End of the English (British?) Empire? Or Something Else?

The paper analyzes best-seller lists in seven major European book markets between April 2008 and March 2009. The paper’s authors introduce the concept of an impact factor for best-selling authors that shows how influential an author is in a given market and across the analyzed markets overall. The paper’s authors discovered that a new generation of European best-selling authors appeared in major book markets of Europe such that those not writing in English have an impact of almost twice that of the English writers. Furthermore, the authors have discovered that only veteran English or American best-selling authors tend to be published by big media conglomerates; the majority of the European best-selling authors were published by a surprising mix of big and small, independent and international publishing houses. It is striking that English as the most popular second language in the world did not play a stronger role as an intermediary language in the transmission of books from one European culture to another, as European publishers in major markets still employ editors who read a variety of languages and thus play the role of intermediaries in how books travel from one culture to another.     

Church schools,educational markets and the rural idyll

Researchers have begun to explore the role that faith schools play in contemporary educational markets but the emphasis to date has been on urban rather than rural contexts. This article approaches the issue of marketisation through a qualitative case-study comparison of two Anglican primary schools in contrasting rural localities in England and Wales. Engaging with a range of stakeholders, including parents and pupils, the article explores reasons why the schools were valued, drawing on wider constructions of childhood, religion and rurality. The consequences of the schools’ popularity on factors such as traffic, parking, school ethos and local community ties are also considered. The findings of the study problematise some of the prevalent assumptions about marketisation, including the role of social class and geography in these processes. As such, the article makes an important contribution to the sociological literature on faith schools, rural schools and educational markets.     

The tangled roots of real estate markets,the state,and public education

In this article, I use a case study of education in nineteenth-century Oregon to place the twentieth-century phenomenon of ‘shopping for schools’ within a broader historical context. In doing so, I make three points. First, documenting previously unacknowledged links between the spread of public education and efforts to market land, I suggest that education, real estate markets, and the state have deeper and more tangled roots than scholars have imagined. Second, I contend that wrestling with these tangled roots suggests the need for scholars to reexamine the role of private markets in shaping the organisation of educational opportunity across places and time. Third, I argue that histories like Oregon’s demonstrate that ‘state’ and ‘market’ are neither stable nor mutually exclusive categories.     

从家族村落到中心市镇：宋代以来棠阴的社会变迁

夏布是清代江西省出口货物之大宗,被誉为江西第二大特产,其中尤以赣东宜黄、赣西万载加工的夏布最为精美。而棠阴又是宜黄夏布的主产地,以夏布漂白精美著称。从宋代到晚清,棠阴由一个家族村落发展为墟市再到夏布业中心市镇,发展水平超过当时的县城。以棠阴为中心,出现了一个连接晋豫沪闽诸省以及南关、朝鲜等地的海内外市场网络。这一历史变迁过程中,地方特色手工业的发展扮演了关键性角色,但自然资源和交通条件诸因素也不容忽视。     

对合理运用税收手段调节企业资本市场的思考

随着资本市场对经济发展的作用不断增强,优化企业资本市场税收政策和改善资本市场环境成为完善税收制度的重点.该文分析了目前我国企业资本市场存在的问题,分析了税收对资本市场和企业资本结构的引导作用,并提出了运用税收政策调节企业资本市场的政策建议.     

Tradition or Modernity? The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness Among Women Science Educators in Cameroon

Building on an earlier article in which I analyzed the views of women scientists and science educators in Cameroon, West Africa (Woodhouse & Ndongko, 1993), I reflect upon the ways in which these same science educators managed to commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, attributed by Alfred North Whitehead to the abstractions of 17th-century physics.On the one hand, the women in our study tried to make their science teaching as concrete as possible by introducing examples from African traditional medicine that were familiar to their students. On the other, they undermined these laudable efforts by consistently diminishing the value of traditional indigenous healing, for they regarded the abstractions of scientific methodology as real in a way that such treatments were not. I argue that this is a prime example of the fallacy.Furthermore, the only way in which these women science educators could imagine that African traditional healers would be accepted by the scientific community was to become professionals by adopting the abstract methodology of science, which falls foul of the fallacy in the first place. Only then could their various traditional treatments be assimilated to the market and developed commercially by multinational corporations. I argue that this overlooks the ways in which such corporations appropriate the cultural and intellectual property of traditional healers in Cameroon and elsewhere. Moreover, their reasoning is based once again on the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, accepting the abstractions of the market as real, while disregarding the value of indigenous knowledge itself.     

The ethics of competition: accountability policy enactment in Chilean schools’ everyday life

ABSTRACT

Public policies have a moral order, an ethical horizon. They offer a vocabulary of imagined micro-policies. Using the case of Chile, this paper examines the ways in which accountability policies are reworked within schools and how they affect actors’ subjectivities. It adds new findings to the existing body of research on school accountability policies, offering in-depth evidence based on the case of Chile, which has a high-stakes testing model and a widespread competitive voucher system. The research is based on case studies of ten public and private subsidised schools, framed by a sociological perspective of policy enactment theory. The research findings show the ways that accountability policies are recreated, expanded, and intensified at the local level, permeating an ethic of competition. The analysis focuses on three qualitative trends: school actors’ sense-making of test scores and labels; zones of safety and risk for teachers under an accountability regime; and the emergence of a sticky web of persuasion, surveillance, and coercion among school members in order to improve performance. The practices examined are not understood as ‘secondary effects’ or an ‘implementation problem’, as if they occur unconnected from the policy rationale. The outcomes are consistent with the policy itself in interaction with school life.     

How parental and school responses to choice policies reconfigure a rural education market in Victoria,Australia

Market principles now dominate the education and social policies of many Anglophone countries, including Australia, but articulate differentially within specific contexts. Existing historical legacies, local economic and social conditions, and geographical settings interact with federal and state funding and transport policies to shape the nature of regional education markets and the choices families make in a rural school market in Australia. Through two school case studies, this article explores the effects of policy shifts on parental choice and student movement within a regional Victorian community. Informed by policy sociology, the article views the policy as a dynamic, often ad hoc process with contradictory effects. It indicates how an ensemble of federal and state funding and conveyancing policies enable some schools to develop marketing practices that reconstruct the local education market to their advantage through the introduction of transport and flexi-boarding policies. It demonstrates that education markets are not confined to urban settings and that while choice is not a new phenomenon in this rural area, federal and state funding and transport policies have reconfigured local markets and intensified the market work undertaken by schools and parents with, in this instance, unequal effects on the provision of schooling in a rural region.     

School reform policy in England since 1988: relentless pursuit of the unattainable

There is growing concern that almost 20 years after the 1988 Education Act, top‐down, large‐scale reform has stalled. The policy mix of choice, competition, markets, regulation, accountability and leadership seems not to have closed the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged areas and individuals, while most variations in school performance can be explained in terms of intake differences. This paper reviews policy and progress since 1988 and assesses the extent to which central government has achieved its educational aims. Unacknowledged tensions and contradictions are identified in structures and practices that are supposed to constitute a reliable framework for sustainable improvement. The conclusion is drawn that since 1988 the national government apparatus has itself become an important obstacle to further progress. An independent review of policy‐making and implementation is recommended so that schools and colleges are enabled to contribute more effectively to improvements in the quality of education.     

The privatisation of public schooling in New Zealand

This paper examines recent privatisation practices in New Zealand public schooling. The standard political rhetoric is that free publicly provided schooling is guaranteed by statute. This position may be challenged by reference to two apparently insignificant practical examples of the way in which policy gives effect to privatisation in public schooling: (1) the commissioning of national assessment strategy policy advice, and (2) the award of contestable funding for the provision of support services to schools. It is argued that such practices advance neoliberal theories of schooling at the expense of the previous social democratic liberal settlement. The paper considers some possible consequences of increased privatisation of policy advice and service provision for understandings of and commitments to public schooling.