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In this article I identify how developments in consumer culture, waged-work and health policy have informed our current interest in the body, before suggesting that Durkheim's and Mauss's methodological approach towards the external and internal dimensions of "social facts" provides us with a valuable basis on which we can analyse the impact of these factors on those subject to them. Building on their interest in the corporeal internalization of societal trends, and the centrality of body techniques to the habitus, I then outline a new "corporeal realist" framework that can assist us in analysing the education of bodies. This focuses on the relationship that exists between the general forms of body "pedagogics" dominant within a society as a whole and the specific types of body "pedagogies" evident in curricula and schools. Recognizing these different terms as referring to distinctive phenomena helps us avoid the assumption that schools simply mirror society, highlights the importance of exploring the interactions between society and school, and sensitizes us to the need to investigate how social norms and policy initiatives are variously filtered, mediated and re-contextualised within the educational field.

Pierre Bourdieu's writings provide us with a powerful vision of corporeal sociology (an approach towards human relationships and identities that has at its centre the socially shaped embodied subject), and an understanding of the body as a form of physical capital. Despite his protestations to the contrary, however, a reproductionist bias pervades Bourdieu's conception of social action, making it difficult for him to account theoretically for those individuals who deviate from the class trajectories 'assigned' them during their formative years. After exploring the idea of physical capital implicit within Bourdieu's work, this article places this conception of the body on a non-reproductionist footing by developing the pragmatist notion of situated action. This conception of action is then used to illustrate how the relationship between social field and physical capital can result in not only a continuation of habitual action (and an associated accumulation of particular quantities and qualities of physical capital), but in action informed by crisis and revelation (and associated transformations in the individual's relationship with physical capital) that can aid our understanding of the education of bodies.

Supply teachers are playing a growing role in British and Welsh schools, because of staff shortages and in-service training demands. Using data from a comparative case study of cover arrangements in a local education authority and a district health authority, this paper identifies several major factors affecting the organization of supply workers. Includes 42 references. (MLH)