Building upon critical education policy studies of crisis, disaster, and reform, this essay develops a theory of "recovery" that further elaborates the nature and operation of "crisis politics" in neoliberal education reform. Recovery is an integral process in capital accumulation, exploiting material, and subjective…

This paper uses Margaret Archer's morphogenetic approach to analyze the emergence of civil society within global educational governance. The purpose is to understand the intersection of historical structures with global actors and spaces that have accompanied the globalization of education. Based on findings from a study on the impact in…

Since the 1980s, state schools in England have been required to ensure transparency and accountability through the use of indicators and templates derived from the private sector and, more recently, globally circulating discourses of "good governance" (an appeal to professional standards, technical expertise, and performance evaluation…

In recent years, education and family policy in the UK has sought to incorporate the views of children and young people through an active participation agenda, in the fulfilment of children's rights under the obligations of the UN Convention for the Rights of the Child. Drawing on empirical evidence, this paper suggests that this aspiration…

The recent emergence of "new" venture philanthropists, social entrepreneurs and neoliberal policy advocates and the new ways in which they configure and perform their political agendas have brought important changes in the way in which education policy is enacted. This study takes some of the ideas sketched in previous work further and…

In this article, the focus is on educational governing in the making. Drawing on conceptual underpinnings of socio-technical approaches, this implies an interest both on the way in which a sound knowledge base for policy measures is created, as on the distribution of that knowledge through publically available instruments. Governing by evidence…

The Austrian "school autonomy policy", which allowed schools to develop specific "curricular profiles", is taken as an example for discussing processes and effects of school decentralization policies. Data from school case studies (based on qualitative interviews and document analysis) are used to analyse and interpret the…

This paper aims to contribute to the debate on neoliberal governmentality in higher education by focusing its analysis on the constitution of conflictual subjectivities. Starting from the hypothesis that resistance is constitutive to any power relation and coextensive with it, the paper problematizes the production of conflictual subjectivities in…

This paper focuses on the dual dependencies apparent at the intersection of the media society and the audit society by empirically exploring and discussing the relationship between Swedish local newspaper coverage and school inspection activities. The research questions pertain to the Inspectorate's media strategy, how inspection is…

In 2009, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) set a target to lift Australia's Year 12 or equivalent attainment rate from 83.5 to 90% by 2015. In the context of global financial uncertainty, the target was rationalised as a means for boosting national productivity and developing human capital to help Australia compete in the global…

This paper reflects on the key actors in education policy making in Zimbabwe. It looks at the contextual complexities that characterized policy-making in this country to make sense of the contestations that the state had to confront and accommodate. The policy network approach is employed as an analytical framework to clarify how, in particular…

This review essay discusses the history, evolution and development of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and traces the growing impact of its education work. The essay is in four main sections. The first discusses Carrol and Kellow's "The OECD: A Study of Organizational Adaptation" (Edward Elgar) and…

This article examines education accountability as a mechanism of coercive neoliberal urban governance in the USA. Drawing on Gramscian theory of the "integral state" as the dialectical synthesis of coercion, consent, and resistance, the author argues that as the crisis gives the state less room to win consent, it intensifies coercion as…

Through a sociological analysis of the knowledge and actors that have become central to international assessments, the paper focuses on the processes that influence the production of shared narratives and agendas, adopting the position that their existence is not organic, but rather the product of undertakings that often fabricate and manage,…

This study examines one of the most notable manifestations of Japanese education's incorporation into the global education restructuring movement: the 2007 reintroduction of national academic achievement testing ("zenkoku gakuryoku gakushuu joukyou chousa"). In so doing, I aim to untangle the complex intermingling of national and…