez, and Alexander W. Wiseman for their comments on early drafts of this chapter. Also, I benefited from the
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insights of two anonymous reviewers who helped me clarify my ideas and writing. Lastly, I want to thank Cesar R. Torres for the hours spent reading the final draft of this chapter.
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EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT OF IMMIGRANT-ORIGIN AND NATIVE STUDENTS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS INFORMED BY INSTITUTIONAL THEORY Claudia Buchmann and Emilio A. Parrado Throughout the industrialized regions of the world, immigrant children and children of immigrants comprise a rapidly growing segment of the schoolage population. This is true in countries with a long history of immigration, such as the United States and Australia, as well as in European nations where large-scale immigration is a much more recent phenomenon. Changes in the global economy coupled with changes in immigration policies and other forces have spurred a recent wave of immigration to industrialized world regions of a magnitude heretofore unseen. This new wave of immigration has raised questions and concerns regarding the effects of immigration on receiving nations and on the lives of immigrants and nonimmigrants within these nations. For the sizable segment of the immigrant population that is young, key adaptation outcomes and prospects for social mobility largely stem from their experiences in the educational system. To the extent that educational achievement is a strong predictor of social and occupational mobility,
The Impact of Comparative Education Research on Institutional Theory International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 7, 335–366 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3679/doi:10.1016/S1479-3679(06)07014-9
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achievement differences among foreign-origin and native students are important predictors of the long-term mobility prospects of immigrants and their integration into the host society. Despite the importance of this issue, research comparing the educational achievement of immigrant and nonimmigrant children has been quite limited. While a growing body of literature examines the determinants of academic achievement for children of immigrants in the United States (Hirschman &Wong, 1986; Kennedy & Park, 1994; Kao & Tienda, 1995; Portes & MacLeod, 1996,1999; Zhou & Bankston, 1998; Mouw & Xie, 1999), few studies have examined attainment and achievement gaps of immigrants in a comparative context. Thus, Alejandro Portes’(1997) comments regarding the study of immigration nearly a decade ago still apply today: ‘‘the vigorous resurgence of the sociology of immigration in recent years has been, by and large, a single-country phenomenon y the wave of novel research and theory on immigration in the United States has not been accompanied by a comparative thrust of similar vigor’’ (p. 818). As a result, very little is known about how immigrants compare to non-immigrants in terms of their educational performance or attainment across societies; to our knowledge, there are no systematic, comparative quantitative analyses of immigrant educational achievement or achievement gaps across nations. Portes (1997) goes on to argue that systematic cross-national research is useful for three purposes: ‘‘first to examine the extent to which theoretical propositions ‘travel,’ that is, are applicable in national contexts different from that which produced them; second, to generate typologies of interaction effects specifying the variable influence of causal factors across different national contexts; third, to themselves produce concepts and propositions of broader scope’’ (p. 820). Portes’ comments regarding the utility of comparative research for theory building align well with the goals of this chapter. First, as we examine patterns of educational achievement among immigrantorigin and native-born students in 14 industrialized countries, we seek to determine the extent to which theoretical propositions developed to explain achievement differences in the United States apply across a range of industrialized nations with large or growing immigrant populations. Second, like other contributors to this volume, we believe that comparative research is especially well-suited for building and testing institutional theory, as it provides researchers with a framework to examine how causal factors have variable influences across different institutional contexts. Using data from the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS), we examine the determinants of mathematics achievement scores for immigrant and native students. The TIMSS is especially well-suited for
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such comparative research as it provides systematic data on representative samples of 13–14 year-old students – including their performance on internationally standardized achievement tests – for a wide range of countries. We investigate the relationship between immigrant status and educational achievement in each nation and examine the relevance of two prominent ‘‘individual-level’’ explanations for gaps in achievement between immigrant and native students: (1) arguments which maintain that differences in academic performance are largely due to differences in family background, such as parental education, socioeconomic status and family structure; and (2) perspectives that emphasize differences in language ability as the primary factor predicting achievement differences. Then, we build on institutional perspectives to develop the proposition that educational achievement of immigrant students is related, in part, to institutional variations in the mode of incorporation of immigrants in the host society. Both governmental policies and public attitudes toward immigrants may have enduring effects on the incorporation patterns of immigrants into their host societies. All societies have developed legal rules, discursive practices and organizational structures that define both the status of immigrants and the degree of their participation in the institutions of the host society (Soysal, 1994, p. 32). In some nations, the practices and policies that determine membership are exclusionary in that there exist strong cultural and economic boundaries between natives and foreigners and immigrants are seen as temporary residents in the host society (Baker, Esmer, Lenhardt, & Meyer, 1985; Freeman, 1995). Other nations are more inclusionary, with policies and practices that encourage the integration of immigrants into the host society. Institutional variations in the degree of exclusion/inclusion of foreigners should be important determinants of immigrant incorporation, over and above the cultural background or individual characteristics of the immigrants themselves. In this chapter, we compare countries with different immigrant incorporation regimes and investigate the degree to which immigrant/native achievement differences correspond to these institutional variations in the host societies. After controlling for individual and family background factors, we find that immigrant achievement gaps are largest in nations with exclusionary immigration regimes and smallest in nations with inclusionary regimes. In light of the very limited comparative research on immigrants educational experiences, these findings help advance the study of how immigrants’ experiences are different across Western, industrialized societies. Moreover, they demonstrate the utility of comparative research for developing institutional theory and at the same time they underscore the value of
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institutional arguments for providing a more complete understanding of cross-national variations in the achievement gaps between native-born and immigrant-origin students. Because this chapter is only a first step in the study of the impact of institutional variations in immigrant incorporation; we conclude with suggestions for future research on how variations in immigration regimes may impact host societies and the individuals, both immigrant and native born, within them.
EXPLANATIONS FOR ACHIEVEMENT GAPS: INDIVIDUAL-LEVEL AND INSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVES With some important exceptions, immigrants tend to lag behind native students in terms of educational attainment and academic achievement. Prior research has focused on two individual-level explanations for the educationally disadvantaged position of immigrant students. Differences in Family Background. According to human capital and status attainment perspectives, achievement gaps between immigrants and native students are largely due to differences in the family background and socioeconomic status of these groups. A well-developed literature on social stratification carefully explores how parents’ education and occupational status, family income and family size and structure influence educational outcomes (Blau & Duncan, 1967; Duncan, Featherman, & Duncan, 1972; Sewell & Hauser, 1975; Hout, Raftery, & Bell, 1993). Research from the United States and a range of other countries documents a negative relationship between family size and educational attainment1 (Blake, 1989; Downey, 1995), and the negative effects of single parenthood on children’s educational outcomes range from a greater probability of school dropout to lower achievement (see Seltzer, 1994, for a review). To the extent that immigrant children are more likely to come from disadvantaged family backgrounds than native students, we should expect related lags in attainment and achievement among immigrant children. Once family background factors are held constant, gaps in educational outcomes should substantially decline or disappear. The findings of much of the U.S.based research support this argument. For example, studies comparing Hispanic-immigrant and native-born students in the United States find few independent effects of ethnicity and immigrant status, after controlling for parent’s education, occupation, income and other family background
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characteristics (Duncan & Duncan, 1968; Bean & Tienda, 1987; Jones, 1987; Kennedy & Park, 1994; Warren, 1996). Differences in Language Ability. Other research emphasizes differences in language ability as a primary determinant of the gaps in educational performance. For example, Fernandez and Nielsen (1986) find that Mexicanorigin students in the United States who do not speak fluent English are at a serious disadvantage in school. Several studies indicate that low-socioeconomic status and poor language ability are important factors for the underachievement of immigrant youth in the United States, although the effects of socioeconomic status are generally larger than language ability (Rosenthal, Baker, & Ginsburg, 1983; Glenn & de Jong, 1996). In addition to having difficulty communicating in school, students with language deficiencies may be more likely to be viewed as slow learners. Alternatively, recent studies point out the value of bilingualism, whereby students of foreign origin who maintain their native language, in addition to speaking the language of their host country, appear to have advantages over monolingual students (Zhou & Bankston, 1998; Mouw & Xie, 1999). For these students, bilingualism may facilitate greater parent–child communication in households where parents are native speakers. Institutional Variations in Immigrant Incorporation. The above explanations focus primarily on individual differences – in terms of family background, sociocultural adaptation, language ability, etc., – to explain variations in educational outcomes of different immigrant groups. Prior research has paid little attention to institutional variations across host societies as a potential factor in immigrant/native student achievement gaps, likely because so much of the research in this area has focused on immigrant experiences in a single context, most notably the United States. This is unfortunate, since features of the host society may play an important role in immigrants’ process of adaptation, even net of variations in individual and family characteristics. A very different approach is found in institutional theory, where the main focus is not on individual attributes of different groups (e.g., immigrants and non-immigrants) but on collective-level and cultural processes. As Jepperson (2002b) explains, ‘‘by focusing on the broad institutional frameworks of society, sociological neoinstitutionalism then defocalizes ‘actors’ on purpose. This idea is pursued in order to envision features of the social world not easily captured – or not captured at all – when focusing upon actors’’ (p. 4). Institutional theory emerged largely from the ideas of John W. Meyer (1977) and his colleagues, who were ‘‘reacting to the enduring individualism of American sociology’’ (Jepperson, 2002b, p. 3). Institutionalists seek to
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show how ‘‘many basic features of the entities examined – national states, organizations, individuals – are shown to be constructions of institutionalized cultural environments, rather than being ‘hardwired’ and pregiven outside the social system’’ (Jepperson, 2002b, p. 4). How can institutional arguments help us understand differences in educational achievement between immigrant and native-born students? One line of institutional theory maintains that nation-states have distinctive ‘‘institutional logics’’ and political cultures that underlie patterns of nationbuilding and loci of authority (Jepperson, 2002a). For example, Meyer (1983) sketched a typology of modern polity types in which he distinguished between ‘‘statist,’’ ‘‘corporatist’’ and ‘‘individualist’’ nation-states (roughly France, Germany and the U.S., respectively); Jepperson (2002a) extended and modified this typology in order to understand the different paths that nations took to modernize. Other institutionalist scholars in sociology (Soysal, 1994) and political science (Freeman, 1995, 1997) have developed typologies of nation-state variation in the receptivity toward immigrants by examining the policy discourse and organization structures that deal with the incorporation of foreigners into society. For example, Yasemin N. Soysal (1994) shows that different polity forms in Europe led to different regimes for incorporating labor migrants. She argues that differences in immigrant incorporation regimes reflect ‘‘different collective modes of understanding and organizing members in host polities y incorporation styles bear the imprint of collective paradigms of membership that persist over time’’ (pp. 35–36). Thus, rather than locating the source of educational achievement gaps of immigrant and native-born students within individuals (in terms of their language abilities, family background, etc.), institutionalism urges us to focus on how the categories of ‘‘immigrant’’ and ‘‘native’’ may be constructed and certified differently across nation-states and how these patterns, in turn, may relate to variations in achievement gaps. Nations differ in their historical experiences with immigration, the degree to which they promote immigration, and public acceptance of immigrants within the host society. By attending to national-level variations in the receptivity toward immigrants, we can begin to group countries into institutional ‘‘types’’ in terms of the degree to which their policies and practices are exclusionary toward immigrants and then make predictions on how these institutional variations relate to several aspects of immigrants’ experiences, including their educational achievement relative to native-born students. Countries that have long immigrant traditions tend to have inclusionary immigration regimes. Migration was critical to the founding and development
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of countries like the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. According to Freeman (1995), they are ‘‘prototypical countries of immigration, and they stand alone today in encouraging mass immigration for permanent settlement.’’ Since these nations adhere the principle of citizenship jus soli (according to place of birth), second-generation immigrants are citizens and have a secure legal basis on which to make decisions about their futures (Castles & Miller, 1993, p. 222). Moreover, Canada and Australia have pursued multicultural modes of incorporating immigrants into society; the United States has used a combination of multicultural and assimilationist modes – whereby immigrants often form ethnic communities and are gradually accepted as part of a pluralist society. While multiculturalism remains a controversial topic of debate in these nations, it continues to evolve and gain greater acceptance (Castles & Miller, 1993, p. 229). In contrast to traditional immigrant societies, most countries in Northern Europe have adopted a more exclusionary stance toward immigrants (Baker et al., 1985). These nations did not see immigration as ‘‘necessary or important to nation building or integral to the national identities of European states’’ (Freeman, 1995, p. 885). Instead, Northern Europe has only recently experienced mass influxes of immigrants. After World War II, Northern European nations began programs to recruit temporary guest workers primarily not only from Southern and Eastern Europe, but also from former colonies and other developing regions, to meet labor demands. By 1970, Germany had admitted 3 million foreigners, most of whom were migrant laborers (Fassmann & Mu¨nz, 1994, p. 7). During the 1970s, with the onset of economic recession and growing anti-foreigner movements, most countries halted the recruitment of foreign labor; but family reunification, an inflow of refugees from Eastern Europe and higher-than-average birth rates of immigrants led to increasing immigrant populations in Northern Europe through the 1990s. Several writers have argued that this large-scale immigration poses serious dilemmas with respect to citizenship and nationality in Northern European societies, which have little remembered history of such problems and slight inclination to accommodate the cultural demands of minorities (Freeman, 1995; Brubaker, 1990; Quillian, 1995). As a result of these realities, the responses of governments and the public toward immigration are much less positive than in traditional immigrant societies. One striking example of the difference between inclusionary and exclusionary regimes relates to the policies and practices regarding the granting of citizenship to foreigners. In contrast to traditional immigrant countries, Northern European nations generally do not grant citizenship on the basis of birth in the country; immigrants, and their children, must contend with
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more restrictive naturalization procedures in order to become citizens (Soysal, 1994). In Germany, Switzerland and Denmark, citizenship is granted jus sanguinis (according to citizenship of the parents), rather than jus soli (according to place of birth). For example, by German law, children born in Germany are still considered foreigners if they are not of German ancestry. At the same time, children able to prove even the most distant German ancestry are granted citizenship, regardless of their knowledge of German language or culture (Convey & Kupiszewski, 1996). While in recent years, countries with the most restrictive naturalization policies have begun to widen access to citizenship – especially to children of immigrants who have lived in the country for many years – immigrants’ naturalization rates remain very low in most Northern European countries (OECD, 1997). Of course there are important variations within this general Northern European ‘‘exclusionary’’ pattern (see e.g., Soysal, 1994). Some countries, most notably Germany, but also Switzerland and Austria, cling to idea that they are not countries of immigration and that their sizable populations of foreign-origin are not immigrants, but temporary migrants (Convey & Kupiszewski, 1996). This view, coupled with very restrictive naturalization policies, means that most foreign residents do not have access to a range of rights and services and are denied political representation and participation. On the other hand, Sweden and the Netherlands have more readily come to terms with the idea that migrants admitted as temporary laborers are likely not returning home, and they have recognized the need for the long-term integration of these immigrants. Since the 1980s both nations have tried, with varying success, to implement policies toward that goal, sometimes looking to the multicultural models of Australia and Canada for guidance. The Netherlands, Sweden and Norway have also relied more strongly on the welfare state to accommodate immigrants (Entzinger, 1994; Brochmann, 1999). We compare inclusionary immigrant countries and exclusionary Northern European countries with a third group of countries in southern Europe, which have a rather neutral stance toward immigrants. The nations of Spain, Portugal and Greece have long been poorer than their northern counterparts and, therefore, accustomed to exporting labor to other regions in Europe. But in recent decades, these countries have made a rapid transition from sending to receiving countries. Return migration first exceeded emigration in Spain and Greece in 1975 and in Portugal in 1981; since then, these countries have received significant numbers of immigrants from outside the European Community, while they continue to send nationals abroad (Freeman, 1995). The forces contributing to these changes in Southern Europe include rapid economic growth, the development of segmented
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labor markets with large informal sectors, lax or nonexistent immigration control mechanisms and intense migration pressures from nearby countries. In contrast to Northern European contexts, public views have been either largely indifferent (Portugal) or even receptive (Spain) toward immigration, as the demand for low-cost labor still exceeds supply (Freeman, 1995, p. 884). Differences among host countries, their history with and receptivity toward immigrants may, in part, explain immigrants’ adaptation to their host societies and, specifically, the educational experiences and performance of immigrant children, net of family background and individual characteristics. Given the recent nature of large-scale immigration and the generally more restrictive, exclusionary views and policies toward immigrants in many Northern European countries, we expect that immigrants’ integration will be more problematic in these societies and be reflected in larger achievement gaps between immigrants and native students in these nations, in comparison with Southern European and immigrant nations. Other factors likely are important to consider in making any broadly comparative claims about variations in nations’ histories, policies and modes of incorporating immigrants. Countries vary in their investment in education, their extent of support for a welfare state, the degree to which immigrant enclaves in the host society exist and support newcomers and many other factors. Nonetheless, if evidence indicates that net of individuallevel factors, immigrant achievement gaps are patterned according to the institutional differences outlined here, we gain confidence that institutional variations in incorporating immigrants practiced by host societies should be studied further as plausible sources of immigrant achievement gaps.
HYPOTHESES On the basis of the above explanations, three hypotheses emerge that we test empirically in the analyses that follow. Hypothesis 1. Immigrant achievement gaps are primarily due to differences in family background. After controlling for differences in parental education, socioeconomic status, family size and structure, achievement gaps between immigrant and native students will be greatly reduced or eliminated. Hypothesis 2. Immigrant achievement gaps are both due to differences in family background and proficiency in the language of the host country.
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Immigrant children from households where the language of the host country is seldom or never spoken will demonstrate lower achievement than students from households where the host country language is always spoken. After controlling for family background factors and language proficiency, achievement gaps between immigrant and native students will be greatly reduced or eliminated. Hypothesis 3. National-level institutional variations in the modes of incorporation of immigrants condition the effects of immigrant status on educational achievement. In Northern European countries, immigrant achievement gaps should be larger, and remain larger net of family background and language proficiency, than in Southern European or Immigrant Countries. Immigrant gaps should be smallest in Immigrant countries relative to both Southern and Northern European countries.
DATA AND METHODS To test these hypotheses, we use data from the TIMSS. TIMSS was conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) in 1995, and is one of the largest international survey on educational achievement to date (IEA, 1995, 1997). It includes systematic data on indicators for student background, attitudes and activities, math and science achievement scores and school characteristics for student populations in primary, middle and late-secondary schools in 42 countries. We conduct analyses using data from three sets of countries that correspond to the institutional typology outlined above: seven Northern European countries (Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway), three Southern European countries (Spain, Portugal, Greece), and four Immigrant Countries (United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand). We use data for the middle-school population, technically defined as ‘‘all students enrolled in the two adjacent grades that contain the largest proportion of 13-year-olds at the time of testing’’ (IEA, 1997). This population basically corresponds to seventh- and eighth-grade students and is most similar in age to those used in prior research on immigrant student populations. The survey entailed substantial efforts to standardize measures and procedures across countries and to document national deviations from international norms established by the IEA. In each country, students were
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sampled for testing through a two-stage stratified cluster design. At least 150 schools comprising a representative population were selected; very small or geographically remote schools and those with a curriculum very different from that prevailing country-wide were excluded (IEA, 1997). Within selected schools, a sample of mathematics and science classrooms was randomly selected and all students in these classes were surveyed. In the mathematics classes, students were administered a ninety-minute mathematics test consisting of 151 multiple-choice, short-answer and extended response items. Raw scores on this test were used to compute an international mathematics achievement score for each student.2 We estimate ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models to determine the effects of immigrant status and other independent variables on mathematics achievement by country in the form, M c ¼ a c þ bc X c þ c where c indexes countries, M equals math achievement scores, X represents independent variables and a and b are parameters to be estimated. To examine the relationship between immigrant status and math achievement, we compare three generational groups: (1) first-generation immigrants are foreign-born children with one or both parents of foreign origin, (2) second-generation immigrants are native-born children with one or both parents of foreign origin, and (3) native students are students born in-country of native-born parents. This definitional strategy has both strengths and limitations. First, it is the conventional strategy of defining immigrant status used by most prior research on the educational performance of immigrant students in the United States (Kao & Tienda, 1995; Portes & MacLeod, 1999), so the results from the comparative analysis can be readily compared to those of prior research. Second, it distinguishes aspects of immigrant status that should matter for educational achievement in all countries. Importantly, however, in light of the discussion regarding citizenship policies above, this generational definition may not capture some important variations in the Northern European countries where citizenship is not granted according to place of birth. For example, given that German children classified as ‘‘native’’ according to the above definition are considered foreigners if they are not of German ancestry, it is possible that in Germany, our analyses underestimate differences by immigrant status, as some students classified as natives may be disadvantaged. Unfortunately, the survey did not ask questions regarding citizenship status. An additional limitation of the TIMSS data is that students were not asked about their country of origin or ethnicity. Thus, we are not able to
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examine possible differences by the country of origin for first- and secondgeneration immigrants. This is unfortunate since much of the research on immigrants’ educational experiences in the U.S. finds substantial differences among immigrants of different origins. Students of Chinese, Korean and Filipino origin are seen as examples of successfully adapting to school, while children of Latin minorities are said to confront serious handicaps (Portes & MacLeod, 1999, p. 374; Hirschman & Wong, 1986; Zhou & Bankston, 1998). The data do not allow us to examine the internal diversity of immigrant populations in different countries or the role such diversity may play in shaping differences in educational achievement. Nonetheless, we maintain that these data are appropriate for testing the institutionalist idea that the categories of ‘‘immigrant’’ and ‘‘native’’ may be constructed and certified differently in countries with different immigration incorporation regimes. Regardless of achievement variations that may exist within immigrant populations, if the patterns in the achievement gaps between immigrants and native-born students correspond to institutional variations discussed above, it is reasonable to construe this as evidence in support of the institutional hypothesis. Other independent variables include individual and family background characteristics. Student’s Age, in tenths of a year, is based on birth date. Female is a dummy variable coded 1 if the student is female. Father’s education is the student’s report of his or her father’s educational status, consisting of four categories: did not complete secondary, completed secondary, vocational education and university. Because the survey contains no direct measure of parental income or occupational status, we use a measure of household resources as a proxy measure of socioeconomic status. It is derived as the sum of ‘‘yes’’ responses ( ¼ 1) to a series of questions about possessions (e.g. car, television, computer) in the household, ranging from 0 to 16. Family size is the respondent’s report of the total number of people living in the household. Single Parent is a dummy variable coded 1 if student lives with only one parent, either mother or father. Finally, home language is a dummy variable coded 1 if the student reports that the language of the test3 is always or almost always spoken at home (versus sometimes or never ¼ 0). Detailed definitions and descriptive statistics for all variables used in the analysis are reported in Table A1 of Appendix A; Table B1 of Appendix B shows country-specific descriptive statistics for math achievement and background characteristics for the full sample and then for first- and second-generation immigrant and native students.
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RESULTS For each country, we first estimate a baseline model (model 1) that examines the impact of immigrant status on math achievement, controlling only for age and sex of the student. In terms of immigrant status, native students are the reference category. Tabular results for these analyses are presented in Table C1 of Appendix C. Math achievement scores of first-generation immigrants are significantly lower than native students in all countries except Spain, Portugal, Australia and New Zealand. In New Zealand, first-generation immigrants have significantly higher scores than native students. Achievement gaps are larger in Northern European countries. Second-generation immigrants also appear to have significantly lower math achievement in most countries, except Denmark, Norway, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where there is no significant difference between math scores of second-generation and native students. Where significant, the achievement gap of second-generation immigrants is smaller than for first-generation immigrants in all countries, except in the United States, where it is larger. Females have significantly lower math achievement scores in all countries except Germany, Norway, Canada and Australia. On the basis of these results, Fig. 1 graphically displays the gap in math scores between immigrants and native students for Northern European, Southern European and Immigrant Countries. The white bar represents the gap in mathematics scores of first-generation immigrants compared to 70 2nd Generation
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native students; the black bar represents the gap between second-generation immigrants and native students. A second model controls for family background factors (see Table C2 of Appendix C). In addition to age and sex of the student, this model controls for father’s education, socioeconomic status, family size and structure. In all countries, father’s education has a strong positive impact on math achievement. The effect of SES is also positive and significant in most countries (Austria and Denmark are two exceptions), though its effects are generally small. The effects of family size are less remarkable that we might expect on the basis of prior research; family size has no significant impact on achievement in four Northern European nations (Germany, Switzerland, Denmark and Norway). Though negative and significant in all other countries, its effects on math achievement are generally small. This may due to the less precise measure of family size – total number of people in the household – used here, instead of the preferred measure of total number of children, which more accurately reflects possible constraints of sibling size on educational outcomes that are results of the dilution of resources across children in the household. The negative effects of living with a single parent are larger and more consistent. In all but three countries (Austria, Spain and Portugal) children in single parent households have significantly lower scores than those in households with two parents. In sum, these results generally correspond with much prior research, which finds that children of well-educated parents with more income and those who live with both parents in small families have higher rates of attainment and achievement than other children. With the addition of these variables, the previously significant negative effect of female is reduced to non-significance in some countries, but net of these factors, females still demonstrate significantly lower math achievement in Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Spain, Portugal and the United States. While these effects of the control variables are interesting in their own right, our primary interest is with the effects of immigrant status, net of these factors. In all Northern European countries, large negative effects of first-generation immigrant status remain, net of family background factors. Previously non-significant effects for first-generation immigrants in Spain and Portugal are now negative and significant. The effect of second-generation status on math achievement also remains relatively unchanged with the addition of controls for family background. In line with prior research in the United States, we find that the achievement gap between first-generation immigrants and native students largely disappears (for second-generation immigrants the gap is reduced but still significant). Similarly non-significant
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effects of immigrant status in Australia and New Zealand indicate that, after controlling for family background and socioeconomic status, students of immigrant origin perform on par with native students. Interestingly, in Canada, achievement gaps remain large and significant in this model. Figure 2 presents the gap in math scores between immigrants and native students in all countries with family background factors controlled. Indeed the pattern of results for Northern European countries does not appear much different from that presented in Fig. 1, indicating that the addition of family factors has little impact on the effects of immigrant status. In a final model, we examine the combined impact of language ability and family background on achievement (see Table C3 of Appendix C). The results are displayed graphically in Fig. 3. Language ability has a positive significant effect on math achievement in all countries except for the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark. For Northern European countries where language is significant (Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Norway) its effects on math achievement are large and first generation-native achievement gaps are substantially reduced – so much so in Norway that the achievement of immigrant-origin students is now indistinguishable from that of native students. In Germany, Switzerland and Austria, these gaps remain negative and significant. In all Southern European and Immigrant Countries, children in households where the language of the host country is commonly spoken have 70 2nd Generation
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significant advantages in math achievement. Even so, in Greece the negative effects of immigrant status remain. In Spain and Portugal, once language proficiency is controlled, immigrant-origin students perform as well in math as their native counterparts, while in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, some immigrant-origin students actually perform significantly better than native students. Again the case of Canada does not fit the pattern for other immigrant Countries; first-generation immigrants continue to under-perform relative to native students, net of controls for family background and language proficiency.4 On the basis of these results, Fig. 4 graphically presents the predicted math scores for natives, second- and first-generation immigrants in all 14 countries. Switzerland reports the highest scores for all three groups, Portugal the lowest. Within these extremes, however, there are several interesting comparisons. For example, predicted math scores for first-generation immigrants are higher in Norway, Sweden, Austria and Switzerland than in the U.S. For second-generation immigrants, predicted math scores are higher in all Northern European countries than in the United States. These comparisons underscore the point that, while Northern European societies appear to fare poorly in terms of the math performance of their immigrant populations compared to their native populations, in terms of overall math achievement, immigrant-origin students in Northern Europe fare far better than immigrant-origin students in the United States. The immigrant
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Predicted Math Scores for Natives and Immigrant Origin Groups in 14 Countries, Model 3.
achievement gaps in these countries are attributable, in part, to the high average achievement of native students. Similarly, the lack of achievement gaps in the United States is due, in part, to the lower achievement scores of all students. As countries aspire to high achievement rates for all students regardless of immigrant status, the case of Australia may be most informative. It demonstrates relatively high math achievement levels across all groups and small gaps between groups.
DECOMPOSITION ANALYSIS In an attempt to get some sense of the mechanisms underlying the differences in immigrants’ achievement in different social contexts, we decompose differences in math achievement scores in Northern and Southern European regions with respect to Immigrant Countries. For these analyses we combine the student samples from all Northern European countries into a single ‘‘Northern Europe’’ sample and all Southern European countries into a single ‘‘Southern Europe’’ sample. Cases from the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are combined to form an ‘‘Immigrant Country’’ sample. For this analysis, it is necessary to create general measures for parents’ education and socioeconomic status that were measured in precisely
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the same way across all contexts. Thus, instead of using father’s education comprised of four categories in most countries, and three categories in some countries (see Table C2), we use a measure of parents’ education, which indicates whether at least one parent had completed secondary school. The variable for socioeconomic status is a simplified measure indicating whether the student’s household possesses three educationally relevant resources: a calculator, a computer and a study-desk. Beyond these measures, countries were allowed to add questions regarding other material resources in the home, so these measures are not standard across countries. The main objective of this simulation exercise is to capture the extent to which differences in the educational achievement of immigrants across regions are explained by: (1) the mean background characteristics of immigrant groups in different regions (e.g., sex, parents’ education, SES, family size and structure, language) or (2) the social context of the host societies receiving immigrants, as reflected by differences in the returns to the background characteristics of immigrant groups. The following equation is used to produce the decomposition: M ic M or ¼ aic aor þ X or ðbic bor Þ þ bor ðX ic
X or Þ þ ðX ic
X or Þðbic
bor Þ
where Mic Mor, is the difference in mean math achievement scores in Immigrant Countries (ic) relative to other regions (or), namely Northern and Southern Europe, aic aor is the difference in intercepts which, in this context, reflects differences in math achievement across regions when the independent variables equal 0, Xor (bic bor) captures how much of the difference in achievement is due to differences in coefficients. It allows us to simulate the average math achievement score that would be obtained by immigrants in Northern and Southern European regions if the returns to background characteristics were the same as those returns for immigrants residing in Immigrant Countries. Together, the difference in intercepts and coefficients estimate the extent to which disparities in math achievement scores are due to parameter estimates and thus capture the role of institutional context in affecting educational outcomes. bor (Xic Xor), captures the effect of differences in mean social background characteristics; that is the extent to which compositional differences in the immigrant population explain differences in math achievement scores. (Xic Xor) (bic bor) (not reported) is an interaction term to balance the equation.
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We perform this exercise for both first-and second-generation immigrants. The models estimated to produce the decomposition are reported in Table C4 of Appendix C; Figs. 5 and 6 graphically present the results from this decomposition. Results in Fig. 5 indicate that, on average, first-generation immigrants have higher math scores in Immigrant Countries than in Northern or Southern Europe. The mean math achievement score (indicated by the column labeled ‘‘observed’’) for first generation immigrants in Immigrant Countries is 511.8, in Northern European Countries it is 500.9 and in Southern European Countries it is 454.7. When we decompose this difference according to differences in parameters and means, the magnitude of the effect differs considerably across regions. The ‘‘parameters’’ column shows the impact of applying the coefficients of Immigrant Countries to Northern and Southern European Countries. If first-generation immigrants in these contexts experienced the same returns to socioeconomic characteristics as their counterparts in Immigrant countries, their math scores would be would be 5.8 and 46.5 points higher, respectively.5 The ‘‘means’’ column shows the predicted math scores of immigrants in Northern and Southern European countries if they had the same mean values of the independent variables as immigrants in Immigrant Countries. In this case their mean scores would be 3.7 and 4.3 points higher, 520
Southern Europe
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Decomposition of Differences in Math Scores across Regions: First Generation.
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550 540 530
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Decomposition of Differences in Math Scores across Regions: Second Generation.
respectively.6 Thus, while both differences in mean background characteristics and the returns to background characteristics are to blame for the lower math achievement of immigrants relative to natives in Northern and Southern Europe, more of the difference is attributable to differences in the returns to background characteristics. In other words, the different immigrant achievement gaps across the three contexts appear to stem less from differences in the socioeconomic composition of the migrant flow and more from differences in the context of immigrant incorporation. Southern European countries in particular appear to have greater difficulties in assimilating first-generation immigrants, but the disadvantaged situation of first-generation immigrants in Northern European countries relative to their counterparts in Immigrant Countries is also evident. The decomposition results for second-generation immigrants reported in Fig. 6 are considerably different. The results indicate that if secondgeneration immigrants in Northern Europe had the parameter estimates of second-generation immigrants in Immigrant Countries their educational attainment would actually decrease. In Southern Europe, on the other hand, there is evidence of discrimination, or at least, barriers to assimilation of second-generation immigrants. If immigrants in Southern Europe had the parameters of Immigrant Countries their achievement would be considerably higher. For second-generation immigrants, differences in means
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do not contribute dramatically to differences in achievement scores across contexts. Overall, these results suggest that immigrant achievement is affected considerably by the context of immigrant incorporation. In comparing the results for first-generation immigrants in Northern European countries with those in Immigrant Countries, it appears that a considerable portion of the immigrant achievement gap stems from difficulties in assimilating into the host society. Interestingly, second-generation immigrants in Northern European countries do not appear to suffer these same difficulties. The extent to which this difference between first- and second-generation immigrants reflects an increasing ability of migrants to adapt to their host society over time or, rather, changes in the migrant population themselves is unclear. It is plausible that the greater difficulties for first-generation immigrants relative to second-generation immigrants to attain math scores comparable to native populations indicate that recent waves of immigrants to Northern European countries are facing greater difficulties in assimilating than previous waves of immigrants. In Southern Europe, on the other hand, limits to assimilation are more pronounced and present for both the first and second generation. Their immigrant populations, however, remain relatively small. It is likely that these effects will change as immigration becomes more generalized.
CONCLUSIONS In light of these findings, it appears that sweeping generalizations regarding the determinants of immigrant achievement gaps across a wide range of societies are not possible. While the lower achievement of immigrant students can be largely explained by differences in family background and language proficiency in the United States, as well as in some other societies with a long history and tradition of immigration, these factors do not explain the sizable gap in performance between immigrant-origin and nativeborn students in many Northern European societies. Thus, Hypotheses 1 and 2, developed primarily on the basis of prior research in the United States receive support in some contexts, but do not appear to hold in the European nations analyzed here. Rather, the patterns of findings reported in Figs. 1–3, in conjunction with the decomposition analysis reported in Figs. 5 and 6, lend support to the hypothesis that national-level institutional variations in the incorporation of immigrants condition the effect of immigrant status on educational achievement. Immigrant achievement gaps in Northern European countries
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are larger and remain larger, net of family background and language proficiency, than in Southern European or Immigrant Countries. This is an important finding in that it indicates that institutional aspects of the host society matter for immigrant adaptation, even net of variations in individual and family characteristics. While these results are encouraging, they provide only a first step toward an understanding of how institutional variations may structure the experiences and mobility of immigrants in industrialized societies. We have sketched such institutional variations in very broad-brush strokes by grouping countries into institutional ‘‘types’’ in terms of the degree to which their policies and practices are exclusionary toward immigrants. Much work remains to be done in order to fill in the details. For example, this chapter has not attended to the specific processes or mechanisms that may be the source of the lower achievement of immigrants in exclusionary societies. In Northern European countries, governmental policies and public animosity toward immigrants may mean that immigrant students are more likely to be segregated from native students. They may be discriminated against and have less access to quality educational resources. If they and their parents are denied citizenship rights, they may have little recourse to redress such inequities. Any or all of these factors may influence the educational achievement of immigrant-origin students. While crossnational analyses of numerous countries like the one in this chapter are useful for establishing broad patterns across a wide range of societies, they are less useful for determining the explanatory mechanisms within countries that are the source of these patterns. Studies that focus on detailed data from one or two countries are more suitable for achieving this goal. One study, now 20-years old, exemplifies the kind of knowledge that can be gleaned with detailed data from a single country. David Baker and his colleagues examined how immigrant and native students were allocated to the three types of German secondary schooling – the Gymnasium, the Realschule and the Hauptschule. The Gymnasium is the most selective type of schooling and traditionally leads to a university education. The Realschule provides education appropriate for white-collar business or skilled trade occupations. The Hauptschule is the least selective and provides the fewest career opportunities (Baker et al., 1985, p. 216). Immigrant students were most likely to enter the secondary school system via Hauptschule and remain there over the course of their secondary education. Moreover, in regions with large populations of immigrants, fewer native students were enrolled in the Hauptschule and more were enrolled in Realschule or Gymnasium. The authors maintain that in the face of growing enrollment of immigrants in the Hauptschule, native Germans avoid the Hauptschule and are either
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redistributed upward into higher status strata of secondary schools or migrate out of regions with large influxes of immigrants. The segregation of immigrant students in low-status schools and the reassignment of German students to high-status schools, whether through official or unofficial means, is one plausible explanation for the large immigrant achievement gap in Germany and other nations with an exclusionary stance toward immigrants. Future research could examine whether immigrant students tend to be segregated in low-status schools in other Northern European countries. Austria, Switzerland and The Netherlands have highly stratified secondary-school systems where students are allocated to schools that differ greatly in curricula and the extent to which they prepare students for higher education (Shavit & Mu¨ller, 1998; Eurydice European Unit, 1997). If research finds that immigrants are segregated in the lowest-strata of secondary schools in these countries, the understanding of how institutional variations wield their impact on immigrants’ educational experiences will be advanced substantially. Another fruitful line of research would redress the inability of the above analyses to examine the national origin of immigrants as a potentially important source of educational achievement variations. In addition to differences in the modes of incorporating immigrants, host nations differ in the types of immigrant populations they receive, in terms of their skills, their likelihood of integration, and their country of origin. Differences among immigrant populations that are not captured by the individual and family background characteristics in the above analyses may play a role in explaining national variations in the math performance of immigrants. Unfortunately, we know of no large comparative data sets on educational performance that include data on the nation of origin of immigrant students. Even the Programe on International Student Assessment (PISA), the largest and most comprehensive survey on educational achievement in industrialized countries to date does not report nation of origin data for immigrant students (www.pisa.oecd.org). Thus researchers likely will have to rely on comparative studies of a few countries to examine this issue. For example, a study comparing the educational performance of Turkish immigrants in European nations with different modes of immigrant incorporation would effectively serve to hold nation-of-origin constant. Variations in the mean educational achievement of a single immigrant group across different contexts could reasonably be attributed to institutional variations in receptivity toward this immigrant group across contexts. We hope that the ideas set forth in this chapter spawn future research on the educational experiences of immigrants in different host societies. The idea that the educational achievement of immigrant students is related, in
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part, to institutional variations in the host society is an important departure from prior research which has focused primarily on the individual attributes of immigrants and non-immigrants to explain achievement outcomes. In this regard, this chapter underscores the value of institutional arguments for providing a more complete understanding of cross-national variations in the achievement gaps between native-born and immigrant-origin students.
NOTES 1. But there are important exceptions to this pattern; see Shavit and Pierce (1991) and Blake (1989). 2. The IEA recommends that this score be used for international and withincountry comparisons since it takes into account the specific difficulty of the items attempted by each student, their relative difficulty internationally, and the measurement error component (IEA 1997, chapter 6). 3. In Canada, Switzerland and Spain, the tests and surveys were administered in more than one language, depending on the region of the country and the language of instruction in the local schools. Canada: French, English; Switzerland: German, French, Italian; Spain: Castellano, Catalan, Gallego, Valenciano (IEA, 1997, pp. 7–9). 4. We tested whether coefficients for effects of immigrant status in all countries were significantly different from coefficients for the United States. Coefficients for first-generation status in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Canada are significantly different from the U.S. coefficient. For second-generation status, coefficients for Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark are significantly different. There is little change in the effects of other control variables with the addition of language proficiency. The effects of female, father’s education and family size are very similar in all countries. The effects of SES in Germany and Norway cease to be significant in Table C2. The effects for single parent are unchanged, except in the case of Austria, where it is now significant. 5. This result is indicated by the difference between the ‘‘parameters’’ and the ‘‘observed’’ column; for Northern Europe: 506.7-500.9 ¼ 5.8; and for Southern Europe: 501.3-454.8 ¼ 46.5. 6. This result is indicated by the difference between the ‘‘observed’’ column and the ‘‘means’’ column; for Northern Europe: 504.6-500.9 ¼ 3.7; for Southern Europe 459.1-454.8 ¼ 4.3.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Prior versions of this paper were presented at the 2002 meeting of the Population Association of America in Atlanta, GA and at the Stanford University School of Education in Palo Alto, CA. We thank John Meyer, students and faculty in the Stanford University School of Education and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
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APPENDIX A Detailed definitions and descriptive statistics for all variables are shown in Table A1.. Table A1.
Definitions and Descriptive Statistics (full sample) for Variables Included in the Models.
Name Dependent variables Math achievement
Immigrant status First generation Second generation Native Controls Age Sex Father’s education
Socioeconomic status
Family size Single parent Home language
Description
Mean
S.D.
Score on International Mathematics Achievement Test (ranging from 144 to 887)
512.81
91.10
Student is foreign-born and one or both parents are foreign born Student is native born and one or both parents are foreign born Student and both parents are native born
0.05
Child’s age ranging between 13 and 18 years Coded 1 if child is female Level of education attained by father. Coded as: 1 ¼ did not complete secondary 2 ¼ finished secondary 3 ¼ finished vocational education 4 ¼ university (some university or finished university) Sum of yes responses to series of questions regarding material possessions in the household (e.g., car, television, computer), ranging from 0–16 Total number of people live in the household Child lives with only mother or father Language of school instruction is always spoken in the household, (versus sometimes or never)
0.15 0.80 13.73 0.51 3.53
0.80 0.50 1.68
9.79
3.11
4.64 0.19 0.91
1.41 0.39 0.28
APPENDIX B Table B1.
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Country-specific descriptive statistics are shown in Table B1. Math Achievement and Social Characteristics across Countries and Immigrant Status.
Country All Math achievement
Austria Denmark Germany Netherlands Norway Sweden Switzerland Greece Portugal Spain Australia Canada New Zealand United States
497.9 (81.4) 5.9 2.7
510.8 (86.8) 9.4 6.7
543.6 (83.5) 11.0 3.0
496.6 (83.8) 6.9 3.6
527.8 (87.6) 11.4 5.4
561.4 (88.2) 22.9 8.5
477.5 (89.5) 5.3 2.3
444.3 (65.5) 1.8 6.8
478.3 (75.2) 1.4 12.8
533.8 (93.8) 8.3 29.1
513.9 (84.6) 6.6 19.8
505.1 (89.2) 10.2 20.8
492.1 (91.3) 5.8 14.1
550.4 (86.8) % Parent’s secondary education 16.9 % Basic education resources 60.2 Family size 4.7 (1.6) % Native language at home 99.0
499.6 (81.2) 23.5 71.1 4.2 (1.0) 99.2
514.4 (85.8) 12.8 70.7 4.5 (1.4) 98.6
547.2 (82.0) 17.6 84.7 4.5 (1.1) 95.2
497.3 (83.4) 36.6 65.5 4.4 (1.4) 99.1
531.9 (86.6) 32.1 62.6 4.3 (1.1) 99.3
568.5 (87.1) 13.7 68.3 4.6 (1.7) 96.1
478.5 (89.6) 20.8 28.0 4.7 (1.2) 97.7
443.5 (65.2) 8.9 35.7 4.5 (1.5) 98.3
479.5 (75.7) 21.1 41.8 4.8 (1.3) 88.1
532.6 (93.1) 31.3 67.5 4.7 (1.2) 98.8
515.0 (83.9) 41.3 56.1 4.5 (1.2) 88.2
503.1 (88.3) 29.6 57.7 4.8 (1.4) 97.1
494.8 (90.8) 35.7 56.6 4.6 (1.5) 96.6
493.5 (95.9) 28.3 40.5 4.4 (1.5) 35.1
457.3 (83.6) 30.4 58.9 4.8 (1.4) 44.6
479.6 (84.3) 22.6 59.6 4.4 (1.4) 44.3
505.0 (92.4) 30.8 69.2 4.8 (1.5) 43.6
483.6 (86.1) 44.7 56.1 4.9 (1.9) 39.8
483.9 (86.9) 39.5 46.1 4.7 (1.5) 34.9
523.8 (92.7) 21.7 45.5 4.4 (1.2) 33.7
458.8 (79.3) 51.2 27.6 4.6 (1.0) 61.8
441.1 (58.6) 29.6 39.8 5.1 (2.0) 72.4
465.2 (72.5) 32.5 51.9 4.9 (2.0) 24.7
537.4 (96.6) 43.4 67.7 4.7 (1.4) 70.2
501.0 (91.3) 49.5 55.0 5.0 (1.6) 47.2
517.4 (94.1) 57.1 64.9 5.0 (1.7) 56.7
486.9 (95.5) 40.8 46.0 5.4 (2.2) 44.0
534.3 (93.9) % Parent’s secondary education 29.2 % Basic education resources 59.8 Family size 4.4 (1.7) % Native language at home 76.7
490.8 (79.2) 29.8 66.9 4.1 (1.3) 87.6
501.0 (92.1) 17.5 64.4 4.5 (1.7) 72.2
526.3 (88.7) 27.7 78.5 4.5 (1.3) 76.5
494.1 (86.8) 50.2 71.5 4.7 (1.8) 84.5
518.3 (88.9) 37.7 60.7 4.3 (1.3) 81.7
554.2 (85.6) 19.7 65.2 4.3 (1.1) 76.1
468.0 (89.8) 28.3 37.1 4.6 (1.4) 92.2
455.5 (71.3) 21.3 51.5 4.7 (1.7) 93.0
471.7 (71.7) 15.0 47.8 4.5 (1.2) 33.2
535.4 (94.4) 34.6 69.8 4.6 (1.2) 90.3
513.7 (84.6) 53.0 67.1 4.7 (1.3) 80.4
505.9 (89.5) 37.3 60.3 4.9 (1.6) 90.7
478.5 (90.8) 33.6 49.5 5.2 (1.9) 66.6
2042
3420
2620
3462
4788
7789
5331
5447
5499
8664
11652
4404
8590
% Second generation % First generation Natives Math achievement
First Generation Math achievement % Parent’s secondary education % Basic education resources Family size % Native language at home Second Generation Math achievement
N
3922
Note: Parent’s secondary education indicates the percent of students reporting that at least one parent had secondary school. Basic education resources indicates the percent of students reporting that their household has a calculator, a computer and a study desk.
CLAUDIA BUCHMANN AND EMILIO A. PARRADO
545.8 (89.0) 10.0 5.2
Tabular results of the analyses are shown in Tables C1–C4. Table C1.
Regression of Math Achievement on Immigrant Status and Controls. Southern European and Immigrant Countries
Northern European Countries Germany Switzerland
Austria
Netherlands
34.31
51.68
57.70
40.40
(6.18) Second Generation 11.45 (5.17) Age 0.46 (1.98) Female 0.82 (3.01) Constant 508.04 (28.43)
(3.51) 13.92 (2.32) 20.17 (1.01) 7.08 (1.92) 288.30 (14.29)
(6.47) 16.58 (4.72) 3.50 (2.03) 12.17 (2.80) 507.91 (28.12)
(9.71) 19.89 (5.30) 4.12 (2.17) 6.06 (3.28) 607.31 (29.99)
0.07 7789
0.03 3966
0.02 2563
First Generation
R2 N
0.01 3350
(standard errors in parenthesis) pr0.05; pr0.1
Sweden 47.61
Denmark Norway 49.27
20.71
Greece
Spain
Portugal United States
24.11
13.45 1.34 (5.39) (11.39) (7.91) (8.26) (8.65) (6.66) 7.78 10.18 7.45 8.34 4.53 10.09 (3.94) (7.90) (5.99) (5.57) (3.04) (3.56) 30.22 19.76 29.09 11.12 1.86 6.25 (1.52) (2.89) (2.39) (1.73) (1.23) (0.80) 9.16 4.13 9.21 11.24 4.01 8.00 (2.45) (3.61) (2.83) (2.46) (2.03) (1.76) 113.94 239.18 106.77 335.90 508.89 535.98 (21.25) (38.91) (32.18) (22.87) (16.95) (11.41) 0.10 4608
0.04 1947
0.04 3297
0.01 5268
0.01 5421
0.02 5328
7.26 (4.23) 16.85 (2.85) 6.94 (1.41) 7.10 (1.98) 594.49 (19.73) 0.01 8489
Canada
Australia New Zealand
16.07
3.23 (3.23) (3.60) 0.33 3.14 (2.01) (2.17) 9.41 17.84 (1.11) (1.51) 1.30 1.95 (1.57) (1.94) 388.32 280.90 (15.07) (21.02) 0.01 11476
0.02 9367
13.26 (4.51) 3.56 (3.38) 15.28 (2.19) 6.33 (2.71) 299.09 (29.68) 0.01 4302
Educational Achievement of Immigrant-Origin and Native Students
APPENDIX C
363
Regression of Math Achievement on Immigrant Status, Family Background and Controls. Northern European Countries
Southern European and Immigrant Countries
Germany Switzerland Austria Netherlands Sweden Denmark Norway
Spain
32.83
42.61
48.55
18.11
35.73
14.75
12.72
(6.16) (3.57) (6.46) Second generation 13.12 13.21 19.13 (5.07) (2.31) (4.67) Age 2.10 21.58 5.84 (1.94) (0.99) (2.00) Female 11.70 2.04 5.51 (2.97) (1.89) (2.79) Father’s Education (ref: less than Secondary) Secondary 21.05 14.36 22.11 (3.34) (2.75) (4.43) Vocational 26.21 — 32.11 (7.13) (3.80) Some university 49.55 49.59 61.04 (4.73) (3.55) (5.39) SES 2.32 0.11 1.30 (0.69) (0.46) (0.62) Family size 1.76 0.55 1.74 (1.01) (0.64) (0.89) 15.24 5.31 Single parent 17.87 (3.76) (2.63) (3.69) Constant 450.78 226.52 459.71 (29.63) (15.85) (29.24)
(9.62) 14.58 (5.27) 1.90 (2.14) 4.64 (3.25)
(5.54) (11.40) 6.95 7.49 (3.91) (7.84) 30.44 21.19 (1.50) (2.86) 2.45 10.09 (2.42) (3.57)
(7.97) 6.55 (5.95) 30.14 (2.37) 3.43 (2.81)
(8.01) 16.26 (5.36) 14.59 (1.67) 6.67 (2.37)
(8.50) 8.87 (2.99) 0.55 (1.22) 7.36 (2.00)
(6.51) 0.77 (3.49) 3.24 (0.79) 6.44 (1.73)
First generation
R2 N
0.06 3350
46.79
0.11 7789
(standard errors in parenthesis) pr0.05; pr0.1
0.06 3966
17.98 (5.00) 35.14 (4.91) 42.02 (5.47) 3.54 (1.14) 2.97 (1.49) 14.81 (5.51) 533.33 (32.19)
14.60 (3.27) — 34.29 (3.47) 2.21 (0.52) 1.82 (1.09) 10.83 (3.36) 76.81 (22.29)
0.06 2563
0.13 4608
Portugal
U.S.
Canada Australia New Zealand 17.38 (3.19) 3.66 (1.98) 12.46 (1.09) 0.47 (1.54)
2.78 (3.48) 0.99 (2.09) 19.35 (1.45) 1.92 (1.87)
4.87 (4.44) 0.84 (3.27) 17.73 (2.12) 3.33 (2.63)
3.10 2.71 23.76 21.73 13.37 17.77 15.54 (3.31) (3.14) (2.37) (2.75) (5.35) (3.60) (3.46) 7.93 30.88 21.47 24.89 25.76 15.03 31.54 (4.44) (3.26) (3.84) (4.88) (3.68) (2.81) (2.76) 32.83 26.56 54.60 18.99 39.94 50.50 35.87 48.93 (5.60) (4.37) (3.31) (2.66) (3.08) (2.91) (2.00) (2.35) 1.41 4.08 3.24 1.15 1.92 6.35 1.17 1.18 (1.08) (0.62) (0.55) (0.55) (0.38) (0.40) (0.45) (0.75) 1.42 3.70 3.03 1.99 6.14 2.76 0.07 7.72 (1.77) (0.96) (0.98) (0.76) (0.57) (0.59) (0.65) (0.77) 22.04 13.38 18.34 4.93 2.92 28.17 16.42 15.25 (4.69) (3.64) (3.31) (3.18) (2.61) (2.05) (1.86) (2.36) 225.30 65.73 292.89 455.44 461.09 523.47 328.83 216.27 (42.00) (32.86) (23.41) (17.78) (12.40) (19.84) (15.68) (21.35)
1.20 (3.55) 13.15 (4.48) 37.21 (3.55) 2.38 (0.54) 7.46 (0.91) 27.03 (3.42) 265.91 (30.02)
1.88 (4.09) 9.89 (2.78) 2.41 (1.35) 4.75 (1.89)
12.84 (5.39) —
0.07 1947
0.07 3297
0.09 5268
0.04 5421
0.09 5328
0.1 8489
0.05 11476
0.09 9367
0.09 4302
CLAUDIA BUCHMANN AND EMILIO A. PARRADO
Greece
60.07
38.91
364
Table C2.
Regression of Math Achievement on Immigrant Status, Family Background, Language and Controls. Northern European Countries
Southern European and Immigrant Countries
Germany Switzerland Austria Netherlands Sweden Denmark Norway 40.51
34.72
(7.13) (4.01) (7.80) Second generation 5.68 6.18 12.34 (5.36) (2.37) (4.91) Age 2.27 22.11 6.50 (1.93) (0.98) (2.00) Female 1.58 6.21 12.25 (2.96) (1.88) (2.79) Father’s Education (ref: less than Secondary) Secondary 21.40 11.98 20.95 (3.33) (2.74) (4.43) Vocational 31.91 24.00 — (7.11) (3.77) Some university 47.63 59.13 49.99 (4.72) (3.53) (5.40) SES 1.06 1.85 0.31 (0.69) (0.46) (0.62) Family size 0.61 1.90 1.73 (1.01) (0.64) (0.89) Single parent 18.20 5.95 16.15 (3.75) (2.60) (3.68) Language 36.47 31.37 28.29 (6.90) (3.21) (7.15) Constant 422.38 192.49 422.89 (30.33) (16.01) (30.33)
(10.16) 15.27 (5.41) 1.89 (2.14) 4.67 (3.25)
(6.92) (13.42) 6.51 5.71 (4.06) (8.01) 21.20 30.44 (1.50) (2.86) 2.51 10.06 (2.42) (3.57)
18.25 (5.02) 35.41 (4.93) 42.46 (5.52) 3.56 (1.14) 3.04 (1.49) 14.74 (5.51) 3.68 (6.34) 536.57 (32.67)
14.59 (3.27) — 34.27 (3.47) 2.17 (0.52) 1.79 (1.09) 10.96 (3.36) 6.01 (6.60) 71.18 (23.13)
0.06 2563
0.13 4608
First generation
R2 N
23.77
0.06 3350
25.36
0.12 7789
43.14
12.08 (9.77) 1.02 (6.10) 30.27 (2.36) 4.32 (2.81)
Greece 23.13 (8.38) 14.49 (5.36) 14.49 (1.67) 6.80 (2.36)
12.67 (5.39) —
2.72 23.86 (5.32) (3.59) 14.85 31.34 (4.43) (3.26) 32.65 25.96 54.65 (5.61) (4.36) (3.30) 1.18 0.90 1.44 (1.08) (0.62) (0.55) 1.32 0.37 7.56 (1.78) (0.96) (0.98) 22.10 14.07 17.84 (4.69) (3.63) (3.30) 9.92 49.18 34.78 (13.01) (9.30) (6.90) 215.17 17.90 259.06 (44.06) (33.95) (24.30) 0.07 1947
0.08 3297
0.1 5268
Spain
Portugal
U.S.
Canada Australia New Zealand 5.75 (3.68) 3.62 (2.11) 19.22 (1.45) 1.58 (1.86)
15.03 (4.91) 2.38 (3.28) 17.86 (2.12) 3.02 (2.63)
21.56 13.27 16.24 15.53 2.53 (3.45) (3.31) (3.14) (2.37) (2.75) 8.25 30.74 19.77 24.20 24.73 (3.83) (4.88) (3.68) (2.81) (2.75) 18.18 39.81 48.67 35.63 48.51 (2.66) (3.08) (2.92) (2.00) (2.35) 4.03 3.25 1.05 1.85 6.02 (0.54) (0.38) (0.40) (0.45) (0.75) 2.01 2.30 3.73 2.99 5.80 (0.76) (0.57) (0.59) (0.65) (0.77) 4.74 2.97 28.43 16.56 15.46 (3.17) (2.61) (2.04) (1.86) (2.35) 13.10 9.64 23.61 12.23 29.40 (2.86) (5.61) (3.54) (2.19) (4.18) 444.20 450.62 502.08 318.54 189.61 (17.91) (13.82) (20.05) (15.77) (21.63)
1.53 (3.54) 12.52 (4.47) 36.77 (3.54) 2.37 (0.54) 7.07 (0.91) 26.32 (3.41) 25.36 (5.27) 237.88 (30.51)
6.32 (8.68) 1.55 (3.39) 0.57 (1.21) 7.08 (1.99)
0.05 5421
10.17 (6.67) 0.25 (3.50) 3.17 (0.79) 6.41 (1.73)
0.09 5328
9.96 (4.45) 3.30 (2.94) 2.41 (1.35) 5.22 (1.89)
0.11 8489
12.32 (3.31) 2.68 (1.98) 12.46 (1.09) 0.46 (1.54)
0.05 11476
0.09 9367
0.09 4302
365
(standard errors in parenthesis) pr0.05; pr0.1
0.07 3966
38.83
Educational Achievement of Immigrant-Origin and Native Students
Table C3.
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Table C4.
CLAUDIA BUCHMANN AND EMILIO A. PARRADO
OLS Models Predicting Achievement Scores for Immigrant Generations by Region. Northern Europe
First Generation Female Parents secondary educ Socio-econ. status Family size Single parent family Native home language Intercept
6.815 22.641 17.024 10.721 10.701 18.247 533.882
1611 0.072
N R2 Second Generation Female Parents secondary educ Socio-econ. status Family size Single parent family Native home language Intercept
(3.301) (5.065) (4.608) (1.615) (5.631) (4.702) (8.755)
13.355 18.531 16.263 3.692 11.525 26.923 522.724
N R2 (standard errors in parenthesis) pr0.05; pr0.1
(2.671) (3.341) (3.119) (1.101) (3.678) (3.524) (6.432)
3695 0.050
Southern Europe
1.635 (8.342) 15.420 (8.467) 19.560 (8.738) 6.494 (2.439) 2.907 (9.347) 7.486 (8.214) 477.066 (14.747) 299 0.066 0.885 27.791 21.015 4.785 11.928 2.185 477.066 1362 0.063
Immigrant Countries
1.555 21.962 44.773 8.149 26.037 5.009 518.114
(1.786) (3.778) (3.880) (1.084) (4.322) (3.692) (7.216)
2446 0.132 (4.054) (5.332) (4.181) (1.425) (5.458) (4.251) (7.996)
3.160 28.962 31.613 7.284 17.978 21.029 505.294
(1.040) (2.196) (2.282) (0.748) (2.617) (2.819) (4.998)
6958 0.102
FROM CITIZEN TO PERSON? RETHINKING EDUCATION AS INCORPORATION Francisco O. Ramirez Comparative educational research has influenced the development of the world society perspective as surely as the world society perspective has shaped research directions in comparative education. Rooted in neo-institutional ideas emphasizing the extent to which actors and activities are profoundly constructed and influenced by their environments, the world society perspective imagines world models or blueprints of progress and justice that give rise to and increasingly standardize nation-states, organizations, and individuals. The role of education and educationally certified professionals in the overall process of standardization is a core premise in this perspective and a recurring feature of comparative educational research motivated by this perspective. The universalistic character of these models and the formal rationality associated with them facilitates standardization, in aspiration and policy, if not always in practice. Simply put, what all of this means is that we increasingly live in a world in which there are shared standards about who is a person, what constitutes an organization, and what does a nation-state look like. Furthermore, there is a sense that those entities not in the know can learn to become and act like proper
The Impact of Comparative Education Research on Institutional Theory International Perspectives on Education and Society, Volume 7, 367–387 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3679/doi:10.1016/S1479-3679(06)07015-0
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nation-states, organizations, and individuals. How else can one explain the proliferation of expertise roaming the world with the latest word on learning to learn, benchmarking, accountability, transparency, democracy, civil society, and other virtues de jour! Much of the empirical research which situated the world society perspective on the comparative education map is well known and has been summarized elsewhere (cf. Ramirez, 1997; Meyer & Ramirez, 2000). Suffice it to say that the two global trends that serve as corner stones of the world society research edifice are the enormous expansion of educational enrollments at all levels and the expanded scope of the aims and uses of education and the plethora of educational organizations that embody and elaborate these purposes. Ours is truly a world certificational society. There are, of course, alternative ways of accounting for the rise and impact of the world certification society. And, these in turn have raised critiques of the world society perspective, critiques often centering on issues of agency and power. These critiques are not without merit, but unfortunately, they often lead to exaggerated and culture-free understandings of agency (see Jepperson & Meyer, 2000) and to oversimplified notions of power cum coercion which underestimate the authority and influence of world cultural models (see Ramirez, 2003a). In what follows, I first briefly reiterate some of the main ideas of the world society perspective and explore its roots in neo-institutional theories. Next, I identify a direction of future theorizing and research, which both challenges and extends the world society perspective and comparative education research. I first propose to distinguish between institutionalized domains and contested terrains. A clearer understanding of the former is enhanced by the explicit recognition of the latter. Third, I apply this distinction to the question of the role of education in the political incorporation process. The transformation of the masses into citizens via mass schooling is an established theme in comparative political sociology, which has strongly influenced key strands of world society-driven research. Here, I emphasize a second distinction, one between earlier issues of exclusion versus inclusion and current issues regarding the terms of inclusion. Lastly, I reflect on the changing character of the polity to which one is offered membership in the education-based incorporation process. Much of the literature continues to privilege the nation-state and national citizenship. But there is also an emerging literature on human rights and even human rights education. So, I conclude by distinguishing between national citizenship and world or transnational citizenship.
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THE WORLD SOCIETY PERSPECTIVE AND NEO-INSTITUTIONAL THEORIES Comparative education has typically focused on differences across countries and sought to explain these differences as a function of differences in historical legacies, in societal prerequisites (as in variants of functionalist analysis), or in internal patterns of competition and conflict across social classes and status groups. In these studies the independent and the dependent variables of interest are endogenous characteristics of national societies. The latter are presumed to operate mostly as ‘‘closed systems’’ with their past trajectories (think path dependencies) and their present states (think present system needs or current power configurations) shaping the educational outcomes of interest. These endogenous characteristics may depict properties of the economy, e.g. degree of industrialization, the polity, e.g. democratic versus authoritarian regimes, the culture, e.g. Confucian group centric versus Protestant individual oriented, etc. or the educational system itself, centralized versus decentralized. The latter, of course, may be viewed both as a dependent variable influenced by the degree to which the polity is centralized or decentralized as well as an independent variable, influencing the growth of enrollments. In the classical Collins (1979) formulation the comparatively greater growth of post-primary enrollments in the United States was an outcome of status competition which itself was made more likely by a decentralized educational system. The latter in turn reflected and was shaped by a decentralized political system. Status competition dynamics and other endogenous factors may continue to be important influences on varying educational outcomes. Some chapters in this volume highlight the continued importance of historical traditions and cross-national variations in internal structures in accounting for some differences (see in this volume, for example, Buchmann on the historical legacy of immigration and its influence on immigrant/native achievement gaps, or Park on why parental participation is more beneficial in some national school systems, or Astiz on the importance of varying conditions within Argentina in influencing local reaction to community participation goals). But it is the observation of a growth in common educational outcomes, despite cross-national variations in historical legacies and societal characteristics, which initially triggered the idea of a common world, a common source of influence. This idea was employed to make sense of the ‘‘world educational revolution,’’ that is, the global expansion of primary enrollments after World War II (Meyer, Ramirez, Rubinson, & Boli-Bennett,
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1977). All sorts of countries were committing resources to increase enrollments and extolling the virtues of mass schooling for individual and national development. This idea was also used to examine the European origins of mass schooling as a state instrument for the political incorporation of the masses (Ramirez & Boli, 1987). Both with respect to the origins and expansion issues the puzzle was to figure out why different entities increasingly acted in common ways: creating schools, expanding enrollments, establishing national educational ministries and passing compulsory school laws, allocating curricular time to privilege some school subjects, attributing economic, political, and even military success to the quality of schooling. These are some of the common organizational and ideological educational outcomes we seek to explain. The first premise underlying the world society perspective is that nationstates and national educational structures operated as if these were ‘‘open systems.’’ That is, it would not do to pretend that these entities were well buffered from one another. Exogenous factors were clearly at work and figuring out what these were and how they lead to common outcomes was a major challenge for the development of the world society perspective. There were two alternative explanations that we found inadequate. First, following a functionalist imagery, one could argue that the worldwide triumph of schooling was brought about because schooling worked! Neo-institutional theories do not presuppose that nothing works. There is no doubt that there are some goals for which some forms of schooling add up to an efficacious technology. But the ever expanding and diffused goals of schooling at all levels indicate that we are not in the limited and concrete realm of ‘‘efficient mousetrap production.’’ Expanded school systems with elaborated curricula are not adopted across national boundaries because their expected payoffs are clearly realized elsewhere. The frequency of educational reforms and their relatively short life spans suggests that we really do not have a strong handle on what constitutes the optimal level of curricular and pedagogical inputs that lead to economic growth, political integration, and social well being. Macro level educational effects appear to be unstable especially while dealing with political and social objectives. Even with respect to economic outcomes different results are found in different studies; contrast Hanushek and Kimko (2000) with Ramirez et al. (2006) on the relationship between academic achievement and economic growth. A second explanatory line stresses the role of power dependency ties. These arguments share with the world society perspective the premise that nation-states and national educational structures operate as ‘‘open systems.’’ From this perspective there are exogenous influences and these involve the more powerful dictating educational outcomes to the more
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dependent ones. Just as one can find some evidence of educational efficacy at work one can also find some support for power dependency processes. Coercion is in fact one of the three mechanisms that neo-institutional theories emphasize in accounting for a growth in commonalities, that is, institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). National states and national legal systems are the main examples of coercive sources of institutional isomorphism. In the absence of a world state, at the international level center periphery dynamics are often emphasized, e.g. the power of international donors or international governmental organizations such as the IMF or the World Bank to impose their agendas on aid or loan-dependent countries. The other two mechanisms emphasized by neo-institutionalists are mimetic and normative processes. A growth in educational commonalities may be brought about because some national educational system gains heroic status and others imitate it. German, American, Japanese, and Scandinavian schooling have enjoyed heroic status in different eras and with different national goals in mind. More recently this has been referred to as educational-policy borrowing (but see Khamsi-Steiner, 2004 for a renewed emphasis on power and dependency dynamics underlying policy borrowing). Lastly, the role of professionals, scientists, and experts in theorizing education, and more broadly, theorizing its role in individual and national development, has been stressed. Instead of borrowing specific policies what we have is enacting broad principles. A growth in common educational discourse as in affirming national educational standards (of the world class variety, of course) and national educational goals may especially be susceptible to the influence of educational experts. In many cases the affirmation of broad educational principles may be loosely coupled with actual school practices. The celebration of human capital, for instance, may go hand in hand with high rates of student and even teacher absenteeism. On evidentiary grounds summarized elsewhere (see Chabbott & Ramirez, 2000) we eschewed explanations that mostly relied on the presumed efficacy of education or the sole exercise of coercion to make sense of the world educational revolution. There are too many educational outcomes that simply cannot be made sense of through either of these explanations. National educational ministries, for example, have flourished (see Kim in this volume) but their economic or political efficacy is unclear. A stable political democracy and sound economic growth characterized the United States long before its establishment of a distinctive cabinet position for education. Furthermore, this example also shows that it is possible for some educational structure such as a national educational ministry to spread worldwide even though it is not in place in a dominant power.
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From a world society perspective nation-states are not only open to other nation-states but also to the theorization of an influential army of education and development experts. From the latter come norms as to how nationstates should act and ideas as to what constitutes an authentic nation-state. There are thus both cognitive and normative elements in the definition of the nation-state and the standards against which it is to be evaluated. These standards operate as models setting forth the appropriate goals of the nation-state and the rational (often educational) means through which these goals are to be realized. Through international organizations and conferences these standards are articulated and elaborated. It is through these mechanisms that progress and justice goals become nation-state goals. The worldwide enactment of these standards leads to highly scripted nation-state goals: economic growth, political democracy, social equality, human development, etc. The centrality of education in these scripts accounts for its worldwide triumph as legitimated means to an array of national goals. Nation-states are thus not just ‘‘open systems’’ but model-driven and script-enacting ones. The models are universalistic in character: all nationstates are imagined to be capable of attaining progress and justice. Alternative theories stressing inherent national superiorities or virtues are taboo. The scripts are highly rationalized: a lot of theorization confidently links means to ends, regardless of the evidence. What follows from this is the optimistic premise that learning can take place: nation-states, organizations, and individuals can learn. Thus, much of the theorization is explicitly educational in character, culminating in current themes such as the learning society, lifelong learning, and learning to learn. Perhaps these themes lead to some policy borrowing. They most surely constitute principles that can be enacted as sought after goals. Goal enactment displays proper nation-state, organizational, and individual identity. The world society perspective thus emphasizes the importance of identity and identity management at the macro societal level of analysis. The underlying social psychology is Goffmanesque: nation-states operate within a world of frames that inform their identity and legitimate their activity and there is much ‘‘presentation of self’’ among nation-state actors. But nation-states vary in the degree to which they are linked to (or buffered from) world models of progress and justice and their organizational carriers and professional articulators. In more recent formulations, the world society perspective has emphasized that common outcomes are more likely among nation-states with stronger links to world models of progress and justice (cf. Ramirez & Meyer, 2002). This has led to studies that not only identify world and regional educational trends but also test hypotheses
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regarding the effects of varying organizational and ideological links to world models on educational and related outcomes (cf. Suarez, 2006). These links may reflect greater membership in international organizations, greater participation in international conferences, or greater access to ‘‘neighbors’’ with the right membership/participation profile. The earlier research leads to the general finding of greater institutional isomorphism (common educational outcomes) over time. Recent studies refine this general finding by setting forth the conditions under which common educational outcomes are more likely to take place. Furthermore, these studies help account for deviant cases by emphasizing their relatively isolated character. Relatively isolated nation-states are more likely to pursue distinctive educational goals or maintain unique educational structures. To summarize, the world society perspective assumes that nation-states (and other actors) seek to enact a legitimated identity and that much professional theorization defines and standardizes what constitutes proper identity and reasonable action. Scripted goals and rationalized strategies for attaining these goals follow from the worldwide institutionalization of the nation-state. The ‘‘world educational revolution’’ is the triumph of education as a rationalized strategy for attaining an array of scripted goals. In a world certificational society, highly certified experts play a major role in creating and diffusing the professional theorization that leads to common educational goals, e.g. education as human capital or education as human rights, and structures, educational ministries or compulsory school laws. Nation-states with greater access to educational expertise are more likely to experience common educational outcomes. From a world society perspective education as a national instrument for transforming the masses into national citizens is very much an institutionalized or taken for granted domain. In the next sections this conceptualization is both amplified and problematized. First, we consider the distinction between institutional domains and contested terrains. Next, we reflect on national versus postnational citizenship and the shift from an earlier debate on inclusion versus exclusion to the current controversies hinging on the terms of inclusion issues.
INSTITUTIONALIZED DOMAINS AND CONTESTED TERRAINS The right to education is clearly institutionalized. It is articulated in national legislation and in international conferences. Both the Universal Declaration
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of Human Rights and the National Interest are invoked to firmly frame this right. The right to education is theorized both as human right and as human capital. No one seriously disputes the right of all children to be educated and everyone understands that this means going to school for a prescribed period of time. There is also growing consensus on what is to be learned in school. Lastly, enrollment, achievement, and other school data are collected and often compared to ascertain how well a country is doing by its children. National educational report cards have become commonplace. National economic and political crises are increasingly diagnosed as having both educational roots and educational remedies. What we have here are the basic elements of what make actors and activities within a given domain taken for granted or institutionalized. Despite huge differences in the resources assigned to this educational domain (both between and within countries) the enactment of student and teacher roles within classrooms is recognizable and distinguishable from other role enactment patterns in other domains. Moreover, recurring patterns of activity are meaningful because they are theorized and theorized in a universalistic idiom (Strang & Meyer, 1993). All sorts of similar expectations are activated in observers with the simple information that the actors they observe are teachers and students in a setting called a classroom. Lastly, theorization assigns value to the domain and indicates the ways in which the value can be realized best. Thus, the normative emphasis is added to the cognitive one and a rationalizing how-to-get-this-done recipe is further added to the mix. The ubiquitousness of educational reforms and the great likelihood that the reforms will be cast in universalistic language makes sense only if one understands that the right to education is institutionalized as a positive for both the child and the national society. There are indeed debates on how to best teach mathematics or science but both sides agree that their favored pedagogy or curricula would work best for all children. To be sure, there are exceptions to this rule. But the educational reforms that command the greatest attention are universalistic in scope. The right to education is cognitively intelligible, normatively valued, and organizationally displayed in school and classroom roles and routines. It is this confluence of cognitive, normative, and organizational elements that result in a strong degree of institutionalization (see Jepperson, 1991 for a formal explication of the concept of institutionalization). None of the elements discussed above were in place in 1800 and only weakly so in a few countries by 1900. Much of its worldwide establishment takes place after World War II with respect to both its universalistic thrust and its rationalization around human capital and the national interest and
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human rights and personal development. The educability of the peasants, the working class, women, and people of color was highly contested in different countries in earlier centuries. Whether schooling the masses would transform them into good, loyal, and, productive citizens was also disputed. Lastly, even some supporters of schooling, John Stuart Mill, for instance, were skeptical about the extent to which government supported compulsory schooling was a positive development. So, what was once a contested terrain has now become an institutionalized domain. And, for most countries born after World War II there was no transition from contestation to institutionalization. What had been a suspect innovation in an earlier era for some countries was now so transnationally validated that there were virtually no local counter forces to schooling the masses. Exceptions to this takenfor-granted pattern, the apartheid regime in South Africa obviously, were slowly but surely stigmatized throughout the world. This historical transformation should not blind us to the fact that there are contested terrains within educational circles. Nor should we assume that the historical pathway is always in one direction, from contestation to institutionalization. That which is institutionalized can be contested. Successful contestation leads to de-institutionalization or to emergent institutions. No, the right to education has not itself been contested. But if you think of mass schooling as an instrument of political incorporation, linguistic homogenization was clearly a feature of this process in some of the earlier innovators. The transformation of peasants into Frenchmen presupposed the codification and celebration of French as the national language and the demise of dialects therein. The movement was from ‘‘A Wealth of Tongues’’ to ‘‘France, One and Indivisible’’ (Weber, 1976). The right to education went hand in hand with the obligation to learn French. Parallel developments can be found in other countries though market forces, not state bureaucracies, played a more decisive role in the United States, for example. Throughout the 20th century, the amount of official curricular time dedicated to the teaching of the national language sharply increased worldwide (Cha, 1991). Time allocated to the study of classical languages, Latin and Mandarin Chinese for example, declined. So too did the time for local or sub-national languages. However, in recent years there has been an increase in the number of official languages that countries have identified in their reports to the International Bureau of Education (Benavot, 2004). The question of the language of instruction in school and what languages should the child be exposed to is now clearly much-contested. Does a child not have a right to learn in her mother tongue? Will not the child learn more effectively if
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taught in a tongue that more directly resonates with him? Do not minorities and indigenous peoples have a right to their culture, and thus, to the language that reflects and activates their culture? Is it not time to show more respect for Patois and other tongues? Moving from a rights discourse to a more pragmatic human capital one, the questions is whether societies would not be better off if their populations were more bilingual or even multilingual? More broadly, this involves a celebration of diversity and multiculturalism at both the national and international levels. In some countries that celebration has collided with proponents of a more uniform common ground (see the papers in Smelser & Alexander, 1999). These proponents worry about national fragmentation; they seek to conserve what was a 19th century progressive view which assumed that ‘‘the other’’ could (optimistically) and ought (normatively) learn French, English, German, etc. and become citizens. Twenty-first-century progressives are less likely to privilege national sovereignty (a point to which we later return) and are more likely to concern themselves with the rights of sub-national entities. From their perspective the human rights of these entities trump the demands of the nationstate, another point we later address. Suffice it to say that the right to one’s language was not even vaguely a citizenship right in the debates regarding citizenship in Western Europe. Neither modern psycholinguistics nor current anti-hegemonic sensitivities could have earlier been mobilized to frame and support this right. Today, however, psychological research can be cited in support of the thesis that multiple-language exposure leads to cognitive enrichment for children. And, from a macro perspective, the argument is made that the world as a whole would be better if linguistic diversity was promoted instead of accepting the hegemony of English (Macedo et al., 2003). Note that what is called for is not a defensive return to national languages as state instruments, but rather a celebration of dialects the world over.
FROM EXCLUSION/INCLUSION TO TERMS OF INCLUSION Nineteenth-century conservatives preferred a more exclusive polity and a more limited franchise. They contended that not everyone was qualified for citizenship. In its early development the franchise was restricted by property ownership and literacy criteria that had the net effect of excluding women and people of color as well. Literate property owners were imagined to be
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more responsible decision-makers because ownership, it was argued, literally gave them a greater stake in the system. Not surprisingly, nineteenthcentury conservatives also opposed mass schooling. Some reluctantly accepted this educational initiative when the expanded franchise handwriting was clearly on the wall. Robert Lowe, a conservative spokesperson put it this way: ‘‘I believe it will be absolutely necessary to compel our future masters to learn their letters’’ (Simon, 1987, p. 105). However exaggerated in tone, this remark clearly indicated a sense that educational socialization was needed for those who would now wield more political power. Throughout the 20th century the exclusionary position has collapsed in country after country; the principle of one person one vote has triumphed. All sorts of excluded categories have been recast as citizenship material. Not surprisingly, schooling for all has also increasingly become a world-legitimated mantra (Chabbott, 2003). The movement toward a more inclusive polity/inclusive school system, however, could co-exist without much changing the terms of inclusion. Before World War II there is little evidence of a search for working class or peasant role models as these categories of once excluded people became eligible for incorporation via mass schooling. There were no serious efforts to discover and promulgate working class or peasant contributions in the teaching of national history. And, needless to say, the cultures and languages of ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples were not attended to in educational policy or practice. Nineteenth-century progressives favored an inclusive polity but not one in which the newly incorporated could negotiate or question the terms of incorporation. And, until very recently, the champions of ‘‘Third World’’ nationalism sought to re-organize the exclusive colonial polity into an inclusive nationalist one without much attending to the interests or rights of sub-national entities. Until very recently, the lingering debates were still along the exclusion/inclusion dimension. But along many different fronts the terms of inclusion has become the lightning rod of our times. I have, elsewhere, discussed the terms of inclusion issue with respect to women, distinguishing between issues regarding women in science as mostly access and inclusion issues versus women and science as mostly epistemological and organizational issues, more in line with terms of inclusion considerations (Ramirez, 2003b; see also Wotipka, 2001). The first set of issues does not lead to the interrogation of the domain (science) into which women seek greater access. The gendered character of the domain is indeed interrogated in the women and science literature. In assessing, the gendered character of the welfare state Orloff (1993) also deals with the terms of inclusion question. She contends that the underdevelopment of
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citizenship rights such as right to childcare, is due to the fact that welfare states envisioned citizens as male full time workers. The relationship between social class and schooling also lends itself to the distinction between exclusion/inclusion issues and terms of inclusion questions. It is clear that polities and schools have an easier time aligning themselves with an inclusive logic of citizenship than with coping with the rise and intensity of the terms of inclusion challenges. But it is also clear that these challenges are unlikely to subside and need to be better understood. Much of the earlier educational focus of the world society perspective fell squarely on those issues that primarily deal with the triumph of inclusive citizenship/inclusive schooling. The world trends refereed to earlier – educational expansion and the growth of educational rationalization – were frequently discussed as exercises in and displays of nation-state legitimacy. The proper nation-state committed itself to schooling the masses and to fostering the credential society. Its probity was not dependent on results but on its conformity to world models or standards. These were authoritatively articulated, if not crafted by certified professionals and their organizational carriers. Regardless of whether economic growth, social equity, or efficient universities was a discernable outcome, the adaptation of the appropriate means was a good-enough indicator that the country was moving in the right direction. More often than not, the appropriate means involved consultation with scientists, professionals, and other experts and engagement with their rationalizing discourse of world standards and best practices. It is through these mechanisms of increased ties and increased engagement that educational systems become more homogenous over time. What neoinstitutionalists call ‘‘a logic of confidence’’ is widely activated through the enactment of world standards. Without clear efficacious educational technologies, the countries of the world rally around educational standards, thereby achieving a higher level of world standardization. But what can we learn from the rise in the terms of inclusion arguments? Does this imply the decline of the ‘‘abstract individual’’ and the sense that there should not be any ‘‘partial societies’’ between the individual and the state (in pacem Rousseau)? Does the new focus on terms of inclusion represent an era of group or collective rights? How is this reconcilable with the neo-liberalism emphasis on individuals and markets? Are nation-states now in the business of incorporating groups a´ la the corporatist tradition? The world society perspective has always emphasized the tensions between the rights of individuals and the authority of the nation-state (cf. Meyer, Boli, Thomas, & Ramirez, 1997). This tension is evident in critiques of the nationstate for imposing on all a common language or a common culture. But this
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adds up to group rights only in those circumstances where groups now have rights of representation or decision-making in this or that sphere. If a ministry of education is required to have sub-ministers from various groups to deal with their group interests that would indeed be evidence of group rights. Group rights in action are clearly displayed when the owners of some properties face restrictions on their uses due to ancestral tribal land rights. But where individuals have the right to role models from their gender or ethnicity or where indigenous peoples have the right to have their history and culture included in textbooks on the national history and culture, such rights appear to be individual rights. Here it seems that more empowered individuals can assert the cultural right to have their group or collectivity membership be recognized as part of their personal identity. This is less about group rights per se, but rather the rights of individuals to have their sub-national languages or cultures gain official standing. Note that one could strongly argue for bilingual education in the schools or women’s studies in the university without making these innovations requirements. An expanded menu of options is much less likely to encounter opposition than a new set of canonical requirements. What this menu displays is not so much expanded group power but increased individual choice. The net effect of the rise of terms of inclusion arguments is both an increase in group emphases and rights and an increase in individual rights, especially in the realm of cultural rights. Bringing back Patois affirms Patois speakers’ rights to their language and their culture regardless of the extent to which these rights are exercised. Opposition to this and other similar developments in language policy often cling to the grand narrative in which state and nation come together with common language as the moral glue. But the grand narrative is no longer taken for granted and more pragmatic cost effective ideas are now brought to bear in defense of linguistic uniformity. This pragmatism further tames the grand narrative, which welded state, nation, and society and assigned to schools the heroic task of transforming the nameless masses into national citizens (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983).
NATIONAL AND TRANSNATIONAL CITIZENSHIP At the heart of the world society perspective is the premise that the legitimacy of the nation-state, individual citizenship, and mass schooling as political incorporation into the nation-state, is in large part contingent on the wider world. Notions of state sovereignty were transnationally validated, as
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were the limits of state sovereignty. The distinction between institutionalized domains and contested terrains is crucial to understanding what was the range of principles, policies, and practices that states needed to display in order to be viewed as legitimate states. Outside this range there were contested terrains made up of future contenders and former but faded winners in the institutionalization of nation-state identity game. There was also an array of optional principles, policies, and practices. A nation-state commitment to schooling became a mandatory principle in the 20th century but the extent to which schooling was centralized or decentralized was an optional policy. Until very recently, states were imagined to have the right, though not the duty, to construct a single official language and to pursue a monolinguistic policy in the schools. So, where does the right to be taught in one’s own language and its multicultural correlates come from? There is no getting around the fact that this right has been asserted and critiqued and that the question of language is a deeply contested issue. It is not a matter of exclusion versus inclusion; it is quintessentially a debate over the terms of inclusion. I contend that the taming of the grand narrative is a key to understanding the rise of terms of inclusion debates across a wide front and the escalation of the question of language in particular. The grand narrative presupposed a clear divide between the nameless excluded and the established included; the progressive solution was to include, and through an educational baptism, transform masses into citizens. The progressive inclination today is to think in terms of persons and their rights independent of their citizenship status. So, if established citizenship is suspected of envisioning a citizen with a particular gender, race, ethnicity, or class background the latter needs to be challenged. The price of inclusion should not involve the shedding of identity pegs not formally or informally enshrined in the dominant conception of citizenship. This challenge clearly affects education and language policy and use therein. Consider, for instance, this declaration of children’s linguistic human rights (1) Every child should have the right to identify positively with her original mother tongue(s) and have her identification accepted and respected by others. (2) Every child should have the right to learn the mother tongue(s) fully. (3) Every child should have the right to choose when she wants to use the mother tongue(s) in all official situations. (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1995)
Note that the same proponent of these children’s linguistic rights also argues that just as the world needs biodiversity, it needs linguistic diversity as well. What we have here is the assertion that linguistic rights are good for
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children and for the world, a subtle recasting of the well-established idea that what was good for children (education) was also good for their national societies. The recasting emphasizes rights but also the sense that the world would benefit from this development. This perspective is also found in the education for all conference, a conference that emphasized the right of the child to a quality education and the value of achieving this goal, not just for countries, but also for the world as a whole. The taming of the grand narrative goes hand in hand with the rise of the world as the subject of professional rationalizing. There is a growing interest in the state of the world with respect to environment, health, and other related matters that are quickly subjected to a world of scientized discourse and analysis. There are more efforts to depict the world via the collection and analysis of world level indicators, for example, measures of world economic output, global warming, and international political stability, etc. Expertise that in principle applies to the world as a whole, gains prominence. Local knowledge must undergo a process of ‘‘glocalization’’ in order to be sustainable and respectable. The movement to preserve local languages is worldwide in character and illustrates ‘‘glocalization’’ in action; a discourse of global value and human rights greatly facilitates transforming local matters into global concerns (see Robertson, 1994 for an explication of the concept of glocalization). The language-policy debates illustrate this transformation, highlighting linguistic human rights and the place of languages in the world as whole. Bringing back Patois is not only about children’s linguistic human rights but also about national and world enrichment. Not only is the world more the subject of theorization, but also the theorization leads to the premise that the world can be conceived of as an actor or, to be more precise, as a domain of world actors and activities. The expansion of international governmental and non-governmental organizations is evidence of world or at least transnational structures. World conferences and treaties and resolutions that are intended to be ratified around the world also illustrate a growth of world consciousness and world organization. Within this world, human rights have emerged as an international regime, which activate standards that provide one and all with rights not necessarily codified in their national constitutions. To be sure nation-states are expected to recognize and respect these rights and that may well lead to their affirmation in national legislation. But the net effect of these theorized world standards is that new rights can be claimed even in the absence of national legal foundation. What may emerge as a 21st century mantra – know your human rights – is not about knowing your constitutional rights but about those rights set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human
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Rights. The dynamic is less about social contracts and more about discovering natural human rights. The shift in emphasis from citizenship to human rights is uneven and contentious. Its corollary is a shift from national to postnational or world citizenship (see Soysal, 1994). These shifts have ramifications for the political uses of mass schooling as incorporation instruments. The politically excluded from the perspective of the nation-states already have standing and rights from the perspective of a world affirming human rights. Their personhood and the rights that accrue to them are not contingent on the triumph of progressive forces and the changes in positive law that follow. To the extent that personhood is theorized independent of citizenship and international organizations and social movements dramatize this theorization in local settings, the terms of inclusion becomes a salient issue. An equal opportunity to be a man (if one is a woman) or to be fluent in the official national language (if one identifies with some other tongue) will no longer do. Even male identifiers with the national language, if they choose to act like 21st century progressives, can be mobilized to support terms of inclusion sensitivities and demands. The right to be taught in one’s own language and its multicultural correlates is grounded in a human rights discourse (with some pragmatic references to learning benefits) which itself presupposes a transnational or world common ground. The educational implications of these developments constitute a new research direction for the world society perspective. The education, citizenship, and nation-state links are not going to disappear. Much of the practical responsibility for coping with cultural-rights demands will fall squarely on the nation-state. Some older interests and demands will be couched in human rights terms and their chances of sticking are greater if the human rights frame is invoked. Success is even more likely if both human rights and human capital can be simultaneously invoked. And increasingly, these fames will be invoked with not only the national interest but also the world interest in mind. Even when efforts fail it will be interesting to see if and how diversity claims were managed in often unexpected ways by earlier established or ‘‘insider’’ groups (cf. Davies, 1999 on the cultural rights discourse of religious fundamentalists seeking better standing in Canadian schools). The study of civic education will clearly be impacted if a postnational or world citizenship emphasis grows. Whether the older national citizenship emphasis erodes or simply co-exists with the new postnational one remains to be seen. Needless to say, the rapidity and magnitude of the educational changes are likely to vary across regions and countries. Some countries will
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be at the forefront of the postnational civic-education development, others may slouch in this direction (see Asitz, Wiseman, & Baker, 2002), and still others may resist. The world society perspective generates hypotheses about how national educational changes should be influenced by world and regional rates of change, by linkages to the wider world and to one’s region, and by the presence of and exposure to world and regional conferences and other enabling events. The overriding idea is that the more a country is embedded in and influenced by educational-professional discourse on postnational citizenship and human rights or on personhood, multiculturalism, and cultural rights, the more the country will move in the direction of a postnational civic-education emphasis. The more countries move in this direction, the more we will have to think about the emerging imagined world community and its relationship to Anderson’s imagined national community (Anderson, 1983).
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS I have painted with broad strokes to try to problematize citizenship and language-policy issues in schooling, from a world society perspective. In doing so, I have avoided naturalizing nineteenth century developments that crystallized the age of nationalism and the use of education to construct citizens of the nation-state. These historical developments were contentious ones that lead to the triumph of what was then the progressive view: via schooling the excluded were to be incorporated and included. The terms of inclusion were not much of an issue but have since become a serious bone of contention. This more recent development presupposes a world that set forth rights not solely rationalized around preexisting citizenship packages. The new cultural rights are rights of persons framed in human rights terms and theorized as universal in scope. The world itself is increasingly imagined as a community; international organizations and social movements dramatize the world community. This poses a further challenge to the grand narrative associated with the age of nationalism. One manifestation of this challenge is the rise of terms of inclusion debates. The rights bearing person is included in a transnational polity as a postnational citizen. This is evident in the European Union but the potential is worldwide in character. The professed right to learn in one’s own language and to have that respected by all is a concrete indicator of the broader terms of inclusion debates. This development goes hand in hand with efforts to preserve the tongues of the world, for the sake of the world. These
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developments give rise to educational innovations (see Suarez on human rights education in this volume, for example), which call for further comparative educational research from a world society perspective. More broadly, comparative educational research is needed to shed light on the demarcation line between institutionalized domains and contested terrains. Educational innovations can be studied as candidates for institutionalization or as efforts to contest established educational principles, policies, or practices. In an earlier era, women’s entry into universities constituted such an educational innovation, challenging the established association between higher learning and masculinity. More recently, school reforms in the teaching of science or mathematics also pose a challenge to more standard pedagogical practices. We know that single-sex schooling in higher education today is at best an option, not the taken for granted reality it was at the beginning of the twentieth century. But there are ongoing debates about gender equity in higher education, about whether the ideal type university student continues to be a male. So, the debates are no longer about whether women belong in the university, but rather whether the university is a ‘‘chilly place’’ for women. How the math and science ‘‘wars’’ will turn out remains to be seen. Will this be an area in which there is no decisive victory for either the traditionalists or the reformers, an area in which contestation fades and tolerance rises for cross-national variability in pedagogy and curricula? The theoretical challenge is to figure out why some principles, policies, and practices are deemed obligatory and others optional. A university that excludes women would be under great pressure to be fair and include them. But whether to offer women’s studies or not continues to be optional. One could easily compile a list of obligatory and optional educational principles, policies, and practices. The challenge though is to identify some more general criteria for ascertaining the scope of mandatory nation-state identity pegs and distinguishing it from the zone of tolerable national distinctiveness in the realm of education. All other things being equal, rights established earlier in the citizenship package are more likely to be mandatory: consider the current human rights status of the older citizenship right to an elementary education. Since the rights of citizens were more often than not set forth as individual citizenship rights, these rights regardless of their age are more likely to be translated into mandatory human rights. A broad right to not be discriminated against underlies the right to fairly compete for access to higher education. Note however, that the right to have a percent of the student body or the faculty, reflect one’s gender, ethnicity, or some other group characteristic is more contentious. Thirdly, much national-educational distinctiveness is
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tolerated if that which is different has not been rationalized as an educational means to a scripted national goal. There is much tolerance for whether to have or not to have school uniforms though these could be construed as constraints on individual self-expression. National tradition can be effectively invoked if it does not collide with theorization that links the constrained rights to national goals. Consider the frequency with which the case for girls’ education is made on the ground that their human capital must not be underutilized. National tradition that limits girls’ education is transnationally unacceptable. All other things being equal, earlier established individual citizenship rights that are rationalized around national goals are more likely to stick as human rights and more likely to lead to mandatory educational principles, policies, and practices. These general criteria suggest why the current wave of demands regarding language rights is more contentious. These are new rights that at least, in part, appear to be collective or group rights and these have yet to be rationalized around scripted national goals. One of two developments may tilt these now debatable rights into the mandatory zone: successful theorization linking their educational expression to scripted national goals, multiculturalism in the service of economic growth, for example, or the fuller theorization of world standards linking language rights to desirable world outcomes, multiculturalism as a means to world peace, for instance. These developments need not be conceptualized as a zero-sum game since world standards frame and inform national goals. If the taming of the grand narrative is indeed an ongoing process, we should expect to find more direct appeals to world standards and increased references to world citizenship. If the world does change in this direction, then education as incorporation will entail a new dimension, the transformation of national citizens into world persons.
REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Astiz, M. F., Wiseman, A., & Baker, D. P. (2002). Slouching toward decentralization: Consequences for curricular control in national education systems. Comparative Education Review, 46, 66–88. Benavot, A. (2004). A global study of intended instructional time and official school time, 1980–2000. Geneva: International Bureau of Education. Cha, Y.-K. (1991). Effects of the global system on language instruction, 1850–1986. Sociology of Education, 64, 19–32.
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Chabbott, C. (2003). Constructing education for development: International organizations and education for all. New York: Routledge/Falmer. Chabbott, C., & Ramirez, F. O. (2000). Development and education. In: M. Hallinan (Ed.), Handbook of sociology of education (pp. 163–187). New York: Plenum. Collins, R. (1979). The credential society. New York: Academic Press. Davies, S. (1999). From moral duty to cultural rights: A case study of political framing in education. Sociology of Education, 71, 1–23. DiMaggio, P., & Powell, W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48(April), 147–160. Hanushek, E., & Kimko, D. (2000). Schooling, labor force quality, and the growth of nations. American Economic Review, 90(5), 1184–1208. Hobsbawm, E., & Ranger, T. (Eds) (1983). The invention of tradition. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Jepperson, R. (1991). Institutions, institutional effects, and institutionalism. In: W. W. Powell & P. J. DiMaggio (Eds), The new institutionalism in organizational analysis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Jepperson, R., & Meyer, J. W. (2000). The ‘actors’ of modern society: The cultural construction of social agency. Sociological Theory, 18, 100–120. Khamsi-Steiner, G. (Ed.) (2004). The global politics of educational borrowing and lending. New York: Teachers College Press. Macedo, D., Dendrinos, B., & Gounari, P. (2003). The hegemony of English. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Meyer, J., Boli, J., Thomas, G., & Ramirez, F. O. (1997). World society and the nation-state. American Journal of Sociology, 1(July), 144–181. Meyer, J. W., & Ramirez, F. O. (2000). The world institutionalization of education. In: J. Schriewer (Ed.), Discourse formation in comparative education (pp. 111–132). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Meyer, J. W., Ramirez, F. O., Rubinson, R., & Boli-Bennett, J. (1977). The world educational revolution, 1950–1970. Sociology of Education, 50(October), 242–258. Orloff, A. S. (1993). Gender and the social rights of citizenship: The comparative analysis of gender relations and welfare states. American Sociological Review, 58(3), 303–328. Ramirez, F. O. (1997). The nation-state, citizenship, and educational change: Institutionalization and globalization. In: W. Cummings & N. McGinn (Eds), International handbook of education and development: Preparing schools, students, and nations for the twenty-first century (pp. 47–62). New York: Garland Publishing. Ramirez, F. O. (2003a). Toward a cultural anthropology of the world? In: K. Anderson-Levitt (Ed.), Local meanings/Global culture: Anthropology and world culture theory (pp. 239–254). Wiesbaden: Palgrave. Ramirez, F. O. (2003b). Women in science/Women and science: Liberal and radical perspectives. In: T. Wobbe (Ed.), Zwischen Vorderbu¨hne und Hinterbu¨hne (pp. 279–305). Beitrage zum Wandel der Geschlechterbeziehungen in der Wissenchaft. Ramirez, F. O., & Boli, J. (1987). The political construction of mass schooling: European origins and worldwide institutionalization. Sociology of Education, 60, 2–17. Ramirez, F. O., & Meyer, J. W. (2002). National curricula: World models and historical legacies. In: M. Caruso & H.-E. Tenorth (Eds), Internationalization: Comparing educational systems and semantics (pp. 91–107). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
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Ramirez, F. O., Luo, X., Schofer, E., & Meyer, J. W. (2006). Student achievement and national economic growth. American Journal of Education. Robertson, R. (1994). Globalization and glocalization. Journal of International Communication, 1, 33–52. Simon, B. (1987). Systemization and segmentation in education: The case of England. In: M. Detlef, et al. (Eds), The rise of the modern educational system (pp. 88–110). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (1995). Multilinguals and the education of minority children. In: O. Garcia & C. Baker (Eds), Policy and practice in bilingualism: Extending the foundations (pp. 40–62). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Smelser, N. J., & Alexander, J. C. (Eds) (1999). Diversity and its discontent: Cultural conflict and common ground in contemporary American society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Soysal, Y. (1994). Limits of citizenship: Migrants and postnational membership in Europe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago press. Strang, D., & Meyer, J. W. (1993). Institutional conditions for diffusion. Theory and Society, 22, 487–511. Suarez, D. (2006). Creating global citizens: The emergence and development of human rights education. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford. Weber, E. (1976). Peasants into Frenchmen: The modernization of rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wotipka, C. M. (2001). Beyond access to transformation: A cross-national analysis of women in science and technology, 1970–2000. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford.
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AUTHOR INDEX Abbott, A. 76, 90 Abramovitz, A. 54 Abrams, P. 44 Adair, R. 89 Akiba, M. 15, 21, 98–99, 189, 309 Albert, J. 148 Aldrich, P.V. 127 Alexander, R. 284 Alford, R. 89, 213–214, 224, 226–227, 245 Alliaud, A. 285–286 Allmendinger, J. 188–189, 199 Almond, G. 50, 311, 325 Altbach, P.G. 17, 90 Anderson, B. 8, 383 Anderson, M. 180 Anderson, R.D. 41 Anderson-Levitt, K. 99 Arato, A. 311 Archer, M.S. 27 Arevalo, G. 273 Arlidge, J.T. 34 Armer, M. 244 Armytage, W.H.G. 37 Arnove, R.F. 98, 241, 307–308 Aronowitz, S. 161, 177 Arum, R. 81 Astiz, M.F. 28, 45, 88, 98, 305, 308–309, 323, 328, 383 Aurini, J. 121, 127, 132 Auyero, J. 323 Ayalon, H. 86
Bacon, W.F. 191 Baker, D.P. 1–2, 5–6, 15, 21, 27, 28, 45, 80, 83, 85, 88, 98–99, 121, 123, 128, 130, 178, 189, 192, 205, 309, 328, 337, 341, 356, 383 Baker, K. 339 Ball, S.J. 76, 300, 308 Bankston, C. 336, 339, 346 Barber, B.L. 191 Barnard, H.C. 40–41 Barnes, B. 34 Baum, J. 132 Bean, F.D. 339 Becker, G.S. 139 Beech, J. 281 Bell, D. 60 Bell, E.O. 338 Bellamy, G.T. 45 Benavot, A. 4, 6, 9, 78, 98, 158, 168, 240–241, 254, 309, 375 Ben-David, J. 168 Bendix, R. 139 Beoku-Betts, J.A. 178 Berger, M. 287, 289, 300 Berger, P.L. 4 Berkovitch, N. 79 Bernstein, B. 140 Birgin, A. 308, 312 Blackstone, R.M. 82 Blake, J. 338, 358 Blossfeld, H. 75, 241–242 Bodine, E.F. 209 Boli, J.F. 3, 5–8, 28, 77–78, 100, 139, 142, 144, 146, 148, 157, 210, 212, 240, 246, 305, 308–310, 325, 378 389
390 Boli-Bennett, J. 3, 100, 370 Bossert, S.T. 12 Bourdieu, P. 86, 88, 140, 153 Bowles, S. 140, 273 Boyd, W.L. 12, 139 Bradley, K. 75, 79–82, 84–86, 175, 178, 241, 246, 273 Brady, H. 59 Braun, T. 171 Bravo, H.F. 318 Bray, M. 306–308 Breen, R. 82 Brint, S. 82, 242, 246–247, 260 Brochmann, G. 342 Brody, R. 49, 53 Brooks, B. 82 Brown, L. 63 Browne, I. 145 Browne, J. 82 Brubaker, R. 341 Brunner, J.J. 281 Bryk, A.S. 198 Bryson, B. 49, 60, 62 Buchmann, C. 100, 188–189, 193–195, 197–198, 204, 273, 335 Bukowski, A. 226 Burbules, N. 307 Burki, S. 311 Burnham, W.D. 63 Byrne, E.M. 85, 88 Campbell, C. 243, 273 Candau, V.M. 106 Cano, D. 281 Cappella, J. 56 Caronna, C. 213–214, 219, 221–222, 224, 227, 231–232 Carpenter, M. 34 Carver, K. 187, 195 Cassell, J.W. 127 Castles, S. 341 Catsambis, S. 84, 86 Caverzasio, S. 110
AUTHOR INDEX Cerulo, K. 90 Cha, Y.K. 6, 98, 158, 254, 309, 375 Chabbott, C. 6, 123, 125, 158, 178, 241, 246, 260–261, 268, 273–274, 377 Chance, W. 34 Chang, P. 144 Charles, M. 80–82, 84–86, 241, 246, 273 Chen, C. 191 Cheung, C. 8 Chiswick, B. 140 Cigliutti, S. 308 Clark, B.R. 76, 139, 161, 178 Claude, R.P. 102, 104, 106 Cobbe, F.P. 34 Cohen, J. 311 Coleman, J. 61 Collier, D. 325 Collins, R. 55–56, 140, 242, 246, 273 Converse, P. 52 Convey, A. 342 Cooke-Taylor, R.W. 35 Coppin, A. 273 Correll, S.J. 79–80, 84 Cowen, R. 288 Cross, M. 242–243, 273 Crow, G. 226 Cummings, W. 129, 235 Cunningham, B. 56, 63 Dahl, R.A. 49, 58, 64, 325 Dale, R. 98, 282 Dalton, B. 193–195, 197 Danielson, L.C. 45 Darity, W. 140 Darling, N. 204 D’Aunno, T. 124 David, M. 76 Davies, J. 76 Davies, S. 98, 121, 127, 132, 382 Davini, M.C. 292 Davis, C.H. 171 Davis, L.J. 29
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Author Index de Azevedo, F. 287 de Jong, E. 339 Deal, T. 209 Dendrinos, B. 376 Dezalay, Y. 98 Dezhina, I. 175 Diamond, L. 311 Dillinger, W. 311 DiMaggio, P.J. 3, 5–7, 22, 49, 60, 62, 90, 104, 113, 124, 150, 219, 310, 325, 371 Dobbin, F. 114, 125 Donzelot, J. 31 Dore, R. 139 Dorsey, E. 114 Dougherty, K. 242 Douglas, M. 86 Dournbush, S.M. 204 Downes, A. 244 Downey, D.B. 187, 205, 338 Dreeben, R. 139, 141 Drew, E. 66 Drori, G.S. 69, 157, 167–168 Duhalde, E. 314 Dumont, L. 145 Duncan, B. 338–339 Duncan, O.D. 338–339 Duncan, W. 141 Dussel, I. 308, 312 Eckstein, M. 300 Edelman, L.B. 125 Eisemon, T.O. 171 Eisenhart, M. 89 Elbers, F. 104, 107, 109, 111 Elias, N. 18–19 Elliott, C.R. 89 Elmore, R. 307 England, P. 140 Entzinger, H. 342 Epstein, J.L. 187 Epstein, M. 148 Erlanger, H.S. 125 Ertman, T. 33
Esmer, Y. 337, 341, 356 Etzioni, A. 230 Etzkowitz, H. 177 Evans, J. 49, 60, 62 Farkas, G. 140 Farr, J.R. 33, 38 Fassmann, H. 341 Featherman, D.L. 338 Fein, L.C. 126 Felipe, P. 106 Fernandez, R.M. 339 Fiala, R. 6 Figueiredo, M. 288 Finegold, K. 245 Finnemore, M. 177 Fiorina, M. 8, 60, 62 Fiske, E. 307 Flam, H. 225–226 Flora, P. 148 Forje, J. 177 Forrest, A. 38 Forster, R. 29 Foucault, M. 29, 38, 45 Fraleigh, M.J. 204 Frame, J.D. 168, 171–172, 175, 178 Frank, D.H. 61, 144 Frank, D.J. 4, 77, 89, 99, 159, 162, 175 Franz, S. 98 Freeman, G. 337, 340–343 Freeman, J.H. 125 Friedland, R. 89, 213–214, 224, 226–227, 245 Fruhling, H. 106 Fryer, M. 273 Fujimura-Fanselow, K. 80 Fukuyama, F. 311 Fuller, B. 7, 9, 214, 235, 243, 271, 308 Gabler, J. 159, 162, 175 Gaddy, C. 166
392 Gaillard, J. 171 Gamson, D. 245 Gardner, P. 34 Garrido Perez, J.I. 307 Garth, B. 98 Geddes, B. 310, 316 Gerchunoff, P. 315–316 Gibbons, M. 161 Giddens, A. 219, 284 Gieryn, T. 180 Ginsburg, A. 339 Gintis, H. 140, 273 Gitta, C. 104 Glenn, C.L. 339 Gloria, A. 106 Goesling, B. 309 Goldstein, D.S. 41 Goldstein, J. 39 Gordon, A. 145 Gordon-Langford, A. 6 Gorostiaga Derqui, J. 307 Gounari, P. 376 Graham, L. 175 Grant, N. 15 Greenwood, R. 124, 213 Greve, H.R. 132 Grusky, D.B. 82 Guppy, N. 98 Guthrie, T. 34 Gvirtz, S. 284–286, 290, 295 Haas, J. 242, 244, 246 Hall, P. 325 Hamilton, T. 244 Handler, J. 213 Hannan, M. 147 Hannaway, J. 307 Hannon, M.T. 125 Hannum, E. 100, 188–189 Hannum, H. 273 Hanson, M. 306–307, 328 Hanson, S.L. 84–85, 178 Hargreaves, A. 308
AUTHOR INDEX Hauser, R.M. 338 Haydu, J. 33 Henry, R. 244 Hensmans, M. 213 Herbst, S. 49, 59 Herczynski, J. 222, 225–226 Hewitt, N.M. 87 Heywood, C. 41 Hines, P. 108 Hinings, C.R. 124, 213 Hironaka, A. 4, 144 Hirsch, P.M. 126 Hirschman, C. 336, 346 Ho Sui-Chu, E. 187, 204 Hodgkinson, R.G. 34 Hodson, R. 244 Holland, D. 89 Holmstrom, E. 166 Hooks, G. 244 Hout, M. 338 Hunt, L. 40, 42 Hunter, B. 148 Hurst, D. 242, 244, 246 Ichikawa, V. 191 Ige, T. 104 Inglehart, R. 89 Inkeles, A. 70 Jacobs, J. 81 Jamieson, K.H. 56 Jane, M. 55 Jarman, J. 82 Jefferson, C. 34 Jepperson, R.L. 6, 62, 310, 340, 368, 374 Jimenez, E. 312 Johnson, D. 41 Johnson, R.W. 35, 306 Jones, C. 37–39 Jones, D. 85 Jones, F.E. 339 Jonsson, J.O. 82, 87 Junn, J. 49, 52–53, 55
393
Author Index Kalleberg, A.L. 127 Kamens, D.H. 3–4, 6, 9–10, 49, 98, 158, 177, 240, 254, 309 Kamens, J. 309 Kamin´ski, B. 215–216 Kanter, R. 61 Kao, G. 336, 345 Karabel, J. 82, 242, 246–247, 260 Keck, M.E. 101 Keeler, J. 315 Kelly, G.P. 80 Kennedy, E. 336, 339 Kerbow, D. 187, 205 Kerckhoff, A.C. 188, 273 Kernell, S. 64 Kerr, C. 161 Kim, J. 137 Kimmel, M. 89 Kirp, D.L. 124, 161 Kitschelt, H. 245 Kleinberger, A.F. 139, 144 Kontogiannopoulou-Polydorides, G. 86 Kooij, P. 8 Kruszewski, K. 233 Kupiszewski, M. 342 Kurian, G.T. 148 Labaree, D. 130, 245–246 Ladd, E. 65 Lamborn, S.D. 204 Lane, H. 40 Lange, L. 169, 171 Lareau, A. 140, 200 Larripa, S. 295 Lauglo, J. 306–307, 312 Leiderman, P.H. 204 Lenhardt, G. 337, 341, 356 Leslie, L. 161, 178 LeTendre, G.K. 2, 5–6, 15, 21, 27, 45, 80, 83, 85, 98–99, 121, 123, 130, 189, 309 Leung, M. 8 Levitas, T. 222, 225–226
Levitsky, S. 328 Limoge, C. 161 Linz, J. 311 Liu, C. 244 Llanos, M. 315 Lobban, N. 241–242 London, N. 241, 244, 255, 271 Lowie, T. 59, 65 Lubrano, L.L. 171 Luckmann, T. 4 Macedo, D. 376 MacKenzie, C. 241, 273 MacLeod, D. 336, 345–346 Magendzo, A. 106 March, J.G. 62, 310 Mark, P.C. 168, 171–172, 175, 178 Marsden, P.V. 127 Marshall, T.H. 30 Martin, F. 148 Martin, J.P. 104 Martinez, C. 97 Matier, M. 89 Mayer, S. 188, 203 Mazuri, A.A. 177 McChesney, R. 56 McCullough, J.S. 306 McEneaney, E.H. 99, 123, 130, 158, 178, 240, 242, 252, 255, 271 McGill, P. 242 McGinn, N. 307, 328 McIlwee, J.S. 85 McLean, M. 306 McMahon, W.W. 141 McNeal, R.B. 187, 195 Meijer, C.J.W. 45 Mendel, P. 213–214, 219, 221–222, 224, 227, 231–232 Mendes Faria Filho, L. 287 Menem, C. 314 Menin, O. 288 Merton, R.K. 88, 159
394 Mettler, S. 245 Meyer, D. 245 Meyer, J.W. 3–7, 9–11, 16, 28, 50–52, 61–62, 69, 71, 77–78, 89, 96, 98–100, 102–103, 123–124, 126, 130, 139, 144–146, 148, 153, 157–159, 178, 209–210, 212–213, 221, 234, 240, 242, 246, 252, 254–255, 271, 273, 282, 305, 308–310, 325, 337, 339–341, 356, 367–368, 370, 372, 374, 378 Michta, A. 220 Migdal, J. 214, 310 Miller, M.J. 341 Mills, C.W. 77 Milner, M. 145 Miron, G. 235 Miyahara, D. 77 Mizruchi, M.S. 126 Mu¨ller, W. 357 Mu¨nz, R. 341 Mollis, M. 98 Monnington, W. 34 Moon, H. 157, 161 Moore, B. 8 Mouw, T. 336, 339 Moynihan, P. 63 Muller, C. 187, 205 Muller, W. 82 Mundy, K. 100, 114 Munı´ n, H. 308 Murillo, M. 315, 317, 327 Murmis, M. 328 Murphy, J. 37 Murphy, L. 100, 114 Myers, R. 140 Nagel, J. 3, 145, 177 Narin, F. 168, 171–172, 175, 178 Narodowski, M. 281 Nelson, C. 235 Nelson, J.I. 132
AUTHOR INDEX Nelson, P.J. 114 Nelson, R.R. 176 Nie, N. 49, 52–53, 55 Nielsen, F. 339 Noah, H. 300 Nowak, S. 215 Nowotny, H. 161 O’Connell, P.J. 137, 141 O’Donnell, G. 326 Offe, C. 215 Ogawa, R.T. 12 Olsen, J. 62, 310 Olsen, R. 273 Orloff, A.S. 245, 377 Osiatyn´ski, W. 228, 233 Oswald, H. 192 Oszlack, O. 286 Owen, D. 35 Paasch, K. 187, 195 Pajares, F. 75, 84 Paqueo, V. 312 Park, H. 187, 199, 336, 339 Parrado, E.A. 335 Parris, C. 241, 243 Paxton, J. 148 Perrow, C. 126 Perry, G. 311 Persky, S. 225–226 Petrocik, J. 52 Pierce, J.L. 358 Pijl, S.J. 45 Pini, M. 308 Plateau, N. 86 Podemski, K. 225 Polanyi, K. 33 Portantiero, J.C. 328 Portes, A. 336, 345–346 Powell, E.B. 52, 189 Powell, W.W. 3, 5, 7, 22, 104, 124, 150, 213, 219, 310–311, 325, 371
395
Author Index Prawda, J. 306 Premdas, R. 244, 273 Price, R.H. 124 Puiggros, A. 307 Putnam, R.W. 45, 49, 65, 311 Quillian, L. 341 Raftery, A.E. 338 Ragin, C. 45 Ragoonath, B. 244, 273 Ralph, J. 241, 246 Ramirez, F.O. 3–4, 6–8, 12, 16, 28, 61, 69, 77, 79–80, 83, 96, 99–100, 102–103, 123, 125, 139, 142, 144, 146, 148, 157, 175, 178, 210, 212, 240–242, 246, 260–261, 268, 273–274, 282, 305, 308–310, 325, 367–368, 370, 372, 377–378 Ranum, P.M. 29 Raudenbush, S.W. 198 Rauscher, L. 239 Ravitch, D. 299 Reay, D. 76 Reese, W. 241, 246 Reinser, E. 139 Rhoten, D. 308, 312 Ricci, D. 59, 65 Rich, E.E. 37 Richardson, J.G. 27, 45 Ridgeway, C.L. 79–80 Rieble, S. 244 Risman, B.J. 79 Risse, T. 101 Ritter, P.L. 204 Ritzer, G. 77 Rivarola, M. 308 Rix, S.E. 140 Roberts, D.F. 204 Robertson, R. 97, 381 Robertson, S. 98 Robinson, J.G. 85 Robson, A.H. 37
Roland, R. 180 Rondinelli, D.A. 306 Rosenthal, A.S. 339 Rowan, B. 4, 7, 11, 124, 126, 209, 213, 221, 234 Rubinson, R. 3, 7–9, 100, 145, 241–242, 244, 246, 305, 309, 370 Rueschemeyer, D. 8 Ruff, M. 213–214, 219, 221–222, 224, 227, 231–232 Rupp, J. 8 Santos Ribeiro, M.L. 287 Sarewitz, D. 166 Saunders, K. 54 Schattschneider, E.E. 53 Schaub, M. 85, 178 Schlozman, K. 59 Schofer, E. 4, 51–52, 69, 144, 158–159, 178 Schott, T. 171 Scho¨pflin, G. 218 Schrag, P. 62, 68 Schriewer, J. 97, 282, 297, 299 Schubert, A. 171 Schudson, M. 49, 55–57, 63, 66 Schultz, T.W. 139 Scoble, H.M. 95, 101, 103, 106 Scott, J. 89, 213 Scott, P. 161 Scott, R. 209 Scott, W.R. 6, 124, 213–214, 219, 221–222, 224, 227, 231–232, 235 Scott-Jones, D. 191 Scott-Keltie, J. 148 Seltzer, J.A. 338 Selvaratnam, V. 90 Selznick, P. 230 Sene´n Gonza´lez, S. 318 Sewell, W.H. 38, 44, 338 Seymour, E. 87 Shanahan, S. 8
396 Shapin, S. 34 Shauman, K.A. 83–85 Shavit, Y. 75, 81–82, 241–242, 357–358 Shenhav, Y. 177 Sikkink, K. 101 Silva, P. 316 Silver, H. 35 Simon, B. 37, 377 Sirowy, L. 78 Skidmore, T.E. 286–288 Skocpol, T. 8, 49, 65, 245 Skutnabb-Kangas, T. 380 Slack, P. 33 Slaughter, S. 161, 178 Smelser, N.J. 151 Smith, B.H. 102 Smith, D. 70 Snyder, C.W. 3, 177 Soltow, L. 145 Sonnert, G. 84 Sorensen, G. 325 Soule, S. 97 Southwell, M. 291–292 Soysal, Y.N. 3, 8, 16, 100, 114, 144, 153, 178, 309, 337, 340, 342, 382 Steelman, L.C. 189 Stehlik-Berry, K. 49, 52–53, 55 Steinberg, L. 204 Steinberg, S.H. 148 Steiner-Khamsi, G. 282 Steinmo, S. 8 Stephens, E. 8 Stephens, J. 8 Stevens, E. 145 Stevenson, D.L. 21, 121, 128, 192, 205 Stevenson, H.W. 299 Stigler, J.W. 299 Stiker, H.-J. 29 Stinchcombe, A.L. 85 Stolte-Heiskanen, V. 86 Strang, D. 96–97, 144, 153, 374 Street, S. 307, 328
AUTHOR INDEX Strenta, A. 89 Sturt, M. 34 Suarez, D. 96, 102–103 Suarez, D.F. 95 Sutton, J.R. 114, 125 Sutton, R.I. 124 Szreter, R. 139 Sztompka, P. 215, 218 Tanuri, L.M. 300 Tarrow, S. 245, 325 Taylor, R. 325 Teachman, J.D. 187, 195 Tedesco, J.C. 285–286, 290 Teixeira, R. 52 Thelen, K. 8 Thisted, S. 308 Thomas, G.M. 5–7, 77–78, 144, 146, 148, 305, 308–310, 325, 378 Thomas, R. 308 Tienda, M. 336, 339, 345 Tilly, C. 140 Tiramonti, G. 308, 312 Tocqueville, A. 38 Tomiak, J. 218 Torre, J.C. 315–316 Torres, C.A. 98, 307 Torres, R.M. 100 Trace, A. 299 Tracy, T. 80 Trow, M. 78 Tsang, M. 273 Tuma, N. 144, 147 Tvedt, T. 102 Tyack, D. 145, 241, 245 Uggen, C. 125 Uttal, D.H. 191 Valverde, G. 98 Van Buuren, J. 8 Van Horne, V. 166 Vaughn, M. 27
397
Author Index Ventresca, M.J. 144, 148, 175, 210, 212 Verba, S. 50, 52, 59, 325 Vickers, M. 7, 11 Wahrman, D. 35 Waldow, F. 282 Walker, J. 59–60 Walters, P. 141 Warren, J.R. 339 Webb, B. 29, 33 Webb, S. 29, 33 Weber, M. 4, 44, 245, 254 Wedel, J. 215 Weiler, H. 216, 307, 328 Weiss, J.A. 8, 80 Went, R. 307 Werum, R.E. 28, 189, 241–242, 273, 239 Weso"owski, W. 230 West, C. 80 Weyland, K. 328 Willms, J.D. 187, 204
Windolf, P. 78, 80, 242, 244, 246 Winkler, D. 306 Wiseberg, L.S. 101, 103, 106 Wiseman, A.W. 1, 11, 15, 21, 28, 45, 88, 98–99, 189, 309, 328, 383 Wolfe, D. 160 Wolhuter, C.C. 17 Woloch, I. 37 Wong, M.G. 336, 346 Wong, S. 6, 254 Wong, S.Y. 61, 98–99, 158 Wotipka, C.M. 79–80, 83, 161, 178 Xie, Y. 83–85, 336, 339 Zeldin, A.L. 84 Zhou, M. 336, 339, 346 Zimmerman, D. 80 Zolberg, A.R. 33 Zsindely, S. 171
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398
SUBJECT INDEX academic discipline 169 academization 161, 167 access to education 11, 100, 134, 158, 246 achievement gaps 336–340, 343–344, 346–347, 349, 351, 354–355, 369 adaptation 70, 178, 284, 290, 335, 339, 343, 356, 378 agriculture 58, 158, 163–164, 166, 169, 171, 265 appropriatedness 160 Argentina 281, 283–284, 286–288, 290–297, 369 art 5, 63, 123, 158, 161, 163–164, 166–167, 169, 171, 176, 185, 241–242, 258, 264–265 benevolent institutions 38, 43 bienfaisance 37–38 bilingualism 339 brain drain 166 Brazil 108, 281, 283–284, 286–297 Buenos Aires 306, 319–324, 326–328 bureaucratization 246, 256–257, 261, 272 Caribbean 239, 241–243, 271 centralization 37–38, 42, 45, 256, 261, 272; also see decentralization citizenship 8–9, 30–32, 53, 79, 89, 110, 159, 240, 242, 252, 265, 268, 272, 341–342, 345, 356, 368, 373, 376–380, 382–385
citizenship rights/human rights 9, 31–32, 51, 69, 79, 95–96, 100, 116, 144, 149, 158, 240, 242, 252, 265, 268, 272, 356, 368, 373–376, 378, 380–385, colonial 145, 175, 243, 260, 270–271, 377; also see post-colonial communist countries 175 community participation 369 comparative 1–7, 9–15, 17–21, 27–28, 42, 44–45, 76, 87, 96–99, 115–116, 126, 159, 162, 180, 188–191, 193–194, 198, 202–203, 210–211, 213, 234, 240, 265, 272, 282–283, 297, 299–300, 335–337, 343, 345, 357, 367–369, 384 credentials 64, 81–82, 134, 140, 169, 189, 242, 259–260, 266–267, 270, 272 cross-national 6, 9, 14–17, 75–76, 80, 98, 137–138, 157–159, 161–163, 168–169, 174–175, 188–189, 191, 193–196, 199, 201–202, 204, 240, 255, 336, 338, 356, 358, 369, 384 curriculum 6, 41–42, 51, 95, 98, 104, 107, 110, 113–115, 128–130, 158, 161, 192, 194, 199–201, 245, 258, 261, 265, 267, 292, 294–296, 345 decentralization 33, 45, 98, 210–211, 216–227, 229–230, 232–235, 256–254, 264, 272, 287, 294–295, 305–309, 311–313, 315, 317–322, 324–328 decoupling 21, 177, 264 developed countries 84, 123, 149, 152, 171, 174 developing countries 123, 161, 171, 174, 239, 241–242, 260 399
400 development 1–6, 8–9, 14–17, 22, 37, 51, 58, 65–66, 75–76, 79, 83–85, 95–106, 108, 112–115, 123, 129, 138–143, 145–147, 149, 151–152, 158, 160, 162, 176, 188, 191, 198, 209–211, 214, 220, 229–230, 233, 240–241, 243, 258, 260, 263–264, 269–270, 276, 283, 286–287, 291–292, 340, 342, 367, 370–372, 375–376, 379, 381–385 diffusion 64, 89, 96–99, 102, 122–123, 129, 149, 151, 169, 213, 281, 283, 292–293, 297, 300 diversity in policy implementation 307 dynamic interaction between the global and the local 307 education as incorporation 367, 385 education decentralization 305, 308, 311, 326 education, vocational see vocational training educational achievement 15, 189, 193, 200, 202, 335–337, 340, 344–346, 352, 355–357 educational consumers 51, 104, 127, 130, 161 educational expansion 2, 4–5, 9, 14, 16–17, 21, 51, 78, 122, 125, 139, 141, 144–145, 239–244, 246–248, 252–253, 255–256, 258–261, 265–266, 268–269, 271–272, 378 educational policy 12, 14–15, 77, 189, 241, 246, 377 Elementary Education Act, 1870 (England) 35 embeddedness 54, 160, 177 English poor law 33, 37 enrollment 2–3, 14, 16–17, 51–52, 76, 79, 81, 83, 85–87, 122, 140–141, 144–145, 157–158, 161–164, 166–167, 169–172, 174–175, 177, 184, 221, 240, 242, 244, 247, 252, 257–258, 261–262, 356, 368–370, 374
SUBJECT INDEX entrepreneurial university 161 exclusion/inclusion 29, 31, 53, 127, 259, 337, 368, 373, 376–378, 380 Factory Act, 1831 (England) 35, 41, 44 faculty 162, 175–176, 242, 248, 258, 270, 384 family background 75, 140, 189, 337–340, 343–344, 346, 348–350, 355–357 first generation immigrants 353 fiscal policy 256, 261, 264–265, 272 for-profit education 126 foreign influences 282–283, 287, 290–293, 297, 299 franchises 121, 127–129, 131–133 gender 61, 75–77, 79–89, 100, 140, 161, 176, 201, 211, 241, 248–249, 269, 379–380, 384 gender and math/science 84 global norms 240, 246 globalization 96–102, 116, 167, 171, 175, 177, 294 glocalization 97, 381 higher education 2, 4, 21, 49–53, 55, 57–60, 62–64, 67–71, 75–76, 78–82, 84–86, 88–89, 122, 137, 153, 158, 161–162, 166–168, 171, 175–178, 242–244, 256–257, 265–266, 272–273, 357, 384 hoˆpitaux ge´ne´raux 39 human rights 51, 69, 95–96, 100–115, 144, 149, 240, 242, 252, 265, 268, 272, 368, 373–376, 380–385 humanities 81, 83, 131, 158–160, 163–164, 167, 169, 171–172, 174, 176 hybrid organizations 124–125, 130–131 immigrant incorporation 337–340, 354–355, 357 immigrants 285, 288, 335–357
Subject Index individualism 69, 77, 87, 240, 242, 252, 265, 272, 339 industrialized countries 78, 80, 82, 84, 89, 240–241, 336, 357 institutional sequence 27, 29, 32, 35, 40, 42, 44 institutional variations 197, 337–340, 343–344, 346, 355–358 Institutionalism 5, 17, 20, 122, 245, 340 institutionalization 4–5, 7, 14, 17, 19–20, 45, 64, 95–96, 113–115, 148, 150, 152, 157–158, 169, 209–210, 212, 271–272, 281–283, 373–375, 380, 384 institutionalized domains/contested terrains 368, 373, 380, 384 international agencies 159, 282–283, 291–297, 299–300 interpretative approaches 308 isomorphism 6–7, 15–16, 76, 113, 122–123, 133, 147, 150, 160, 177, 209–210, 212, 232, 234, 240, 261, 282, 371, 373 labor market 3, 22, 45, 75, 77, 80, 82, 85, 88, 134, 189, 243–245, 264, 269, 343 language rights 385 Latin America 106, 108, 281–284, 292, 295–296, 299 law 33–34, 37, 40–42, 51, 63, 76, 103–104, 110, 125, 131, 137–139, 141–149, 151–152, 163–164, 166–167, 169, 171–172, 174–176, 212, 218, 220, 223, 228, 258, 284–286, 294–295, 342, 370, 373, 382 legitimacy/legitimation 7–8, 10, 13, 15–17, 19, 39, 101–102, 108, 114–115, 124–125, 134, 138, 142–144, 150–152, 209, 211, 213, 215–219, 221, 223, 232, 234–235, 241, 266–267, 378–379 loi Guizot, 1833 (France) 41 loose coupling 17–18, 244, 276
401 macro-level analyses 80, 122–123, 130, 134, 240 market forces 375 massification 167, 177, 288 math achievement 85, 87, 345–354 medical sciences 163–164, 169, 171–172, 174–175 Merton, Robert K. 88, 159 meso-level analyses 121–123, 130, 134, multiversity 161 nation-building 9, 100, 145–146, 240–242, 249, 263, 266, 268–272, 285, 340 National Institution for Deaf Mutes (France) 39 natural sciences 81, 163–164, 169, 171, 176, 284 new education movement 283–284, 289–291, 293 Northern Europe 341, 350–351, 354 pedagogical reach 27–30, 32, 34, 37, 40–45 Phillipe Pinel (France) 39 policy adaptation 306, 310, 320, 324–325 political approaches 308 positivism 284, 286–287, 290 post-colonial 214, 241, 243, 260, 271 postsecondary education 264, 268–270 rational choice 88, 225 rationalization 4, 35, 57–58, 63, 69, 76–77, 79, 130, 149, 214, 224, 257, 269, 374, 378 receptivity toward immigrants 340, 343, 357 reform outcomes 310 reiterated problem solving 33, 35, 42 science and technology 83, 87, 245, 263, 265, 271–272 scientization 167–168
402 second generation immigrants 341, 345–348, 350, 353–355 sex segregation by field of study 81 social sciences 81, 131, 158–160, 163–164, 166–169, 171, 174, 176 Southern Europe 281, 342, 351–355 state fragmentation 245, 252, 256, 265, 272 stratification 75–77, 82, 85–86, 90, 140, 188–189, 194, 241, 246, 255, 271–272, 338 subnational political contexts 307 supplementary education 121, 124, 130, 134 taming of the grand narrative 380–381, 385 teacher education 286–287, 289–290 technical organizations and environments 16, 122, 124–125, 130 technocratic political interest 60, 291–293, 308, 316, 324 terms of inclusion 158, 368, 373, 376–380, 382–383 tertiary education 99, 122, 157–164, 166–169, 171–172, 174–178, 244, 252, 256, 263, 265, 268, 270 theorization 96, 116, 372–374, 381–382, 385 transnational models 299–300 Trinidad & Tobago 239, 241, 247, 254, 259, 261, 263, 268, 273, 275–276 tutelary complex 31 UNESCO 79, 84, 102, 104–105, 111–112, 115, 137, 142, 148, 158–159, 162–163, 177, 185, 292–293, 299
SUBJECT INDEX universal 16–18, 71, 77, 87, 96, 100–101, 105, 112, 122–123, 128, 134, 137, 139, 144, 210, 212, 214, 218, 244, 257, 269, 282, 292–295, 297, 373, 381, 383 universal model of education for the information age 282, 293–295 universalistic 42, 60, 67–68, 144–145, 160, 167–168, 367, 372, 374 university 2–3, 50, 67–68, 70, 78, 80–81, 84, 110–111, 132, 160–162, 167, 169, 176–177, 180, 244–245, 258, 260–261, 263–265, 268, 281–282, 290, 346, 356, 379, 384 vocational training 22, 137, 176, 244, 267, 271–272, 274 voluntary principle (England) 35, 37 West 61, 80, 174, 178, 211, 214, 235, 244, 258 Western countries 149–150, 168–171, 173–175, 179–180 women 75–76, 78–89, 103, 110, 249, 285, 375–377, 379, 384 world culture 2, 5–7, 9, 11, 15, 123, 134, 145–147, 149, 167, 282 world citizenship 382, 385 World Educational Revolution 3, 369, 371, 373 World Polity 130, 159, 176–177 world region 162, 335 world society 51, 148–149, 159–160, 167, 177, 242, 252, 265, 272, 282, 367–370, 372–373, 378–379, 382–384 Worldwide models 77
