Stephen Ball's work has deservedly received a good deal of attention. In this article, I detail a number of tasks in which the critical sociologist of education--as a "public intellectual"--should engage. I then place Ball's work within these tasks and evaluate his contributions to them. In the process, I show that one of the…

This paper focuses on Stephen Ball's article, "The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity", since it is here that he analyses the issue of how neoliberal education policies shape teacher identities that I also wish to explore. I begin by providing a summary of the 2003 piece, noting how it locates teachers and their…

This article aims at showcasing the main contributions of Stephen J. Ball to educational research in Brazil, particularly to the study of educational and curriculum policies. We also highlight some of the limitations in the incorporation of Ball's ideas in Brazil as well as some of the challenges that these author's ideas pose to…

This paper traces developments across Stephen J. Ball's policy sociology in education "oeuvre" and considers their implications for doing research on education policy today. It begins with an account of his policy sociology trilogy from the 1990s, which outlined his conception of the policy cycle consisting of the contexts of…

The process of "knowledge adoption" is defined as the means through which policy-makers digest, accept then "take on board" research findings. It is argued in Brown, however, that current models designed to explain knowledge adoption activity fail to fully account for the complexities that affect its operation. Within this paper, existing…

For many years there has been a sharp division between project-based learning, and problem-based learning, with the former adopting a more technical rationalist approach while the latter adopts a more Socratic or dialogic approach. This article argues that current notions of project-based learning are too narrow and that combining the two…

As China has appeared only recently as an important knowledge producer with growing global economic significance, little is known internationally about how these processes develop and are managed within China. The rapidly expanding Chinese higher education system is playing an increasingly important role in China's knowledge economy and therefore…

The imperative of transforming education continues to permeate the discourse of UK education reform. Although the Coalition government's publications herald a "new school system", they reveal the same neo-liberal thinking as their New Labour predecessors. The context of the national budget deficit is now being brought to bear to promote greater…

This article argues that creativity has the greatest potential to flourish if a learning environment is embedded within a community that emphasises a deep sense of place. Yet in a globalised world, rootedness is often regarded as antithetical to creativity. But far from representing dead artefacts that are anti-modern and non-economic, culture and…

Burton Clark's 1998 monograph, "Creating Entrepreneurial Universities: Organizational Pathways of Transformation," has become seminal in the literature on entrepreneurialism in universities. In this paper I re-examine the validity of Clark's analysis through an interview study of one of his original entrepreneurial universities, namely Warwick…

This article serves as context for the other papers in this special issue, all of which deal with developments in UK secondary education since c.1980. The paper comprises a review of selected impulses and imperatives that saw the substantial legacy of medieval and humanist schooling in Britain re-shaped, during the period c.1830-c.1980, into the…

This paper examines the Coalition Government's plans for vocational education and training for 14- to 19-year-olds in England. It argues that new types of educational institutions will enable the emergence of new forms of segmentation in which the vocational track is likely to become split into 'technical education' and lower level 'practical…

The training of teachers in upper secondary education varies considerably dependent on whether training is undertaken as a secondary school teacher or as a teacher within the Further Education (FE) system. Indeed, until the late 1990s, the training of teachers in FE had been the focus of little regulation by Government. Differences also occur…

This article reviews recent policies for 14-19 learning in Wales and Scotland, and discusses the extent to which these policies have diverged from England following parliamentary devolution in 1999. It distinguishes different types of divergence and suggests that many policy differences have not been about major issues of educational philosophy or…

This article examines current debates surrounding British higher education funding from a political economy perspective, drawing on "positive" and "institutionalist" political economy. Adopting the lens of political economy enables a critical assessment of the use of terms drawn from economics by many higher education decision-makers. Current…