Institutional sequences, pedagogical reach, and comparative educational systems

Abstract

This chapter proposes a reconceptualization of educational formalization. By formalization I broadly mean when school attendance ceases to be voluntary, and state authority is elevated over local controls. Although these twin processes tend to parallel each other, there is sufficient variation that while both conditions may obtain, countries can be located on a distribution measuring centralized to decentralized control over educational dimensions (see e.g., Baker & Letendre, 2005, p. 139). Very different social origins may indeed matter as the primary source of subsequent centralized or decentralized controls, and yet countries may adopt broadly similar forms of national authority in spite of very different social origins. The former takes the more historicist strategy, concentrating on national differences that elaborate into different organizational outcomes (see especially Vaughan & Archer, 1971; Archer, 1979). The latter argues that transnational, global forces exert defining influences on countries, producing educational patterns that are visible at the global level and are independent of national differences (see especially Boli, Ramirez, & Meyer, 1985; Ramirez & Boli, 1987; Astiz, Wiseman, & Baker, 2002; Werum & Baker, 2004). Nonetheless, there is no straightforward causality that links social origins to formalization, for it is clear that each strategy needs and incorporates elements of the other. At minimum, the characterization of an educational system as centralized or decentralized remains conceptually risky. This chapter suggests an alternative conceptualization that may lighten this conceptual risk, and bridge the distance between the historicist and institutional approaches to comparative educational systems.

Citation

Richardson, J.G. (2006), "Institutional sequences, pedagogical reach, and comparative educational systems", Baker, D.P. and Wiseman, A.W. (Ed.) The Impact of Comparative Education Research on Institutional Theory (International Perspectives on Education and Society, Vol. 7), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 27-48. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1479-3679(06)07002-2