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Provides a case study of how school effectiveness policy is mediated by teachers and Local Education Authority (LEA) advisors. Uses qualitative data of a "failing" junior school in the United Kingdom to highlight (1) an LEA response to an evaluation by the Office for Standards in Education and (2) staff mediation of the LEA intervention. (CMK)

As Allaire and Firsirotu (1984) pointed out over a decade ago, the concept of culture seemed to be sliding inexorably into a superficial explanatory pool that promised everything and nothing. However, since then, some sophisticated and interesting theoretical developments have prevented drowning in the pool of superficiality and hence theoretical redundancy. The purpose of this article is to build upon such theoretical developments and to introduce an approach that maintains that culture can be theorized in the same way as structure, possessing irreducible powers and properties that predispose organizational actors towards specific courses of action. The morphogenetic approach is the methodological complement of transcendental realism, providing explanatory leverage on the conditions that maintain for cultural change or stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the international momentum of the school effectiveness movement continues, its exponents remain largely impervious to criticism. This paper argues that while they may not readily align themselves with the individualistic aspects of Conservative social philosophy, their methodology necessarily secretes an atomised social ontology. The charge of ideological commitment rests on the fact that the essentially positivist epistemology employed by school effectiveness researchers presupposes an ontology of closed systems and atomistic events. Thus any notion of the structuring of life-chances is automatically ruled out of court. The reciprocity of social ontology and methodology is explored in order to account for the myopia of the school effectiveness movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that sociologist John Hood-Williams article on the rejection of sex/gender distinction is not so much concerned with rejecting the so-called additive approach to the biological and the social where the biological base is seen a priori. Throughout this article the author's main concern is with defending the analytical indispensability of the ontological sex/gender distinction. Whether people are naturally aggressive, or males, or patriarchal or whatever can only be decided by research which pays careful attention to stratification and emergence and is alive to the problems of defining the natural and the social. The prevalent notion that women, naturally want to be mothers because of a supposedly intrinsic maternal instinct, it is in their biological make-up to do so. If everything social could be reduced to the biological then logically there would be no pre-dispositional hormones: either hormone determines or they do not. Whether there may be a biologically based potential for heightened maternal investment is irrelevant, since it is the case that mothers and fathers are equally nurturing.