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Social reproduction theory names at least two distinct traditions, one of which has a long history in educational research. Social reproduction theory in education emerged out of a concern with education's relationship to capitalist inequalities. By contrast, social reproduction feminism developed out of feminist interventions regarding the role of women's unpaid care-work in the reproduction of capitalism. In this paper, we suggest that the renewed energy surrounding social reproduction feminism provides an opportunity to revisit social reproduction theorizing in education. We review the fields' histories and ready the ground for an integrated framework. At the heart of this integration is a feminist analysis of reproductive labor in its contradictory relationship to capitalism. Expanding the analysis from the reproduction of capitalist relations to the reproduction of life under capitalism, this approach avoids the pitfalls of determinism and attends to students' participation and teachers' work in the contested labor of social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper maps the global dimension of higher education and associated research, including the differentiation of national systems and institutions, while reflecting critically on theoretical tools for working this terrain. Arguably the most sustained theorisation of higher education is by Bourdieu: the paper explores the relevance and limits of Bourdieu's notions of field of power, agency, positioned and position-taking; drawing on Gramsci's notion of hegemony in explaining the dominant role played by universities from the United States. Noting there is greater ontological openness in global than national educational settings, and that Bourdieu's reading of structure/agency becomes trapped on the structure side, the paper discusses Sen on self-determining identity and Appadurai on global imagining, flows and 'scapes'. The dynamics of Bourdieu's competitive field of higher education continue to play out globally, but located within a larger and more disjunctive relational setting, and a setting that is less closed, than he suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the organization and representation of time in certain kinds of undergraduate programs, here represented by a sociology program in a US university. Written requirements for the major are analyzed as constituting a 'chart' that defines academic time in terms of units of before-after relationships. The paper shows how students 'reuse' these temporal units when charting paths through the university and reckoning their academic work to specific futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the long-term association of family socioeconomic status (SES), educational, and labor force outcomes in a regional US longitudinal sample (N = 2264). The results offer insights into the mechanisms underlying the role of family SES in transitions from secondary schooling to early work experiences. It was found that the academic achievement gap associated with SES widens during secondary schooling due in part to course-level tracking. Family SES relates to college enrollment mainly via its association with academic gains in school, but also through family income and father’s occupational status. Family SES is weakly but significantly related to adult offspring’s earnings but more strongly related to occupational status. Educational qualifications and cognitive skills make independent contributions to the explanation of labor force outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reviews the existing literature to discuss how critical race theory has been applied as a theoretical framework to higher educational research in the United States and what its contributions are. To provide necessary context, I will discuss race and racism in the United States, the background of US higher education in relation to race, the emergence of critical race theory and its application in US higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the context of the ongoing debate between critical race theory (CRT) and Marxism, I begin in this paper by examining the origins of CRT in Critical Legal Studies (CLS) in the United States. I go on to describe CRT’s entry into education, first in that country, and then in the United Kingdom. I move on to a discussion of current debates between critical race theorists and Marxists, focusing on an analysis of arguments for the existence of abstract racial domination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores Indian women's views on arranged marriages in the United Kingdom. It is based on research carried out with 32 Indian women studying at a university in the South East of England, UK. The article draws on Wenger's social theory of learning to explore how Indian women's participation in communities of practice in higher education contributes to their participation in arranged marriages. The concept of 'social capital' is used to discuss how women are able to negotiate their participation in arranged marriages, It is used to examine the knowledge and identity resources that women develop through their participation in higher education, which provides them with the means from which to develop the necessary 'bridging ties' leading to their active participation in the wider South Asian community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to understand Korean students' motivations for studying in US graduate schools. For this purpose, I conducted in-depth interviews with 50 Korean graduate students who were enrolled in a research-centered US university at the time of the interview. In these interviews, I sought to understand how their motivations are connected not only with their family, school, and occupational backgrounds, but also with the stratification of global higher education. Theoretically, this paper attempts to combine the concept of global positional competition with Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital in the field of global education. By critically examining a push-pull model of transnational higher education choice-making, this study situates Korean students' aspirations in the contexts of global power and the hierarchy of knowledge-degree production and consumption. After analyzing the students' qualitative interviews, I classify their motivations for earning US degrees within four categories: enhancing their class positions and enlarging their job opportunities; pursuing learning in the global center of learning; escaping the undemocratic system and culture in Korean universities; and fulfilling desires to become cosmopolitan elites armed with English communication skills and connections within the global professional network. Based on this analysis, I argue that Korean students pursue advanced degrees in the United States in order to succeed in the global positional competition within Korea as well as in the global job marketplace. As they pursue advanced US degrees, Korean students internalize US hegemony as it reproduces the global hierarchy of higher education, but at the same time Korean students see US higher education as a means of liberation that resolves some of the inner contradictions of Korean higher education, including gender discrimination, a degree caste system, and an authoritarian learning culture. Therefore, this study links Korean students' aspiration for global cultural capital to complex and irregular structures and relations of class, gender, nationality, and higher education that extend across local, national, and global dimensions simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I begin by taking a brief glimpse at the current state of global capitalism. I then look at attempts in Britain and the US to argue the case, within educational theory, that postmodernism and poststructuralism can be forces for social change and social justice. Concentrating on some of the work of Elizabeth Atkinson, Patti Lather and Judith Baxter, I argue that such claims are illusory. I make the case that Marxism remains the only viable option in the pursuit of social change and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretically informed by the sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu, this analysis represents an initial attempt to examine what it would mean to analyse educational policy as a social field. By employing such a frame, two main claims are addressed: (1) that the sociological perspective of Bourdieu offers valuable potential for understanding both educational policy, per se, and what it means to analyse educational policy; and (2) that there is good reason to question claims about shifts in power relations in US educational policy. Where other contemporary analyses of educational policy draw on some of Bourdieu's conceptual framework, in this paper I hope to more systematically elaborate methodological concerns raised when applying a Bourdieuian framework to educational policy. Further, I argue the perspective developed here suggests that in the 1980s US educational policy reforms reveal the historical maturation of a social field which has developed its own autonomy and its own rewards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservative critiques of education and proposals for reform show striking similarities in Canada, Britain and the US. All seem to reflect what Haberrnas referred to as "the affirmative stance towards social modernity and the denigration of cultural modernity". The paper uses this distinction to describe and analyse New Right criticisms of educational progressivism and conservative efforts to promote a new sympathy for business values, market discipline and market relations in schools and colleges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The market alternative in education is gaining ground in policy-making circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Parental choice and school competition are seen as ways of achieving reform and raising standards while at the same time reducing State intervention into education planning. This paper interrogates the arguments made for markets and against public monopoly schooling,, and it is argued that on both counts of advocates are partial and flawed. The failure to address the bases and effects of inequalities of the market are given particular attention. It is argued that markets in education provide the possibility for the pursuit of class advantage and generate a differentiated and stratified system of schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debate on teacher quality and quality in teaching and teacher education has been as vigorous in Australia as it has been in the UK and the USA In Australia, however, reform in teacher education has been subsumed within a national metapolicy of corporate federalism which is an amalgam of beliefs or discourses including neo-corporatism, economic rationalism, corporate managerialism and human capital The paper analyses the most recent document on reform of teacher education in Australia (the Ebbeck Report) and shows how its policy formulation is influenced by the discourse of corporate federalism It also shows how micro-economic reform in this sector is related to reforms in other sectors of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]