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Comment intériorise-t-on des normes et des valeurs qui nous sont extérieures ? Comment des processus sociohistoriques sont-ils incarnés par des individus et des institutions ? Posant ces questions fondamentales de la sociologie à un terrain difficile d’accès et des archives inédites, ce livre nous rappelle que l’objet sociologique est conquis plutôt que donné et inséparable de la reconstruction de son histoire. L’auteure y interroge l’internationalisme politique à travers le prisme de l’éducation. Comment le qualificatif « international », qui désignait depuis le milieu du xixe siècle les relations entre des États-nations, est-il venu à désigner dans l’entre-deux guerres une « mentalité » spécifique et l’intériorité même de certains individus ainsi symboliquement séparés de tous les autres ? Comment s’est construite la légitimité des écoles dites internationales ? Comment expliquer leur élitisme ?

L’auteure répond à ces questions à partir du cas du baccalauréat international, diplôme privé de fin d’études secondaires chapeauté par une organisation à but non lucratif. C’est en examinant la construction sociohistorique des normes unifiant des lycées à l’échelle intercontinentale, au-delà de la diversité prônée, qu’elle offre des pistes pour expliquer leurs configurations actuelles. Ce livre offre une analyse inédite de ce que veut dire « être international » aujourd’hui.

This article attempts to bridge a divide between the empirical use of Bourdieu’s concepts and the theoretical discussion of field theory with regard to education. I ask how a school can be ‘international’ where education is predominantly embedded in nation-states. First, I introduce field theory and its applications to globalization and education. Second, I analyze the International Baccalaureate Organization, a large non-profit provider of accreditation for schools, as a case for conceptualizing a global field of ‘international education.’ My ethnographic and historical findings provide the background for the global field argument. Second, drawing on IBO’s student data, I construct a geometric space of IB schools and analyze it as a relatively autonomous subfield. Finally, I show how combining field analysis and geometric modeling yields a new perspective on ‘international education.’

Peripheral to national education systems, international schools are either excluded from the debate on these systems or considered as exceptional. As an object of study they reveal the limits of this vision. This article questions the pervasive usage of the notions of ‘market’ and ‘competition’ in sociology of education, proposes a renewed approach based on classical authors, and argues that international education may be conceived as a ‘symbolic good’, irreducible to its monetary value.

This article examines a particular type of public–private partnership (PPP) that is rarely studied in comparative educational policy studies: one in which a government funds privately run international schools. The aim of this PPP is to enrich and thereby improve the regular curriculum or to the quality of education in public schools. As the exponential growth of International Baccalaureate (IB) illustrates, such forms of PPP have increased significantly over the past few years. The authors show that transnational accreditation holds a special appeal for the middle class that is committed to cosmopolitanism, international mobility, and global citizenship. However, international standards schools such as IB are not alone with advancing a transnational accreditation of their educational programmes. Symbolically, Programme in International Student Assessment also provides a transnational accreditation, albeit not on individual education programmes but rather on entire educational systems. The article examines the reasons for the popularity of this type of PPP, analyses the interaction between the private and public education sectors, and investigates how governments explain, and what they expect from, the close cooperation with private education providers.

What are the origins of international schools? Authors in the fields of education and institutional history often point to the “need” of an invisible group of parents. This need, and the “demand” these schools claim to fulfill, haunt common discourse. From a historical and sociological viewpoint, however, these are precisely the factors that require explanation. This article draws on several archival sources to analyze competing projects and visions of the United Nations International School in New York and to thus reconstruct its origins. The analysis shows that the founders of this school were neither an established occupational group of international civil servants nor an organized group of parents. On the contrary, high-level officials mobilized around the cause of a United Nations school in their quest for other status claims. A historical sociology of international education can therefore effectively replace the myth of origins, providing a better understanding of international civil servants as a social group.

Today, the International School of Geneva is known as the world’s oldest and largest private international school, having opened in 1924 under the name “International School”. Many schools have attempted to foster an international environment in a general sense; this school is the first to claim an inter-national identity with reference to a specific political ideology. In this article, I argue that neither student statistics, nor official discourse, nor the individual experience of consecrated School founders can account for this claim. After careful analysis of different forms of capital invested in the School, its founding no longer appears to be a simple response to a "need" or a "demand" but a complex process of social distinction.

What does it mean to assemble a list of works in translation and qualify them as World Literature? Our response to this question is based on an analysis of quantitative and qualitative data on the literature program developed by the International Baccalaureate Organization. The emergence of this NGO over the past century and its recognition as a body with legitimate authority over «international education» raises the question of autonomy with regard to pedagogic action on a world scale. Recent research on the market of translation will enable us to analyze power relations dissimulated by the act of selection and consider its practice.