Unbundling

Powered by the growth of for-profit activities, marketisation, massification and a perceived gap between higher education degrees and the demands of an everchanging labour market, unbundling is a process of disentanglement based on the notion that higher education teaching, administration and management are akin to commercial services or products that can be divided or combined in different ways. McCowan (2017, p 736) distinguishes between two types of unbundling. The first type of unbundling occurs through the disaggregation of services or products that were previously delivered or sold together. The second type of unbundling refers to a ‘no-frills’ model where a product is stripped of its non-essential parts so it can be acquired by (and integrated into) other delivery forms and services. Advocates of unbundling view these developments as not only desirable but inevitable given the diverse needs and changing aspirations of individuals, the requirements to make products and services more accessible to a wider range of users, and the pressures on service providers to make their products and delivery mechanisms more cost-efficient and effective. Critics, however, argue that unbundling not only transforms but undermines the values, functions and modes of interaction traditionally performed by higher education institutions and their workers. From this perspective, unbundling is the unravelling of traditional forms of higher education, albeit affecting higher education systems across the globe at different rates and scales through varying intensities and differential effects (McCowan, 2017; Ivancheva et al, 2020).

There are various examples of unbundling across different phases and sectors of education, albeit higher education at the time of writing has emerged as the main site for its innovation and dissemination. A key focus for researchers working this area is the realisation, application and effects of unbundling on curriculum, the academic profession, policy reform, and interactions between public and private institutions and actors (Ivancheva et al, 2020). More concrete examples include the growing division between professionals and organisations involved in the design, delivery or assessment of courses (for example, Massive Open Online Courses; the introduction of low-cost degree courses; the outsourcing of administrative, information and communication technology, and managerial tasks to sub-contractors; the growth of teaching-only institutions; the separation of teaching from research; the expansion of distance education and multi-campus universities; and the emergence of new divisions of labour among academic and non-academic personnel).

Historiography

Conventional approaches to the study of history, sometimes called historical method or traditional historiography, rely on using guidelines and techniques borrowed from archaeology to write histories of the past. These techniques include drawing on primary and secondary source material as well as employing ‘source criticism’ to determine the reliability of source material and acceptable oral traditions, often with a probabilistic approach to ‘drawing generalisations – inferring patterns – from individual studies to make more generalised claims about the world’ (Priem and Fendler, 2019, p 614). Combined, these techniques in writing history also provide the tools to ‘story’ history through accurate account-giving that builds up a reliable picture of the past events and their environments. Tamboukou (1999) warns, however, that historical methods of accounting for the past tend to operate within certain ontological and epistemological a prioris that include a naive Enlightenment view of past events that overestimates the rationality of history as ‘continuous development, progress and seriousness’ (p 208). In other words, historical methods can sometimes suffer from a strict teleological view of knowledge production as cumulative, linear, progressive and inevitably and unendingly striving for improvement and betterment of peoples: history moves through periods of time or stages of development (from ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilised’, for example) in which ‘new’ knowledge builds on ‘old’ knowledge to correct inaccuracies, to overcome error, to combat bad information or ignorance, or to rewrite false accounts. For radical revisionists of history, this acceptance of liberal progress is not only naive but serves ‘as a rationalisation for the inequitable status quo’ (Kincheloe, 1991, p 234).

As du Gay (2003) reminds us, historical methods may suffer from the ‘logic of overdramatic dichotomisation’ (p 664) in which past events (and their relation to the present or some imagined future) are presented chronologically and sequentially through an epochalist reading of social change as discrete moments in the singularity of place and time. It is important to acknowledge that social change can be the result of ruptures and shifts made possible by unique historical agents and environments, thus equating elements of social change to situated happenings.

Rationality

The concept of rationality is central to policy formulation and implementation. Rationality refers to the quality or expectation of being logical, reasonable or scientific, and therefore points to a set of universal definitions and appropriate standards against which the usefulness of policy decisions in achieving certain goals and outcomes can be judged to be internally consistent, valid, reliable, even replicable. This view of policy decisions or advice as rational presents an ideal representation of policy as evidence-driven, namely that the policy process is a scientific or apolitical practice structured around hypothesis testing that uses value-free knowledge to generate contextual or causal explanations for social change. Leaving aside the idea that policy is evidence-or fact-based, which is arguably false in some cases, there is the notion that the rationality of the policy process can be traced to its proclivity for and demonstration of science.

But science has a communicative context according to Andrews (2007) since scientific knowledge requires both consensus and authority in order to be considered legitimate. In other words, scientific knowledge claims never exist intrinsically and independent of human activity, but rather emerge through their relation to other sources of authority or processes of legitimation and consensus formation that determine their ‘politicisation’ and role in the policymaking process. Moreover, even assuming that the policy process is evidencebased and scientific in the Enlightenment sense of universal and value-free, it is important to separate out the rationality of the policy process (the means by which policy makers assimilate perfect information into policy decisions so that they are fair or accurate) and the rationality of the policy actor. This is because, as Dunleavy (1991) reminds us, some people may ‘operate through intransitive preference orderings’ (p 249) or exercise their decision-making through emotional attachments and ethical commitments not captured by a standard or comprehensive rationality that privileges forms of instrumental choice. Moreover, according to Bevir and Brentmann (2007), economistic models of rationality are inadequate for making sense of the ways in which diverse rationalities combine in unique ways to produce iterations of local reasoning and individual experience.

Genealogy

Originally developed by French social theorist and philosopher Michel Foucault, the concept of genealogy aims to trace ‘the details and accidents that accompany every beginning’ (Foucault, 1998, p 144). For Foucault (1998), genealogy recognises that every idea and thought system is conditioned by ‘its jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories and unpalatable defeats’ (pp 144– 145). Genealogy therefore ‘rejects the meta-historical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for origins’ (Foucault, 1998, p 140). Inspired by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who through his writing on morality and religion opposed metaphysics and the search for the origins or essences of things (in German ‘Ursprung’), Foucault described ideas and thought systems as the ‘exteriority of accidents’ (Foucault, 1998, p 146), meaning that what comes to stand in for, or represent, truth is only ever the ‘outcome of a process in which there is conflict, confrontation, struggle, resistance’ (Foucault, 2002, p 457).

Genealogy therefore concerns the mode of dissension by which some ideas and thought systems acquire the status of ‘truths’ – universal ideals, value systems or normative assumptions. Here, mode of dissension refers to that dynamic, generative, productive space in which ideas and thought systems are struggled over by cultures and interest groups through invasions, ploys, omissions and silences. In this sense, genealogy differs from traditional historical methods of inquiry where, typically, ideas and thought systems are studied chronologically or sequentially as the culmination and expression of a linear-rational search for truth. On this account, genealogy views ideas and thought systems as the contingent product of struggles over meaning, struggles that tend to be concealed or violently suppressed through appeals to ‘reason’, ‘rationality’ or ‘morality’. Genealogy therefore aims at denaturalising ideas or thought systems taken to be timeless and rooted in a fixed and unchanging reality, ‘making it so that what is taken for granted is no longer taken for granted’ (Foucault, 2002, p 456).

Activism

All research enables change; activist education policy research seeks explicitly and primarily to achieve specified changes to educational arrangements, practices, cultures or structures to alleviate the effects of disadvantage. Yeatman (1998) provides a useful definition of a policy activist as ‘anyone who champions in relatively consistent ways a value orientation and pragmatic conception of policy which opens it up to the appropriate participation of all those who are involved in the policy process, all the way from points of policy conception to delivery on the ground’ (p 10).

This definition, with its focus on values and participation, signifies a shift from how policy activism was first conceptualised by Heclo in the 1970s (in Smyth, 2012). Here, the policy activist ‘was a kind of knowledgeable policy technocrat who was prepared to carefully watch developments’ (Smyth, 2012, p 180). Intellectually, the activist disposition in policy research originated with the Frankfurt School in Germany, which advanced a critical approach to scholarship that ‘aim[ed] to go beyond simply understanding and critiquing social, political and economic relations, towards seeking to change the world’ (Savage et al, 2021, p 308). An important strand of critical education policy sociology continues this activist tradition (see, for example, Apple, 2013; Blackmore, 2014; Gorski and Zenkov, 2014). Whether it is called (socially) critical or activist, such policy research intends ‘taking aim at both the ideological and practical work of schooling [and/or higher education] and connecting it to the wider structural issues that dominate public education’ (Tilleczek, 2012, p 254).

Activism in policy research may be achieved in several ways, singly or together. One form of discursive achievement is through employing a methodology centred on co-construction where individuals or groups affected by a particular dimension of oppression contribute as partners in the research design and/or research process. For example, Tilleczek (2012) ‘committed to working with and for young people to collectively make fissures visible to those in policy and decision-making positions’ (p 254). Co-constructing or co-producing research can also be used as a sort of self-reflexive activism whereby power imbalances located in higher education might be problematised and disrupted to the wider benefit of communities and education (Duggan, 2021).

A key dilemma for writers, be they poets, philosophers or researchers, is how to give meaning to the world when there are so many interpretative repertoires to articulate and learn from. To speak or to write is to participate in a symbolic economy where meaning is negotiated and mobilised through the availability of scattered discursive resources. Writing, in essence, is that dynamic, productive site where meaning is continually made, normalised and contested. A related dilemma for writers therefore concerns the why of said meaning. Taking a postmodernist perspective to its logical conclusion, meaning is arbitrary in the metaphysical sense that it lacks any ontological fixity to speak of. It has no essence or origin, or at least its origin has no status beyond the ‘exteriority of accidents’ (Foucault, 1998, p 146). Meaning at best reflects the interplay between spontaneous action and reproduced habits of culture. Postmodern cynicism aside, meaning is not entirely free-floating or symbolic. It represents pragmatic, engaged attempts at sensemaking. In other words, meaning making can be characterised as essential epistemic work, a form of ‘anchoring’ that is vital to human cognition and abstract thinking (Eagleton, 2003, p 59). Consider the importance of meaning to human efforts at coping with complexity or making social reality amenable to capture by unique and historically contingent systems of signification and belonging.

The dilemma here, then, concerns the symbolic and material consequences that result from deploying certain discursive resources (words, imagery, tropes, arguments) over and against others in our productions and representations of the world. If we accept the view that there is no such thing as neutral writing, and that writing only makes sense through the provision of shared meaning, it is incumbent on writers to take responsibility for the habits and choices that shape their constructions of reality. This includes recognising what is at stake when we write. After all, writing is about taking positions. Why do we write? For whom do we write? What is to be gained or lost from writing in a particular way? What kinds of disagreements must be struggled over, negotiated, held apart or brought together to achieve particular kinds of writing? As Bacchi (1999) reminds us, problems and solutions are not arrived at indiscriminately through the identification of some pre-existent, transcendental nature.

Borrowing

The term borrowing has for a long time been a central focus of research in the field of comparative and international education. Due to this disciplinary anchoring, the topic of borrowing has typically been studied in a cross-border manner with a focus on how countries and their governments borrow from the tried-and-tested policy arrangements of other countries. There are two strands of borrowing research worth mentioning here. There is, on the one hand, the normative and applied strand of borrowing research that focuses on studying evidence of ‘best practice’ and the effective transfer and implementation of those practices to other contexts perceived to be in need of reform or improvement. Steiner-Khamsi (2014) argues that the goal of applied research is to provide solutions to identified problems, namely the optimal class size or the optimal frequency for prescribing student tests that enhance the quality of education. On the other hand, there is the analytical strand of borrowing research that situates borrowing as a phenomenon in-and-of-itself worthy of critical attention. Here the focus shifts towards studies that concern how and why borrowing occurs within and across particular spaces and times (Steiner-Khamsi, 2014). The focus of this entry concerns the latter strand of borrowing research.

Different generations of borrowing researchers have focused on distinct topics, from early research that investigated the choice of reference societies in national policy reforms, to more recent studies that analyse, among other things, harmonisation processes facilitated by international organisations such as the European Union. In these studies, the term borrowing is typically accompanied by another term, namely lending, used here to refer to the policy influencer rather than its opposite, the policy recipient. Such binary distinctions may be considered too simplistic to capture the complex realities of borrowing, however, including the actions of those who facilitate or impede such processes. Educational borrowing can also be used to denote a specific mechanism of deliberate and often linear education (policy) transfer (Perry and Tor, 2008) (see entry on ‘Transfer’). Additional terms can be used to represent or stand in for such processes, including the terms reception and translation (Steiner-Khamsi, 2014).

Narrative policy analysis

Narrative analysis in policy and the social sciences more generally has as its main focus the ways in which human subjects mobilise storytelling and the narrative form as a medium for producing meaning about the world and relations to the self. Politicians and policy makers, for example, deploy narratives through speeches and policy documents to achieve particular ends that include persuading the electorate of their vision, commitment or sentiment. Similarly, citizens assembled in a government council meeting addressing local councillors about a particular issue that is affecting them may draw on storytelling as an effective tool for communicating their preferences or grievances and discontents. In both cases, the narrative form of communication can be ‘best understood as the personal enactment of communal methods of self-accounting, vocabularies of motive [and] culturally recognizable emotional performances’ (Wetherell and Edley, 1999, p 338).

Policy as text or discourse can also be approached as narratives (‘policy narratives’) in the sense they reflect technologies, practices or rationalities of government (Bansel, 2015a). According to Chase (2017), narrative is the achievement of ‘[m] eaning making through the shaping or ordering of experience, a way of understanding one's own or others’ actions, of organising events and objects into a meaningful whole, of connecting and seeing the consequences of actions and events over time’ (p 421). A narrative approach to policy studies therefore closely observes how different, seemingly contradictory and competing discourses are brought together through the medium of narratives to communicate and represent definitions and practices of policy as well as policy problems and their solutions. Understood from this perspective, policies as artefacts do not reflect actually existing realities but rather reflect the political work of governments or other actors who actively seek to prefigure and contain realities to complement and realise particular ends. This includes mobilising policy as narratives in order to imagine and manage the possibilities for acting on and governing citizens as bearers of rights, obligations and duties (Wilkins, 2018) (see entry on ‘Governmentality’). The narrative approach therefore concerns questions of power and refusal, namely how policy narratives function as modes for curating governing, on the one hand, and modes for inciting resistance, on the other hand.

Mediation

In policy studies, mediation refers to two distinct processes. Lúcio and Neves (2010) describe the first as being where two or more parties with unaligned positions engage with one another through a further, dispassionate and neutral participant (a mediator) in order to reach a mutually agreeable policy position. This position cannot be one that is predetermined by the mediator. For this aim to be realised, the mediator must be acceptable to the other parties and must typically not occupy a position of authority in relation to the negotiators or wield power within the mediation process. This process must be confidential and based on open-minded negotiation rather than on confrontation, as well as aim to anticipate future potential conflicts. Importantly, decisions are reached by the negotiators rather than the mediator, whose role is to facilitate their communication. The impetus to align diverging interests or goals may come from within or beyond the grouping (not including the mediator), but participation in all cases must be voluntary. This sense of mediation has applications beyond policy formation, and may be used to reconcile relationships between, for instance, institutions, nations, corporations or factions; between individuals within them, or between any of those former and their communities (Lúcio and Neves, 2010).

While mediation's earliest and best-studied examples are located in conflict studies, particularly regarding labour disputes, Lúcio and Neves (2010) identify strong possibilities for mediation ‘as social and educational work’ (p 486). Their justification lies in increasingly robust evidence that mediation may function as ‘a communicative action’ (Lúcio and Neves, 2010, p 486) whose deployment may strengthen and develop, rather than repair, relationships between subjects who may be conceived as proactive agents of social transformation. In this way, Lúcio and Neves (2010) argue that mediation as social and educational work aims to problematise and complexify, and through that to construct new social relations in a spirit of dialogue and sharing.

Mediation may be employed more or less formally and at different points in the policy process. Exemplifying the more formal end of the spectrum, the US has statutes that determine the use of specific conventions for public policy mediation for the creation and revision of regulations (Laws and Forester, 2007).

World culture theory

Central to world culture theory (sometimes called world polity theory, world systems theory or world system analysis) is the claim that the development and emergence of education systems, policies and practices within nation-states is isomorphic and can be explained by wider systemic changes occurring at the international and global level where ‘rationalised myths’ (Silova and Brehm, 2015, p 12) perpetuated by world culture scripts/models come to bear upon and influence national and subnational policy contexts. In this sense, world culture theorists are less concerned with the role of unique path tendencies, organisational logics and value systems to the formation of education systems, nor do they take seriously the context-sensitive, micro-political strategies through which national policy frameworks are adapted in the context of regional and local developments and the contradictions and tensions flowing from these untidy convergences and problematic alignments. Instead, world culture theorists adopt the lens of methodological globalism (or ‘regionalisation’ and ‘Europeanisation’) to locate and explain the development of education systems according to trends considered to be generalisable and evidence of policy borrowing and policy transfer.

However, in order for a country to be amenable to statistical capture within this model of generalisation, it must have ‘already committed itself to the modern nation-state institutional apparatus’ (Rappleye, 2015, p 59) and therefore modelled itself according to a meta-policy or globally circulating discourse shared by other countries, that is, ‘world models [that] are a derivative of the dominant global position of the West’ (Rappleye, 2015, p 66). One implication of this is that world culture theory is often accused of normative commitments to epistemic communities and organisations originating in the Global North, giving rise to postcolonial critiques of the Eurocentrism of world culture theory (see Takayama, 2015). This might include a narrow technical focus on using metrics, performance indicators and output measurements to calculate teaching quality, school management, inputs and infrastructure, and learner preparation. In turn, the adoption of these policy instruments makes it possible for schools and school systems to be located within relations of equivalence where they are made to appear to be comparable and commensurate with each other.

Community

The concept of community in education may refer to a wide range of formal and informal arrangements or collective movements, from classrooms, parent forums and management groups to professional, discursive and epistemic groupings that embody multiple histories and contexts. These collectives may be grounded in culture, policy making, science, nation-states or economic systems. In addition to communities being thought of as entities spanning scales from the local to the global, they may also be empirically studied as arrangements that are subject to multiple national and transnational influences. Increasingly, researchers have turned their attention to critical questions about which communities are acknowledged and made visible in research and which ones remain invisible or even marginalised. This includes a related focus on which communities influence agenda-setting and policy and how. The critique of human-centrism (anthropocentrism) in education research, for example, demonstrates how nonhuman communities affect and are affected by policy.

One of the most popular definitions of community can be traced to the seminal work of Anderson (1991) and his historical investigations of the emergence of nationalism and nation-states. Anderson (1991) describes the nation as an imagined horizontal comradeship irrespective of inequality and exploitation experienced by its members. Here, Anderson (1991) examines the different historical processes (including education) that create the conditions of possibility for these imagined communities to take shape. The nation as a community can be considered anonymous in the sense that its members will never meet all other members. Yet, according to Anderson (1991), these members imagine the nation as something confined to a finite space known as the sovereign state. This notion of ‘imagined communities’ has emerged within empirical studies beyond any singular interest in nationalism, following Anderson's (1991) claim that communities can be ‘distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’ (p 7) and that many communities will be defined by imagination because they are temporally and spatially unfixed. Stables (2003), for example, characterises the school as an imagined discursive community, one that is mobilised by students and teachers but also by those who are not directly connected to it, such as politicians.

Leadership

Educational leadership is a field that draws on differing disciplinary backgrounds with distinctive epistemologies that produce knowledge claims that are arguably mutually incompatible. Leadership knowledge intersects with policy in diverse ways that reflect its underpinning epistemology. Here, specifically, the field may be broadly understood as composed of functionalist and critical parts (see Gunter [2016] for a more detailed mapping). Functionalist scholars tend to locate their work in the school improvement and/or effectiveness tradition (see, for example, Leithwood and Jantzi, 2005). This draws on a positivist epistemology that is often explicitly atheoretical or even anti-theoretical (Courtney et al, 2018); the legitimacy of such research lies in its unmediated responsiveness to questions regarding ‘what works’ in education. Courtney et al (2021a) describe how functionalist researchers largely render professional practice through leadership models denoted by adjectives such as ‘transformational’, ‘distributed’ and ‘system’, which they deploy in an often unproblematised and normative manner. Functionalist assumptions include that leadership is an ontologically valid concept and is necessary to improve education, whose goal is to improve students’ outcomes in standardised tests. Here, the leadership style/model is operationalised through the leader's vision, which inspires and motivates followers in ways that take little account of context. This decontextualisation is purposive: it enables an illusory universalism that underpins a leadership industry (Gunter, 2012). Privileged models change over time in a way that responds to state political agendas. For example, transformational leadership was imported from business into the field of education where it comprised a key mechanism for education reforms internationally. Charisma is integral to, but implicit within, this broader transformational model, with its focus on the single ‘heroic’ leader (see Courtney, 2021a). As heroism failed, the focus moved to distributed and then system models, all of which focus instrumentally on delivery and performance. Functionalist research into educational leadership is designed to be amenable to policy making through its claimed capacity to produce solutions to complex problems, for example.

The functionalist part of the field can be contrasted with the critical (Gunter, 2016; Courtney et al, 2021a; Courtney and McGinity, 2022). Drawing on social constructionism, critical scholars may problematise the very existence of leadership, noting that conceptual distinctiveness arrives only with the addition of the sort of adjectives mentioned earlier (Gronn, 2003).

Queer policy analysis

Queer policy analysis comes from queer theory, which itself draws on diverse intellectual and activist strands, not all of which are internally coherent. This might not matter; queer theory's principal definitional criterion is that normative definitions are to be resisted and problematised, including its own, and so ambiguity is a central feature. The field's semantic adoption of ‘queering’ to complement ‘queer theory’ reflects and results from the conceptual instability of the noun form. Using ‘queer’ as a verb foregrounds a particular disposition that produces oppositional, subversive and/or liberatory actions. In this entry, attention is drawn to some of the major ways in which queering has been operationalised in thinking about and practising education research and policy. These strands are considered alongside their conceptual antecedents and contributors, as well as the consequent implications for policy.

In an interview, Connell (Rasmussen et al, 2014) provides a ‘capsule definition’ (p 340) of queer theory that may usefully be unpacked and developed:

First, therefore, queer theory problematises binaries. Here, it reveals its activist foundations in the lesbian and gay movement which contained the first such binaries to be disrupted. Foucault (1976) argued that turning ‘homosexual’ from an act into an identity was purposively undertaken in order to construct and constrict those so named as objects of power in abjection of the normatively positioned yet fragile heterosexual. Drawing on Foucault's (1976) deconstructionist arguments as well as on Derrida's (Derrida and Houdebine, 1973) insights concerning binary oppositions, queer theory aimed to destabilise the ontological labels of gay, lesbian or straight, as well as to problematise their compulsory association with particular ideas about masculine and feminine (the heteronormative matrix). This strand concerns most obviously identities, particularly relating to sex and sexuality (see, for example, Courtney, 2014), especially in relation to individual experiences and lives.

Elite

Identifying putative elites is a key but problematic task because observing that a sub-set of a population functions as an elite insofar as policy formulation is concerned is easier than identifying who the members of that sub-set are. It seems that elite identification is a product of the intellectual and conceptual framework that is deployed to do so. Kakabadse et al (2011), for instance, typologise elite identity according to four theories. In classical theory, elites are composed of ‘people who have the highest indices in their branch of activity (“the strongest, the most energetic and the most capable”) within society’ (Kakabadse et al, 2011, p 3), which means that the constitution of elite groups is liable to change. In critical theory, elites are a product of ‘access to wealth and power’ (Kakabadse et al, 2011, p 3), which makes them hard to displace. In democratic theory, elites are those whose acquired skills are deployed or deployable for the common good. Elites can consequently be removed through democratic processes. In network theory, elites are constituted through ‘strong social, political or professional ties’, and so membership is ‘evolving [and] dynamic’ (Kakabadse et al, 2011, p 3). There is considerable literature that identifies a shift from economic through corporate to education elites, whereby actors made powerful through and within a capitalist landscape move their attention to the framing of public policy in ways that suit their interests. This means that elite actors are not obliged to directly participate in policy making but they may influence it through supranational institutions like the World Trade Organization (Gaus and Hall, 2017). This phenomenon, like its underlying neoliberal ideology, is global yet enacted locally by those acting in ways that reproduce a neoliberal orthodoxy (Courtney, 2017b; McGinity, 2017). In practice, it is not possible to disentangle the reproduction of neoliberalism from neoconservatism, whose definition foregrounds the reproduction of advantage and so is central to any discussion of elites.

Visual methods

Visual methods and visual analysis refer to tools and technologies used for generating and analysing data about the social world. Typically, visual methods make use of non-verbal modes of representation and/communication in order to supplement or compensate for traditional verbal or text-based approaches to data generation and sense making. Visual methods make use of a wide range of digital and non-digital artefacts to generate data about the social world, including maps, diagrams, photographs, video footage, collage and drawings (Radley and Taylor, 2003; Copeland and Agosto, 2012; Wilkins, 2012). Visual methods such as photo elicitation, auto-photography and participatory mapping are therefore particularly useful in creative and arts-based research and learning but also when working with research participants who, for whatever reason, cannot engage in conventional forms of data generation which rely on speech or written forms of communication. Through enabling people to communicate their perspectives and experiences through visual forms of representation, visual methods help to generate new knowledge and forms of meaning making, especially among ‘hard to reach’ groups (Delgado, 2015). In some instances, visual methods have been used to great effect as a supplement to interviews as a way to prompt memory and reduce misunderstandings between interviewer and interviewee (Harper, 2002). Central to visual methods, however, is an appreciation for the context in which visual artefacts of any description (maps, photographs, drawings) are produced, with the implication that visual artefacts cannot be read as neutral or unmediated reflections of ‘objective truth’ but rather emerge through an interpretive framework made possible by the producer and viewer.

In the 20th century, visual anthropologists primarily used documentary photography and film as supplementary artefacts for supporting empirical claims about the nature of the social world (Edwards, 1992), in what can be described as ‘realist ethnography’. In the 1970s and 1980s, these documentary and realist traditions of early visual methods came to be displaced by postmodernist, critical theory and cultural studies perspectives and concerns about the discursive composition and effects of the visual image, specifically its social and political function as a vehicle for affirming, contesting and concealing claims to power and ideology.

Fast policy

Since the 1980s, political and social scientists have been documenting the technological, economic and cultural effects of globalisation. Globalisation has given rise to a multitude of ontological and economic possibilities, from instantaneous communication to cross-border trade of physical commodities. Globalisation has therefore been studied at various scales and levels, from microqualitative studies observing the impact of resettlement on refugees and the emergence of hybridised local cultural identities, to macro-quantitative studies examining the impact of transnational capital mobility, trade liberalisation and international outsourcing on national industries.

Another significant impact of globalisation has been the intensification and compression of policy movement around the globe, held together by the involvement of ‘intermediary’ actors in the brokering, mediation and translation of relationships and exchanges between governments and agencies. This enables a range of intergovernmental and interagency pragmatic policy borrowing and fast-tracking policy decision-making to occur. The result is the translocal and cross-scalar flow and insertion of new global policy networks at the subnational and national level made possible by the expansion of multilateral organisations and international political and economic unions, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank and the European Union.

On the one hand, the increased mobility of policy ideas across the globe is, according to Peck and Theodore (2015), evidence of ‘fast-policy regimes’ (p 3) or ‘compressed policymaking moments’ (p xvi). These are mobile, fluid, transnational policy spaces in which intermediary actors and agencies spanning transnational corporations, philanthropic organisations, professional bodies and business communities work through long-distance interconnections to broker new kinds of cross-national political and institutional connections. Their aim is to influence and profit financially from the packaging and selling of ‘what works’ or ‘best practice’ solutions to different countries (Bartlett and Vavrus, 2016). While fast policy can give the impression of policy ideas moving seamlessly across national borders and subnational spaces more or less intact, Peck and Theodore (2015) warn against ‘reading off’ these processes as evidence that policy ideas are recontextualised and implemented according to interests or motivations that can be traced to some principle design, singular logic or predefined sequencing.

Ontology

Ontology is the naming and categorisation of reality, or that which is. Pluralising it to ontologies aligns with post-positivist insights into the multiple and contingent conditions of reality. Ontological statements, including classifications, about what is draw on how we think we know (see entry on ‘Epistemology’). Each of these two concepts requires and shapes the other. For example, an epistemological approach that draws on material semiotics ‘argues that the practice of relations shapes and forms the actors caught up in them’, that ontological realities ‘are done in practices’ (Law and Singleton, 2014, p 384, original emphasis) or enactment. Since different actors engage in different practices, this means that in material semiotics, what might have been thought of as an ontologically singular entity or phenomenon from a positivist perspective, is instead necessarily plural. This is compounded by the insight that even over little time, the context within which practice takes place also changes, which in turn produces new realities. That which is, or the ontological object, can never be singular in material semiotics and similar epistemologies. This multiplicity goes beyond the interpretive, where it is understood that a single event will be experienced and interpreted in many ways that themselves acquire an ontological status; it suggests that what is being interpreted is already ontologically multiple.

Asking what education policy is may consequently be seen as a more ontologically challenging and politically charged question than it at first appears, bringing to the fore issues including reality versus representation. That is to say, policy-as-relational-practice (social reality) and policy-as-text (representation) are ontologically more imbricated than they are identical, and it is evidence of power functioning effectively and teleologically to have them understood as reducible to one another, and/or as the text having privileged status over embodied practices.

The power to impose ontological understandings of what policy is constitutes a power over reality, including how subjects make sense of themselves, and so ontological framings are simultaneously largely implicit in policy and policy studies and also fundamental to the creation and reproduction of epistemic paradigms, their communities and claims.