Education and Conventions: An Introduction to Theoretical Potential and Empirical Findings of Convention Theory on Schools, Vocational Training, and Higher Education

This introduction to the special issue, “Convention Theory in Research on Schools, Vocational Training, and Higher Education,” presents an overview of convention theory for education research, emphasizing the usefulness of convention theory applied to researching all education sectors: spanning preschool, formal schooling, vocational training, and higher education. In this editorial, we articulate how the theoretical potentials of convention theory in the field of education research lie in the bases of neo-pragmatism, the orders of worth analytical framework, and convention theory’s concepts of investments in forms and regimes of engagement. The brief theory introduction is enriched with examples using convention theory in education research. We then outline a convention theory methodology for deductive (theory-led) and inductive (theory-reflexive) social research. This is followed by a summary of the ten original articles in the special issue and their key contributions to this growing and increasingly international field of research.