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This paper is a response to that of Moore and Muller 'The Discourse of Voice and the Problem of Knowledge and Identity in the Sociology of Education', which appeared in Volume 20 of this journal. It starts by summarising and endorsing their criticisms of 'voice discourses' but argues that their case is weakened by their failure to distinguish clearly between the 'debunking of knowledge' associated with the postmodernist theories that underpin 'voice discourses' and the general propositions of a social theory of knowledge. The idea that knowledge has a social as well as an epistemological basis is now widely accepted in philosophy as well as sociology. The paper draws on a paper by Stephen Toulmin and makes a distinction between anthropological and sociological approaches to the idea of knowledge having a social basis. It goes on to use some ideas from the author's recent work on the issue of knowledge specialisation to suggest the kind of contribution that a sociological approach to knowledge can make to current curriculum issues as well as to educational policy more broadly. [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]

This paper argues that the question of knowledge needs to be reconceptualised if sociology is to make its potential contribution to current debates about the curriculum. It begins with a review of the dominant assumptions underlying contemporary curriculum policy: neo-conservative traditionalism and technical-instrumentalism. It then examines the relativist position on knowledge that follows from the postmodernist critiques that have recently come to dominate social theory, particularly in the sociology of education. The paper argues that, in different ways, each of these approaches avoids the question of knowledge and hence leaves unresolved epistemological and educational dilemmas. In the final section, the paper draws on recent research in the sociology of science to develop what is referred to as a social realist approach to knowledge and explores its implications both for the curriculum and the claims that we are entering a 'knowledge society'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is intended to place the other papers in this issue of the journal in a broader theoretical and political context. It considers some of the ways in which sociologists of education have approached the analysis of the curriculum and discusses the extent to which their work can be seen as a contribution to political struggles in and around the curriculum. It pays particular attention to the ways in which recent American and Australian work in this field has developed and to some of the criticisms that have been made of the political orientation of such work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having first reviewed the lack of a sociology of the academic curriculum, this paper looks back at a period when radical critiques of conventional knowledge were being developed in the context of 'revolutionary' politics, both outside and inside the academy. Interdisciplinarity was central to some attacks on the established curriculum, and the praxis of interdisciplinary work marked the emergence of 'new' subjects such as Cultural Studies and Women's Studies. Interviews with women academics, responsible for introducing interdisciplinary women's studies degrees in the UK and North America, show how the disciplinary boundaries were re-drawn rather than demolished. This paper argues that the power of the established disciplines to incorporate new knowledge, without ceding territory to those who were intent on a wholesale reform of the system, is an illustration of how academic knowledge and academic institutions maintain their essential conservatism, preserving the status quo by limited concessions to innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a response to Professor Swanwick's further critique of our sociological perspective on music education. We argue that criticisms made in relation to our positions on referentialism, the ability of people to appreciate music cross-culturally, and the various analytic categories of Meyer, Chester and Keil are all grounded in a desire to isolate the essence of `music' from social and cultural processes. We further argue that the difficulties perceived with our positions do not follow from a belief in the culture-specific significance of different musics per se, but rather from overly rigid and sometimes mistaken interpretation of our perspective. Finally, we point to the danger of assuming a cross-cultural category, `music', when many cultures have no equivalent word and use what we understand as `music' in ways vastly different to ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]