The work of Stephen Ball: Contributions to the Debate on the Study of Education Policy in Ibero-America

Abstract

This article presents a literature review led with the purpose of gathering and organizing the main contributions made by Stephen Ball to the field of educational policy research. We present Ball's epistemological perspective on the study of both the textual and discursive dimensions of policies and his discussion on the need to develop new theoretical approaches oriented to understand the complexity of policies and the need of new integrative analytical frameworks to study the trajectory of policy processes. Accordingly, this paper describes the continuous policy cycle as a methodological model and synthetizes Ball's conceptual tools for understanding and explaining the process involved in the trajectory of that cycle. Those conceptual tools are organized according to their relevance to the macro or the micropolitical arenas. The former, focuses the analysis on the transformations of the State: the pluralization of the policy arenas, the private participation in public services, the formation of global policy networks, and the market as the ideological root of these transformations. The latter states the need to study both agency and local practices as the key aspects to understand the results and effects of policies through the concepts policy enactment and policy recontextualization. Finally, we advocate for the relevant contribution of these tools as analytical resources for the study of educational policies and in Ibero-America.