Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (10)
- Part of a Book (3)
- Book (1)
- Doctoral Thesis (1)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (15)
Based on a Globally Structured Agenda for Education, this article presents the construction of the New Opportunities Initiative in Portugal. Thus, it analyses the relationship between the European Union and the Portuguese State with regard to the construction of this programme, identifying for this purpose the effects of governance processes. Through an analysis of Education and Training 2010 Program and New Opportunities Initiative documents, issued between 2000 and 2010, the strengthening of the discursive rhetoric based on a utilitarian and instrumental perspective of adult education and the incorporation of the principles of new public management in the field of education can be shown. In Portugal, the New Opportunities Initiative not only reflects these trends but also gives rise to a new way of constructing policies in the field of adult education.
Blurring the boundaries. University actorhood and institutional change in global higher education
(2021)
Higher education (HE) scholarship often focuses on the so-called ‘entrepreneurial’ university as a consequence of new public management reforms. Simultaneously, the remarkable expansion of private HE is said to fragment, specialize, and diversify HE systems. Such diagnoses are misleading as they ignore wider environmental pressures and simultaneous changes in both public, non-profit and for-profit HE. We argue that putative diversity in HE operates as a ceremonial façade behind which large-scale isomorphic change across national HE systems, sectors, and organizational forms occurs. Multiple causes trigger such change originating in the increasingly global HE environment, including a burgeoning international HE regime, accounting and accountability practices, increased permeability of HE systems facilitated by open borders, education markets, and global science as well as (neo)liberal ideologies stressing human capital and human rights. As other organizations, those in HE become subject to these pressures turning universities into more rationalized, standardized, and strategic actors.
Embedded in social worlds, education systems and research reflect distinct national trajectories. We compare two contrasting traditions of educational research (ER). Whereas British ER exhibits a multidisciplinary and pragmatic character, German ER reflects pedagogy and mainly humanities-based traditions. Yet, in both countries, policymakers’ growing demand for evidence in ER resulted in increased funding, specific research programs, and mandatory large-scale assessments. These have reshaped the field, suggesting more similar ER agendas. Based on a comprehensive original dataset of basic ER projects funded by the main grant-making agencies in both countries (2005–2015), we analyze five dimensions: levels, objects, disciplines, methodologies, and themes. We find epistemic drift, with partial convergence characterized by a multi-level focus, multidisciplinary approach, strongly empirical and quantitative methodology, and a premium on teaching and learning themes. The cases remain distinct in exploring systemic questions in a wider contextual frame (UK) or concentrating more narrowly on the individual learner (Germany).
Este artigo apresenta uma análise crítica da criação e implementação da mais emblemática medida política para o campo de jovens e adultos pouco escolarizados em Portugal: o Programa Novas Oportunidades. Recorrendo à proposta de Roger Dale sobre a agenda globalmente estruturada para a educação, discutiu-se a fabricação desta medida a partir de um cenário de regulação transnacional. Através da análise documental de um conjunto de documentos europeus e nacionais entre o período de 2000 e 2010 para o campo da educação de jovens e adultos, verificou-se que Programa Novas Oportunidades é consequência de um fortalecimento do processo de regulação das políticas educativas, levado a cabo pela União Europeia. Este fortalecimento resultou na construção de um programa político para o campo da educação de jovens e adultos em Portugal que comunga não só das mesmas ideologias instrumentais para a educação da União Europeia, como de uma gestão tecnocrática das políticas educativas, assente na procura de resultados.
Developed throughout the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, structural-functionalism profoundly shaped social sciences thinking, including Comparative and International Education. This school of thought analyzes the functions of the interrelated parts that constitute society, including education, to explain how they contribute to maintaining order and harmony in society. The first part of the chapter provides an overview of the antecedents and developments of the structural-functionalism by making reference to the main scholars and ideas that contributed to its elaborations. The second part of the chapter explores its applications in the field of comparative international education by providing several examples of how structural-functionalism influenced the analyses of early comparativists. The chapter ends with a conclusion, a list of further reading, and a mini-case study.
Informed by multiple disciplines, theories, and methods, higher education scholars have developed a robust and diverse literature in many countries. Yet, some important (organizational) sociological perspectives, both more established and more recent, are insufficiently linked. In particular, we identify two theoretical strands – institutional and relational – that, when joined, help to explain contemporary developments in global higher education and yield new organizational insights. We review relevant literature from each perspective, both in their general formulations and with specific reference to contemporary higher education research. Within the broad institutional strand, we highlight strategic action fields, organizational actorhood, and associational memberships. Within the relational strand, we focus on ties and relationships that are especially crucial as science has entered an age of (inter)national research collaboration. Across these theories, we discuss linkages between concepts, objects, and levels of analysis. We explore the methodological approach of social network analysis as it offers great potential to connect these strands and, thus, to advance contemporary higher education research in a collaborative era.
The Europeanization of higher education has gained considerable scope and momentum over the past quarter century. Whereas the coordinative Bologna process, with soft governance mechanisms, has facilitated standardization across countries, European Commission funding programs target universities more directly. The Erasmus Mundus Joint Degree Programme, as an incentive-based program, epitomizes the dynamics of such European funding management. Notably, it has established expanding university networks across Europe and unique new tertiary degrees that facilitate international student mobility. Applying social network analysis to 561 participating universities through several program cycles, we longitudinally examine three key patterns in the program’s development: the expansion of the program, the consolidation of pan-European networks, and the participation of and coordination by central universities in these Europeanization processes. Program participation increased considerably across cycles, even as established networks were consolidated, largely through re-accreditation of established programs. Moreover, we identify those universities that assume a central position in the inter-organizational structure of this international program. These universities actively facilitate the evolving Europeanization of higher education by strengthening inter-university networks via a signature EU program.
While the literature in skill formation systems has paid considerable attention to inter-variation between types of national skill formation systems and intra-variation among individual types as in the case of collective skill formation systems, less is known about the role of the European Union in establishing a European model of skill formation. Building on studies in educational governance and decentralised cooperation, this paper analyses the European Alliance for Apprenticeships (EAfA) and explores its relationship to national skill formation systems. We analyse the emergence of a European model of collective skill formation and offer case studies of Ireland and France to understand how this European model relates to these two contrasting skill formation systems. Through deductive qualitative content analysis of official documents, we show that (a) the EAfA, in resembling characteristics of national collective skill formation systems, promotes the emergence of a European model of collective skill formation, and (b) that Ireland and France show signs of moving further towards adopting elements of a collectivist training model centred on apprenticeship training although mediated by path-dependencies of a liberal (Ireland) and statist (France) skill formation model.
The gradual transformation of the social contract of science, in which policy-makers demand value for money and relevant knowledge to contribute to the solution of societal problems, has contributed to change the model provision of funding for science. Such quests for relevance recognises its genesis in the idea of evidence-based policy and practice that originally started in the field of medicine and quickly spread to other fields, such as education, and the overall policy process. In the search for what has been called the “what works” movement, one of the funding arrangements that has recognised special momentum since the 1990s is the thematic research programmes, sponsored by governments or research state agencies, to directly targeted research topics and develop research capacity. Considerable sums of public research funding for educational research has been allocated through thematic national programmes in order to guarantee quality in research, to create research capacity, and to provide results that could inform practitioners and policy-makers. In this chapter, I discuss how intrinsically and extrinsically related aspects of programmification in the United Kingdom and Germany foresee and impact the sustainability in educational research.
The study of research funding arrangements and the production of scientific knowledge has been marked by a lack of understanding about how research funding instruments interact and how these instruments shape policy-making and research fields. To fill this research gap, this study is theoretically supported by policy feedback and policy instruments’ interaction studies. It investigates the effects of the UK's research assessment exercise in the creation of the most emblematic national thematic research program for the field of educational research in the country – the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP). Based on qualitative analysis of policy documents and semi-structured interviews with policy-makers and boundary-spanners, this paper shows how the research assessment exercise contributed to the creation of the TLRP and how the interaction between the two policy instruments shaped the field of educational research in England. In particular, the results show a) how the institutionalisation of the research assessment led to frame a “quality problem” in educational research that legitimated several policy initiatives, including the creation of the national thematic research programme (interpretative effects) and a shift in resources allocation (resource/incentive effects); and b) how the interaction between the two policy instruments contributed to methodological and epistemic drifts in the field of educational research.
