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This paper explores recent changes in tertiary education policy in New Zealand, which are designed to address legitimation deficits. By offering an analysis of the making, and the subsequent unmaking, of quasi-markets in tertiary education, this paper attempts to describe how the state dealt with legitimation deficits resulting from providers' of tertiary education use of the adult and community education funding category to increase their revenues. In providing this description, the paper helps to provide a way of understanding how the state in New Zealand has responded to legitimation deficits by introducing a new regime of governance. The paper concludes by arguing that, in terms of its treatment of category 5.1 funding, this regime is supportive of neo-conservative goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper, we argue that neo-liberal governance regimes are deeply contradictory and that these contradictions are increasingly evident within the education sector. Drawing on a case study of the consequences of restructuring in education in New Zealand, arguably a paradigm case of neo-liberal governance, we suggest the state is faced with a dilemma about how best to manage these tensions and contradictions within the framework of the political rationality itself. One strategy is to isolate and localise these problems in order to contain and manage the risks associated with them. We identify five variants we argue can broadly be viewed as local states of emergency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the relationship between techniques of quantitative analysis and explanatory models of the association between social class and educational success in the context of empirical data from the New Zealand Progress at School project. The data discusses in this paper are from the Progress at School project which followed the educational careers of students who entered 37 New Zealand secondary schools in 1991. The research was designed as a school effects study, but few differences in student attainment that could be attributed to any property of the school attended were observed, and the data examined here with other interests in mind. The Progress at School project was structured by a family resource framework that might best be described as an explanatory sketch, or a set of connected hypotheses, for the purposes of directing the research and interpreting empirical data of both a quantitative and ethnographic kind. The specific techniques of path analysis, and of correlational analysis, more generally, should not be ignored by studies with access to quantitative data on social difference in educational attainment. At the same time, Boudon's argument that the mode of presentation of the data, what he calls the syntax of explanation, has a non-trivial significance in constructing causal accounts of social differences in education should be admitted as on with considerable force. This does not commit realists to the methodological individualism of Boudon's empiricism, or to accounts in terms of a model homo sociologicus acting within deterministic social structures, but neither are realists committed to the habitus-driven agent of an ultimately functionalist, and probably formally determinist, theory of social and educational reproduction.