NPM and educational reform in Europe

In this opening chapter we outline our conceptualisation of NPM and why this is an important and enduring focus for analysing system changes to the nation state and public services within and across Europe. We provide an analytical framework for presenting ten European countries as sites for examining NPM and we frame our contribution as European Lessons for Policy and Practice through examining how and why the field of critical education policy studies can gain new insights about NPM within the organisation, the locality, nation, and beyond. In doing so we examine the challenges brought by criticisms of methodological nationalism and claims regarding the necessity for normative cosmopolitan visions. At the same time we argue for a renewed centrality of the nation state as an analytical focus, refusing any reductionist account of a shift from government to governance, for example via the hollowing out of the state thesis, and proposing a more nuanced conceptualization of the state as a social relation. This enables our analysis to capture the complexities of the overlapping and interplay between government (i.e. the practices of management by state institutions and public administration), governance (i.e. the practices of social regulation involving a variety of interdependent social, political and administrative actors within and beyond the state), and governmental practices (i.e. the wider power relations governing conduct in apparently non-political sites). Such a contribution focuses on the intellectual resources within and used by the field, so we consider not only the pre-eminence of sociology but also the importance of political studies in shaping and enabling thinking for and about policies and practices.