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This paper maps the global dimension of higher education and associated research, including the differentiation of national systems and institutions, while reflecting critically on theoretical tools for working this terrain. Arguably the most sustained theorisation of higher education is by Bourdieu: the paper explores the relevance and limits of Bourdieu's notions of field of power, agency, positioned and position-taking; drawing on Gramsci's notion of hegemony in explaining the dominant role played by universities from the United States. Noting there is greater ontological openness in global than national educational settings, and that Bourdieu's reading of structure/agency becomes trapped on the structure side, the paper discusses Sen on self-determining identity and Appadurai on global imagining, flows and 'scapes'. The dynamics of Bourdieu's competitive field of higher education continue to play out globally, but located within a larger and more disjunctive relational setting, and a setting that is less closed, than he suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the organization and representation of time in certain kinds of undergraduate programs, here represented by a sociology program in a US university. Written requirements for the major are analyzed as constituting a 'chart' that defines academic time in terms of units of before-after relationships. The paper shows how students 'reuse' these temporal units when charting paths through the university and reckoning their academic work to specific futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The market alternative in education is gaining ground in policy-making circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Parental choice and school competition are seen as ways of achieving reform and raising standards while at the same time reducing State intervention into education planning. This paper interrogates the arguments made for markets and against public monopoly schooling,, and it is argued that on both counts of advocates are partial and flawed. The failure to address the bases and effects of inequalities of the market are given particular attention. It is argued that markets in education provide the possibility for the pursuit of class advantage and generate a differentiated and stratified system of schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debate on teacher quality and quality in teaching and teacher education has been as vigorous in Australia as it has been in the UK and the USA In Australia, however, reform in teacher education has been subsumed within a national metapolicy of corporate federalism which is an amalgam of beliefs or discourses including neo-corporatism, economic rationalism, corporate managerialism and human capital The paper analyses the most recent document on reform of teacher education in Australia (the Ebbeck Report) and shows how its policy formulation is influenced by the discourse of corporate federalism It also shows how micro-economic reform in this sector is related to reforms in other sectors of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I begin by taking a brief glimpse at the current state of global capitalism. I then look at attempts in Britain and the US to argue the case, within educational theory, that postmodernism and poststructuralism can be forces for social change and social justice. Concentrating on some of the work of Elizabeth Atkinson, Patti Lather and Judith Baxter, I argue that such claims are illusory. I make the case that Marxism remains the only viable option in the pursuit of social change and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretically informed by the sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu, this analysis represents an initial attempt to examine what it would mean to analyse educational policy as a social field. By employing such a frame, two main claims are addressed: (1) that the sociological perspective of Bourdieu offers valuable potential for understanding both educational policy, per se, and what it means to analyse educational policy; and (2) that there is good reason to question claims about shifts in power relations in US educational policy. Where other contemporary analyses of educational policy draw on some of Bourdieu's conceptual framework, in this paper I hope to more systematically elaborate methodological concerns raised when applying a Bourdieuian framework to educational policy. Further, I argue the perspective developed here suggests that in the 1980s US educational policy reforms reveal the historical maturation of a social field which has developed its own autonomy and its own rewards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservative critiques of education and proposals for reform show striking similarities in Canada, Britain and the US. All seem to reflect what Haberrnas referred to as "the affirmative stance towards social modernity and the denigration of cultural modernity". The paper uses this distinction to describe and analyse New Right criticisms of educational progressivism and conservative efforts to promote a new sympathy for business values, market discipline and market relations in schools and colleges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the development of mental testing, it discusses the tests themselves, the men who developed them, and the social and historical context in which they worked. Attention is drawn to the interpersonal connections among the early testers and the social background which they shared. It is argued that the tests were produced in an intellectual and social climate heavily influenced by eugenicist theory. Acceptance of the vocabulary of psychometry into educational debate institutionalised this theory as scientific 'fact'. Finally, some reference is made to research which first cast doubts on such 'facts'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-stakes, standardized testing has become the central tool for educational reform and regulation in many industrialized nations in the world, and it has been implemented with particular intensity in the United States and the United Kingdom. Drawing on research on high-stakes testing and its effect on classroom practice and pedagogic discourse in the United States, the present paper applies Bernstein's concept of the pedagogic device to explain how high-stakes tests operate as a relay in the reproduction of dominant social relations in education. This analysis finds that high-stakes tests, through the structuring of knowledge, actively select and regulate student identities, and thus contribute to the selection and regulation of students' educational success.

This article contrasts the use of ethnographic research procedures in the study of schools in Great Britain and the U.S. It also reflects on differences between the anthropology and the sociology of education. In the course of this exploration the authors also hope to draw together much of the literature from the respective countries and disciplinary fields. There is an obvious and striking difference between British and U.S. school ethnography. Whereas the U.S. research on schools and classrooms has been conducted primarily by applied anthropologists, that in Great Britain has been done overwhelmingly by researchers who see themselves as sociologists. It is noticeable that several researchers working as sociologists were trained as anthropologists or began work in anthropology departments. Where British research has looked to North America it has been to U.S. sociology in genera--especially symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology. The article also attempts to establish that the Atlantic really does divide school ethnographers into differing traditions. It establishes the truth of the authors' claim that school and classroom ethnography in the U.S. and Canada is predominantly anthropological in orientation, while that in Great Britain is more sociological.

By drawing on interviews with administrators, faculty and staff at one school in the northeastern United States, this qualitative work considers the ways in which school leaders negotiate, resist or draw upon discourses associated with health, weight, nutrition and fitness to understand and experience their own bodies and interpret their roles and responsibilities at the school. Analysis of the narratives suggest that school leaders saw themselves as public examples from which students might resist and/or mimic (ill-)health. Further, school leaders believed that it was only through their active engagement in and display of health that they were able to effectively evangelize their commitment to the social project of self. Thus, while schools could provide an important venue for young people to experience diverse notions of health and well-being, without a school leader's knowledge of or commit to exploring these alternatives, this outcome is unlikely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black boys in the United Kingdom and the USA have almost become synonymous with the concept of 'underachievement'. However, many Black boys are achieving against the odds. Whilst the possession of a high degree of dominant cultural capital is widely recognised as a key contributory factor to academic achievement, the contributory role of other forms of non-dominant capital is often overlooked. This qualitative study of educationally successful Black males in the United Kingdom and the USA, involving 40 Black male students from both new and ancient universities, set out to establish whether religion was a contributory factor to the educational success of Black male students. The study found that most of these students were religious and that their church community engineered cultural and social capital and their belief in God engineered religious capital, all of which made significant contributions to these Black male students' academic achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although high-stakes tests play an increasing role in students' schooling experiences, scholars have not examined these tests as sites for socialisation. Drawing on qualitative data collected at an American urban primary school, this study explores what educators teach students about motivation and effort through high-stakes testing, how students interpret and internalise these messages, and how student hierarchies develop as a result. I found that teachers located boys' failure in their poor behavior and attitudes, while arguing that girls simply needed more self-esteem to pass the test. Most boys accepted their teachers' diagnosis of the problem. However, the boys who felt that they were already 'doing their best' and 'working hard' began to doubt that educational success is a function of merit and effort. I conclude that students learn about much more than the three Rs through their experiences with high-stakes testing, and argue that future research should attend to the social dimensions of these experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we consider how broad shifts in social relations over the past 30 years have given rise to new social control regimes in US public schools. We argue that the contemporary mechanisms of control engendered by mass incarceration and post‐industrialization have re‐shaped school discipline. To illustrate contemporary discipline in the ‘New American School,’ we discuss the emergence of police officers and technological surveillance in schools. These two strategies of school social control facilitate the link between courts and schools, and expose students to both the salience of crime control in everyday life and to the demands of workers in a post‐industrial world. By incorporating police officers and technological surveillance into the school safety regime, schools shape the experiences of students in ways that reflect modern relationships of dependency, inequality, and instability vis‐à‐vis the contemporary power dynamics of the post‐industrialist labor market and the neoliberal state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from two large-scale ethnographic investigations in which we interview poor and working-class white girls and women living in post-industrial cities in the Northeastern US, we argue that violence of all sorts is deeply embedded inside poor and working-class white communities, domestic violence in particular. The date reveal that children experience, witness and learn the rhythms by which their mothers, siblings and, perhaps, they are beaten. While in the US we have produced an enormous legal infrastructure of mandatory reporting, in the event of suspicion of child abuse, we have--as educators--defaulted to the law and not engaged a fully developed educational project through which to respond to the problem. Although deeply contested, a public space that is accessible to poor and working-class youth and where abuse in the home may be discussed and analyzed may be schools, yet many educators do not deal with this issue at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of education in the US is extremely varied in its theoretical and methodological tendencies, its visions what research is for, and its political sensibilities. This article describes a number of the most interesting recent developments within critically-oriented sociology of education in the US It pays particular attention to work on the politics of meaning. It discusses representative examples within the sociology of curriculum It then takes up 'critical' and 'postmodern/poststructural' work on critical discourse analysis, identity politics, political economy and the labor process, and racial formation Finally, it concludes with a discussion of the continuing tensions between the critical and postmodern/poststructural communities methodologically, conceptually, and politically [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies the correspondence thesis devised by Bowles and Gintis (1976) to the 1988 Education Reform Act. Theoretical shortcomings of the thesis are identified, and a reformulated version is suggested which incorporates resistances into the analysis of the education system. More limited claims for the thesis are posited. The Education Reform Act is then explored with reference to the revised correspondence principle. Building on the work of previous theorists, it is argued that we may be seeing shifts to post-Fordist education, although contradictions and tensions in this movement are identified. It is suggested that the quasi-market in education is to some extent a change in the legitimating processes of reproduction, rather than a change in what is being reproduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many high school drop-outs share a history of academic failure and truancy behaviour, their underlying reasons for leaving school are far more complex, and involve a web of both personal and school-related problems. Interviews with drop-outs from a working class high school in the USA revealed how the school's response, or lack of response, to their problems compounds their difficulties and creates a tension over the source of blame for their failure. On the one hand, these adolescents criticised the school for its failings, but on the other hand, they attributed much of their failure to themselves. In resolving this issue of blame, these suburban white drop-outs, in contrast to innercity minority youth, indicated that, ultimately, they themselves must be at fault for failing to conform to the expectations and demands of school. An explanation for this difference is offered by contrasting their lack of collective identity with the racial consciousness of African American drop-outs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'at-risk' child has become a topic of increasing concern to American educators. It has been estimated that fully one-third of all school-age children are currently at risk for academic failure, and a recent report on pre-school-age children suggests that all are at risk to some degree. This article explores contemporary, constructions and constructions over time in an effort to deconstruct the notion of the 'at-risk' child and to examine how meaning is produced and to what end. The theoretical and historical material provide a framework in which data from a statewide survey of school administrators, regarding their preferences for pre-kindergarten programs, are interpreted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to enlarge on knowledge about tenured academic women derived from accounts of their experiences sought through a series of interviews. Eight women in one school in a large Southern state university in the United States were studied. The study uses the concept of gender scripts drawing out the issues of inequality, discrimination and the politics of gender as they pertain to a group of tenured academic women. Findings include the valuing of so-called male attributes in academe, the problem of the women's distrust of other academic women and the existence of subtle and not so subtle boundaries between men and women academics. The women's successful strategies for dealing with the problems encountered in a male-dominated university are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within recent years scholars in both sociology of education and curriculum studies have explored what it is about the school that reproduces class, race and gender relations that maintain an unequal social structure While it has long been recognized that school outcomes differ along these lines, the role that the school plays in creating differential outcomes and forms of consciousness that sustain fundamental inequalities and antagonisms has been largely ignored. This is as much true for scholars like Bowles and Gintis as it is for earlier functionalists. This article begins to fill this void by focusing on the relationship between the `hidden curriculum' and student culture Data presented here were gathered as part of a larger study on the `lived culture' of lower class black students in a community college (which I call Urban College) located in a large northeastern city in the United States I argue that, rather than `determine' student culture in any simple sense, the hidden curriculum and student culture emerge in relation to one another Each creates aspects of the other and neither can be discussed or analyzed separately The way in which elements of the hidden curriculum combine in a concrete culture to produce aspects of student consciousness is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines political support for brain dysfunction which is culminating in the Children With Learning Disabilities Act of 1969 in the U.S. The act among other things, added learning disability to the list of educational abnormalities recognized by the federal government and authorize federal expenditures for research and pilot school programmes. There were two broad interpretations of the basic brain dysfunction model. The first of these was learning disability, which de-emphasized neuropathology and provided a relatively optimistic prognosis. Special educators and some researches urging this orientation used it to press for a less physiological and more educational approach to educational abnormality, intended to give them more independent control over the operation of special education categories and programmes and through this strengthen the power of educators to define normality and abnormality, as well as increase the demand for learning disability specialists. The other interpretation of the model, sociogenic brain damage, pointed to social and especially family factors as significant causes and its attention to neurostructural damage and non-development carried a distinctly pessimistic prognosis.

It is argued that underwriting much contemporary educational research is a parochial fascination with education, which cannot handle educational difference, indifference, or dissent except as in some sense pathological and aberrant. Detectable in the analogies, assumptions and arguments of the educational researcher, it is argued that this fascination with education reaches its acme in the so-called 'radical' definition of educational equality, where 'statistical parity' is taken, or rather mistaken, for 'educational equality'. The intractable problems raised by such a definition in assessing educational equality in a pluralistic society are examined by reference to the work of its foremost advocate-J S Coleman [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how and by how much the existence and performance of the Journal of Educational Sociology contributed to the different dimensions of the institutionalization of its branch of knowledge. According to E. George Payne, the periodical's founder, the Journal was originated for the purpose of representing the field of educational sociology in the U.S. By representing this field of study, the Journal also made an important contribution to the more comprehensive process of institutionalization. The possession of a journal is not only in itself a component of this process, but it furthers what appear to be its three other dimensions. First, the acceptance of the subject by higher education, in particular the universities, with the concomitant production of appointments, curricula, examinations, research facilities, and others, in this context it has been perceptively pointed out that university organizational practices and mechanisms may equally well hold up or speed up the process. Next, the rise of an attached group of professional workers, generally accepted as such, and enjoying the esteem and autonomy that the term implies. Lastly, the acceptance of the field as a legitimate area by public bodies, especially ones able to fund teaching and research activities, and thus more particularly, governmental agencies.