The considerations presented here are embedded in the discourse on recent changes in the education system. Against this background, the talk takes up a model well-known from different theories: the strained relation between implementation on the one hand and an only partially plannable form of appropriation, learning, on the other. Although innovation vocabulary has by now become widespread, heterogeneous images of innovation processes are subsumed under the title ‘innovation’: While some of these approaches concentrate particularly on how and in which ways an innovation spreads in the education system, others are more interested in forms of its deep anchorage. While the approaches mentioned first often refer to sociological works focussing particularly on the stability of the system, the latter rather fall back on educational-psychological approaches whose object are forms of individual knowledge transfer. This talk aims to discuss a theoretically founded model which allows us to describe the social spreading and anchoring of innovations. To this aim such apparently incompatible theories as the systems theory (Luhmann) on the one hand and the theory of practice (Bourdieu) as well as the theory of structuration (Giddens) on the other are taken into account. Besides these brief theoretical considerations, first results of an empirical-qualitative investigation are brought up for discussion.

The empirical research is conducted with a qualitative knowledge-sociological discourse analysis (Keller). It aims to reconstruct and trace social processes of knowledge generation. The analysis is based on publicly available written material, particularly on protocols and interviews of working groups contributing to the UN-Decade ‘Education for Sustainable Development’ in Germany. Within the discourse-analysis, the Decade is understood as a discourse-formation in which several parallel sub-discourses are conducted. Following a rough discourse analysis supported by a software for the qualitative analysis of texts, some of these sub-discourses will be compared to each other in order to identify different styles of knowledge construction when facing an implementation request. The more detailed step of the discourse analysis particularly considers the carriers of knowledge mentioned, their position in the discourse, the directions of knowledge transfer and the mode of its construction. Some very first results of the discourse analysis will be discussed.

In this contribution, a model of ‘complete’ innovation will be theoretically developed and underpinned with some first empirical findings. The theoretical considerations show that an innovation becomes ‘completed’ with its active appropriation in the respective social field of application. Implementation and social appropriation appear less as consecutive sequences than as overlapping phases. From a methodological point of view, the knowledge-sociological discourse analysis may cause reflection regarding the issue of hidden knowledge influencing implementation. With regard to theory development, the thoughts presented here may be fruitful for a further modification of a social learning approach. In addition to that, the findings might be inspiring for a critical reflection concerning the quality of implementation of (European) educational policies.