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Articles

Critical policy sociology: key underlying assumptions and their implications for educational policy research

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Pages 59-75 | Received 08 Sep 2016, Accepted 19 Oct 2017, Published online: 31 Oct 2017
 

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, educational policy researchers have considered critical policy sociology, mostly known as ‘policy sociology’, as a useful research methodology for analysing educational policies. However, despite its increasing popularity, policy sociology has been a confusing concept hence it is often used interchangeably with other terms such as policy analysis. In the main, there is a dearth of literature outlining its key underlying assumptions and how this methodology helps policy researchers to analyse social, political and economic issues related to educational policy. By reviewing current body of literature in the field, this paper identifies policy sociology as one of the four major traditions in the policy analysis field. The paper presents six key underlying assumptions of policy sociology – value based study, political study, historical study, multidisciplinary study, assemblage study, and discourse study – and discusses how researchers have used policy sociology as a research methodology for analysing educational policies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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