Comparative and international education: policy transfer, context sensitivity and professional development

This paper examines the intellectual and professional contribution of comparative and international studies to the field of education. It explores the nature of the challenges that are currently being faced, and assesses its potential for the advancement of future teaching, research and professional development. Attention is paid to the place of comparative and international education (CIE)-past and present-in teacher education, in postgraduate studies, and in the realms of policy and practice, theory and research. Consideration is first given to the nature and history of CIE, to its initial contributions to the field of education in the UK, and to its chief mechanisms and sites of production. Influential methodological and theoretical developments are examined, followed by an exploration of emergent questions, controversies and dilemmas that could benefit from sustained comparative analysis in the future. Conclusions consider implications for the place of CIE in the future of educational studies as a whole; for relations between and beyond the 'disciplines of education'; and for the development of sustainable research capacity in this field.

Public policy and foreign-based enterprises in Britain prior to the Second World War

This article examines the early evolution of British policy, prior to the Second World War. The British government adopted an ‘open’ policy towards foreign direct investment (FDI), despite periodic fears that some foreign acquisitions of UK firms in key sectors might be detrimental to the national interest, and a few ad hoc attempts to deal with particular instances of this kind. During the 1930s, when the inflow of foreign firms accelerated following Britain's adoption of general tariff protection, the government developed a sophisticated admissions policy, based on an assessment of the likely net benefit of each applicant to the British economy. Its limited regulatory powers were used to maximize the potential of immigrant firms for technology transfer, enhanced competition, industrial diversification, and employment creation (particularly in the depressed regions), while protecting British industries suffering from excess capacity.

Changing building user attitude and organisational policy towards sustainable resource use in healthcare

Health care provision is significantly impacted by the ability of the health providers to engineer a viable healthcare space to support care stakeholders needs. In this paper we discuss and propose use of organisational semiotics as a set of methods to link stakeholders to systems, which allows us to capture clinician activity, information transfer, and building use; which in tern allows us to define the value of specific systems in the care environment to specific stakeholders and the dependence between systems in a care space. We suggest use of a semantically enhanced building information model (BIM) to support the linking of clinician activity to the physical resource objects and space; and facilitate the capture of quantifiable data, over time, concerning resource use by key stakeholders. Finally we argue for the inclusion of appropriate stakeholder feedback and persuasive mechanism, to incentivise building user behaviour to support organisational level sustainability policy.

Government policy under price uncertainty: a source of volatility in illegal immigration

In this paper we provide an alternative explanation for why illegal immigration can exhibit substantial fluctuation. We develop a model economy in which migrants make decisions in the face of uncertain border enforcement and lump-sum transfers from the host country. The uncertainty is extrinsic in nature, a sunspot, and arises as a result of ambiguity regarding the commodity price of money. Migrants are restricted from participating in state-contingent insurance markets in the host country, whereas host country natives are not. Volatility in migration flows stems from two distinct sources: the tension between transfers inducing migration and enforcement discouraging it and secondly the existence of a sunspot. Finally, we examine the impact of a change in tax/transfer policies by the government on migration.

Globalization and new policy concerns: the WTO and the EU's sustainability criteria for biofuels

The transfer of some decision-making authority from the domestic to the supranational arena as a result of the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 potentially changed domestic policy dynamics. The WTO agreements reflect the trade policy concerns addressed in the Uruguay Round in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This article applies and adapts historical institutionalism to explain how international organizations may constrain and facilitate certain domestic policy options. It demonstrates that, while the WTO legal framework has become more receptive of environmental sustainability concerns, the social sustainability concerns that were increasingly entering the debate over biofuel policies were not easily accommodated, and this was seen as a constraint on the content of the European Union’s (EU) policy adopted in 2009. Only the environmental dimension of a broader concept of sustainability was included in the policy design.

The Cold War and its aftermath in the Americas: the search for a synthetic interpretation of U.S. policy

More than two decades have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the transfer of the Cold War file from a daily preoccupation of policy makers to a more detached assessment by historians. Scholars of U.S.-Latin American relations are beginning to take advantage both of the distance in time and of newly opened archives to reflect on the four decades that, from the 1940s to the 1980s, divided the Americas, as they did much of the world. Others are seeking to understand U.S. policy and inter-American relations in the post-Cold War era, a period that not only lacks a clear definition but also still has no name. Still others have turned their gaze forward to offer policies in regard to the region for the new Obama administration. Numerous books and review essays have addressed these three subjects—the Cold War, the post-Cold War era, and current and future issues on the inter-American agenda. Few of these studies attempt, however, to connect the three subjects or to offer new and comprehensive theories to explain the course of U.S. policies from the beginning of the twentieth century until the present. Indeed, some works and policy makers continue to use the mind-sets of the Cold War as though that conflict were still being fought. With the benefit of newly opened archives, some scholars have nevertheless drawn insights from the depths of the Cold War that improve our understanding of U.S. policies and inter-American relations, but they do not address the question as to whether the United States has escaped the longer cycle of intervention followed by neglect that has characterized its relations with Latin America. Another question is whether U.S. policies differ markedly before, during, and after the Cold War. In what follows, we ask whether the books reviewed here provide any insights in this regard and whether they offer a compass for the future of inter-American relations. We also offer our own thoughts as to how their various perspectives could be synthesized to address these questions more comprehensively.