Unintended Transformations of Control Over Education: a process of structuring

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Abstract
The article considers the changing nature of political relationships between educational management agencies in England and Wales during the 1940s and 1980s, within the areas of scientific, technical and vocational education and training, and within the school system. It suggests that the general agreement among writers that there has been a marked shift towards the centralisation of power masks a number of important problems concerning the processes underlying this development. In particular, the assumptions by many researchers that increased government control was the consequence of a cumulative process generated by actions intended to achieve this outcome seems to be misconceived. The occasions of greater central control should be seen more as ‘drifts towards centralisation’ that were both transformative and the outcome of developments in which unintended consequences played a significant part. The dynamic relationships between structure and agency which underlie such processes can be illuminated through the development of the ‘structuring’ model currently being constructed by sociologists.

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