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The provisions of the Higher Education Act (2004) have renewed interest in widening participation research. Therefore, this paper explores the development of this scholarly field, primarily in the United Kingdom, by examining major trends in the study of higher education. Political debates related to higher education, the prevailing structure of the sector and predominant sociological perspectives have largely shaped the empirical and theoretical concerns of widening participation research. These delimiting factors have resulted in incomplete accounts of the barriers to higher education, which do not fully explore the relationship between students' social characteristics, learning experiences and university careers. Furthermore, contemporary research runs the risk of reinventing the wheel and replicating the mistakes of the past, since there has been a collective act of forgetfulness with respect to earlier contributions. In contrast, this paper provides guidelines to facilitate a holistic agenda for future widening participation research.

At a time when "personal development planning" is being rolled out across the UK higher education sector, this paper explores young adults' inclinations to plan for the future in relation to work, relationships and other aspects of life. Although Giddens has emphasised the prevalence of strategic life planning (or the "colonisation of the future") in all strata of contemporary society, du Bois Reymond has argued that there are important differences by social class, with young people from more privileged backgrounds more likely than their peers to engage in such life-planning activities. This paper draws on interviews with 90 young adults (in their mid-20s) to question some of these assumptions about relationships between social location and propensity to plan for the future. It shows how, within this sample at least, there was a strong association between having had a privileged "learning career" (such as attending a high-status university and identifying as an "academic high flier") and a "disinclination" to form detailed plans for the future. In part, this appeared to be related to a strong sense of ontological security and the confidence to resist what Giddens terms "an increasingly dominant temporal outlook." (Contains 2 tables.)

Theorists of friendship in contemporary society have suggested that our relationships with peers are characterised by their emphasis on openness, disclosure and emotional communication. Moreover, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim argue that friendship, as a deliberately sought, trusting partnership between two people, can play an important role in countering some of the negative consequences of a market-driven society, "acting as a shared lifeline to take the weight of each other's confusions and weaknesses". However, drawing on a series of in-depth interviews with students from nine different higher education institutions, this paper will argue that such theorists overlook significant complexity in the ways in which young adults choose to "order" their friendships. Indeed, it will suggest that highly individualised and ruthlessly competitive approaches to academic study can be maintained alongside more socially cooperative relationships with friends and peers, played out in non-academic arenas. The paper will discuss the implications of this for both sociological theorising about friendship, and policy and practice within the higher education sector. (Contains 2 notes.) [The research on which this paper is based was funded by the Society for Research in Higher Education.]

This paper argues that the recent debate about plagiarism has taken on aspects of a moral panic, which reflects underlying anxieties about the state of higher education in the United Kingdom. In contrast to the moral absolutism of some commentators, we argue for the significance of posing the phenomenological question of "what is plagiarism in its appearing?" We present a detailed idiographic analysis of two cases taken from a wider study of staff perceptions of plagiarism looking at the multiple meanings of plagiarism in the life-world of individual staff. Our approach does not entail judgemental relativism; rather, it involves a proper recognition of the limitations of rule-bound approaches to complex ethical matters. We argue for a virtues-based approach to plagiarism, which recognises complexity, and for a more measured and collegial debate.

This paper draws upon a range of ideas and concepts developed by the British sociologist Basil Bernstein to examine recent challenges and changes encountered by members of professional occupations, including those who teach and research in higher education. The paper discusses and seeks to develop Bernstein's analysis of how particular structurings of knowledge may be related to the formation of occupational identities centred in what Bernstein refers to as "inwardness" and "inner dedication". It then examines a range of challenges to such identities--particularly those arising from the "regionalisation" of knowledge and from "genericim". The paper concludes by assessing the prospects for perpetuating such identities in an era of increasing marketization and managerialism.

Embarking upon a pre-university gap year is an increasingly popular option among British students. Drawing on Brown et al.'s work on positional conflict theory and the increased importance of the "economy of experience", this paper seeks to explore this growing popularity and argues that the gap year's enhanced profile raises important questions concerning the processes by which certain groups of young people are able to gain advantage over others during a period of educational expansion. Indeed, it is arguably no coincidence that the gap year's popularity has taken off in parallel with this expansion, as the gap year emerges as an important means of "gaining the edge" over other students in the context of increased competition for entry to elite institutions.

There is a widely recognised national trend for girls to outperform boys at all levels of compulsory schooling. With few exceptions, however, most recent research has reported that, in relation to academic performance at university, men are proportionately over-represented at the First Class level. A number of general hypotheses have been put forward to explain this phenomenon, including those that assume gender-linked differences in cognitive and/or personality traits. A smaller proportion of research has given explanatory primacy to the broad subject area studied. More specifically, it has been alleged that the over-representation of men within the First bracket is largely a function of a "compositional effect" whereby men achieve proportionately more Firsts as there are more of them within the First-rich Sciences. Based upon analysis of 1,707,408 students graduating between 1995 and 2002, this paper seeks to provide the most comprehensive exploration, to date, of this effect. It confirms that a substantial proportion of the "gender gap" can be explained with reference to the male propensity to take degrees in First-rich disciplines.

Although Boudons distinction between primary and secondary effects, and its associated rational action models of inequality of educational opportunity, have been more influential in the field of social stratification and mobility than in the sociology of education, there is good reason to reconsider the theoretical and practical implications of this approach. The investigation brings conceptual analysis and empirical research to bear on Boudons arguments in a manner that may be somewhat unorthodox. The theoretical arguments are developed in the context of a detailed empirical investigation of three transitions--age 10 to O-level, O-level to A-level, and A-level to degree--using the extensive 1970 British Cohort Study. It is concluded that primary and secondary effects should be recognised as methodological rather than theoretical concepts, that the techniques used to identify them are independent of rational action theory and that, contrary to an influential position, the evidence suggests that primary effects are more important than secondary effects in the generation of social disparities in access to education. (Contains 3 tables.)

This paper examines the changing nature of professional practice in English further education. At a time when neo–liberal reform has significantly impacted on this under–researched and over–market–tested sector, little is known about who its practitioners are and how they construct meaning in their work. Sociological interest in the field has tended to focus on further education practitioners as either the subjects of market and managerial reform or as creative agents operating within the contradictions of audit and inspection cultures. In challenging such dualism, which is reflective of wider sociological thinking, the paper examines the ways in which agency and structure combine to produce a more transformative conception of the further education professional. The approach contrasts with a prevailing policy discourse that seeks to re–professionalise and modernise further education practice without interrogating either the terms of its professionalism or the neo–liberal practices in which it resides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contract researchers constitute an expanding occupational group in UK higher education and contribute significantly to national research output Despite recent concern and debates over their marginal status and inferior conditions of employment, little is known about the actual complexities of contract researchers' working lives. Drawing upon qualitative interviews, an attempt is made to remedy this lacuna, by portraying certain kinds of occupational knowledge and practices utilised by social science contract researchers. The paper focuses on the understandings and strategies which are developed and refined as researchers attempt to sustain employment in a highly insecure realm. What is portrayed is not the technical expertise required for this kind of research, but rather the knowledge, acumen and action which are more informal, tacit and indeterminate. This paper examines the cognitive and interactional processes which need to be developed and combined with technical expertise, if employment is to be maintained in such a competitive and insecure field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite rapid growth in UK postgraduate education and a current focus on issues of access to higher education, consideration of possible social class differentials at the postgraduate level is missing from the sociological literature. Using Higher Education Statistics Agency data, this paper presents a preliminary investigation of the relationship between social class and progression to postgraduate study in England and considers the interplay with other salient variables, including subject of study, institutional type and first–degree achievement. Evidence of a social class differential in progression to higher degrees is used to test various sociological theories, particularly those proposed by Bourdieu. There is support for the concept of ‘institutional habitus’ developed in recent UK studies. It is concluded that there is scope for further in–depth empirical research into social class and postgraduate study. [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.

'Widening participation' and increasing student diversity are currently key concerns across the higher education sector, and particular attention has been drawn to the persistent under-representation of working-class students within British universities. It is thought that widening participation in higher education (HE) can result in a number of social and economic benefits, at a national level, for under-represented social groups and for individual participants. Less is known about the viewpoints and understandings of working-class non-participants, such as whether 'official' perceptions regarding the value of HE are shared or contested. Focus group discussions were conducted with 109 non-participant Londoners, aged between 16 and 30 years, from a range of working-class backgrounds. Findings focus upon non-participants' constructions of risks, costs and benefits during application, participation and graduation. These perceptions of 'value' are discussed with relation to widening participation strategies amongst ethnically diverse 'working class' groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Occupational therapy pre-registration education stands at the intersection of the fields of health and social care and higher education. UK Government agendas in both fields have seen an increase in the number of students entering with non-traditional academic backgrounds, a group noted to experience particular challenges in negotiating the transition to, and persisting and succeeding within, higher education. Drawing on data from an ongoing longitudinal case study, a Bourdieuian lens is applied to exploring the early educational experiences of a group of these students during their first year of study and highlights a number of key issues, including the high-value status of linguistic capital and its relationship to understanding the rules governing practices within the learning environment, the processes via which students manage to adapt to or interestingly, to resist, the dominant culture of the field, and some of the barriers to finding a foothold and legitimate position within the new field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a contribution to the sociology of an expanded and newly diversified UK higher education system. How differentiated is the student experience? How sharply is the system polarised? Drawing on interviews and questionnaires conducted in five sociology departments in a variety of pre-1992 and post-1992 universities, it examines students' views on 'what they learn' and their orientations to study. It explores differences in curriculum content and organisation and the extent to which student narratives and identities vary with differences in institutional context. A typology of student experiences and subject engagement is advanced that as well as capturing institutional differences also locates a range of student orientations - and worthwhile student experiences - in all five departments that suggests a somewhat greater commonality of experience and outcome across institutions than the extreme polarisation of institutional experiences and outcomes sometimes suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK Government is calling upon higher education students to see their learning as an investment that will give them direct benefits in the labour market. At the same time, the relationship between educational credentials and their returns in labour market has been changing in recent times. Based on a qualitative study with 53 final-year undergraduate students in a pre-1992 university, this article examines the way higher education students understand the role of their educational credentials in relation to their future employability. It shows that students perceive their academic qualifications as having a declining role in shaping their employment outcomes in what is perceived to be a congested and competitive graduate labour market. While academic credentials are still seen as a significant dimension of their employability, students increasingly see the need to add value to them in order to gain an advantage in the labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on qualitative research with diverse women students in the UK, illustrating how spatial concepts can be applied to the higher education context and to women's experience within it. The students researched create the university as an imagined space: a refuge from various forms of external threat. This is integral to associations they make between studying and selfhood. Constructing 'belonging' in the face of events and processes that seem to point to their marginalisation reveals the university not as a transparently understandable space, but as a space constructed by and from their own desires: emotional and conceptual, rather than rational and objectively measurable. However, the university is a temporary refuge rather than a permanent liberation. The imagined space repeatedly comes up against material limits, and is always under threat from the encroachments of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of social-class-related patterns of access to Higher Education (HE) has become a matter of public debate in the UK recently, but is on the whole portrayed one-sidedly in terms of issues of selection (elitism), and the social dimensions of choice are neglected. Here, drawing on an Economic and Social Research Council research study, choice of HE is examined using Bourdieu's concepts of 'classification' and 'judgement'. HE is viewed in terms of its internal status differentiations. Students' positive and negative choices are addressed using qualitative and quantitative data, and the 'accuracy' of status perceptions are also tested. It is argued that choices are infused with class and ethnic meanings and that choice-making plays a crucial role in the reproduction of divisions and hierarchies in HE, but also that the very idea of choice assumes a kind of formal equality that obscures 'the effects of real inequality'. HE choices are embedded in different kinds of biographies and institutional habituses, and different 'opportunity structures'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is suggested that major studies of mature student experience are limited by the epistemological underpinnings of their approach and that the representations they offer do not permit an adequate sociological understanding. It is then argued that conceptual tools derived from Bourdieu's sociology can facilitate such an understanding. Two segments of qualitative data from interviews with mature students and their tutors in a UK university department are used to illustrate the potential for a sociological approach which, by focusing on both the constituting and constituted nature of practices, avoids the pitfalls of objectivism and subjectivism apparent in some previous research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]