| Abstract: | This article seeks to put forward one tentative basis on which comparative education might profit from an engagement with 'globalisation', and to circumvent the danger that that engagement will lead to a shift in purpose, from 'how to make education better' to 'how to make education do better'. It uses the example of the career of the New Zealand model of neo-liberalism and new public management to expose, from the perspective of how a 'localism' becomes globalised, something of the nature of the processes, discourses and mechanisms of globalisation and of the subjects who drive them. The article examines the local conditions that enabled the development and installation of the New Zealand model, the discursive and formal characteristics that made it desirable and possible for it to be incorporated at a global level, and the means through which this was done. It concludes by drawing some possible theoretical and methodological implications of the career of the New Zealand model for the relationship between comparative education and globalisation. |
