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This introductory chapter introduces standards and standardisation as concepts of outmost relevance to current educational practice and policy across the world, and frames them historically, empirically, as well as theoretically. Furthermore, it gives an overview of how the book is structured and how it can be seen to contribute to the wider field of research in education. The chapter starts by introducing the concepts before it provides the reader with a background description of the broad discursive landscape of policy developments, as painted by educational policy research. Subsequently it describes how standards and standardisation have been theorised within educational research, and concludes with a presentation of the different contributions.

Narratives about educational phenomena and identities that circulate in society have the power to frame and make sense of specific educational experiences as well as general educational ideas. Some of these narratives also underwrite assumptions for policymaking and thus produce meaning, structure and alignment in an otherwise uncertain and complex field of governing. Narrative control refers to the way a specific selection of narratives and narrative plots legitimise, necessitate and normalise a specific way to understand educational purposes, processes and identities. The analyses in this chapter illuminate processes of narrative control in core documents of the latest Norwegian educational reform. Through the narrative construction of a specific educational trajectory, pupil identity and categories of deviance representing positions at risk, the documents' narrative control generates a specific standard regulating what a ‘normal pupil’ is.

To compare France and Germany, we will take a new approach to the discussion on lifestyles and social stratification. Instead of anchoring our definition of social stratification in predefined concepts, such as social class and status, we will empirically explore the latent patterns of social stratification and lifestyles. Our strategy allows us to investigate whether social stratification is best measured by one, two, or more dimensions; and then to map the associated patterns of lifestyles onto this/these dimension(s).

As indicators of social stratification, we use education, household income, and occupational status; and to measure lifestyles, we use data from two surveys on lifestyles and cultural consumption (Media og kulturforbruksundersøkelsen 2004, Norway; and module Pratiques culturelles et sportives, Enquête Permanente sur les Conditions de Vie 2003, France). We limit our analysis to occupationally active respondents, 20–64 years of age.

We would expect our findings to differ somewhat between the two countries; but given that social stratification is a pervasive element of all modern societies, we would also expect to find common empirical patterns that may be of relevance to the way we conceptualize lifestyles and social stratification.

The three papers in this section include theoretical and conceptual discussions, such as the definition of social class, how social mechanisms can be elaborated and tested, and a discussion on occupational segregation by cognitive ability.

In their authoritative literature review, Breen and Jonsson (2005) claim that ‘one of the most significant trends in the study of inequalities in educational attainment in the past decade has been the resurgence of rational-choice models focusing on educational decision making’. The starting point of the present contribution is that these models have largely ignored the explanatory relevance of social interactions. To remedy this shortcoming, this paper introduces a micro-founded formal model of the macro-level structure of educational inequality, which frames educational choices as the result of both subjective ability/benefit evaluations and peer-group pressures. As acknowledged by Durlauf (2002, 2006) and Akerlof (1997), however, while the social psychology and ethnographic literature provides abundant empirical evidence of the explanatory relevance of social interactions, statistical evidence on their causal effect is still flawed by identification and selection bias problems. To assess the relative explanatory contribution of the micro-level and network-based mechanisms hypothesised, the paper opts for agent-based computational simulations. In particular, the technique is used to deduce the macro-level consequences of each mechanism (sequentially introduced) and to test these consequences against French aggregate individual-level survey data. The paper's main result is that ability and subjective perceptions of education benefits, no matter how intensely differentiated across agent groups, are not sufficient on their own to generate the actual stratification of educational choices across educational backgrounds existing in France at the beginning of the twenty-first century. By computational counterfactual manipulations, the paper proves that network-based interdependencies among educational choices are instead necessary, and that they contribute, over and above the differentiation of ability and of benefit perceptions, to the genesis of educational stratification by amplifying the segregation of the educational choices that agents make on the basis of purely private ability/benefit calculations.

Economic inequality in contemporary advanced societies is strongly tied to the variation in wages across occupations. We examine the extent to which this variation is captured by social class and occupational prestige and ask how the associations between class, prestige, and wages can be explained. On the basis of data from 11 countries in the European Social Survey (ESS) 2004, we find (a) that class and prestige account for a very large proportion of the occupational variation in wages; (b) that the tight links between class, prestige, and wages are strongly associated with the skill requirements of jobs but only weakly tied to other positional traits, including authority, autonomy, and scarcity; and (c) that these findings are highly similar in all countries examined. We conclude that the rank order of positions in the labor market is a social constant driven by efficiency requirements of work organizations rather than by the exercise of power. This iron law of labor market inequality clearly contradicts major class theoretical models, including Wright's and Goldthorpe's. In addition to empirically refuting contemporary class theory, we offer a number of more conceptual arguments to the same effect. At a macro level, however, power relations arguably affect the rate of economic inequality by determining the reward distance between positions in the constant rank order, as indicated by the large cross-national variation in wage dispersion.

A number of studies show that women are underrepresented in positions of power and authority in the labour markets of Western societies. Comparative studies within this field are few, and based on data from the 1980s, showing larger gender differences in workplace authority in the Scandinavian countries than in English-speaking countries (especially the U.S.). In this paper we use data from the International Social Survey Programme 1997 to describe and compare the gender gap in managerial positions within the labour markets in the U.S. and Norway. We include a perspective on differences in managerial and national cultures in order to interpret our findings. The American society has been characterized as individualistic and contract-based with a strong market orientation and work ethics. Compared with this, the Norwegian culture is less individualistic and less market oriented, and more inclined to emphasize a norm about a balanced life between work, family and leisure. These cultural differences may help us understand why the gender policy in these countries historically have had divergent foci: The Americans have implemented a powerful policy of equal opportunities within the labour market, regarding family issues as private matters. The Norwegians have a long-term political goal of gender equality in all areas of the society, comprising work-family linkages with a strong emphasis on arrangements allowing family members (in particular women) to combine work and family life. However, it seems fair to say that Norway has been less successful in implementing a powerful policy of equal opportunities within the labour market, in particular within the private sector. The paper discusses some possible implications of the differences between the U.S. and Norway, with regard to women’s access to managerial power positions.