The sociology of education at the cross road of sociology of public action: accuracy for an empirical typology of accountability systems in education
In Quebec, most of the studies that analyses the rise of accountability in education belong to the field of school administration. Following the few that uses theoretical and analytical tools from sociology, this article aims to highlight the various forms taken by accountability systems in a comparative perspective. Using as theoretical framework the sociology of public action and focusing on the tools at the core of accountability systems we build an empirical typology that allow us to classify education systems in Europe and Canada within four types of accountability systems. The use of PISA 2012 allows us to embrace a large number of education systems on which few comparative studies focusing on accountability were conducted so far. The discussion of our results through the light of several type-ideals of regulation allows us to put in dialogue two very different kinds of typologies that nevertheless use the same theoretical framework. We discuss then the accuracy of a fruitful dialogue between educational sciences, sociology of public action and sociology of education.