ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the intimate and complex relations between educational research and its social and political embedding as seen from the perspective of comparative education in Sweden, in which several activities are based on educational ‘numbers’. It provides a theoretical stance by focusing on the conceptualisation of complexity and aims to contribute to the ‘re-thinking’ of the meaning of the ‘re-thinking’ itself. The metaphor points to a situation in which science and its effects are embedded in society as society is embedded in science. The chapter explores examples of how problems of complexity and reductionism have been dealt with in the field of comparative education. Torsten Husen was together with Neville Postlethwaite the editor of International Encyclopedia of Education. The chapter examines how Economic Co-operation and Development changed the rules of the game by emphasising governing by results instead of resources in education and how these rules make it possible for new agents to enter the educational Agora.
