A figurational approach to understanding school climate and peer harassment: Possibilities from Norbert Elias's work.

Although psychological approaches have been the mainstay of scholarly research on school climate, offering state‐of‐the‐art measurements and methodologies, sociological perspectives remain essential perspectives because violence is essentially a social phenomenon. This paper offers a theoretical consideration of contributions to this field, focusing specifically on those that provide a critical historical lens. I suggest that while Foucault's approach to the disciplining of docile bodies and self‐restraint offers crucial conceptual tools, Norbert Elias's work—which is scarce in scholarly research on school climate—provides a complementary but necessary framework for understanding emotional and relational aspects of peer harassment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]