Field theory and education: a case study of the international baccalaureate

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to bridge a divide between the empirical use of Bourdieu’s concepts and the theoretical discussion of field theory with regard to education. I ask how a school can be ‘international’ where education is predominantly embedded in nation-states. First, I introduce field theory and its applications to globalization and education. Second, I analyze the International Baccalaureate Organization, a large non-profit provider of accreditation for schools, as a case for conceptualizing a global field of ‘international education.’ My ethnographic and historical findings provide the background for the global field argument. Second, drawing on IBO’s student data, I construct a geometric space of IB schools and analyze it as a relatively autonomous subfield. Finally, I show how combining field analysis and geometric modeling yields a new perspective on ‘international education.’

KEYWORDS:

• Field theory
• symbolic goods
• geometric data analysis
• global field
• multiple correspondence analysis
• International Baccalaureate
• international schools

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a more detailed definition, see (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 47; Sapiro, 2015).

2. For a systematic account of analogical thinking in sociology, see (Vaughan, 2014).

3. As a statistical method, MCA originated in France during the 1960s and was developed by statistician Jean-Paul Benzécri and French sociologists associated with Bourdieu. It gained fame with Distinction (1979), one of the most influential books in sociology globally, yet remains largely ignored outside of France despite its uses in the sociology of culture applying the analyses in Distinction to other national contexts (Duval, 2016).

4. The Journal of Research in International Education includes the directors of IBO and GEMS in its editorial board. For a detailed critique of this literature, see (Dugonjić, 2014a).

5. For recent examples, see (Bunnell, 2020; Verger et al., 2016).

6. Swedish sociology of education stands out for its significant empirical contribution combining the field-analytic approach with MCA in the context of higher and upper secondary education (Bergström, 2017; Börjesson et al., 2016; Forsberg, 2018), yet its significance has been disconnected from the broader discussion of field theory and global fields. While this is surprising given the affinity between MCA and field theory, it is in line with the Swedish reception of Bourdieu’s work in sociology education, which, much like his American reception, isolated the concept of cultural capital from field theory (Besbris & Khan, 2017, p. 150); yet unlike the latter, focused on using MCA to construct social spaces (Hultqvist & Lidegran, 2020).

7. The interviews I conducted and transcribed were thereafter used to analyze the social trajectories of international school teachers and to complete the analysis of IBO’s curricula in world history and literature in translation, see (Dugonjic-Rodwin, 2014b).

8. For more detail on this field-analytic approach to interviews, see (Bourdieu, 1981, p. 4).

9. For another example of this usage, see (Lebaron, 2008).

10. Edu-business founded in 1972 by Kevin Mc Neany and based in Cayman Islands.

11. Edu-business founded in 2000 by Sunny Varkey and based in Dubai. Implanted in a dozen countries, it is the largest operator of private schools in the Middle East with schools in West Africa, Asia, UK and Switzerland (Ball, 2012).

12. For a detailed analysis of these hierarchies in practice, see (Dugonjic-Rodwin, 2014b, pp. 258–262).

13. (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 141)

14. (Bourdieu, 2005, Introduction).

15. Interview with Frans, 25 January 2012: manager at North Anglia Education Inc. for 1 year, B.A in engineering from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Belgian, age 30.

16. (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 13).

17. (Peterson, 2003, p. 41).

18. On markets of symbolic goods as a stage in the emergence of social fields, see (Bourdieu, 1996, Part I, Chapter 3).

19. For example (Leach, 1969; Meyer, 1968).

20. Interview with Frans, 25 January 2012, cited p. 13.

21. Interview with Bill, 30 September 2010: director general and English teacher at UNIS for 25 years, B.A in English, Univerity of Hawaï, American, age 58.

22. Interview with Courtney, 13 October 2010: Anthropology teacher at UNIS for 43 years, PhD in Anthropology at Columbia University, British, age 65.

23. Interview with Marwane, 2 October 2007: English teacher at Ecolint for 33 years, M.A in English Paris X, French, age 61.

24. On selecting axes based on decreasing singular values, deviations and cumulated modified ratios, see (Le Roux & Rouanet, 2010, pp. 39, 51).

25. Interview with Paul, 14 October 2010: History teacher at UNIS for 16 years, PhD Richmond College, British, age 60.

26. See the major readers on globalization and education (Lauder et al., 2006; Spring, 2015).

27. The newer the teacher is to ‘international education,’ the more they find these rules and norms constraining. For a detailed analysis, see (Dugonjic-Rodwin, 2014b, pp. 229–290).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung [100014_126966]; Uppsala Universitet.

Notes on contributors

Leonora Dugonjic-Rodwin

Leonora Dugonjic-Rodwin is Researcher in the Sociology of Education and Culture (SEC). Before joining Uppsala, she was a SNSF fellow at Humboldt-University in Berlin, a post-doctoral researcher at the CNRS in Paris and associate coordinator (with Gisèle Sapiro) of the European Project INTERCO-SSH. Her work centers on internationalism in education, the social construction of education markets and global field analysis. Her forthcoming book, Une international élitiste: sociologie historique du baccalauréat international (Presses universitaires de Rennes) examines the social structures and historical dynamics of IB programs and schools, combining field theory with the theory of symbolic goods, quantitative and qualitative methods, micro, meso and macro levels of analysis. Informed by her empirical research, Dugonjic-Rodwin also engages with questions of methodology and epistemology in socio-historical research. She has published articles in Pedagogica historica, Revue suisse des sciences de l’education, Education Comparée, Journal of Curriculum Studies and Prospects: Quarterly Review of Comparative Education. She is also an affiliated member of the European center of sociology and political science (CESSP) in Paris, France and the Research team on the social history of education (ERHISE) in Geneva, Switzerland.