Sociology was born as an attempt to delimit an object of investigation offered by society as a social reality. The ambition was that of “treating the social facts as things” (Durkheim) or of understanding and explaining the social relations by respecting an “axiological neutrality” (Max Weber). Today, however, we are in the presence of a new kind of sociologists, and they are by no means the less popular ones, who are not trying to avoid assessments in their analysis of the present social world. I have in mind especially two sociologists, Ulrich Beck (Munich) and David Held (London). I will discuss in particular the view of sociology presented in a recent book of Ulrich Beck (Macht und Gegenmacht im globalen Zeitalter, 2002, translated into French under the title Pouvoir et contre-pouvoir a l’ere de la mondialisation, 2003), and I will show some analogies between Beck and Held. Finally, I will try to identify the points hat make the present sociological epistemology different from that of the great founders of this science.

The cosmopolitan vision

Policy Research in Educational Settings: Contested Terrain

The idea of fast policy regimes, first appearing in Jamie Peck’s 2002 article published in no other than this journal, has been influential in shaping the agenda of the emergent research of policy mobility studies for more than a decade. Now, in the first research monograph on fast policy regimes (and also likely the first in policy mobility studies), Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore have drawn on their individual, as well as collective, research since the late 1990s to offer a more expanded consideration of this salient global phenomenon. In their conceptualization, fast policy is a policymaking condition coproduced by intensified and instantaneous connectivity between actors and institutions in varying scales, across places, in this neoliberalization era. Continuous interreferencing and experimenting in high velocity and frequency is what sets fast policy apart from other forms of policy mobility in history. While many contemporary neoliberal schemes exhibit these characteristics, the authors in this book specifically interrogate the policy-making conditions of two policy models: conditional cash transfer (CCT) and participatory budget (PB). Students of critical policy research will likely appreciate how Peck and Theodore begin the book with an extensive and incisive discussion over the epistemology, methodology, and research methods guiding their work; these fundamental components of research have not received enough consideration in critical policy studies. In the introduction and part I, the authors reject the policy transfer tradition that narrowly attributes policy movement to rational technological diffusion. Rather, they assert a social constructivist reading of policy movements as “continuous and often contradictory process-cum-practices of translation” (p. xxvii), encompassing mutations situated in nonleaner circulations, contextualization, embedding, and dis-embedding across different geographic sites and scales. The associated methodological challenges that come with expanded reformulation, namely following policies through complex social landscapes across multiple sites, are addressed with adapting the extended case method. This approach informs the interviews and constructive engagement Peck and Theodore conducted when focusing on policy networks and following moving policy ideas at the elite level. Extended case method also dovetails with the choice of two policies that shared structural conditions (e.g., strongly promoted by influential international organizations such as the World Bank) but yielded divergent outcomes in different places. In addition, the Global South origin of the two cases offers an opportunity to examine the less understood South–South and South–North policy movements. Part II of the book illustrates this approach through discussing the policy-making conditions surrounding the rapidly expanding CCT model. It starts with the Opportunity NYC experiment under New York City’s Bloomberg administration, which was modeled on the Oportunidades CCT program in Mexico, the poster child of the World Bank’s neoliberal approach to poverty alleviation by incentivizing work and human capital–building. Despite deliberate designs to make Opportunity NYC accommodate New York’s own context, the program’s mixed results failed to lift Bloomberg’s reputation and brought it to a quick end. Yet, this setback did not undermine the status of Oportunidade as an exemplary social policy model with plenty BO O K R EV EW

Fast policy: experimental statecraft at the thresholds of neoliberalism

This paper reports on a systematic literature review of policy research in the area of environmental and sustainability education. We analyzed 215 research articles, spanning four decades and representing 71 countries, and which engaged a range of methodologies. Our analysis combines quantification of geographic and methodological trends with qualitative analysis of content-based themes. Significant findings included temporal spikes in published policy research occurring in the mid-1970s, late 1990s, and after 2005, as well as geographic under-representation of Africa, South and Central America, Eastern Europe, and North and West Asia. The majority of articles reviewed were non-empirical; empirical articles overwhelmingly focused on teaching and learning directives, rather than exploring the complexity of policy development or enactment. We conclude our analysis by describing key research gaps as highlighted by the review and propose directions for moving forward policy research in environmental and susta...

Environmental and sustainability education policy research: a systematic review of methodological and thematic trends

Environmental unsustainability is due to both structural features and historically specific characteristics of industrial capitalism resulting in specific patterns of production and consumption, as well as population growth. Sustainability literature criticises the established corporate and political power hegemonies, interested in maintaining economic growth, as well as inability or unwillingness of citizen-consumers to counteract these hegemonic tendencies. Yet, official policies are still targeted at social and economic ‘development’ as a panacea for unsustainability challenges. Instead, renewed accent on social and economic objectives are outlined by a set of sustainable development goals (SDG) that include objectives of fighting poverty, promoting better health, reducing mortality, and stimulating equitable economic growth. What is less commonly critiqued is the underlying morality of unsustainability and ethical questions concerned with the ‘victims of unsustainability’ outside of socioeconomic discourse. The achievement of SDG goals, as will be further elaborated on in this article, is unlikely to lead to greater social equality and economic prosperity, but to a greater spread of unsustainable production and consumption, continuous economic as well as population growth that has caused environmental problems in the first place and further objectification of environment and its elements. This article argues that an invocation of ethical duty toward environment and its elements is required in order to move beyond the current status quo. Such ethical approach to unsustainability can effectively address the shortcomings of the mainstream sustainability discourse that is mainly anthropocentric and therefore fails to identify the correct locus of unsustainability.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in International "Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology" on 2015 available online: http://www.tandfonline.com https://doi.org/10.1080/13504509.2015.1111269

https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/

/pdf/the-victims-of-unsustainability-a-challenge-to-sustainable-40mtzl6i5y.pdf

The victims of unsustainability: a challenge to sustainable development goals

This paper is concerned with the twinning of sustainability with priorities of economic neoliberalization in education, and in particular via the mobility or diffusion of education policy. We discuss the literature on policy mobility as well as overview concerns regarding neoliberalism and education. The paper brings these analyses to bear in considering the uptake of sustainability in education policy. We ask to what extent sustainability as a vehicular idea may be twinning with processes of neoliberalization in education policy in ways that may undermine aspirations of, and action on, environmental sustainability. Toward the end of the paper, we draw on data from an empirical study to help elucidate how the analytic frames of policy mobility can inform our analyses of the potential concerns and possibilities of sustainability as a vehicular idea. In particular, we investigate how sustainability and related language have been adopted in the policies of Canadian post-secondary education institutions over ...

https://sepn.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/McKenzie-et-al-In-Press-Policy-Mobility-and-Neoliberalism.pdf

Rebecca McNeil

Papers

Education policy mobility: reimagining sustainability in neoliberal times