This study assesses the extent to which public high schools become more or less socially mixed after families are allowed to choose schools outside their designated catchment areas in a mid-sized Canadian city. We draw on settler-colonial theory, critical human geography, and critical social theory while applying a critical mapping of school…

This paper explores how bureaucracy impedes the implementation of higher education (HE) policy at Japanese universities. Administrative systems employ Weberian legal-rational bureaucratic practices that are central to the institutional identity of a university. Rather than the means to internationalisation and reform in general, these systems…

Increasing globalisation is concomitant with a growing lack of uniformity in the world. Hardly any satisfactory concepts are available which grasp both of these tendencies within the scope of a single model. While processes of becoming globally alike are central to world system theories, comparative research into institutions has identified a…

In its "adolescent" phase of development, comparative education engaged with a wide variety of social theories. The next period of comparative education scholarship is likely to be characterized by a focus on global trends, rigorous blending of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and commitment to pursuing more general insights about how…

The field of comparative education has been slow to incorporate poststructuralist concerns due to theoretical bias, the linguistic barrier of postmodernist discourses, and the critique of postmodernism as indifferent to social issues. Debates on key questions of epistemology, ontology, and ethics in social research are needed to further…

Since the classical authors of the nineteenth century, the explanation of macro-social phenomena has been considered as the essential epistemic achievement, hence the "raison d'etre," of comparative analysis in the social sciences. In practice, however, the claims of comparative social enquiry for providing convincing explanations are…

This paper presents a review and assessment of existing theoretical accounts to explain differentials in access to education and training in advanced economies. These theories tend to focus on the analysis of the influence of a set of economic, sociological and political variables on access to education. Existing theories are criticized on two…

Ideas from postpositivist thinking have been particularly challenging for comparative education scholarship and its metanarratives. Analysis of articles in major comparative education journals in the 1990s examines the integration of ideas from 10 poststructuralist thinkers and explores in detail the appropriation of Foucault's ideas and…

Reviews changing attitudes towards the schooling of Black South Africans as revealed in a study of texts and statements by leading White politicians and historians. Discusses dominant schools of educational thought in South Africa focusing on the nationalist/conservative, the liberal, and the radical/neo-Marxist. (JHZ)