Captured by the Discourse? Issues and concerns in researching ‘parental choice‘

Abstract

In this paper we look at the relationship between political, cultural and economic change, the ‘position’ of parental choice in the various policy texts (in particular, it's centrality to The Parent's Charter) and what we have termed the context of practice (Bowe et al., 1992). In particular, we raise some issues and concerns that arise from research to date, in terms of their methodologies, their analysis and their representations of choice. It is the failure, in all these respects, to consider the complexity and inter‐relatedness of choice‐making and political and economic change that gives rise to our concerns. We tentatively suggest a heuristic device, the metaphor of landscapes of choice, that we think might help us to explore the relationships between the various policy contexts, whilst recognising the embeddedness of the research process in precisely these contexts.