Provincialising the world culture theory debate: critical insights from a margin

Abstract

Neo-institutionalist theory of global 'isomorphism', or so-called World Culture Theory (WCT), has been much debated in comparative education. One notable feature of the debate is that the vast majority of its participants belong to a handful of closely knit comparative education communities. Ironically enough then, a debate that fundamentally concerns the globalisation of education has hardly been 'globalised', with virtually no comparative scholars participating from 'other' comparative education societies. Clearly, there is a need to critically engage with WCT by explicitly drawing on 'other' intellectual traditions of comparative educations. To this aim, I first discuss the critical methodological insights and underlying epistemic standpoint of Japanese comparative education scholars. I then employ their arguments as a starting point for my subsequent post-colonial critique of WCT and the WCT debate. Overall, this study illuminates the hitherto unacknowledged 'epistemic ignorance' of the on-going WCT debate in the English-language, 'paradigmatic' comparative education realm and suggests a way to move beyond this provinciality.

Toward a Postcolonial Comparative and International Education

“…This body of scholarship, with ideas drawn from neoinstitutionalist organizational sociology, is grounded in a truncated reading of Weber's work (Carney et al 2012). As Takayama (2015) has pointed out, the world-culture approach uncritically accepts the Eurocentric premises of Weberian sociology-including the notion of the West as a coherent, bounded entity that has given rise to special events, concepts, and paradigms that are now diffused throughout the world. As a result, the differences recognized in much of the CIE scholarship drawing on the world-culture approach are treated as a manifestation of absence, or as a variation or inflection of the culture supposedly diffused from the West.…”

“…As a result, the differences recognized in much of the CIE scholarship drawing on the world-culture approach are treated as a manifestation of absence, or as a variation or inflection of the culture supposedly diffused from the West. By conceding national and regional inflections of world culture, this approach keeps intact the Eurocentric conceptualization of modernity-and modern schooling (Carney et al 2012;Takayama 2015). A Eurocentric concept becomes "the point of observation and classification of the rest of the world" (Baker 2012, 7), which Walter Mignolo (2007) argues is the underlying logic of the Occidentalist epistemology.…”

“…North American, British, and some western European CIE societies, which virtually monopolize the editorial teams and reviewers of the most influential journals of the field-including Comparative Education Review -set the theoretical and methodological agenda. Researchers in peripheral societies are generally expected to emulate them, though the hegemony of the Anglo-European comparative education discourse is from time to time contested in the periphery (Takayama 2015).…”

“…5 The same pattern is witnessed in many textbooks in the comparative education scholarship in other countries. For instance, in many comparative education textbooks in Japan, the identical historiography of the field is presented along with a separate and much condensed discussion of the history of the Japanese comparative education scholarship (Takayama 2015). 6 We are aware that the scholarly traditions and orientations in comparative education in North America and Europe are not identical.…”

Imagining Sociology of Education Otherwise

“…Cognizant of this problem, I have taken it upon myself to serve as the 'bridge,' putting the insights of Japanese education scholars in conversation with the sociology of education scholarship generated primarily in the Anglo-European countries (see e.g. Takayama 2013Takayama , 2015. This bridging work does pose a set of challenges and contradictions that trouble me from time to time (see Takayama 2011, 2016a.…”