61

Historically, political sciences have not paid much interest to education and schools. In this report, we shall open up a space of debate around these convergences with sociology in order to foster a new reflexive and critical approach. Conceived after the the coordinators organised a workshop at a conference held in Amiens, France in November 2014 entitled “European social sciences faced with the globalisation of education and training”, it continues in the vein of prior articles which were published in the review –Quality and the Management of Education (Grek, Ozga & Lawn 2011), Europe: a cognitive tidying up? (Dale & Derouet 2012), Educational reason as a social issue (Popkewitz 2013)– which initiated a distance with regard to methodological nationalism and analysed the construction of the European Space of Education as a political object. It showed how the dialogue between the two approaches led to a better understanding of education and training stakes; it underlined, on the basis of empirical studies, the interest of a mutual use of the tools of sociology and political sciences and the contribution of analyses with regard to the social logics of politics and policies. If political sciences are mainly interested in the methods of constructing decisions and the relations between political and institutional actors, sociology inscribes its processes in relation to societal issues by studying the constitution of a public issue, its implementation and its results from the point of view of the social groups which are confronted by it.The collected texts are structured around three additional reflections: the social construction of public problems in education, the development and implementation of educational policies, and research projects which fall within the scope of the sociology of engagement and educational institutions.