Xavier Rambla

• Autonomous University of Barcelona

In this article we examine the European Semester as an innovative form of policy coordination, with distinct effects on education and skills policies for Member States. We analyse the Semester's framing of education policy, and examine its manifestations in Spain and Sweden, two countries considered to be different in their approach to education. D...

In this paper, we will analyze how a few initial vocational education and training (VET) schools have elaborated wide-ranging responses to early leaving from education and training in Liguria (Italy) and Catalonia (Spain). In contrast with many members of the EU and the OECD, the prevailing institutional arrangements in these two countries hardly s...

We are living at a time of educational expansion in most parts of the world, which creates new opportunity structures for young people [...]

The enactment of higher education policies has followed an unprecedented sequence of innovation around blended and hybrid learning because of the gradual dissemination of pedagogical and technological developments. These include quality assurance, qualification frameworks, employability programs, international mobility of students and teachers, and...

Investigar experiencias de transición entre fases de la vida, particularmente en momentos de cambios profundos, ayuda a comprender las estructuras y las relaciones más profundas de las sociedades (Walther et al., 2022). Mientras que la juventud, la adultez y la vejez se distinguían claramente a mediados del siglo XX, más adelante la adultez se ha e...

Twenty ye ars after the Lisbon strategy, education policy in the European Union (EU) is at a critical juncture, with a new set of strategic goals endorsed for the 2021–2030 decade. This article examines the complex interplay of ideas, institutions and actors, in articulating education policy priorities in the new European Education Area (EEA). Draw...

El interés por la coeducación comenzó a manifestarse en España hacia los años ochenta. Maestras, profesoras, también algunos maestros, empezaron a preguntarse cómo conseguir que, más allá de la escuela mixta, la educación de niñas y niños fuera igualitaria, algo que sabíamos que no sucedía, pero que era difícil imaginar. Debido a este interés y dem...

Due to an array of individual, institutional and structural factors, several constraints hinder the access of migrant youth to education, training and employment in Catalonia. In this article, we explore the conditions in which young migrants access the education and training system in Catalonia (Spain). Drawing on the theory of opportunity structu...

The chapter explores the rationale, benchmarks and assumptions on political relationships according to which the European Union designs its policies in the areas of education and innovation. This analysis unveils how the geopolitics of knowledge spells out key processes that take place within the European Union. Politics intermingles with knowledge...

This article draws on interviews with 164 young beneficiaries (of) and 128 professionals in charge of lifelong learning policies in eighteen regions located in nine member states of the European Union in 2017. Drawing on the concept of ‘opportunity structures’, we analyse variations between regional institutional arrangements and interactions betwe...

Literature on education and training highlights two factors that impinge on the distribution of early leaving (ELET) and exclusion from employment and training (NEET) across EU regions. One of these factors lies in the institutions that regulate the transition from education and training to employment at the national level. Over time, these institu...

The edited collection coherently focuses on different facets of the same issue: lifelong learning policies for young adults that address young people, in particular those in situations of near social exclusion. The contributors investigate the specific forms of embedding of these policies in the regional economy, the labor market, the education/tra...

Although the challenges of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) have become apparent in middle-income countries, the making of these systems has not been systematically theorised and compared. This article discusses such processes in Brazil ―a recognised emerging economy, and Chile― one of the last economies to join the high incom...

The chapter takes stock of the insights produced in the different chapters of this collection and draws conclusions based on three theoretical perspectives that guided our analysis. Each of them highlights a few important points that are helpful to make sense of the evidence posited by the thematic chapters. Cultural Political Economy provides cruc...

Lifelong learning policies may construct target groups in two different ways. First, sometimes encompassing systems of lifelong learning policies implement programmes for specific social categories in terms of school performance, gender or ethnicity. Second, lifelong learning policies are much more fragmentary in many countries. There, experts and...

This comprehensive collection discusses topical issues essential to both scholarship and policy making in the realm of Lifelong Learning policies and how far they succeed in supporting young people across their life courses, rather than one-sidedly fostering human capital for the economy. Examining specific regional and local contexts across Europe...

This article explores the interface between lifelong learning policies and the definition of social vulnerability of young adults in two regions located within the European Union. Girona comprises a constellation of small towns with important industry, service and hospitality sectors. Vienna is a global city where many key international operators a...

The article analyses the interaction between the European Commission and a sample of educational authorities in Spain with regard to the policy against early school leaving. Although this member state scores the highest proportion of early school leavers, apparently it is not adopting some key recommendations issued by the Commission. In fact, whil...

Introduction Education is clearly an appropriate context for discussing the potential of capability-promoting policies. Certainly, in keeping with their explicit commitment to abstraction, Nussbaum (2000) and Sen (1999) do not necessarily make reference either to education or other policy fields. However, the United Nations Development Programme ha...

This chapter considers whether public policies impinge on the values of education by focusing on the experience of three Southern Cone countries: Argentina, Brazil and Chile. It first provides an overview of some theoretical arguments underpinning the impact of public policy on the instrumental values of education before discussing educational deve...

Most current social welfare policies aim to ameliorate immediate problems or injustices, but they do little to foster human development or support the potential of people within marginalized communities. How can we more effectively use public policy to foster human development? How can we overcome the injustice of contemporary society and give peop...

In recent years, the Civil Society Education Fund has supported national education civil society coalitions (NECs) in low-income countries so that they put pressure on governments and donors to implement the Education for All agenda and the Millennium Development Goal on education. This article draws on literature on global governance as well as on...

This briefing paper draws on the recently adopted Sustainable Development Goals and the previous statements regarding inclusive education so as to propose guidelines for international aid in the area of education. Basically, both concepts stand for a wide-ranging view of education in the frame of correlative challenges and objectives. A key point i...

This chapter presents a comparative analysis of Education for All plans in Brazil and the Philippines. These two countries share a number of commonalities not least due to their current status as emergent, intermediate economies in the global world. However, the official indicators of educational development show disparate trends in the middle term...

Public policies analysis is paying a growing attention to the analysis of theories of change. This approach is proposed to the extent it inquires which concrete factors either favour or hinder the outcomes of programmes implemented in given settings. Often, these studies draw on the review of the specialised literature so as to estimate the coheren...

This article analyses how Education for All policies were transferred to Brazil and Latin America by means of ambitious educational strategic plans such as the Plan for the Development of Education and the National Education Plans – promoted by the Federal Government of Brazil, and the Latin American Educational Goals – promoted by the Organisation...

El artículo estudia la política global de la educación, que se ha generado a partir de las interacciones entre los organismos internacionales, los gobiernos de los estados, una floreciente sociedad civil global, y un nuevo interés por convertir la educación en un mercado de servicios. Dicha transformación ha dado lugar a unos regímenes sociales de...

The article compares educational regionalisation in Europe and Latin America. This analysis unveils the influence of three social phenomena in the two case studies, namely power, fields of activity and knowledge. Mostly, it focuses on the initiatives led by the European Union and the Organisation of Ibero-American States in order to implement large...

The article contextualises over-age enrolment within the social divisions affecting the education system in Brazil. The following section analyses to what extent the components of multidimensional poverty impinge on the probability for a student to attend a course corresponding to a lower age. This analysis is helpful to discuss two mechanisms that...

La comunicación analiza varias dimensiones del desarrollo humano en América Latina. En primer lugar, las teorías normativas de la justicia social sugieren que las evaluaciones de las políticas públicas se apoyen en los datos sobre escolarización y rendimiento académico, de igual modo que contextualicen sus conclusiones en los análisis correspondien...

Introdução Em agosto de 2011, a Fundação João Pinheiro realizou, em parceria com a Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, o seminário internacional “Pobreza, desigualdade e desempenho educacional” na cidade de Belo Horizonte. Os temas debatidos foram: “Pobreza e educação: elos fortes da destituição”; “Desigualdades e desempenho educacional: os dilemas...

The article contextualises over-age enrolment within the social divisions affecting the education system in Brazil. The following section analyses to what extent the components of multidimensional poverty impinge on the probability for a student to attend a course corresponding to a lower age. This analysis is helpful to discuss two mechanisms that...

The paper analyses some dimensions of human development in Latin America. First, the normative accounts of social justice recommend that evaluations of public policies rely on data about school enrolment and academic performance and frame their conclusions in relevant analyses of material deprivation. Second, salient interactions have been noticed...

This article analyses the ‘soft power’ that the Federal Government of Brazil has gained by designing and implementing a very ambitious Plan for the Development of Education. It draws on fieldwork carried out in the country in 2009 and 2010 in order to conduct a discourse analysis of the strategy deployed by the key political agents. The results sho...

In many countries choice of school is an increasing concern for families and governments. In Spain and Chile, it is also associated with a long‐standing political cleavage on the regulation of large sectors of private‐dependent schools. This article analyses both the micro‐ and the macro‐politics of choice in these two countries, where low‐status 1...

In this article we draw on the method proposed by CROP (Comparative Research on Poverty) so as to spell out the causal mechanisms provoking the durable inequalities that underlie social inclusion policies in Argentina. We use Norman Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis in order to highlight how international organizations and the Argentinean go...

In this article we draw on the method proposed by CROP (Comparative Research on Poverty) so as to spell out the causal mechanisms provoking the durable inequalities that underlie social inclusion policies in Argentina. We use Norman Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis in order to highlight how international organizations and the Argentinean go...

This paper describes a model for the analysis of the quality of teaching and learning in higher education. Empirically validated through an extensive student‐focused survey, this model puts forward a concept of quality that challenges that which is commonly used in institutional analysis. Research indicates that quality, rather than being a simple...

The incorporation of the perspective of gender in the public policies in Brazil is quite recent, being few the registry and analysis of the provincial and municipal experiences, in special, that concern the initiatives of formulation and management of public budgets. This article tries to contribute to the overcoming of this fault, discussing and a...

Brazili's school system has a high above-age rate, that is, a high percentage (over 60%) of students whose age is above the school age expected for the school year they are enrolled in. In this article we look into the mechanisms responsible for above-age from a sociological perspetive, and inquire whether its causes are found both in the way socia...

El sistema escolar brasileño tiene elevada participación (mas de 60%) de estudiantes con una edad cronológica superior a la edad escolar correspondiente al curso en que se han matriculado (fenómeno de la "sobre-edad"). En este artículo queremos indagar los mecanismos causales de la "sobre-edad", desde una perspectiva sociológica, indagando si sus c...

Incl. bibl., abstract For the past decades international organisations and governments have promoted and implemented analogous education policies on the grounds that education is the key factor to foster development and fight poverty. This article sets the context of these educational programmes and analyses their discourse on poverty in Argentina...

p> Preguntarse por la calidad del aprendizaje en Educación Superior (E.S.) no es una cuestión nada simple. Como toda apreciación de naturaleza evaluadora, fundamentalmente depende de los referentes empleados en hacerlo y del modo cómo se realiza. Ello convierte a dicha noción en un concepto complejo y controvertido debido a las distintas aproximaci...

This study estimates the trends of school segregation in Catalonia (Spain) between 2001 and 2006. Currently, new immigration has reopened the debate about the ‘Other Catalans’ triggered by concern with the integration of the incoming population. An ‘intersectional approach’ to social divisions suggests that class and ethnic school segregation respo...

Brazil has the second largest popula- tion of black ancestry of the world, after Nigeria, and records sharp indexes of social inequality compared to other countries. The article analyzes the ethnic axis of inequality in Brazil. An over- view of ethnic-race relations is presented in order to report how the Brazilian social sciences have taken accoun...

El objetivo del artículo es analizar el papel que juega la influencia internacional en el diseño y aplicación de políticas educativas en el Cono Sur. Específicamente pretende explorar el proceso a través del cual las ideas, recomendaciones y metas globales modelan las políticas educativas latinoamericanas. Para ello, el artículo se centra en el pro...

The aim of this article is to review the current state of inclusive education in the world and to suggest a few relevant considerations. The first section “Two parallel concerns” retraces the inescapable connections between the educational aspects of inclusive education and more general concerns regarding inequality. The second section “Inclusive e...

Resumen. Este artículo establece un estado de la cuestión de la educación inclusiva en el mundo y sugiere algunas reflexiones al respecto. El primer apartado recuerda las conexiones ineludibles entre las preocupaciones educativas por la educación inclusiva y las preocupaciones más generales por la desigualdad. El segundo consigna los criterios de b...

In this article we aim to explore if these interventions are powerful enough to meet their official objective, that is, to overcome educational problems and disadvantages. Our argument relies on two previous generalizations that have established the framework for wider discussion. On the one hand, some recent contributions continue the long intelle...

The article analyses educational targeting in Argentina, Brazil and Chile from a sociological point of view. It presents the ‘logic of induction’ as an ideal type. This pedagogic discourse is the vehicle of an educational anti-poverty strategy that aims to induce clearly targeted groups to improve on their own. The analysis explores the influence o...

The article analyses educational targeting in Argentina, Brazil and Chile from a sociological point of view. It presents the 'logic of induction' as an ideal type. This pedagogic discourse is the vehicle of an educational anti-poverty strategy that aims to induce clearly targeted groups to improve on their own. The analysis explores the influence o...

El artículo presenta las interpretaciones sociológicas que se han formulado para dar cuenta de las estrategias propuestas actualmente para combatir la pobreza mediante la acción selectiva (o focalizada) y la activación. Una perspectiva considera que esta estrategia es especialmente adecuada a los cambios sociales que están teniendo lugar. Sin embar...

L’article exposa diverses critiques de les hipotesis sobre el capital social, el capital huma i la mobilitat social (de posicio i d’ingres), les quals sovint es presenten com un argument empiric a favor de l’estrategia de combatre la pobresa ensenyant les persones pobres a utilitzar aquests capitals individuals per aprofitar els canals de la mobili...

The article provides the information and theoretical interpretation required for a comparison of six countries (France, Sweden, Spain, Argentina, Brazil and Costa Rica). The author attempts to ascertain whether social change has reduced the relative inequalities between the positions of their class structures and status and whether it has promoted...

This paper makes use of one of the last concepts developed by Basil Bernstein (the Totally Pedagogised Society, TPS) to understand some of the forces and contradictions underlying today's teachers' work in Spain. In his last written work, Bernstein (2001) pointed out some arguments to illustrate the emergence of a TPS. Always interested in uncoveri...

El artículo presenta la información y las interpretaciones teóricas necesarias para comparar seis países (Francia, Suecia, España, Argentina, Brasil y Costa Rica) con el fin de averiguar si el cambio social ha suavizado las desigualdades relativas entre las posiciones de sus estructuras de clase y estatus, y si ha promovido su desarrollo económico...

En: Revista de educación (Madrid) Madrid 2003, n. 330, enero-abril ; p. 83-98 Se revisa la bibliografía internacional sobre los factores sociales de la elección de escuela y presenta los resultados de varios estudios etnográficos sobre este tema en España. Se defiende la tesis de que las familias eligen escuela de manera distinta según su clase soc...

Research suggests that domestic knowledge is an expression of gender differences, which is constructed and deployed through unequal social relations and is able to empower women if it gains collective spaces of expression. The article presents an analysis of parental involvement at school in Spain so as to underpin the former thesis and highlight i...

This article explores the recontextualisation process of educational diversity in the context of recent educational policy changes in Spain. The article, based on Bernstein's theory of the structuring of pedagogic discourse, argues that the concept of educational diversity can be understood as a pedagogic device structured by a set of rules which r...

En: Revista Internacional de Sociología Córdoba 1999, tercera época, n. 22, enero-abril; p. 5-31 Se plantea que las relaciones entre la estructura social y la política social se establecen en términos de bidireccionalidad y recursividad. Tanto una condiciona a la otra, como a la inversa. También se cuestiona una visión simplista de la política soci...

En: Cuadernos de Pedagogía Barcelona 1999, n. 284, octubre ; p. 48-53 El Proyecto Arianne se ha organizado como una red de equipos de investigación que han trabajado autónomamente en Dinamarca, Alemania, Grecia, Gran Bretaña, Francia, Italia, España y Portugal. En cada caso se ha desarrollado un modelo propio para conseguir un mismo objetivo: elabo...

En: Revista Internacional de Sociología Córdoba 1999, tercera época, n. 24, septiembre-diciembre ; p. 55-73 Análisis de la formación, desarrollo, resultados e impacto de la participación ciudadana como agente democratizador en la escuela, promulgada por la Ley órganica del Derecho a la Educación (LODE, 1985), por medio de las Asociaciones de Madres...

La idea principal que se defiende en este artículo es que las relaciones entre la estructura social y la política social se establecen en términos de bidireccionalidad y recursividad. Tanto una condiciona a la otra como a la inversa. También se cuestiona una visión simplista de la política social según la cual serviría para compensar las desigualda...

Applies to the Spanish educational system, the theory of semiperipheral societies developed by B. de Souza Santos. Spanish schooling is described as semiperipheral in that it entails a significant gap between aspirations and provision. Implications for the analysis of other Mediterranean school systems are discussed. (SLD)

Dintre de la polèmica sobre el servei militar, la sociologia pot analitzar les contradiccions pragmàtiques derivades de la realització dels principis constitucionals. En aquest article es presenta una monografia sobre un quarter dels Pirineus l'any 1990. S'hi argumenta una hipòtesi formulada en els termes següents: l'apartament que imposa el quarte...

Els diversos corrents de la sociologia de la ciencia sovint han dirigit la seva atencio exclusiva be a l'estudi dels disscursos cientifics, be al de les estructures i interaccions institucionals que els produeixen. Aquest article es un intent de posar en relacio aquests dos nivells d'analisi i d'aplicar els resultats a l'estudi sociologic de la soc...

Ressenya de l'obra de J. Pahl apareguda el 1989, Money and Marriage. London: McMillan.

Ressenya de l'obra de J. Fontana apareguda el 1992, La història després de la fi de la història. Barcelona: Eumo.