Political Pressures on Educational and Social Research

Karen Trimmer is Associate Professor with the University of Southern Queensland. With extensive experience in education, her research interests include decision-making by school principals; policy and governance; social justice impacts of policy; Indigenous participation in higher education and quantitative methods.

Section 1 Contexts surrounding policy, ethics, power and resource 1 The pressures of the political on rigorous and ethical research 2 The problem of the policy agora: how power differentials, methodological naivety and the ideological preferences of policy-makers affect the development of government policy 3 "What works?": From health to education, the shaping of the European policy of evidence 4 Ethical drift in educational research: understanding the politics of knowledge production 5 Play the game or get played? Researchers strategies around R&D policies 6 On Relevance and Norms of Science in times of Restructuring: Educational Research in Sweden 7 Is the Emperor naked? Experiencing the PISA hysteria, branding and education export in Finnish academia 8 Making an impact: politics and persuasions in 21st century Higher Education 9 The impact of managerial performance frameworks on research activities among Australian early career researchers Section 2: Case studies from the field 10 Ethical dilemmas in program evaluation 11 Surfacing the implicit 12 Balancing relationships and intellectual rigour in research for Government Agencies 13 When research, policy and practice disconnect: An educational leadership policy example 14 The Politics and Complexity of Research Utilisation in the Central Education Policy Arena in Taiwan 15 The pressures within: dilemmas in the conduct of evaluation from within government