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This paper examines how the Durkheimian approach to the 'ideal' delineates a possible way of straddling the dilemma between the normative orientation of 'powerful knowledge' accounts and the critical orientation of 'knowledge of the powerful' accounts. It argues that the normative aims are embedded in the fabrics of the sociological description with which the Durkheimian notion of 'elementary form' is concerned. To see where this enterprise can lead, this paper turns to the sociology of education of Bourdieu and Bernstein. Both draw on Durkheim's writings on primitive classifications in education and society, working towards uncovering the regularities of the world of knowledge classifications. Keeping in line with Bourdieu and Bernstein, this paper argues that one has to make the same refusal to the advocates of an abstract ideal of educational knowledge that is dissociated from its social conditions of historical realization in pedagogic contexts, and to the advocates of a cynical relativism of ideal that rejects any necessities socially established.

Talcott Parsons did not leave us with a global and consistent sociology of education. Instead, different aspects can be found in Parsons's oeuvre in different theoretical contexts. This paper summarises these different parts of Parsons's sociology of education -- his writings on the concepts of education and socialisation, the university, the school, the professions, and modernisation -- and discusses central criticisms and perspectives for further theoretical development. The paper goes on to argue that the value of cognitive rationality serves as a common basis of Parsons's sociology of education and that Parsons's sociology of education should be characterised as normative functionalist. Since the current sociology of education does not deal very intensely with Parsons's theoretical approach, the paper also considers references to other authors and the relevance for current questions and research in the sociology of education.

The subfield of Sociology of Education (SOE) concerned with the growth of neoliberalism through critically analysing its policies, discourses, and processes of subjectivation has made a significant contribution to education in the last 40 years. Whilst this scholarship has generated new knowledge about what happens to people, contexts and educational systems when they are regulated by neoliberal logics, it has also subsumed the sociological imagination under what this episteme considers valuable. The paper aims to challenge this excessive focus on the neoliberal episteme by broadening our research scope to recover the subjects' magmatic expression in SOE research. To do this, we introduce Hugo Zemelman's notion of "subject" to examine how SOE can overcome this neoliberal closure. The paper discusses three epistemic movements: focusing on the subject, researching the undetermined possibilities of the present in a given order, and, paying attention to the evocative and symbolic aspects of thinking and language.

The 'problems' and 'solutions' of modern education are overwhelmingly produced and tailored by the modern episteme, institutions, truths, and powers of the Global North. To find new ways of thinking and doing sociology, this paper will explore the outlines of a new Global Sociology of Education Imagination (GSEI) inspired by pre-modern epistemes selected precisely because of their distance from modern European standpoints: the ancient lost matriarchal societies and commons-based societies organised around shared goods in pre-modern Europe. Using Foucault's archaeological methodology, this paper finds inspiration in these epistemes to outline a new GSEI capable of questioning certain tenets of the modern sociological episteme regarding science, knowledge, truth and its order, roles, voices, commitments, and 'places'. It concludes with an invitation to experiment with a new GSEI inspired by these pre-modern epistemes, as a tool to openly challenge modern (education) domination and make it intolerable.

Reflecting through the prisms of past, present ("the shape of things that are and were") and future ("the shape of things to come"), this paper discusses three challenges for sociology of education: the rise of populism and declining faith in 'experts'; inequities within and re/produced by the sociology of education; and how to enact a sociology of education that can 'make a difference' to social inequalities. The paper puts forward some ideas in support of a current and future practice of the discipline that is pluralistic and orientated towards social justice. Arguments are made for the value of public-orientated dialogue that is conducted in a range of registers and the importance of acknowledging and engaging with the 'debt' (Ladson-Billings) that is owed to minoritized communities and minoritized researchers. Finally, a case is made for a sociology of education based on the principle of service as enacted through praxis partnerships.

In this paper, we consider the intensifying pressures on critical research and academic integrity in a research policy context that has come to be increasingly dominated by an instrumentalist mind-set. Using sensitising resources drawn from Geoff Whitty's critique of the 'what works' agenda, we reflect on the current conditions of academic labour and some of the key issues and dilemmas they pose for critical researchers in the sociology of education and beyond. In particular, we underline the trend for 'what works' agendas to become constitutive of academic identities and practices, including at micro-levels, such that the option of 'standing outside' them is shifting from being merely personally taxing to being institutionally disallowed. In addition to highlighting the dilemmas this creates for critical researchers and the threat this poses to expansive and democratic approaches to education, the paper emphasises the centrality of relationship-forming in understanding and underpinning academic integrity.

This paper presents an account of the development of the sociology of education in the UK, by means of an analysis of papers published in the field's flagship journal, the British Journal of Sociology of Education and its US equivalent, Sociology of Education. In particular, we examine the representation of two contrasting traditions in addressing social inequalities: 'political arithmetic'; and the more recent 'cultural turn'. We find that in the UK, the cultural turn dominates; whilst in the US, it is political arithmetic which does so. In accounting for these contrasting national profiles, we argue that they are underpinned by divergent social infrastructure and organisation. We also discuss some of the implications of the dominance of the cultural turn in the UK, specifically in terms of the relationship between the fields of academic research and policy and the development of a cumulative evidence base to address social inequalities in education.

This paper attempts to work on a number of different levels. Firstly, it comprises my personal reflections on a career in sociology of education. These reflections are entwined with a history of the discipline that emphasises themes of power, politics and pragmatism. This subjective, and inevitably partial, account is combined with an examination of the structure and composition of the academic field of sociology of education and its relationship with the two disciplines it originates from, sociology and education, but also with the wider field of politics. The ways in which these different strands within sociology of education coalesce or diverge, and the consequences in terms of tensions, fissures and struggles within the field will be considered. I also discuss the subject and content of sociology of education, and its future possibilities for radical as opposed to reactionary or reformist agendas.

This paper considers the sociology of education (SOE) as a modern human science. It suggests that the SOE is mired in a set of unreflexive, redemptive, Enlightment rationalities, and explores the messy relationships of the sociology with education that result from this. It is argues that the sociology of education has consistently failed to distance itself from the metaphysics, optimism and oppressions of modern schooling. That it has failed to call into question either the basic building blocks of schooling, or what we call education -- pedagogy, curriculum and assessment -- or the buildings themselves, the spaces of education. The paper concludes by asserting to need for critique rather than simply criticism as a starting point for thinking education differently.

In this paper we begin to explore how knowledges being generated in bioscience might be brought into productive articulation with the Sociology of Education, considering the potential for emerging transdisciplinary, 'biosocial' approaches to enable new ways of researching and understanding pressing educational issues. In this paper, as in our current research, we take learning as our focus. Our work brings together collaborators from across fields: sociology of education; molecular biology and biochemistry; cognitive neuroscience; fMRI imaging; and EEG. Through the paper we explore the generative potential of an encounter between life sciences and sociology of education. Through consideration of the conceptual and methodological elements of our 'Synchrony in Learning' research and engagement with our pilot experimental approach, our research is suggesting that our central concept, learning, is undergoing metamorphosis, challenging us to understand learning as a phenomenon produced through the intra-action of a multiplicity of forces and processes.

This paper argues that the sociology of education would benefit from greater integration with social scientific research focused on morality. This body of research offers a rich set of resources that can illuminate and extend many of the sociology of education's intellectual concerns. In support of this argument, the paper draws on data from Millennium Cohort Study in the UK to empirically examine how a wide range of socio-demographic characteristics are related to young people's moral attitudes. The analysis focuses on the extent to which adolescents state that a range of actions are wrong. In doing so, the paper makes an important contribution to studying the moral lives of young people.

Global movements to decolonise sociology have gained significant momentum in recent decades and offer far-reaching implications for the field of education. One understudied area of research, however, concerns the sociologies of education taught and experienced in teacher education outside of Anglo/European contexts. This paper uses post-/­decolonial theory to explore the teaching and learning of sociology of education for pre-service teachers at the University of Zambia. It draws on data from surveys (n = 318) and five focus groups with pre-service teachers (n = 20), a focus group with tutors (n = 3) working on the course, and reflections by course lecturers to examine Zambian pre-service teachers' experiences and perspectives of sociology. We argue that a sociology of education which includes some elements of the classical canon but is grounded more firmly in sociological perspectives related to local social issues, contexts, and epistemologies may lead to a more informed and inspired cadre of pre-service teachers, and by extension, citizens.

This paper draws on actor-network theory and on the sociology of cultural consumption to examine the phenomenon of corporate Massive Open Online Courses. Through an analysis of texts available in the public domain, the paper argues that over a short period (between 2012 and 2013) digitisation technology became associated with the emergence of a hybrid "actor": the digital video-recorder teacher. A parallel is drawn between the "interactive affordances" of digital instruction and the playback and cataloguing options that have contributed to shifts in television viewing habits. The digital video-recorder teacher is described as an artefact in the service of a postmodern project of self-improvement through cultural consumption, which recruits digitisation to meet a growing demand for "upgrades to the self". In the conclusion, the paper explores how the study of digital education could benefit from an interface between sociomaterial studies and the sociology of culture.

Despite proliferating attention within the social sciences toward the sources and consequences of climate change and environmental crises, educational sociologists have been slow to confront ecological questions. This omission may seem surprising given the prominence of global perspectives within the field. However, we argue, such a focus is emblematic of the discipline's sociocentrism and anthropocentrism. Against such a reified sense of the field's conceptual and analytic purview, this paper reads ecology into educational sociology, with the aim of theorizing a 'geo-logic' basis for future scholarship. If critical sociology of education is to maintain its relevance in the Anthropocene, the discipline must attend to ecological problematics. Building on three recent contributions to socio-ecological thought, we explain the necessity of an ecological attunement in critical sociology of education. To serve this call, we offer a theoretical revision of key disciplinary commitments, clearing new pathways for educational sociologists to do this crucial work.

This paper seeks to further develop and refine a theory of the ways in which artefacts created by humans direct and deflect the attention of groups and individuals as they act in specific institutional settings. It draws on the writings of Basil Bernstein and Lev Vygotsky. These are two bodies of theory that have strengths which, to some extent, address the weaknesses of the other. It is argued that taken together they will provide a strong base for further extension and refinement in order to provide a coherent account which encapsulates the espoused but not yet fully realised ambitions of both theoretical traditions. A sociological focus on the rules which shape the social formation of discursive practice will be brought to bear on those aspects of psychology which argue that cultural artefacts, such as pedagogic discourse, both explicitly and implicitly mediate human thought and action.

The author reflects on continuities and changes in the subdiscipline, using Mary Douglas and Basil Bernstein. In 2000 the millennial issue of "Sociology," the generic journal of the British Sociological Association, included a paper about the sociology of education called 'The anomalous beasts: Hooligans and the sociology of education'. It focused on hooligans as anomalous beasts in the sociology of education, and the sub-discipline as an anomalous beast within the discipline of sociology itself. It concluded with, very poor, predictions about the likely state of sociology of education and UK sociology in 2025. The fortieth anniversary of "BJSE" is a good time to revisit that millennial evaluation in order to offer a new sociologically informed re-evaluation of the field in 2020, set an agenda to highlight some of the current weaknesses in the sub-discipline and update the analysis of the uneasy relationship with the wider discipline of Sociology itself.

Valuable developments in the Sociology of Education over the last 40 years have involved the widening and deepening of analytical perspectives to include not only class-based research in education but also the complex interactions of class, race and gender in all educational, social, economic and political contexts. From a sociology of knowledge perspective the field has become historically more mature and multi-­dimensional in its research and analysis of socio-educational contexts internationally. This paper argues that despite these progressive developments, one dimension is still largely ignored i.e. that of the religions of the world and of the social and cultural implications of these faiths for education today. Sociological analysis which elides a religious dimension not only presents an over-simplified view of social relations in the modern West but also fails to make an authentic engagement with education.

The paper makes a connection between transmission modes and constructivism in sociology and education, respectively. There are parallels between Archer's criticism of upward and downward conflation in social theory, and approaches to learning in education. In her 2012 book, Archer seeks to reconceptualise socialisation as relational reflexivity. This paper seeks to connect this idea to thinking about learning in relational terms and links the analysis to Young's account of "bringing knowledge back in". The paper uses an example from field work on participation in learning to provide concrete examples that illuminate the points being made. It argues that learning theory needs to move away from transmission and the constructivists' ideas about education and to consider the relational aspects of learning.

Talcott Parsons did not leave us with a global and consistent sociology of education. Instead, different aspects can be found in Parsons's oeuvre in different theoretical contexts. This paper summarises these different parts of Parsons's sociology of education – his writings on the concepts of education and socialisation, the university, the school, the professions, and modernisation – and discusses central criticisms and perspectives for further theoretical development. The paper goes on to argue that the value of cognitive rationality serves as a common basis of Parsons's sociology of education and that Parsons's sociology of education should be characterised as normative functionalist. Since the current sociology of education does not deal very intensely with Parsons's theoretical approach, the paper also considers references to other authors and the relevance for current questions and research in the sociology of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a long-standing concern within the sociology of education for ameliorating educational inequality, the challenge of improving educational opportunities for disadvantaged students remains deeply entrenched. While 'macro' issues such as segregation and systemic inequalities in school funding and access to qualified teachers must be addressed as matters of social and educational justice, Basil Bernstein's novel focus on "relations within" education as the site of pedagogic discourse offers teachers and those working inside school systems a particularly powerful vision for promoting more equitable outcomes for students. This paper examines this assertion through a case study of the "mixed" pedagogical practice of a successful teacher in a fifth-grade urban classroom in the United States.

This article draws on the sociology of Basil Bernstein to show how his detailed theories of "recontextualisation" and the "pedagogic device" provide useful analytic levers to examine the politics of educational change. We focus on recent policy developments that have significantly impacted Australian school education: the Program for International Student Assessment; the National Assessment Programme for Numeracy and Literacy; and the government's public dissemination of school achievement data through the MySchool website. The analysis illustrates the ways in which the logics of economic rationalism not only have become ubiquitous in Australian education policy, but have come to recontextualise--or reshape--discourses of social and educational equity through new norms of competition, standardisation and commensurability. In doing so, the paper highlights the value of a Bernsteinian approach to understanding the vernacular character of neoliberalism in contemporary educational policy.

In 2014, Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-first Century" rocked the economic and political world, with its argument that inequality is destined to increase; in the field of education, however, this book has been almost entirely ignored. I argue that Piketty's treatise is relevant to educational theories for three reasons: his rejection of meritocracy contributes to theories of social mobility; his critique of human capital theory provides fodder for debates about educational purpose; and his interdisciplinary analysis supports the political economy tradition in education. However, I also argue that it is necessary to move beyond the economic determinism in Piketty's arguments, to explore the transformative potential of education as a consciousness-raising process, the agency of communities, the production process, and alternative solutions to inequality. I argue that education scholars should use the renewed interest in inequality generated by Piketty's book to shift the dominant discourses about education, schools, and social justice.

The launch in Australia of a government website that compares all schools on the basis of student performance in standardized tests illustrates the extent to which neoliberal policies have been entrenched. This paper examines the problematic nature of choosing schools within the powerful political context of neoliberalism. It illustrates how key elements of the neoliberal worldview are normalized in the day-to-day practices of schooling and how certain norms and values that characterize neoliberalism are shaped and reinforced in the education system and also in personal, family and social imaginaries. The task for educational sociology, therefore, is to problematize and 're-imagine' the prevailing neoliberal imaginary.

This paper examines the role that social characteristics play in determining the academic success of students who begin university with roughly similar entry grades. The data used were drawn from the administrative records of over 38,000 UK-domiciled undergraduate students from one British university between 1998 and 2009. Results show that the characteristics of entrants have varied only slightly over this period and intake is still largely in favour of ‘traditional’ entrants: namely those from professional occupational backgrounds, the privately educated and those of traditional age. The relationship between background characteristics and eventual academic success also reflects patterns seen at earlier education stages. However, when prior attainment was taken into account, the link between degree outcome and many social characteristics does diminish – notably for students who were privately educated and who came from professional occupational groups. This suggests that once students have overcome barriers to admission, it is entry grades rather than social characteristics that may most strongly influence eventual academic success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite proliferating attention within the social sciences toward the sources and consequences of climate change and environmental crises, educational sociologists have been slow to confront ecological questions. This omission may seem surprising given the prominence of global perspectives within the field. However, we argue, such a focus is emblematic of the discipline's sociocentrism and anthropocentrism. Against such a reified sense of the field's conceptual and analytic purview, this paper reads ecology into educational sociology, with the aim of theorizing a 'geo-logic' basis for future scholarship. If critical sociology of education is to maintain its relevance in the Anthropocene, the discipline must attend to ecological problematics. Building on three recent contributions to socio-ecological thought, we explain the necessity of an ecological attunement in critical sociology of education. To serve this call, we offer a theoretical revision of key disciplinary commitments, clearing new pathways for educational sociologists to do this crucial work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a critical exposition and analysis of the work of an acclaimed Italian educator, Lorenzo Milani, and ideas that emerged from his experiences in two Tuscan localities. His work is well known in Italy and many parts of southern Europe. Despite the translations of his works into English and Spanish, in the early 1970s, and their use in sociology of education classes in the United Kingdom, he seems to have had a very limited impact on the Anglo-North American-dominated critical education field. The paper revisits his ideas, in this 90th anniversary year, indicating their contemporary relevance and the signposts they provide for a critically and sociologically engaged pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper makes a connection between transmission modes and constructivism in sociology and education, respectively. There are parallels between Archer’s criticism of upward and downward conflation in social theory, and approaches to learning in education. In her 2012 book, Archer seeks to reconceptualise socialisation as relational reflexivity. This paper seeks to connect this idea to thinking about learning in relational terms and links the analysis to Young’s account of ‘bringing knowledge back in’. The paper uses an example from field work on participation in learning to provide concrete examples that illuminate the points being made. It argues that learning theory needs to move away from transmission and the constructivists’ ideas about education and to consider the relational aspects of learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses how three other articles have employed E.P. Thompson's concept of the moral economy to analyse movements of resistance to higher education (HE) marketisation processes. Two of the studies relate to the English HE sector while one is a study of the Israeli system. The articles were selected because they are indicative of one of the key challenges that scholars working within the sociology of higher education may encounter when applying Thompson's ideas: rendering a faithful sense of the temporality which is foundational to Thompson's concept, and which makes it such a powerful tool of critique regarding dominant hegemonic processes such as higher education marketisation. I conclude the article with a discussion of the challenges that arise in transferring a concept that originated in history to the sociology of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many school choice studies focus on individual parents' preferences, we simultaneously address the structural context within which families make decisions and the strategies they develop in response. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 24 Black middle-class parents of young children, we demonstrate that they sought well-funded, academically rigorous schools populated by racially diverse middle-class students. Using administrative data, we then show that such schools are exceptionally rare, reflecting the structural realities of US society. To manage the ensuing dilemma, the parents implemented one of two school-selection strategies: 'assiduous rationality', which entailed collecting information to make a maximally informed decision, and 'trusting a close tie', which entailed identifying a network member who had been successful, and following their lead. Regardless of their strategy, the parents exhibited significant institutional mistrust and anxiety. Our results point to the constraint exercised by social structures, which can thwart parental goal realization regardless of class resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on the case of academic work produced by Colombian scholars, to address the debate on the persistent failure of policy efforts to improve school effectiveness. Realist meta-theory plays a significant role in this research, because it provides a general framework to identify ontological problems and inconsistencies in empirical and theoretical positions informing policy debates in the country. The analysis focuses on the contributions and weaknesses of empiricism, structuralism and post-structuralism in the work of Colombian scholars, and concludes by arguing for the need to deploy research methodologies that study stratified emergent social processes behind observable educational outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Bourdieu’s early work on education, he declares that ‘All pedagogic action (PA) is objectively symbolic violence insofar as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power’. This article rethinks Bourdieu’s proposition. It questions whether all PA is symbolic violence and the very notion of a cultural arbitrary upon which this view is based. For Bourdieu, culture is framed narrowly in terms of class, and pedagogy a mechanism by which it is reproduced. As such, it functions as a form of violence having much in common with Foucault’s notion of discipline. Unlike Foucault, however, who also acknowledges the enabling potential of power as a technology of the self, Bourdieu has no such equivalent. His concept of PA leaves little room for capacitation wherein, rather than a cultural arbitrary, certain skills can be seen to have an inherent use value equipping individuals with capacities that are a means for social transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Building from the classic Wisconsin model of status attainment, this study examines whether a specific style of parenting, concerted cultivation, and a close friend’s school-related attitudes and behaviors mediate the relationship between a family’s socioeconomic status and their child’s academic achievement in the United States. Using a recursive path model on nationally representative panel data of high school students (N= 10,350), the results confirm a direct association between socioeconomic status and concerted cultivation. In addition, concerted cultivation and close friends are shown to mediate the relationship between a family’s socioeconomic status and their child’s academic achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on the socially-situated nature of learning shows how practices and identities are affected by participation in communities, but very little is known about how mature-age students experience the relational dynamics of university. Based on data from a qualitative study of first-year students, we consider written accounts by older learners to examine how they negotiate the culture of higher education. We found that mature-age students encounter a university culture dominated by younger students, who draw separating boundaries between the social and the academic and stigmatise older students because of their academic practices. Drawing on Lave and Wenger’s learning theory, we examine the way mature-age students negotiate the process of becoming legitimate members of the learning community, and the resistance they face in doing so. Knowing how mature-age students learn, and how to support them, depends on examining their negotiation of university culture, as well as their differing aspirations and needs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws attention to the relative lack of theoretically and methodologically elaborated approaches to understand and explain the complex relations between transnationalization of higher education and globalization seen especially from the point of view of global capitalism. The main aim of this article is to contribute to the construction of a theory of transnational academic capitalism (TAC). A theory of TAC argues that those networks, practices and activities that are blurring the boundaries between higher education, markets and states are increasingly becoming transnational without supposing that this transformation implies that local and national levels are insignificant in studying TAC. In this respect, focus is especially on methodological starting points of a theory of TAC. It is argued that a theory of TAC should be based on sociological relationalism and qualified methodological transnationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]