Boundary control and education policy in federal systems: explaining sub-federal resilience in Canada and Germany

Broschek, Jörg

doi:10.1080/03050068.2021.1958628

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 36 publications

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“…Thus, the first two articles explore the issues of educational system formation and transformation in countries organised on a federal basis. Jörg Broschek (2021) uses the examples of Germany and Canada to examine the 'resilience', as he calls it, with which the individual statesthe German Länder and Canadian provincesdefend their primary or even exclusive responsibility for education policy and funding against encroachments from the national level. Drawing on the perspectives of historical institutionalism, he is able to show that the development of public education systems, and thus the responsibility of the individual states or provinces in this regard, goes back to the time before the founding of the modern German and Canadian nation states.…”

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Comparison and explanation: a long saga

Schriewer¹

2021

Comparative Education

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A consensus exists that comparative research consists not of comparing but of explaining.No matter how paradoxical the above quote by Przeworski (1987, 35) may seem, it refers to a problematique which has been under discussion not only in comparative education, but in the comparative sub-disciplines of the social sciences in general. In fact, in most of the fields which later on became the human and social sciences, attempts at explaining the enormous variety of peoples, belief systems or social practices encountered on voyages, in the course of expeditions or through systematic studies have marked the decisive shift from earlier forms of ethnographic description to more academic forms of comparative study that occurred towards the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. The explanation of social and, in our case, educational phenomena came to constitute an essential epistemic achievement and, therefore, the raison d'être of comparative research. The rise of the modern concept of 'culture' testifies to this shift. From a sociology of knowledge perspective, one can even assume a virtual co-evolution of the heightened interest in comparative studies and a specifically 'culturalist' approach to transmuting a social object domain into those studies' distinctive subject matter (cf. Luhmann 1995). This approach was geared towards examining the amazing variety of social institutions and practices not as such, not in disjointed isolation, but always in terms of their affiliation to and dependence on their more encompassing socio-cultural conditions. In varying proportions, it combined basic notions of cultural relativism with forms of seeing things in historical and sociological perspectives. In leading the comparative scholar to comprehend the phenomena of interest by capturing the interrelationships with their distinctive social and cultural environmentcouched in terms that originated in that period: by grasping their 'functions' or their embedding in 'organisms/organisations'this 'culturalist' mode of looking at subjects and articulating problems gained researchframing significance for the further development of comparative education.In the long run, however, merely culturalist and holistic approaches underpinned by ideas of historicismas evident in the works of the founding generation of comparative educationalistswere not able to provide convincing explanations. On the other hand, conceptual alternatives were obviously dependent on the state of theory formation in the human and social sciences. This became particularly obvious from the 1960s onwards, when comparative education underwent a major shift from traditions of hermeneutic historicism to decidedly social-scientific theories and research procedures. Not only were strongly generalised sociological and economic models developed, such as models derived from encompassing theories of modernisation or human capital; but, in the context of the orthodox philosophy of science, the structure of explanations itself became the subject of intense d...

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confidence: 99%