Comparative Education Bulletin - Faculty of Education - The ...

curricula, programmes. I draw from the literature on sociology of
knowledge, sociology of education and social theories that have
dealt with educational change. The debates in the literature could
conceptually be grouped into theories that emphasise structure at
one end of the spectrum, and human agency at the other end, with
middle ground theories focusing on both structure and agency, and
their mutual relationship with knowledge. It is worth noting that the
discourse-oriented theory of Foucault cannot be subsumed entirely
under either structure or agency as it spans the spectrum of both
structure and agency with its underlying notion of power.
In this review of the theoretical debates on the nature of academic
disciplines and disciplinary change, I have encountered two main
puzzles: first, how to reconcile two seemingly unrelated bodies of
literature on disciplines and fields: the realist, objectivist conceptual
definitions of fields, and the phenomenological, subjectivist,
contentious, and critical perspectives on fields of knowledge as fields
of power; and second, how to link and integrate theories of social
change with the ‘shaping’ of knowledge by structure and/or agency,
and/or discourse. I conclude the article with an attempt to integrate
these diverse perspectives into a meaningful theoretical framework for
analyzing whether comparative education is a substantively distinct
field from education or not.
Social Theory and Disciplinary Knowledge: Historical and
Intellectual Contexts
I discuss the nature of academic disciplines, first from a realist perspective,
followed by a phenomenological or social constructionist
perspective. A realist perspective views disciplinary knowledge as
reflecting a discernible and stable reality, or real-world differences
in subject matter. By contrast, a phenomenological perspective takes
knowledge as essentially socially constructed. Before proceeding with
their divergent explanations of the nature of disciplinary knowledge,
I devote some discussion to the historical and intellectual contexts of
these varying perspectives. I take the 1970s as a historical dividing
line in this discussion, since this decade particularly witnessed a
revolutionary shift in the dominant epistemology and world view.
Prior to the 1970s, the dominant epistemology was realist,
materialist, and positivist in orientation. But the publication in 1979
of Jean-François Lyotard’s seminal work, The Postmodern Condition,
marked a new epistemological challenge. The postmodernist turn in
the 1970s introduced social constructivist, anti-essentialist and counterontological
theories. In parallel with these epistemological shifts
(and perhaps informed by them), there were also transformations in
the dominant worldviews prevalent in the social sciences. Prior to
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