Bourdieu and the study of educational policy: introduction.

This article introduces a series of articles on Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of education, published in the November 2005 issue of the periodical "British Journal of Sociology of Education." The paper by Sandra Taylor and Parlo Singh documents struggles over the definition and practice of social justice in education inside the bureaucratic field, a struggle over statist capital. Karl Maton notes that the concept of field has been relatively neglected in the application of Bourdieu's work in education, with more emphasis given to the concepts of habitus and capitals. Some of Bourdieu's late writings about globalization also have relevance to considerations of the policy cycle in education in a context of globalization, an argument sustained by Bob Lingard, Shaun Rawolle and Sandra Taylor in their paper.