Understanding Comprehensive School Reforms: Insights from Comparative-Historical Sociology and Power Resources Theory

The historical origins and development of comprehensive schooling have seldom been analyzed systematically and comparatively. However, there is a rich comparative and historically grounded literature on the development of welfare states, which focuses on many relevant policies, but ignores the education system. In particular, the power resources approach applied by many welfare state scholars has been continuously elaborated and refined in various ways. Two major comparative-historical analyses of the development of education systems, and comprehensive schooling in particular, are therefore reviewed and discussed with a view to how their insights could be enriched with knowledge drawn from welfare state literature. The article argues that, while education does constitute a separate analytical issue, scholars of comprehensive and other educational reforms could nonetheless improve their arguments by taking into account the debates and theoretical elaborations produced in the field of welfare state analysis.