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This special issue brings together current work in education research that engages with a pragmatic, yet critical theoretical tradition sprung from the French context during the 1980s. Based on a particular understanding of existence, perception, reality and the dynamics of social life, this theoretical tradition has continuously been developed over the past four decades in a variety of fields, such as law, economic studies, political sciences, education research and sociology. Despite its rich history, this approach has until recently only garnered limited attention from English-speaking research communities. Consequently, our aim is to introduce the approach to the European Education Research Journal readership and demonstrate the tradition's richness and range of use for education research. By showing the many ways in which this perspective can be utilised in education research, we hope to inspire more scholars who publish in English-speaking contexts to engage with us and explore what insights this 'novel' perspective can bring to our research field. In this editorial, we briefly explain the perspective's base assumptions and key features, discuss the potential relevance of this approach for education research, and introduce the articles of the special issue. First, however, we want to address the issue of naming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cry that today's higher education students are particularly individualist is a commonly-heard one. In England, the considerable personal cost of tuition is often blamed for creating a series of negative student traits, including consumerism (an idea that one has bought the right to a degree) and individualism (a sense of the individual as the beneficiary of the bought product, as against any sense of collectivism, or education as public good). This paper explores one element of students' purported individualism: their resistance to group-work as an aspect of assessment. Presenting interview data with university students in England, it argues that such student disquiet does not stem from a resistance to collectivism in general. Using pragmatic sociology, the paper considers students' often gentle and humorous comments about group-work as critique, not complaint. Rather than understanding students' resistance to group-work as individualist grievance about doing something they would simply rather not do, this way of conceptualising their comments understands students as making critical points about what should be assessed for at university. It argues that this way of thinking about resistance to group-work leads us to take that resistance seriously, and in turn to take students seriously as interlocuters on educational matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical, and in particular Bourdieusian, sociology of education is often suspicious about educators when they describe their ideal students. It tends to see these descriptions as euphemisations, so that apparently intellectual assessments are really elitist evaluations about students' class positions. However, this way of thinking about educators can lead to reductive accounts in which actors are completely blind to the real meaning of their beliefs, which must be unveiled by sociologists. In this article I utilise Luc Boltanski's pragmatic sociology to offer an alternative model of educators' accounts, in which there is no real meaning to be unveiled, but rather a complex mix of meanings held in educators' minds at once. Analysing interview data with those teaching on new liberal arts degrees in English universities, I demonstrate what can be gained by staying with the complexity of participants' own accounts, rather than mining them for one fundamental truth.

The principal aim of this article is to provide a historical overview of 25 years of competence policy in the European Union, highlighting connections between past and current initiatives and outlining possible scenarios for the decade to come. The article presents the social investment turn in social policy as the critical political background against which the emergence of a competence strategy in European Union education policy should be analysed and understood. The competence strategy, it is argued, finds its roots in a renewed attention at the European Union level for harmonising educational outputs and labour market demands. While trying to produce a schematic history of the emergence and change of the competence strategy, the article does not seek to offer strict definitions of competence itself; instead, it conveys the nebulous and context-dependent nature of the concept.

A growing body of literature is encouraging academics to slow down their academic work as a way of managing the acceleration of university life. Little attention, however, has been paid to the important differences in temporalities among different sorts of higher education institutions, and the effect this is likely to have upon the sense of acceleration and, crucially, the capacity to resist it. This article discusses interview data with academics at a particularly 'fast' academic site, drawn from a broader comparative study of three very different sorts of institution. It argues that the culture at this university is fundamentally structured around the principle of rapid change, in marked contrast to both more research-intensive "and" more teaching-intensive institutions. Any advice about the management of change must, I argue, take into account the specifics of institutional situations as well as broader structural causes of institutional difference, if it is to prove effective.

Abstract Recent scholarship in the historiography of feminism has sought to challenge certain received histories of the movement which seem likely to obscure the social, intellectual and political complexity of [...]