Knowledge and its Enemies: Towards a New Case for Higher Learning ...

policy research still only provides a narrow framework, and a poor basis for explaining state-university relations, because it tends to rely heavily on historical and descriptive forms of analysis rather than being firmly located within advances in political theory. Widely observed phenomena lead to the assumption of a relationship with national policy styles, leading on to propositions that relate to path dependency. However, the fundamental mechanisms governing the process of path dependency have never been properly articulated. Moreover, there is some contention by Scott and Hood over the importance of national policy styles, and, significantly, this comes from outside the higher education policy community. However, key assumptions driving this criticism need to be questioned, which suggests that a more thoroughgoing analysis of a much more fundamental nature may be long overdue in respect to the whole question of state-university relations.

The policy styles approach offers great potential, as an explanatory method, to challenge the dominance of Clark's framework. However, to do so it must be located more firmly within the classic theoretical approach to state formation, such as notions of the autonomous state (Elias 1982; Weber 1968; Tilly 1975; Ertman 1997) to which it is but a poor cousin. As will be shown, the observed linkages and causal inferences can then be better identified and made relevant to contemporary debates in political economy, through which concepts of strong and weak states are being contested and developed (Skocpol 1979; Mann 1984; Davidheiser 1992; Weiss and Hobson 1995; Seabrooke 2002). To date, the most systematic examination of these ideas, in relation to education, relates to the developing world (McGinn and Street 1986), while the recent experience of higher education in advanced Western nations clearly lends itself to an examination of this kind. For instance, the initial wave of reform, from the early 1980s, was more thoroughly implemented within the Anglo states than in much of Continental Europe. Why this should be the case is anomalous in that it does not neatly conform to the conception of ‘weak’ states having a minimalist presence (Evans 1995, 22), given that the reforms were often rigidly imposed. However, as previously mentioned, this pattern does neatly correspond with more recent observations by Levy.