Throughout the course of capitalist modernity, in a space of growing defence of national borders, building and entrenching unequal positions and relations, the State, the market and the community have been the leading actors of social regulation. The protagonism of one (usually the State) tended to be accompanied by the retraction, curtailment or subordination of the others, simultaneously or not, to very different degrees according to the historical context and social, cultural, economic and political/ideological changes. These unstable protagonisms of the (old) principles of social regulation have been confronted with the profound changes and transitions of the last few decades, making way for the inter-penetrations, hybridisms and ambivalences, in contexts now (also) marked by protagonisms that have emerged from other forms of social regulation, at a national, international and transnational level. The public/private interfaces, and the plurality of market and quasi-market expressions in education, can be read with this vaster backdrop.
Principles of social regulation; Public; Market and quasi-market