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After briefly outlining Bernstein's personal and educational history, the paper goes on to review the scope of his work over the past 30 years, his theoretical contribution and his position among colleagues in the post-WWII era of British sociology. There follows a more detailed examination of the main tenets of his theory, pointing out that Bernstein's strategy was to present his ideas in the form of dichotomies, such as that between modes of socialization as personal or positional, and of linguistic codes as elaborated or restricted. The paper suggests that while critical issues in educational thinking and in sociology varied through the course of Bernstein's career, such as the study of socialization and its consequences for social reproduction, his dichotomizing remained a constant strategy throughout his writings. I end by briefly referring to my own work that offers some possible alternatives to Bernstein's dichotomies, concluding, however, that the enduring quality of Bernstein owes not a little to the appeal of his overly sharp theoretical distinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working in communities is increasingly a feature of UK (United Kingdom) higher education. Within the last decade communities of practice (CoPs) have migrated from organizational development departments and evolved to become tools for practice based learning in educational settings. More recently, in nursing, the literature reports that CoPs have the potential to blend the skills of both academics and clinicians to transform and create new knowledge that is both scholarly and applicable to practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After 1945, a broad ‘post-war consensus’ developed in the West. There was general agreement that the state had an important role to play in such areas as macroeconomic management, environmental protection, and social pro- vision for health, education, and welfare. But since the late 1970s, as part of the neo-liberal project to extend the market into every aspect of social life, there has been a backlash against ‘inefficient’, ‘bureaucratic’, ‘unwieldy’, and ‘inflexible’ state provision. In this article, I examine the discursive dimension of one facet of the ‘new capitalism’: the marketization of education in the UK. Using frameworks derived from critical discourse analysis, I analyze texts from three election manifestos: the Labour and Conservative manifestos from the 1987 election (a turning point in UK education policy), and the Labour 1997 manifesto. I show how aspects of textual organization, such as patterns of transitivity, the representation of social actors, semantic prosody, and coherence, have a central role to play in the construction of ‘comprehensive’ and ‘market’ conceptualizations of the domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]