Ninnes and Burnett have performed a considerable service in charting the contours of poststructuralist discourse in the field of comparative education, over the past decade or so, since Val Rust's clarion call of 1991 (Rust, 1991). They argue that the traditions of poststructuralism have more to offer than has been explored, and illustrate major concerns of the corpus, particularly via a consideration of some key concepts drawn from Foucault. The relative lack of take-up of this field by comparativists is clearly the case. As an example, there was stout opposition voiced by some at World Council meetings during the mid-1990s, to the proposal to include the term 'postmodernity' in the title to the 1996 World Congress of Comparative Education Societies, on the basis that it was 'ideological'. Such a lament can also be applied to many other research traditions within the field of comparative education, of course, notably those of continental origin, but even more so, those from Asia, Latin America, the Arab world, and elsewhere. It is indeed somewhat striking that a field of research claiming to be defined by cross-cultural pursuits, and perhaps by the same rationale, can still often be-to extend a phrase used by Robert Cowen, and cited again by Ninnes and Burnett-'impressively parochial' (Cowen, 1996, p. 165). In one sense it reflects, of course, the substantial dominance of Anglo-American scholarship, or at least that of the English language (Crystal, 1997; Yang, 2002). This fact, long lamented by European, Latin American and Asian colleagues whose first language is not English, has also meant that significant theoretical tributaries from such regions (and even more so, from the Middle East and Africa) often become only partly visible, and after significant delays. In effect then, such regions, and many of their indigenous theoretical contributions, are marginalised in mainstream comparative journals, despite strenuous efforts by editors of comparative journals to undo this effect. Thus, Philip Altbach (1984), among others, has long pointed to a kind of core and periphery effect operating in the scholarly and publishing world. This phenomenon is also paralleled by the academic labour market, to a fair extent (Welch, 2002). Given these linguistic and cultural contours to the development of comparative discourse, it is interesting to speculate as to the likely differences in the results of a Ninnes and Burnett exercise, undertaken in French or Spanish, for example; and given the linguistic reach of the two authors, this might well be an interesting idea. In this sense, it is perhaps no surprise to be able to point to the relative lack of take-up of poststructuralist discourse in the field of comparative education, given the relative imma-