ERIC Number: EJ1050355
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2015
Pages: 24
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1476-7724
EISSN: N/A
Provincialising the World Culture Theory Debate: Critical Insights from a Margin
Takayama, Keita
Globalisation, Societies and Education, v13 n1 p34-57 2015
Neo-institutionalist theory of global "isomorphism", or so-called World Culture Theory (WCT), has been much debated in comparative education. One notable feature of the debate is that the vast majority of its participants belong to a handful of closely knit comparative education communities. Ironically enough then, a debate that fundamentally concerns the globalisation of education has hardly been "globalised", with virtually no comparative scholars participating from "other" comparative education societies. Clearly, there is a need to critically engage with WCT by explicitly drawing on "other" intellectual traditions of comparative educations. To this aim, I first discuss the critical methodological insights and underlying epistemic standpoint of Japanese comparative education scholars. I then employ their arguments as a starting point for my subsequent post-colonial critique of WCT and the WCT debate. Overall, this study illuminates the hitherto unacknowledged "epistemic ignorance" of the on-going WCT debate in the English-language, "paradigmatic" comparative education realm and suggests a way to move beyond this provinciality.
Descriptors: Comparative Education, Global Approach, Cultural Context, Social Theories, Politics of Education, Epistemology, Foreign Countries, Scholarship, Ideology, National Organizations
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Japan
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A