About

Patricia Bromley is an Associate Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. She holds a Ph.D. in International & Comparative Education from Stanford University, along with an M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University, an M.A. in International & Comparative Education from Stanford University, and an M.Sc. in International Studies from Rutgers University. Her research interests include civic education, international and comparative education, and leadership and organization. Bromley's scholarly work focuses on education reform, the influence of international organizations on education policies, and the analysis of global trends in education through various methodological approaches. She has contributed to understanding the dynamics of education reform in the twenty-first century, the legal restrictions on foreign funding to NGOs, and the representation of gender, race, and ethnicity in educational materials.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Political economy
• Computer Science
• Epistemology
• Law
• Economics
• Gender studies
• Public relations
• Linguistics
• Anthropology

Selected publications

• ‘Reformism’ and the liberal culture: global trends in education reform, 1970–2019

  Comparative Education · 2026-04-10

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Education reform and the global learning crisis: when does reform help?

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2025-04-15 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  In this study, the authors seek to understand the relationship between national education reforms and student achievement. To do so, they draw on two newly established education databases to test if education reform is linked to increased learning outcomes. First, they use the Harmonized Learning Outcomes (HLO) Database, which combines student assessment scores from major international and regional assessments. Second, they use the newly established World Education Reform Database, which consists of national education reforms from 189 countries. Using synthetic control to estimate the causal impact of national education reforms on learning outcomes, the key results show that learning outcomes increase after countries articulate quality-focused national education reforms. The study advances the field by providing new empirical evidence about the relationship between education reform and learning worldwide.

  PublisherDOI

• The global structure of local strategy: Institutional embeddedness and global cities’ strategic urban governance

  2025-03-08

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Cities worldwide have turned to publishing strategies that articulate their plans for the future to their peers and stakeholders. How do a city’s interlinkages influence whether and when cities publish such a plan? Informed by political economy and institutional perspectives on organizations, we posit that a combination of competitive and cultural pressures influences a city’s adoption of strategic planning. Institutional theory suggests that strategic planning is adopted as a signal of legitimacy, particularly by entities enmeshed in global culture. Conversely, political economy perspectives hold that strategic planning is vital for competing for international capital and maintaining one’s economic status. Although both a city’s cultural embeddedness and economic status may increase its propensity to strategize, these influences arguably operate through and are shaped by its administration’s centrality in an emerging network of intercity associations. To show this, we tracked the adoption of strategic plans across the 360 largest cities worldwide from 2000 to 2019, uncovering the influence of cities’ network affiliations on the spread and nature of strategic planning. The event history analysis reveals that institutional factors outweigh the influence of economic status in predicting strategic planning. However, the effect of a city’s administrative centrality in inter-city networks diminishes with its economic status. This indicates that network dynamics propagated by higher-status cities more directly influence lower-status cities. The study sheds light on the impact of inter-city networks on cities’ strategic approaches to challenges like climate change, providing a macro-level foundation for understanding city strategy. It also shows how institutions and the political economy jointly influence cities, integrating two literatures that have long existed concurrently but without much interaction.

  PublisherDOI

• Globalizing opposition to pro-environmental institutions: The growth of counter climate change organizations around the world, 1990 to 2018

  PLoS ONE · 2025-01-22 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  More than two decades of social scientific research has identified the growing network of corporations, think tanks, nonprofits, and advocacy organizations that aim to obstruct climate change action within the United States. Conventional arguments emphasize the role of economic self-interest (e.g., wealthy and powerful corporations) in shaping the rise of an organized "counter climate change movement" that seeks to discredit evidence about anthropogenic climate change and derail solutions to address the problem. In this paper, we track the growth of counter climate change organizations around the world and emphasize the role of reactionary cultural dynamics in driving their emergence. As climate change discourse is infused in more areas throughout society, climate change issues become more salient in the public sphere, generating adversarial grievances, identities, and mobilization among oppositional groups. Drawing on panel logistic regression models for 162-164 countries from 1990 to 2018, we find that counter climate change organizations are most likely to develop in countries with more extensive state policies and structures oriented toward protecting the natural environment, net of a variety of factors that account for a country's economic interests or its overall capacity to produce domestic associations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “Othering” Through War: Depiction of Asians/Asian Americans in U.S. History Textbooks

  Educational Researcher · 2025-03-27 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Using computational methods, we investigate a data set of 874,125 sentences from 30 U.S. history textbooks used in California and Texas schools to consider how they discuss Asians/Asian Americans. Only 1% of all sentences in our sample has any mention of Asians. Most of these sentences focus on Chinese and Japanese, and when individuals are named, they are usually White. The most prevalent topics in which Asians appear are about war. Discussions of wars are a centerpiece of history textbooks, but the dominance of such narratives is especially high for Asians relative to other ethno-cultural groups. The sentiment of verbs used to describe Asians is strikingly negative. Asians are described more negatively than others in both war and nonwar contexts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The missing link: democracy, education, and carbon emissions

  Environmental Politics · 2025-08-05 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Hyper-Organization and Myths of Community

  Organization Studies · 2025-08-09 · 1 citations

  article

  It is common to depict an opposition between formal organization and solidary community. Contemporary society-wide rationalization constructs organizations as modern purposive actors, or hyper-organizations, operating under high uncertainty environments and with multiple stakeholder interactions. This, we argue, tends to partially reconstruct organizations, their components, and their environments and stakeholders as diffuse and abstract, yet purposive communities. Our arguments and observations suggest a broad shift toward displays of contemporary forms of community. Organizations that depict themselves as more empowered, committed, responsible, and purposive social actors use the term “community” more. Further, the depiction of “community” is highly abstract, rather than a traditional form linked to concrete local geographies or social groups. Overall, we suggest that rationalization in the society of organizations paradoxically generates supra-rational celebration of emotive notions such as community. We find support for our argument in the analyses of 300 annual reports representing 80 large, public United States companies over the period 1960 to 2010.

  PublisherDOI

• Advancing Global Social Change: Systems Approaches to the Role of Nonprofits in Climate Policy

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Varieties of Political Indoctrination in Education and the Media (V-Indoc) Dataset V1

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Nonprofits as Organizational Actors

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-01-11 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Bromley and Santos make a cultural argument that situates nonprofit organizations within the broader context of organization itself. Due to the ascendancy of organization as an emergent category of social structure, the authors suggest that all types of organizations (government, business, nonprofit) are becoming increasingly similar. As the divisions between them (e.g., for-profit organization vs. nonprofit organization, etc.) become less prominent, the sector in need of explanation is the organizational one, writ large. Thus, rather than explaining the nonprofit sector, per se, the authors argue that the nonprofit sector is just one manifestation of organization and that it is organization that deserves our attention. In this sense, sector theory as traditionally understood (as narrow attention to the nonprofit sector in comparison to other sectors) diverts attention from more fundamental sociocultural developments. The authors argue that one can only understand nonprofit organizations vis-à-vis government and for-profit organizations by first understanding this broader context.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• John W. Meyer

  Stanford University

  20 shared

• Walter W. Powell

  8 shared

• S. Garnett Russell

  Columbia University

  6 shared

• Daniel Pemstein

  University of Gothenburg

  6 shared

• Francisco O. Ramírez

  6 shared

• Rie Kijima

  University of Toronto

  5 shared

• Christof Brandtner

  École de management de Lyon

  4 shared

• Jared Furuta

  Stanford University

  4 shared