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The society of Hong Kong objected strongly when the government instructed schools to change their medium of instruction from English to Chinese at the junior secondary level soon after Hong Kong was reunited with the People's Republic of China in 1997. This paper tries to make sense of the objection to this piece of politically correct and pedagogically sound policy. It analyses the situation from Bourdieu's ideas of habitus and various types of capitals. The paper argues that the government's effort to persuade Hong Kong society to accept mother-tongue education on pedagogical grounds alone was to no avail because the English language has not only become a habitus of society; it also serves to distinguish Hong Kong people from mainland Chinese. The failure of the government was partly due to its insensitivity to the nature and social functions of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Judith Butler is perhaps best known for her take‐up of the debate between Derrida and Austin over the function of the performative and her subsequent suggestion that the subject be understood as performatively constituted. Another important but less often noted move within Butler’s consideration of the processes through which the subject is constituted is her thinking between Althusser’s notion of subjection and Foucault’s notion of subjectivation. In this paper, I explore Butler’s understanding of processes of subjectivation, examine the relationship between subjectivation and the performative suggested in and by Butler’s work, and consider how the performative is implicated in processes of subjectivation—in ‘who’ the subject is, or might be, subjectivated as. Finally, I examine the usefulness of understanding the subjectivating effects of discourse for education, in particular for educationalists concerned to make better sense of and interrupt educational inequalities. In doing this I offer a reading of an episode of ethnographic data generated in an Australian high school. I suggest that it is through subjectivating processes of the sort that Butler helps us to understand that some students are rendered subjects inside the educational endeavour, and others are rendered outside this endeavour or, indeed, outside student‐hood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore the process of subjectification (sometimes also called subjectivation, or simply, subjection) through which one becomes a subject—a process that Butler describes in terms of simultaneous mastery and submission, entailing a necessary vulnerability to the other in order to be. I examine the conceptual work Butler has undertaken to extend the Foucauldian concept of subjectification, and I draw on some encounters between teachers and their students in order to make these processes of subjectification understandable in the context of education. I conclude the paper with some notes toward an ethics of classroom practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a previous British Journal of Sociology of Education article (Nixon & Wellington, 2005) we examined current trends in book publishing and how these have influenced and will influence the construction of the field of educational studies. (The latter study was a follow-up to an earlier study reported in Nixon [1999].) The present article focuses on journals and their editors and, to a lesser extent, the role that the peer review process plays in shaping the field of educational studies. We use (critically rather than deferentially) notions drawn from the work of Bourdieu (1996)—the ‘field of power’, defining boundaries, systems of dispositions, right of entry and the ‘illusio’—to consider and conceptualise data from interviews with 12 journal editors. Our own position in writing this article is as academic practitioners involved in reading, peer-reviewing and editing academic journals within the field of educational studies. The plea is to recognise that the pen is a mighty sword. We are of course embedded in practices and constrained by them. But these practices owe their dominance in part to the power of a normative language to hold them in place, and it is always open to us to employ the resources of our language to undermine as well as to underpin the practices. We may be freer than we sometimes suppose. (Skinner, 2002, p. 7) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper begins with a brief reference of some of the inaccuracies in accounts of the so called 'Honeyford affair'. The main purpose of the paper, however, is not to compare differing accounts, but rather to examine aspects of Honeyford's discourse in its own terms. These aspects include his notion of 'racism', his concern with 'tolerance and coherence' and his account of what he refers to as 'the human character'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines the difficulties in conceptualising and presenting research, in particular doctoral work in education, in the current climate of intellectual theorising. It argues that many researches experience a phenomenon described in the paper as 'post-modernist tension' when trying to write in an atmosphere of theoretical and methodological uncertainty. The author elaborates the 'symptoms' of post-modernist tension, and makes a critique of some elements of contemporary social theorising. Nevertheless, the author acknowledges the usefulness of contemporary social theory in challenging traditional research, despite its density and inaccessibility to many researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses sociologically the current form of school-based secondary assessment, in Queensland which is criterion-referenced to Year 10 and a hybrid criterion/norm referenced form at the end of Year 12. Habermas' arguments are used to suggest that this. assessment pattern will give the state potentially greater 'steering capacity' over education by 'rationalising' it-the 'scientisation of schooling'. This form of assessment fits within the accountability discourse of the economically parsimonious 1980 while meeting selection demands. However, the approach does meet some educational demands. The paper also reflects upon the role of the state and expert knowledge in policy formulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to demonstrate that Bourdieu's critics who claim that his theory is structurally 'frozen', with no room for human agency misperceive the basis of the theory The relationships between his theory and education are summarised and the concept of habitus explicated Then drawing on Outline of a Theory of Practice, the determinants of practice are shown to incorporate change and human agency This is then related to an examination of education as cultural practice, and some comments made in that light on a recent paper by Willis, and `Origins and Destinations'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to outline and evaluate Pierre Bourdieu's work as it has appeared most recently in feminist studies and the field of gender and education. In particular, it suggests ways in which Bourdieu's theoretical insights could be seen to more effectively contribute to cutting edge debates in both social theory and feminist thought regarding concepts such as agency, identity and domination. It also argues that a more creative and empirical engagement with the recent work of Bourdieu, alongside an interdisciplinary reading of more recent cultural and social theories of power, would be a fruitful way forward in advancing a feminist sociology of education. In the present historical moment and against the tide of postmodern and post-structuralist feminist accounts, Bourdieu is often read as a determinist who has little to offer contemporary feminist debates or who argues that masculine domination is too tightly woven to social practices of a given field. In short, this paper argues that such a view is not only a misreading of Bourdieu's work on fundamental theoretical grounds, but fails to acknowledge the ways in which his more recent work on masculinity addresses both the cultural and social conditions underlying contemporary forms of symbolic domination. In short, the paper argues that Bourdieu's theory offers an analytical breadth and range beyond the scope of anything that a normative, liberal account of masculine domination could provide. Yet, in drawing from such diversity, Bourdieu's oeuvre is able to resist incomprehensibility. It stands as a highly focused, realistic and generative attempt ( McNay, 1999 ; McLeod, 2004 ) to chart the problems of subordination, differentiation and hierarchy, and to expose the possibilities, as well as the limits, of gendered self-hood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of globalisation and hegemonic neoliberalism, the state's ability to legitimate the economic system and its own policies cannot be assumed as a positive automatic effect. The economic and political conditions that once framed state action have changed, and it is reasonable to think that the emergence of a new accumulation regime implies also a shift in the traditional strategies used by the nation-state to legitimate its policy-making. This paper reviews how the neoliberal educational agenda develops a new political rationality that changes the traditional forms in which the state has managed its legitimation crisis. In addition, the paper argues that context-based factors, nationally specific, show that this political rationality may not be uniformly applied among different nation-states. The case of semiperipheral countries provides some evidence on the necessary combination of old and new strategies developed by the state to legitimate a neoliberal agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the close relationship between education and the middle class has long been recognised in the sociology of education, its various dimensions have rarely been examined in detail. Through investigating the educational histories and occupational destinations of 199 recruits into the middle class, this paper explores whether there is any clear connection between educational pathway and occupational location. In particular, it analyses the cohort’s various careers against suggested cleavages within the middle class (professional/managerial, symbolic/material, public/private). The data indicate that educational pathways influence occupational locations along a number of directions. Some schools, notably those that are private and academically selective, feed a greater proportion of students into high-status universities and out into high-status occupations. However, in terms of the level of occupation, the status of university seems more important than the school. Whether a school is public or private does not appear to have influenced the choice of a managerial or professional career path, but school sector may contribute to horizontal differentiation of middle classes in terms of whether they take up employment in the public or private sector. The data suggest that schools reflect and reinforce contrasting allegiances to private and public forms of educational provision that then influence sectors of employment and political preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning from the argument that the sociology of educational knowledge remains a sociology without a theory of knowledge, this paper illustrates the significance of the structuring of knowledge for the development of intellectual fields through a study of cultural studies in British higher education. The paper presents a means of bridging the divide between analyses of ‘relations to’ and ‘relations within’ education (Basil Bernstein) by conceiving educational knowledge as legitimation, i.e. as both positioned strategies within a field of struggles and potentially legitimate truth claims. First, the institutional trajectory of and claims made for cultural studies by its proponents are outlined. Analysis of the underlying principles of this language of legitimation is developed into a generative conceptualisation of modes of legitimation, and cultural studies is defined as a knower mode, where knowledge is reduced to the knower and epistemology replaced by sociology. Using this framework, cultural studies is then analysed in terms of: (i) relations to its institutional trajectory (developing Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘field’ approach); and (ii) relations within its mode of legitimation, focusing on their ramifications for the field’s structure. It is argued that legitimation embraces the insights of both approaches, thereby contributing to a cumulative and epistemological sociology of educational knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis in this paper has its origins in a critical account of the sociology of education (Bernstein, 1975) where the various approaches to the study of sociology were taken as the distinguishing feature of the discourse. This matter was further developed (Bernstein, 1996), with the distinction between vertical and horizontal discourses and their various modalities introduced in the context of differentiating this mode of analysis from more 'Bourdieuan' perspectives. This present paper is concerned with filling out and extending the sketches adumbrated in earlier work in a more accessible form. The model proposed generates a language which relates the internal structure of specialised knowledges, the positional nature of their fields or arenas of practice, identity constructions and their change, and the forms of acquisition for successful performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates certain aspects of the debate about the causes of unequal educational performance By analyzing two illustrative explanations of performance. It shows that the debate appears to be shaped by a fundamental theme in modern Western culture, the nature-culture opposition. This suggests that the knowledge that we have concerning educational performance is influenced not only by the social and political interests and positions of educators and researchers, but also by more basic cultural concerns, and if we want to understand both educational performance and the debate surrounding it, we need to be aware of this broad influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can an explanation of the origins of social disparities in educational achievement be assisted by a critical examination of Bernstein’s sociology? This central question is approached by a consideration of the status of Bernstein’s socio‐linguistic thesis. The focus is on the nature of the explanations provided. The paper asks: What is the explanatory force of Bernstein’s structuralism? What is the relationship between Bernstein’s sociological explanations and Vygotskian psychological explanations? What are the effects for pedagogy of cognitive socialization mediated by language‐use consistent with Bernstein’s theory? The answers to these questions may pose a challenge for sociologists of education engaged with Bernstein’s sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the way social partnerships tend to be represented as either horizontal localised networks or neo-liberal policy instruments. Building on two empirical studies of partnerships, we argue that partnerships cannot be understood in either/or ways but are negotiated at the interface between central agencies and local networks. They are mediated by networks operating through the partnership and through government and community, and by the different organisational logics of agencies. These complexities challenge our ways of analysing and representing partnerships, and justify further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the educational experiences of a group of African Caribbean and mixed ‘race’ young people from the perspectives of their parents. The discussion is set within a national context where children of African Caribbean origin are one of the lowest achieving minority ethnic groups in the UK and are disproportionately one of the highest ethnic groups of children excluded from school. The parents recount a pattern of cumulative negative experiences which for many of the children results in academic underachievement and becoming demotivated to learn, by a system that they feel has rejected them, or imposed exclusion. The story is hardly new but it provides important further evidence that schools need to tackle head-on factors such as low teacher expectations and negative stereotyping of young black people and their contribution to black underachievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the methods of personal reflection and auto/biography to consider the ways in which global social and political transformations have influenced a key generation of feminist sociologists entering the academy and attempting to introduce feminist knowledge and pedagogy into academic curricula. Three critical events on or around 22 November are used to highlight key political moments, the associated development of changing themes in forms of analysis of social transformations, and the part played by feminism and sociology within higher education. They are the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963, the Israeli–Arab war in 1973 and the resignation of Margaret Thatcher in 1990. The argument is that there has been a clear relation between changing social and political contexts and methodological understandings, which have drawn on developing feminist perspectives and reflexive sociological analysis, especially as embraced within the sociology of education. In particular, the shift from a political and professional perspective on social change and family life towards one that engages with personal issues is noteworthy. It is one of the hallmarks of both feminist notions associated with reflexivity and developing sociological methodologies and policy sociology. Thus, the personal and the political are now central methodological forms of feminist and sociological analysis within education and, especially, the sociology of education, influencing pedagogy within higher education, especially associated with developments in professional postgraduate education. I weave my personal reflections on my professional developments through an analysis of the key moments related to specific policy regimes and changing forms of understandings within the fields of policy sociology and sociology of education. I conclude with current concerns about the balances between the personal and professional within educational research and policy sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that theorizations of the state which are sensitive to both its durability and its permeability, and theorizations which can account for the massive interconnections between local and global forces as well as different material and discursive sites are missing from contemporary work in the sociology of education. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’ as a key resource for addressing this impasse, the authors highlight the constant fabrication of racial identity through the production of the pure space of racial origins or ‘resentment’—the process of defining one’s identity through the negation of the other. This dynamic, the article maintains, now informs key discourses both in popular culture and education. The authors conclude that these processes operate in tandem in the prosecution of the politics of racial exclusion in our times, informing key policy debates, including those around affirmative action and bilingual education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response to articles by Shilling and Abraham, which were concerned with the relationship between Giddens' structuration meta-theory, differentiation-polarization theory, and positivism. Despite their conflicting conclusions, both authors criticize my reconstruction of differentiation-polarization theory, and I try to clarify the nature of that reconstruction and the theory it represents. It seems to me that these articles display misunderstandings of, and unwarranted prejudice against, positivism; though they are of course by no means alone in this. I suggest that while the sort of debate in which these authors engage is welcome, there needs to be a more open-minded approach towards the theoretical and methodological resources available to sociologists of education, including those frequently dismissed as positivist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response to Harker & May 1987 which rejects as inaccurate and misleading their 'exposition' of the theory, the analysis of the place of rules in the theory, the analysis of what is taken to be its structuralist base, and shows how forms of the practical sense may be realised in, and described by, the theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationships between sociology, democracy and education. Its main argument is that post-modernist theory (in spite of its own inherent inconsistencies) can be interpreted as a constructive challenge to the hierarchical presuppositions of academic sociology. It can thus help to provide a theoretical framework for formulating a new set of institutional arrangements for social inquiry, which would reconstitute sociology as a democratic educational practice. In order for this to occur, sociology must recognise that the problematic nature of the social relationships of authoritative interpretation constitute a key theoretical problem: a 'democratic' sociology must re-focus its efforts on formulating methods for critique which would help to enfranchise practitioners in the rigorous analysts of their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response to Professor Swanwick's further critique of our sociological perspective on music education. We argue that criticisms made in relation to our positions on referentialism, the ability of people to appreciate music cross-culturally, and the various analytic categories of Meyer, Chester and Keil are all grounded in a desire to isolate the essence of `music' from social and cultural processes. We further argue that the difficulties perceived with our positions do not follow from a belief in the culture-specific significance of different musics per se, but rather from overly rigid and sometimes mistaken interpretation of our perspective. Finally, we point to the danger of assuming a cross-cultural category, `music', when many cultures have no equivalent word and use what we understand as `music' in ways vastly different to ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents several articles offering sociologists' views on cuts in British higher education as of 1984. John Brennan contributes a nation-wide view of the cuts in the public sector, outlines institutional policies and prejudices and suggests strategies for survival. His paper also shows that the distinctive ecology of public sector higher education poses both threats and opportunities for sociology. Meanwhile, Alan Waton provides a macro-view of the UGC action. Rosemary Deem writers of her experience as a County Councilor involved in working for the retention of courses in a public sector college and provides the only contribution with a happy ending. Also Ivan Reid discussed the problems and potentials of strategies for survival. According to Brennan, there never was a golden age for the polytechnics. He further said that they have experienced cuts and financial stringency over a long period of time. He also said that the effects have been gradual and have become almost taken for granted. Ivan Reid stated that it is difficult to establish whether sociology and sociology of education face threats over and above that posed to higher education in general. The intimate relationship of sociology of education with teacher education has meant that it has shared the fate of closures and cut-backs with the other disciplines of education and faced many of these well before the present situation.

Marxist sociology of education has been criticized in recent papers by Hickox and Hargreaves. It is argued that these writers largely misunderstand and misrepresent the work they criticize Hickox attributes a position to Marxist sociologists of education which few, if any, now hold Hargreaves makes a more powerful case, but is insufficiently familiar with Marxist scholarship to grasp the nature of the Marxist project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As early as 1970, M. S. Archer argued that Bourdieu's sociology of education was the product of the particular conditions of the French educational system within which it was formulated. The same argument was subsequently advanced more generally by Richard Jenkins, who insisted that Bourdieu's sociology of culture, particularly the analysis contained in La Distinction/Distinction ( Bourdieu, 1979 , 1986 ), was an expression of the peculiarly French emphasis on taste as a basis for social differentiation. Bourdieu was himself interested in the relations between particular and universal explanation in social science, and in many of his later articles he focused specifically on the question of the transferability of his concepts, such as 'cultural capital'. The English Preface to Homo Academicus ( Bourdieu , 1988 ) is an explicit discussion of how the analysis presented in the text of French higher education should be read and adopted by English readers, while Practical Reason ( Bourdieu, 1994 , 1998 ) contained published lectures in which Bourdieu considered the applicability of La Distinction to Japanese society. The purpose of my proposed contribution is to trace the development of Bourdieu's sociology of education in the context of educational policy developments in France during his lifetime and, equally, to trace the ways in which his work has been used in the British context during the period between the first reception of his educational work in the United Kingdom in Knowledge and Control ( Young, 1971 ) to the reception of his more polemical political interventions of the 1990s, many of which implicitly invoked earlier educational thinking. The intention is that this discussion should revive interest in the relevance of Bourdieu's work to the British situation by reference to many of the later texts that appeared after the emphasis of the British field of reception had shifted from education to cultural studies. La noblesse d'état/State nobility ( Bourdieu, 1989 , 1996 ) and La misère du monde/The weight of the world (Bourdieu et al. , 1993, 1999 ) have direct implications for British thinking about education that are different from the implications of the texts of the 1960s, and it is important to disrupt the tendency still to see the importance of Bourdieu's educational work primarily in relation to Les héritiers/The Inheritors ( Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964b ; 1977 ) and La reproduction/Reproduction ( Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970 , 1977 ). Finally, the discussion will confront the question of transferability and ask whether the comparative conditions in Britain and France between 1960 and 2002 justify the transfer of his analyses and research methods across the cultures in the future beyond his death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents opinion on information technology and the sociology of education. My own interest in what might be called a sociology or politics of technology relates to earlier attempts to develop a sociological analysis of school science. We started the Technology and Education Project, recognizing on the one hand the need to explore the problems and possibilities of the so-called new technologies and also to remain aware that the issues were not new or specific to particular technologies, but part of those more general processes of specialization, the hierarchies and forms of power relation associated with industrialization. Many teachers are aware of the shortages of available software, of the constraints imposed by local authority funding policies, and by the inappropriateness of the available programming languages for educational purposes. All these are important issues for both teachers and sociological research, but a concentration of them would in my view pre-empt discussion about more basic issues that have yet to be considered at least within education. Again it is important to stress that this is not an argument against the possible use of expert systems in education, which might broaden pupils' access to opportunities to realize their own purposes. It is rather to cause us to be much more explicit about those purposes and the extent to which particular divisions of labor and particular dependencies may become enshrined and mystified in software even more than in people.

Over recent years there has been growing appreciation of the body's corporeal significance in how children learn in educational settings. 'The body' has been conceptualised from a variety of perspectives that we characterise as: 'the body without flesh', 'the body with fleshy feelings' and 'the body made flesh'. We reflect on these perspectives with reference to the model of embodied action used in our ongoing research on relationships between education and disordered bodies, outlining what they might differently offer in terms of understanding body/mind/culture relationships. We suggest that Basil Bernstein's notion of the 'pedagogic device', when reworked around the concept of a 'corporeal device', may provide one way of better conceptualising such relationships avoiding some of the fault lines and dualistic thinking inherent in other perspectives. If, as sociologists or school practitioners, we are to address the agency of 'the body' in cultural reproduction and better understand how the corporeal realities of children influence their sense of position, value and self, then we will need to deal with both the 'physical' and the 'phenomenal' universes of discourse, and the 'somatic mediations' of lived experience. This will mean giving as much attention to the biological dimensions of embodiment as its discursive representation currently receives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses an enduring concern in the sociology of education: how social class differences are reproduced through schooling. In particular it focuses on the functioning of pedagogy in this regard. The article presents a model that elucidates the inner logic of pedagogy in order to reveal the structuring of inequality with respect to different groups of students. Theoretical concepts are drawn from the work of Bernstein, Dowling (1998) and Pedro (1981). An analysis considering the relay of social class differences, what is relayed, and its organizational form is undertaken with respect to working class and middle class children learning literacy in a sample of South African primary schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the theoretical constructs of Bourdieu and their contribution to understanding the reproduction of social and cultural inequalities in schooling. While Bourdieu has been criticised for his reproductive emphasis, this article proposes that there is transformative potential in his theoretical constructs and that these suggest possibilities for schools and teachers to improve the educational outcomes of marginalised students. The article draws together three areas of contribution to this theme of transformation; beginning by characterising habitus as constituted by reproductive and transformative traits and considering the possibilities for the restructuring of students' habitus. This is followed by a discussion of cultural capital and the way that teachers can draw upon a variety of cultural capitals to act as agents of transformation rather than reproduction. The article concludes by considering the necessity of a transformation of the field to improve the educational outcomes of marginalised students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systems designed to ensure that teaching and student learning are of a suitable quality are a feature of universities globally. Quality assurance systems are central to attempts to internationalise higher education, motivated in part by a concern for greater global equality. Yet, if such systems incorporate comparisons, the tendency is to reflect and reproduce inequalities in higher education. Highlighting the European context, we argue that, if higher education is to play a part in tackling social inequalities, we must seek alternative methods to explore pedagogic quality in institutional settings. The sociologist Basil Bernstein's concepts of classification and framing provide an illustration of the potential of sociologically informed, qualitative approaches for exploring and improving higher education pedagogy and also for addressing social justice issues: these two concepts are used to analyse documentation about undergraduate sociology in two universities that have quite different reputations within the English and Northern Irish higher education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence of social differences in educational achievement as a social fact presents the sociology of education with a challenge to which it has responded with indifferent success. It is argued that contemporary explanations that dismiss the existence and relevance of differences in cognitive performance arising as a consequence of class variation in socialisation are likely to misrepresent the real causes of inequality/difference. The substantive discussion, organised around six questions dealing with the explanatory capacity of this concept, suggests that a satisfactory theory of inequality of educational opportunity will need to concern itself with the effects of socialisation on cognition. Some implications for educational practice and policy-making are briefly noted in conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bourdieu's social theory offers a way of understanding some of the most important features of the field of educational research, while also providing educational researchers with a rich conceptual apparatus for their practice. This article addresses both of these methodological themes and the connections between them. We begin by outlining some key trends in educational research, mainly in Britain, over recent decades in terms of Bourdieu's Field Theory. Special attention is given to the relative positioning of researchers and the formation of an 'avant-garde'. We refer to the impact of educational policy and attacks on educational research, with attendant effects on the field, and on the formation and legitimacy of knowledge about educational processes. This analysis is followed by an example taken from a contemporary research project in which principles derived from Bourdieu's approach have been adopted in framing methodology. We give particular attention to the terms of the programme in which the project forms a part, and key aspects of it such as 'user engagement'. Both methodological justifications and consequences are discussed, as well as tensions with dominant expectations of research processes and outcomes. Finally, we argue that, following Bourdieu's own public strategies of sociopolitical action, educational research methodology that is radically reflexive has the capacity to found a critically effective discourse with practical consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the impact of forces for commodification on universities and highlights some of the potential socio-politico, economic and educational implications. Restructuring of funding and governance frameworks which have attempted to develop new modes of functioning in higher education which are more responsive to government intervention and market forces are outlined. Developments in three key areas of higher education are analyzed: access, knowledge reproduction, and knowledge production. It is argued that these developments pose considerable challenges for the field of the sociology of education, especially since it has tended to neglect higher education as a site of enquiry. Implications for future sociology of education work are outlined. The international literature on the restructuring of higher education reveals that there is a global trend away from forms of funding and regulation which were based on the social compact that evolved between higher education, and state and society over the last century. Governments across the world are making concerted efforts to boost participation rates in higher education. The link between higher education and economic development has focused attention on access to higher education in developing countries. The deepening stratification of higher education systems within industrialized countries is mirrored in the divisions in higher education across industrial and developing countries.

Drawing on the 'sociology of pedagogy', the present article addresses a continuing challenge for teachers and policy-makers. The challenge is how to encourage disengaged learners to take up offers of educational success. The article brings important theoretical frames from the sociology of pedagogy into current research debates about 'productive pedagogies'. Focusing on the social relations of pedagogy, the article promotes a theoretical and empirical imperative to look keenly to the insights provided by students to construct clearer solutions to the challenge of providing engaging pedagogies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the specificity of the institutional dialectical dynamics of how recent policy impacts on teacher cultures and in turn how teacher cultures impact on policy. The study illustrates the complexity of the development of Occupational strategies and identifies at a time of rapid organisational change. This could not have been predicted on the basis of a "priori" sociological assumptions concerning teacher responses. Further theory-led empirical work might serve to demonstrate the wide range of responses to the restructuring of teachers' work. This may enable one, in relation to student responses to schooling, to move beyond a search for a teacher typology and construct a grammar of modes of challenge, which accounts for hegemonic and counter-hegemonic tendencies. This may facilitate the generation of theoretical models that help one to incorporate one's understanding of school work-pIace micro-politics within more general explanations of the changing nature and structure of teachers' work, at a time of rapid socioeconomic, political and technological change. In turn, this may provide much needed support at a critical time for State teachers, students and comprehensive schooling.

In 1981 a new curriculum development project, Science in Society, was published by the Association for Science Education. It has been widely praised and a growing number of teachers are using the material in their teaching. There have been, however, a number of criticisms about the restricted definition of the topic area and about bias in the curriculum material available. This article briefly describes the project and the context in which the project was developed. It is argued that many of the aspects of the course that have been criticised can be understood through an examination of the largely unquestioned assumptions prevalent in school science teaching at the time of the inception of the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is shown that an explicit social referentialism still pervades the work of Vulliamy & Shepherd and that such a view inevitably leads to a negative account of how people from one culture may respond to the music of another. Objective categories of musical criteria are once again put forward to facilitate a more open theory of musical significance. Attention is drawn to the educational limitations of music when it strongly signals group identity, or moves towards anarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses issues on the sociology of education in the Netherlands as of 1982. Like in most European countries and in the U.S., sociologists in the Netherlands have only recently shown a systematic and empirical concern with matters of education and socialization in general. In fact it was only after 1950 that the first few research projects were done and it was 1964 before the Dutch sociologists officially began to show interest in the subject when the Netherlands Sociological Society held a conference devoted to the basic problems of the sociology of education. Most of the teaching and research work in the sociology of education has taken place in the university departments of sociology and definitely not in institutes and colleges of education. More and more, the academic study of education is being built upon a few basic disciplines. In the country, there is a movement towards more or less interdisciplinary departments of education in which sociologists of education participate from their own sociological departments. In the Netherlands, a considerable part of the sociological research in the field of education is carried out in institutes which were specifically founded for that purpose. Dutch sociologists of education have organized themselves quite firmly to create favorable conditions for the development of their discipline. Four fields or subjects which cover most of the Dutch activities in the field of sociology of education, both in terms of theory and research. These are: social inequality in education, education and economy labor market and qualification, the school as an institution and educational policy.

This article discusses studies which represent the different sociological approaches to education in developing countries. The major contours of the sociology of education landscape are determined and can only be understood sensibly in terms of the two opposed theoretical paradigms of modernisation and dependency. Modernisation theory has its theoretical basis in the structural-functionalism which dominated sociology. Development as modernisation is taken to be an essentially evolutionary process relying primarily upon changes in the central value system of any particular society. Becoming modern involves the first massive and fundamental resocialisation of the population and secondly, the effective and efficient selection and allocation of appropriately talented and trained manpower. The education system is taken to be of singular importance in both functions. Two further facts combined to provide the policy and epistemological bases for modernisation theories of development. First, it is argued that the economic failure of ex-colonial nations is significantly related to the absence of mass education at primary levels. Secondly, it is assumed that education in western societies is a major source of economic growth which cannot be attributed to the rate of increase in capital formation.