Introduction

This chapter explores the methodological challenges in comparing education policies in a globalising world. We begin with the claim that, for the most part, education policies, programmes and practices have been, and continue to be, located in national territorial spaces, although this does not mean the global element is absent. Rather it was possible to detect a ‘thin’ global policy regime in the years following the Second World War until the 1980s. With the advance of neoliberalism as a global political project, there has been a thickening of regional and global policy making activity arising from, and in turn driving, the transformation of national and sub-national education spaces, policies and outcomes. Such transformations have generated important challenges for researchers of education, largely because education policies are no longer primarily ‘national’ or indeed made by national states.

Our aim in this chapter is to sketch the contours of the changes that have taken place in the governance of education systems as a result of global processes, and the challenges this presents us with regard to how we study and compare education policies. We do this by way of four ‘isms’ which we problematise as litmus tests of global educational change. We then raise the question of critical comparison and suggest two conflicting ways that it can be used to study the nature, form and outcomes of education policies. In the final section of the paper we offer three (not exhaustive) methodological reflections – each with a different dimension through which to explore global education processes; ‘time’, ‘space’ and ‘logics of governing’ in education policy making.

‘Isms’

We start by pointing out that, in order to study and compare global education policies, we need to be mindful of the conceptual categories we use – in large part because although the name of a category might remain the same, the meaning of that category (for example state, nation, education, university) may well have changed. We refer to the practice of deploying these same categories without asking questions about the meaning of that category, as methodological ‘isms’ (Robertson and Dale, 2008). The basis of the way we understand and seek to use the term ‘isms’ comes from Herminio Martins (1974), who coined the term ‘methodological nationalism’.