Disciplines and Fields in Academic Discourse

Abstract

There has been much scholarly debate on whether comparative education is a discipline, a field, a method, or simply a different perspective in education. Some of its critical practitioners have pointed out the field’s lack of a substantive institutional and epistemological core (e.g., Kazamias & Schwartz, 1977; Cowen, 1990). A survey of the comparative education literature reveals that there is no universally consistent definition of comparative education, but that there are instead comparative educations (Cowen, 2000). As a first step to address the above debate adequately, I explore here the literature on the nature of academic disciplines and fields, and the socio-historical explanations of disciplinary change.