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This paper explores the layered transitional experiences of a semi-professional athlete named Jack (a pseudonym) between the fields of professional sport and further and higher education. Our analysis is framed by the quadripartite framework of structuration and focuses on Jack’s ‘in-situ’ practices at his college and university in order to illustrate how these can operate to reproduce, transform, and challenge the habitual discourses and rituals that circulate within these institutions by generating forms of corporeal empowerment for young athletes who have valued conjunctural knowledge. The findings highlight the fragility of the transition process and raise questions regarding how the experiences of young people are shaped by the relationships between employment and post-16 education. Jack’s experiences have implications for both policy and practice within further education and higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper contributes to arguments for the potential of Giddens' structuration theory in educational research. It illustrates how 'conceptual schemes' from structuration theory were applied to the author's empirical research on a type of alternative educational practice in India, 'private school outreach'. It shows how Giddens' concepts of 'social system', 'structure' and 'agency' helped to conceptualize private school outreach, and how 'constraint' and 'ontological security' offered explanations of apparent contradictions in private school outreach practice within the context of the reasons and motivations of actors. It also argues that when schools attempt to do things differently, contradictions may occur because the same 'rules and resources' that are drawn on in the production of alternative practice are drawn on in the reproduction of practice. Finally, acknowledging the debates around structuration theory, some of its key criticisms are addressed in relation to the empirical application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study drew on Bernstein's theory and Moscovici's theory of Social Representations to investigate how children in classrooms with different types of structuration developed social representation of the curriculum. Comparable case studies were carried out in schools chosen to reflect three types of pedagogy according to Bernstein's typology. Twelve classrooms took part and ethnographic investigations were employed to compile a typology of recognition and realisation rules to map the range and type of curriculum structuration in each. Children's representations of the curriculum were investigated through specially designed tasks. Findings showed that as children gained experience of schooling they constructed more elaborate social representations of the curriculum regardless of the pedagogic mode and that classroom structuration became a feature of the junior rather than the infant children's representations. Older children in classrooms with performance pedagogies had two classifications for recognising classroom culture, while those in classrooms with mixed and competence pedagogies did not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines similarities and differences between structuration theory, habitus and complexity theory, as theories of social change. The paper suggests that structuration theory and habitus can theorize change, but that complexity theory offers a more complete theory of change because it focuses on social production rather than reproduction. Although there are elective affinities between structuration theory, habitus and complexity theory, nevertheless there are important differences between them. Complexity theory, being at heart a theory of change and development, differentiation and open systems, is more than merely a reformulation of structuration theory and habitus, and offers a more complete theory of social change than these two. Implications and agendas are drawn for the sociology of education from a complexity perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theorising the interplay of structure and agency is the quintessential focus of sociological endeavour. This paper aims to be part of that continuing endeavour, arguing for a stratified social ontology, where structure and agency are held to be irreducible to each other and causally efficacious, yet necessarily interdependent. It thus aims not to be part of that on-going journey in search of the 'ontological holy grail'. Instead, it offers a way of linking structure and agency which enables the practical education researcher concretely to examine their relative interplay over time. The methodological key to teasing out their relative interplay is held to be analytical dualism. It will be argued that such a methodological device is precluded by Giddens' structuration theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]