Policy as/in Practice: A Sociocultural Approach to the Study of Educational Policy B. A. Levinson & M.

Sutton

Policy as/in Practice: A Sociocultural Approach to the Study of Educational Policy

# Publisher: Ablex Publishing (February 28, 2001) # Language: English # ISBN-10: 1567505171 # ISBN-13: 978-1567505177

Policy as/in Practice: A Sociocultural Approach to the Study of Educational Policy B. A. Levinson & M.Sutton

Policy as/in Practice: A Sociocultural Approach to the Study of Educational Policy Introduction Chapter Bradley A. Levinson and Margaret Sutton Overview Over the past twenty years, approaches to educational policy analysis have gradually opened up to qualitative research methods and to sociocultural perspectives on schooling. The growing focus on policy implementation, in particular, has conferred legitimacy upon some constructs and approaches that derive from fields like anthropology and cultural studies more broadly. Still, we would argue, a more grounded sociocultural approach to educational policy studies, let alone a fully anthropological approach, has yet to be developed. Such is the project initiated by this book and the series that it launches. In this project we ask: What would educational policy studies look like if they re-conceptualized the notion of policy itself as a complex social practice, an ongoing process of normative cultural production constituted by diverse actors across diverse social and institutional contexts? In this inaugural volume, we bring together a collection of studies that view educational policy from a variety of angles and at different levels of social life. The studies share a common concern to explicate policy as a practice of power, and to interrogate the meaning of policy in practice. Drawing on work in anthropology (Douglas, 1986; Shore and Wright, 1997), sociology (Ball 1991; Borman et al. 1996), and feminist and critical theory (C. Marshall, 1998; Mohanty, 1991; Calhoun 1995; Habermas, 1984; Giddens, 1984; Smith 1987; Bourdieu 1991)and thereby anchored in qualitative, comparative researchthis book seeks to expand our understanding of the cultural, contextual, and political dimensions of educational policy. Our working definition of policy fails to privilege official governing bodies only, and includes unofficial and occasionally spontaneous normative guidelines developed in diverse social spaces. We thereby challenge an understanding of public policy as a necessarily legitimate representation of public needs and interests. Still, it is important to recognize the specific modes and impacts of government-backed--what we call legally authorized, or official--policy. 2

Policy as/in Practice: A Sociocultural Approach to the Study of Educational Policy B. A. Levinson & M.Sutton Authorized policy is a form of governance, to be sure, but one that is constantly negotiated and re-organized in the ongoing flow of institutional life, a political form disguised by the objective, neutral, legal-rational idioms in which [it is] portrayed (Shore and Wright, 1997, p. 8). Many authors in this volume examine official state policy as a discursive mode of governance absolutely central to the administration of modern societies. Policy serves at various levels of government as a legitimating charter for the techniques of administration and as an operating manual for everyday conduct; it is the symbolic expression of normative claims worked into a potentially viable institutional blueprint. Instead of separating them entirely, we prefer to examine policy formation and implementation (or, as we prefer, appropriationsee below) as a dynamic, interrelated process stretching over time. Thus, we investigate moments of official policy formation in relation to moments of policy appropriation to account for the negotiation of policy in daily life. One approach to official policy formation involves researching the powerful (Walford, 1995) and examining the specific social arenas where the interests and languages comprising a governing policy charter get negotiated into some viable form (see Anderson-Levitt and Alimasi, , Sutton, Murtadha-Watts, and Rosen, this volume). Yet a sociocultural analysis of policy cannot end there. The study of official policy appropriation highlights other moments of the policy process, when the formulated charter, temporarily reified as text, is circulated across the various institutional contexts where it may be applied, interpreted, and/or contested by a multiplicity of local actors (see Mantilla, Street, Quiroz, Schwab, Porter, and Cade, this volume). Just as our definition of education includes intentional learning outside formal school settings (Hansen, 1979; Levinson, 2000), so our approach highlights the validity of rather more local, non-authorized forms of policy (see Street, Cabral Flix de Sousa, and Schwab, this volume). Such a perspective can further challenge the division between policy systems or arenas, on the one hand, and the range of sites where policy gets implemented. We believe the now conventional distinction between policy formation and implementation as distinct phases of a policy process (Hill, 1993; Lewis and Wallace, 1998) implicitly ratifies a top-down perspective, unnecessarily divides what is in fact a recursive dynamic, and inappropriately widens the gulf between everyday practice and government action. When we pay close attention to the frameworks of cultural meaning people use to interpret their experience and generate

Policy as/in Practice: A Sociocultural Approach to the Study of Educational Policy B. A. Levinson & M.Sutton social behavior, we see not only the recipients of educational policy but also its authorized formulators and purveyors as fully cultural animals as well. By highlighting the place and role of values, beliefs, and identities in the policy process, we provide analytic tools to range across the spectrum of sociocultural activity. In reality, of course, processes of policy formation occur across many contexts of contemporary social life. After all, policy is a kind of normative decision-making, and such decision-making comprises an integral part of everyday life. On the one hand, public policy is conferred the status of official tool of governance. On the other hand, smaller scale institutions, such as businesses and local schools, may enact their own policies to specify proper procedure and conduct. Our boss may explain the company policy, our principal the school policy. Even individuals have been known to refer to their policies on a range of matters, including the regulation of interpersonal relations. Though many societies and languages do not have such everyday analogues of policy, they do have well-developed moral discourses regulating human conduct. For these reasons, we believe a sociocultural policy analysis should link the discursive practices of normative control in any local-level community or institution with the discursive practices comprising larger-scale structures of law and governance. A key term in our approach is the deceptively simple meta-theoretical concept of practice. The idea of practice has emerged as a way of accounting for the situated logic of activities across a wide array of contexts. Practice gets at the way individuals, and groups, engage in situated behaviors that are both constrained and enabled by existing structures, but which allow the person to exercise agency in the emerging situation.1 Qualitative sociocultural research into everyday practice thus promises to demystify the policy process and reconceive it in culturally reflexive terms. An emphasis on the purposeful practice of diverse social actors reinstates agency across all levels of the policy process, making it possible to see policy not only as mandate but also as contested cultural resource. It is in this sense that we prefer to analyze policy in terms of how people appropriate its meanings.2 Appropriation, of course, highlights the way creative agents take in elements of policy, thereby incorporating these discursive and institutional resources into their own schemes of interest, motivation, and action. Appropriation is a kind of taking and making ones own. With this term, we draw attention to how previously excluded actors lay claim to the right to

Policy as/in Practice: A Sociocultural Approach to the Study of Educational Policy B. A. Levinson & M.Sutton create policy. Thus, Porters study of local actions in Kentucky shows that the state-mandated reform provided openings for action by newcomers and others who had previously been marginalized in educational leadership. Even outright resistance to a policy can be conceived as a kind of appropriation insofar as it incorporates a negative image of policy into schemes of action. Through this appropriation, new kinds of local normative policies may take shape. For instance, in this volume Street shows how Mexican teachers, in their struggle for union democracy, reject the States new modernization policy and thereby propose new local policies for school-community relations. In sum, we seek to link analytically the diverse domains and modalities through which people make policy through practice.3 We prefer qualitative, ethnographic research for elucidating the richness and complexity of the policy process. Ethnographic research highlights the lived experience of people in everyday life. On the one hand, it is a set of methods for viewing social reality. Researchers engage in participant observation and interviews for extended periods of time, attempting to get at patterns of social interaction and discourse. Yet ethnography is more than a set of empirical methods; it is perhaps more importantly a way of seeing (Wolcott, 1999), a practice of cultural interpretation that attempts to reconstruct the cultural logic, the embedded meanings, of discourses, institutions, and actions (cf. Wright, 1994). Though not every study in this book is fully ethnographic in the anthropological sense, each one helps us to see the way policy works as cultural practice. As the following section will show, numerous social and intellectual currents have enriched and enlivened the field of policy analysis over the past fifty years. Yet, we maintain that in all the scholarly discourse around policy, there is little evidence of the sociocultural perspective: a locally informed, comparatively astute, ethnographically rich account of how people make, interpret, and otherwise engage with the policy process. We hope this introduction will make clear that a deeply cultural approach to educational policy has yet to be developed. Such an approach can and should develop in dialogue with existing studies to chart out new tools for research and change. Our primary goals in this volume are thus to build upon and extend previous work in the study of educational policy formation and implementation through the articulation of a critical sociocultural framework and the illustration provided by selected studies.

Policy as/in Practice: A Sociocultural Approach to the Study of Educational Policy B. A. Levinson & M.Sutton It is also our firm belief that a sociocultural approach to educational policy should not remain at the level of critique or analytic description. In our final section, we suggest the steps necessary for bringing ethnographic knowledge about policy into the policy process itself, to facilitate a more robust participatory dialogue and encourage a research practice that supports democratic action both in its execution and in its outcomes. The Study of Educational Policy: Histories and Frameworks The notion of educational policy, like public policy more broadly, emerged over the course of this century as part of a trend toward greater rationality and efficiency in the administration of vast public enterprises. Like transportation, food supplies, sanitation and health services, education today is a central arena of public policy. Public policy can take a wide range of forms, from broad statements of goals to more specific statements of intention (Pressman & Wildavsky, 1984), expressed in speeches, official statements, court decisions, laws and regulations, all of which embody the authority to define goals and to command means. At the most basic level, all public policies specify priorities and procedures for distributing goods and services to the members of a society. As Bhola has observed, the intent of policy is to direct and to harness social power for social outcomes (1975, p. 1). In so doing, policies also express the authoritative allocation of values by a decision-making body (Ball, 1990). In the United States of America, early conceptions of policy, trumpeted during the functionalist heyday of social science, celebrated a new administrative rationalism. Policy was often portrayed as a technocratic object, a kind of fuel rod for the body politic: put the policy in and watch the machine run. Policy analysis sought to apply the best of social scientific knowledge to the rational solution of perennial human problems. Indeed, the expansion of the Cold War lent a certain urgency to the tone of such analyses, which conflated national security concerns with the need to ameliorate basic conflicts in our civilization (Lasswell, 1951, p. 8). Given the intent to assess and influence policy processes, it is perhaps not surprising then that policy analysis has historically been dominated by a managerial perspective (Bowe and Ball, 1992, p. 7), which assumes a linear model of the policy process. In this model, the policy process is divided into sequential steps and each is analyzed in turn (Porter, 1995, p. 8). Typically, the linear model assumes that policy processes begin with problem identification, then

Policy as/in Practice: A Sociocultural Approach to the Study of Educational Policy B. A. Levinson & M.Sutton move through stages of policy formation and adoption, which is followed by implementation and ultimately by evaluation (ibid., p. 26). Until recently, the preponderance of scholarship in the field has focused on the extreme ends of the process how policy is formed and methods for evaluating policy impacts. In most contemporary educational studies, policy is conceived in terms of multilateral, national, state, or local directives that legislate institutional structures, proper codes of conduct, and academic standards for schools. Such directives are thought to originate in negotiations amongst the institutional actors and stakeholders who wield power at these various levels. Once formulated, policy then filters down to be implemented in the varying school contexts to which it might apply. However, in this conception, less powerful actors--especially students and their parents, but even teachersare seen as adjusting their actions and expectations to a fait accompli, challenging the coherence of educational policy (Fuhrman, 1983; McLaughlin and Talbert, 1993), or at best resisting policy directives through footdragging or deliberate inaction. Other approaches counterpoise policy to practice, conceiving the former as an instrument of governance and the latter as classroom instruction (Cohen and Spillane, 1993) or political resistance (Wells and Serna, 1996). It is easier to define what public policy is, than what policy does. Questions about the impacts and relative efficacy of specific policies define the better part of the field of policy analysis. In education, policy studies have grown from the academic study of school administration, which along with educational psychology formed the core subjects of Schools and Colleges of Education as they developed in the early years of this century (Tyack, 1974). In the1960s, federal civil rights legislation in the U.S. and similar state-sponsored efforts to induce social change in other countries spurred demands to assess the impacts of a whole range of social programs, leading to the creation of graduate schools of public policy (Wildavsky, 1987, p. xxiii). Thus, since the 1960s, educational policy analysis has been informed both by changing theories in the field of education and by changing approaches to policy analysis in other social spheres. The techniques of policy analysis developed in North America, the U.K., and elsewhere in Western Europe have become global sciences by their incorporation into practices of international assistance by development agencies.

Policy as/in Practice: A Sociocultural Approach to the Study of Educational Policy B. A. Levinson & M.Sutton Shaped by multiple contexts of theory and practice, educational policy studies defy neat categorization by theory or method. Bobrow and Dryzek note that the policy field is marked by a variety of technical approaches (1987, p. 5). Foremost among them, they maintain, is welfare economics, with an emphasis on cost-benefit accounting as a means of assessing welfare. This claim continues to hold true in particular for educational policy analysis in the Third World, the practice of which is strongly determined by the proclivities of external funders. With no less weighty an institution than the World Bank claiming intellectual authority over policy directions among nations which accept its funds, educational policy analysis applied to the Third World reduces to the analysis of investment choices (Psacharopoulos and Woodhall, 1985). To be sure, support by donor institutions for systemic reform of education has expanded the range of acceptable techniques for policy analysis in Third World contexts. However, with the fiscal center of gravity both for reform and for its study residing outside of national governments, educational policy analysis concerned with Third World settings remains more strongly technocratic than analyses produced by European and North American researchers, about the policy processes of their own national societies. Two trends of recent years have begun to change both the focus of policy analysis and approaches to it. The first has been a growing concern with implementation as an integral part of the policy process, rather than what happens after policy is made. It is all too telling that the social turmoil of the 1960s, both in the U.S. and abroad, spawned a more critical and substantivist analysis of policy. Odden (1991) identifies the 1960s as the origins of implementation studies. The growth of federal initiatives gave rise to a generation of scholars who looked more closely at how policies generated through a rather distant political process were implemented in local settings. Lipsky and Wildavsky began writing about the streetlevel bureaucrat and the impulse to speak truth to power. Greater attention was being paid to questions of scalehow policy moved across vastly different locales and levels of social organizationas well as to politics and powerhow policy reflected distinct interests and thus was subject to different responses and scenarios. For perhaps the first time, policy was conceived as a process rather than a simple charter or political act (cf. Burstein, 1991; Burstein and Bricher, 1997; Weiss, 1982).

Policy as/in Practice: A Sociocultural Approach to the Study of Educational Policy B. A. Levinson & M.Sutton In education, this perspective on implementation is associated with Elmore and McLaughlins (1988) study of educational reform in the U.S., originally conducted in the 1970s. Taking seriously the notion that implementation shapes policy has led to a wide range of qualitatively-informed case studies of policy in action, in education and other fields such as health (Walsh, 1996; Hill, 1993). These studies implicitly challenge a simple linear model of policy processes and focus attention more closely on the meaning of policy in the lives of those affected by it. As Odden (1991) documents for the United States, studies of implementation, which fundamentally recognize the processual character of policy, have evolved over the past three decades to develop increasingly sophisticated mid-range concepts and theories (cf. Fitz et al., 1994). A parallel literature on policy research, informed by concepts from critical and feminist theory (Ball 1991; Marshall 1998), has emerged to complement, and in some ways to challenge, the implementation perspective. Another important trend in policy analysis which has had special relevance for the study of educational policies in the Third World is the set of studies which focus on the development of social science research and the use (or as is often the case, non-use) of expert technical knowledge in the formulation of policy (Apter, 1974; Bhme and Stehr, 1986; Eisemon, 1981; Knorr-Cetina, 1983). This branch of analysis brings the insights of the sociology of knowledge to bear upon policy processes. The literature on knowledge generation and utilization asks how research can be designed and undertaken so that researchers and policy makers construct knowledge together (Reimers and McGinn, 1997, p. 107). In some ways this strain of work acknowledges earlier attempts to document the way policy was formed within government agencies. McGinn and Streets (1982; 1984) sociological study of the Mexican education ministry found that a political rationality emerging from organizational conflicts between technocratic politicians and the national teachers union, rather than research-based knowledge per se, overwhelmingly determined the making of decisions and the allocation of resources. Research knowledge, if utilized at all, was applied selectively--and after the fact--to justify decisions made according to highly political criteria. Such studies force us to see that before research knowledge can substantially inform policy processes the cultures of policy formation must be reformed.

Policy as/in Practice: A Sociocultural Approach to the Study of Educational Policy B. A. Levinson & M.Sutton Scholarship on policy implementation and knowledge utilization have opened the field of policy analysis up to some of the critical intellectual orientations which influence our work in this volume. Both forms of study create dynamic models of policy processes and encourage a more contextualized understanding of policy as practice. Increasingly, ethnographic research approaches have been applied to understanding the power dynamics intrinsic to the formation of authoritative policy. Institutional ethnography, a phrase coined by feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith (1987), has begun to yield important insights into the social dynamics of specific institutions which are central to the formation of official policy. Institutional ethnography has been especially revealing of the policy processes involved in internationally-funded development projects, notably in Fergusons study of a rural development project in Lesotho funded by the Canadian government (1990), and in Adele Muellers analysis of the field of women in development (1987). Institutional ethnography shares intellectual ground with another set of approaches to the study of power and policy which are particularly critical to our sociocultural conception of policy. These are ideological analysis and discourse analysis, particularly those inspired by Foucault (1972; 1973; 1979) and by feminist and other critical epistemologies (Harding, 1987; Povinelli, 1991; Collins, 1990; Sutton, 1998; cf. Marshall, 1998). These approaches involve a cultural critique of dominant institutions and ideologies. In Thompsons (1990:56) critical survey the analysis of ideology...is primarily concerned with the ways in which symbolic forms intersect with relations of power. It is concerned with the ways in which meaning is mobilized in the social world and serves thereby to bolster up individuals and groups who occupy positions of power...To study ideology is to study the ways in which meaning serves to establish and sustain relations of domination...(our emphasis) Thus, to study the practices through which political elites formulate policy is to engage a cultural analysis of their ideological strategies (Eagleton 1991). Phyllis Chock Pease (1991; 1998) has contributed a fascinating set of articles about how ideological discourses surrounding the issue of immigration shape policy discussions in the United States Congress. Carol Greenhouses new volume on Democracy and Ethnography, which compares the construction of identities in socalled multicultural liberal states (e.g., Spain and the United States), similarly explores the

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Policy as/in Practice: A Sociocultural Approach to the Study of Educational Policy B. A. Levinson & M.Sutton ideological terrain of elite, state discourses as these play themselves out in various realms of popular culture. Finally, longstanding anthropological insights into myth, ritual, and the construction of social solidarity, coupled with critical discourse analysis, can be especially valuable for our understanding of the relationship between existing, codified policy and the conceptions of local actors. Three of the contributors to this volume invoke myth and other traditional anthropological concepts to elucidate policy formation and appropriation. Lisa Rosen employs the categories of myth and ritual to analyze a local California debate on mathematics education policy as a focus for examining the broader relationships between policy processes and an underlying moral order in education. From her participant-observation of health educators in Sao Paulo, Isabel Cabral Flix de Sousa reconstructs a set of myths which, she maintains, obstruct meaningful communication between these educators and their clients. Maureen Porter highlights a specific category of myth the origin myth and how in one Appalachian mountain community it provides a discursive frame for promoting educational change. In relation to policy process in the Third World, these critical perspectives on the material efficacy of authoritative discourses have been elaborated by, among others, Escobar (1995) and Pigg (1992). Balls (1991) work on educational policy reforms in the U.K. and Popkewitz (1991) in the U.S. develop analytically kindred approaches. Ideological and discourse analysis have particular relevance to a sociocultural approach to policy analysis, as they dissolve the lines between ordinary and authoritative meanings of policy by directing attention to the regimes of meaning which are constantly reinvented and reinforced through institutional practices. Beyond critique: actionable knowledge for policy democratization Too often, research inspired by critical theory ignores the inescapable need for administrative techniques in modern societies. It is easier, and far too tempting, to raise a critique without venturing into the messy business of policy formation. We believe that the studies compiled in this volume suggest and illustrate ways in which critically informed, sociocultural policy studies can contribute to more democratic processes of educational policy making. Spanning several continents, disciplines, and forms of education, these articles nonetheless pick up common threads in their analyses of policy formation and appropriation.

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Policy as/in Practice: A Sociocultural Approach to the Study of Educational Policy B. A. Levinson & M.Sutton Sociocultural approaches to policy formation and appropriation promise to expand and deepen understanding of policy processes and how they impinge upon the daily lives of diverse people. Underlying the theoretical agenda of opening up policy analysis to sociocultural constructs lies a pragmatic concern with contributing to improvements in educational policy. Authoritative state policy is likely to remain, for some time, a strong force defining educational experiences for children and adults around the world. Those who seek to understand the meaning and import of educational policy seek at the same time to inform it, as citizens and as professionals. By way of conclusion, this section lays out five ways in which sociocultural studies might contribute to democratizing policy processes. In comparison to the average citizen, policy researchers are (relatively) privileged interlocutors in the process of policy formation. Although knowledge utilization research, as we noted above, shows that research studies have only modest influence on policy formation, policy researchers often have access to the ears of policy designers. Sociocultural research into policy formation and appropriation can bring to light the diverse interests and perspectives of students, parents, teachers, local administrators, and others who shape and are shaped by policy processes. Being mindful of the dangers of speaking for others, policy researchers nonetheless are in a position to raise awareness in the policy formation process of the multiple sites in which policy manifests, as well as the multiple meanings that governing policy may acquire in daily practice. This point is illustrated throughout the volume, from Anderson-Levitt and Alimasis explication of differences in pedagogical ideals for reading instruction, to Murtadha-Watts and Quiroz analyses of selective appropriation of conflicting policy mandates by educators, to Schwabs elucidation of the conflicting normative regimes in Aboriginal education. In a related vein, policy research can be more or less well informed by the perspectives of its subjects. In the process of informing policy makers, policy researchers can construct research in ways that facilitate the voicing of concerns by those whom policy will affect. Participatory research methods, for example, are an effort to privilege the voices of subjects by providing a platform for subjects to define issues as they see them. In this volume, Streets long-term involvement as a researcher with teachers unions provides one clear example of mutual engagement between researchers and subjects in the policy research process. Porters reflections upon her efforts to construct participatory research illustrate some of the difficulties

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Policy as/in Practice: A Sociocultural Approach to the Study of Educational Policy B. A. Levinson & M.Sutton attendant upon such approaches. Through these and related techniques, and by providing a

forum for the expression of the needs and interests of policy constituents, sociocultural policy research can contribute a counter-balance to managerial perspectives on policy (cf. Fitz et al., 1994; Dryzek, 1987). Cultural and critical perspectives on policy processes can also challenge fundamental assumptions behind specific policies. Adams et. al., for example, challenge researchers and policy makers to think more explicitly about the nature of their relationship and its consequences for policy formation. Sutton critiques the epistemological regime of policy studies, asking whether the current operational structures and procedures can be modified to accommodate more democratic purposes. Rosens study of the debate processes of a California school board uncovers practices of silencing in public deliberation which undermine free and open debate. Studies of appropriation in general can be a lever against unexamined assumptions in policy formation, because they show how policy in practice differs from policy as conceived authoritatively. The practices of research can put the researcher in a position of opening channels of communication amongst those who participate in different moments of policy formation and appropriation. Porter, Cade, and Schwab all speak of ways in which their presence as researchers created new and different venues for communication amongst and between parents and students, on the one hand, and teachers and educational authorities on the other ( cf. Blackmore, 1995). Perhaps ironically, the nature of researchers as always in some sense outsiders to the communities they study as well as to the policy making process provides a kind of cultural permission to initiate unprecedented meetings of people and ideas. Such possibilities should be maximized. The final point is one that by definition will not be demonstrated by research studies but rather by what researchers choose not to study. Democratization of policy processes calls for a retreat from purely technocratic, top-down approaches. In some cases, the best thing a researcher may contribute to democratizing policy making is to advocate consultative alternatives to research. Such alternatives may in the end be more cumbersome or time consuming, but they will always be more effective in yielding beneficial and broadly endorsed outcomes.

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Policy as/in Practice: A Sociocultural Approach to the Study of Educational Policy B. A. Levinson & M.Sutton

Notes

Practice has been articulated as a powerful heuristic corrective to the cultural and economic determinisms (which

accorded little agency to individual actors and little power to historical-cultural particularity) and voluntarisms (which accorded little power to patterned social forces in constraining or enabling individual action) dominating the social sciences of this century. An emphasis on practicewhat Giddens (1984:288) calls strategic conducthas, moreover, challenged the reductive tendencies of materialism and idealism. Among the most prominent practice theorists have been the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1990, 1992), Anthony Giddens (1979, 1984), and R.W. Connell (1983, 1987). Bourdieu is the scholar who has most self-consciously undertaken to construct a general theory of practices, and who uses the term most frequently. Similar and perhaps equally important theorists of practice for us would include Philip Abrams (1982), Norbert Elias (1978, 1991; Goudsblom and Mennell 1998), Marshall Sahlins (1981, 1985), Mary Douglas (1975), Sherry Ortner (1984, 1996), Stuart Hall (1990; Grossberg 1996:155-57), Michel de Certeau (1984), and Zygmunt Bauman (1973; 1992). Bourdieu, Connell, and Ortner provide the most helpful and explicit discussions of the methodological options entailed by practice theory.
2

The meaning of appropriation has links to practice theory as it has emerged in critical fields of scholarship like

sociology (Corsaro, 1993), cultural studies (Johnson, 1986/1987; Walser, 1997), social history (Chartier,1997), and cultural anthropology (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997; Rockwell, 1996). The use of appropriation signals an active process of cultural production through borrowing, recontextualizing, remolding, and thereby resignifying cultural forms like language, music, and dress. The appropriation of educational policy emphasizes the agency of local actors in interpreting and adapting such policy to the situated logic in their contexts of everyday practice.
3

Even informal educational practices outside schools may constitute policies based on alternative value systems

or models of the educated person (Levinson et al, 1996).

References

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Policy as/in Practice: A Sociocultural Approach to the Study of Educational Policy B. A. Levinson & M.Sutton

Abrams, P. (1982) . Historical sociology. London: Routledge. Alvarez, R.R. (1988) . National politics and local responses: The nations first successful school desegregation court case. In H. Trueba & C. Delgado-Gaitan (Eds.), School and society: Learning content through culture (pp. 37-52) . New York: Praeger. Apter, D. (1974). The role of the new scientific elite and scientific ideology in modernization. In S. P. Restivol and C.R. Vanderpool (Eds.)., Comparative studies in science and society. (pp. 398-408). Columbus: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Co. Apthorpe, R. (1997). Policy as language and power. In C. Shore & S. Wright (Eds.), Anthropology of policy: Critical perspectives on governance and power. (pp. 43-106). London and New York: Routledge. Ball, S. J. (1990) . Politics and policy making in education. London: Routledge. Bauman, Z. (1973) . Culture as praxis. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Bauman, Z. (1992) . Intimations of postmodernity. London: Routledge. Bhola, H. S. (1975). The design of (educational) policy: Directing and harnessing social power for social organization. Viewpoints: Bulletin of the School of Education, Indiana University, 51 (3), 1-16. Blackmore, J. (1995). Policy as dialogue: Feminist administrators working for educational change. Gender and Education, 7 (3), 293-314. Bobrow, D. B., & Dryzek, J. S. (1987). Policy analysis by design. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press. Bhme, G., and Stehr, N. (1986). The growing impact of scientific knowledge on social relations. In G. Bhme and N. Stehr (Eds.)., The knowledge society.(pp. 7-30). Dordrecht: D. Rekiel Publishing. Borman, K., Cookson, P., Sadovnik, A., & Spade, J. (Eds.). (1996). Implementing educational reform: sociological perspectives on educational policy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Bourdieu, P. (1977) . Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1989) . Language and symbolic power. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990) . The logic of practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991) . Language and symbolic power. Stanford: Stanford University Press Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (1992) . The purpose of reflexive sociology (The Chicago workshop). In P. Bourdieu & L. Wacquant (Eds.), An invitation to reflexive sociology (pp. 61-216) . Cambridge: Polity Press. Bowe, R., Ball, S. J., & Gold, A. (1992). Reforming education and changing schools : case studies in policy sociology. London ; New York: Routledge. Burstein, B. (1991). Policy domains: Organization, culture, and policy outcomes. Annual Review of Sociology, 17, 327-350. Burstein, B. & Bricher, M. (1997). Problem definition public policy: Congressional committees confront work, family, and gender, 1945-1990. Social Forces 76 (1), 135-169. Calhoun, C. (1995) . Critical social theory. London: Blackwell. Chartier, R. (1997) . On the edge of the cliff. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chock Pease, P. (1991) . Illegal aliens and opportunity: myth making in congressional testimony. American Ethnologist, 18 (2) , 279-294. Chock Pease, P. (1998) . Porous borders: discourses of difference in congressional hearings on

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