Conference Agenda

This symposium will highlight the role of European policy elites (experts, consultants, advisers, etc.) by showing that they wield significant power and legitimacy in shaping educational reforms during last decades at global level, while at the same time its illustrates the social and political features of these reforming groups and networks in national spaces. By charaterising these European elite groups and networks by their positions within the State and/or International Organizations, the symposium will display the circulation of ideas and knowledge, beliefs and assumptions, between individuals and groups, but also their relations of dependence as well as their technocratic and/or ideological connivance that shape a doctrinal puzzle.

Often referred to as neo-liberalism versus welfarism, these ideas, discourses, and prescriptions are more a complex combination of personal experience, adoption of scientific and expert statements, formulation of values or principles of justice, but also political expediency in front of public opinion and interest group pressures. Far from considering educational reforms and decision-making as linear, sequential, or incremental processes, the symposium will emphasize authoritarian, sometimes nationalistic stances, but also uncertain dimension of power facing the uncertainty and complexity inherent to policy-making at global scale. It will underly the incoherence and cognitive dissonance of decision-making, the tacit and shared knowledge on which justifications are based, or the story-telling that legitimizes changes in political rhetoric

Therefore, the symposium will help to better understand ongoing and endogenous transformations of the educative State, in characterizing interactions within national, European and global elites, but also their resources and capacities for action in framing public action programmes and delivering political discourses, through games of competition and rivalry, according to specific professional, administrative, managerial cultures and ethics.

Beyond mapping national, Europaen and global links, which demonstrate also some affinities and proximities between these elites, the symposium also will intent to characterize the more or less structured, more or less formal policy networks that shape the European reformist agenda in education through recommendations and prescriptions leading to lasting and relatively irreversible changes in policy-making.

Based on the comparison between several European countries, bringing together different authors specialized in education policies, the symposium will seek to answer the following questions

- How do these elites exercise their power, their authority, by mobilising different resources and capacities to influence the decision-making process?

- How are these elites structured in networks or groups, epistemic communities or coalition of causes, in relationships that facilitate the sharing of knowledge, ideas, representations and beliefs on educational policies at national and global level?

- What is the role of cognition, values, beliefs, representations and the strategy in these alliance games and power relationships? What is the impact of public action instruments and their interpretation (laws, indicators, data, etc.)?

- How is it possible to characterize the type of proximity or affinity maintained by these elites within State, in other institutions or networks, or in International Organizations?

From a methodological perspective, policy makers will be chosen for their membership in a ministerial cabinet, as heads of a ministerial directorate or as experts/advisers for the Ministry of Education, or for their relationships with global networks and organisations, etc. Whenever possible, their socio-professional career and their various positions in education or elsewhere will be established. Analyses would developed from the study of different expert groups, national conferences, representative institutions, and parliamentary hearings in which this elite has intervened with important effects on implementing reforms.

This communication will demonstrate how the formal group of responsible officials in the Czech Republic ceased to be decision elite in the normative course of educational reforms and was replaced by a fluid group of elite normative actors who operate on different logic and through different spatial forms (Wirthová, 2021). They publish many normative papers and recommendations and held public debates influencing publicly state officials, politicians, and other decision-makers to change education system. It is argued that the prior horizontal division is accompanied in effect by hierarchisation, that through practices of “co-invitation” (to a debate or an expertise) produce consecration that provides pride and elevation above ordinary matter, and provide the possibility of evading both subordinate relations to formal institution officially responsible for the educational reform (MOE) and responsible relations to the audience (those affected by these reforms as schools, teachers and parents). This new normative elite is a mix of various jurisdictions, some state officials among them, but these loyalties are less important than the spatial practices that enable both to intervene and to construct moral and expert identity to its members by moralising quantitative data as something inherently Good. Therefore, this elite is not based predominantly on economic advantages, although partnership with wealthy actors (banks) is involved, but on the ability to spatially evade limits and secure the channels for intervention. The discourse emerging elite normative infrastructure produce mobilises both the neoliberal vocabulary of effectivity, auditing, measuring quality and moral of “doing good” (Wirthová, 2022). This reproduces the division among those to be measured and improved in quality (the matter) and those who do not come under this measurement (individual-knowledgeable-expert actors who pursue the common good for everyone and therefore are incontestable).

Wirthová, J. (2022). Patterns of actorship in legitimation of educational changes: The role of transnational and local knowledge. European Educational Research Journal, 21(4), 658 –679.Wirthová, J. (2021). Anti-state populism in Czech educational governance: Relations among state, expertise, and civil society. In J. Herkman, E. Palonen, V. Salojärvi, & M. Vulovic (Eds.), The Second Helsinki Conference on Emotions, Populism, and Polarisation. University of Helsinki.

As regards the actors that govern the education policy and educational reforms in Slovenia during the last three decades, it is evident that the high political elite (ministers) and politico-administrative elite (e.g. heads of a ministerial directorate) have been very rapidly changing. Since already nineteenth minister responsible for education was appointed in 2023, it is hard to identify the stable politico-administrative elite. On the other hand, the relatively small network of experts has been actively involved in all three “big” education reforms as authors of their conceptual backgrounds, members of advisory groups etc. During the periods between the reforms in the last three decades, they act as university professors and members of various national expert committees (the technostructure of the ministry). Taking into consideration both facts (changing politico-administrative elite and stable epistemic elite), the presentation focuses on the following main research question: “Is there an epistemic elite that leads reforms in education in Slovenia”? and tries to address several subsequent sub-questions of how such a network of experts, has been able to survive in changing political environment, what are experts’ characteristics and activities, and whether and how their network can (not) be perceived as epistemic elite. The presentation is based on the following theoretical-conceptual backgrounds: a) The development of post-socialist education systems in which politicization is tainted and the role of expert knowledge is favoured as well as compliance with Western values prioritized (e.g. Chankseliani & Silova, 2018; Halász, 2015); b) The characteristics of epistemic communities/elites, including their personal, relational, organizational, institutional and cultural backgrounds, authority and legitimacy (Haas, 1992); c) The role of epistemic communities/elites in policy-learning (e.g. Dunlop & Radaelli, 2013) and policy-making (e.g. Gaber, 2007; Kodelja, 2007; Radaelli, 1995); d) The critical examination of the role of the epistemic elite in contemporary educational reforms and/or education policy-making (e.g. Cross, 2013; Dunlop, 2016).

Chankseliani, M., & Silova, I. (Eds.). (2018). Comparing Post-Socialist Transformations purposes, policies, and practices in education. Symposium Books. Cross, M. (2013). Rethinking epistemic communities twenty years later. Review of International Studies, 39(1), 137–160. Dunlop, C. (2016). Knowledge, epistemic communities and agenda-setting. In Z. Zahariadis (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Agenda-Setting (pp. 273–294). Routledge.Dunlop, C., & Radaelli, C. M. (2013). Systematising policy learning. From monolith to dimensions. Political Studies, 61(3), 599–619. Gaber, S. (2007). Spoprijem za hegemonijo ali vaje iz praktične teorije? [A struggle for hegemony or a drill in practical theory?]. Sodobna pedagogika, 58(102), 62–80. Haas, M. P. (1992). Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination. International Organisation, 46(1), 1–35.Halász, G. (2015). Education and Social Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe. European Journal of Education, 50(3), 350–371. Kodelja, Z. (2007). Reforme, stroka in šolska politika [Reforms, science and school policies]. Sodobna Pedagogika, 58(2), 34–48. Radaelli, M. C. (1995). The role of knowledge in the policy process. Journal of European Public Policy, 2(2), 159–183.

This presentation tries to characterize a set of elite actors structured around a programme of educational reform legitimizing the PISA survey in France. These actors hold positions of power or influence that enable them to participate directly in decision-making within reformist networks. In this way, they define general guidelines based on shared values in order to make public action in education more effective. They formulate problems and draw up diagnoses through studies, reports and statements in the public arena and the media. They develop arguments and reasoning while advocating the adoption of reformist measures, and they participate in various high councils and expert groups. They have sufficient cognitive and symbolic resources to guide and legitimise policy-making or to challenge it. They mobilise situational capital (they occupy high positions in the civil service or in the academia), intellectual capital (they have expert knowledge) and symbolic capital (they enjoy a high level of notoriety and recognition). They are also players engaged in a power struggle in the field of education policy between the Left and the Right. They act as mediators while setting the reform agenda, either as experts, ideologues or intellectuals, brokers or translators, moral entrepreneurs, technocrats or researchers. They are part of a dynamic of social and cognitive learning that leads them to formulate public problems in education but also to produce ignorance of some other problems. Historically involved at the core of the State, these elite actors are increasingly involved in think tanks and circles of reflection outside the State sphere. From a methodological perspective, our study aims to gather sociographic data to characterise these elite actors (social origin, education, status, professional trajectory, positions held in their careers, etc.) and to use network analysis to show their relationships within the state technostructure, demonstrating certain links of dependence and affiliation as well as games of influence and power that determine reformist policy-making. We will also use our tacit knowledge of this field of power and some documentary resources (papers, reports, legislative and regulatory texts, the press, social networks) to study different epistemic and political positions within the state technocracy.

Normand, R. (2022). PISA as epistemic governance within the European political arithmetic of inequalities: A sociological perspective illustrating the French case. In Critical perspectives on PISA as a means of global governance (pp. 48-69). Routledge. Normand, R. (2023). French Education Policies and the PISA Paradigm: The Strong Republican State Absorbing External Influences. In School Policy Reform in Europe: Exploring Transnational Alignments, National Particularities and Contestations (pp. 117-137). Cham: Springer International Publishing.