Product Description: The work of Michel Foucault has become a major resource for educational researchers seeking to understand how education makes us what we are. In this book, a group of contributors explore how Foucault’s work is used in a variety of ways to explore the ‘hows’ and ‘whos’ of education policy – its technologies and its subjectivities, its oppressions and its freedoms...read more

Product Description: This latest volume in the World Yearbook of Education Series focuses on educational elites and inequality, focusing particularly on the ways in which established and emergent groups located at the top of the social hierarchy and power structure reproduce, establish or redefine their position...read more

Product Description: How do race and class intersect to shape the identities and experiences of Black middle-class parents and their children? What are Black middle-class parents’ strategies for supporting their children through school? What role do the educational histories of Black middle-class parents play in their decision-making about their children’s education? There is now an extensive body of research on the educational strategies of the white middle classes but a silence exists around the emergence of the Black middle classes and their experiences, priorities, and actions in relation to education...read more

Product Description: In this fully updated edition of The Education Debate, Stephen J. Ball guides us through a flood of government initiatives and policies concerning education over the past twenty years, showing how these policy interventions have changed the landscape and meaning of education, turned children into learners and parents into consumers, and played their part in the reformation of contemporary governance...read more

Do private and philanthropic solutions to the problems of education signal the end of state education in its ‘welfare’ form? Education policy is being reformed and re-worked on a global scale. Policies are flowing and converging to produce a singular vision of ‘best practice’ based on the methods and tenets of the ‘neo-liberal imaginary’. Philanthropy, business and the governments are coming together in new networks and sites of policy outside of the framework of the nation state. This book is a first step in recording, mapping and making sense of the most important aspects of these new relations and dynamics of policy. Using the approach of ‘policy sociology’ and the methods of social network analysis, Global Education Inc. explores the policy activities of edu-businesses, neo-liberal advocacy networks and policy entrepreneurs, and of social enterprises and ‘new’ philanthropy. It also addresses the ways in which education and education policy itself are now being exported and bought and sold as profitable commodities and how entrenched problems of educational development and educational quality and access are now being addressed through ‘market solutions’. That is, by the involvement of private providers in the delivery of educational services, both independently and on behalf of the state. Universities, schools and education services are being acquired as assets by private equity companies. Private storefront schools are being set-up by local entrepreneurs and through franchising arrangements, funded through microloans. School chains funded by philanthropy and run by multi-national edu-businesses are being harnessed to the attempts of developing societies in an attempt to achieve their Millennium Development Goals and provide mass access to basic education. Curriculum materials and pedagogy software and policy ideas such as inspections, leadership, school choice and accountability are being retailed by western ‘knowledge companies’ and consultants across the globe. This book argues that these new forms of policy and policy-making require new concepts and methods of policy analysis, with chapters including: Networks, Neo-liberalism and Policy Mobilities New’ Philanthropy, Social Capitalism and Education Policy Policy as Profit: Selling and Exporting Policy Money, Meaning and Policy Connections Global Education Inc. is a crucial book that will be of great interest to students of social and education policy and social and education policy analysts and researchers.

Foucalt's work continues to have an enormous cross-disciplinary influence. This book explores some of his key ideas and concepts in relation to a variety of education contexts and issues. It argues that schools, like prisons and asylums, are often artificial and highly disciplined environments and provide excellent case studies for Foucalt's concern with the technologies of power and domination and the arbitrariness of modern institutions. The essays in this collection approach the subject in different and original ways. Three use historical material to explore aspects of the constitution of modern education. Three examine the role of discourse about education in the contemporary politics of education - the discursive work of the "New Right" is of particular interest. Other contributions consider the theoretical relevance of Foucalt's work to educational practice, particularly to assessment and educational research.

Product Description: Over the last 20 years, international attempts to raise educational standards and improve opportunities for all children have accelerated and proliferated. This has generated a state of constant change and an unrelenting flood of initiatives, changes and reforms that need to be ‘implemented’ by schools...read more

Product Description: This book explores some of the major processes involved in the definition of school subject knowledge. Using historical ethnographic methods, the contributors to the collection highlight and examine some of the factors involved at national, institutional and classroom levels in the making of school subjects...read more

Product Description: Stephen Ball’s micro-political theory of school organization is a radical departure from traditional theories. He rejects a prescriptive ‘top down’ approach and directly addresses the interest and concerns of teachers and current problems facing schools...read more

Product Description: Based on interviews with key actors in the policy-making process, this book maps the changes in education policy and policy making in the Thatcherite decade. The focus of the book is the 1988 Education Reform Act, its origins, purposes and effects, and it looks behind the scenes at the priorities of the politicians, civil servants and government advisers who were influential in making changes...read more

Product Description: This book explores some of the major processes involved in the definition of school subject knowledge. Using historical ethnographic methods, the contributors to the collection highlight and examine some of the factors involved at national, institutional and classroom levels in the making of school subjects...read more

Product Description: Education, Globalisation and New Times comprises a selection of the most influential papers published over the twenty-one years of the Journal of Education Policy. Written by many of the leading scholars in the field, these seminal papers cover a variety of subjects, sectors and levels of education, focused around the following major themes: education, globalisation and new times policy theory and method policy and equity...read more

Childcare is a topic that is frequently in the media spotlight and continues to spark heated debate in the UK and around the world. This book presents an in-depth study of childcare policy and practice, examining middle class parents’ choice of childcare within the wider contexts of social class and class fractions, social reproduction, gendered responsibilities and conceptions of ‘good’ parenting. Drawing on the results of a qualitative empirical study of two groups of middle class parents living in two London localities, this book: takes into account key theoretical frameworks in childcare policy, setting them in broader social, political and economic contexts considers the development of the UK government’s childcare strategy from its birth in 1998 to the present day highlights the critical debates surrounding middle class families and their choice of childcare explores parents’ experiences of childcare and their relationships with carers. This important study comes to a number of thought-provoking conclusions and offers valuable insights into a complex subject. It is essential reading for all those working in or studying early years provision and policy as well as students of sociology, class, gender and work.

Product Description: Bringing together twenty years of research and writing, this book provides an overview of Stephen Ball’s career and shows not only the development of his most important ideas but also the long-lasting contributions he has made to the field of educational policy analysis...read more

Product Description: The RoutledgeFalmer Reader in Sociology of Education brings together a carefully selected collection of articles and book chapters to reflect enduring trends in the field of Sociology of Education. Focusing on the major issues confronting education today, this lively and informative Reader provides broad coverage of the field and includes sections on crucial topics such as: social class globalization gender curriculum social inequality and social justice students and classrooms...read more

Product Description: Dangerous Encounters: Genealogy and Ethnography explores the methodological and theoretical relationships between the epistemology and practices of ethnographic research and the epistemology and practices of Michel Foucault’s genealogical method...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Class Strategies and the Education Market examines the ways in which the middle classes maintain and improve their social advantages in and through education.Drawing on an extensive series of interviews with parents and children, this book identifies key moments of decision making in the construction of the educational trajectories of middle class children...read more

Product Description: This outstanding collection contains 100 papers drawn from the broad range of contemporary writing on the sociology of education. Major trends and developments from the 1970s through to the 1990s are represented. The following four volumes offer a comprehensive introduction to, and overview of, the field: * Theories and Methods* Inequalities and Oppressions* Institutions and Processes* Politics and Policies...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This internationally appealing book is based on a two-year case study of a group of young people as they move through their final year of mandatory schooling and into their first year of post-16 experience. It looks at their choices, the market behaviour of local education and training providers and those who help and advise these choices. The authors show that recent and current political policies for post-16 education disadvantage, marginalise and exclude young people rather than improve their life chances. The book draws together the major issues and attempts to suggest alternative ways forward for a more inclusive post-16 education and training system. (view table of contents)

Product Description: What has been the impact of parental choice and competition upon schools? How do parents choose schools for their children? Who are the winners and losers in the education market? These questions are discussed in this book, which draws upon a three-year study of market forces in education...read more