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Robertson, Susan L. and Roger Dale, Researching Education in a Globalising Era: Beyond
Methodological Nationalism, Methodological Statism, Methodological Educationism and Spatial
Fetishism, published by the Centre for Globalisation, Education and Societies, University
of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1JA, UK, available: http://susanleerobertson.com/publications/.

Researching Education in a Globalising Era: Beyond Methodological

Nationalism, Methodological Statism, Methodological Educationism
and Spatial Fetishism
Susan L. Robertson and Roger Dale

Centre for Globalisation, Education and Societies

University of Bristol, UK

Forthcoming in (2008) J. Resnik (ed)

The Production of Educational Knowledge in the Global Era
Rotterdam: Sense Publishers
Researching Education in a Globalising Era/Robertson and Dale

Introduction

At its most concrete, the voluminous literature on globalisation is a complex and

overlapping set of stories not only about profound changes that are taking place but our
own understandings of these changes. These transformations have followed the
disintegration of the post World War II settlement in the developed western economies
in the 1970s, the emergence of neo-liberal economic policies and new technological
developments in the 1980s, and the collapse in 1989 of the iconic Berlin Wall which had
structured West-East alliances and relations (Mittelman, 2004). The post-war suturing of
state-economy-civil society relations also unravelled in the face of attacks on
enlightenment thinking which had shaped ideas about modernisation and progress
(Harvey, 1989), as well as notions of knowledge, power and subjectivity (Foucault, 1982).

While there is considerable debate over precisely how best to define globalisation
(Scholte, 2005), there is broad agreement that it is an historical process involving the
uneven development and partial and contingent transformation of political, economic
and cultural structures, practices and social relations (Hobsbawm, 1999; Jessop, 1999
Mittelman, 2004; Scholte, 2005 whose distinctive features (in contrast to modernisation)
involve the denationalisation and transformation of policies, capital, political
subjectivities, urban spaces, temporal frameworks (Sassen, 2006: 1)). Crucial in these
unfolding processes is the rise of powerful globalising actors; the intensification of
accumulation; new political, social and class struggles (Harvey, 2006);. Having said this, it
is also important to note that globalisation is also taking place within as well as beyond
national boundaries. Sassen (2003), for example, argues that processes of globalisation
have resulted in the partial denationalisation of the state, with important implications for
questions of citizenship, representation and politics.

Within this, the education systems of modern nations have faced major changes in terms
of, firstly, the mandates that now drive education policy, secondly, the human and fiscal
resourcing for the provision of education (capacity), and thirdly, the governance of the
sector (Dale, 1997). These changes have been well rehearsed – so our remarks at this
point are necessarily brief. The new mandate for education—what it is desirable that the
education system should do—has increasingly privileged global economic
competitiveness, lifelong learning, education for a knowledge based economy and
education as an export industry. The resourcing of education (human and fiscal)
emphasises efficiency, effectiveness and accountability. Finally, new structures of
governance (funding, regulation and so on) have reconfigured relationships between the
state and civil society, public and private, citizens and communities (Newman, 2001).

One of the key effects of globalisation on education is an evident shift away from a
predominantly national education system to a more fragmented, multi-scalar and multi-
sectoral distribution of activity that now involves new players, new ways of thinking
about knowledge production and distribution, and new challenges in terms of ensuring
the distribution of opportunities for access and social mobility (Dale and Robertson,
2007). One way of conceptualising the changing nature, scope and sites involved in the
work of education is to see a new ‘functional and scalar division of the labour of
education’ emerging (see Dale, 2003).

More broadly, these emerging social structures of the world demand new knowledges so
that we might understand better a new ontology of world order (Cox, 2002: 76). While
not a new debate in the social sciences, it is an important, albeit highly contested, one.

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Ulrich Beck (2002), for instance, has argued that the global transformation of modernity
calls for rethinking the humanities and social sciences. He argues that the study of
globality and globalisation has revolutionised the social sciences as these processes call
into question the deeply held national assumptions that have historically shaped the
development of modern social sciences. Like Cox (op. Cit), what is at issue for Beck
(2002: 29) is that it is not possible to understand changes in the nature of the relationship
between social structures and our knowledge of the world with tools that are no longer
fit for purpose. We require a new lexicon, Beck argues, to describe social phenomena
that is not dependent upon what he colourfully refers to as ‘zombie’ categories—such as
‘national states’, ‘identities’, ‘classes’ and so on. Second, rethinking the social sciences
opens up the possibility of an ideational shift that would in turn generate possibilities for
a more dialogical ‘cosmopolitan’ imagination (ibid).

Beck’s arguments around cosmopolitanism as a new imaginary are controversial and ones
that we do not intend to engage with here. Rather, the more important point for this
chapter is to take up the conceptual and methodological challenges he poses concerning
the social sciences more generally and our analysis of education in a globalising era more
specifically. It is fundamentally the changes of the scale and the means of governance at
and through which ‘education’ is carried out that has exposed the shortcomings of
previous theorising.

In this chapter we focus upon four key underpinning assumptions which still shape
research on education but which we argue are challenged by globalisation;
methodological nationalism, methodological statism, methodological educationism and
spatial fetishism –or as we have argued elsewhere – a set of ‘isms’. By ‘ism’ we mean the
tendency to see these categories as natural, fixed and unchanging—or in other words as
ontologically and epistemologically ossified. The assumption/acceptance of these
categories means that the understanding of changes brought about by globalisation may
be refracted through the lenses of unproblematic conceptions of the nationalism, the
state, education systems and the spatial geometry of education, even as these changes
themselves bring about changes in the meaning of, or the work done by, nation states
and education systems and thereby undermine their validity.

Four Assumptions of Research in Education

(i) Methodological nationalism

The outstanding, and most relevant, example of methodological nationalism is ‘the nation
state’. The nation state has been at the core of comparative education throughout its
history. It has been the basis of comparison, what has been compared. As Daniel
Chernilo puts it, “…the nation-state became the organizing principle around which the
whole project of modernity cohered” (Chernilo, 2006: 129). We might see it as the
institution that embodies the principles of modernity and through which those principles
are to be delivered. Furthermore, the nation-state conception is further reinforced by its
being embedded within a well established system of similar states, (where nation states
are recognised as legal entities under international law) which deepens the difficulty of
both looking beyond, and of imagining alternatives to it.

The nation state has been the core concept on which the methodological nationalism
that has characterised most of social science has been based (Martins, 1974). We can

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identify four distinct elements of this problem (for an extended critique of the
conception of methodological nationalism in comparative education see Dale 2005). The
first, and best known, is the idea that methodological nationalism sees the nation state as
the container of ‘society’, so that comparing societies entails comparing nation states (see
also Beck, 2002; Beck and Znaider, 2006) and their distinctive economic, cultural and
social systems. Invoking the national as an analytical category in a cultural account tends
to result in categories such as Indian, or Korean, with little ground given to the huge
differences within this category either at the level of identification or at the level of ethnic
groupings. The second is the close association between nation states and comparison
brought about by the ‘national’ being the level at which statistics have traditionally been
gathered. As one of us put it elsewhere, methodological nationalism operates both about
and for the nation-state to the point where the only reality we are able to
comprehensively describe statistically is a national, or at best an international, one (Dale
2005, 126). The third element of the problem arises from the tendency to juxtapose an
unreconstructed methodological nationalism to underspecified conceptions of
‘globalisation’ in a zero-sum relationship – that is as the global has taken on more
functions and power this ostensibly has been at the expense of a new disempowered
state. The final element concerns the extent of the suffusion, or identification, of
concepts of the nation state with a particular imaginary of rule. This has become clearer
through recent discussions of conceptions of ‘sovereignty’, ‘territoriality’ and ‘authority’
(see especially Ansell and Di Palma 2004). These discussions essentially see the particular
combination of responsibilities and activities that nation-states have been assumed to be
responsible for as historically contingent rather than functionally necessary, or even
optimal. Thus, though the ontology that “…a region of physical space… can be
conceived of as a corporate personality”, the nature, implications and consequences of
this have varied greatly, and it remains the case that “…the unity of this public authority
has generally been regarded as the hallmark of the so-called Westphalian states” (Ansell
2004, 6), while “…the chief characteristic of the modern system of territorial rule is the
consolidation of all parcellized and personalised authority into one public realm” (Ruggie,
1993: 151). However, while “…public authority has been demarcated by discrete
boundaries of national territory…so, too, has the articulation of societal interests and
identities that both buttress and make demands upon this authority” (ibid.: 8). The
question is then raised about the “…implications of a world in which the mutually
reinforcing relations of territory, authority and societal interests and identities can no
longer be taken for granted” (ibid.: 9)

(ii) Methodological statism

If methodological nationalism refers to the tendency to take the nation state as the
container of societies, the related but considerably less recognised term—methodological
statism—refers to the tendency to assume that there is a particular form intrinsic to all
states. That is, it is assumed that all polities are ruled, organised and administered in
essentially the same way, with the same set of problems and responsibilities, and through
the same set of institutions. The problem emerges because the state, as an object of
analysis, exists both as a material force and also an ideological construct (Mitchell, 1999:
76). The ideological construct tends to dominate, and spread—for instance through
global interventions like the ‘good governance’ agenda (Weiss, 2000). Added to this
problem, as Bourdieu (1999: 53) points out are the problems for the analyst when
categories are produced by the state and are also deeply embedded in societies. Thus, “to
endeavour to think the state is to take the risk of taking over (or being taken over by) a

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thought of the state, that is, of applying to the state categories of thought produced and
guaranteed by the state and hence to misrecognise its most profound truth”.

We see this in the way an assumed set of institutions has become taken-for-granted as the
pattern for the rule of societies and that this pattern is the one found in the West in the
20th century, and in particular the social-democratic welfare state that pervaded Western
Europe in the second half of that century (see Zurn and Leibfried, 2005, 11). Central –
and, we might argue, unique--to this conception was that all four dimensions of the state
distinguished by Zurn and Leibfried (resources, law, legitimacy and welfare) converged in
national constellations, and national institutions. What Zurn and Leibfried make clear,
however, is that “…the changes over the past 40 years are not merely creases in the
fabric of the nation state, but rather an unravelling of the finely woven national
constellation of its Golden Age” (Ibid.: 1). To put it another way, both the assumption of
a common set of responsibilities and means of achieving them, and the assumption that
they are necessarily rather than contingently associated with each other, can no longer be
sustained, outside a continuing methodological statism.

We can point to two further assumptions of methodological statism in the social sciences
in general and education in particular. The first is the recognition of its locational
specificity as the basis of methodological statism. The model of the state that became
taken-for-granted in academic discourse across most of the social sciences was not one
that was ever established or present in the greater part of what we refer to as developing
countries. That model was not only imposed on the majority of post-colonial states that
were created after World War II, but formal acceptance of, and attachment to, it became
the main basis of membership of the ‘international community’. As has been pointed out
by Ferguson and Gupta (2002), among others, that model of the state was never an
effective means of conceiving of how the majority of developing societies were ruled.
They see work on states based on two assumptions; verticality, which “refers to the state
as an institution somehow above civil society, community and family” (Ibid.: 982). This
top-down assumption is contrasted with grass roots and encompassment, “…the state,
(conceptually fused with the nation) is located within an ever widening series of circles
that begins with family and local community and ends with the system of nation-states”
(op.Cit). This conceptualization produces a sense of hierarchical nested-ness. This
politically imposed representation of ruling and with it sovereignty of rule has not only
distorted attempts at introducing fair, efficient and effective forms of rule in those
countries, but its acceptance as a valid and accurate account by academics as well as
politicians, on the basis that the same term meant the same thing, irrespective of
circumstances, has equally distorted analyses of the governance of developing countries.
The depth of the penetration of these kinds of assumptions on the social sciences and
relevant to education and international development is summed up by Ruggie as
displaying “…an extraordinarily impoverished mind-set…that is able to visualize long
term challenges to the system of states only in terms of entities that are institutionally
substitutable for the state” (1993: 143). Our point here is not to suggest that the state as
an actor is unimportant. It has, and continues to be a very significant and powerful
ensemble of institutions that is able to mobilise power and act. Rather our focus is on,
first, the way the idea of the state represents itself as a universal form rather an a
particular representation that has been univeralised, and second, on the way the state
itself as both a project and container of power has evaded close intellectual scrutiny.

The main conclusion to be drawn from this brief discussion is that one essential basis of
any response on the part of education researchers to understanding processes of

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globalisation is to recognise that using ‘the state’ as an explanatory concept, without

major qualification, is both to accept an inaccurate picture of the world and to perpetuate
a particular outcome of political imposition. To put it briefly; one consequence of
globalisation for comparative education, and for social science more generally, is to make
it clear that the nation-state should be regarded as explanandum, in need of explanation,
rather than as explanans, part of an explanation. Or, to put it another way, the
component parts of what is connoted by the nation-state, need to be ‘unbundled’, and
their status and relationships examined anew in a globalised world, by comparative
educationists as by other social scientists.

We can illustrate the points made above about methodological statism by recognizing
that the national state is no longer the only most important, or taken-for-granted, actor in
the area of education. Indeed, as Chernilo (2006: 134) argues, what is to be explained is
how it is that the state has managed to represent itself as the primary site of power and
container of these social relations, including education as a particular geometry of
activities, when empirical investigation could tell us that this was not the case. That
aside, concretely we can see that if we look closely at the governance of education—that is
the combinations and coordination of activities, actors/agents, and scales, through which
‘education’ is constructed and delivered in national societies—we can identify four
categories of activity that collectively make up educational governance (that are for the
sake of exposition taken to be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive), funding;
provision, or delivery; ownership; and regulation. These activities may in principle be carried out
independently of each other and by a range of agents other than the state –though the
state remains a possible agent of educational governance and at a multiple set of scales,
from the local to the global.

One example of the kind of theorizing made possible by the recognition of and escape
from, methodological nationalism and statism is to conceive of ‘education’ as not
necessarily and exclusively associated with the nation-state, but as constituted through
the complex workings of functional and scalar divisions of the labour of educational
governance (see Dale 2003), which can mean any or all of a single locus of governance,
parallel loci of governance at different scales, or hybrid forms of governance across
scales, and/or activities, and/or agents. For example, since the restructuring of the
education sector in the UK and the emergence of new processes of European
regionalism, important aspects of the governance of education have now being separated
off from the sub-national and reconstituted at the national and European scales and
downward into schools. So, what is broadly meant by governance here is the replacement
of the assumption that the state always and necessarily governs education through
control of all the activities of governing, with what might be called the coordination of
coordination, with the state possibly retaining the role of coordinator, or regulator, of last
resort (see Dale, 1997).

(iii) Methodological educationism

Education has been a central project of modern and modernising societies. Since the
early nineteenth century, mass education has been a crucial element of the modern nation
state in the interests of collective progress and in the interests of equality and justice
(Meyer, 1999: 131). As Meyer notes, “these doctrines became increasingly dominant
over time and, after World War II, were celebrated in many UN and UNESCO
pronouncements and in the highly developed scientific ideologies about education as a

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direct ingredient in national economic and political development, as with human capital
theory.

‘Education’ would appear on the surface to be the most constant of the three
components we are currently examining. After all, almost everyone in the world has
either been to school, or is to have the opportunity to go to school—which, interestingly,
is how education is defined in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). However, we also
know that what is understood by ‘education’ differs widely and along multiple
dimensions, and that the experience of schooling varies enormously.

Despite this, ‘education’ tends to be seen as equally fixed, abstract and absolute as
methodological nationalism and statism. However ‘education’ requires explanation rather
than provides it. It also has similar consequences for analysis and understanding. Key
evidence for this is to be found in Meyer et al’s analyses of the global scripts of education
(see for example, Meyer et al 1992). The most crucial, but also the most taken for granted
feature of these discourses is that they essentially equate education with (compulsory) schooling.
We might also note that the central elements of what we refer to as ‘education’ have
themselves co-evolved in a rather similar way—indeed, alongside the evolution of the
nation-state (see Green 1993)—and may be in need of a similar kind of conceptual
‘unbundling’ that matches the unbundling that is now taking place of the system itself as
a result of education being constructed as a for-profit industry that operates locally and
trans-nationally.

This point is also made by comparativists Bray and Kai (2007: 141), who point out that
while education systems have long been a prominent unit of analysis, “…detailed
scrutiny shows that scholars rarely define what they mean by systems”. A major reason
for this state of affairs, they argue, is that education and education systems are difficult to
delineate and hence describe.

We would also suggest that the term ‘education’ often escapes close analytical scrutiny as
it has a dual character; it is both descriptive and normative. It is descriptive in the sense
that it tends to refer to a system--for instance, higher education establishments or
schools. What is ignored in this description are all of the other ‘influences’ – such as
home, peer groups, workplace and so on, that contribute to the learning of a person. It is
normative in that it is value-laden and that education—in this case ‘schooling’ and ‘the
education system’—is viewed as a good thing and that the ‘education’ one receives in
such a setting has positive value. These descriptions are then assumed to be linked to
what is effectively a global normative imaginary that education is inherently—
necessarily—‘a good thing’ (Meyer, 1999). That is to say, the rationale for education is
universally approved and educationism assumes that is what education systems are
created to achieve with the consequence, as John Meyer points out, that most sociology
of education accepts those goals as unproblematic and is devoted to pointing to failures
and shortcomings in meeting them (Meyer Op. Cit). This normative move enables us to
sidestep the fact that education is about the acquisition of particular knowledges;
knowledges that may or may not work for an individual or group depending upon their
social location (Bourdieu, 1997). It also usefully disguises the role of education in
capitalist systems; as a tool for social stratification.

The idea of ‘education as a human right’, by which they mean access to schooling, is a
further illustration of the point that we are making. However, what is it a right to? The
right to have your own situated knowledges either taken account of, or alternatively,

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ignored? While there is some political mileage in having a concept that can absorb a
variety of meanings—for instance in arguing that modernizing societies need access to
education through the provision of schools, it does mean that there is important
analytical work to be done in looking more closely at purposes, processes, practices and
outcomes.

Educationism is also compounded by two self-limiting parochialisms in the field of

education. Disciplinary parochialism restricts the bases for the study of education of
education to approaches that come within the field, often, it seems, to work that contains
‘education’ in its title; this leads to analyses that share the same assumptions about the
field—with the lexical equivalence removing the need to problematise them (see Dale
1994). Institutional parochialism similarly refers to the tendency within all education
studies to take existing education systems, institutions and practices in isolation as self
evidently the appropriate focus for their endeavours, and not to problematise these
systems, and so on (see Dale 2005: 134)

In the conclusions to their essay Bray and Kai (2007: 141) call on scholars to explore the
implications of different definitions and boundaries in order to examine new ways of
conceptualizing education. We support their call. We believe there are three elements
involved in addressing this problem. The first is to disaggregate, or ‘un-bundle’ these
different components. The second is to seek to establish the determinants and
consequences of the boundaries and content of education as a separate sector; and the
third is to focus on questions around how, by whom and under what circumstances,
education is currently represented.

The first, which we have previously discussed (see Dale, 2000), involves replacing the
single term education by a series of questions that any understanding of education has to
take into account. This essentially entails stipulative representations of ‘education’ with a
set of variables or questions, as in Table 1. The basic idea behind the ‘Education
Questions’ is that rather than assuming/accepting that we all mean the same thing when
we are talking about education, we pose a set of precise questions that can frame
discussions and provide a basis for coherent discussion and systematic comparison. The
questions also prise open, through questions about governance and consequences, the
fact that knowledge—its production, circulation, consumption and transformation—is a
highly political process and therefore one that demands rigor by researchers because it
matters.

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LEVEL EDUCATION QUESTIONS

Level 1 Who is taught, (or learns through processes explicitly designed to

foster learning), what, how and why, when, where, by/from whom,
Educational
Practice under what immediate circumstances and broader conditions, and
with what results?
How, by whom and for what purposes is this evaluated?

Level 2 How, in pursuit of what manifest and latent social, economic, political
and educational purposes; under what pattern of coordination
Education
Politics (funding, provision, ownership, regulation) of education governance;
by whom; and following what (sectoral and cultural) path
dependencies, are these things problematised decided, administered,
managed?

What functional, scalar and sectoral divisions of labour of educational

governance are in place? [authors: I have suggested that you explain
Level 3
these divisions in more detail in the text of your chapter.]
The Politics In what ways are the core problems of capitalism (accumulation,
of Education social order and legitimation) reflected in the mandate, capacity and
governance of education? How and at what scales are contradictions
between the solutions addressed?
How are the boundaries of the education sector defined and how do
they overlap with and relate to other sectors? What ‘educational’
activities are undertaken within other sectors?
How is the education sector related to the citizenship and gender
regimes?
How, at what scale and in what sectoral configurations does
education contribute to the extra-economic
embedding/stabilisation of accumulation? [Authors: Again, this
point could be further discussed—perhaps an extra sentence or two.]
What is the nature of intra- and inter-scalar and intra- and inter-
sectoral relations (contradiction, cooperation, mutual indifference?)

Level 4 What are the individual, private, public, collective and community
outcomes of ‘Education’, at each scalar level?
Outcomes

Table 1: Education Questions

(iv) Spatial fetishism

In this fourth section we address a more recent problem with research on education—
one that tends to nuance context by specifying the global and globalisation as the new
element in society. One common approach is to privilege outcomes that are self-
evidently global (such as reference to the expansion of international agencies such as the

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such as the World Trade Organization), ignoring the more nuanced, inside the national,
changes that have taken place. Examples here include the rise of international trade
departments exclusively concerned with trade in education services (as in the case of
Australia), the rise of the globalizing for-profit education sector in countries such as the
United States, and the impact on local communities of ‘globally-competitive’ universities.
Another is one that we see in some papers submitted for review to our journal
Globalisation, Societies and Education or at conferences. Globalisation appears in the title and
the text, however this tends to be the end of the story. We neither know what difference
globalisation makes to the policies, programmes and practices under analysis, and nor do
we know what kind of phenomena globalisation is supposed to be. The global and
globalisation are thus inert concepts; the container—context—is simply inflected with an
adjustment of content, like a new product on the shelf. Brenner (2003: 38) describes this
tendency in the social sciences as spatial fetishism. It involves “…a conception of social
space that is timeless and static, and thus immune to the possibility of historical change”.
The context now is globalisation, yet its causal dynamics—in other words ‘what difference
does space make?’ –are absent.

There are a number of different ways in which spatial fetishism is evident in research on
education and globalisation. Take the research on the restructuring of education that
focused on decentralization that was so popular during the 1980s (cf. Caldwell and
Spinks, 1988). Concepts like ‘local’ and ‘place’ tended to assume an essential and
romantizied meaning (familiar, good); one that was juxtaposed against the global
(powerful external force, abstract space, bad). The ‘local’ is appealed to as a site where an
imagined community has strong social links (social capital) while the community’s actions
are always collectively oriented rather than self-interested. This essentializes the nature
of community, its interests and relationships.

In the wider literature on globalisation, the spatial is binarised—as either global or local.
Several problems emerge as a result. One is that “…the global appears as a telos on the
move in an ongoing process called ‘globalisation’” (Gibson-Graham, 2002: 27) defying
transformation. While this might be expected, for instance, when politicians galvanize
support for a political project, it is not particularly helpful in research work for it tends to
construct globalisation as a process without a subject (Hay, 1999). The problem that
emerges here is that not only are the actors (states, multinational firms, international
organizations and so on) not placed under scrutiny, but we have no sense of the kinds of
agents and their politics. This in turn limits action (Robertson, 2006). A second problem
in binarising the local-global in this way is that processes we might associated with
globalisation are always out there, rather than in here (for instance, inside national
boundaries, institutions, subjectivities). However as Sassen (2006) argues,

…these processes take place deep inside national territories and institutional
domains that have largely been constructed in national terms in much of the
world. What makes these processes part of globalisation even though they are
localized in national,indeed sub-national, settings is that they are oriented
toward global agendas and systems. They are multi-sided, transboundary
networks and frameworks that can include normative orders; they connect
subnational or “national” processes, institutions and actors, but not
necessarily through the formal interstate system.

In order to overcome the problem of fetishizing space, it is important that we see it as

integral to social processes and that it is produced from social relations (Lefebvre, 1974).

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It is both the object and outcome of struggles; struggles that take place at multiple scales.
Insisting on this means insisting that society and space are integral to each other rather
than space being an undifferentiated spatial backdrop against which social relations take
place, as when globalisation is simply an interchangeable or newer context. As Massey
argues; “…the spatial is social relations stretched out” (1994: 2). She goes on:

The lived reality of our daily lives is utterly dispersed, unlocalised in its
sources and in its repercussions. The degree of dispersion, the stretching,
may vary across social groups, but the point is that the geography will not be
territorial. Where would you draw the line around the lived reality of your
daily life? ... If we think space relationally, then it is the sum of all our
connections, and in that sense utterly grounded, and those connections may
go around the world (Massey, 2005: 184-5).

Taking Sassen and Massey’s points together, it is important that our research imaginaries
resist ways of thinking about space as either here or there, but rather we are seeing
complex assemblages.

This way of thinking about the spatial in relation to education enables us to see
knowledge production, its circulation, consumption and transformation—both in its
official (see Apple, 1990) and unofficial forms—as constituting and being constituted
spatially, and that this spatial organisation is a particular geometry of power; an
assemblage of moving/institutionalised relations that not only have horizontal and
vertical reach, but that these processes are also dynamic. And, as Massey argues, since
“…social relations are embued with power and meaning, the spatial is as an ever shifting
geometry of power and signification” (1994: 2).

If we spatialise our analysis of very important governance shifts, such as with school
choice policies or the creation of a global education market, we can see how space and
scale (as a vertical partitioning structure – Collinge, 2005: 189) are critical dynamics in
this process. Butler and Robson (2003: 6), for example, show how middle class families
in London—in contrast to working class families–adopt a strategic approach to
education markets with the whole metropolitan area is treated as a single market for
which they identify the most appropriate opportunities for individuals in the household.
Their practices in turn constitute space and the social relations that underpin a highly
selective middle-class education market. The strategic and relational nature of the spatial
is highlighted in Waters (2006: 1048) study of the way middle class Hong Kong families
“…employ spatial strategies to by-pass local academic competition and therefore
localized social reproduction by accumulating valuable cultural capital in Canada”. This
in turn undermines the value of locally-delivered education. Similarly, we can see how
new education projects are being constructed in space to construct different kinds of
knowledge/spaces that compete with existing projects, such as the creation of a
competitive European Higher Education Area through the reorganization of higher
education in the Member States of Europe and beyond (Keeling, 2006); the construction
of a global education industry under the regulatory auspices of the World Trade
Organisation (Robertson, Bonal and Dale, 2002); or the global position-taking of
Australian universities which in turn shape the global higher education space (Marginson,
2007). These new formations are constituted through new strategies and social relations.
The actors that have been involved in these projects have used different scalar locations
to either unsettle (Bologna) or bypass (global exporting of education services) and the
fixed institutionalised interests of the ‘education profession’.

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Researching Education in a Globalising Era/Robertson and Dale

Conclusions

In this paper have tried to make four methodological arguments in relation to

researching education and globalisation: that methodological nationalism, methodological
statism, methodological educationism and spatial fetishism are chronic tendencies within
the social sciences more generally, and specifically within education research. The point
of offering this critique is to be mindful of this in our own research work. It is also to
open up some lines of debate regarding the implications of globalisation for education
research. We have argued that, as a whole, to make an unproblematised national
container the focus of all analytic attention is more than ever problematic in an era of
globalisation, while the tendency to reify, or fetishise, the national level can be seen to
extend to the form of rule—‘statism’—and, in the case of areas like comparative
education, to the object of study, education. The second is that this exercise
demonstrates that terms were never actually accurate—the state, for instance, in most
settings never ‘did it all’, for instance. Third and most important in this chapter, is that
each of these is in danger of generating from the core categories of studying education a
set of what we have called methodological ‘isms’, which have to be recognised and
overcome if we are to progress our analysis of education, particularly comparatively, in
an era of globalisation (Dale and Robertson, 2007). Both the generic and the nation-
specific (indeed, what counts as nation-specific) characteristics of education sectors have
changed and are changing under the pressure of globalising forces. As is apparent from
our argument, it is no simply moving beyond the national to a new scale. This would
simply be to commit the same fallacy but from the other direction—through the
romance of the global. The wider and more important argument is that education as
sector is changing in ways that make existing assumptions and forms of analysis—those
that make up methodological educationism—unhelpful, even misleading. While the
global and the regional are being re/constituted at the current time, to talk about and
research education in a global era means that we are attentive to the complex ways that
knowledge processes that represent themselves as ‘education’ are being
constructed/constituted at multiple scales—out there and inside national boundaries.
Finally simply adding ‘globalisation’ to education without being sufficiently attentive to
what it means to talk about the spatial and its causal powers risks fetishising the spatial.
This is particularly problematic as it is our view we in turn risk not seeing the strategic
way in which actors are using space to further new education projects with very different
logics and deeply inequitable social relations.

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