13 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 C. Maroy, X. Pons (eds.), Accountability Policies in Education, Educational Governance Research 11, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01285-4_2 Chapter 2 Morphologies and Contexts Christian Maroy, Xavier Pons, and Samuel Vaillancourt 2.1 Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to provide readers with the principal elements of context and information about the French and Quebec education systems necessary to appreciate the comparison of these two performance-based accountability poli- cies. Our presentation rests on a particular analytical grid which was conceived a posteriori, i.e., after the research study as a whole, to meet two different goals 1 : (1) making more explicit pieces of knowledge on each system which may be taken for granted and enabling a foreign observer to follow our argumentation without being a specialist in each system and (2) detailing key contextual variables that must be kept in mind when interpreting our fnal results. For instance, it seems diffcult to understand why relatively similar policies—at least formally, if we look, for instance, at the policy tools that are implemented—produce such different effects on teaching, with the progressive implementation in Quebec of new pedagogical man- agement, whereas, in France, a strong decoupling persists between managerial 1 This contextual approach raises several issues. How detailed should this analysis be? It is, indeed, always possible to provide more information about a context. Can a teleological analysis be avoided? There is a risk here of limiting the analysis and choosing only aspects of context that both prepare and confrm our ultimate fndings instead of highlighting other forms of “compossibility,” to use Leibniz’s concept. Both contexts are often exposed to the same general trends of reform but with different intensity. Do we have to favor a symmetrical presentation of the two situations with the twofold risk of having an unbalanced presentation and of overestimating some aspects in one case and underesti- mating some in the other? Or should we make specifc choices and, if so, on what basis? C. Maroy (*) · S. Vaillancourt University of Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: christian.maroy@umontreal.ca; samuel.vaillancourt@umontreal.ca X. Pons University of Eastern-Paris Creteil, Paris, France e-mail: ponsx@wanadoo.fr