At the policy level, the World Bank and other aid agencies evidence a practical orientation, emphasizing problems described as solvable by expertise and improved use of capital. In reality, tension exists between educational planning based on positivistic, technical rationality and political interaction grounded in situational considerations. (JHZ)

Explains a theoretical framework for interpreting educational policy-making and, on the basis of that framework, identifies educational policy makers and policy changes in Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s. Tests the theory by examining controversies about secondary education and the structure of the educational system. (JHZ)

An unintended outcome of Swedish higher education reform, and one detrimental to academic work, was that the more numerous the reforms, the larger the size of the coordinating bodies above the local units and the more rapid the growth in bureaucratic personnel within local institutions of the higher education system. (MH)