Abstract
In this chapter, we describe the theoretical framework underpinning our comparative and multilevel research study. We first define accountability as a relationship in the continuation of Mark Bovens’ perspective. Then we synthesize the four main approaches of education accountability available in the international literature: the typological approach, the political approach questioning the transformations of governance of education systems, the econometric approach on the effects of accountability on academic performance, and the more sociological approach on the implementation and local reception of accountability policies. We show the scope and the limitations of each approach to better stress the possibilities offered by our theoretical framework. The latter combines the North American neo-institutionalist approach, either organizational or sociohistorical, with the French sociological policy analysis (sociologie de l’action publique). It is based on three concepts. The first one is that of policy trajectory that we define as a combination of three processes: path dependence on earlier choices, policy bricolage, and translation by certain national actors of policy ideas and instruments circulating on a transnational level. The second one is policy mediation: accountability policies are co-constructed at all levels of public action by different actors and organizations that transfer, translate, and contextualize these policies, depending on various factors. The third concept is that of policy instrumentation understood as the set of problems posed by the choice, the implementation, and the usage of policy instruments. These three concepts allow us to study in depth accountability policies’ implementation itself.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, this could be due to the results of external exams affecting access to a superior level of education for students and their parents; the publication of results for parents in a context of free choice; the taking over the control of the school or school district by a higher regulatory level, the threat to close a school, or the replacement of staff or management in the case of continuously weak results and a lack of improvement; or individual or collective financial bonuses associated with pedagogical performance.
- 2.
Besides the influence of NPM, networks of experts were able to play a key role in the formulation of these theories. Concerning “soft accountability,” Claude Thélot has, for example, theorized about the “mirror effect” in France (Pons, 2010). The role of the inspectorate in the conception of “self-evaluation” has been important in the Scottish case (Ozga & Grek, 2012). In Canada and the USA, economic theory has been very influential in the conception of “high-stakes accountability,” while the reflexive model has been influenced in Ontario by authors like Fullan, Rincon-Gallardo, and Hargreaves (2015).
- 3.
Regulation is to be understood here in the broader sense, as in the French term régulation which is more all-encompassing than the formal regulation in English, translated by réglementation in French. We take the view that “social regulation” denotes multiple, contradictory, and sometimes conflicting processes for orienting the behaviors of actors and defining the rules of the game in a social system (Maroy, 2008). “Political regulation” by public authorities is not only institutionalized in legal mechanisms (in this case, political regulation essentially means formal or statutory regulation) but also, more recently, in incentives, evaluation, emulation, consultation, and accountability mechanisms.
- 4.
In this section, we use elements published in a “think piece” by UNESCO (Maroy & Voisin, 2017).
- 5.
Issue number 2010/1–2 of the journal Cahiers internationaux de sociologie entitled “Ce qu’évaluer voudrait dire. Variations anthropologiques et sociologiques sur l’évaluer’” provide a number of major contributions to this type of discussion.
- 6.
Indeed, it is noteworthy that policy implementation or the analysis of “strategies of educational change” constitutes completely distinct fields of research in North America, as indicated by studies or handbooks which try to produce an appraisal of the available knowledge from a perspective of practical assistance for change and decision-making (Hargreaves, Lieberman, Fullan, & Hopkins, 2010; Honig, 2006; Sykes et al., 2009). This research domain has not been as clearly defined as such in the Francophone world.
- 7.
Here we refer, among others, to the “shift” to a “performance evaluation nexus” (Clarke, 2004), the “move” from “regulative” to “inquisitive” and “meditative” practices (Jacobsson, 2006), the “comparative turn” (Martens, 2007), the “quality turn” (Segerholm, 2012), the “topological turn” (Lury, Parisi, & Terranova, 2012), etc.
- 8.
Nonetheless, our multilevel analysis intends to distinguish itself with regard to the notion of “multilevel governance.” In political science, this notion is especially used as a descriptive tool to (1) go beyond the debate between supranationalists and intergovernmentalists to reflect on the European construction (Jeffery, 1997) and highlight the bargaining between the commission and member states (Marks, 1992, 1993); (2) introduce, through a generic notion, an empirical analysis of a given sector such as agricultural and rural policies (e.g., Le Pape & Smith, 1998) or a reflection on the evolution of the political responsibility (Papadopoulos, 2001); (3) stress the emergence of a decisive new scale of the implementation of public action such as regional and infranational governments in the European Union (Hooghe, 1995) or like the role of national bodies in a bottom-up approach to European construction (Jeffery, 1997); or even (4) insist on new modes of structuring actors in the policy process, in networks, for example (Le Galès & Thatcher, 1995). With just a few exceptions (Palau, 2011; Smith, 2004), this notion has seldom been conceptualized, perhaps because, for many authors, it stems from a pleonasm.
- 9.
Moreover, this could actually be done within an analytical tradition. From now on, the sociology of public action draws upon a number of analytical frameworks of neo-institutionalist approaches.
- 10.
In this section, we present again elements that have already been published in an earlier article (Maroy, Pons, & Dupuy, 2017).
- 11.
Obviously, theoretically, a policy trajectory may move through more drastic or disruptive changes. In his article on the use of path dependence concept in historical sociology, for instance, James Mahoney (2000) mentions several notions used in the neo-institutionalist literature to capture this kind of radical change: “critical junctures,” “decline,” “path breakpoint,” “exogenous shock,” and “critical threshold point.” We could also add the notion of “revolutionary change” proposed by John Campbell (2004). The “transitology” movement in political science also provided several analytical tools to conceptualize these changes such as those of “bifurcations” or “crisis” (Dobry, 2000). Our aim in this chapter is not to ignore them but, consistently with our empirical findings, to focus on more gradual changes which are in fine more relevant in our case study.
- 12.
Then it is a matter of ministries’ power of constraint with regard to intermediate entities, pushing them to comply with the legislation and the regulation in effect (regulatory authority, mechanisms to control the objectives and outputs, threats of retaliation in other areas, etc.).
- 13.
Pressures to conform to normative expectations or new norms originating from various professional or social organizations which tend to define these norms (e.g., “success for all students,” efforts to lower the dropout rate, and more responsibility to schools) and formalize them and ensure that professionals in compulsory education comply with them.
- 14.
In a situation of uncertainty, there is an inclination to adopt practices used elsewhere (mimetism) when the actor or organization does not know which practice is most appropriate from a rational perspective seeking effectiveness. Faced with this uncertainty, there is a tendency to do what others are doing, in another organization; thus, they can be inspired by what is presented as or what is supposed to constitute “good practices” or “good technologies” to employ to ensure effectiveness.
- 15.
According to the classic work of sociology of Norbert Elias (1991), a configuration refers to the particular arrangement of multiple interdependencies between individuals. To illustrate his point, the German sociologist multiplies examples (the use of pronouns, football, tribe, state, etc.); the most famous is probably the game of chess. As was argued elsewhere (e.g., Buisson-Fenet & Pons, 2014), this concept may be fruitfully used in a policy analysis’ perspective to investigate how local interdependencies between policy actors may shape local public action.
- 16.
Christopher Hood (1986) does not precisely define the notion of tool and tends, in fact, to reduce it to its instrumental dimension. Lester M. Salamon (2002) develops a productive and mercantile vision of the instrument, defined as a “package” which contains “a type of good and activity,” “a deliverable vehicle,” “a delivery system,” and a “set of rules, whether formal or informal, defining relationships among the entities that comprise the delivery system” (p. 20). The approach of Lascoumes and Le Galès (2004) proves to be more Foucauldian, the policy instrument being defined as “a technical device with a generic vocation with a concrete conception of the relationship between the political realm and society and supported by a conception of regulation” (p. 14). Thus, for them, “each policy instrument constitutes a condensed and finalized form of knowing about social power and the ways to exercise it.”
- 17.
This approach, which inspired C. Hood (1986), is based on a certain number of postulates or problematic orientations from a sociological point of view, such as a failure to take into account the distinctive features of the available systems, the priority given in the analysis to the improvement of the effectiveness of the control exercised over the system, the strict and little relevant distinction between the government and the society it controls, etc.
- 18.
Please see, for example, the different analytical breaks that the sociology of public action implies for Lascoumes and Le Galès (2007) from the existing thinking of political phenomena that prevailed in the literature.
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Maroy, C., Pons, X. (2019). Theoretical Framework. In: Maroy, C., Pons, X. (eds) Accountability Policies in Education. Educational Governance Research, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01285-4_3
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