Book Review: Comparative education: the construction of a field

Maria Manzon spent several years at the University of Hong Kong pondering on the history and meaning of comparative education. This book is the result of this pondering. In his introduction to the book, Robert Cowen recalls (gently) grumbling, “that we did not know very much about ourselves” as comparative educationalists (p. xiii), and he further acknowledges that this very book put closure to his (gentle) grumbling. For those of us trying to make sense of comparative education, Manzon’s book is mandatory reading.

Manzon organizes the book around two essential questions, the first institutional in its nature, “Why is comparative education institutionalised as a distinct field when its intellectual distinctiveness seems to be blurred?” (p. 2). Following this line of thought, the second question refers to the intellectual substance of the field, simply, “What is comparative education?” (p. 2). To reply to the first question, she reviews, as the second chapter’s title indicates, Disciplines and fields in academic discourse (p. 13) drawing specifically on Foucault’s genealogies of academic fields and on Bourdieu’s field theory. Manzon admits, with Foucault, that “academic disciplines are, to some extent, socially constructed [my emphasis]” (p. 26). With that, Manzon sets up her tools for analyzing comparative education institutions as “historically contingent discursive formations of heterogeneous elements;” emerging from “power struggles” and constituting “power relations;” requiring “disciplines and disciplinary institutions” for “stabilisation of discourses [emphasis in original]” (p. 28). Instead of fully accepting the broadening of the concept, i.e. that knowledge and “truths” emerging from disciplines are also socially constructed, Manzon, perhaps hesitantly, characterizes the “intellectual substance of knowledge it aims at as essential and universal” (p. 26). She then turns to Bourdieu to analyze the intellectual field as “shaped and re-shaped by the interaction between macro-/meso-structural forces and the micro-political interests of human agency” (p. 32). Hence, her analysis of comparative education is striving to understand the “complex interactions among the relatively autonomous theoretical discourses that struggle to appropriate symbolic capital in the field, and the social, political and economic contexts in which these discourses are accepted or rejected” (p. 35).

To set up the ground for analysis, chapter 3 presents a bird’s view of the field of comparative education “as institutionalised in universities, specialist books and journals, and professional societies from 1900 to 2008” (p. 37). In particular, useful chronological histories trace evolution and models of the teaching of comparative education, of research and publication in the field, and of specialized institutions, including international agencies such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and professional organizations such as comparative education societies. Using the analytical tools already established, Manzon characterizes some of these latter as organizations created to “be represented on the WCCES [World Council of Comparative Education Societies] as one more entity at par with other entities irrespective of their unequal political, economic and academic power” (p. 122), even if this representation proved purely “symbolic” since, “what lay behind an organizational façade was nothing but inactivity” (p. 122). In other cases, the creation of societies “represented power struggles over positions and institutional resources in the field, sometimes catalyzed by micro-political reasons” (p. 122). The historical contingencies leading to the creations of societies are analyzed from a Foucauldian perspective, drawing on sources where, not without humor, human agency is illustrated by haphazard events, such as people who “bumped into each other” (p. 123, quoting Wong and Fairbrother (2007, p. 245)). Manzon’s analysis, then, is situating comparative education in “the complex interplay of structure and agency,” and “not purely the outcome of intellectual pursuits, but also of pragmatic and political reasons” (p. 123).

In chapter 4, Manzon turns from the analysis of the institutional spaces to delineating the intellectual history of the field, including its epistemological boundaries. She is drawing among others on Paulston’s taxonomy of “root paradigms and branching theories” (pp. 134–139)—which is situating the theoretical shifts in comparative education—as well as on Cowen’s “paradigmatic themes” (pp. 139–141); both are attempts to explaining the field and its evolution. To avoid the oft-too Western-centered history (which Manzon is implicitly—and rightly—criticizing: “if they [comparativists] focused on the ‘developing’ world, it was to offer educational prescriptions to achieve national development;” (p. 144)), she also includes alternative intellectual histories, from mainland China to socialist Eastern Europe, South America and Africa (pp. 142–151).

The nature of the discourse of comparative education as “a discipline, a field, a method, or such other designation coined by academics” (p. 153) is then deconstructed in chapter 5. In particular, García Garrido’s (1996) delineation of the debate of the object of comparative education is used as a reference for the discussion, starting with the position that there is no object and therefore “no science of comparative education”—“it is only a methodology” (p. 158). Rather than concurring with this reductionist argument (which is analyzed drawing on Mason (2008)), Manzon is positing that the characteristics of comparative education also lie in its “Otherly dimension (commonly cross-cultural, cross-national, cross-regional, cross-/trans-societal) [emphasis in original]” (p. 169). A further element, she argues, may be related to its teleological element—a theoretical, pragmatic or critical purpose (pp. 173–176).

Manzon subsequently turns to related comparative disciplines (comparative politics, comparative sociology, etc.) and to educational sciences (history of education, anthropology of education, etc.) to further her positioning of comparative education as a distinct—if wobbly—field. This leads to its characterization as composed of “heterogeneous elements—objects, methods, theories, participants—which, due to historically contingent conditions, have come together to form a more or less stable discursive formation known as ‘comparative education’” (p. 209). In her final chapter, Reconstructing comparative education, Manzon leaves us with a reminder that its evolution is not “linear, unidirectional and necessary,” but rather “non-linear, multidirectional and contingent” (p. 228).

Mark Bray in his series editor’s foreword labeled Manzon’s volume “a milestone” (p. xi); and Erwin H. Epstein considered it as “in the same league as the great classics of the field” and “indispensable … for scholars who seek a genuine grasp of the field” (back cover). I would like to add that Maria Manzon, in her deconstruction of the field also reconstructs it in its multidirectional, heterogeneous and contingent facets, in a way that is finally making sense of comparative education. For scholars and students of the field, this book indeed constitutes mandatory reading.