In his book, Fluctuating Fortunes, Vogel (1988) documented the changing cycles of power of global business. In periods of high business power, schooling tends to be driven towards business values. These periods move educational policy and economic policy into close harmony. At such times, educational questions tend to be driven hard by vocational questions; issues of competitiveness and economic efficiency are widely promoted. But the educational and the economic are, as a matter of fact, not synonymous. Sometimes they can be performed in harmony, but at other times they lead in very different directions if the educational needs of school students are scrutinised in their own right. At times, when business power is held in balance by other forces, the ‘internal’ professional power of educator groups can emerge as a major defining force.

Such a period began in the years after the Second World War. This period of ‘cold war’ between political ideologies set capitalist business values against systems of Communist production. In the west, egalitarian social policies were pursued and public education systems were heavily promoted as vehicles of common purpose and social good. Business values and the private sector lived in ‘mixed economies’ where public sectors provided a good deal of the ‘public services’ of national systems.

In this period, which lasted well into the 1970s - even into the 1990s in some countries (e.g. Canada) - educators were seen as having large amounts of professional autonomy. Much educational change was, at this time, left to internal educational experts, to initiate and define.

In these historical circumstances of substantial professional autonomy, change theory looked for the sources of initiation and promotion of change to the educator groups ‘internal to the school systems’. In conceptionalising curriculum change in the 1970s, I developed a model which scrutinised the ‘internal affairs’ of change and set this against the ‘external relations’ of change.