First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is an assessment of the reluctance of American education institutions to undergo change and reform at a time when it is considered necessary. The lack of public confidence in educational institutions is discussed along with the subsequent consequences.

The New Institutionalism in Education brings together leading academics to explore the ongoing changes in K–12 and higher education in both the United States and abroad. The contributors show that current educational trends—including the increased globalization of education, the growing emphasis on educational markets and school choice, the rise of accountability systems, and the persistent influence of business groups like textbook manufacturers and test makers on educational policy—can best be understood when observed through an institutional lens. Because schools and universities are organizations that are stabilized by deeply institutionalized rules, they are subject to the enduring problem of substantive educational reform. This book gives researchers and policy analysts conceptual tools and empirical assessments to gauge the possibilities for institutional reform and innovation.

In this ground breaking analysis, Terry M. Moe treats Hurricane Katrina as a natural experiment that offers a rare opportunity to learn about the role of power in the politics of institutional reform. When Katrina hit, it physically destroyed New Orleans' school buildings, but it also destroyed the vested-interest power that had protected the city's abysmal education system from major reform. With the constraints of power lifted, decision makers who had been incremental problem-solvers turned into revolutionaries, creating the most innovative school system in the entire country. The story of New Orleans' path from failure to revolution is fascinating, but, more importantly, it reveals the true role of power, whose full effects normally cannot be observed, because power has a 'second face' that is hidden and unobservable. Making use of Katrina's analytic leverage, Moe pulls back the curtain to show that this “second face” has profound consequences that stifle and undermine society's efforts to fix failing institutions.

'The Politics of Education' provides an introduction to both the political dimensions of schooling and the politics of recent educational reform debates. The book offers both undergraduates and starting graduate students in education an understanding of numerous dimensions of the contested field of education, addressing questions of political economy and class, cultural politics, race, gender, globalisation, neoliberalism, and biopolitics. Discussions work through contemporary reform debates that include some of the most widely discussed reform topics such as school privatisation, standardised testing, common core curriculum, discipline, and technology. The book covers contemporary educational debates and seriously considers views across the political spectrum from the vantage point of critical education, emphasising schooling for broader social equality and justice.

Institutions play a pivotal role in structuring economic and social transactions, and understanding the foundations of social norms, networks, and beliefs within institutions is crucial to explaining much of what occurs in modern economies. This volume integrates two increasingly visible streams of research—economic sociology and new institutional economics—to better understand how ties among individuals and groups facilitate economic activity alongside and against the formal rules that regulate economic processes via government and law. Reviews "This volume is a welcome addition to the expanding literature on institutional analysis. . . . Besides sociologists, we are afforded the pleasure of contributions from anthropologists, economists, historians, political scientists, and scholars located in schools of law and education. . . . One of the pleasures of the volume is the wide range of topics, times, and locales addressed by the authors. . . . In all these diverse situations, the application of institutional queries and approaches enhances our understanding and appreciation of the endlessly rich and diverse nature of social life."—Contemporary Society "This admirable book makes a strong contribution to institutional theory, has many excellent chapters . . . and is a model for interdisciplinary exchange and cross-fertilization. . . . It is dense with interesting ideas and points for debate, and I heartily recommend it."—Sociological Research Online

The study of political institutions is among the founding pillars of political science. With the rise of the 'new institutionalism', the study of institutions has returned to its place in the sun. This volume provides a comprehensive survey of where we are in the study of political institutions, covering both the traditional concerns of political science with constitutions, federalism and bureaucracy and more recent interest in theory and the constructed nature of institutions. The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions draws together a galaxy of distinguished contributors drawn from leading universities across the world. Authoritative reviews of the literature and assessments of future research directions will help to set the research agenda for the next decade.

This book sets out a series of possible approaches to pursuing social justice in and through educational settings. It identifies a series of key features of the contemporary political, theoretical and popular landscape in relation to school practice.

This is an assessment of the reluctance of American education institutions to undergo change and reform at a time when it is considered necessary. The lack of public confidence in educational institutions is discussed along with the subsequent consequences.

This book comprises six main chapters and addresses the core research question: How can the endurance of academic bias in Ghana’s secondary education system be explained in the context of educational reform versus change of government concurrence? Six sub-questions have subsequently been derived from the core research question, enabling a comprehensive and rigorous treatment of the subject matter of investigation. The manuscript adopts an historical institutionalism approach, combining path dependency with partisan theory in explicating structural persistence in the secondary school system in Ghana. A case study methodological design procedure has been employed in the investigation of three episodes of educational reform, anchored on qualitative content analysis as the main data reduction mechanism.