Impressive strands of research have shown the emergent reality of increasing world-level interconnection in almost every field of social action. As a consequence, theories and models have been developed which are aimed at conceptualising this new reality along the lines of an ‘institutionalised’ World Culture. This offers a new understanding of the worldwide diffusion of specifically modern – i.e. mainly Western – rules, ideologies and organisational patterns, and of attendant harmonisation and standardisation of fields of social action. World Culture theories have not gone unchallenged. Rather, cross-cultural studies have revealed much more complex processes of regional fragmentation and (re-)diversification; of the refraction, appropriation, and hybridisation, through distinct socio-cultural conditioning, of world-level models and ideas; and of the ongoing effectiveness both of structural path-dependencies and of specifically cultural aspects such as collective memories, social meanings, and religious (or ideological) belief systems. Comparative research has thus highlighted an intricate simultaneity of contrary currents: of the increasing world-level interconnection of communication and exchange relations on the one hand, and, on the other, the persistence of context-specific interpretations, translations, and deviation-generating re-contextualisations of world-level forces and challenges. This research provides the theoretical problematique that animates this volume. The chapters explore the conceptual tools and explanatory power of theories and models which do not just oppose or reject World Culture theory, but are instead suited to complementing and differentiating it. The volume offers an enlightening conceptualisation of the intricate interaction of global processes with local agency, and of world-level forces with the self-evolutionary potentials inherent in specific contexts, socio-cultural structures, and distinctive meanings constellations. This book was originally published as a special issue of Comparative Education.

The new comparative research in this volume explores the global flow of competence-based education, curricular policy, and frameworks for instructional practice. Taking critical perspectives, the chapters trace the pathways through which educators and policy actors adopted and reshaped competence-based education as promoted by the OECD, the World Bank, and the European Union. The authors ask: What purposes do competence-based educational reforms serve? How are competence-based models internationally deployed and locally modified? What happens as competence-based reforms get re-contextualized and contested in particular cultural, social, and political contexts? In their nuanced examination of these global flows, the authors theorize how competence-based reform strategies variously produce hybridity, silent borrowing, “loud borrowing,” and new social imaginaries. Although entangled with other “hot topics” in educational research —skills and dispositions for citizenship and employment; higher-order and critical thinking; and socio-emotional learning—competence itself has multiple, fluid meanings. The authors dissect this polysemy while documenting the pivotal role of key actors in the development, design, and deployment of reforms in diverse international contexts. Contextualizing Global Flows of Competency-Based Education will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of comparative education, educational research, curriculum studies, sociology, and education leadership and policy.This book was originally published as a special issue of Comparative Education.

This edited volume reflects on how the “transnational” features in education as well as policies and practices are conceived of as mobile and connected beyond the local. Like “globalization,” the “transnational” is much more than a static reality of the modern world; it has become a mode of observation and self-reflection that informs education research, history, and policy in many world regions. This book examines the sociocultural project that the “transnational turn” evident in historical scholarship of the last few decades represents, and how a “transnational history” shapes how historians construct their objects of study. It does so from a multinational perspective, yet with a view of the different layers of historical meanings associated with the concept of the transnational.

This book provides an unconventional account of post-1989 education reform in Romania. By drawing on policy documentation, interviews with key players, qualitative data from everyday school contexts, and extensive textbook analysis, this groundbreaking study explores change within the Romanian education system as a process that institutionalises world culture through symbolic mediation of the concept ‘Europe’. The book argues that the education system’s structural and organisational evolution through time is decoupled from its self-depiction by ultimately serving a nation-building agenda. It does so despite notable changes in the discourse reflecting increasingly transnational definitions of the mission of the school in the post-1989 era. The book also suggests that the notions of ‘nation’ and ‘citizen’ institutionalised by the school are gradually being redefined as cosmopolitan, matching post-war patterns of post-national affiliations on a worldwide level.

Digital methodologies, new forms of data visualization and computer-based learning and assessment are creating new challenges as well as opportunities for scholars in educational research. The World Yearbook of Education 2019 explores this highly relevant topic, opening a new discussion about the various conceptual and methodological challenges and opportunities in contemporary educational research. This volume explores contemporary methods of inquiry, with chapters organized around four topics of enduring interest in this field: impacts, patterns, relations and contexts. The World Yearbook of Education 2019 comprises contributions from internationally renowned scholars exploring novel concepts and methodologies in grappling with contemporary empirical phenomena in educational research. Vital questions such as how we understand the technological developments that are creating new possibilities for and demands on education, and how we make sense of complex cases that cut across multiple nations, are discussed. This newest addition to the prestigious World Yearbook of Education series provides a fascinating read for scholars in the fields of education policy and comparative education. It is not only a useful resource for educational researchers and policy makers examining new trends and emerging issues, but would be of interest to graduate students exploring innovative methodologies, particularly in the study of education and education policy.

Explores how China's divorce courts have generally done less to protect abused women than to empower and enable their abusers.

This book examines contemporary educational research and its governance, addressing key questions via a multidisciplinary theoretical framework of comparative institutional analysis with original data and applying multiple methods. The authors explore and explain important changes in the governance of educational research and the contents of scholarship in education and related disciplines across Europe since the 1990s. This volume synthesizes findings from a multi-year comparative research project, including in-depth empirical case studies of three distinct educational research cultures evolving in Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom. The authors reconstruct and compare changing conceptualizations of educational research, embedded in increasingly internationalized contexts of research, and examine shifts in its governance, including patterns of funding, publication, and evaluation. They examine the producers of European educational research and the distinct role of the European Union in constructing a European Educational Research Area, in establishing cross-border networks, and in (re)shaping educational research agendas. Through innovative empirical analysis of programs of research on various levels and education researchers’ collaborations in scientific networks, they provide insights into (supra)national dynamics in education-related scholarship. Theory-guided content analysis of research projects funded by leading national funding agencies and by the most highly developed supranational research funding instrument – the EU Framework Programme – enables the authors to embed findings on Germany, the United Kingdom, and Norway in a broader European perspective.

This book proposes and unpacks the construct 'Criticism against Northern Hegemony in the scholarly field of Comparative and International Education' as bringing together a number of related strands in the field and as showing a promising future trajectory for the evolution of the field, namely the affirmation of the Global South. This construct captures a significant amount of what leading scholars in the field of Comparative and International Education are currently engaged with. It also expresses a view of both the current epoch of education as well as of the societal contextual imperatives shaping education. Criticism against Northern Hegemony in the field comes to the fore in a number of related strands in the current discourse in the field. This scholarly book originates from the Research Unit of Human Rights Education in Diversity at North-West University, South Africa, where the author is affiliated. The book is grounded in the Creed for Human Rights. From this perspective, the book advocates for a new phase in the historical development of the field, with a focus on advancing the affirmation of the Global South as a central moral foundation. The author envisions that this shift will represent a significant advancement in Comparative and International Education, propelling it to an unprecedented stage of value and importance.

Multinational companies transfer managerial practices such as quality management globally. Studies from different perspectives have examined cultural, institutional, and organizational challenges in practice transfer, however, little is known about the micro-processes of intercultural transfer, especially in complex cultural settings as Brazil. Integrating the recontextualization perspective and Scandinavian institutionalist transfer-as-translation approach, this book explores micro-processes of transfer from German MNC to Brazilian subsidiaries from a multiple cultures perspective. Findings show the complementary nature of micro-processes of translation and recontextualization, embedding them into a process model of four stages: Preparation, translation, recontextualization, and institutionalization. Intercultural transfer can be considered an iterative and multi-level process in which practices diffuse from individuals, to teams, to the organization. The book contributes to international management by cross-fertilizing the two approaches, by highlighting cultural and institutional particularities of the Brazilian context using a culturally sensitive methodology, and by showing the transformative power of managerial practices on organizations and ecosystems.

"The categories commonly mobilized to think about education have long been associated with the notion of the nation state, and functioned as obstacles, rather than resources, for our understanding of how globalization plays out in this particular field. In the last two decades, both social theory and comparative politics have attempted to overcome these limitations in their own way. Social theory increasingly acknowledged education as a global phenomenon. Theories have been developed to describe a global society evolving across borders. They show how, through processes that remain debated (cultural isomorphism, capitalism, functional differentiation), a number of structural and semantic evolutions have spread across education systems. Part I of this Handbook is dedicated to presenting, discussing, and comparing three such theories of globalization and their implications for our understanding of education and education policy. Comparative politics has for its part concerned itself with developing a more complex, less unified and 'transformationalist' view of the State by acknowledging the fragmentation and distribution of its functions among distinct domains and levels. Part II gravitates around this global constellation, with chapters focusing on global reforms, norms and ideas put forward by supranational organizations, on international accountability processes and on the ways in which nation states or local actors adopt, implement or resist global ideas and reforms. The two Parts reflect these disciplinary approaches to the relation between globalization and education. Together, these two approaches seek to provide a comprehensive overview of how globalization and education interact to result in distinct and varying outcomes across world regions"--