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Conjunctions of power and comparative

education
Roger Dale

Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

Published online: 18 May 2015.

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Vol. 45, No. 3, 341362, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2015.1006944

KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Conjunctions of power and comparative education
Roger Dale*

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Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

This paper develops the basis of a comparative sociological account of
the present state and potential of Comparative Education (CE) as a eld
of study by examining the mechanisms and contexts generated by three
conjunctions of power and CE. The rst of these concerns issues of
power over the eld, how it has been, and is being, framed by the
operation of power of various kinds. Power over what counts as CE
emerges through three forms of strategic selectivity, based on: (1) its
missions, locations and wider contexts; (2) its political, discursive, theoretical, methodological and valorisational opportunity structures; and (3)
its institutional locations within the structures of university governance
and national and international funding bodies, and the conditions of
knowledge production that they frame. Next, it addresses issues of
power in CE, how it is and has been conceived, by whom, and with
what analytic and political consequences. Finally, the paper directs attention to the potential power of CE. It focuses on two contrasting forms
taken by the outputs of CE, the production of expertise and of explanation, which together suggest something of the nature of the dilemmas of
the relationships between power and CE. Expertise concerns the power
of the eld as a source of comment and advice on the development of
educational policy, based on qualitative and quantitative comparisons of
education systems and their performances. The second, by contrast, considers the potential of a comparative approach to the explanation of
social phenomena.
Keywords: comparative education; power; opportunity structures; expertise; explanation

Introduction
In this paper I will be attempting to demonstrate the nature, basis and
consequences of power in, over and through Comparative Education (hereafter CE) by means of what might be seen as a sociological analysis of CE
itself as an object of study. This will entail taking CE itself as a kind of
case study of the operation of different forms of power and their outcomes
in an academic eld. In essence, the purpose of the paper is an attempt to
demonstrate the explanatory potential of CE which I take to be by far its
*Email: r.dale@bristol.ac.uk
2015 British Association for International and Comparative Education

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greatest contribution by advancing a basis for an explanation of its own

current practices, status, achievements, forms and outputs. I will do this not
by comparing those practices and so on directly, or by providing a generalised account of them based on common patterns or bundles of attributes,
but on the basis of the method of abstraction. Thus, the basic argument will
be that theories do not explain empirical situations in this case the practices and so on of CE directly, but indirectly, in terms of the structures
that produce them (Sayer 1982). In this case, I will attempt to elaborate
what this might mean by identifying and elaborating what I shall refer to as
the key opportunity structures that frame CE as a eld of study in the UK.
Specically, my starting point is that the complexity and signicance of
the relationships between elds of study as distinct and collective academic
endeavours, with that which they seek to explore, comment on, understand
and explain, are relatively rarely addressed. Exponents of such elds often
seem to proceed on the assumption that they are purely driven by the sets
of methods, theories, concepts, approaches and so on that have been developed in the name of CE. However, they tend to do so without fully taking
into account what relationships there might be within and between these
bodies of approaches (which do, of course, frequently conict with each
other, a fact that is typically put down to internal methodological, theoretical, etc. differences), on the one hand, and, on the other, what might be
more abstractly referred to as their conditions of existence (what Maria
Manzon [2011] refers to as power relations associated with social structures
and human agency, and discourse [211]), their relationship to what they do
and, especially, why they do what they do.
In particular, I want to argue here that such conditions of existence signicantly shape what CE does and is, especially as they relate to issues of
power. The key questions become what factors inuence what we choose
to do when we say we are doing CE, in what terms do we justify those
choices, and in what forms and with what consequences do issues of power
arise? So, underlying my argument is an eschewal of both denitional and
performative ontologies of CE, in favour of what might be seen as a
political sociological account of CE, the fulcrum of which will be various
conjunctions of CE and Power.
The most important source in relation to the objectives of this paper is
not the number of times that power appears in texts or indexes in the
existing literature, but what that literature reveals about the purposes and
ambitions of CE, and the place and understanding of power as structure
and process in those assumptions. I will address these issues through a
focus on different conjunctions of power and CE. There are two key
methodological bases to this strategy. First, I will adopt the
ethnomethodologists crucial distinction by making CE topic rather than
resource, or, to put it another way, take it as explanandum, in need of
explanation, rather than explanans, providing explanation. The other is the

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distinction John Seeley (1967) made between the making and taking of
social problems. The basis of the distinction is that the nature of an issue,
and the expectations of how it might be addressed, are taken more or less
unproblematically, as they are identied by various interested parties, while
there is, rather, a need to (re-)make them as problems that can be
approached from a less pre-determined (and hence less interested) stance,
a process that starts from problematising the categorisation itself.
What this entails in the context of this paper is: (1) to consider how,
when, in what circumstances and conditions and with what consequences
both (what everybody knows about) CE and power are taken as
resources, rather than made into topics in their own right, and (2) to
indicate some ways that these circumstances, conditions and consequences
depend as much on the institutional and power relationships over and within
CE its conditions of existence as they do on internal disciplinary
debates. In brief, the main aim of the paper will be to make CE, by establishing some of the bases on which it has been taken, in particular by
focusing on its conjunctions with power.
I will attempt to develop this argument in three stages, taking up particular conjunctions between CE and Power power over CE, power in CE,
and power of CE.
Power over CE
By Power over, I refer to the ways that CE itself as a eld of study has
been, and is being, framed by the operation of power of various kinds. I
rst advanced the argument I will develop here in an analysis of the sociology of education in England (Dale 2001). That analysis drew on Karabel
and Halseys (1977) argument that, sociology of education has been inuenced more by its social context than by any inner logic of the development of the discipline (28).1
I suggested that the social context of the discipline could be seen as
formed across three axes of what I referred to as a selection principle that
informs practitioners foci, justications and activities, and frames the
conditions of knowledge production in the eld. These axes were:
a broadly shared Project, or Mission;
a shared Location;
shifting political/economic/cultural Contexts.
If we approach CE through these axes, we see that what is distinctive about
the Projects of all Education sub-disciplines is their desire to improve the
world, to demonstrate the capacities and value of education, rather than treat
it merely as an academic exercise. Comparative Education is no exception
here, being driven by what we might refer to as a modernist/meliorist

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(usefulness according to Cowen [2006]) Project (as seen in its historical

association with Modernisation), in harness with the pursuit of a
methodology/methodologies that would enable that progress to be achieved.
Its Location, at the heart of the institution and practice of Education in
Education Faculties means that the assumptions and conceptions of reality
that CE is based on and the purposes towards which it is bent, have tended
to be shared with the practitioners and policy makers they are studying.
Together, its project and location suggest that CE2 tends essentially to:
(1) take the nature of the eld of education for granted and (2) regard it
unproblematically as a good thing, with a consequent focus on enabling
improvements in its practices, organisation and administration and processes.
This has led CE to focus particularly on issues like the identication and
promotion of good practice, and the identication and removal of barriers,
be they pedagogical, administrative, organisational, conceptual, logistical or
ideological, to the full realisation of Educations promise and potential,
which are themselves rarely, if ever, questioned.
Such commitments have also made up an important element of the wider
political Contexts within which CE operates, especially, perhaps, in its continuing commitment to improving education in the developing world.
Although their nature and forms may have varied considerably across time,
those commitments have continued to frame its justications. These have
included a progressive shift from largely national, formal, state Education
systems and institutions, to addressing the nature and consequences of
globalisation, which is seen as both a challenge and an opportunity for
CE, for instance in the form of methodological nationalism (see Dale 2005).
One other key contextual factor has been the availability of signicant and
high-prole quantitative databases, producing competitive comparative data
that politicians need to respond to.
In the remainder of this section, I will attempt to articulate the nature
and consequences of CEs current Project, Location and Context through
addressing the ways that they jointly frame what is taken as the core business and strategies of CE. The idea of a selection principle is elaborated
here in the form of what I will refer to as the main Opportunity structures
that together shape the eld of and practice of CE.
The fundamental basis of the concept of opportunity structures is Marxs
(1852) famous dictum: Men make their own history, but they do not make
it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances of their own
choosing, but under already existing circumstances, given and transmitted
from the past (7). Those already existing circumstances include and frame
the possibilities for present and future action, with some of them more
powerful and signicant than others. Opportunity structures can be seen as
derived from and reections of those existing circumstances. They are collections of rules, institutions, conventions, practices and discourses that
restrict or enable different sets of actors and the actions they take; they

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embody and exemplify what is to be regarded as sensible, realistic and

legitimate (Koopmans and Statham 1999, 228), they frame conceptions of
the desirable, the possible, the attainable and the unattainable. The largest
body of work taking up the opportunity structure paradigm is that developed by social movement theorists who were interested in the ways that
existing political systems, elites and capacity for repression frame the possibilities of success for new social movements; together these constitute and
shape the selection of means available to social movements wishing to
make a political impact. An educational example is provided by the sociologist Ken Roberts (2009), who argues that [Occupational] opportunity structures are formed by the inter-relationships between family origins,
education, labour market processes and employers recruitment practices
(355) and uses this framework as the basis of comparison and explanation
of historical changes in school-to-work transitions.
In the case of CE, these could be seen as ideas and practices believed to
be sensible, realistic and legitimate in the particular facets of the activities
of CE, which its Project, Context and Location provide for its exponents
through the kinds of investments they have in and through their witting
or unwitting adherence/attachment to particular conceptions of what CE
is, how it should be practised and to what ends.
The nature and signicance of opportunity structures has been well
captured by Colin Hay (2002):
These structures are selective of strategy in the sense that, given a specic
context, only certain courses of action are likely to see actors realise their
intentions. Social, political and economic contexts are densely structured and
highly contoured. As such they present an unevenly distributed conguration
of opportunity and constraint to actors. They are, in short, strategically selective, for whilst they may well facilitate the ability of resource- and knowledge-rich actors to further their strategic interests, they are equally likely to
present signicant obstacles to the realisation of the strategic intentions of
those not similarly endowed. (380381)

That is, they have a shaping effect on the degree to which, and the forms in
which, what count as policies, for instance, or methodologies, and
ultimately CE itself, are to be implemented through them.
Methodologically, we might see the idea of opportunity structures as providing a level of abstraction from which we may be able to understand and
explain the nature and forms of CE more effectively including the different
national forms taken by CE for, after all, theory is concerned not with
empirical events, but with the structures that brought them about. To put it
another way, the opportunity structures approach leads us to focus on how the
menu of choices is formed, as a preliminary to choosing within it. It should
also be clear that opportunity structures are analytic categories, not empirical
ones; comparative educationists do not consult lists of possibilities, but

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necessarily act within opportunity structures that legitimate, favour and prioritise some forms of decision and action over others. Decisions and understandings about what counts as CE are not random, but not necessarily
consciously follow particular framings of the possibilities over others.
One crucial point to be made here is that the various opportunity structures that I will discuss in this section are to a degree nationally based, and
differ from each other on that basis, though with considerable elements in
common (this point is developed further below, especially in the section on
methodological opportunity structures). Thus, a major rationale for adopting
the opportunity structure strategy is that it does provide a means of
comparing different national models of CE, and isolating and explaining
those differences and their consequences.
In the remainder of this Power Over CE section, though it will not be
possible to go into them in any depth, I will briey outline and consider the
forms taken by four different opportunity structures, whose contents and
combinations to some extent underlie, among other things, different national
understandings and practices of CE. In particular, these opportunity structures provide the frameworks within which conceptions of power within CE
are formed, and the potential of CE is delimited. The four opportunity
structures are Political, Discursive, Theoretical and Methodological.
Political opportunity structures of CE
To exemplify what is meant by political opportunity structures, it might be
useful to consider their value in making sense of the work and inuence of
the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in particular. One
important way of understanding why and how PISA arose in the forms it
did and when it did is to see it as a response to a particular set of political
opportunity structures. The political opportunity structure within which the
OECD operates is one framed in part by competition between advice suppliers. The OECD competes in this arena with other organisations, such as
the World Bank, the United Nations Educational, Scientic and Cultural
Organisation, the Institute of Economic Affairs and the European Union,
and increasingly with private organisations such as McKinsey, Pearsons
and international rankers of Higher Education so that what it chooses to
do is framed not only by what it might like to do, but by the need to compete in a certain area and according to a particular set of priorities. For
instance, OECD, too, works within a particular political opportunity structure, one key element of which is that well over half its funding comes
from two member countries, the USA and Japan.
In this section, I will emphasise three key components of CEs political
opportunity structure: funding, focus and standing, and I will briey
consider CEs relationship to three important areas where political

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opportunity structures shape it in signicant ways. The rst of these is concerned with the traditional relationship between education and development,
which has been a signicant element of CEs political opportunity structure
for several decades, to the point where it could be claimed that the changing
nature of that relationship has been a dominant feature of the political
opportunity structure. Aid and development are central elements of this
relationship, which inuence all three of the components of the political
opportunity structure. They provide, for instance, on the one hand, a powerful rationale for CE, and, on the other, a steady ow of doctoral students
who are to learn what is current in Western education and how it might
benet the education systems to which they will return with that knowledge;
and this mission, though it may vary somewhat in specics over the years,
remains a central feature of what is to count as CE.
In terms of the second area of CE activity that is shaped by its political
opportunity structure, it seems fairly clear that at what might be seen as
macro-level policy, of Politics with a large P, or possibly, as structurally
selective (see Jessop 2012), CE has attracted more attention and moved
closer to the limelight in recent years as a result of the proliferation of competitive comparative measures of school performance at an international
level. It seems like the obvious place for governments to seek expert
advice on these matters, whether concerned with their technical standing or
the interpretation of their meaning.
It could appear that these two sets of activities are not only framed by
power, in the shape of the political opportunity structure, but could become
beholden to it, as what the political opportunity structure enables and offers
may become somewhat constraining and restrictive, as focus follows funding.
There is clear evidence of this in the UK Research Excellence Framework, a
key element of CEs political opportunity structure, which powerfully shapes
and polices the terrain of legitimate academic knowledge production.
The third element of the political opportunity structure of CE operates at
an entirely different level, that where standing becomes important. Like
any other discipline or eld of study, CEs prospects depend to a considerable degree on the elds general standing within academia. And here,
notwithstanding the generally low prestige of education within universities
(certainly in most Western countries), CEs academic standing may be a
positive aspect of its political opportunity structure, certainly by comparison
with Teacher Education, for instance. The major bases where CE is
practised include many of the most prestigious universities in the world
Stanford, Columbia, Toronto, London, Hong Kong and Beijing Normal, to
name but a few. Such associations offer a serious degree of political connection and protection to the practice of CE elsewhere.
Perhaps the best example of shaping of issues by political opportunity
structure is Novoa and Yariv-Mashals (2003) celebrated account of the
dilemmas caused for CE by the shifting political opportunity structures that

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confront it. These present polarised opportunities for CE as, on the one
hand, complicit in, the handmaiden of, the ofcial political opportunity
structure, as reected in its potential as a tool of governance, and, on the
other, the difcult-to-realise possibility of making it a potentially emancipatory historical study.
Discursive opportunity structures
Ruud Koopmans and Paul Statham (1999) distinguished discursive opportunity structures from the broader concept of political opportunity structure on
the grounds that the latter tends to neglect cultural dynamics that also play
a pivotal role in movement outcomes (228); that is to say, they focused on
how the content of policies, as well as their processes, was shaped
strategically selected by the political processes through which it was
formed. As they explain it in a later paper:
Political discourse analysis takes the emergence and public visibility of frames
as an indicator for the meaning giving side of challenges to dominant political and cultural norms, values and problem denition, relating framing [of
problems] to the dominant set of cultural and political norms, i.e., to discursive opportunity structures. (Koopmans et al. 2005, 23)

Thus, as one leading theorist of social movements, Myra Marx Ferree

(2003), put it, the concept of discursive opportunity structure as an institutionally anchored gradient of opportunity provides [the] missing link
between discourse and power, and it also claries the difference between
discursive context and strategic choice (339). Ferree (2009) also points out
that ofcial texts such as policies:
never speak for themselves, but need to be interpreted, implemented and
enforced they offer a discursive structure an institutionalized framework
of connections made among people, concepts and events that shapes the
opportunities of political actors by making some sorts of connections appear
inevitable and making others conspicuously uncertain and so especially inviting for debate. (89)

One example of how the concept of discursive opportunity structure might

be used in comparing aspects of national education systems comes from an
eight-country European study of educational transitions (into and out of
lower-secondary education), which I have been involved in. One major difculty that we confronted was that of nding a way that we could compare and
not merely juxtapose the various countries policies on transition. Since they
were strictly not comparable at the empirical level, we adopted the strategy of
constructing a tertium comparationis, a third element, on the basis of their
relationship to which we could compare all the countries. The element we settled on was the countries understandings of, and responses to, migrant young

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people. We chose this issue because though it was not at the centre of any
countrys education policy, they all recognised it as a problem that they had to
nd a means of tackling. It was in addressing this problem that the value of
the discursive opportunity approach became apparent. In essence, the countries all construed and constructed the problem, what it was a problem of
and how it could be solved in quite different ways. One key basis of these
differences in construing and addressing the problem was the ways that they
wrote and talked about it and, especially, how they tried to categorise and
relate it to existing and available problems. That is to say, their responses were
all framed, at quite a deep level, by the different (national) political and discursive opportunity structures available to them. This was most clearly
demonstrated in the ways that they categorised and named the migrants. For
the Dutch, they were Allochtoon meaning from elsewhere, but subject to
several meanings entailing forms of otherness; the Italians referred to nonItalian speakers and the British to ethnic minorities, while the French
Republican tradition effectively prevented them from naming differences that
were not supposed to exist. One fundamental and exemplary difference was
that found between countries like France, where citizenship is based on ius
soli (country of birth), and Germany, where it is based on ius sanguinis (the
law of blood). Recognising these differences enabled us to provide much
more nuanced accounts not just of countries attitudes to migrant children, but
also, for instance, to compare the nature and consequences of conceptions of
the national within the education system.
Colin Hay (2011) summarises the interplay of what we are referring to
as discursive opportunity structures as follows:
established ideas become codied, serving as cognitive lters through which
actors come to interpret environmental signals also concerned with the conditions under which such established cognitive lters and paradigms are contested, challenged and replaced access to strategic resources and to
knowledge of the institutional environment is unevenly distributed actors
perceptions about what is feasible, legitimate, possible and desirable are shaped
both by the institutional environment in which they nd themselves and by
existing policy paradigms and worldviews. It is through such cognitive lters
that strategic conduct is conceptualised and ultimately assessed. (69)

Here, the feasible, the legitimate and the possible can be seen as elements
contained within the discursive opportunity structure.
Theoretical opportunity structures
Trying to identify and account for the different kinds of theoretical opportunity structures that frame CE is a formidable task indeed, well worthy of a
study in itself, which means that this section will tend even more to the
illustrative rather than substantive than the rest of the paper. To this end, I
want to establish from the start that my focus will be on the assumptions

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about power on which theories rest rather than on their explanatory effectiveness though, of course, these things can be separated only for purposes of exposition.
It is useful to start by returning to Karabel and Halseys (1977) argument
about what might be called the sources of theory choice, which they locate
outside disciplines rather than internal to them and which, of course, is
fundamental to the opportunity structure argument in general. We might
then start with the location of CE within the academy, which, notwithstanding the prominent sites mentioned above, may more generally be
regarded as a sub-eld of a low-status area of study that struggles with its
own disciplinary distinctiveness and claims. Indeed, agonising over claims
to and denitions of its scope, purpose and identity has constituted a signicant strand of work within CE since its beginnings. This has often entailed
difcult entanglements between concepts and consequences of the relationships of theory, methodology and methods.
One major consequence of these two things (academic location and failure to agree on what identies the eld in terms of approaches, etc.) is that
theories tend to be appropriated from a range of disciplines and theoretical
traditions. (Lest we think this necessarily casts a long shadow of piecemeal
eclecticism over the process, we should bear in mind the enormous success
of the development of world culture theory, which was very largely accomplished within the eld of CE). However, as I have just noted, the issue
here is not so much the effectiveness of theories as the opportunity structures that frame their choice, and the consequences of this for their assumptions about the nature and consequences of power.
The most directly useful tool of analysis here is Robert Coxs (1996) distinction between problem-solving and critical theories, and the ways in
which these have been appropriated whether implicitly or explicitly in CE
constitute a major element of its theoretical opportunity structure. Cox distinguishes what he calls problem-solving theory from critical theory, where:
The general aim of problem solving is to make [social and power] relationships and institutions [into which they are organised] work smoothly by dealing effectively with particular sources of trouble. The strength of the
problem-solving approach lies in its ability to x limits or parameters to a
problem area and to reduce the statement of a particular problem to a limited
number of variables which are amenable to relatively close and precise examination. (88)

By contrast:
Critical theory, unlike problem-solving theory, does not take institutions and
social power relations for granted but calls them into question by concerning
itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of
changing. It is directed toward an appraisal of the very framework for action
which problem-solving theory accepts as its parameters. (8889)

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Partly inspired by this distinction, around 10 years ago I (Dale 2004) wrote
a brief commentary on what could be seen as some parameters of the theoretical opportunity structures of education policy studies an appropriate
comparator for CE in many ways. In addition to the Coxian distinction, I
pointed to three other sets of metatheoretical or pretheoretical assumptions made in the study of education policy, which are directly relevant
here. These were the degree of disciplinary parochialism (which in that case
was determined by the existence of the word education in the title of the
article or the journal in which it was published); the level of ethnocentrism
they contained; and the relationship between analysis and advocacy in the
texts. In the case of contemporary CE, we could say that disciplinary
parochialism has been replaced by something of a disciplinary smorgasbord,
drawing, sometimes rather promiscuously, on a variety of elements culled
from a range of approaches.
These issues emerge in somewhat different ways in what we might see
as the major substantive elements framing CEs current theoretical opportunity structures: the availability of large-scale international educational databases, on the one hand, and the nature and consequences of globalisation,
on the other, both of which, albeit in somewhat contrasting ways, contribute
strongly to the theoretical opportunity structures.
In terms of the second, ethnocentrism, especially in the form of methodological nationalsm, had to give way to developing understandings of the
relationships between globalisation and education, which is clearly an issue
that is absolutely central to CE. However, while a range of theories have
been advanced, the dominant approach in CE over the past two decades has
been the world-polity or world-culture theory advanced in particular by
John Meyer and Francisco Ramirez and colleagues. This approach has set
the agenda for CE and laid down a theoretical opportunity structure that has
become an orthodoxy that has until relatively recently been almost unchallenged. While I do not have time or space to go into the details of the
approach (but see Dale 2000), it is crucial for the current argument to try to
isolate the assumptions about power that underlie this dominant framework.
These are especially important since they have consequences not just for
what counts as CE, but also implications for the understanding of power.
The theoretical opportunity structure framed by World Culture Theory
has a number of key features with consequences for conception of power
within CE. First, it posits and assumes a preference among nation-state
actors for the principles of market economies and democratic polities, so
that:
Instead of describing and explaining, world culture scholars have been
increasingly involved in selectively identifying and advocating for the global
diffusion of particular education models [which] reect particular Western
and, especially, North American ideals, thus legitimizing dominant

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educational paradigms and compromising the possibilities for understanding

actual processes of global convergence in education. (Carney, Rappleye, and
Silova 2012, 368)

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Second, it has little or no conception of agency. Institutional theory rests

on an assumption of how conformity occurs and is by its nature antithetical
to the notion of agency (Fligstein and McAdam 2014, 28) and has no
theory of change.
Third, Fligstein and McAdam argue that:
[The world polity theorists] view of institutional action is that once a set of
rules and resources becomes institutionalised they become taken for granted,
so that [I]nstitutions take on a life of their own, and people are reduced to
automatons, who download scripts that tell them what to do. (179)

while:
their conception of actors is to remove them from mattering by making them
passive recipients of scripts from outside about what people like them
should or should not do. This substitutes a cultural kind of structuralism for a
more resource-based view of structure. (219)

Fourth, there is no recognition of any interests apart from a common

global interest that is contained within the world culture framework.
The signicance and consequences of recognising the nature and importance of its theoretical opportunity structures on the understanding of power
and its consequences for CE as an activity could not be made clearer.
Methodological opportunity structures
It has often been suggested that its methodology is what particularly distinguishes and denes CE as a eld of study, and this is reected in several of
the accounts of the historical development of the eld. This has created a
strong tradition of methodological discussion, much of which seems to be
devoted to denitively describing the eld of CE. It is particularly when we
come to consider CEs methodological opportunity structures, then, that we
encounter what might be called internal opportunity structures, for instance
in the path-dependent consequences of the central debates. However, even
here, we nd external factors at play. The most signicant of these may
be the nding/claim that CEs have signicantly differing national origins
and (associated) methodological opportunity structures, which themselves
become a topic for comparison. One good example of this is Christophe
Charles (2013) comparison of and explanation of the differences
between different countries (mainly France the assumed base of the
comparative endeavour Germany and the UK) conceptions of comparative
and historical sociology. He starts by pointing out that there is very little

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comparative work in French studies of social issues, and this, he suggests,

is largely due to:

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the local and regional focus of most history theses, the politicization of historical debates mainly on a national basis, and the assumed uniqueness of
France based on the Revolution, an exceptionalism that limits the possibility
of comparison with other countries. (68)

Such prejudices have been a decisive obstacle to comparison (69), especially, perhaps, as they may also be found in other countries (in the case of
the UK, its whig approach to history).
Alongside such different genealogies, we nd much more mundane, but
also much more pressing, inuences on methodological opportunity structures. These relate most importantly to the need for funding to carry out
studies in CE. It is possible to carry out very successful and valuable
library-based studies in CE, of which Charles own, and that of Schreiwer
in the same volume are notable examples, but such studies are not sufcient
in themselves to carry the whole weight of CE inquiry as the merest
glimpse at the contents of the elds journals quickly attests. The fact is that
almost any of CEs methodologies and methods carry major implications of
time and resources, generating considerable funding requirements, necessitating explicit and implicit trade-offs. At its most basic, in order to compare different countries it is useful to have rst-hand knowledge of them,
and to know them well enough to base academic comparative analyses of
them, it is highly desirable to be able to visit them, preferably for extended
periods of eldwork, which is very expensive. And, of course, similar cases
could be made for other forms of data collection and analysis in CE.
Thus, issues of nancial feasibility are central elements of CEs methodological opportunity structure, with at least three serious implications. One
of these is the likelihood of serious cost-benet trade-offs in designing
research. The second is even more signicant. It is that comparative
methodologies, like practically all education research methodologies/methods, have been subjected to considerable direct political control over the
past two decades at least. The extreme example of this was the US Department of Educations refusal to fund any research on the No Child Left
Behind programme that was not quantitatively based. Similar, if slightly less
extreme, examples can be seen in the very high emphasis placed on evidence-based research, where what counts as evidence is similarly closely
policed. At the very least, we may expect such patronclient relationships
(which is not putting the nature of much research funding too strongly) to
frequently generate explicit and implicit methodological trade-offs.
And, third, it is crucial to recognise that where it is possible to access
adequate funding, it rarely comes without a (methodological) price. Beyond
tight funding and political constraints on CEs methodological choices, we

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frequently nd conditions of access, to research sites, or databases, for

instance, made subject to conditions that have signicant methodological
implications. This can have signicant consequences, for instance, for what
is probably the most popular methodology in CE, the case study (not least
on the grounds of its strong suitability as a basis for PhD study, which is a
key means of securing CEs place in academia). Within case study
methodology, the choice of case(s) can frequently be crucial, yet frequently
this may turn out to be a Hobsons choice, with signicant methodological
implications.
Finally in this section, it is impossible to ignore the arrival at the centre
of the CE enterprise of PISA. Like other huge quantitative cross-national
databases that have long provided a major source of CE research, their
attraction seems to be based on their availability and potential for forms of
competitive comparison, rather than any strong theoretical rationales. And it
hardly needs pointing out that such data are very much taken by CE,
rather than made by it.
These examples are intended to be illustrative of the relevance of external, sometimes apparently extrinsic, constraints on CEs methodological
opportunity structures. In some ways this may be the most immediately
important of the opportunity structures we have discussed in this section,
because it is the most visible, the most deeply rooted and the closest to the
heart of the practices that compose CE.

Power in CE
By power in CE I am referring to the ways that it (power) has historically
been conceptualised in academic work in the area. My intention is not to
point to what might be seen as typical deployments of the concept, but to
focus as far as possible more broadly to the forms and assumptions about
the nature and operation of power within the eld. There is no shortage of
references to power in CE textbooks and articles but, with a few notable
exceptions, often the concept is somewhat ineffectively problematised. The
focus and contexts of references to power tend to refer to discussions about
power in Education, rather than to Comparative studies in other areas of
social science, where power may be differently problematised. Meanings
tend to be somewhat implicit and consequential, typically assuming Lukes
(1974) rst dimension of power,3 the ability to prevail in decision-making,
and based on forms of methodological nationalism and methodological statism, and it may be signicant in this regard that one of the commoner ways
that the term seems to be used is as a means of referring to a national state
as in Western powers (see Dale 2005).
However, there are clear signs that this situation may be changing. In
particular, there has been a retreat from the state-centred assumptions that

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tended to associate power with (government) policy as the key mode of

governing education, which seemed to prevail until the turn of the century,
and their replacement by such different transnational output-based forms of
governing as New Public Management and, especially, the turn to quantitatively based and transnationally created and supported competitive comparison between education systems. These are largely based on the
quantication of qualitative differences, typied and emblematised in the
PISA studies, which have extended the depth and reach of competitive comparison to a point where it can clearly be seen to be shaping national preferences and expectations.
A second major shift in conceptions of power has been to move away
from the conventional state-centred, top-down model of education policy
making to embrace much more of its operation in conditions that are often
referred to as the messiness of power as cultural, or as a function of
knowledge, where power is seen as productive rather than structural. One
problem that arises here, however, occurs when these different approaches
are seen as competing, zero-sum alternatives, rather than as at least mutually
compatible, as I argue below.
Given this, it becomes very useful to draw on wider power literatures,
as a means of distinguishing these quite different meanings and uses of
power in CE. These can be distinguished across two, interlinked, dimensions.
The rst dimension has been most effectively advanced by Ann Shola
Orloff (2012). She distinguished between two analytic approaches that are
based on what she refers to as power and politics, and discussed how
these have been deployed in social science. Her argument is that these two
approaches represent different responses to changing conditions of what
might most usefully be referred to generically as post-Fordism. What she
refers to as politics (as conceived in the political science literature) is
focused on structural issues of the state, broadly conceived. The alternative, power, is associated with the (broadly Foucauldian) cultural turn,
which tends to see power everywhere. We might see this reected in CE
in (albeit frequently tacit) discussions about whether the eld should concern itself with politics or with policy. Another way that this has been
represented is as different modalities of power sovereignty and biopower.
In particular, she points to the somewhat impoverished conceptions of politics adopted by those who followed the cultural turn, where too often politics is anything that reproduces, reects or resists existing distributions of
resource and power (8) and where power had no empirical referents.
Quoting Linda Zerilli, Orloff points out that the word political signies a
relation between things, not a substance in anything (10), and goes on to
emphasise that:

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while it is necessary to recognize the potential political character of all social

relations, [since] power is constitutive and productive of these and other relations, we can distinguish individual resistance or the everyday reproduction of
social structures from politics, which is public and collective. (11)

So, while the focus of this paper will tend in the direction of the structural, rather than the cultural, it is crucial to bear in mind that these are
not to be seen as mutually exclusive alternatives, in the sense of having to
pick sides, as often appears to be the case in social science, but rather as
not only mutually compatible but potentially mutually productive. These
arguments draw considerably on the work of Andrew Sayer (2004), who
explains the mutual compatibility of the two approaches through demonstrating how they can both be understood through the medium of a realist
approach. He proposes that:
[What we have been referring to as cultural approaches] in the form of ideas
such as performativity, governmentality and capillary power can all be theorized in a realist way [i.e., as mechanisms] [and this] avoids the kind of identity thinking which assumes that discourses and their effects correspond.
Discourses can be performative [which implies that they cause change],
though they can fail as well as succeed in producing intended effects. Power
as productive ts well with critical realist accounts of causal powers [for realists, a cause is whatever produces a change] concepts of governmentality
and capillary power can be seen as forms of dispersed power which operate
partly through processes of internalization and self-discipline by actors rather
than internal pressure. (17)

Power of CE
The potential power of CE lies fundamentally in providing different ways of
seeing the world, of going beyond and behind concrete examples of educational practice, with a view to indicating how they might be improved or
how they might be explained. These reect, reproduce and generate, respectively, two quite different forms and purposes of the potential value of CE,
on the basis of a distinction that has run right through this presentation,
which we might refer to here as the distinction between CE as a producer
of expertise and CE as a producer of explanation.
However, the nature and forms of power that CE is able to exercise are
themselves subject to opportunity structures, and in this case the crucial
opportunity structure framing the power of CE is essentially the market
for CE knowledge. We might refer to this as a valorisation opportunity
structure, which frames the ways that CE knowledge and understandings are
realised and deployed in the world. The evidence below suggests that this
opportunity structure comes down decisively on the side of the production
of expertise rather than of explanation.

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As with the other opportunity structures we have discussed, recognition

is mainly achieved through perceived policy relevance, continuing the
time-honoured commitment [of] CE to policy-oriented research relevant to
the world around it (King 1997, 90, quoted in Crossley 2000, 323), though
this might be seen to be regularly changing fashion in development policy
(McGrath 2001, 394) as part of the basis of shifting valorisation opportunity
structures.
The medium for this opportunity structure is constructions of expertise,
and markets for such expertise, which becomes a key part of the vocabulary
of CE.
Expertise has been seen as an attempt to produce symbiosis between
scientic and political authority, to be politically subservient, but epistemologically authoritative (Davies 2011, 346). The major attraction of expertise,
however, may be that, like quantication, it can be presented as an antidote
to partiality and this has a number of clear consequences for the forms it
may take, such as evidence-based policy. The potential signicance of the
use of expert groups becomes clearer when we consider how extensively they
are used, especially by the OECD and the European Commission. In terms
of the former, it is important to heed Sotiria Greks (2013) conclusion that
there now exists an expertocracy that specialises in expertise and the selling of undisputed, universal policy solutions have now drifted into one single
entity and function (695), and she goes on to suggest that the OECD has
become a site of coproduction of both knowledge and social order (Grek
2014). In the EU, according to Ase Gornitzka (2007), the:
DGEACs [Directorate-General for Education and Cultures] structure of committees and expert groups is a poignant [sic = powerful?] indication of the
networked administrative systems dealing with education and training as a
policy area. The DGEAC has a well developed committee structure that connects the European Commission to education policy actors and expertise
across Europe: in 2006, it organized 70 expert groups, ranking it eighth of all
DGs in terms of number of expert groups. (12)

Romuald Normand (2010) concludes his account of the role of expertise in

the construction of the European strategy in education by emphasising that:
the expertise which presents itself as neutral and universal, gives the impression that policy makers manage public action with method and rationality,
[while] expertise also helps to elaborate a common vision of public issues in
education so the Commission can act as an entrepreneur in the area of lifelong learning without risking any intrusion in the affairs of states. (415)

The consequences of these arguments for CE valorisation opportunity structure are that as experts, exponents of CE can be seen to be triply detached
from their academic roots, from their national origins and from accusations of partiality, a fairly thorough deracination.

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Having pointed to the salience of conceptions of expertise, it is important to consider the implications of this for social science in general, as well
as for CE. Some of these implications have been very well elaborated by
Bruno Theret (2005), who refers to:
the autonomy of knowledge from power as a condition of the truly democratic exercise of scholarly comparison which is essential to enable us to
take distance from the societies we grew up in [but] can be easily threatened
in multiple ways by political or administrative logic because it is very
difcult for researchers totally to free themselves from forms of state
thought, where we are thought by our own states. This state thought
occurs at an individual level, in the organization of research, where it takes
the form of academicism and is objectied in the research instruments
that shape the political form of the problems that science is called upon to
address, and the information available to do it. These forms of dependence
are experienced at several levels, such as the status of the researcher role,
means of access to empirical information, and forms of recognition of academic work. The interplay of all these things can lead researchers to convert themselves more or less voluntarily into experts, or at least make such a
change easier. (9192)

Theret concludes, The extent to which a researcher carrying out the role of
expert can still count him/herself as involved in the logic of the scientic
eld becomes a key issue for the scientic community (92, all translations
mine, RD).
Summary and conclusion
It may be helpful at this point to indicate briey the directions in which the
various opportunity structures I have discussed might direct the efforts and
effects of CE.
In terms of discursive opportunity structures, it matters considerably
which discourses are seen as dominant and most compelling for exponents
of CE in seeking to carry on with their trade. We might see here a clear distinction between educational and economic discourses.
The discussion of political opportunity structures suggests that CE is
under pressure to move in the direction of expertise, with an element of
political dependence and possibly also accountability.
Theoretical opportunity structures might be seen to frame CE as essentially problem solving, and addressing external audiences rather than the
development of the eld itself.
And as we saw, methodological opportunity structures seem to be moving towards implementing a patronclient relationship, which seems to be
reinforced by a valorisation opportunity structure that places an emphasis
on the need to provide policy-relevant expertise.

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What role for CE?

To conclude, I will attempt very briey to specify more clearly the kinds of
possibilities afforded CE by its various opportunity structures. I will do this
by employing Michael Burawoys (2004) classication of forms of what he
calls sociological labour, which I think provides a relevant and perhaps
revealing framework for estimating where CE might nd itself, and how
that corresponds to how it would like to nd itself. Burawoy plots forms of
sociological labour across a 22 table, where one axis is made up of sociological knowledge classied as instrumental or reexive and the other
of audiences for the work of sociologists academic and extra-academic.
He draws four ideal types from the matrix: Professional Sociology, formed
by instrumental knowledge and an academic audience, which provides
legitimacy, expertise, distinctive problem denitions, relevant bodies of
knowledge, and techniques for analyzing data (1609); Policy Sociology,
which combines instrumental knowledge with an extra-academic audience,
and focuses on solutions to specic problems dened by clients (1608);
Critical Sociology, formed on the basis of reexive knowledge and an academic audience, which questions the moral foundations of existing professional sociology (1609); and, nally, Public Sociology, based on reexive
knowledge and an extra-academic audience, which engages publics beyond
the academy in dialogue about matters of political and moral concern
(1607).
It is crucial to note Burawoys insistence that these four types are not
mutually exclusive, and can be expected to combine in various ways.
Nevertheless, while these are very much capsule denitions, and Burawoy
has elaborated them in much more complex ways, my hope is that they will
provide a set of alternatives that is sufciently recognisable to enable exponents of CE to use them as a basis for judgment of the value of the sociological approach I have adopted, even if/as it may point to gaps between
the elds aspirations and the constraints.
But, nally, the most important conclusion to be drawn about the relationship between CE and power in this context is the crucial need, however
inadequate the attempt made here, to establish the point that not seeking to
discover the causes of things (which I continue to believe is within the
capacity of CE and should be a central part of its practice) entails ignoring
the nature of the power that keeps them in place. There is, of course, no
guarantee that discovering such explanations will change the world, but it
may possibly enable more of the reality of the world, and especially of
what sustains it in its present forms, to be revealed.
Acknowledgements
Presidential Address at the British Association for International and Comparative
Education Conference, Bath, September 9, 2014.

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Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes
1. There are afnities here with Maria Manzons (2011) outstanding analysis of
CE as a eld constructed not purely out of an inner logic based on cognitive
criteria, but also [by] power relations (2) and, in a rather different way, with
Michelle Schweisfurths (2014) entertaining and insightful quasi-anthropological account of CEs tribes.
2. I am quite aware that there are several different strands of CE, but identifying
them, and discussing their differences, interesting and important as it would be,
is not central to the purpose of this paper, which is to identify some of the
wider elements framing the eld as a whole. Differences between tendencies
within CE are taken as different interpretations of sets of external opportunity
structures that are broadly common to all of them. However, it will be useful in
this context to briey indicate the differences between what I will refer to as
external opportunity structures, which frame the eld as a whole, and internal path dependencies, which help explain the formation and continuities and
discontinuities of the ways that CE has responded to the external opportunity
structures. Perhaps the simplest way of doing this is to suggest that opportunity
structures frame all possibilities for the eld, but they do not determine the outcomes of the activities taking place within the discipline in (typically tacit)
response to them. Those responses themselves develop along different lines
ontologically, epistemologically, theoretically, methodologically and so on
and these different sets of responses not only differentiate themselves from each
other, but separate themselves into possibly quite distinct schools, or approaches. These schools and approaches themselves become sedimented in
particular ways, in a process that can be seen as laying down distinct paths
for others to follow. Such a process is at the heart of the theoretical approach
known as path dependency, whose central argument is that initial sets of decisions and conditions affect and may set limits to subsequent decisions and
occurrences, or that the ways that things have previously been organised and
imagined inuence the ways they are organised now. So, to put it at its simplest, the bottom line of this discussion is that opportunity structures constitute
the external framing of CE, while the internal responses to these framings
themselves may be signicantly path dependent. And it is in the interplays
between the two that the eld develops, though it is crucial to note that the
external framings, opportunity structures of academic elds, are not constant or
consistent, but subject to varying degrees and directions of external pressure.
3. Lukes (1974) distinguishes three dimensions of power. In the rst, the person with
the power in a situation is the person who prevails in the decision-making process.
In the second dimension, shaping the agenda around which decisions are to be
made is an important source of power. The third dimension applies to the power of
shaping the preferences of those involved in political choices, for instance.

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