Beyond Methodological ‘ISMS’ in Comparative Education in an Era of Globalisation

Abstract

SCALAR: One example of the kind of theorizing made possible by the recognition of and escape from, methodological nationalism and statism is to conceive of ‘education’ as not necessarily and exclusively associated with the nation-state, but as constituted through the complex workings of functional and scalar divisions of the labour of educational governance (see Dale,2003), which can mean any or all of a single locus of governance, parallel loci of governance at different scales, or hybrid forms of governance across scales, and/or activities, and/or agents. So, what is broadly meant by governance here is the replacement of the assumption that the state always and necessarily governs education through control of all the activities of governing, with what might be called the coordination of coordination, with the state possibly retaining the role of coordinator, or regulator, of last resort (see Dale, 1997).