In considering the importance of approaches to educational policies that critically analyze the trajectory of social and educational policies in the search to evaluate the results and effects of these policies, notably in the context of neoliberalism, the objective is to discuss the theoretical-analytical method developed by Stephen J. Ball. With focus from the field of Sociology of Education or the "Sociology of Policies", called Policy Cycle Approach and Theory of policy enactment recognized in Brazil as Theory of interpretation / translation of politics in the context of practice, Stephen Ball made expressive contribution of the approach to discussions in the field of educational policies. To meet the general objective of the research, the theoretical-methodological productions of Prof. Dr. Stephen J. Ball, notably in the 2003 - 2013 decade; the main concepts discussed by the author in the context of the sociology of policies were identified, and content analysis procedures based on Franco (2008) were carried out.

Professor and researcher at the Institute of Education at the University of London - UK, Stephen Ball is now considered one of the most relevant sociologists on educational policy studies in the UK and abroad. Since 1980, his research has contributed to the field of studies of educational policies with the development of resources that allow the understanding of how policies are produced, focusing on the consequences of the market interests present in education. The author's accurate observation dealt with several educational policies and their networks, among the countries are: United Kingdom, Africa, India and Brazil.

According to Brazilian researchers Mainardes and Gandin, "Ball's concepts are, in fact, broad and sophisticated, and in fact, can be used not only by those interested in educational policy and sociology of education, but by researchers from a variety of other fields" (MAINARDES; GANDIN, 2013, p 256). Ball's approach encompasses the interest in knowing what is behind policies - as is the case in educational markets - so it is understood that this perspective is not restricted to the educational field and is attractive for scientific research aimed at fostering theories of political action, in order to unveil what Ball names as "neoliberal imaginary."

On Stephen Ball's influence in Europe, Zanten and Kosunen comment that "forms of influence, ranging from simple citations in bibliographies to a strong borrowing in the text, from literal quotations to the elaboration of forms of recontextualization and hybridization with other ideas" (ZANTEN; KOSUNEN, 2013, p. 248-249). From this perspective, Stephen Ball is understood as one of the most relevant researchers on educational policies, since the approach of his concepts - as in the case of the Policy Cycle - has subsidized studies in different countries which seek to analyze the trajectory of social and educational policies (CORBITT, 1997; VIDOVICH, 1999; WALFORD, 2000; LOONEY, 2001; KIRTON, 2002; VIDOVICH; O'DONOGHUE, 2003; LOPES, 2004; LOPES; MACEDO, 2011).

In this paper, we intend to deepen studies3 on the theoretical-analytical method developed by Stephen Ball and collaborators (BALL; BOWE, 1992; BALL, 1990; 1994; BALL; BOWE; GOLD, 1992; BALL; MAGUIRE; BRAUN, 2012) from the field of Sociology of Education or the "Sociology of Policies" (BALL, 1990; 1997; 2008), called the Policy Cycle Approach and also Theory of policy enactment recognized in Brazil as Theory of interpretation / translation of politics in the context of practice. In the references studied, the interpretation is evidenced only as an initial reading, with the aim of approaching the meaning of politics. The translation, in turn, is linked to the comprehension of the text within the limits of action, in which a process of re-representation occurs, reordering that happens through various material and discursive practices.

Theory of Policy Enactment, in turn, has been developed by Ball, Maguire, and Braun (published in the book: How schools do policy: policy enactments in secondary schools, 2012) , from a survey carried out in secondary schools in England and funded by the Social Research Council (ESRC) entitled: Policy enactments in the secondary school, developed between October 2008 and April 2011. For the authors, interpretation is only one initial reading, with the aim of approaching the meaning of politics. The translation, in turn, is linked to the comprehension of the text within the limits of action, in which a process of re-representation, reordering occurs through various material and discursive practices. The term "enactment" refers to the notion that an actor has a text that can be presented/represented in different ways. In this way, Enactments constitute ongoing responses to politics, sometimes durable, sometimes fragile, in the various networks and chains of relationships, but this response is neither direct nor linearly replicating policy guidelines. It is in the interaction and interrelationship between diverse actors, texts, conversation, technology and objects (artifacts) that politics is interpreted, translated, reconstructed and redone in different, but similar, ways (BALL; MAGUIRE; BRAUN, 2012).

In a perspective that distances itself from binary positions, Ball (2011) defends an epistemologically different position and declares an interest in questions about "the ontology of politics", or about "how we become incarnate policies." The author seeks to break with the idea that policies are made for people and they implement them. Policies are rather objects of some form of translation or of active reading; a kind of "creative social action." In their processes and actions, it is necessary to capture not the effects on abstract social collectivities, but rather the complex interplay of identities, interests, coalitions, and conflicts (Ball, 2011, p. 44).

In the face of the problems surrounding researchers and the research of educational policies - their concepts, polarizations and procedures - it seems relevant to make efforts to deepen methodological studies of critical analysis of educational policies. The path chosen in the present study is directed towards the theoretical-methodological deepening of the theoretical-analytical approach of Stephen J. Ball and collaborators.

The text is divided into four parts. The first is composed by the present introduction; the second that deals with the nature of political research in education in the light of Thompson (1981) and Ball (2011); the third one in which the data obtained with the survey carried out on the theoretical and methodological production of Stephen J. Ball between the years 2003 and 2013 are treated, this third part has nine subdivisions made according to the concepts presented in the works found, being 3.1 Choice policy, 3.2 Performativity, 3.3 Privatization of education, 3.4 Social class and gender, 3.5 Social class, choice policy and gender, 3.6 Policies of privatization of education, governance, business and new philanthropy, 3.7 Theory, research and sociology of education, 3.8 Policy enactment and 3.9 Subjectivity and resistance. Finally, the present work ends with the Final Considerations and the list of references.

Regarding policy research, especially in the area of educational policies, it is possible to identify the impossibility of carrying out a critical analysis of policies without clearly defining the theoretical position and the epistemological approach that guides the analysis. After all, the researcher's theoretical-methodological efforts, if not observed the necessary ontological and epistemological vigilance, can result in the spontaneous and instrumental attachment to the appearances and/or technicalities of the research, or to the construction of generic self-confirming hypotheses (THOMPSON, 1981) that dispense empirical control. Thus, while remaining entangled in the realm of practical manipulation of reality, the researcher runs the risk of being caught in the web of systematization of categories which, given immediate practice, are false and illusory in themselves, distort the real world, and block the search for structures that determine the phenomena. Otherwise, if one chooses to establish categories a priori, if one proposes the primacy of theory over facts, one takes primacy over material reality and dominates it.

Failure to observe the intimate complicity between theory and empiricism, universality and particularity, time and space, can make the research process become a serious misunderstanding and political, ethical and epistemological implications can have repercussions in the short and medium term on the production of knowledge, notably in the context of policy studies. In this sense, Ball (2011, p. 43), in an article in which he reviews the research on Educational Policy in the United Kingdom, carried out during twenty years, alerts to some problems of an empirical, analytical and interpretative nature of the polls in education. One of the mistakes identified by the author in the designs and focuses of policy studies is the repeated gap between policy and practice. In studies about educational practices, politics is commonly ignored or practice is thought "as something outside relational contexts" (Ball, 2011, p.36), as if it were not affected by politics and vice versa. In this case, the problem focuses on the researcher's interpretive work.

Other commonly neglected aspects of educational policy research are defined by Ball as: an "extravagant a-historicism" (Ball, 2011, 38); a "no sense of place" (Ball, 2011, 40) and a "predominant descriptive empiricism" (Ball, 2011, p.42).

One of the neglects refers to "the substantive disconnection of research in educational policy from the general arena of social policy," on which Ball emphasizes:

The theory (or the intellectual effort) is important for the research, because "it provides the possibility of a different language, a language that is not captured by the assumptions and inscriptions of policymakers or by the immediacy of practice" (BALL, 2011, p. .44). However, "theoretical work also has intrinsic problems of incorporation". Its use cannot be converted into a molded "mantric" discourse, as "a process of embedding concepts" (BALL, 2011, p. 45). In this ambivalence or tense contradiction, what cannot be accepted is "neglect of ideas, concepts and significant theories" (BALL, 2011, p. 94), in the field of educational research.

In the search for concepts used by Stephen J. Ball to deal with educational policies, a survey was carried out on the theoretical-methodological productions of the author between 2003 and 2013, which took as a data source the list of "Top authors in social Science" published by "Academic Search from Microsoft" - Source: https://academic.microsoft.com/, in which, among the 100 authors with the largest number of publications in the world, Stephen Ball ranked 18th in the 2013 ranking. The following articles were found in the electronic databases: British Education Index and Google Scholar in the delimited period: 2003-2013.

Among the main electronic journals in which Stephen Ball presented the highest indexes of publications were those presented in Table 1.

For the presentation and discussion of the concepts found, three tables were used - tables 2, 3 and 4 -, the first grouping the works published between the years 2003 and 2005; the second 2006 and 2009 and in the last presents the texts published between 2010 and 2013. It was sought in the subdivisions of this chapter to deal with the concepts found in each of the periods in clipping in the tables.

Between 2003 and 2005, Stephen Ball excelled in the publication of 13 articles in international journals. In this period the author discussed some fundamental concepts for the recognition of his ideas in the field of educational policies, among which stand out: politics of choice, performativity, social class and gender. In the following table, the information of the articles in which the concepts were found is presented.

In the period 2006-2009, Stephen Ball, alone or in partnership with other authors, published 18 articles as shown in Table 3:

In this set of articles, the main topics discussed reveal a connection with the concepts discussed in the period 2003-2005. That is, in the 2006-2009 period, a set of articles dealing with: 1) Social class, politics of choices and gender; 2) Privatization policies of education, governance, business and new philanthropy; 3) Theory, research and Sociology of Education.

In the wide range of articles published by Stephen Ball and collaborators between 2010 and 2013 - as explained in Table 4 - two major sets of themes can be identified: policy enactment and resistance. In this period, these researchers completed one of their most significant research projects on policy enactment in London secondary school and this research resulted in the main publications presented here.

Based on the research problem: How schools do politics, or more specifically: how policies are lived, interpreted, and translated within the school, the researchers have developed case studies in four state high schools and a private one, focusing on three substantive policies in force in England: 1) personalized learning; 2) performance and standards of performance (specifically AC targets in English and mathematics); and 3) Behavior Management Policies.

The policy choice emerged in the United Kingdom in the early 2000s and gave families the right to choose where they wanted to enroll their children, whether in a public or private school, subsidized by scholarships. Focusing on middle-class families, Ball discusses the risks and effects of school choice as a possibility of engagement between family and education for the market. The risk lies in the legitimacy, by politics, of the criteria of competition in education, with the middle class struggling to maintain its advantages in the new conditions of choice.

The concept of Performativity emerged as a new mode of regulation by the state in the advanced of liberalism (or neoliberalism). It is the emergence of a new set of social relations of governance that have new ways of distributing functions and a new hierarchical grid of social responsibilities (DALE, 2002). This newness arises from changes in the roles of the state, capital, public sector institutions and citizens and their relations with each other, or what Cerny (1990) calls the "shifting architecture of politics." First, and central to all of this, is the change/passage with regard to public sector activities, "(...) of the state as provider to the state as regulator, establishing the conditions under which several domestic markets are authorized to operate, and the state as an auditor evaluating its results" (SCOTT, 1995, p.80), or what Neave (1988) calls the new evaluating State.

From a variety of disguises, the key element of the package that makes up education reform, be it at school, in colleges or universities, consists of three technologies of politics: the market, managerialism and performativity. These elements present different degrees of depth in different places and/or nations, but they are close and interdependent in the reform process. When employed together they become an attractive alternative to overcome the centralizing state. In general terms, the new technologies of reform are an important part of the alignment of the public sector to the systems of organization, methods, culture and ethics of the private sector. In this game, the differences between the public and the private are reduced and alignment creates the preconditions for the privatization and commercialization of public services.

For Ball, "performativity is a technology, a culture and a mode of regulation that employs judgment and comparison as a means of incentive, control, friction and change based on rewards and sanctions (both material and symbolic)" (BALL, 2003, p. 216). Performances - of subjects or organizations - serve as measures of productivity or 'quality' displays, or 'moments' of promotion or inspection. As such, they represent the value, quality or value of an individual or organization within a field of judgment. Who determines what counts as effective or satisfactory in performance and what is considered valid as a measure and indicator? In education this struggle becomes highly individualized and focused on the teacher as an ethical subject who finds its value challenged or displaced by the terrors of performativity. The researcher suggests that performativity produces opacity and at the same time transparency in that it requires the individual and/or organization to take great care in the construction or maintenance of the fabrication. "The new performance worker is an enterprising subject with a passion for excellence" (BALL, 2003, p. 215). It composes the currency and substance of performance. As individuals and organizational actors, the representations are constructed or fabricated as a device, with an eye on the competition. In this way, the term manufacturing seems to capture the sense of deliberation thus becoming a response to performativity.

The fabrication of the organization (and individuals) is based on the possibility of representing or producing a version about that organization or person that does not really exist. It involves the use and reuse of meanings considered or accepted as correct by the policy. These versions are not "outside of the truth", but they also do not yield a simple truth or direct account to politics. They are purposely produced in the sense of "accountability." Truthfulness is not the key point, but its effectiveness for the market or for regulation. It means that to be audited or evaluated an organization transforms itself.

However, such fabrication is profoundly paradoxical. From a perspective, organizational manufacturing provides a calculated facade of the organization and the environment. However, in another sense, the work of fabricating the organization requires submission to the rigors of performativity and competition disciplines. There is a surplus of meaning in such exercises. An excess that overflows into the daily life of the organization. Manufactures, in this way, are both resistance and capitulation.

Stephen Ball and Alan Cribb consider that this concept must be urgently discussed under the lens of ethics. For them, this policy and its practices are creating new ethical spaces and new groups of goals, obligations and dispositions, which must be analyzed from two points of view: the first requires an examination of the ethics of politics which, in its architecture, is being organized with the intention of re-moralizing or reworking the aims and motivations of educators in the perspective of entrepreneurship, business and competitiveness; the second requires the analysis of the ethical effects of this policy, which means thinking about the creation of new ethical spaces and new clusters of goals, obligations and dispositions, which lead to the reconstruction of institutional norms and constraints, as well as impose a new ethical sense of practices, subjects' positions and their subjectivities (BALL; GRIBB, 2005).

According to the authors, there is a central agenda for re-moralizing the ethics of privatization policy (BALL; GRIBB, 2005, p. 117). And in it, directly or indirectly, the private model focuses on the intention to import a new set of virtues, purposes and motivations, as well as to dispense with the old and discarded model based on bureaucracy and the defense of interests of groups of professionals. In these terms, business dealing is the future of education, while bureaucracy and traditional forms of professionalism are part of the past. In a context in which the goals, obligations, and dispositions involved in the purpose of education "to be like a business and to appear like a business" are celebrated in politics as "a good deal" (BALL; GRIBB, 2005, p. 117). New types of sensitivities are deliberately encouraged in the perspective of pursuing and defending the affirmation of basic, trouble-free similarities between education and business. Thus, a deep and pervasive procedural ethics of re-engineering public provision is defended and pursued.

Consequently, this policy produces first-order effects, which are the creation of new goals, obligations and provisions and second-order effects, that is, the consequences of this in practice. Within these new spaces and from these new positions, new forms of ethical action become possible. This new ethic is what the authors call "aggressive accounting" of performance (BALL; GRIBB, 2005, p. 120). In this perspective, teachers' reputation and budgets, as well as student achievement and funding performance, are increasingly conditioned in a relationship in which profitability and performance are increasingly susceptible to aggressive accounting.

According to Ball and Gribb (2015), the discussions presented here are critical to a reengineering of values, which are composed of three aspects: 1) Greater emphasis on results (income generation, profits, performance indicators) as a constituent of success institutional and professional, rather than broader notions of learning, responsiveness, well-being; 2) New paths to obligations: obligations towards sponsors, financiers, "partners"; the strong mobilization of obligations to employ institutions in a competitive market. That is, a shift from horizontal to vertical social relationships, based on the corporate world. "Privatization does not simply change the way we do things, it also changes the way we think about what we do, and how we relate to ourselves and to others" (BALL; GRIBB, 2005, p. 121). 3) The valuation of new provisions such as "competitiveness, consumerism, selling and turning skills", plus orientation to success, personal and institutional rewards, and the imperatives of institutional survival. All this about and against all that we take to be as academic or high school or teachers virtues (BALL; GRIBB, 2005, p. 121).

Stephen Ball and Carol Vincent, with the collaboration of different authors, explore in several articles questions related to the way gender influences the processes of choice and how the notion of gender is woven through networks of socialization between the generations. Family relationships vary in terms of gender, educational and social backgrounds, and family habits. In this same perspective the author discusses maternity and identity to explore how middle-class women professionals experience changes in their self-identity.

The authors seek to analyze how women respond to the emotional and physical work required by their roles (both as workers and mothers), how they negotiate tensions between the two, and how couples adapt to employment management, child care, and a home . Their studies lead to the conclusion that despite the social and economic advantages of middle-class families, adults are not presenting major changes in the traditional understanding of family relationships, a tradition that focuses on the bonding of women and children, locating men on the periphery of the relationship.

For discussion of social class, policy choice and gender, several co-authors, along with Stephen J. Ball and Stephen Vincent, participate in the research group of Stephen Ball. The authors take up and deepen discussions about class, family, and child care.

Discussions encompass some of the ways in which sociology of education has contributed to the work of detailed population management by constructing a relentless gaze (initially focused on families) and the concomitant development of a body of specialized professional knowledge. Ball points out that in recent years the sociology of education has contributed to the criticism of the management of institutions (schools) and their professionals (teachers) through various forms of measurement and inspection (BALL, 2003). In other words, at different times and in different ways the sociology of education has created the conditions of possibility and an analytical view of power in which the family and the school were constructed as fields of knowledge and research and for the implantation of technologies of the politics.

Stephen Ball deepens and expands discussions on privatization and brings to the debate concepts such as governance and new philanthropy. It examines different forms of privatization, which take place on, within and through education and educational policies, within and through the business of education and state actions.

From Ball's point of view, privatization is complex, multifaceted and cross-cutting at different and multiple levels in the field of politics: institutional, national and international. It brings about changes in the conception of the state, through rhetoric of partnerships, expansion, diversification and profitability, organizational changes in the public sector (recalibration), and new forms of state such as governance, networks, philanthropy, and performance management. These are hybrids privatized agencies in the interior of the state which redraw the borders between public-private, rearticulate the relations and reallocate tasks between organizations.

Two forms of change take place in this way: in the forms of government and in the forms and nature of the participants in the governance process. In the language of political science, they are called "network governance", that is, "webs of stable and permanent relations that mobilize dispersed resources for the solution of political problems" (PAL, 1997 apud BALL, 2009a, p.96). These new forms of participation evidence that, gradually and more intensively, policy formulation takes place "in parallel spaces for and through state institutions and their jurisdictional boundaries" (SKELCHER; MATHUR; SMITH, 2004, apud BALL, 2009a, p. 96).

Stephen Ball argues that there are a significant number of actors in the state's and hence education's privatization and "recalibration" (JESSOP, 2002) work: the sale of its retail services by education companies, the remodeling of schools, colleges and universities, the installation of new management skills and performance management and the insertion of company narratives are some of the main aspects to be considered. These factors also contribute to the production of a new kind of subjectivity in the public sector and, in other words, contribute to the process of enabling organizations and their actors to think about themselves and what they do differently.

For the author, this developing market-state is not a spontaneous kind of free-market neoliberalism, or a simple history of economic determinism or the triumph of business interests. Rather, it is a complex interrelationship between companies and the state, which as Kelsey (KELSEY, 2006 apud BALL, 2009a, p. 97) suggests is "reciprocal and contradictory". Far from the idea of an impotent state, it uses its power to advance the process of commodification. The state offers stability and legitimacy and acts on behalf of its own national businesses to promote and finance educational services and uses public policies to stimulate dynamic external investment. As a broker of social and economic innovations, this state assumes an active role in the resource allocation process.

So, in Ball's conception, privatization and state need to be thought out together. The state works to manage the inter-scale interdependencies between different venues and spheres of policy and service delivery that are generated by various privatizations. It plays a key role in governance regimes.

Governance is thus a new field of government, which involves problems of coordination, accountability and transparency, so that there are new emerging solutions. Four types of change are implicated in this concept: one is the form of government (structure and agency), the other is the form and nature of the participants in the governance process, the third is the prevailing discourse within governance, and the fourth is production of new willing types. In this field, new voices and interests are represented within the political process and new nodes of power and influence are built or reinvigorated in the field of politics (BALL, 2009a). The already diffused divisions between public/state, private and third sector are even more drastically blurred by the entry of new players into the field of governance and the hybridization of existing players (BALL, 2009b, 537).

Stephen Ball offers a specific view on the need for and use of theory in research in education and presents a sociological design of sociology of education, focusing on some of its significant "moments" and "problems", which have contributed to its restless relationships with schools, teachers and education policy. In this exercise of thought, Ball brings to the debate the contributions of Bernstein, Foucault, and Bourdieu to explore some of the turmoil and conflict that characterized the sociology of education at different points in its history.

In the paper on "The Need and Violence of Theory," Ball (2006) works from the perspective of the epistemological role of theory in making research possible and reflexive. "I am seeking here to highlight the practical role of theory in research as a toolbox and means of conceptual analysis and a system of reflexivity" (BALL, 2006, p. 3).

The author proposes to discuss the theory from the epistemological positioning of two thinkers - Bourdieu and Foucault - who he considers more provocative in the sense that they try to avoid having a theory, like global abstractions or irrational orthodoxies, to emphasize the practice of the social sciences and social research, as a possibility to think the social world differently.

As Foucault explained his purpose was not to formulate a systematic global theory that could explain everything, but to analyze the specificity of the mechanisms of power to construct knowledge strategies (FOUCAULT, 1980 apud BALL, 2006, p.4). And Bourdieu wished his readers to read his work as exercise books, rather than theories. He made it a point to remind us that theories should not be valued for their own good (KARALAYALI, 2004 apud BALL, 2006).

Bourdieu's effort was to destabilize and reinvent the sociological habitus, "a system of dispositions necessary for the constitution of the sociologist's office in its universality" (BOURDIEU, 1993 apud BALL, 2006, p.4). Instead of being constrained between choices by poles, Bourdieu sought to work between binaries. His social model articulates objectivism (construction of a discourse within which to converse with other sociologists about the object) and subjectivism and its epistemology is promulgated between scientism and theoreticalism, which implies that the researcher can apprehend reality without touching it (KARALAYALI, 2004 apud BALL, 2006).

Foucault denied any attempt on his part to construct a theoretical system or a holistic view of the social. His work was marked by discontinuity, fun and avoidance. In style and substance, he thought of his work as outside and against the conventions of normal rigor.

For Ball, Bourdieu and Foucault offer us a form of scientific social practice and their thoughts extrapolate the discursive construction of boxes, categories and divisions proper to modern thought. Taking them as a reference, however, does not mean abandoning what we believe and consider productive. This does not mean to become something, changing old for new orthodoxies, on the contrary, it means fighting against the complacency and comfort of having an orthodoxy. This also means giving up spontaneous empiricism, casual epistemologies, theory by numbers, and fighting the governamentality of scientism to find adequate rigor, a reflective and practical rigor that goes beyond the subtleties and safety of technique.

The author discusses the relevance of a method for reflexivity as a possibility to understand the social conditions of knowledge production. He also suggests the importance of theory violence as a reflective tool in the researcher's practice and its role in shifting orthodoxy, parsimony and simplicity, which is the role of theory in grasping some sense of the obstinacy and complexity of the social.

In his discussions on sociology of education, Ball focuses on some of his significant "moments" at different points in his history. They are the periods of 1930s/1960s (political arithmetic), the 1970s (the new Sociology of Education) and 1980 (and what could be called "flight to policy studies" and particularly one aspect of this that produced the notion of policy studies and, in particular, one aspect of it that produced the notion of "school effectiveness").

In the third block of published articles (Table 3), these in greater quantity, Stephen Ball deepens the studies on the subjects already described and, consolidate its researches in the field of the "policy enactment", an approach that expands the methodological references of policy analysis. There is also an increase in the number of publications in articles (22) and in the number of co-authors who participated in these productions, especially Carol Vincent, Annette Braun and Meg Maguire.

In the articles published by Stephen Ball and co-workers between 2010 and 2013, the authors explore ways in which teachers interpret, adapt, or transform policies through the lens of their values, pre-existing knowledge, and practices. They analyze the role of different types of policy actors and identify different types of policies, policy themes, and the ways in which policy speaks to teachers. The authors consider that while much attention has been given to assessing how well policies are implemented, that is, how well they are implemented in practice, less attention has been given to understanding and documenting the ways in which schools actually deal with the multiple, and sometimes the opaque and contradictory demands of different "types" of politics.

In this process of investigation, teachers are located as objects and at the same time actors of politics in the scope of the political process and in doing so they seek to explain the complexity and incoherence of the political process and attend to the work of speeches, texts, works of art (in this case visual artifacts) and "political technologies" (Policy Technologies) (BALL, 2008) in the production (teacher and student) of themes and their effects. By defining the work of politics as situated within a framework of contingencies and materialities within the school, researchers discuss the role of context (buildings, budgets, staff, inputs, etc.) in training, framing and interpretive limitation and policy responses.

From a conceptual point of view, they resort to Foucault to analyze speech and governmentality, Barthes on literary theory, Fenwick and Edwards on actor-network theory, Policy Cycle approach previously proposed by Stephen Ball, in addition to the contributions of Spillane (2004) and Supovitz and Weinbaum (2008).

It is worth emphasizing that the relevance of this approach lies in the consideration of the mutual and dynamic relationship between structure and human agency, in which the latter finds a genuine prerogative in the analysis of politics.

In this perspective 'Enactment' refers to the understanding that policies are always interpreted and translated into a creative process by several actors, in a particular context and place (BALL; BRAUN; MAGUIRE, 2012). According to these authors: interpretation is an engagement with language, while translation occupies a third space between politics and practice. It is an interactive process of institutional production of text and placement of these texts into action. Interpretation deals with strategy and translation deals with tactics, but they are closely related and overlapping (BALL; BRAUN, MAGUIRE, 2012, p. 45-47).

The policy enactment approach is particularly relevant considering its analytical work on the new modes of regulation and its discourses of power. In general terms, I would like to highlight a new mode of social (and moral) regulation that touches deeply and immediately on the practice of professional reform of state and reform meanings and identities and produces a new professional subjectivity" (BALL, 2006, p. 693). Thus, in the analysis of politics as interpretation and translation - policy enactment - the researcher needs to take into account "the histories and ideologies of the people who receive the policy and its texts and what directs them in the process of re-interpretation of politics on the way they do it"(BALL, 2012, p. 3).

In the perspective of subjectivity and the interference of neoliberal policies in their constitution, Stephen Ball discusses in the articles published in 2013 a different approach on the concepts of subjectivity and resistance, based on Foucault's discussions. For him, resistance, which has always been thought of as a collective political exercise, is thought of in a different way, that is, through the notion of self-care. For Ball and Olmedo (2013) neoliberal reform in education has produced a new kind of teacher and new forms of subjectivity. In this sense, if subjectivity is subject to change in politics, it can also become a terrain of struggle and resistance.

This "different" approach takes as its starting point the specific forms of resistance, that is, as Foucault suggests, the authors seek to examine resistance to practices and, specifically, performativity practices, then use such resistance practices "as a chemical catalyst, in order to bring to light the power relations, to locate its position, to discover its point of application and the methods used "(FOUCAULT, 1982 apud BALL; OLMEDO, 2013, p. 86).

Resisting the flow of neoliberalism is different from the struggles of the past. In this case it covers resisting our own practices. It is about confronting yourself at the center of our discomforts. If one follows the logic of criticism, one discovers that in neoliberal times we are precisely the ones to be blamed. Resistance to dominant speech and technology implies that we must change our understanding of what it is to be a teacher. All this involves a constant and organized work on oneself, that is, resistance would be the "establishment of a certain objectivity, the development of a policy and a self-government, and an elaboration of an ethics and practice in relation to oneself" (FOUCAULT, 1997 apud BALL; OLMEDO, 2013, p.93).

The text contributes to the sociology of politics whose ontological and epistemological bases articulate or dialogue with the analytical approach of Stephen Ball and his coauthors when dealing with the concepts brought by them in the articles published between 2003 and 2013, these being: policy choice; performativity; privatization of education; social class and gender; policy choices and gender; policies for the privatization of education; governance; business and new philanthropy; theory, research and sociology of education; policy enactment; subjectivity and resistance.

In view of the survey carried out and the main concepts identified in Stephen Ball's work, one can consider how proficient and consistent his theory is, in order to support the analysis of educational policies in the current context. The collected and organized database certainly allows other deepening and discussions, which, due to the limits for the writing of scientific articles, were not brought to discussion, but constitute a productive source of data that will subsidize the production of other scientific articles about the subject.

These studies were of permanent character and made possible the construction of a theoretical framework of foundation of the works. Among the contributions of authors dedicated to the construction of analytical models of social and educational policies, the following stand out: "Theory of interpretation/translation of politics in the context of practice" and "Approach of the Policy Cycle" formulated by the English sociologist Stephen Ball and collaborators (BOWE; BALL, 1992; BALL, 1990; 1994; BALL; MAGUIRE; BRAUN, 2012).