Xavier Rambla Sociologia

World Bank SABER basically provides data so that governments design ‘smarter’ education policies. In contrast with this top-down approach, the Civil Society Education Fund attempts to influence on educational policy-making by means of research-based advocacy (watch the video specially from minutes 0-1:30 and 4:40-5)

L’acció social consisteix a actuar amb referència a una altra persona. El nostre comportament, en essència, es basa en accions socials.

D’ ençà que Daniel Defoe va escriure la novel.la Robinson Crusoe al segle XVIII,i s’ha estès la idea que les accions socials responen a un càlcul racional. De fet, molts economistes prenen aquesta història per il.lustrar models d’acció individual.

Tanmateix, la realitat desborda aquesta simplificació. Per exemple, la invenció tecnològica sovint és el producte d’accions deliberades que hom ha dut a terme per assolir un objectiu. És un càlcul per trobar la millor manera d’aconseguir un fi. Ara bé, ningú no inventa aïlladament sinó dins d’una xarxa social on participen persones que comparteixen interessos, coneixements, valoracions de la seva feina, i sovint, emocions molt intenses. Penseu en el procés que va dur a inventar l‘ordinador personal.

El cas és que les accions racionals moltes vegades es despleguen per fer realitat un valor; no només per uns fins tan instrumentals com els de Crusoe. La feina de la Free Software Foundation n’és un exemple.

Les emocions també ens impulsen a actuar. Per l’alegria, la vergonya, la por, la compassió o l’enveja fem moltes coses. De fet, quan creixem, configurem el nostre caràcter, és a dir, una determinada predisposició a experimentar aquestes emocions amb una certa identitat. Les “novel.les de creixement” es van començar a escriure poc després de Robinson Crusoe. Expliquen com un personatge es va transformant a mesura que viu unes experiències, i destaquen quines emocions sent el personatge en aquestes tessitures. Segurament heu sentit a parlar, posem per cas, de Les Aventures de Tom Sawyer.

A més de protagonitzar accions racionals i afectives (o emotives), el sociòleg Max Weber va argumentar que també actuem per costum segons les normes socials. Aquestes normes són prescripcions sobre el bon i el mal comportament. Algunes han estat codificades, com ara les lleis o les normes ISO de producció, però d’altres són informals. La majoria de vegades donem les normes socials per descomptades, cosa que ens estalvia de pensar per què les hem de complir. És així que, en llevar-nos, seguim la rutina de dutxar-nos, vestir-nos, esmorzar, etc. En um lloc de treball també ens adonem que cal complir unes normes implícites que no estan escrites enlloc. La norma de respectar l’espai personal a un parc públic és un altre exemple. Saltar-se una norma és una transgressió que comporta una sanció. Les sancions poden ser contundents (anar a presó), però moltes vegades tan sols es tradueixen en mirades, gestos o comentaris de reprovació.

Next Autumn the UN will approve a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030. While some NGOs praise the breadth and ambition of the approach, some think tanks argue that a more rigorous calculation recommends to concentrate endeavours on a few actions with the highest likely effectiveness as measured in economic terms.

This debate retrieves old normative issues concerning social change and human progress. For instance, is there a single path to progress? Can socio-economic development become universal? Does the earth contain enough resources for 7 billion people?

It also has to do with classical and current analytic debates on social change. For instance, does rational choice lead change? Do powerful social agents influence on the views and actions of other people? Is social change the consequence of social agency (either through aggregation of rational decisions or the outcome of conflicts)?

In the first term of the 2015-16 academic year, the course on Social Change and Globalisation will address these debates. Have a look at this video introducing the course.

Some recent articles on the issue published by Routledge here

The World Bank Systems Analysis for Better Educational Results, the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, the Global Partnership for Education Civil Society Education Fund and the European Union Open Method of Coordination are currently creating repositories and data sets as well as producing reports, score cards, guidelines, best practice case studies, policy briefs and guidelines in order to constitute worldwide systems of knowledge management in the field of education policy.

However, these initiatives largely overlook two important conditions of knowledge management.

First, their approach is not interested in developing the capabilities of specific organisations, particularly schools. Lead commentators on management such as Peter Drucker and Chris Argyris nevertheless highlighted the connection between innovation, knowledge and organisation.

Second, their approach mostly focuses on explicit knowledge. This is a very significant bias to the extent that knowledge management is particularly aware of the conversion of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge (Nonaka, Collins).

UAB Divulga: cat, cast, eng

Who decides on taxes? While empirical evidence shows that governments mostly do so, recent proposals are opening the debate on global taxes. Should a global tax on wealth be implemented? Thomas Piketty has made this suggestion, which at least could be implemented at the scale of the European Union. However, a wider debate on legitimacy starts immediately. Do taxpayers have to fund authorities who are not directly accountable by means of ellections?

Does Nancy Fraser’s three-dimensional definition of global justice account for all the relevant issues? Philosopher Nancy Frazer proposed a three-dimensional definition of cosmopolitan justice that takes into account a wide array of concerns. Maybe you find some suggestions in her work. She proposes to distinguish distribution (e.g. Piketty’s global wealth tax, Tobin’s tax on financial transactions), recognition (e.g., rights of ethnic minorities, multilingualism, LGBT rights) and participation (global civil society, deliberative development)

Albeit difficult, the distinction between the influence of power in defining the MDGs and the normative underpinning of the MDGs is very helpful. We can discuss if these goals are grounded on human rights, capabilities or justice, and have arguments to both agree (e.g. with Amartya Sen or Martha Nussbaum) or to disagree. Some critics argue that “development” is a Western discourse that disrupts native political projects in the Global South (e.g. Arturo Escobar and Vandana Shiva). Crucial to the social analysis of development is the observation that the empirical evidence that politics has been at stake does not automatically refute the normative theories on global justice. Some authors propose to recognise a complex and multi-lateral ecology of knowledges but not necessarily to conclude that any claim concerning validity is so consistent as any other one. There is no point in conflating the appraisal of validity with the analysis of the social relations embedded in knowledge. Such an intellectual operation is neither  coherent in logical terms nor respectful of cultural diversity in ethical terms.

Hans Rosling and Richard Wilkinson clearly show that development cannot be reduced to the GDP per capita. Despite some very general correlations, public health does  not only depend on economic growth. Moreover, compelling evidence unveils the harmful effects of inequality for public health. So, public health does not only depend on biological factors or material power but also on the political economy. Power relations dramatically impinge so much on political decision-making and economic distribution that eventually have consequences for public health.

According to recent findings, the German federation has become innovative in educational policy-making. On the one hand. the Länder and the federation found new ways of cooperating after the conflict on the role of regions in the European Single Act. Currently, they take some time to make decisions, but the intense interaction and deliberation observed in the process seems to be fruitful. On the other hand, most of the Länder have successfully aligned their education policy with other policy areas which contribute to research, development and education.

Recently published evidence also notices a somehow successful consolidation of cooperative federalism in Brazil. In that country, since municipalities and states are all of them units of the federation and keep their own resources, some commentators expected competitive strategies to prevail, and welfare downsizing to be the likely consequence. However, the federation has managed to equalise resources and outcomes in such areas as education and health by creating a core system of strategic planning for local and regional governments. This system sets benchmarks and makes all of them accountable in these policy areas.

In Spain, devolution of education and health policies to ‘autonomous communities’ was completed by 2000. In the aftermath, the central government tried to foster ‘territorial coordination’ by providing complementary funds for the schools to implement some wide-ranging initiatives in order to tackle school failure (e.g. individualised tutoring, mentoring, extending after-class activities to all). Some regional governments have also proved to be innovative in launching a multilaterally supported, ambitious and long-term strategy for lifelong learning (the Basque country), and delivering scholarships conditioned to successful participation in further education (Andalusia). Some local governments have also strengthened their authority to guarantee more transparent school admission policies and have been struggling to widen career guidance (in Catalonia). However, the pressure for the Constitutional Court to cancel the bulk of the 2006 Catalan Statute Act (which had been voted in the Spanish Parliament and in a referendum in Catalonia) and the final decision of the court challenging many articles of that act severely damaged trust between the central and the regional governments. After 2010 fiscal consolidation has weakened some of these innovations by reducing the educational and health budgets as well as restricting social protection in a context of increasing hardship.

These three examples suggest that multi-level government can be as innovative as the Forum of Federations NGO expects it to be. However, this potential directly depends on the mainstream political arrangements and the underlying rationale of fiscal policies.

Michael Keating suggests an extremely relevant distinction when featuring the “rescaling of the European state” as “ the migration of functional systems, identities, and institutions to new levels”. This concept can be read as the presentation of three different mechanisms of policy rescaling. Mechanisms are causal patterns which are enacted in some contexts.

The current political and academic arguments on the currency area and the free trade agreement make reference to the migration of functional systems. On the one hand, many economists have blamed the institutional design of the currency union for the sovereign-debt crisis to the extent that policy-makers have failed to design and implement a reliable fiscal union, which in their view must underpin a currency union. On the other hand, the proposal to sign a free trade agreement between the EU and the US has been challenged on the grounds that a sound economic policy should nowadays localise as many activities as possible and engage in resolute de-financialisation.

Apparently, the varying attachment of identities has to do with democratic disaffection and the search for more accountable and responsible authorities. Thus, some political parties vindicate the strengthening of member states’ competencies vis à vis the Union, since the legal basis of the European Commission, the European Council and the European Parliament entail significant democratic deficits. At the same time, some regions pursue their independence from their respective member states in other to become new members of the EU on their own. These latter movements claim for new democratic decision-making procedures on the very limits of the ‘demos’.

Finally, institutions themselves migrate. The Europe 2020 Strategy keeps a frail equilibrium with the undergoing ‘energy transitions’ in France and Germany and the reliance of Eastern countries on carbon as far as renewable sources, emissions and efficiency are concerned. The European Central Bank is the new last resort lender beyond the former national banks, but the officials of the German Central Bank address severe criticism to its policies. Labour and education policies respond to an even more complex rescaling insofar as their framework goals are established in Brussels by means of the Open Method of Coordination, member states are accountable through the data base of benchmarks constructed by Eurostat, and regional and local governments are often expected to build territorial coalitions to align these goals with regional economic development.

In the end, these social changes are also influencing sectoral boundaries in the whole continent. Not only education and employment policies, but also macro-economic, trade, energy, transportation and other policy sectors are being connected in innovative complex ways. While Europeanisation brings this effect about at the upper level, simultaneous and disparate trends of both devolution and centralisation are doing so at the level of sub-state politics.