Abstract
In this conceptual article, we present the “Sport for Development and Peace” (SDP) discourse as a case of scientific rationalization. First, we shed light on the ongoing theory debate around the “global/local problematique” in globalization and global policy research in comparative and international education. We then link up with the SDP discourse and show that academic work mostly features research related to the fact that the majority of the SDP programmes and ways of implementing them have been conceptualized in the Global North, yet are to be implemented in the Global South. In that context, we illustrate International Organizations as sites of scientized knowledge production and translation. Scientific rationalization occurs when specialized technical knowledge and management techniques enter the discourse.
Highlights
Globalization and global policy researchers in comparative and international education participated in – or at least witnessed – a theory debate between representatives of World Culture Theory (WCT) on the one side (e.g., Meyer et al, 2010; Bromley et al, 2011; Ramirez & Meyer, 2012; Baker, 2012; Wiseman, 2010), and scholars who have been challenging the hypotheses claimed within that sociological neo-institutionalist scholarship, mobilizing on the other side alternative conceptual assumptions drawn from their own field research (e.g., Rappleye, 2015; Carney et al, 2012; Silova, 2012)
What is striking though, is that only the representatives of WCT, and perhaps those researchers in comparative and international education who tend to sympathize with claims of WCT (e.g., Amos, 2014; Powell, 2020; do Amaral & Erfurth, 2021), provide scholarship on the role International Organizations (IOs) play in connection with scientization, while both the “interlocutors” (Anderson-Levitt, 2012, p. 443) of WCT representatives and the mediators between the neo-institutionalist and cross-culturalist camps fall short on theorizing scientization of global educational governance linked to educational policymaking and practice
By linking up with a definition coined by Mike Zapp, according to whom scientization is “an explicit emphasis on the ultimate value of the rational analysis of all physical and social phenomena” (Zapp, 2018, p. 5), we present an example of an increasingly scientized program that reflects how scientific rationalization occurs when specialized technical knowledge and management techniques enter the processes of transformation of knowledge, and IOs are increasingly becoming sites of knowledge production and translation: the “Sport for Development and Peace” (SDP) discourse
Summary
Globalization and global policy researchers in comparative and international education participated in – or at least witnessed – a theory debate between representatives of World Culture Theory (WCT) on the one side (e.g., Meyer et al, 2010; Bromley et al, 2011; Ramirez & Meyer, 2012; Baker, 2012; Wiseman, 2010), and scholars who have been challenging the hypotheses claimed within that sociological neo-institutionalist scholarship, mobilizing on the other side alternative conceptual assumptions drawn from their own field research (e.g., Rappleye, 2015; Carney et al, 2012; Silova, 2012). Langer’s (2015) review of literature on SDP, which only focused on the African continent, points out that there is an overwhelming indication that only a handful of local discourses in the Global South have inevitably been intertwined with the SDP programmes developed in the North – especially, suffice at the implementation level, narrowing through specific contextual approaches determined by the target group or community.
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