This chapter focuses on differences across disciplines. We investigate patterns over time as well as ideological differences at the present time. Since data is most plentiful for the US, this chapter focuses primarily on a single country.

This chapter introduces our data and methods of analysis. We begin by laying out the research design employed for the Romanian Natural Experiment. In the second section of the chapter, we discuss problems of generalizability and how they might be overcome. In the third section, we introduce the World Values Survey and our empirical strategy for analyzing that data, along with important caveats. In the final section, we address a potential problem of measurement in the Romanian Natural Experiment and World Values Survey, both of which are subject to social desirability bias.

This chapter surveys extant work on the topic, beginning with a discursive view of the material and continuing with a systematic survey focused on journal articles that estimate a causal effect. Most of these studies indicate that university education has a liberal effect on students. However, a closer look at this literature reveals a more complex picture.

This chapter explores various explanations for this liberal shift in the academy. We begin by reviewing six common explanations: dislocation between cultural and economic capital, public sector employment, genetics, intellectual activity, the opening of higher education in the postwar era, and self-selection. Next, we introduce a functionalist approach that focuses on the long-term consequences of an institution with a high degree of organizational autonomy whose purpose is to pursue general truths about nature and society that can be grounded in reason.

This chapter introduces the topic, our approach to it, our thesis, and the keyword of “liberalism.” Next, we outline the book.

This chapter presents the main results from the Romanian Natural Experiment and the World Values Survey tests. Outcomes are divided into seven general topics: (a) social capital, (b) democracy, (c) law-abidingness, (d) culture, (e) cosmopolitanism, (f) economics, and (g) overall ideology. In each case, we show that university attendance exerts a liberal effect on social and political attitudes.

Decoupling

Decoupling is one of several ways in which organisations might resist (or not) external, so-called ‘institutional’ pressures to be and act in a certain way (see, for example, Coburn, 2004), with other possibilities ranging from enthusiastic adoption, through grudging acceptance and avoidance, to refusal. In this spectrum, decoupling is a form of avoidance. It originated as a mechanism to explain lack of intra-organisational change in the literatures on institutional theory, with landmark contributions from, among others, Weick (1976) and Meyer and Rowan (1977). Weick (1976) pointed out that rational theories of change in organisations, including schools, often fail to account for what actually happens there and what might motivate it. Weick (1976) subsequently developed the notion of ‘loose coupling’ to indicate the ways in which ‘coupled events are responsive, but that each event also preserves its own identity and some evidence of its physical or logical separateness’ (p 3).

Meyer and Rowan (1977) built on Weick's (1976) insight by suggesting that a binary exists between those two elements of an organisation that are most often loosely coupled or decoupled. The first element consists of the organisation's structures, which grow to reflect the demands of the environment or what Meyer and Rowan (1977) call the ‘institutional rules’ (p 340) where institutional refers to beyond the organisation. These rules ‘function as myths which organisations incorporate, gaining legitimacy, resources, stability, and enhanced survival prospects’ (Meyer and Rowan, 1977, p 340). (In other framings, these institutional rules would constitute the policy landscape to be resisted, accommodated or embraced). The second element, decoupled from the first, consists of the technical realm of routine work activities within the organisation, which may operate according to quite different logics or imperatives. This means that ‘conformity to institutionalised rules could promote the long-term survival of the organisation without necessarily increasing its efficiency or technical performance’ (Oplatka, 2004, p 149).

Taking up this analytic in relation to education, Oplatka (2004) notes that ‘one aspect of schools’ conformity to socially legitimated changes and innovations is that their organisational structure and processes mirror the norms, values, and ideologies institutionalised in society’ (p 148). In many states and jurisdictions internationally, these ideologies contemporarily will be largely grounded in market-based logics.

Chapter 4 discusses various theories of learning that have an impact on how EC professionals can work with young children. Theories about how children (and, indeed, adults) learn science and the factors that affect learning in young children are described. The relationship between everyday concepts and scientific concepts is distinguished. The place of affective factors in children’s learning is also described. Various case studies are presented to highlight aspects of children’s learning.

Implementation

Policy implementation ‘may refer to anything meant to happen after an intention or aspiration has been expressed’ (Hupe, 2014, p 166). However, it has largely been constructed in the sub-field of implementation studies as having certain common features. These include a rejection, or under-emphasising, of the role of theory; an assumption of rationality in the actors involved; a strict conceptual division of labour between policy makers at the ‘top’ and implementers at the ‘bottom’; a reliance on a technical interpretation of the mechanisms of implementation; and an understanding of the relationship between the elements in a causal chain as linear and direct. Implementation in this positivist perspective is amenable to being rendered as broad-brush diagrammatic models comprising, for instance, wheels, cycles or one of the latter in a series of sequential or perceived causal stages.

Such simplistic models cannot capture the complexity of the social and political interactions involved in policy processes. Neither can the conceptual and theoretical tools used in most implementation studies satisfactorily explain how policy ‘gets done’. Consequently, the sub-field, which emerged following Pressman and Wildavsky's (1973) landmark publication, is characterised by disputes. For instance, the field engaged in a long-lasting debate regarding whether policy implementation should be seen as ‘top-down’ or ‘bottomup’. A ‘top-down’ perspective is concerned with how faithfully, effectively and efficiently a policy is translated into practice from the hierarchical apex, where it is formulated, to the chalkface, and by which mechanisms. Any deviations from the original policy intention are problematised and the implementer blamed for them. Concomitantly, the values and actions of the policy maker are accepted uncritically and adopted as the starting point of the implementation study. Hupe (2014) describes ‘mainstream implementation studies’ (p 170) as typically ‘top-down’ and tending to be explored through single case studies. ‘Bottom-up’ implementation studies are concerned, on the other hand, with the motivations, experiences and actions of those who are meant to be doing the implementing. These actors are characterised by Lipsky (1980) as ‘street-level bureaucrats’. Far from wilful non-compliance, bottomup studies demonstrated the diverse influences on actors as they engage with policy.

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.