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This paper sets out to demonstrate that Bourdieu's critics who claim that his theory is structurally 'frozen', with no room for human agency misperceive the basis of the theory The relationships between his theory and education are summarised and the concept of habitus explicated Then drawing on Outline of a Theory of Practice, the determinants of practice are shown to incorporate change and human agency This is then related to an examination of education as cultural practice, and some comments made in that light on a recent paper by Willis, and `Origins and Destinations'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a previous British Journal of Sociology of Education article (Nixon & Wellington, 2005) we examined current trends in book publishing and how these have influenced and will influence the construction of the field of educational studies. (The latter study was a follow-up to an earlier study reported in Nixon [1999].) The present article focuses on journals and their editors and, to a lesser extent, the role that the peer review process plays in shaping the field of educational studies. We use (critically rather than deferentially) notions drawn from the work of Bourdieu (1996)—the ‘field of power’, defining boundaries, systems of dispositions, right of entry and the ‘illusio’—to consider and conceptualise data from interviews with 12 journal editors. Our own position in writing this article is as academic practitioners involved in reading, peer-reviewing and editing academic journals within the field of educational studies. The plea is to recognise that the pen is a mighty sword. We are of course embedded in practices and constrained by them. But these practices owe their dominance in part to the power of a normative language to hold them in place, and it is always open to us to employ the resources of our language to undermine as well as to underpin the practices. We may be freer than we sometimes suppose. (Skinner, 2002, p. 7) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis in this paper has its origins in a critical account of the sociology of education (Bernstein, 1975) where the various approaches to the study of sociology were taken as the distinguishing feature of the discourse. This matter was further developed (Bernstein, 1996), with the distinction between vertical and horizontal discourses and their various modalities introduced in the context of differentiating this mode of analysis from more 'Bourdieuan' perspectives. This present paper is concerned with filling out and extending the sketches adumbrated in earlier work in a more accessible form. The model proposed generates a language which relates the internal structure of specialised knowledges, the positional nature of their fields or arenas of practice, identity constructions and their change, and the forms of acquisition for successful performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates certain aspects of the debate about the causes of unequal educational performance By analyzing two illustrative explanations of performance. It shows that the debate appears to be shaped by a fundamental theme in modern Western culture, the nature-culture opposition. This suggests that the knowledge that we have concerning educational performance is influenced not only by the social and political interests and positions of educators and researchers, but also by more basic cultural concerns, and if we want to understand both educational performance and the debate surrounding it, we need to be aware of this broad influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can an explanation of the origins of social disparities in educational achievement be assisted by a critical examination of Bernstein’s sociology? This central question is approached by a consideration of the status of Bernstein’s socio‐linguistic thesis. The focus is on the nature of the explanations provided. The paper asks: What is the explanatory force of Bernstein’s structuralism? What is the relationship between Bernstein’s sociological explanations and Vygotskian psychological explanations? What are the effects for pedagogy of cognitive socialization mediated by language‐use consistent with Bernstein’s theory? The answers to these questions may pose a challenge for sociologists of education engaged with Bernstein’s sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the way social partnerships tend to be represented as either horizontal localised networks or neo-liberal policy instruments. Building on two empirical studies of partnerships, we argue that partnerships cannot be understood in either/or ways but are negotiated at the interface between central agencies and local networks. They are mediated by networks operating through the partnership and through government and community, and by the different organisational logics of agencies. These complexities challenge our ways of analysing and representing partnerships, and justify further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the educational experiences of a group of African Caribbean and mixed ‘race’ young people from the perspectives of their parents. The discussion is set within a national context where children of African Caribbean origin are one of the lowest achieving minority ethnic groups in the UK and are disproportionately one of the highest ethnic groups of children excluded from school. The parents recount a pattern of cumulative negative experiences which for many of the children results in academic underachievement and becoming demotivated to learn, by a system that they feel has rejected them, or imposed exclusion. The story is hardly new but it provides important further evidence that schools need to tackle head-on factors such as low teacher expectations and negative stereotyping of young black people and their contribution to black underachievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response to Harker & May 1987 which rejects as inaccurate and misleading their 'exposition' of the theory, the analysis of the place of rules in the theory, the analysis of what is taken to be its structuralist base, and shows how forms of the practical sense may be realised in, and described by, the theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationships between sociology, democracy and education. Its main argument is that post-modernist theory (in spite of its own inherent inconsistencies) can be interpreted as a constructive challenge to the hierarchical presuppositions of academic sociology. It can thus help to provide a theoretical framework for formulating a new set of institutional arrangements for social inquiry, which would reconstitute sociology as a democratic educational practice. In order for this to occur, sociology must recognise that the problematic nature of the social relationships of authoritative interpretation constitute a key theoretical problem: a 'democratic' sociology must re-focus its efforts on formulating methods for critique which would help to enfranchise practitioners in the rigorous analysts of their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents several articles offering sociologists' views on cuts in British higher education as of 1984. John Brennan contributes a nation-wide view of the cuts in the public sector, outlines institutional policies and prejudices and suggests strategies for survival. His paper also shows that the distinctive ecology of public sector higher education poses both threats and opportunities for sociology. Meanwhile, Alan Waton provides a macro-view of the UGC action. Rosemary Deem writers of her experience as a County Councilor involved in working for the retention of courses in a public sector college and provides the only contribution with a happy ending. Also Ivan Reid discussed the problems and potentials of strategies for survival. According to Brennan, there never was a golden age for the polytechnics. He further said that they have experienced cuts and financial stringency over a long period of time. He also said that the effects have been gradual and have become almost taken for granted. Ivan Reid stated that it is difficult to establish whether sociology and sociology of education face threats over and above that posed to higher education in general. The intimate relationship of sociology of education with teacher education has meant that it has shared the fate of closures and cut-backs with the other disciplines of education and faced many of these well before the present situation.

Marxist sociology of education has been criticized in recent papers by Hickox and Hargreaves. It is argued that these writers largely misunderstand and misrepresent the work they criticize Hickox attributes a position to Marxist sociologists of education which few, if any, now hold Hargreaves makes a more powerful case, but is insufficiently familiar with Marxist scholarship to grasp the nature of the Marxist project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents opinion on information technology and the sociology of education. My own interest in what might be called a sociology or politics of technology relates to earlier attempts to develop a sociological analysis of school science. We started the Technology and Education Project, recognizing on the one hand the need to explore the problems and possibilities of the so-called new technologies and also to remain aware that the issues were not new or specific to particular technologies, but part of those more general processes of specialization, the hierarchies and forms of power relation associated with industrialization. Many teachers are aware of the shortages of available software, of the constraints imposed by local authority funding policies, and by the inappropriateness of the available programming languages for educational purposes. All these are important issues for both teachers and sociological research, but a concentration of them would in my view pre-empt discussion about more basic issues that have yet to be considered at least within education. Again it is important to stress that this is not an argument against the possible use of expert systems in education, which might broaden pupils' access to opportunities to realize their own purposes. It is rather to cause us to be much more explicit about those purposes and the extent to which particular divisions of labor and particular dependencies may become enshrined and mystified in software even more than in people.

The existence of social differences in educational achievement as a social fact presents the sociology of education with a challenge to which it has responded with indifferent success. It is argued that contemporary explanations that dismiss the existence and relevance of differences in cognitive performance arising as a consequence of class variation in socialisation are likely to misrepresent the real causes of inequality/difference. The substantive discussion, organised around six questions dealing with the explanatory capacity of this concept, suggests that a satisfactory theory of inequality of educational opportunity will need to concern itself with the effects of socialisation on cognition. Some implications for educational practice and policy-making are briefly noted in conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the 'sociology of pedagogy', the present article addresses a continuing challenge for teachers and policy-makers. The challenge is how to encourage disengaged learners to take up offers of educational success. The article brings important theoretical frames from the sociology of pedagogy into current research debates about 'productive pedagogies'. Focusing on the social relations of pedagogy, the article promotes a theoretical and empirical imperative to look keenly to the insights provided by students to construct clearer solutions to the challenge of providing engaging pedagogies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses studies which represent the different sociological approaches to education in developing countries. The major contours of the sociology of education landscape are determined and can only be understood sensibly in terms of the two opposed theoretical paradigms of modernisation and dependency. Modernisation theory has its theoretical basis in the structural-functionalism which dominated sociology. Development as modernisation is taken to be an essentially evolutionary process relying primarily upon changes in the central value system of any particular society. Becoming modern involves the first massive and fundamental resocialisation of the population and secondly, the effective and efficient selection and allocation of appropriately talented and trained manpower. The education system is taken to be of singular importance in both functions. Two further facts combined to provide the policy and epistemological bases for modernisation theories of development. First, it is argued that the economic failure of ex-colonial nations is significantly related to the absence of mass education at primary levels. Secondly, it is assumed that education in western societies is a major source of economic growth which cannot be attributed to the rate of increase in capital formation.