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In this chapter we adopt the analytic of “assemblage” (Anderson and McFarlane, 2011) to document how New Public Management (NPM) has been mobilized and recontextualized within different nation states over time through the unique combination of discrete yet tangled and globally diffuse political movements and configurations. To make sense of these issues empirically, we trace multiple iterations of NPM in five countries: Argentina, Australia, England, Italy and Spain. We focus our attention on the intermediating actors, networks and projects that have crystallized to produce different possibilities for the emergence of NPM within these countries and reflect on their comparable yet uneven development as dynamic expressions of governance assemblages.
This chapter makes an intervention in the literature on knowledge mobilization and global education policy by presenting a novel approach to studying policy movement. The central purpose of this approach – labelled bibliographic ethnography – is to highlight the work that bibliographic references do in the context of academic and organizational texts, while also keeping one eye on the wider implications of the productive nature of such citations beyond the limits of the text itself. The approach brings an ethnographic sensitivity to the analysis of the role that citations play in the sense that it asks: what kinds of statements or claims are enabled in the context of academic and organizational texts by the invocation of a given reference? As will be explained, this analysis is then placed within a second level of reflection where the researcher assesses the work of citations in relation to the dominant features of the sociohistorical and political-economic context. Analysis of this kind necessarily has a political dimension, because the underlying phenomenon itself is political. That is, the issue of who to cite and how to interpret and instrumentalize existing research has political implications, even when authors do not have open political intentions with their research.
This chapter focuses on the complex processes and underlying mechanisms in the formation of Lebanon’s national social and emotional learning (SEL) policies since the Syrian refugee influx in 2011. Drawing conceptually on education policy mobilities and the cultural political economy of education, the primary focus is on following SEL as an example of globally mobile education policy ideas and policy frameworks. Empirically, we draw on two primary data sources generated in a larger comparative case study: policy document analysis and 26 semi-structured interviews with transnational–national actors and four national policy makers, conducted virtually from September 2020 to June 2021. The findings illustrate how the US-originated SEL discourses and approaches have become deterritorialized and globally mobile as a global policy solution by interactions across the transnational policy actors, networks, events, and the shifting technological and topological apparatus arising across multiple scales. Identifying policy actors across multiple scales and studying the key drivers of their engagement illuminate the topologies of the global aid architecture. Although the national SEL policy-making processes in Lebanon were perceived to epitomize collaboration among actors on multiple levels, the roles undertaken by transnational–national actors and national policy makers in those processes are reflective of highly unequal power dynamics.
The movement of policy is a core feature of contemporary education reform. Many different concepts, including policy transfer, borrowing and lending, travelling, diffusion and mobility, have been deployed to study how and why policy moves across jurisdictions, scales of governance, policy sectors or organizations. However, the underlying theoretical perspectives and the foundational assumptions of different approaches to policy movement remain insufficiently discussed. To address this gap, this book places front and center questions of theory, ontology, epistemology and method related to policy movement. It explores a wide diversity of approaches to help understand the policy movement phenomena, providing a useful guide on global studies in education, as well as insights into the future of this dynamic area of work.
The movement of policy is a core feature of contemporary education reform. Many different concepts, including policy transfer, borrowing and lending, travelling, diffusion and mobility, have been deployed to study how and why policy moves across jurisdictions, scales of governance, policy sectors or organizations. However, the underlying theoretical perspectives and the foundational assumptions of different approaches to policy movement remain insufficiently discussed. To address this gap, this book places front and center questions of theory, ontology, epistemology and method related to policy movement. It explores a wide diversity of approaches to help understand the policy movement phenomena, providing a useful guide on global studies in education, as well as insights into the future of this dynamic area of work.
The movement of policy is a core feature of contemporary education reform. Many different concepts, including policy transfer, borrowing and lending, travelling, diffusion and mobility, have been deployed to study how and why policy moves across jurisdictions, scales of governance, policy sectors or organizations. However, the underlying theoretical perspectives and the foundational assumptions of different approaches to policy movement remain insufficiently discussed. To address this gap, this book places front and center questions of theory, ontology, epistemology and method related to policy movement. It explores a wide diversity of approaches to help understand the policy movement phenomena, providing a useful guide on global studies in education, as well as insights into the future of this dynamic area of work.
This chapter is an attempt to trace the legacy of colonial time in the secular historiography of the madrasa and the modern higher education institutions in Turkey. The guiding questions of inquiry are: (1) how have secular historians narrated attempts at policy and institutional borrowing of scientific ideas and higher education institutions in the 19th-century Ottoman Empire?; and (2) what are the conditions that make it possible for secular historians to be able to conceptually juxtapose two institutions that have historically belonged to two different discursive systems, temporal regimes and institutional traditions? Adopting a philosophical and historical interpretive framework, the chapter puts forward the argument that the system of reasoning of secular historiography relies heavily on a secular conceptualization of time inherited from the Western social theory of “modernization” and “modernity,” wherein there is a particular temporal order and organization of the historical experience. To problematize this ordering of historical experience, this chapter engages with recent revisionist historiography and argues that Ottoman reformers were operating in multiple temporalities in the 19th century when transferring and translating scientific concepts and institutions of Western origin. Operating in multiple temporalities has to be seen as an ontologically necessary condition for the reformers, which was already a common practice in both Islamic jurisprudence and theology. Overall, this chapter problematizes the uncritical adoption of Western, secular time as a condition of possibility and a background grid of intelligibility for global policy movement, which otherwise incessantly reproduces the conditions and aspirations of Western modernity, occluding other onto-epistemologies.
This chapter presents a critical realist discourse analysis approach to examine how policy actors and mechanisms associated with structural factors from different levels (that is, local and international) interact in the movement of inclusive education policy from the global context to a certain local context. The discussion is initiated with an overview of the inclusive education policy-making terrain in Malaysia and is followed by an examination of the theoretical underpinnings of a critical realist discourse analysis. The theoretical framework will center on two key approaches: Reisigl and Wodak’s (2009) discourse-historical approach and Jessop’s (2005) strategic relational approach. The second section of the chapter presents some empirical insights that follow from the approach delineated in researching policy movement processes. It is hoped that the use of a critical realist discourse analysis approach will provide more nuanced explanations with respect to how, why and through what international and local mechanisms global education policies can be borrowed, developed and evolve.
This chapter illustrates the application of actor-network theory (ANT) to the study of policy movement through the case of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), which has significantly influenced language learning, teaching and assessment in Europe and beyond. We call into question the binary vision of global/local by showing how the CEFR was co-constructed by multiple actors and how actors’ identities shifted and were made through the transfer of the CEFR. We also examine how multiple ontologies of the CEFR – as a technical standard enabling test score alignment and as an ideology of plurilingualism promoting cultural and linguistic diversity – were performed in practices of different actors, which first strengthened and then undermined a Japanese reform project oriented to the CEFR. We conclude the chapter with a discussion on how ANT facilitates the development of policy movement research by moving beyond the convergence/divergence debate and encouraging researchers to explore relationality and heterogeneity in the so-called “global” education policies.
The literature on education policy movement – that is, the diffusion, transfer and translation of education policy globally – has continued to expand. This expanding research on policy movement has built on established approaches, while also reflecting the development of new approaches or the combination of existing ones. However, the underlying theoretical perspectives and the foundational assumptions of policy movement scholarship frequently remain implicit and insufficiently elaborated. This chapter responds by characterizing four related yet distinct orientations to understanding and studying education policy movement: cross-scalar approaches, discourse-centered approaches, policy mobilities approaches and decolonial approaches. The approaches discussed within and across these groups are distinguished in terms of their theoretical and methodological features. However, before presenting these approaches, the chapter first situates education policy movement within the broader phenomenon of globalization. This section explains how the political, economic and cultural dimensions of globalization affect education systems around the world and encourage or impede education policy movement. It is also attentive to how the features of globalization continue to evolve and, indeed, how globalization is experiencing a backlash along all three dimensions (political, economic and cultural). This discussion thus describes the “context of contexts” in which – and in reaction to which – scholarship on education policy movement itself continues to develop. The conclusions emphasize, first, that emerging approaches to education policy movement reflect eclecticism and, second, that the boundaries between different approaches to researching policy movement are now less clearly defined than before. The conclusions furthermore recognize the contributions and complementarities of different approaches, while also calling on scholars to strive for theoretical clarity, to move beyond descriptive studies and to engage with a range of theoretical perspectives in order to see and explain policy movement in new ways and to achieve more nuanced understandings of policy movement phenomena.
