The Commission, the Single Market and the Crisis: The Limits of Purposeful Opportunism

The economic and financial crisis opened a window of opportunity to place the Single Market back on top of the European agenda as part of a two-tiered crisis response, which also included reinforced financial supervision and economic co-ordination. We argue that the Commission acted as a ‘purposeful opportunist’ in both tiers; but whereas in economic governance issues there was breakthrough change in the Commission's achievements and competences, in the Single Market realm policy change was fairly modest. Using process tracing analysis our goal is to explain why the Commission did not succeed in furthering a genuine Single Market reform. Our findings suggest that the Commission's entrepreneurship was constrained by the limited salience of Single Market issues in the crisis context and by the lack of actual political commitment from the other relevant stakeholders. Thus, our research highlights the limits of the Commission's opportunistic behaviour in less advantageous circumstances.

STUDENT’ S ENGAGEMENT IN SCHOOL: A LITERATURE REVIEW

Students’ Engagement in School has been the focus of debate concerning academic success and school dropout, and pointed out as a mean to address the problems affecting our schools and their students, not only for having value in itself, but also for being an important mediator between several academic variables. This paper reviews the research and literature on this concept and its relations with personal and contextual variables, as well as with academic performance, with the aim of summarizing the main relationships found. Literature presents a significant number of studies which sustain that personal variables, such as self-efficacy and self-concept, as well as contextual - peers, school, family- are related with school engagement. The adoption of mastery goals, for instance, has a positive impact on school, as they are related with the use of cognitive and self-regulatory strategies by students. Positive relationships with peers, teachers support and the quality of family relations are associated with higher levels of engagement and academic performance, while negative experiences, such as bullying, are related with educational difficulties. Following this, we reflect about the relevance of studying engagement in school, in the context of widespread financial crisis, and emphasize the need to rethink educational institutions considering the paradigmatic changes that currently occur.