Various authors have charted the changing and intertwined emphases in comparative education over the last four decades, including modernisation and development, socially critical and neo-Marxist perspectives, and ethnography and phenomenology. Ideas from postpositivist thinking—postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism—have been particularly challenging to comparative education, because they disrupt the power structures that imbue much of comparative education and challenge the metanarratives of progress, modernity, dominance and subordination that have been the life blood of the major sets of ideas in the field. In order to examine in part the way in which comparative education is opening itself up to these challenging paradigms, we examine the shifts, developments and omissions in the use of poststructural theoretical frameworks and methodologies in comparative education in the period 1991-1999 and provide a constructive contribution to the debates about the future directions of comparative education in a rapidly internationalising and globalising world.
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