Scientific investigation of education governance: empirical and theoretical trends

Abstract

This study analyses literature concerned with school governance published in the last two decades in journals classified as ‘A1’ by CAPES (a Brazilian public organisation in charge of the coordination for the improvement of higher education personnel). The study is based on the sociology of organisations and performs an exploratory approach, with a proximity with meta-analysis. It analyses the literature edited in Portuguese and focuses on several scientific dimensions (scientific goals, research nature, theoretical frameworks and research strategy). The research method is qualitative by nature, and it involves secondary sources (papers). The papers are the corpus and were selected according to the random systematic sampling technique. The theoretical framework involves several concepts: reification, axiological neutrality, and scientific habitus; furthermore, it proposes the ‘militant science’ concept to typify the analysed science that integrates the empirical corpus. The main findings show some critical findings related to the scientific literature taken as a research object: it is ambivalent, not based on theoretical frameworks, prioritizes theoretical deduction rather than empirical induction, as well as macro-level rather than meso- and micro-levels of analysis; uses scientific methods insufficiently controlled, tends to reification approaches; it is affected by elective affinities and devalues the axiological neutrality.

Governance; Managerialism; Research strategy; Theoretical reductionism