Education politics and contingency

The theoretical tradition in comparative education research is not particularly strong, which may be one reason for the success of the ahistorical and de-contextualized conceptualizations in the field. Similarly, functionalist comparisons based on different system models have become the mainstream among transnational organizations such as the World Bank, the OECD and the EU. This rather mechanistic kind of paradigm has been the bane of comparative research in the past.