Educational Institutions and Perverse Effects: After 1968

The analysis of the relation between institutions and individual behaviours presents sociology with one of its most critical problems. Institutions never determine behaviours but they do affect individuals’ fields of action and of decision-making. As a corollary to this, the analysis of an institutional change’s ‘effects’ invariably entails a study of the modifications in individuals’ fields of action and of decision-making that this change introduced.