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Sociologist Basil Bernstein's theory of symbolic control and cultural production, reproduction and change, developed since the late 1950's until present day, is famous for its complex, formal and generative character and has gained international acknowledgement. It has provided inspiration for theoretical work in a variety of disciplines and the conceptual framework for robust and sensitive sociological empirical research on cultural and particularly, pedagogic practices and their effects, in many parts of the world. This research in turn was used in the continuous development and refinement of the theory. For a variety of reasons, the theory was not always welcome, or well treated, in the Anglo-Saxon intellectual milieu. It has caused strong controversy and has sometimes become the object of crude oversimplification and miscomprehension, as well as of political and ideological misuse. The theory is explicitly grounded on selected and inventively remolded elements of modern social theory and critically incorporates features of more recent currents of thought.

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 article presents Basil Bernstein's response to an article by Michael Huspek which advanced a theory of the relationship between social class and communication codes. Bernstein acknowledges that a developing theory creates a burden for those who engage with it. Such a theory requires its readers a recency of reading. In the case of Huspek he seems to have parted company with the theory well before 1975. The major arguments derived from papers published well before 1970. The section headed A Reconsideration of Bernstein's Descriptions of Working-class Speech draws entirely from a paper published in 1962, and the description of codes reduced syntactic complexity goes back to a paper published in 1958. According to Bernstein, it is therefore difficult, if not possible, to comment on Huspek's paper without summarizing or at least referring to developments of the last 20 years. Developments which not only have escaped Huspek, but perhaps equally seriously have escaped the anonymous reviewers whom Huspek acknowledges. Bernstein's comments is grouped under two headings: Social Class and Education, and Class and Oppositional Codes. Huspek points out that Bernstein has operated with a two level model of empirical research.

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]

The author discusses the existence of general principles that affect the cultural and personal transformation of the subjects during the process of upbringing. In order to find a solution to this problem, the author focuses more on the process of transmission of educational contents than on the contents themselves. The transmissions is carried out though language, which, although subjected to stable rules, cannot be considered completely neutral from the ideological point of view, as it tends to emphasize the meanings produced by dominant social groups. During the relation of upbriging, the transmission is carried out also through a pedagogical instrument. This works according to rules that play a relevant role in the determination of the content and the forms of the relation of upbringing. The three main rules of pedagogical grammar are then examined: the distributive rules, the recontex-tualizing rules and the rules of evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]