Search

Critical, and in particular Bourdieusian, sociology of education is often suspicious about educators when they describe their ideal students. It tends to see these descriptions as euphemisations, so that apparently intellectual assessments are really elitist evaluations about students' class positions. However, this way of thinking about educators can lead to reductive accounts in which actors are completely blind to the real meaning of their beliefs, which must be unveiled by sociologists. In this article I utilise Luc Boltanski's pragmatic sociology to offer an alternative model of educators' accounts, in which there is no real meaning to be unveiled, but rather a complex mix of meanings held in educators' minds at once. Analysing interview data with those teaching on new liberal arts degrees in English universities, I demonstrate what can be gained by staying with the complexity of participants' own accounts, rather than mining them for one fundamental truth.

A growing body of literature is encouraging academics to slow down their academic work as a way of managing the acceleration of university life. Little attention, however, has been paid to the important differences in temporalities among different sorts of higher education institutions, and the effect this is likely to have upon the sense of acceleration and, crucially, the capacity to resist it. This article discusses interview data with academics at a particularly 'fast' academic site, drawn from a broader comparative study of three very different sorts of institution. It argues that the culture at this university is fundamentally structured around the principle of rapid change, in marked contrast to both more research-intensive "and" more teaching-intensive institutions. Any advice about the management of change must, I argue, take into account the specifics of institutional situations as well as broader structural causes of institutional difference, if it is to prove effective.

Critical, and in particular Bourdieusian, sociology of education is often suspicious about educators when they describe their ideal students. It tends to see these descriptions as euphemisations, so that apparently intellectual assessments are really elitist evaluations about students' class positions. However, this way of thinking about educators can lead to reductive accounts in which actors are completely blind to the real meaning of their beliefs, which must be unveiled by sociologists. In this article I utilise Luc Boltanski's pragmatic sociology to offer an alternative model of educators' accounts, in which there is no real meaning to be unveiled, but rather a complex mix of meanings held in educators' minds at once. Analysing interview data with those teaching on new liberal arts degrees in English universities, I demonstrate what can be gained by staying with the complexity of participants' own accounts, rather than mining them for one fundamental truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]