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In this paper the emergence of Cultural Studies is traced and its current place in British intellectual life assessed. Throughout a comparison is drawn between Cultural Studies and British Sociology. In the first part of the paper the 'original curriculum' of Cultural Studies is analysed in its making of a sharp break from previous disciplinary practices. The foundation of Cultural Studies on theoretically defined grounds is then described. In the second part of the paper the changes in Cultural Studies since its inception are described and the current critical potential of the practice assessed, On a pessimistic note the paper ends by noting the threat to the survival of Cultural Studies from the current round of rationalizations of British Higher Education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a project following up previous work about patterns of and attitudes to assessment among sociologists. Two forms of data collection were undertaken: an online questionnaire to sociology departments and a series of focus groups with undergraduate students. The results showed that assessment has become a more salient issue than ten years ago, but that most of the innovations in practice had taken place in post-1992 institutions. The focus group findings confirm those from national satisfaction surveys; namely that student dissatisfaction with assessment is profound and that it persists throughout their undergraduate experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers Olive Banks' work on charting the history and development of British feminism, and particularly her use of collective biography as a research and analytic tool. It is argued that while this has been seen as the least 'fashionable' aspect of her work, it took forward C. Wright Mills' contention for one definition of sociology as the interaction between biography and history, and predated by a decade or so similar work on prosopography by Bourdieu from the 1990s onwards. More recently other sociologists and educationists have taken up this methodological approach, including Jane Martin and Bronwyn Davies and Susanne Gannon. [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 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.

Despite a recently renewed theoretical interesting both North America and in Britain in the sociology of school knowledge, we still have little, if any, comparative empirical material from these two continents. This paper reports the findings of a sociological study, designed to replicate the previous English empirical work by Vulliamy, into music teaching in Ontario high schools. Unlike in England, no overt culture clash was found in Ontario schools between 'school' music and 'students" music, both because of the wider scope of 'what counts as school music' in Canada and because music is not a compulsory school subject there However, by focusing upon the deep structure of the pedagogical process, as opposed to surface features of classroom interaction, it is argued that particular ideologies of the dominant musical culture are transmitted in very similar ways in both contexts. What is shared is a conception of music as equitable with musical notation. The ideological significance of this is pinpointed in an analysis of the structurally homological relationship between different musical languages and the social/cultural contexts of their creation. The processes of school music teaching no only contribute to the legitimation of a dominant musical ideology, but also to much more pervasive ideological assumptions underpinning capitalist societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contrasts the use of ethnographic research procedures in the study of schools in Great Britain and the U.S. It also reflects on differences between the anthropology and the sociology of education. In the course of this exploration the authors also hope to draw together much of the literature from the respective countries and disciplinary fields. There is an obvious and striking difference between British and U.S. school ethnography. Whereas the U.S. research on schools and classrooms has been conducted primarily by applied anthropologists, that in Great Britain has been done overwhelmingly by researchers who see themselves as sociologists. It is noticeable that several researchers working as sociologists were trained as anthropologists or began work in anthropology departments. Where British research has looked to North America it has been to U.S. sociology in genera--especially symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. The article also attempts to establish that the Atlantic really does divide school ethnographers into differing traditions. It establishes the truth of the authors' claim that school and classroom ethnography in the U.S. and Canada is predominantly anthropological in orientation, while that in Great Britain is more sociological.

This article is a contribution to the sociology of an expanded and newly diversified UK higher education system. How differentiated is the student experience? How sharply is the system polarised? Drawing on interviews and questionnaires conducted in five sociology departments in a variety of pre-1992 and post-1992 universities, it examines students' views on 'what they learn' and their orientations to study. It explores differences in curriculum content and organisation and the extent to which student narratives and identities vary with differences in institutional context. A typology of student experiences and subject engagement is advanced that as well as capturing institutional differences also locates a range of student orientations - and worthwhile student experiences - in all five departments that suggests a somewhat greater commonality of experience and outcome across institutions than the extreme polarisation of institutional experiences and outcomes sometimes suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pupils of White and Black Caribbean descent make up the largest category of mixed heritage pupils in the United Kingdom. As a group they are at risk of underachieving and are proportionally over‐represented in school exclusions. Yet little is known to date about the barriers to their achievement. The common‐sense explanation for their underachievement is often in relation to the perception that mixed‐heritage people are more likely to have ‘identity problems’ and low self‐esteem because of their mixed backgrounds. In some cases, this view is further compounded by low teacher expectations associated with the socio‐economic background and household structure of some mixed heritage pupils. By drawing on qualitative data from recent research,1 this article will explore the barriers to achievement faced by White/Black Caribbean pupils in English schools. We argue that although White/Black Caribbean pupils are likely to experience a similar set of barriers to achievement as Black Caribbean pupils, there are important distinctions to be made. The specific barriers to achievement identified for White/Black Caribbean pupils derive from socio‐economic disadvantage, low teacher expectation linked to misunderstandings of mixed heritage identities and backgrounds, and the behavioural issues and attitudes towards achievement linked to peer group pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the establishment of sociology within the British educational scene. Inquiry of the London School of Economics into social mobility; Relation of the educational system to the division of labor and social stratification; Characteristic of the sociology of education.

This article discusses the sociology of education. According to the author, most of the present generation of sociologists of education in Britain commenced their study of the discipline at a time when it was informed by a major consideration of the inequalities of social class. Sociologists and theologists share the gospel that the poor will always be with them, together with a reality of changing situations and definitions and with varying levels of interest and involvement. Some would argue that the cutting edge of the discipline has consequently been dulled, and that the more macro political dimensions of the analysis of education and society have been put aside in favour of smaller practical research questions. At the same time, interest in inequality in education can be seen to have both broadened and deepened. The analysis of social class relations in education has been challenged and extended by research on gender and race relations and policy makers have developed an interest in formulating equal opportunity or equality policies in education in these areas. Sociological analyses of education have in the last decade encompassed many more aspects of schooling. Within an era of economic recession and dominance of monetarist values, ideologies so much part of the educational consensus, such as the concept of equal opportunity, have been reframed and pushed to one side.