Abstract
This chapter considers some conceptual and methodological challenges that face researchers in their attempts to understand and to compare education across cultures. The two core sections respond to philosophical, anthropological and sociological questions associated with the conceptualization of culture, and to methodological questions associated with conducting international and comparative education research across cultures. Through analysis of the concept of culture and of its consequences – including a genealogy of culture, a deconstruction of ‘national culture’ both in modernity and in late modernity under conditions of globalization – and by consideration of the more thoughtful approaches to comparative methodology in the field, the chapter aims to contribute to further conceptual clarity and methodological rigour in this domain.
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Notes
- 1.
An earlier and substantially longer version of this chapter was published in Bray et al. (2007).
- 2.
Why ‘fragmented’ and ‘de-centred’? While in Enlightenment thought the rational individual is (newly) sovereign, the centre of conscious volition and the originator of a coherent set of intentions, recent developments in social theory have challenged this view, suggesting a ‘de-centred’ and ‘fragmented’ self that is far less sovereign than the Enlightenment perspective might have held. It was of course the Enlightenment view that individuals could be freed by reason from ignorance and religious superstition, and thus take sovereign control over their lives. In addition to Foucault’s perspective which I considered in the paragraph preceding this footnote, I summarize here three further perspectives from late modernity that challenge this view.
First, the Marxist structuralist Louis Althusser (1966/2003) argued that the self is by no means sovereign because the power to effect change lies in the material circumstances bequeathed to us by history. In this he reiterated the view of Marx (especially in his later work) encapsulated in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” (1852/1984, p. 15).
Second, the psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan (1977) developed further the ideas of Freud, reiterating that what we think of as the sovereign, conscious, autonomous self is far more influenced by unconscious psychic process than, say, humanist psychologists such as Carl Rogers might have argued. Identity, in Lacan’s view, is anything but innate, fixed, or centred in the conscious self: it is continually being formed and reformed over time through unconscious processes.
Third, the philosopher of language Jacques Derrida (1981) pointed out that individuals are not freely able to fix meaning in the language they use. Instead, their linguistic expressions are bound by their language, which provides a pre-existing structure within which their thoughts and intentions are formed. In this Derrida drew on the work of the structural linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. Agency, in this perspective, lies not in individuals, because, bound by their linguistic structures, the rules of their language, and the unstable systems of cultural meanings within which they are enmeshed, they cannot be sovereign ‘authors’ of their statements: hence the term structuralism and the debate with agency theorists about the drivers of social change.
- 3.
In response to the results of a popular survey of national foods in 2001 by Food Service Intelligence, the former UK Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, declared chicken tikka massala “Britain’s true national dish”.
- 4.
Tobin has since added the dimension of comparisons across time with his recent study, Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited: China, Japan and the United States (2009). Interested readers would do well to consult this volume with regard to the complexity of historical comparison.
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Mason, M. (2014). Culture in International and Comparative Education Research: Conceptual and Methodological Issues. In: Reid, A., Hart, E., Peters, M. (eds) A Companion to Research in Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6809-3_44
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