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This article introduces a series of articles on Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of education, published in the November 2005 issue of the periodical "British Journal of Sociology of Education." The paper by Sandra Taylor and Parlo Singh documents struggles over the definition and practice of social justice in education inside the bureaucratic field, a struggle over statist capital. Karl Maton notes that the concept of field has been relatively neglected in the application of Bourdieu's work in education, with more emphasis given to the concepts of habitus and capitals. Some of Bourdieu's late writings about globalization also have relevance to considerations of the policy cycle in education in a context of globalization, an argument sustained by Bob Lingard, Shaun Rawolle and Sandra Taylor in their paper.

This paper analyses the relationship between education, meritocracy and redistribution. It first questions the meritocratic ideal highlighting how it relates to normative expectations that do not hold fully neither in their logic nor in practice. It then complements the literature on persistent inequalities by focusing on the opportunities for change created by current trends in the economy and in social aspirations. As the meritocratic argument that education is strongly linked to certain rewards in the labour market comes under pressure, increasing social dissatisfaction with education and skills wastage could be expected, as already noted in part of the political economy literature. This literature, however, has tended to conclude from such observations that educational expansion cannot deliver equality. The paper contributes to the debate by focusing on the opportunities created by current trends for the reorganisation of the relationship between education, the economy and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A lack of esteem for teachers and the teaching profession is a central tenet underpinning policy reforms put forward by the 2010 UK Government White Paper ‘The Importance of Teaching’. This article argues that the policy problem and solutions presented in the White Paper lack awareness of the historical and social positioning of teaching. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 32 London-based secondary teacher training students from various social class and ethnic backgrounds, this paper asks how the profession is perceived and what sort of choice it is for the trainees. It employs a Bourdieusian lens and concepts of social and cultural capital to examine the interplay of gendered, classed and ‘raced’ biographies in relation to individuals’ decisions to become teachers. Understanding the social world as ‘accumulated history’, as Bourdieu does, stresses that experiences and outcomes are rooted and collected in a series of historical structures and functionings. The paper argues that the ambiguous status of the profession is both a function and an effect of its conceptualisation as feminised. It also asks whether the weak professional standing of teaching has further destabilising consequences in the present political moment where a string of neoliberal and neoconservative policy reforms reshape the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a first attempt in an ongoing research study of the policy environments in four UK secondary schools to examine policy enactment, where 'enactment' refers to an understanding that policies are interpreted and 'translated' by diverse policy actors in the school environment, rather than simply implemented. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part presents an audit of the policies encountered in four case study schools in the south-east of England. The second part looks at one current English government policy, namely personal learning and thinking skills, and how this is taken up in two of the case study schools. In this way, the paper not just explores why a policy is adopted but also illustrates the capacity for school-based policy elaboration, where schools produce their own 'take' on policy, drawing on aspects of their culture or ethos, as well as on the situated necessities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will trace the adoption of a policy of Social Inclusion in schools in one Australian state in terms of the way in which the policy direction, its discourses and adoption reflect a rhetoric of what Ball has labelled a 'paradigm of convergence'. The analysis will show that the policy discourse, especially in its focus on school retention, appears to endorse the vision of a neo-liberal entrepreneurial competitor as the educated product despite being initiated and implemented by a Labor state government within a rhetoric of community concern for social justice. The second part of the paper reports on the ways in which primary school leaders have responded to this policy which reflects some older educational discourses and is more in line with a prior version of a well-run school and an inclusive society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper utilizes Bourdieu’s conceptual frame to examine the mediatized effects of policy processes concerned with the growth and support of knowledge industries in Australia. These policies span education, science, research and other knowledge industries (such as venture capital firms and intellectual property law). The paper argues that some policy processes are best represented as temporary social fields. The nature of these fields can be described by the kinds of cross‐field effects that they produce. A case study of an Australian knowledge economy policy, The chance to change , and associated policy processes demonstrates the broad analytic capacities of Bourdieu’s conceptual frame for policy analysis, when combined with the concepts of cross‐field effects and temporary social field developed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper raises questions regarding the ability of new qualifications frameworks and assessment systems to promote innovation and social inclusion. Of interest in this paper is the centrality of tacit skill in promoting innovation. Tacit skill is central to innovation, although its positional character is not well understood by policy-makers. It is argued that the relationship between tacit skill and innovation throws doubt on the relationship between assessment led change, and on the social and economic objectives of New Labour (in the UK) and the Labour-led Coalition (in New Zealand). This paper also reviews recent changes in the funding of higher education in New Zealand and in the UK, and explores the impact of economic change on the competition for advancement through education. This paper concludes by arguing that innovation and social inclusion are not compatible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the argument that the contradictions of performativity provide the context in which new forms of professionalism can develop. English further education is used to explore these questions. The paper addresses four issues. It seeks to locate the discussion within the period immediately following the incorporation of colleges of further education in 1993, when colleges of further education were removed from local authority control and placed under aegis of the Further Education Funding Council. This is followed by an examination of changes to the management regime following incorporation. It considers suggestions that bullying forms of management have been superseded and that there has been some feminization of senior management. This discussion is set alongside one addressing the socio-economic context as well as hegemonic understandings of the economy. The final part of the paper examines claims made for the development of an ‘activist’ or transformative professionalism. However the key difficulty with these potentially progressive arguments is that analyses operate at the level of ideology accepting the way in which the knowledge economy is constructed thereby failing to seriously consider and work through the patterns of antagonistic relations that exist within capitalism. In a similar manner they play down education as site of struggle. Whilst the paper is orientated towards English further education the argument has a wider purchase, applying to education in particular and the welfare state in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins by noting the centrality of the issue of working-class school failure within the sociology of education in Britain. It argues that recent government policies have taken insufficient account of sociological work on the impact of social class on educational success and failure. It also suggests that sociologists should pay more attention to middle-class education. The importance of this is illustrated through reference to research on the trajectories of pupils receiving different forms of secondary education. The paper then argues that social inclusion policies need to address a variety of forms of middle-class self-exclusion from mainstream public provision as well as working-class social exclusion. It concludes that education policy needs to be located within a broader social policy framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical policy scholars have increasingly turned their attention to: (1) the work of policy actors engaged in globalised and globalising processes of policy formation, (2) the global flows or movements of education policies across multifaceted, hybrid networks of public–private agencies, and (3) the complex politics of global–national policy translation and enactment in local school contexts. Scholars have emphasised firstly, the economic turn in education reform policies, a shift from a social democratic education orientation and secondly, policy convergence towards a dominant neoliberal political agenda. This paper suggests that Bernstein’s concepts of the totally pedagogised society (TPS) and the pedagogic device, as the ensemble of rules for the production, recontextualisation and evaluation of pedagogic discourses may add to this corpus of critical policy scholarship. It does this by firstly reviewing the take up of Bernstein’s concept of the TPS in the critical policy sociology literature, arguing that this interpretation presents a largely dystopian account of globalising educational policies. In contrast, the paper argues for and presents an alternative open-ended reading and projection of Bernstein’s concept of the TPS and pedagogic device for thinking about globalised processes and devices of the pedagogic communication of knowledge(s). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reveals the array of practices arising from strong policy pressure for improved student results in national literacy and numeracy tests in Australia: the National Assessment Programme in Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). The paper provides an account of a policy context characterised by significant pressure upon teachers and principals to engage in practices to ensure improved outcomes on standardised literacy and numeracy tests, and of teachers and principals’ responses to these policy pressures. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the article argues that what is described as the ‘field of schooling practices’ has become increasingly dominated by a ‘logic of enumeration’, and that high test results on standardised literacy and numeracy tests are increasingly valued capitals, evident in a strong focus upon teachers meeting, discussing and informing one another about NAPLAN; engaging in curriculum development practices which foreground NAPLAN, and; actively preparing students to sit the test, including, whether intentionally or unintentionally, teaching to the test. Such a focus has important implications for the sorts of practices most valued in schooling settings, as more educative logics are potentially marginalised under such circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While it is generally acknowledged that being ‘historically informed’ lies at the heart of critical accounts of education policy-making, the use of historically focused retrospective research methods within the field is rare. This paper makes the case for retrospective research at a time when some of the most significant episodes of post-war educational policy-making are fast passing into the realms of not-so-recent history. In particular, it is argued that current policy scholars now have an opportunity to revisit the issues and concerns regarding the formation of the ‘New Right’ education policy reforms 30 years ago. Drawing on the experiences of a recently completed study of educational policy-making during the 1979–1983 Thatcher administration, it is argued that retrospective methods offer a surprisingly rich opportunity to collect primary data from the policy elites of the 1980s. It is concluded that the time is right for the production of a useful addendum to the founding studies of educational policy sociology that were conducted at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Policy sociologists typically research at large scale. This paper presents an example of a policy analysis which illuminates how policy is embedded in single incidents, lives and places. The case in point concerns the policy fetish for 'closing the gap and raising the bar'. This rhetoric is taken to mean improving the learning of all students, while at the same time producing a more equitable, quality education system. In the case in point, we mobilise an ethnographic fragment and the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre in order to examine the ways in which the policy technology of transforming students into measurable data plays out in the life of one group of Year 10 girls in a struggling English comprehensive school. We argue that our analysis demonstrates that in this very particular case, the pedagogies intended to promote attainment actually accomplished the reverse. We suggest that, following this example, policy sociologists might gain from further research at the micro/vernacular levels of schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses Bourdieu to develop theorizing about policy processes in education and to extend the policy cycle approach in a time of globalization. Use is made of Bourdieu’s concept of social field and the argument is sustained that in the context of globalization the field of educational policy has reduced autonomy, with enhanced cross‐field effects in educational policy production, particularly from the fields of the economy and journalism. Given the social rather than geographical character of Bourdieu’s concept of social fields, it is also argued that the concept can be, and indeed has to be, stretched beyond the nation to take account of the emergent global policy field in education. Utilizing Bourdieu’s late work on the globalization of the economy through neo‐liberal politics, we argue that a non‐reified account of the emergent global educational policy field can be provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little attention has been paid to the relationship between policy and space in the sociology of education. This paper analyses the relationships between educational policy change, in the form of the Excellence in cities policy initiative, and urban change in inner London. I propose, and apply, a framework for a spatialised policy analysis explicitly linking space and policy. I suggest that the intersections of policy, schools, place and space provide new opportunities to explore the interconnection of educational policy change and urban change. I argue that relationships between physical locations and students are significant enabling and disabling factors in neo-liberal educational policy-making. These relationships form what I term the educational renovation of identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social exclusion is a key policy theme for the New Labour government, and has been closely associated with education policy. The emphasis is on the need to combat social exclusion by creating a globally competitive economy through the education system, and through responsible individual attitudes. However, this dominant discourse is interpreted differently at various levels of policy making that provide alternative conceptualizations of the problem, and suggest different roles for education. This paper draws upon a research project that explored the links between education governance and social exclusion, and seeks to illustrate different approaches to social exclusion and education, as these are articulated by politicians and civil servants involved in policy making, or policy implementation in England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1980s, state schools in England have been required to ensure transparency and accountability through the use of indicators and templates derived from the private sector and, more recently, globally circulating discourses of ‘good governance’ (an appeal to professional standards, technical expertise, and performance evaluation as mechanisms for improving public service delivery). The rise of academies and free schools (‘state-funded independent schools’) has increased demand for good governance, notably as a means by which to discipline schools,in particular school governors– those tasked with the legal responsibility of holding senior leadership to account for the financial and educational performance of schools. A condition and effect of school autonomy, therefore, is increased monitoring and surveillance of all school governing bodies. In this paper, I demonstrate how these twin processes combine to produce a new modality of state power and intervention; a dominant or organizing principle by which government steer the performance of governors through disciplinary tools of professionalization and inspection, with the aim of achieving the ‘control of control’. To explain these trends, I explore how various established and emerging school governing bodies are (re)constituting themselves to meet demands for good governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article contributes to the critical policy studies of educational governance and its crisis, through canvassing Basil Bernstein's concept of the 'totally pedagogised society' (TPS). The TPS witnesses not only the growth of transnational private actors, but also the disjuncture between global and national agendas of reform, on the governance of knowledge and subjectivity. This argument is illustrated through a court case surrounding the invalidation of a history exam question in Hong Kong, which occurred after the 2019 social unrest. At the heart of this crisis is a dislocation of pedagogic discourse. The history exam can be considered as an indirect outcome of recontextualising the global policy imaginary of producing subjects of 'critical thinking' and 'knowledge economy', but it is incommensurate with China's regulative discourse, that is, to govern the political consciousness of its postcolonial subjects and legitimise its rule through pedagogic means. The concept of TPS considers the other side of a high-performing regime in Asia: the crisis of reform, the return of a strong state, the evolving power and control relations inside/outside the education system, and the rising tensions between pedagogic agents/agencies, in a period of rapid social change as revealed in Hong Kong today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on findings pertaining to scholarship in education policy drawn from a wider study on all education research in South Africa from 1995 to 2006. This study, which defined education research as broadly pertaining to teaching and/or learning, obtained extensive data from a wide range of sources, including universities, public institutions, NGOs, Education and Training Authorities, museums, publishers, donor agencies, trade unions, conferences, journals and electronic databases. The levels, scale, educational sectors and disciplinary areas of each entry in the resulting 10,315-strong database were identified, and a random sample of 600 texts was analysed in order to distinguish primary research themes. This article summarises seven themes in education policy studies, including policy idealism, policy critiques, language in education policy, higher education policy, further education and training policy, the nature and effects of educational decentralisation and the relationship between education policy and the market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses the way in which EU policy-making operates, explains the relevance of 'lifelong learning' for the European Commission and analyses the mechanisms by which the Commission has advanced policy-making in education and training since the Lisbon Summit. The article reviews in particular the alleged lack of effectiveness of the Open Method of Coordination in education and, second, the notion that the EU advances 'slowly and persistently' in its acquisition of competences in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of the consultants in secondary schools and local authorities within a large-scale consultancy-based reform, the Secondary National Strategy (SNS), in London, UK. The SNS follows a cascade model of implementation in which nationally created initiatives are introduced and supported within local authorities (LA) and schools through LA-based consultant teams. The article is drawn from a larger interpretive case study that follows the experiences of SNS consultants working within the reform from 2002 to 2006. The article uses semi-structured interviews to reveal the various and diverse experiences that occur in schools as a result of the introduction of consultants within LAs. The article argues that introducing an SNS consultancy structure to work within LAs and secondary schools created dynamic, complex and shifting effects across secondary schools. While consultants often attempted to create developmental or learning experiences that resonated with teachers' and departments' experiences, these activities may also have served to further the institutional control of teachers' workspaces. These effects are part of the complexities that exist within school change agendas. Exploring these contradictions helps in understanding school change within urban secondary schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personalisation is an emerging 'movement' within education. Its roots reside in marketing theory, not in educational theory. As a concept it admits a good deal of confusion. It can refer either to a new mode of governance for the public services, or it qualifies the noun 'learning', as in 'personalised learning'. The concern here is with its intellectual affinity to child-centred education, one which the government in England has strongly denied. On balance, the government's view of personalisation is not of a piece with what may commonly be regarded as child-centred education. But the strong semantic accord between the terms 'personalisation' and 'child-centred education' provokes a question: why does the government not provide a term which unequivocally distinguishes its current 'vision' for education from child-centred education? By retaining the term personalisation, the government purports to do two things: first, because of its focus on personalised 'tailored' needs and co-produced solutions, it adapts education even further to a consumerist society; and second, because the term personalisation strikes a chord with the discourse of child-centred education, it blurs the fact that little to do with pedagogy or with curriculum has in fact been changed. The term personalisation generates a nostalgic appeal to better times long gone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article problematises the construction of regulation as an effective manager of risks to children in early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. Adopting a Foucaldian, governmentalist approach to regulation and risk, the authors suggest that governments in Australia have 'risk colonised' regulation to meet their own interests rather than make effective use of regulation as a mechanism for quality assurance. They propose that the risk colonising of regulation has not effectively addressed societal risks to children in ECEC services, and has generated its own risks to quality standards through a preoccupation with institutional risk. In these ways, 'the laugh of Foucault' resounds in the regulation of ECEC services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying upon recent research, this article puts into perspective the evolution of inequalities concerning both education and life chances in France since the 1960s. While a dramatic expansion of education has taken place, what consequences can one observe as far as social mobility and more broadly social reproduction are concerned? In fact, French society does not appear more fair and an interpretation of this mismatch is proposed. First, the main sociological classical theories (Bourdieu, Boudon, and so on) are called up: do they help in understanding the underlying processes, and what questions remain? The persistent inequalities in attainment and the importance of structural external factors are among the most problematic issues. Finally, following this analysis and going back specifically to France, some political questions are sketched out, a central issue being the place that should be given to educational policies to achieve a fairer society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to address some of the key underlying issues currently distorting dominant approaches to schooling it is necessary to acknowledge and engage with our broad intellectual and cultural responsibilities currently shunned by contemporary policy. Philosophy has a key role to play here, in terms of both deconstruction and recommendation. Drawing on the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray, this article argues for the need to situate our work within an historical context that requires judgment about matters of significance and purpose, not mere efficiency and effectiveness. It further argues for the provision of a convincing account of the relational nature of the self that will, in turn, provide the basis of a framework for organisational and communal analysis. The particular framework offered names the dangers of a new totalitarianism exemplified by high performance models of schooling currently preoccupying contemporary practice, advocacy and aspiration. In seeking to reclaim the centrality of human being and becoming in any future education policy it also proposes a person-centred alternative that transforms and transcends the hegemony of insistent instrumentalism in favour of an inclusive, creative community as a more fitting aspiration for education in a democratic society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The task of social scientists is to find ways of investigating and understanding the social, political and economic world, in order to offer insights into everyday and public life in the past, present and future. Bourdieu’s tool kit offers a particular way of theorizing the rules, narratives and self‐held truths of social phenomena and of educational policy as a specific object of analysis. In this article I develop a series of propositions about the ways in which field theory might be applied to explain the abrupt public policy shift effected by the Thatcher government and the adjustments made to it by the Blair government. I suggest that a Bourdieuian approach shows policy working as a means of codification, as a doxa of misrecognition and as currency exchange within and across fields. I conclude with some thoughts about the difficulties of explicating interactions between fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]