School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemTHEORIZING THE UNIVERSITY AS A CULTURAL SYSTEM: DISTINCTIONS, IDENTITIES, EMERGENCIES(WILEY, 2006-08)Abstract Universities currently face new environmental demands and significant internal complexities that appear to challenge their traditional modes of work and organization — and thus their very identities. In this essay, Mark Considine argues that the prospect of such changes requires us to reflect carefully upon the theoretical and normative underpinnings of universities and to delineate the structures and processes through which they might seek to negotiate their identities. Considine re‐theorizes the university as a higher education system composed by distinctions and networks acting through an important class of boundary objects. He moves beyond an environmental analysis, asserting that systems are best theorized as cultural practices based upon actors making and protecting important kinds of distinctions. Thus, the university system must be investigated as a knowledge‐based binary for dividing knowledge from other things. This approach, in turn, produces an identity‐centering (cultural) model of the system that assumes universities must perform two different acts of distinction to exist: first, they must distinguish themselves from other systems (such as the economy, organized religion, and the labor market), and, second, they must operate successfully in a chosen resource environment. Ultimately, Considine argues that while environmental problems (such as cuts in government grants) may generate periodic crises, threats within identities produce emergencies generating a radical kind of problematic for actor networks.
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ItemDo Schools Matter for Early School Leaving? Individual and School Influences in Australia(Taylor and Francis, 2007)
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ItemExplaining Socioeconomic Inequalities in Student Achievement: The role of home and school factors(Taylor and Francis, 2006)
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ItemState differences in achievement among secondary school students in Australia(Australian Council for Educational Research, 2005)A number of recent national studies of student achievement in secondary school have reported differences between the Australian states and territories. State differences are often viewed as insubstantial or as simply reflecting sociodemographic factors, or differences between the states in the grades or ages of the students sampled. In this article, we show that state differences are larger than generally assumed and cannot be attributed to socioeconomic and demographic factors. Generally, student achievement in reading, mathematics and science are higher in New South Wales than the other states, once demographic and grade differences are taken into account. Of concern, is the increased likelihood that students from Queensland, Victoria and Tasmania have in only reaching the lowest OECD proficiency level in reading. We conclude that state differences are meaningful and do have policy implications.