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Degeneracy, resilience and free markets in educational innovation
Author(s) -
Eyal Ori
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
systems research and behavioral science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.371
H-Index - 45
eISSN - 1099-1743
pISSN - 1092-7026
DOI - 10.1002/sres.940
Subject(s) - free market , universality (dynamical systems) , ideology , resilience (materials science) , psychological resilience , perspective (graphical) , degeneracy (biology) , sociology , economics , business , risk analysis (engineering) , computer science , political science , politics , artificial intelligence , psychology , social psychology , law , bioinformatics , physics , quantum mechanics , biology , thermodynamics
The free‐market is commonly presented by its supporters as the best environment for introducing innovations. This paper challenges the universality of this contention by arguing that free‐market dynamics cannot provide the appropriate conditions for significant educational changes. By adopting the perspective of systems research, I claim that the degeneracy characterizing free‐markets lodad educational systems with extreme resilience to changes. Based on Barabasi's network theory, I argue further that introducing change is extremely difficult due to the need to invest extensive effort in identifying specific sources of power (i.e., hubs) and removing them. Thus, this paper suggests that despite the prevalent image of public institutions as highly conservative and stagnant, it might be interesting to investigate their potential as sources of innovations that are no less radical than the alternatives proposed by free‐market ideologues. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.