Shaping of European Education

Interdisciplinary approaches

Martin Lawn, Romuald Normand

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415748346
• eBook ISBN: 9781317750970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

The range, speed and scale of Europeanizing effects in education, and their complexity, has produced a relatively new field of study. Using scholarship and research drawn from sociology, politics and education, this book examines the rise of international and transnational policy and the flow of data and people around Europe to study Europeanizing processes and situations in education.

Each chapter creates a space for policy research on European education, involving a range of disciplines to develop empirical studies about European institutions, networks and processes; the interplay between policy-makers, stakeholders, experts, and researchers; and the space between the European and the national. The volume investigates the construction of European education, exploring the consideration of the role of think tanks and consultancies, international organizations, researcher mobilities, standards, indicators of higher education, and cultural metaphor.

Bringing together international contributors from a variety of disciplines across Europe, the book will be of key value to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education studies, politics and sociology.

1 Introduction

Martin Lawn and Romuald Normand

The range, speed and scale of complex Europeanizing effects in education are a relatively new field of study, reflecting the rise of international and transnational policy, European governance and flows of data and people around Europe. As policy, technology and networks have rapidly developed this field across significant areas of education, European social science has fostered new research studies and analyses of its diverse aspects.

New European policy spaces have emerged from a multifaceted web of relations and a transnational flow of information and people, with heterogeneous forms. Their speed and scale have been transformed by the push for a competitive Europe through the Lisbon process. In the broad area of education, a pedagogical space encouraging a European cultural identity and a distinctive vocational education interest emerged first, followed by supportive Commission projects, which enabled networks in research, evaluation, policy, school, adult and higher education. Now the European policy space in education appears within a range of Commission policy documents, and within a common set of indicators and benchmarks, used in governing Europe, and it is being developed by a range of social actors, drawn from cities, commercial companies and public–private partnerships.

The creation of a distinctive and useful European education policy space is a necessary part of the project of Europeanization in the European Union (EU). A ‘European education area’ is fundamental to the contemporary structuring of the EU, and it goes largely beyond compulsory schooling. It announces the arrival of a major discursive and normative space, centred on education and training, in which the legitimation, steering and shaping of European governance are being played out by the interplay of rhetoric, standards, tools and various agents, processes and networks.

Education as a policy area has a history in the EU, but it is an indistinct one, especially in its early decades. The overall policy aim of a knowledge economy and the development of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) have transformed the perspectives adopted by member states in driving their education policies towards a common space of exchange and cooperation aligned by common objectives and standards. As it has been changed, moving from patrimony to a space of comparison structured by powerful tools and frames, its direction has increased in sophistication and purpose.

But the EU is unable to control its formation by command, through personnel policies, political influence and direct funding or regulations, and to order multiple players, including powerful brokers. European policy-making has no powerful centre governing education in Europe, like other fields of public policies, and it relies upon a range of old and new public, semi-public and private actors for its emergence. Networks of actors of many kinds are producing, translating, comparing or imagining a new European Education Space. Lifelong learning, citizenship and the knowledge economy are shaping and being shaped together as the determining characteristics of this space.

The idea of a discernible governing process in the field of education in Europe may appear confusing. Education appears to be invisible as a governed object in European policy, and appears only as a national object. Yet it has travelled into view in the last thirty years, and it has moved from being a field of cultural action to a regulated space of learning via benchmarks and indicators across different education sectors. The reality is that networks and actors of diverse kinds have been building a European education space for some time. This is a response to the need for new governing strategies and policies and the arrival of a market of mobile private and public agents, working across borders and between institutions, in the field of education/learning. The advent of the idea of ‘network Europe’ has demanded a different approach to both the spatiality of Europe and its mechanisms of governance. The ‘governance turn’ in EU studies is well documented (Kohler-Koch 1999, 2002; Ansell 2000). However, the dynamics of EU forms of governance have proved more difficult to identify. It is argued that the EU, rather than being primarily concerned with state-building or the institutionalization of governance structures, is centrally concerned with the construction of European spaces (Delanty and Rumford 2005). That is, the EU actively constructs European spaces that it is capable of governing and works to create new policy networks and spaces within which it can deploy European solutions to European problems. The idea of space is much more important to EU governance than that suggested by the idea of multilevel governance.

The idea of ‘network Europe’ suggests networks of public, semi-public and private actors, constructing and enacting European policy in social settings and virtual exchanges, with scientific and discursive trading, extending beyond local, national and even European borders. Networks may be viewed as having the potential to mediate and transform both themselves (Castells 1997) and the environment in which they operate. However, European spaces are far more complex than even the idea of ‘network Europe’ would suggest (Borzel 1997). Recent scholarship on the spatiality of Europe has started to go beyond the idea of Europe as a multilevel or networked polity and into the rescaling of state space (Brenner 2004), the idea of network society and global connectivity (Castells 1996) and societal mobilities (Urry 2003). Governing is located in a networked, ahistorical space of flows, aiming at imposing its logic over scattered, segmented places (Castells 1996) and producing a disciplining and enabling space of engagement with state and transnational agencies and elites.

Mobilities, associated with the single market, interconnectivity and a single European policy space, point to the transcendence of territorial institutionalization and a transformed subjectivity, a Europeanness. It is not just that a contemporary focus on network and fluidity is helpful in understanding the education domain but that it appears visible only within a perspective concerned with movement, mobility and contingent ordering (Urry 2000a, 2000b). It is between space and mobilities that the emergence of a new space of learning and the movement and relations of its networked actors is rendered visible, both to its participants and to its enabling and governing forces.

A major European resource is also

its capacity to produce and set up at the global level a system of norms as broad sweeping as possible to organize the world, discipline the interplay of its actors, introduce predictability in their behaviour, develop among them a sense of collective responsibility, and offer those who engage on this path, particularly the weakness, at least some possibility of using these norms as an argument against all, including the world’s most powerful.

(Laidi, 2008: 43)

European policies are driven by an intensive process of standardization that avoids the processes of state regulation and monopoly. Quality standards, mechanisms of accreditation and labelling have penetrated the European political space of lifelong learning and changed the way people are dealing with their professional and institutional environment. European policy creates new spaces of mobility and the circulation of people and ideas along networks, and at the same time it attempts to order them through diverse standards. Research has to question this new version of economic liberalism, which extends the market to education but also makes it endogenous in public services through diverse logics of normalization, certification, data collection and promotion of ‘best practices’.

The installation of the OMC (the Lisbon Process) at the turn of the century indicated the move by the EU into governing by internal and international comparison (European Council 1999). The Lisbon Process produced commitments for member states that had to be met at EU level. This was a new policy stage for the EU, and it involved a new way of working in a new space, education and training. International comparison depends on numerical data and a parallel justificatory discourse about indicators and benchmarking as a means of achieving Community goals. National and European data agencies coordinated their activities, and their data and established benchmarks, in the early years, but a step change was soon needed in the speed and range of measuring tools, and the Commission began to generate a range of data tools and processes to govern this new area of work. It did so by involving a wide range of ‘experts’ from national ministries, specialist agencies, international organizations and universities. For the Commission, working with these experts was to be a step change in a longer process of building European consensus around the OMC as a way of governing, and the use of measurement and comparison across the European education systems. The creation of data through common tools and categories, and the assembly of abstract and commensurable units, began to produce a newly transparent policy domain in education. Norms and standards have become a powerful way of governing across Europe. They have the advantage of excluding political argument and relying on solution building experts. Power does not appear to be actively wielded, and, instead, people are captivated and attracted through the use of ‘incentive acts’ (Brunsson and Jacobsson 2000: 13)

Spatial entrepreneurs are responsible for creating new networks and public spaces of communication, which may later become appropriated by the EU as spaces of governance (Shore 2000). They are not necessarily the dominant managerial elites, but technical experts, administrative personnel, academic advisors, evaluators and professional networkers (for institutions and companies). European actors can – through constructing networks and spaces of cooperation and contestation – work in such a way as to further the goal of European integration, but do so by appearing to act independently of the institutions of the EU or in a synergetic and complementary way by following the market needs of their contracting organizations.

This feature of EU governance is of great relevance to a consideration of education governance, and its scope and direction. So, EU governance in education not only involves a mixture of state and non-state agencies, and the coordination of non-governmental and non-legislative policy tools, but is being undertaken by independent agencies and actors not formally involved (in the sense of being funded or coordinated) in EU-sponsored projects. Learning operates as a discourse across areas of policy, and it operates as a commodity, marketed across Europe by private companies and entrepreneurial organizations. The term ‘spatial entrepreneur’ implies an independent actor involved in networking, partnerships, agenda setting and other forms of soft governance (Lawn 2006), combining to create a thick tapestry of communication, organizational and network relations, stable and unstable linkages and career patterns and constructing networked spaces that can subsequently be organized as sites of European governance. These sites of engagement constitute the field of European networking in education, and contain both traditional actors in the area of education (institutional policy-makers, university groupings, organized professional interests) and those conventionally considered peripheral to education governance (commercial interests, networks of participation and interest, technological innovators). These ‘spatial’ entrepreneurs traverse global enterprise and global flows; they operate in an ordering way across networks and in a heterogeneous and chaotic way as well. As the private and public operations of ‘education’ are both creating its European field, so a range of participants shift between ordered and ordering behaviours in a mix of network relations.

In parallel, the emergence of a new civil society can be observed in the European space. Some interest groups are influencing the policy-making process and try to shape the institutions and strategies adopted by the European Commission. They operate as mediators between national spaces and the European political arena through activities of lobbying and networking that undermines the classical and national representations of social movements (trade unions and professional associations). They are also capable of approaching European and national policy-makers and members of the European Parliament to advance some new representations and discourses about education. It shows that new politics are organized and ordered within the European space through activities developed largely beyond the institutional borders of European institutions. It questions the democratic meaning of these new relationships and the way European policy-makers are choosing between these competing interests or sometimes giving them an advantageous position and legitimacy.

Education as a policy domain in the EU has shifted over time from policy areas in the minor key, because of either the sensitivities of subsidiarity or lack of political will, into a governing by discourse, norms and standards that have merged education with key EU policy areas. This major shift into the goal of a knowledge society, combined with OMC processes, has altered considerably the quiet field of cooperation and support in education. Alongside the subtle uses of data and standards, there is still the useful strategy of soft governance through which a persuasive power is used to captivate its actors and produce a significant European policy space.

Ways of understanding

A sociology of European education should engage with political sciences, which have developed multiple studies on the Strategy of Lisbon and the Bologna process and their consequences on the structuration of national spaces and policies. Significantly, these analyses should go beyond the opposition between inter-governmentalism and neo-functionalism to explain the mechanisms of the European integration. The former explanation assumes that the construction of Europe is at the initiative of nation states searching to increase their power and to defend their interests beside the European Commission (Moravcsik 1999). The latter explanation, in advocating a conception of multilevel governance, stipulates that the transnationalization of decision-making gives more power to the EU and weakens the states (Marks, Hooghe, and Blank 1996). In addition, some institutionalist and constructivist approaches have sought to include a historical and sociological dimension in the study of European integration in focusing on European actors, and their modes of interaction and socialization, going beyond the traditional analysis of discourses and norms produced by the European Commission (Pierson 1996; Bulmer 1998; Peters 1999; Checkel 2001). A new field of European studies was opened to emphasize the political ontologies of European actors, particularly the building of social and professional identities, the formulation and circulation of ideas between policy-makers and experts and the mobilization of interest groups and stakeholders (Christiansen, Joergensen, and Wiener 1999; Kauppi 2010; Kauppi 2013); some researchers have studied the lifestyles of European senior officials and experts revolving around the European Commission, while others, like Marc Abelès (1992), have investigated the places of the exercise of power in studying, in an anthropological way, the work of the European Parliament.

This research in the political sciences invites us to leave simple analyses of the emergent ideas and discourses in European reports and official documents to enter the empirical field of the decision-making and implementation of the Commission’s recommendations in the area of education (Favell and Guiraudon 2009). The aim is to confront discursive practices to the social construction of reality in which European actors are engaged, through various ways, in a set of arrangements, negotiations and strategies that characterize the complexity of the European policy (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Rowell and Mangenot 2010). New approaches of the Europeanization of education policies are becoming well developed, and their mechanisms have been identified: policy borrowing and travelling policies, networks of actors and institutions, multiple scales of governance, spatial mobility, government by numbers, circulating tools, and so on. But there are fewer studies able to explain the diversity of arrangements between actors, their mobilization of tools and resources to act in the European space, and the way they express their interest and gain legitimacy (Saurugger and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Series preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Education governance and transnational experts: Europe and its emerging relationship with the OECD
• 3 The ‘French pinnacle’ of PISA: a boundary object between translations and irreversibility
• 4 Soft governance through PISA benchmarking: German reforms in secondary education
• 5 Power as translation in the global governance of education
• 6 Worlds of educational standards: complex interplays between sociologies of education
• 7 The understories of European education: the contemporary life of experts and professionals
• 8 Meeting expectations: on the challenges of collaborative research through European funding
• 9 The (C)SI effect: school inspection as crime scene investigation
• 10 What kind of public sphere shapes the European Educational Research Space?
• 11 Higher-education governance reforms in Europe: concepts, measurement and empirical findings
• 12 Transnational academic mobility from the perspective of gender inequality: researcher flows and knowledge construction in Europe
• Index