Talking About Education: How Topics Vary Between International Organizations

In this chapter, Raphael Heiberger and Michael Windzio examine which topics are important for major education international organization (IOs). IOs in the field of education follow different ideological paradigms in the global education discourse. Yet, it is an open question as to whether different types of IOs focus on different topics and thereby support different paradigms of education. Based on more than 1000 documents with over 40 million words published by the World Bank, UNESCO, the ILO, the OECD, ISESCO, and SEAMEO, they explore education issues addressed in this sample. Using standardized methods of quantitative text analysis and topic modeling, Heiberger and Windzio reveal that major topics found in these documents do indeed differ between the different types of organizations.