Understanding equity as an asset to national interest: developing a social contract analysis of policy

Abstract

Alongside the influence of market-based reforms in education policy has been the growth of policy that has largely been overlooked – those that outline social contracts. This paper draws on policies that connect with equity as a way of illustrating this social contract turn in policy and develops a conceptualisation of social contracts as they apply to education policy. The argument provides three principles that underpin social contracts, including informed consent, negotiation and accountability. This paper applies these principles to three levels of social contract. At the first level are broad social contracts, which are associated with debates about the kinds of things that states should expect from its citizens, and the things that citizens could expect from governments and the state. The second level of social contract is an institutional or field-based social contract, which spells out the obligations and connections between a specific field and other fields. This level names a kind of social contract that is often exemplified in policies or statements by specific institutions. The third level of social contract deals with contract-like mechanisms embedded in fields that make tangible the obligations and expectations of citizens in fulfilling the expectations of fields.

Keywords:

• equity
• social contracts
• education policy
• contract-like mechanisms scales of social contracts
• asymmetrical dyads

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, Radhika Gorur, Glenn Savage, and Sam Sellar for their help and assistance in putting this special issue together. Thanks also go to Jill Blackmore, Julie Rowlands and Kate Johnstone for their comments that helped refine the argument in the paper.

Notes

1.In the main, examples of policy in this paper will be drawn from Australia, with some reference to the policy work of the OECD. Though the specific cases may have limitations in terms of generalizability because of this context, the language around social contracts may have a broader application.

2.The concept of a ‘national innovation system’ is a key reference point introduced in the Knowledge based economy (OECD, 1996), and refers to ‘the flows and relationships which exist among industry, government and academia in the development of science and technology’ (p. 16). The development of a national innovation system is therefore a strategy which governments can draw on in order to build a knowledge-based economy.

3.It is important to note the critique of contract theory in its application to questions of gender relations: see Carol Pateman's (1988) The sexual contract.

4.I want to thank Fazal Rizvi for his input in relation to this argument. There is a broad politics about what should count as ‘social’ in social contracts and what features can be taken to be distinctive of ‘contracts’.

5.There are, however, other traditions besides the Enlightenment tradition that deal with issues similar to social contract arguments which fall beyond the scope of this paper, and into which the associations of social contracts would differ. Sen's (2009) work touches on some of these connected traditions.

6.Arguably there is a tradition within sociological thought of providing an account of the realisation of these contracts and of a sense of answering back to the focus on ideal-conditions and goals that underpin the setting of social contracts. More broadly, Sen (2009) identifies a distinction in Enlightenment philosophers between those only concerned with identifying just social arrangements, in an ideal sense, and those interested in ‘making comparisons between different ways in which people's lives may be led, influenced by institutions but also by people's actual behaviour, social interactions and other significant determinants’ (p. xvi).

7.Bourdieu's (2003) account of symbolic violence may be a useful resource to understand this process.

8.COAG is a high level council at which negotiations occur between Federal, state (Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australian and Western Australia) and mainland territory (Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory) levels of government. These negotiations relate to the provision of funding from the Federal Government to state governments, which are based on a vertical fiscal imbalance, in which the Federal Government retains responsibility for the collecting of revenue through taxation, while state governments have the main constitutional responsibility for the provision of services, such as school education (with some exceptions). (See Cranston, Kimber, Mulford, Reid, & Keating, 2010).