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

The Necessary and the Contingent: On the Nature of
Academic Fields and of Comparative Education
Maria Manzon
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. But, if comparative education is not
a field, then why does it have infrastructures (professional societies,
journals, conferences, university courses) that make it visible as a field?
And why is there an uneven development and visibility of comparative
education in different places?
These questions are too complex to discuss in this article and
are examined more fully elsewhere. 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. 1 What are the necessary constitutive elements
of academic disciplines? What are their contingent features? And
what are the factors – structural, agency – oriented, and discursive –
influencing disciplinary change?
The literature on academic disciplines and fields can be found
in several domains: philosophy of education, sociology of education,
social theory, and higher education. In the first place, I review the
literature on the nature of academic disciplines and fields, categorising
it into two main groups based on epistemological stance: first, the
theories with a realist, essentialist, and objectivist stance on knowledge,
in contrast to the second group which adopts a social constructionist,
anti-essentialist, and subjectivist perspective.
After exploring different perspectives on the essential nature of
disciplines and fields, I explore the issues of change and diversity in
the classification of knowledge into disciplines and fields. This issue
deals with the social process and context of academic knowledge,
that is, with what shapes the contours and contents of knowledge
as institutionalised in disciplines and fields, schools and faculties,
I take as a point of departure the concluding comments of Bray (2004, p.8 )
where he points out the way to address this debate, concretely of the need to
examine the nature of disciplines and of the factors that bring about their development.
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