Ethics in neoliberalism? Parental responsibility and education policy in Chile and Australia

This article questions the diverse and, in some cases, contradictory ethical forms present in contemporary neoliberal policy frames. In particular, we analyse the demands of responsibility – as a form of ethical commitment – requested of parents by education policies in the contexts of Chile and Australia. Assuming neoliberalism as a contextualised and multivocal form of governing, we applied a policy sociology approach to study the ethical implications for parents of two recent educational reforms developed in the national contexts of this research. Our analyses show that the emerging demands on parents for responsibility in the educational field exceed univocal forms of individual responsibilisation, encompassing expressions of responsibility that respond to collective and public goals.

Policy Sociology in the Contemporary Global Era: Continued Importance and Pressing Methodological Considerations

The intensities of the contemporary moment continue to prompt reflections on the strengths and limitations of approaches typically used to study education policy reform. The central contention of this essay is that policy sociology and its application within education offers needed vantage points on contemporary pressing global policy problems. Future studies would do well to keep the footprint of existing frameworks, which emphasize policy networks and mobilities, power dynamics within these flows, and the focus on doing research that speaks to concerns of stakeholders. The next generation of policy sociologists can further strengthen the relevance and rigor of the analytic scheme by leaning into methodologies that further attend empirically and descriptively to power asymmetries within policy networks.

Dialogue II: ‘Really Useful’ Public Sociology Knowledge

This dialogue includes an engagement between the author and two of the case contributors, both of whom are operating at the boundaries of policy sociology. Whilst this has perhaps underrepresented those working in other spheres of knowledge co-production – research, art, behaviour – it has allowed a focus on the kinds of knowledge that find their ways into the process of policy development and, more generally, what knowledge is valued in the public sphere....

Una economía política y cultural de las subvenciones estatales a la educación privada en Argentina

In comparison with other forms of public-private partnerships (PPP) in education of more recent emergence such as voucher programs or charter schools inspired by the postulates of the theory of public choice, supply-side subsidies for private schools usually respond to less explicit theories of change. Indeed, most of these policies are addressed by specialized literature as unique and highly idiosyncratic arrangements, rather than examples of a particular variety of PPP. The frequent absence of a theory of change that explicitly presents the assumptions, objectives and mechanisms of this type of policy, makes it necessary to reconstruct it from a perspective of policy sociology based on the analysis of the behavior of agents and economic, political, institutional and cultural drivers that lie behind their adoption in each particular context. Based on a review of the literature and the analysis of the legislative debates of the 1947-2006 period, this article seeks to examine the process of adoption of the regulatory framework defined by the policy of supply-side subsidies for private schools in Argentina from an evolutionary perspective of political and cultural economy. The article distinguishes three periods for analytical purposes among which an evolutionary logic of nonlinear continuity prevails, subject to the contextual vagaries and driven by different actors in the field of ideas and political practice.