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Public administration as an aspect of governmental activity has existed as long as political systems have been functioning and trying to achieve program objectives set by the political decision-makers. Public administration as a field of systematic study is much more recent. Advisers to rulers and commentators on the workings of government have recorded their observations from time to time in sources as varied as Kautilya's Arthasastra in ancient India, the Bible, Aristotle's Politics, and Machiavelli's The Prince, but it was not until the eighteenth century that cameralism, concerned with the systematic management of governmental affairs, became a specialty of German scholars in Western Europe. In the United States, such a development did not take place until the latter part of the nineteenth century, with the publication in 1887 of Woodrow Wilson's famous essay, “The Study of Administration,” generally considered the starting point. Since that time, public administration has become a well-recognized area of specialized interest, either as a subfield of political science or as an academic discipline in its own right.

It is appropriate to begin with some observations on the development of Public Administration, for the development of Comparative Public Administration and its present problems are most clearly viewed in historical perspective: The logical problems are related to a chronological development.

A number of theoretical paradigms provide a networking space for the trio and complementary fields of comparative, international, and development educational (CIDE) research. Critics periodically attribute the field's lack of a sound theoretical base or commitment to one area of scientific research or another as a primary weakness in the field.¹ Espoused theoretical paradigms often provide the knowledge debate arena in which academic fields interact and build together. In an alternative perspective from this criticism, we argue that the strength of the CIDE field resides in its ability to combine multiple theoretical perspectives that offer researchers a variety of potentially fruitful metatheoretical analyses. Thus, we do not view this lack of theoretical specification as a weakness; it is the very fabric that enables CIDE educationists to study and represent increasingly complex global and local education systems.

Starting from Gino Arias’s dictum on the uselessness of international trade theory for fascism, this contribution aims to demonstrate two main points. First, the free trade attitude displayed by fascism immediately before and after the “March on Rome” clashed with its nationalist origins. The nationalist movement had supported a strong protectionist policy starting from a rejection of the main principles of marginalist theory. This explains why some issues raised by Pareto and Barone which could have been used as arguments in favor of protectionism were neglected. In turn, this impasse played a major role in the rejection of Mihail Manoilescu’s theory in the thirties. The second point concerns the possibility of some – at least relatively – free theoretical debate on international trade theory and policy. When the regime set itself a clear objective, like the reduction of trade to begin with, and then autarky, the scope for free discussion narrowed to the point of eventually closing. In this context, refusing to support the regime’s choices in economic policy meant resigning oneself to becoming an outcast. A situation offering one more tessera in the complex mosaic of relations between science and politics in authoritarian regimes.

This chapter introduces readers to the Annual Review of Comparative and International Education and approaches to reviewing the field broadly, by examining the ways that scholars and professionals in the field reflect on comparative and international education (CIE). It begins with a synthesis of the reviews and reflective pieces published since the mid-20th century, and then critiques the field for being neither consistently nor systematically reflective. The chapter then summarizes several of the benefits of consistent and systematic reflection through a process of annual review. The chapter concludes with an overview and synthesis of each of the sections, which provide the structure of the Annual Review, and poses questions that drive systematic reflection through each section of the volume and the field as a whole.

Comparative Education is conceptually difficult to define. It has been described as having an unusually wide terrain. It suffers from a host of identity crises, and this chapter enumerates and explains 10: deciding whether Comparative Education is a discipline, a field or a method, what does ‘comparison’ in Comparative Education denote?, the minuscule place of the comparative method in Comparative Education, the dominance of single unit studies, the dearth of taxonomies, the problem that globalization makes Comparative Education seems like a field past its shelf-life, the question as to whether Comparative Education should graduate to International Education, the fact that it can show very little evidence of achieving the lofty goals it purports to pursue, the many pitfalls in practicing Comparative Education and the lack of autochthonous Comparative Education theory. The chapter concludes by indicating the potential from other comparative sciences, in order to address this problem.

The contrast of multilevel and comparative research may seem counterintuitive at first. After all, one might argue that comparative research on organizations by necessity spans several levels of analysis (Rokkan, 1966). Yet, multilevel and comparative research on organizations present rather distinct traditions in organization studies, each with its own epistemological assumptions and associated methods. Accordingly, an approach that aims to incorporate both multilevel and comparative ideas needs to start with taking inventory of these prior literatures to situate itself. In the following, we thus turn to the literatures on multilevel and comparative research as different traditions with surprisingly little overlap.

This discussion essay explores the theory–practice nexus in comparative and international education (CIE) from the author’s role as a third space professional and a budding academic-practitioner (Wilson, 1994) providing academic support to offshore international students at a New Zealand university. It engages with two debates related to the research–practice conundrum in CIE: The first debate relates to the boundaries between CIE and raise questions about the identities of theorists and practitioners in CIE. The author argues that regardless of their identities, implicit theories about why things happened and how things will change in the future are often held by practitioners and theorists alike. The second debate relates to the knowledge hierarchy in CIE and raise questions about who decides the value and utility of the kinds of knowledge produced. Drawing on the politics of knowledge production, the author highlights that it may be the implicit theories held by the theorists or practitioners that ultimately determine the knowledge they saw as useful and valuable.

There has been a resurgence of interest in comparative and international research on teacher education that has been driven, in large part, by the emergence over the past two decades of comprehensive international studies of student achievement supported by (1) the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and (2) the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). Widely published country rankings that set benchmarks for student achievement suggest the importance of understanding more fully what specific characteristics set highly ranked countries apart, especially quality of teaching and teacher education.

Recent literature on comparative and international teacher education is reviewed, focusing on special issues of Prospects (Vol. 42, March 2012, “Internationalization of Teacher Education”), sponsored by the UNESCO International Bureau of Education (IBE) in Geneva, Switzerland, and the International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education (Vol. 11, August 2013, “International Perspectives on Mathematics and Science Teacher Education for the Future”), sponsored by the National Science Council of Taiwan.

A conceptual framework for describing the complexity of teacher education in comparative and international context is presented, adapting an approach used for understanding educational change and reform in emerging democracies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of theoretical perspectives that have been applied to teacher education in comparative and international education with recommendations for new directions that might inform scholarly understanding as well as practice.

Perhaps one of the most important points Shalev makes is that Przeworski and Tuene's (1970) admonition to comparative political analysts to replace the proper names of cases with concepts and variables, or to pursue what Ragin (1987) dubs variable-oriented research, has gone too far. In Shalev's view, cases (typically nation states for the purposes of this discussion) have become all but invisible. This is particularly troublesome in Shalev's mind because, at least as far as comparative analysis of developed democratic capitalist systems is concerned (and we can say the same for political research on Latin America, Africa, or Asia), the cases are few enough to know quite well and bring to the forefront of sophisticated analysis.¹ In addition, Shalev makes the distinct point that the theories we seek to test in comparative political research entail complex and often non-linear causal sequences: causes of particular political outcomes are commonly contingent on the presence of other forces, or conjunctural with temporally and spatially bound forces and contexts. In fact, in comparative theory, it is fair to argue (as Shalev does) that causal explanations of important political outcomes are often put forward in terms of complex configurations of multiple factors. Moreover, in theory and in practice, we are often confronted with the prospect of multiple configurative paths of causation of the same outcome. In the end, Shalev believes that the linear and additive logic of general MR analysis, as well as the more sophisticated versions with non-linear specifications and interaction terms, cannot adequately test our complex theories.