Journal ArticleDOI
Introduction: Understanding Public Policy through Its Instruments—From the Nature of Instruments to the Sociology of Public Policy Instrumentation
TLDR
In this article, the authors explain the significance of a political sociology approach to public policy instruments in accounting for processes of public policy change, since it reveals a (fairly explicit) theorization of the relationship between the governing and the governed.Abstract:
Public policy instrumentation and its choice of tools and modes of operation are treated either as a kind of evidence (governing means making regulations, taxing, entering into contracts, communicating, etc.) or as if the questions it raises (the properties of instruments, justifications for choosing them, their applicability, etc.) are part of a rationality of methods without any autonomous meaning. This paper aims to explain the significance of a political sociology approach to public policy instruments in accounting for processes of public policy change: (1) public policy instrumentation is a major issue in public policy, since it reveals a (fairly explicit) theorization of the relationship between the governing and the governed: every instrument constitutes a condensed form of knowledge about social control and ways of exercising it; and (2) instruments at work are not neutral devices: they produce specific effects, independently of the objective pursued (the aims ascribed to them), which structure public policy according to their own logic.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Governing by numbers: the PISA ‘effect’ in Europe
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the impact of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) on national education systems in Europe and beyond, and concluded that PISA has become an indirect but nonetheless influential tool of the new political technology of governing the European education space by numbers.
Journal ArticleDOI
Reconceptualising the 'policy mix' for innovation
TL;DR: The authors argue that the emergence of the "policy mix" concept into common use in the field of innovation policy studies provides a window of opportunity to reconsider some basic and often hidden assumptions in order to better deal with a messy and complex, multi-level, mult-actor reality.
Journal ArticleDOI
Governing education through data in England: from regulation to self‐evaluation
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the relationship between changing forms of the governance of education and the growth and uses of data in the context of England and suggest that the massive growth of data has unbalanced the relations of governing and created highly centralised system steering.
Journal ArticleDOI
Administrative Burden: Learning, Psychological, and Compliance Costs in Citizen-State Interactions
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors develop the concept of administrative burden as an important variable in understanding how citizens experience the state, and argue that administrative burden is a venue of politics, that is, the level of administrative burdens placed on an individual, as well as the distribution of burden between the state and the individual, will often be a function of deliberate political choice rather than simply a product of historical accident or neglect.
Journal ArticleDOI
Digital education governance: data visualization, predictive analytics, and ‘real-time’ policy instruments
TL;DR: The landscape of digital policy instrumentation in education is surveyed and maps and two detailed case studies of new digital data systems are provided, including ‘learning analytics’ platforms that enable the tracking and predicting of students’ performances through their digital data traces.
References
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Book ChapterDOI
Economy and society : an outline of interpretive sociology
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the economy and the Arena of Normative and De Facto Powers in the context of social norms and economic action in the social sciences, and propose several categories of economic action.
Journal ArticleDOI
Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe a scientific and economic controversy about the causes for the decline in the population of scallops in St. Brieuc Bay and the attempts by three marine biologists to develop a conservation strategy for that population.
Journal ArticleDOI
Policy paradigms, social learning, and the state: the case of economic policymaking in Britain
TL;DR: The authors examined the role of ideas in policy making, based on the concept of policy paradigms, and found that a conventional model of social learning fit some types of changes in policy well but not the movement from Keynesian to monetarist modes of policymaking.
Book
Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics
James G. March,Johan P. Olsen +1 more
TL;DR: The state has lost its position of centrality in contemporary political theory and an emphasis on bargaining among conflicting interest have usurped ideas that embedded morality in institutions, such as the legal system and the corporation, as foundations for political identity as discussed by the authors.
Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe a scientific and economic controversy about the causes for the decline in the population of scallops in St. Brieuc Bay and the attempts by three marine biologists to develop a conservation strategy for that population.