The evolution of professionalism - Centre for Policy Studies in ...

work to the different forms of capital (economic, cultural and social) that school
agents both draw on and develop in their practices and thus trace the exercise of
professional power and the accumulation of professional capital.
Policy Studies
Over time, researchers have approached policy studies from different perspectives.
Drawing upon Roger Dale, Ozga (2000) identifi ed three different approaches or policy
projects based on the intention of the policy research. The “social administration
project” refers to early work, emerging in the post-war era with the development
of the welfare state and the growth of sociology. Sociologists sought to provide
government decision makers with empirical data that would enable them to reform
policy in the interests of the client rather than government (Ozga, 2000).
Since the 1960s, the “policy analysis project” has overtaken the fi eld of policy
studies. Here researchers are concerned with making policy more effective and
effi cient. The focus is more on solving policy problems than on understanding
policy. Within the policy analysis project, there is a continuum of research. The
range is from the “academic analysis of policy” to the “analysis for policy”. The
former is less engaged in practice while the latter can be advocacy oriented. The
policy analysis project has been criticized for both its concern for clients and its
lack of theoretical grounding (Ozga 2000). A third approach, the “social science
project” is more theoretically oriented, and primarily aimed at understanding
policy. This approach is less driven by a concern for clients and oriented toward
the collective good.
The “social science project” aligns itself with critical policy analysis as
articulated by Taylor et al. (1997). By combining critical theory with policy
analysis, critical policy analysis, like the “social science project”, concerns itself
with understanding how things work. It no longer needs to draw on the same frame
of reference used by the policy maker and draws on critical theory for insight into
problems. By remaining within the policy analysis framework these understandings
can be used politically and strategically. Critical policy analysis:
cannot afford to ignore the technical issues of planning, but it must also be
political and strategic. It can help expose the ways in which agendas are set
and framed in favour of dominant interests, and it can identify and overcome
obstacles to a democratic planning process. It can reveal the ways in which
information provided for consultation might be distorted or false or misleading…
It can contribute to an understanding of a policy already in place or help create
pressures towards a new policy agenda. In this way, critical policy analysis can
be both reactive and proactive. (Taylor et al. 1997, 20).
Policy sociology is the label used to describe the amalgam of the social science
and critical approaches described above. The work upon which this book is based
used policy sociology as the frame of reference. More emphasis is placed on
political economy than earlier approaches and takes into account more fully the
structural context and the social forces impinging on the system. Further, recent
developments in the sociology of education, often with a Foucauldian infl uence,
challenge the linear representation of policy process in the dominant literature.
4 Introduction