Knowledge and Identity : Concepts and Applications in Bernstein's Sociology [1 ed.] 9780203837856, 9780415582094

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Knowledge and Identity

What in the digital era is knowledge? Who has knowledge and whose knowledge has value? Postmodernism has introduced a relativist flavour into educational research such that big questions about the purposes of education have tended to be eclipsed by minutiae. Changes in economic and financial markets induce a sense that we are also experiencing an intellectual credit crunch. Societies can no longer afford to think about the role of education merely in relation to national markets and national citizenry. There is growing recognition that, once again, we need big thinking using big theoretical ideas in working on local problems of employability, sustainability and citizenship. Drawing on aspects of Bernstein’s work that have attracted an international following for many years, the international contributors to this book raise questions about knowledge production and subjectivity in times dominated by market forces, privatisation and new forms of state regulation. The book is divided into three sections: •

•

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Part 1: Knowledge – extends Bernstein’s sociology of knowledge by revitalizing fundamental questions, such as: what is knowledge, how is it produced and what are its functions within education and society in late modernity? It demonstrates that big theory, like big science, provides immense resources for thinking ourselves out of crisis because, in contradistinction to micro theory, we are able to contemplate global transformations in ways which otherwise would remain unthinkable. Part 2: Knowledge Production in Post-compulsory Education – consider the new, hybrid forms of knowledge that are emerging in the gap opened up between economic markets and academic institutions across a range of countries. Bernstein said in the 1970s that schools cannot compensate for society but we might now ask: can universities compensate for the economy? Part 3: Knowers – adds new conceptual tools to the understanding of subjectivity within Bernstein’s sociology of knowledge and elaborates conceptual developments about pedagogic regulation, consciousness and embodiment.

This book will appeal to sociologists, educationists and higher educators internationally and to students on sociology of education, curriculum and policy studies courses. Gabrielle Ivinson is Senior Lecturer, University of Cardiff, UK. Brian Davies is Emeritus Professor, University of Cardiff, UK. John Fitz is Emeritus Professor, University of Cardiff, UK.

Knowledge and Identity Concepts and applications in Bernstein’s sociology

Edited by Gabrielle Ivinson, Brian Davies and John Fitz

First edition published 2011 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2011 Gabrielle Ivinson, Brian Davies and John Fitz for selection and editorial material. Individual chapters, the contributors. The right of Gabrielle Ivinson, Brian Davies and John Fitz to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN 0-203-83785-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-415-58209-4 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-83785-6 (ebk)

Contents



Notes on contributors

  1 From monasteries to markets: will universities survive?

vii 1

G abrielle I v inson

PART I

Knowledge and knowers in late modernity

21

  2 Knowledge-­building: analysing the cumulative development of ideas

23

K arl M aton

  3 Social life in disciplines

39

J o h an M uller

  4 Knowledge theory and praxis: on the Anglo-­French debate on reproduction

54

D aniel F randji and P h ilippe Vitale

PART II

Shifting cargo: from singulars to regions and generic knowledge forms

67

  5 Changing knowledge in higher education

69

A ntigone S arakinioti , A nna T satsaroni and G eorge S tamelos

  6 Teachers’ conceptions of knowledge structures and pedagogic practices in higher education G u ð r ú n G eirsd ó ttir

90

vi   Contents   7 Curriculum development processes in a Journalism and Media Studies Department

107

J o - ­A nne Vorster

  8 Vocational qualifications and access to knowledge

124

L eesa W h eela h an

PART III

Multiply anchored subjectivities

141

  9 ‘Psychic defences’ and institutionalised formations of knowledge

143

C laudia L apping

10 Positioning the regulative order

157

J eanne G amble and U rsula Hoadley

11 Bernstein, body pedagogies and the corporeal device

176

J o h n E v ans , B rian D a v ies and E mma R ic h



Index

191

Contributors

Brian Davies is Emeritus Professor of Education at Cardiff University, UK. John Evans is Professor of Sociology of Education and Physical Education at Loughborough University and Director of Research Training within the School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences. John Fitz is Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, UK. Daniel Frandji is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the National Institute of Pedagogical Research (INRP) in Lyon, France. Jeanne Gamble is a part-time Senior Lecturer in the Higher and Adult Education Studies Development Unit (HAESDU) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. Guðrún Geirsdóttir is an associate Professor in Education within the School of Education at the University of Iceland. Ursula Hoadley is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Gabrielle Ivinson is a Senior Lecturer in the Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University. Claudia Lapping is Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Education, University of London, UK. Karl Maton is Senior Lecturer in sociology at the University of Sydney, Australia. Johan Muller is Professor of Curriculum, Director of the Graduate School of Humanities and Deputy Dean of Research and Postgraduate Affairs in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Cape Town, South Africa. Emma Rich is a Senior Lecturer in Sport and Education in the Department of Education at the University of Bath, UK. Antigone Sarakinioti is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Social and Education Policy, University of the Peloponnese, Greece.

viii   Contributors George Stamelos is Professor of Education Policy Analysis at the Department of Primary Education, University of Patras, Greece. Anna Tsatsaroni is Professor of Sociology of Education in the Department of Social and Educational Policy of the University of the Peloponnese, Greece. Philippe Vitale is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Provence (Aix en Provence), France. Jo-Anne Vorster is a PGDHE Coordinator a Rhodes University, South Africa. Leesa Wheelahan is an Associate Professor at the LH Martin Institute for Higher Education Leadership and Management at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

1 From monasteries to markets Will universities survive? Gabrielle Ivinson

Introduction The chapters constituting this volume were all originally papers contributed to the Fifth International Basil Bernstein Symposium at Cardiff University, Wales in July 2008. They reflect the continuing vibrancy of the worldwide work that characterises the application of his ideas to educational policy and practice. Their diversity is evident, while their common thread is continuing devotion, noted in earlier volumes, to ‘putting Bernsteinian concepts to work’ (Moore et al., 2006). They could not possibly reflect the complete range of Fifth Symposium presentations but do illustrate how relevant Bernstein’s concerns are in offering insight to our contemporary troubles. More than a third of the papers offered at the symposium concerned aspects of crisis and change in higher education and almost all, in one way or another, addressed issues of identity and consciousness in relation to knowledge formation, transition and acquisition. This is reflected in the structure of this volume where most of this Introduction is devoted to anatomising aspects of Bernstein’s analysis of the origins of the university and its continuity with contemporary shifts from disciplinarity to trainability and in Part II, ‘Shifting cargo: from singulars to regions and generic knowledge forms’, where a series of empirical studies give accounts of changing knowledge structures in university contexts in teacher education in Greece, Engineering, Physics and Anthropology in Iceland, Media Studies and Journalism in South Africa and contrasting occupational preparation in higher education (HE) and Vocational Education and Training (VET) in Australia. These analyses rest foursquare on fundamental questions explored by Bernstein concerning what knowledge is and how it is produced and made available which are taken up by Maton, Muller and Frandji and Vitale, the contributors to Part I, ‘Knowledge and knowers in late modernity’, each focusing upon big, theoretical issues of what is thinkable in any particular era and its relationship to individual and group subjectivities and identities. Each, indicatively, argues for the greater theoretical, empirical and problem-­solving power of Bernstein’s work than that of his contemporary Bourdieu. In turn, Part III, ‘Multiply anchored subjectivities’, focuses on elaborating some recent conceptual

2   G. Ivinson developments about pedagogic regulation, consciousness and embodiment that celebrate both the openness of Bernstein’s work to other disciplinary approaches and its anchorage in class inscription. These are illustrated by Lapping’s exploration of his use of Kleinian notions of identity, Evans and others’ claim that modification of his notion of the ‘pedagogic device’ provides new and interesting ways of relating biology and culture and Gamble and Hoadley’s analysis of classroom pedagogic control that, like the work of Morais and her associates, reminds us that the institutionalisation and operation of personal modalities in our schools will not necessarily secure access for all children to vertical knowledge forms. The outstanding characteristics of Bernstein’s vision of pedagogic pro­ cesses concern their pervasiveness, connectedness and intimacy of relation to social and cultural hierarchy, power and control. He was very fond of saying that while the differences that marked the natural and social worlds were endless sources of fascination, it was the invidious ranking of the crucial categories of class, gender, race, region and religion that underlay our need to understand ‘both the creation, management and legitimation of specialized differences and the creation, management and legitimation of various social inequalities’ through schooling and other social agencies and that this involved ‘analyzing the complex inter-­relations between education, stratification, economy and the various principles and arrangements of the State’ (Bernstein, 1981: n.p.). His own view of where the script for doing so should start, ‘even where the plot is not worked out and half the characters are missing’, lay in Durkheim’s representation of the contradictory dynamic ‘of the two discourses upon which the medieval university was founded, that of Christianity and that of Greek thought’ (Bernstein, 1996: 82). In a world where universities are required to service society and demonstrate their functional use, Bernstein’s sociology allows modern anxieties about shifts in conceptions of knowledge from sacred to secular, content to skills and text to hypermedia to be placed within a long historical trajectory. His work on the origins of knowledge in ancient Greek universities and changes in the classification and framing of formal knowledge across eras places the information revolution of late modernity in context. While contemporary educational policy rhetoric calls for a radical rethinking of school and university curricula by conjuring terms such as ‘generic skills’, a historical perspective grounds such debates in issues of subjectivity, learning and the limits to the possibilities for knowing in late modernity. Asking what kind of knowledge is needed for the future raises anxieties; knowing futures is an art that we have not yet mastered (Adam and Groves, 2007). Perhaps, instead, our starting point should be rethinking the question, ‘what is education for?’ Bernstein (2001: 382) points out that education is controlled and increasingly micro-­managed by the state. Whereas the last time we had a totally pedagogised society in the medieval period, when the Catholic Church dominated social life, now schools, universities and other state-­ sponsored institutions increasingly serve the needs of government and

From monasteries to markets   3 remind us not to ‘confuse opportunity with democracy’ (ibid.). Pedagogic panic has masked moral panic and new discourses of pedagogy, ignoring content and focusing only on competencies, risk its reduction to technology and learning becoming completely decontextualised from the rest of acquirers’ life spans. What Bernstein feared most of all was the ‘socially empty’, neo-­liberal notion of ‘trainability’ (ibid.: 366), inscribed in ‘life long learning’ rhetoric as ‘creativity and adaptability’ (ibid.: 368), reminding us that the need for pedagogy to be meaningful as well as relevant provides one of our greatest challenges, requiring us to reintroduce issues about content and epistemology into educational debates. In times of weak global and strong pedagogic states we need to look outside formal to informal, adult or popular education ‘outside of the State [where] there’s a possibility for change and initiative’ (ibid.: 382). It is in the interest of pursuing such themes that I now turn in this Introduction to a brief elaboration of Bernstein and other’s views of pedagogic origins, before returning to outline in more detail the nature of the other contributions contained in this volume, where Muller suggests that discussions within education about epistemology have tended to be limited to scientific knowledge, suggesting that we have not yet worked out the full ramifications of Durkheim’s discussion of the Greek curriculum. The humanities constitute the modern Trivium, and can be characterised as disciplines that develop inner consciousness or sensibility. The sciences are disciplines that investigate the outer world, and analyses of the two, involving changes both in knowledge and pedagogy, have not yet been properly conjoined. Even more importantly, what appears to have been left out of current debates and analysis about the purpose of education is the role it plays in the formation of consciousness. In asking what education is for we need to consider social organisation and knowledge more adequately. Knowledge that was produced outside the university in guilds and crafts is attracting increasing attention (e.g. Sennett, 2008) and apprenticeship is being reinvented as the way forward in many education policy documents. In this analysis, early forms of community and institutionalised educational practice, such as existed in monasteries and craft workshops, will be used to explore relationships between curriculum, pedagogy and consciousness that help us to think about knowledge and knowers in late modernity.

The classification of formal knowledge The origins of the university and school curriculum in the West can be traced back to antiquity. The Greek ideal was based on a fierce hierarchy between the sacred and profane. Knowledge belonged to the gods and as mortal beings humans were thought to be incapable of perceiving the truth. Form and not matter was the base of Plato’s hierarchy. The model of pure forms existing outside time and space as abstract ideas was not only a theory of knowledge but also of pedagogy:

4   G. Ivinson This is the right way of approaching and being initiated into the mysteries of love, to begin with examples of beauty in this world, and using them as steps to ascend continually with that absolute beauty as one’s aim, from one instance of physical beauty to two to all, then from physical beauty to moral beauty, and then from moral beauty to the beauty of knowledge, until from knowledge of various kinds one arrives at the supreme knowledge whose sole object is that absolute beauty, and knows at last what absolute beauty is. (Plato, Symposium: 212; cited in Midgley, 1992: 14) This metaphysical axiom required people to know good from bad. Plato saw all study as stages towards this greater goal of the contemplation of goodness. The first Latin classification of knowledge, Varro’s canon of the Liberal Arts (115–27 bc), had nine disciplines divided into three groups: theoretical knowledge derived from texts, language and communication known as the Trivium, made up of grammar, logic and rhetoric; practical knowledge divided into geometry, arithmetic, astrology and music known as the Quadrivium; and the mechanical disciplines: medicine and architecture. The final set was dropped from the classification in the fifth century (Ovitt, 1987). Bernstein developed Durkheim’s work on the Greek curriculum and the classification of formal knowledge into the Trivium and the Quadrivium in which the former was studied first and had higher status than the latter. While Durkheim argued that the distinction amounted to one between the word and the world, Bernstein restated this more forcefully as ‘no world prior to the word’; it was ‘the means of understanding the principles behind the word and its realization’ and ‘the principles of understanding the material world’ (1996: 83). When the Trivium, anchored within antiquity, was recontextualised within the Christian world, the ‘abstract, idealized and essentialist discourse’ of absolute beauty was replaced by the Christian God. However, Christianity held together the two aspects of knowledge in a unity, ‘the word became flesh’ (St John’s Gospel). Following Durkheim, Bernstein articulated that the Christian God was not simply a God to ‘be loved but to be thought about’ (1996: 83). Bernstein made Durkheim’s distinction between the two forms of knowledge radically more powerful by suggesting that the Trivium not only provides the mechanics of language and reason, ‘but is concerned to constitute a particular kind of consciousness’ and accordingly a particular kind of outer world (Bernstein, 1996: 84). The tension between Greek and Christian discourses lay at the centre of the development of the first universities. Within those that emerged in the twelfth century, the Trivium involved knowledge that aimed to develop a specific kind of interiority: the self constituted according to the Word of God that Bernstein referred to as a specific ‘modality of the self ’ – a new, existential self comes into being. Bernstein concluded that the distinction between the Trivium and the Quadrivium reflected a

From monasteries to markets   5 division between the inner and the outer. The Trivium provided the ground for a self-­reflexive form of consciousness or conscience created by intellectual practice whereby the self reflects on actions in the light of Christian theology. Scholarly learning was close to the habits of prayer and meditation inherited from medieval monasteries. A particularly Christian inflection was developed in which self-­consciousness was formed through the ability of persons to decentre by contemplating the self and activities from the position of an idealised ‘I’, imagined as an all-­knowing God (Bernstein, 1996; del Río and Alvarez, 1995). This form of consciousness has dominated Western cultures throughout modernity when the formal curriculum has traditionally incorporated aspects of the Trivium and Quadrivium, yet the pedagogic subject it projected has been dominated by the regulative discourse of Christianity. For this reason Bernstein’s description of the pedagogic device states that instructional is always embedded in regulative discourse. Bernstein was interested in the structure of the discourses that combine to constitute pedagogic discourse and practice in any specific time and place. Moral discourse is usually characterised as lay or common sense, with a horizontal structure, and formal or scientific ones as vertical, for example, obeying the law of non-­contradiction. The forms of each obey different logics and in many respects pull in different directions, one emphasising similarity, the other difference; moral discourse attempting to unite, allowing people to recognise themselves, while formal discourses differentiate and divide, reifying and objectifying the world, expelling human interest (Devereux, 1967; Ivinson, 2007; Moscovici, 2001). One model of these contradictory elements which all educational institutions have to manage can be found in the precursor of the university, the medieval monastery. The medieval monastery The attainment of spiritual perfection was the primary goal of monastic life in self-­contained communities set apart from the mundane world in rural locations. Monks were able to withdraw from the economic necessities that dominated life for most people in order to study the scriptures and contemplate. The strict routines of life involved regular periods of prayer, study and spiritual work. Practical life, Opus Manninus was subordinated to Opus Dei (Ovitt, 1987). Even so, bodies had to be fed and the spiritual had to be reconciled with practical life. Labour was recognised as good, preventing idleness and allowing the monk to work on the self as part of attaining spiritual enlightenment. The principles that Benedict of Nursia established in the sixth century, of renunciation, discipline, humility, patience, obedience and fear of judgement, aligned labour and spiritual pursuit into harmonious relationship. In much medieval thinking practical utility could be viewed as essential yet complementary to high-­status knowledge, each having its time and place. Many scientific breakthroughs, including the first studies of genetics, were achieved by monks.

6   G. Ivinson Monasticism saw the significance of labour in process and not in product, integrating contemplation through prayer, labour with hands and the study of scripture (soul, body and mind). Later this found resonance in Weber’s notion of the English gentleman inspired to work indirectly on himself by working in the world. Yet, while the virtue of the ‘English gentleman was self restraint and self effacement in the interests of achievement, the virtue of the monk was restraint and self effacement in spite of achievement’ (Ovitt, 1987: 105). This model was extremely successful, with some monasteries becoming so affluent that monks were able to hire craftsmen, builders and farmers to undertake jobs they did not wish to do themselves, a development which increasingly undermined the very ideal that the communal, self-­ sufficient monastery sought to pursue (ibid.: 106).

Knowledge and social organisation Bernstein’s sociology of knowledge, unlike philosophical analyses, looks to the structure and patterning of social organisation to explain why some kinds of knowledge are created and achieve and actively retain high status. His analysis refers particularly to social-­class groups and differences between them. Drawing on Mary Douglas’s work on grid and group which, in turn, drew on Durkheim and Mauss, he foregrounded dynamic aspects of knowledge production and reproduction by drawing attention to the way groups mobilise and gain and, indeed, lose control. This intense interest is played out in his analysis of the difference between the ancient Judaic and early Christian communities. His analysis suggests that the former was organised around concrete ideas, such as the Law, the latter according to an abstract idea. Some of the themes introduced in the chapter ‘Thoughts on the Trivium and Quadrivium: The Divorce of Knowledge from the Knower’ (Bernstein, 1996: 57–63) echo the distinction between performance and competence forms of knowledge recontextualisation that relate to pedagogic forms within schools. At a high level of abstraction Bernstein was exploring the form and content of ideals instantiated in different kinds of social organisation and specifically the shared ideas that maintain community belonging. In early Christianity there were many forms of knowing that were not reflected in the curriculum inherited from antiquity, for its lineage was not Roman and Greek but the Jewish people (Küng, 2001: 1). Bernstein (1996: 85) reminds us that important characteristics of the Judaic God are invisibility and temporality. There is no mediation between man and God; God is invisible and perfect, man is relative and imperfect. People relate to an invisible, distant God through ‘holiness’ manifest through the daily cycles of prayer, ritual and the classifications of the law . . . Holiness establishes the unity of God and people through the nature of the social bond. The rules and regulations of the Torah set up the possi-

From monasteries to markets   7 bility of a perfect society and so provide a template for the Jewish community. There is no dislocation of inner and outer. (ibid.) There is a strong social bond on Earth between members and a strong boundary between man and God. We could see this as an early form of a performance-­type model of pedagogy. The history of the early Christian church is not of an elite but ordinary people: fishermen, farmers and crafts people with little political power. In Christianity the boundary between man and God who became man is blurred. Conversion to Christianity involved what Bernstein referred to as ‘a revolution of inwardness’ based on ‘a recognition of Christ . . . Christianity takes a point outside the culture and practice of those to be converted as the basis for this conversion and then colonises from within’ (1996: 84). Such thinking and feeling outside one’s culture and practice requires an abstract orientation which drives a wedge between inner and outer, such that appearance and reality can no longer be trusted to be the same thing. Christianity introduced a new modality of language, ‘an interrogative mode . . . splits the self from its acts, intention from practice . . . No wonder language, communication, became so central to Christianity’ (ibid.: 86). Unlike the certainty of Jewish identity, Christianity’s perfect text in the story of Jesus, set in unfinished society where Law is replaced by the interrogative mode, introduced existential uncertainly, where membership had to be constantly re-­ won. Creating community and legitimating membership required ongoing work, echoing a competence-­type model of pedagogy. Some of the effects of this type of social organisation were emancipatory. Küng (2001) suggested that the early Jewish-­Christian community marked a radical break with a patriarchal tradition because its social bonds were based on an idea rather than blood. Initially it celebrated equality based on the idea of brother- and sisterhood in God. Küng characterised it as democratic not aristocratic or monarchical, citing considerable evidence of men and women working on the same level of equality as missionaries, leaders, recognised apostles, ministers, teachers, preachers and prophets. These new forms of living ‘created a new form of femininity, which freed itself from the reproductive determination of women and was an essential contribution to the history of emancipation’ (ibid.: 22). However, the early Church existed on the margins of society and had no political power. As it developed and became imperial and hierarchical, suppressing original Christian efforts at equalitarianism, a growing renunciation of sex reached a peak when celibacy became associated with salvation, devaluing sexuality and women and losing an early possibility for their emancipation. Gradually, the roles that women had played in the early Church were eroded and even unmarried women were eliminated from the clerical state. Küng argues that the Church, even to this day, is stuck in a mentality forged in the Middle Ages. As in the Roman Empire, the principle of equality

8   G. Ivinson p­ rimarily asserted itself in the private domain, while male domination became established in the sacramental sphere. Hostility to women’s sexuality was a phenomenon inherited from Greek antiquity and appropriated by the Christian church around the seventh century onwards and became particularly developed in Christianity, alongside devaluation of education as a Hellenistic ideal which became openly despised, especially for women, making ‘a major contribution towards perceiving women exclusively as body’ (Küng, 2001: 25) Küng’s account of the early Christian Church can be read as a case of a weak community being colonised by an elite institution, a process paralleling Bernstein’s description of competence-­type models of pedagogy in which the idea behind instructional practice has to be spoken about, elaborated, constantly re-­imagined and anchored in practice. As Bernstein observed, this is costly in terms of time and effort, yet rarely recognised, accounted for or properly resourced. It implies the labour of ‘cooperation, love, friendship and sense of justice’ that Frandji and Vitale refer to in Chapter 4 of this volume. It remains invisible work yielding invisible and, therefore, low-­status knowledge. Some of this informal knowledge specifically developed through craft became institutionalised in the medieval guilds which formed alternative communities in which it was learned. Many scholars, including Bernstein, have turned to craft and apprenticeship modalities to widen debates about learning beyond formal knowledge by investigating communities of practices (e.g. Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998; Sennett, 1998, 2008), recognising that guilds were not add-­ons but total pedagogic environments that forged consciousness as well as knowledge. The Guild House Bernstein (2001) referred to anxieties about how people were expected to make sense within flexible capitalism in relation to Richard Sennett’s (1998) The Corrosion of Character, characterising the condition of pedagogy within late modernity that requires life-­long retraining for short-­term jobs as ‘socially empty’, a fear taken up in Wheelahan’s chapter in this volume. In seeking to expose problems relating to the neo-­liberal workforce and to suggest what kinds of social conditions are required to support the development of skills and cultivation of meaningful learning, Sennett (2008) analyses pedagogy within the medieval workshops of craft guilds, contrasting apprenticeship then with job training now. He suggests that the workshops of twelfth- and thirteenth-­century Europe contrasted with those of the medieval monasteries by aligning the sacred and the profane in a different way. Christian retreat was based on the idea that the further people got from materiality and markets, the closer they came to godhead and developing an interiority that was removed from the concerns of mundane human life. In contradistinction ‘the craftsman represents Christ’s appearance to man but not his being’ (ibid.: 55) and the peacefulness of the secluded monastery was

From monasteries to markets   9 not present in medieval cities. In seven major guilds in Paris at this time, each master by necessity kept order in and out of the house where knowledge was transmitted through a ‘hands-­on’ approach from generation to generation. ‘Knowledge capital’ was the source of the guild’s economic power and while workshop masters had to embody authority in order to keep order, its source was in skill, thus deeply interrelating technology and ethics. Apprentices entered into a totally pedagogic relationship with masters which included both formal aspects of learning skill in the workshop and becoming part of their masters’ extended household, sons not by blood but by contract in which masters had to develop their skills in exchange for having their secrets guarded. Christian ideals continued to shape male consciousness and idleness was imagined to be sinful, a sign of sloth. Learning a craft meant becoming a special kind of moral person and its practice had a social and an economic function, including guaranteeing the purity of coins. Becoming a skilled worker required working through a three-­tiered hierarchy. A seven-­year apprenticeship was followed by journeyman trading outside the master’s territory for another five to ten years, before transition to master craftsman, becoming the pedagogue deemed skilled enough to take on apprentices. Stability and subordination were followed by movement and entrepreneurship, followed by stability and authority. The social bonds of guilds spread across workshops and trading links creating bases for common recognition. Apprentices reproduced craft skills and were expected to become particular kinds of people in society, reflecting a moral as well as material division of labour. Sennett endorsed the ‘personalized face-­to-face authority of knowledge . . . Since there can be no skills without standards it is infinitely preferable that these standards be embodied in a human being rather than in a lifeless, static, code of practice’ (2008: 80). The emergence of Renaissance artists, recognised for their originality, interiority and subjectivity, was a further development that arose from the community of medieval craftsmen (Wittkower and Wittkower, 1963; cited in Sennett, 2008: 65). The value of originality worked against that of imitation of craft, creating a new hierarchy and the rise of individualism as opposed to community, and initiating a shift that became responsible, in part, for the downfall of the medieval guilds. While Sennett distinguishes craftspeople and artists, Bernstein does so between persons and individuals. It is a new and contemporary form of individualism characterised as the neo-­ liberal person that lies at the heart of Bernstein’s warning that knowledge has finally become divorced from knowers. Knowledge markets The latest recontextualisation of knowledge belongs to late modernity and was captured by Bernstein’s phrase ‘the Totally Pedagogised Society’ where the state is better thought of as, in effect, no longer functioning via institutions but acting through capillary movements filtering through all aspects of

10   G. Ivinson life, for example, prescribing parenting skills and anger management. Visions of a radical, post-­modern era imagine people released from worldviews imposed by others and accordingly burdened either by their own freedom or by invention. Confidence in grand theories, grand narratives and scientific texts has collapsed, ushering in an era of radical uncertainty, plurality and complexity; there is no centre to the universe, physical world or man (sic). Knowledge is said to have no foundation, matter no essential base and people unknowable to themselves (de Certeau, 1984). Representational systems, such as language, literature and the virtual media are tools we use to make sense. The soap opera is reality and reality TV enlists people’s lived experiences as representation. In this vision, appearance and reality collapse; there is nothing beyond, behind or outside our own representational creations to anchor meaning; we can no longer appeal to God, the Church or science. The technological domination of nature justified by the Enlightenment is seen to be destroying the eco-­system on which we depend. Against this background a new, corrosive understanding of pedagogy has arisen. Bernstein called the idea behind this new pedagogic rhetoric train­ ability delivered through a new generic pedagogy no longer underpinned by an abstract idea outside the person. In order to cope with the relative, unstable and ever-­changing world, people have simply to submit to the ‘ability to be taught’ which does not provide a basis from which to imagine themselves forward. This continuous, psychological reconstruction cannot be achieved by solitary workers but ‘arises out of a particular social order, through relations which the identity enters into with other identities of reciprocal recognition, support and legitimacy, and finally through a negotiated collective purpose’ (Bernstein, 2001: 366). While never crystallising a view of the ontological base of formal knowledge, Bernstein grapples with how the arbitrary becomes visible, recognisable, fixed and maintained; what meaning, for whom, how and where? These brief scenarios are intended to suggest that forms of recognition are fundamentally tied to communities and, even more importantly, forms of social organisation. Bernstein brings together relations between ideas, social organisation and forms of consciousness. For example, just as weak early Christian communities mobilised around an abstract idea that was spread highly effectively by colonisation from within, they failed to develop strong internal structures such as Laws, and were characterised by a need for constant interrogation and doubt, exhibiting similar dynamics to Bernstein’s description of a competence model in which knowledge is recontextualisation in a form characterised by relatively weak classification and framing. It takes effort and continuing work to hold a community together around an abstract idea. Eventually the Canon Law structures of the Roman Church colonised early Christian communities with enormous consequences for who was and was not recognised, reifying and simplifying the abstract idea, legitimating debate only among ‘experts’ and recontextualising it in the interest of the elite as ideals from the Hellenic era were used to suppress early ideas

From monasteries to markets   11 of equality, echoing aspects of a performance model in which knowledge is recontextualised according to strong classification and framing.

Markets not monasteries: whither universities? Knowledge and knowers in late modernity In Part I our contributors seek to extend Bernstein’s sociology of knowledge by revitalising fundamental questions concerning what knowledge is, how it is produced and its functions within education and society in late modernity. Each develops an aspect of Bernstein’s sociology of knowledge in particular ways. Bernstein kept questions about what was thinkable in any era and what kinds of subjectivities or citizens are produced at the forefront of his work by tracing the classification and framing of knowledge, linking questions about knowledge to questions about knowers. Each of the three chapters in Part I demonstrates that big theory, like big science, provides immense resources for thinking ourselves out of crises because, in contradistinction to micro theory, it enables us to contemplate global transformations in ways which otherwise would remain out of sight. In attempting to theorise knowledge production in our universities, Maton, Muller and Frandji and Vitale each make reference to Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu. In Chapter 2, Maton extends the conceptual language that Bernstein created to analyse knowledge by making his sociology of pedagogy the object of analysis. Maton’s question, ‘How can fields like sociology and education build knowledge over time?’ reflects a specific case of Bernstein’s vast temporal and spatial exploration of knowledge production. Maton compares Bourdieu’s and Bernstein’s knowledge structures and demonstrates that the first is strong on application and the second on theory. Learning Bourdieu’s sociology can be compared to acquiring a craft, Bernstein’s more akin to obeying the law. The former is gained primarily through practice, the ‘gaze’ is acquired through taking time, prolonged practice and typically intimate pedagogical relations to reshape one’s dispositions. Learning Bernstein’s theory is more like studying a text in which concepts have precise meanings that can be specified with increasing levels of abstraction. Maton develops the more finely grained notions of semantic gravity and semantic density to extend Bernstein’s knowledge types into a continuum for describing knowledge specifically within the HE sector. His implicit question about what is produced in universities leads directly to questions about whether their purposes are to produce specific kinds of knowers ­(learners/citizens) or knowledge. Muller takes up this question when he explores peer review, the process that governs research and, therefore, the production of knowledge in higher education institutions. In differentiating the academic and research arms of the university at different levels of specificity, he echoes Bernstein’s concern with relationships between ideas and social organisation by rooting his

12   G. Ivinson a­ nalysis back in Durkheim’s descriptions of mechanical and organic solidarities. He outlines rituals of labour that differentiate and rituals of community that create similarity within the academy and points to the academic lust for recognition, suggesting that the drive to be known as the first to discover something provides the psychological motivation behind many great discoveries, raising questions about the kinds of social organisation that produce a mentality able to ask the question ‘Am I still famous?’ His empirical work suggests that professors share something of the mentality of the master craftsman, exercising noblesse oblige when refereeing the work of other academics, irrespective of status or institution. In Chapter 4 Frandji and Vitale suggest that Bernstein ‘reflected on, beyond and against Bourdieu’, finding, in contrast to Maton, a moral imperative behind his theoretical work, noting that his fifth volume (1996, 2000) opens with a framework for a pedagogy of rights. Echoing aspects of Maton’s more guarded description of Bourdieu’s theory as horizontal, they go further to suggest that concepts such as habitus and symbolic violence are circular while the scope and depth of Bernstein’s theory is gained by its ability to offer increasing degrees of abstraction away from the empirical, allowing specific examples to connect to patterns identifiable at broader analytical levels. With reference to the French sociological tradition, they make a strong case for identifying the green shoots of a sociology of praxis within Bernstein’s work, arguing that Bernstein’s sociology of education demands research projects that make abstract, analytic tools available to educational practitioners. Having learned theoretical tools, academics, like journeymen, must leave the workshop and put their practice to use, seeking integration between the two arms of the academy that Muller differentiated as research and teaching, via social practice across different phases of their careers, maybe bringing in mid-­career research money while later writing and inducting others into the craft. Bernstein recognised that knowledge is relational: inwardness is developed in relation to outwardness. The internal grammar of disciplines relate to the social practices and power dynamics that create knowledge constituted through the historical legacies that formed elite communities. To understand shifts in knowledge structures from singulars to regions there is a need to connect the social organisation of disciplines with disciplinary subjectivities. Within singulars academics focus on constructing their own identities according to rules policed by identifiable communities of scholars in disciplines. If there is a shift towards regional knowledge and a more outward-­ looking gaze we need empirical work that investigates the everyday practices of academics to identify drivers and resistance. The empirical studies of higher and further education in Part II contribute to this project, addressing how boundaries between singulars and regions are created, changed and institutionalised in academics’ practices and whether the days of relative academic autonomy and privilege are numbered, anticipating the consequences of what may be seen largely as academic drift.

From monasteries to markets   13 Shifting cargo: from singulars to regions and generic knowledge forms Given that Bernstein’s theoretical tools help us to understand global market dynamics acting through local practices to capture changes in knowledge production in post-­compulsory education, it is not surprising that one-­third of the papers presented at the International Basil Bernstein symposium in 2008 sought to demonstrate shifts in knowledge construction in further and higher educational institutions across a range of countries. They raise issues as to what kind of new, hybrid forms of knowledge are emerging in the gap opened up between economic markets and academic institutions. The autonomy of state-­sponsored universities in the West and the legitimacy of their right to produce and regulate new knowledge are being called into question amid anxieties about what constitutes the economic base in a post-­industrial era. While there have always been aspects of university curricula that look outward to fields of production, many look inward towards the knower, aimed at cultivating capacities for critical thinking about social and political, as well as economic, problems. The purpose of the academy has long been considered to be to produce such attributes and identities in a particular kind of citizenry. But such liberal ideals, on which Western educational systems were, at least in part, based, have now become eclipsed by dominating, lay notions about the economy that require serious analysis and rethinking. Our contributors consistently point to shifts away from knowledge defined in terms of subject principles towards its increasing hybridisation designed to service applied fields. Yet they also point out that these are not generally taking place as conscious or intended academic projects. Indeed, academics report increasingly feeling that they are reacting to external pressures, that they live in a world where shifts in the constitution of knowledge have knock-­on effects for education. We might seriously question whether universities are training future knowledge workers by inadvertently conforming to dominant and often ill-­thought-through perceptions of economic market needs while gradually giving up their role to educate. Sociologists like Bernstein said in the 1970s that schools cannot compensate for society. We might now ask, can universities compensate for the economy? If higher education curricula are being influenced by global market pressures, Bernstein’s concepts can help work out where knowledge drift is coming from and to identify the likely assemblages that create inertia in higher education systems, so helping us to answer difficult questions as to who in higher education produces knowledge and whose knowledge is valued. Bernstein argued that forms of knowledge defined as disciplines, which he termed singulars, are learned through processes that also cultivate inwardness and generate strong inner commitments to a specific knowledge domain, while increasingly dominant regions look outward to practical and applied fields in shaping content, pace and direction. The implications are far-­reaching, as ‘the volatility of the context will control the nature of the

14   G. Ivinson regionalization’ (Bernstein, 2000: 55) as a discursive procedure. This ‘threatens pedagogic cultures dominated by singulars and raises issues of legitimacy for such cultures’ (ibid.: 52), weakening the autonomous discursive and political bases of singulars. In Chapter 5 Sarakinioti et al. illustrate that ‘the terms on which singulars contribute to regions are increasingly shaped by external forces’ (Beck and Young, 2005: 189) within universities in new, generic pedagogic forms to which Bernstein referred, including ‘key skills’, ‘thinking skills’, ‘teamwork’ and ‘learning skills’, designed to train graduates in ‘problem-­solving’ skills, decontextualised from actual research considerations, putatively providing them with a toolkit to be used according to the problem at hand. In this modality we can detect a shift in balance from inwardness to outwardness. Sarakinioti et al. suggest that genericism refers to processes of giving precedence to procedures and criteria that tend to be generated and specified or sanctioned by governments that are not specific to individual occupations, disciplines or fields of study but, rather, invoke the needs of consumers. Their data is based on a questionnaire survey of teacher-­ educators in Greece, asking respondents which generic skills and competencies specified by EU policies and the Bologna Process they believed were important to preparing new teachers. Although their responses paint a complex picture, they demonstrate academic drift towards interdisciplinarity that reflects a weakening of knowledge classifications and a privileging of ‘new forms of professionalism’ among school teachers, as identified by Ball (2005) and others, in Greece, as elsewhere, marking a transitional phase in education departments lacking long traditions of research and prone to outside influence. Analysing academic life in terms of social organisation and knowledge reveals complexities captured, for example, by James Gee’s (2005) notion of semiotic social spaces occupied sometimes simultaneously and sometimes consecutively by social actors, multiply anchored in areas and communities that operate at different spatial and temporal scales. In Chapters 6 and 7 Geirsdóttir and Vorster provide insight from two empirical studies that relied mainly on observation and interview to capture the everyday process of lecturers’ research, recontextualising (curriculum development) and teaching practices. By investigating three disciplinary departments in one Icelandic university, Geirsdóttir describes how Physics, Applied Engineering and Anthropology created and maintained distinctive disciplinary lives, advancing Muller’s question about what kinds of communities or networks constitute disciplines. Physics academics anchored their identities in a virtual global research community, the hierarchical structure of science, with its strong grammar, providing a near-­universal consensus about appropriate subject principles for years one to three of the undergraduate curriculum. During department meetings only pragmatic issues about which courses would run were the subjects of debate. In contrast, the Anthropology Department spent time and effort creating locally based courses that reflected lecturers’ interests, an approach endorsed at the international con-

From monasteries to markets   15 ferences that many attended. The horizontal structure of Anthropology, along with its weak grammar, yielded a more competency-­based curriculum than the performance type evidenced in the Physics Department. In further contrast, Engineering required that teachers prepared students for the profession in Iceland, as well as advanced academic work. Local ties were evident in the selection of course content as teachers took the needs of local industry into account, thus weakening the classification of the discipline and its boundaries. The interweaving of local and universal pedagogic practices entailed lecturers operating in different communities, enjoying multiple social identities organised around different ideas, some consensual and some diffused, for example, at department level where teaching was organised and at global and virtual levels for research purposes. This juxtaposition of notions of communities of practice (Lave, 1988; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Sennett, 2008; Vygotsky, 1986; Wenger, 1998; Wertsch et al., 1995) and Bernstein’s concepts of knowledge structures and social organisation to university departments suggests that while lecturers maintained multiple identities through different modalities of communication, from face-­to-face department meetings to virtual, international networks, they were least aware of the roles they played in curriculum transformation, in which they expressed little sense of autonomy in all three disciplinary areas. Issues about different kinds of autonomy are developed further in Vorster’s study of a Journalism and Media Studies Department formed from two traditions: Media Studies, anchored in the academy, and the craft of Journalism and media production anchored in external fields of their production. As knowledge producers, curriculum-­changing recontextualisers and teacher reproducers, Media Studies specialists tended to invoke high-­status research activity to exert autonomy in department negotiations about, for example, programme integration. Their success in such negotiations demonstrated the high status of academic identities that were anchored firmly within knowledge production (e.g. research) and how this in turn maintained strong boundaries between theory and practice. In contrast, their media production colleagues tended to see ‘theory’ in much more particular relation to their craft specialisms. While underlining the importance of ideological and institutional features in shaping their relations in the particular, changing context of South Africa and in the absence of regulatory professional bodies in the media, Vorster suggests that, in Maton’s terms, the epistemic relation in fourth-­year Media Studies courses was weakened in favour of a stronger social relation, a knower-­code grammar. Here emphasis lay on students developing critical gaze while, for their media production achievements, they needed to develop a gaze that was both critical and trained, in terms of an elite code focusing both on technical skills and procedures and knowledge about theories of the media underpinning critique of production work as professionals. This is an account redolent of the complexities attending issues of the continuing autonomy of the university both within and without and academics’ opportunities to intervene in society.

16   G. Ivinson Wheelahan’s study of a range of tertiary education curricula further explores the effects of shifts in knowledge from singulars to regions for students. Like Frandji and Vitale, she argues that, in Bernstein’s terms, vocational education has a duty to prepare students to participate meaningfully in modern complex societies. She focuses on processes whereby disciplinary knowledge is recontextualised by lecturers in VET in further and higher education institutions in Australia in courses that are supposed to face outward to fields of production as applied disciplinary knowledge (Young, 2006) in traditional (preparing for particular occupations, such as doctors) and new regions preparing students for a field, for example, business studies, hospitality and tourism. Policy documents characterise generic pedagogies and curricula as a ‘toolbox’ of applicable knowledge. New regions are less directly tied to disciplines than old ones and send out diffuse and sometimes contradictory messages to learners (Muller, 2009), their ambiguity making it difficult for students to form representations of areas or fields that precede development (Ivinson and Duveen, 2005; Muller, 2009). Wheelahan suggests that vocational pathways can be differentiated by the way they mediate access to theoretical knowledge and that degree courses give greater access to disciplinary knowledge than diploma courses in VET, providing more scope for students to form a representation of the subject area. As learning is a process of subjectification as much as it is about gaining toolkits of skills, if students cannot form an image of their new region they cannot know what kind of person to become with the context. In failing to give access to recognisable communities of practice within college or outside in the world of work, new region further education curricula may confirm Bernstein’s fear that generic pedagogies are empty, rendering training irrelevant or meaningless and, at worst, merely forms of state surveillance. Multiply anchored subjectivities Bernstein’s work demands the need to think again about the kind of consciousness that will be forged if knowledge slides away from singulars to regions. As singulars, knowledge structures have relatively explicit rules and principles, making it possible for students to learn their rules of engagement and to recognise their place with respect to the discipline. Both knowledge of subject principles and disciplinary field stand-­points enable phenomena and their own development to be viewed. While knowledge defined as singulars provides possible foundations for the formation of consciousness, when redefined as regions it privileges practical performance. However, when defined in terms of generic skills, it risks becoming empty and the grounds for consciousness are reduced to consumer subjectivities. The neo-­ liberal subject asks ‘Who knows me?’ with little or no thought for ‘What do I know?’ Part III focuses on knowers’ formation of consciousness and subjectivity within Bernstein’s sociology of knowledge. Knowers have tended to be

From monasteries to markets   17 described according to what social organisations and particular institutions, such as family, church and school, make available to them as children and young people. Subjectivity has been described from the outside and social class provided our primary exegesis of power until displaced by identity during the post-­structuralist 1990s. However, identity politics and positions have a tendency towards relativism with no privileged vantage point from which to account for power. In contrast, Bernstein’s theory always assumes hierarchical relations: some positions are more privileged than others. In order to retain a strong understanding of the influence of global forces, such as markets and hegemonic discourses, on consciousness it is necessary to describe how subjectivities are produced by and through institutions that incorporate the kinds of complexities described above. Multiply anchored subjectivities create tensions and cleavages within the person that are addressed here from different perspectives, elaborating conceptual developments about pedagogic regulation, consciousness and embodiment. The process of recontextualisation always involves processes of suppression and exclusion. Lapping demonstrates how Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytical concepts of splitting, projection and introjection, which Bernstein appropriated with a rather light touch, can be used to draw attention to affective and psychic dimensions of sociological processes. Processes of recontextualisation are usually born in moments of rupture, disturbance or transition when psychic work is required to mask, smooth out or defend against the new and unfamiliar. While Bernstein hints at this in his many references to the ‘paranoid schizoid position’, Lapping provides tools for developing his rather flat and fixed term ‘inner’ into a process that reveals the psychic cost and work involved, for example, in classification and in pedagogic control. Yet it remains important to recognise that Bernstein’s work is primarily about the social and when he used psychoanalytical terms it was to describe it and not the individual. While sociology has tended to empty out the psychological, for which Durkheim bears considerable responsibility, Bernstein had a keen sense of the need to recognise the psychological elements within the social, influenced in part by the work of Serge Moscovici (2001). Social organisations mobilise around ideas, yet maintaining them takes psychological effort, sometimes in the face of adversity and the threat of colonisation. The complexity of Bernstein’s work ensures that many of his concepts face in two directions, towards the social and the individual, in delineating how individual types are formed within social organisations. The questions about what knowledge is made available by institutions that were raised in Wheelahan’s chapter are revisited in Gamble and Hoadley in their chapter, with a stronger focus on classroom-­level pedagogy. Considerable work has been undertaken to analyse pedagogic discourse in terms of classification and framing, in particular by Anna Morais and her colleagues, who have developed Pedro’s operationalisation of instructional discourse in terms of strong and weak framing relations over the selection, sequencing,

18   G. Ivinson pacing and evaluation criteria. Pedro identified three types of regulation used by teachers: authoritarian, positional and personal, comparing them to interactional modalities in working- and middle-­class families. Working-­ class modalities tend to be further removed than middle-­class forms from regulative modalities found in classrooms, creating greater difficulties for working-­class learners. There have been numerous attempts to specify what kind of pedagogic instruction could decrease the gap and these usually advocate the need for strong framing. However, Gamble and Hoadley suggest we need to develop a more nuanced understanding of pedagogic control by pointing us back to Durkheim’s notion of ritual. In many studies of classroom interaction, positional forms of regulation are subsumed within imperative or authoritarian forms and placed in opposition to the therapeutic, middle-­class forms referred to as personal. Authoritative regulation involves submission to a more senior person. In personal forms of control the differential status between children and teachers, or novices and knowers is blurred. Positional forms of regulation rely on explicit hierarchical relations between teachers and students that reflect Bernstein’s characterisation of the Judaic community and Sennett’s description of apprenticeship. Bernstein pointed to the role of ritual in education as a means by which individuals submit to the impersonal, as to the grammar of a discipline. Ritual involves repetitive and, we could add, embodied aspects that are often omitted from analyses of learning that rely heavily on discourse. Gamble and Hoadley’s work points to a growing recognition that we need to broaden analysis of learning to include processes that work though bodies and become familiar as rhythms and patterns of practice. There is a need to recognise the body as the site of knowing (Merleau-­Ponty, 1964). In the final chapter Evans et al. make it clear that processes of knowledge reproduction finally come to rest on and in bodies. They focus on the underbelly of formal discourse, referred to in Lapping’s chapter as the suppressed, invisible and excluded. There is a strong need to make invisible forms of embodied knowing related to crafts, as well as other, invisible work – such as caring, repairing and emotional labour – visible, accountable and valuable. These knowledges and practices already underlie and make possible formal knowledge and Bernstein’s (1996) notion of the ‘pedagogic device’, when reworked around the concept of a ‘corporeal device’, provides one way of conceptualising relationships between biology and culture that makes the corporeal realities of children’s lives in classrooms visible. Analyses of pedagogy need to recognise how both bodies and minds mediate knowledge. For example, dominant messages about beauty and health circulate as ubiquitous and contradictory horizontal discourses below the level of conscious awareness. To bring these to consciousness entails containing them in symbolic form and so rendering them available to rational thought, scrutiny and reflection. In this way ideas from the scientific realm can be used to expand vocabularies of bodily knowing by juxtaposing vertical with horizontal discourses in a manner hinted at by Wheelahan in her analysis of VET.

From monasteries to markets   19 In their various ways each contribution to this book seeks to expand our repertoire of pedagogic concepts beyond formal learning and performance pedagogies. They recognise the ebb and flow of learning processes within disciplines and discourses, across contexts, life spans and bodies, both across epochs and from moment to moment, in full recognition of the play of power dynamics shifting between institutional stability and volatility depending on collective fears. The particular contribution of the empirical studies of changing circumstances in a variety of vocational and higher educational contexts in Part II demonstrates that those who teach and research there draw on social resources anchored within global networks of disciplines as powerful tools that may be deployed in a variety of institutional settings, often relying on the strong boundaries that disciplines create to insulate themselves from others and from the mundane as psychic defences. Strong boundaries maintain the status quo and can insulate departments and lecturers from external influences so that they can resist colonisation. However, they can also result in fixed positions in which theory becomes nothing more than defence and fails to engage with social and political problems. At times it may well be that academics need Pedagogies of Survival and at others Pedagogies of Rights depending on what is happening outside the more or less permeable walls of academia.

References Adam, B. and Groves, C. (2007) Future matters: Action, knowledge, ethics. Leiden; Boston: Brill. Ball, S. J. (2005) The Sera Lecture 2004. Education reform as social barbarism: Economism and the end of authority. Scottish Educational Review, 37 (1): 4–16. Beck, J. and Young, M. F. D. (2005) The assault on the professions and the restructuring of academic and professional identities: A Bernsteinian analysis. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 26 (2): 183–197. Bernstein, B. (1981) Preface. The State of Schooling. Educational Analysis, 3 (1): n.p. Bernstein, B. (1996) Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique. London; Bristol: Taylor & Francis. Bernstein, B. (2000) Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique, rev. edn. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Bernstein, B. (2001) From pedagogies to knowledges. In A. Morais, I. Neves, B. Davies and H. Daniels (eds), Towards a sociology of pedagogy: The contribution of Basil Bernstein to research. New York; Washington, DC: Peter Lang. de Certeau, M. (1984) The practice of everyday life. Berkeley: University of California Press. del Río, P. and Alvarez, A. (1995) Tossing, praying, and thinking: The changing architectures of mind and agency. In J. V. Wertsch, P. del Río and A. Alvarez (eds), Sociocultural studies of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Devereux, G. (1967) From anxiety to method in the social sciences. The Hague; Paris: Mouton & Co. Gee, J. P. (2005) ‘Semiotic social space and affinity spaces’, from The Age of Mythol­ ogy to Today’s School. In D. Barton and K. Tusting (eds), Beyond Communities of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

20   G. Ivinson Ivinson, G. (2007) Pedagogic discourse and sex education: Myths, science and subversion. Sex Education, 7 (2): 201–216. Ivinson, G. and Duveen, G. (2005) Classroom structuration and the development of representations of the curriculum. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 26 (5): 627–642. Küng, H. (2001) Women in Christianity. London and New York: Continuum. Lave, J. (1988) Cognition in practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Merleau-­Ponty, M. (1964) The Primacy of Perception, trans. J. Edie, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Midgley, M. (1992) Science as salvation: A modern myth and its meaning. London; New York: Routledge. Moore, R., Arnot, M., Beck, J. and Daniels, H. (2006) Introduction. In R. Moore, M. Arnot, J. Beck and H. Daniels (eds), Knowledge, power and educational reform: Applying the sociology of Basil Bernstein. London: Routledge. Moscovici, S. (2001) Social representations: Explorations in social psychology, (ed.) G. Duveen. New York: New York University Press. Muller, J. (2009) Forms of knowledge and curriculum coherence. Journal of Educa­ tion and work, 22 (3): 203–224. Ovitt, G. (1987) The restoration of perfection: Labor and technology in medieval culture. New Brunswick; London: Rutgers University Press. Sennett, R. (1998) The corrosion of character: The personal consequences of work in new capitalism. New York: W. W. Norton. Sennett, R. (2008) The craftsman. London: Penguin. Vygotsky, L. S. (1986) Thought and language, (ed.) A. Kozulin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wertsch, J. V., Del Río, P. and Alvarez, A. (eds) (1995) Sociocultural studies of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wittkower, R. and Wittkower, M. (1963) Born under Saturn; the character and conduct of artists: A documented history from antiquity to the French Revolution. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Young, M. F. D. (2006) Education, knowledge and the role of the state: The ‘nationalization’ of educational knowledge? In A. Moore (ed.), Schooling society and the cur­ riculum. London: Routledge.

Part I

Knowledge and knowers in late modernity

2 Knowledge-­building Analysing the cumulative development of ideas Karl Maton

Introduction Intellectual fields like Sociology and Education often fail to build knowledge over time. Social realists have for some time diagnosed segmentalism as a problem afflicting these and cognate fields.1 Symptoms of segmentalism include the proliferation of competing approaches that remain strongly bounded from one another; recurring schisms within approaches; fragmentation and factionalisation of the field; intellectual repetition and repackaging of fundamentally similar ideas; historical amnesia; hermeneutic narcissism; drift towards autobiographical reflection; and apocalyptic ontologies announcing ruptures in the nature of social life. The malady lingers on but the question remains as to the cure: how can fields like Sociology and Education build knowledge over time? This chapter aims to help address the problem of segmentalism by analysing the nature of theories that enable cumulative or segmental knowledge-­building. The issue of cumulative knowledge was central to Basil Bernstein’s model of the forms taken by ‘knowledge structures’ in intellectual fields (2000: 155–174). According to Bernstein, ‘hierarchical knowledge structures’ (exemplified by the natural sciences) are explicit, coherent, systematically principled and hierarchical formations of knowledge that develop through the integration and subsumption of existing knowledge. In contrast, ‘horizontal knowledge structures’ (exemplified by the humanities and social sciences) are a series of strongly bounded approaches that develop by adding another approach alongside existing approaches. Bernstein distinguishes these knowledge structures along two dimensions which Muller (2007) terms ‘verticality’ and ‘grammaticality’. Verticality refers to the way theory develops in hierarchical knowledge structures. As Bernstein puts it, they are characterised by ‘attempts to create very general propositions and theories, which integrate knowledge at lower levels’; the tendency is ‘towards greater and greater integrating propositions, operating at more and more abstract levels’ (2000: 161). Grammaticality describes the way some knowledge structures generate relatively unambiguous empirical referents (or ‘stronger grammar’, such as physics), while others are less capable of doing so (‘weaker

24   K. Maton grammar’, e.g. sociology). These two features are said to be central to the capacity of knowledge structures to build knowledge: ‘verticality determines the capacity of a theory or language to progress integratively through explanatory sophistication . . . grammaticality determines the capacity of a theory or a language to progress through worldly corroboration’ (Muller, 2007: 71). These two dimensions recur in Bernstein’s framework at the level of individual theories as internal (L1) and external (L2) ‘languages of description’ (2000: 131–141). L1 ‘refers to the syntax whereby a conceptual language is created’, or how the constituent concepts of a theory are interrelated; L2 ‘refers to the syntax whereby the internal language can describe something other than itself ’ (ibid.: 132), or how a theory’s concepts are related to empirical data. Bernstein describes the ‘syntax’ or principles of each language as being stronger or weaker. A stronger L1 is where concepts are tightly interrelated within a theory; a stronger L2 is where concepts and empirical data are related in relatively unambiguous ways. These two sets of concepts raise a number of issues. First, the notion of ‘verticality’ gives the impression of creating a deficit model. As Muller (2007: 71–72) suggests, Bernstein’s account views verticality as a categorical principle of presence/absence: a field either has verticality or it does not. This reflects his dichotomous and ideal typical model of knowledge structures, which establishes a fault line between the two forms, and constructs horizontal knowledge structures as lacking any capacity for integrative and subsumptive development of ideas. However, these fields are capable of such progress, at least within each of their segmented approaches (Maton, 2010; Moore, 2010). This first issue can be simply solved by thinking in terms of a continuum of stronger and weaker verticality. Second, the framework remains divided between concepts for intellectual fields (verticality/grammaticality) and for individual theories (L1/L2). How the two couplets can be integrated within a more encompassing framework has yet to be explored. Lastly, and most importantly, as Young and Muller (2010: 125) argue, it is not clear what these two couplets actually refer to, beyond highlighting internal relations of knowledge (verticality/L1) and external relations of knowledge to data (grammaticality/L2). We are told that verticality determines the form of intellectual progress but not what it is or how it determines that progress. Similarly, what the principles of L1 and L2 constitute are not made clear and so what makes a ‘language of description’ stronger or weaker remains uncertain. In short, the underlying principles of verticality/ L1 and of grammaticality/L2 are unexamined. It is also not clear how these two dimensions are related in different knowledge structures and work together to shape the building of knowledge over time. Thus, the main questions that Bernstein’s model raises are: • What do these internal relations (verticality/L1) constitute? • What do these external relations (grammaticality/L2) constitute?

Knowledge-building   25 • How do they work together to enable or constrain cumulative knowledge-­building? Each of these questions will be addressed in turn, in a manner that itself aims to build cumulatively on Bernstein’s framework with concepts that deepen and extend his insights and are applicable to both individual theories and whole intellectual fields.

Semantic gravity, semantic density To develop Bernstein’s model I shall explore the principles underlying the internal and external relations of theories and intellectual fields along two principal dimensions: semantic gravity and semantic density. Semantic gravity (SG) refers to the degree to which meaning is dependent on its context (Maton, 2009, 2010) and may be relatively stronger (+) or weaker (–). Where semantic gravity is stronger (SG+), meaning is more closely related to its context; where weaker (SG–), meaning is less dependent on its context. Semantic density (SD) refers to the degree to which meaning is condensed within symbols (terms, concepts, phrases, expressions, gestures, etc.). Where semantic density is stronger (SD+), the symbol has more meaning condensed within it; where semantic density is weaker (SD–), the symbol condenses less meaning. What is condensed is not necessarily an empirical description – it can be feelings, political positions, values, morals and so on (Maton, 2008a). Semantic gravity and semantic density may be independently stronger or weaker, giving four principal modalities (SD+/–, SG+/–). This represents part of the syntax of languages of description and knowledge structures. Redescribing Bernstein’s discourses and knowledge structures along continua of SG and SD moves the analysis from dichotomous ideal-­types towards underlying structuring principles (see Maton, 2009). One can also describe processes of: weakening semantic gravity, as principles are abstracted from the concrete particulars of a specific context or case, or strengthening semantic gravity, as abstract ideas are made more concrete; and strengthening semantic density, such as when a lengthy description is condensed into a term, or weakening semantic density, such as when an abstract idea is fleshed out with empirical detail. This is significant because, I shall argue, it is movements up and down the semantic continua, not just specific states of ‘stronger’ or ‘weaker’, that are key for building knowledge. I shall now use these concepts to explore two modes of theorising with different capacities for enabling cumulative knowledge-­building. To illustrate these modes I focus on the work of arguably the two most influential post-­war sociologists of education: Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu. The analysis comprises three parts, reflecting the earlier questions: their internal relations (the ways the theories relate concepts to other concepts); their external relations (such as to data); and how these two work together to enable or constrain cumulative knowledge-­building. I should emphasise: I

26   K. Maton am concerned with the mode of theorising each theory represents and their potential for enabling cumulative knowledge, not with their theories and achievements per se. I am asking what kind of theorising offers the greatest resource potential for knowledge-­building, not which theory is better.

Internal relations: unpacking verticality Bernstein’s internal language In his theorising, Bernstein successively weakens semantic gravity and strengthens semantic density (heightening abstraction and condensation of meaning) both in the development of particular concepts and through the evolution of the overall framework. For example, Bernstein’s analysis of progressive pedagogy (1977, ch. 6) begins with an empirical description of six fundamental characteristics of a progressive classroom (see Figure 2.1). The structuring features are theorised in terms of relations between different forms of ‘criteria’, ‘hierarchy’ and ‘sequencing rules’, which are condensed into a distinction between ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ pedagogies. Their underlying principles are in turn abstracted and condensed as one modality of classification and framing (–C, –F ) At this point, we have moved a considerable distance from recognisable empirical descriptions towards decontextualised concepts: ‘classification’ refers to the strength of boundaries between contexts or categories, and ‘framing’ refers to the locus of control within the context or category (1977: 176). Moreover, conceptualising an empirical phenomenon as one modality of +/–C, +/–F involves the generative conceptualisation of three further possible modalities which may never have been empirically observed. This generative mode of theorising makes the concepts of greater generality. As the conceptual framework moves towards higher levels of abstraction, it also subsumes and integrates meanings at lower levels. The concepts of classificaTheorisation

Semantic gravity

Semantic density

Pedagogic device Pedagogic codes Classification and framing Visible and invisible pedagogies Hierarchy, sequencing rules, criteria Empirical description

Figure 2.1 An example of semantic gravity and semantic density in Bernstein’s theory. Note Direction of arrows is from weaker to stronger.

Knowledge-building   27 tion and framing stand in for all the steps of abstraction that precede them (Figure 2.1). These are in turn incorporated within a more generalising conceptualisation: Pedagogic codes can now be written as: E ​ ​ _______ ie   ie   ±C /±F where E refers to the orientation of the discourse (elaborated): ______ refers to the embedding of this orientation in classification and framing values. (Bernstein, 2000: 100) A further level of theorising then moves the focus from conceptualising the structuring principles underlying empirical phenomena (pedagogic codes) to conceptualising what generates those principles (the ‘pedagogic device’; Bernstein, 1990: ch. 5). A higher-­order concept is an abstraction from abstractions and a condensation of condensations (SG–, SD+). In Bernstein’s theory, its relation to key lower-­order concepts is often explicitly defined. For example, ‘pedagogic codes’ includes ‘elaborated’, ‘classification’ and ‘framing’; similarly, the ‘pedagogic device’ is in turn explicitly related to the latter two concepts. In this way, there are often tight and explicit abstraction–condensation chains created vertically between concepts. However, in Bernstein’s framework new concepts are not always explicitly of a higher order, but rather new versions of past ideas aiming at greater generality. For instance, ‘pedagogic codes’ subsumes such previous conceptualisations as ‘positional’/‘personal’ and ‘instrumental’/‘expressive’ (Bernstein, 2000: 89–100). Moreover, relations between different aspects of Bernstein’s theory are not always systematically explicated, such as between ‘educational knowledge codes’ (1977: 85–115) and ‘knowledge structures’ (2000: 155–174). Thus, Bernstein’s concepts are not always as horizontally interlocking as those of Bourdieu (see below). This partly results from the dynamic nature of this mode of theorising – each set of conceptualised principles raises the question of what in turn underlies them and more generalising ideas replace existing notions (vertical extension). Bourdieu’s internal language Bourdieu’s concepts are also characterised by high levels of abstraction and condensation. ‘Habitus’, for example, encompasses a wide range of meanings that are context-­independent, including ‘the result of an organizing action . . . a way of being, a habitual state (especially of the body) and, in particular, a predisposition, tendency, propensity or inclination’ (1977: 214; original emphases). However, in analysing a mode of theorising it is the relations between concepts

28   K. Maton that are of significance in determining the nature of its internal language, rather than the concepts themselves. Bourdieu’s internal language is, like Bernstein’s, characterised by different levels of abstraction and condensation. His key concepts for research – field, capital and habitus – represent lower-­order concepts in comparison to such overarching concepts as ‘practice’ and ‘symbolic violence’. Within his theory concepts are also tightly related to others. The concepts of field, capital and habitus (which together theorise the logic of practice) are all interconstitutive, defined in terms of each other, as are the constituent concepts of symbolic violence, ‘pedagogic work’, ‘pedagogic authority’ and ‘cultural arbitrary’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). However, where this mode of theorising differs is the nature of these relations: they are between concepts of equivalent magnitudes of semantic gravity and semantic density – strongly related horizontally rather than vertically. This is not to say that there are no vertical relations between concepts. For example, Bourdieu (1984: 101) summarises his logic of practice as: [(habitus)(capital)] + field = practice. This condenses the idea that practice results from relations between one’s structured and structuring dispositions (habitus) and one’s relational position in a field of struggles (capital), within the current state of play of struggles in that social arena (field). What it does not do, however, is to move along the continua of semantic gravity and semantic density by abstracting and condensing the principles underlying habitus or capital or field (and thus practice). In this mode, higher-­order concepts are thus created by aggregating horizontal relations between lower-­ order concepts, and vertical relations rely less on explicit chains of abstraction and condensation. Similarly, at a lower level, ‘habitus’ is defined as a ‘structured and structuring structure’ (1994: 170) but the principles underlying that ‘structure’ are not abstracted. His mode of development is thus characterised by relatively stronger semantic gravity and weaker semantic density. This limits the effects of a potential stimulus to theoretical development: answers (e.g. ‘habitus’) do not lead to new questions of underlying principles (‘what are the underlying principles of habituses?’). This limits the number of levels or orders of concepts and so vertical extension of the theory. For example, Bourdieu defines the structure of a ‘field’ as given by the rate of exchange between its species of ‘capital’ (status and resources), where their relative values reflect the state of play in struggles among actors possessing those capitals. This raises the question of how their relative status is determined at a particular moment in time: what is the exchange rate mechanism that actors are struggling over? Bourdieu’s answer reflects a horizontal mode of theorising: the limits of the field and of legitimate participation is at once what is at stake in struggles, the ground over which struggles are fought, and what is used in struggles (ibid.: 143). The field is not only the thing, it is the only thing – there is no underlying generative mechanism and so no higher-­order concept to be defined; there is less vertical extension in the theory.

Knowledge-building   29 Internal relations In summary, the mode of theorising represented by Bernstein’s framework develops through the integration and subsumption of concepts at lower levels within concepts at higher levels. This relation is one of greater generality and abstraction (lower context-­dependency) and higher condensation, its internal language of description characterised by moves to weaken semantic gravity and strengthen semantic density; or L1 = SG–, SD+. In contrast, Bourdieu’s mode of theorising develops through the creation of new, similar order concepts or through bringing these concepts into horizontal relations. Its internal language is strongly interlinked horizontally but does not extend as far vertically. Though the concepts themselves are characterised by low context-­dependency and high condensation and so share similar features to those of Bernstein, the mode of theorising and its development do not. Once an initial abstraction and condensation has created concepts, Bourdieu’s theory remains at the same level and advances horizontally; its verticality or L1 is, thus, SG+, SD–.

External relations: unpacking grammaticality Bernstein’s external language Bernstein (2000: 131–141) insisted that the development of theory is of little consequence if the resulting concepts are unable to engage with empirical problems. As Moore and Muller (2002: 627) argue, theory in the Bernsteinian mode ‘does not simply picture or represent reality; it engages directly with it, enters into a relationship with it’. The mode of engagement lies in the external language of description (L2), the means for translating between theoretical concepts and empirical descriptions. This is not the imposition of a model on to empirical phenomena; rather, the L2 ‘must submit to an external ontological imperative’ (Moore, 2001: 13) that allows the data to speak back to the theory. This ‘translation device’ must also emerge from a movement between theory and immersion in the data and, though they often develop together, one ‘must struggle to keep L2 as free as possible’ from the internal theory (Bernstein, 2000: 135). For Bernstein, this external language is crucial: ‘a theory is only as good as the principles of description to which it gives rise’ (2000: 91). This aspect of the mode of theorising, though, is more often discussed than explicitly illustrated in Bernstein’s own corpus, something he acknowledged: ‘In my case sections of the theory (usually without strong principles of description) always preceded the research’ (ibid.: 121). Substantive studies building on Bernstein’s framework are overwhelmingly found in publications by other scholars. However, one should neither elide the form of publication nor the theoretical framework itself with the mode of theorising: that Bernstein did not prolifically publish external languages does not mean this mode of theorising cannot involve them. Indeed, there are a number of examples of such languages, both directly using Bernstein’s concepts and drawing on

Presents a general observation or draws a generalising conclusion about issues and events in the case. Goes beyond re-presenting or interpreting information to offer a value judgement or claim.

Seeks to explain a statement by interpreting information from the case or adding new information. May include use of other literature or personal experience. Descriptive response that summarises or synthesises information presented in the case, including re-wording and re-structuring of a number of events into one statement. Does not present new information from beyond the case.

Generalisation

Judgement

Interpretation

Summarising description

Stronger

Presents a general principle or procedure that moves beyond the cases to address wider or future practice.

Abstraction

Weaker

Form taken by student responses

Coding of responses

Semantic gravity

Table 2.1  Example of an external language of description for semantic gravity

This involved creating the overall structure and content of the project, with design briefs and statements being forwarded to the client, with the final design statement being signed off by the client, giving a stable starting position for the project.

While not alluded to in the interviews, this may have caused problems for the team, as there would have been a new software to work with, and transferral of information from Hypercard to MediaPlant.

While each metaphor provides a realistic learning environment . . ., I felt that the Nardoo metaphor assists with navigation, while the StageStruck metaphor was a barrier to effective navigation.

Precious time would be wasted and deadlines not met when members did not have a full concept of the project.

Legal and intellectual property issues are a major consideration when developing a product.

Example quote from student answers

Knowledge-building   31 other concepts from the same mode of theorising.2 One such example is included in Table 2.1: an external language of description for the concept of ‘semantic gravity’. This was chosen not simply to be reflexive (by discussing the semantic gravity of an L2 for the concept of ‘semantic gravity’) but because it illustrates how an external language is not merely the ‘operationalisation’ of concepts. In this case, its basis was developed in Bennett (2002) independently of the concept of ‘semantic gravity’ to analyse a constructivist learning environment. Conversely, the concept itself was developed separately from this research (Maton, 2010), and only later were the concept and research data brought together (Maton, 2009). Analysing this external language, relations between concepts and data are characterised by stronger semantic gravity relative to an internal language. They are ‘locked on’ to a particular empirical phenomenon, in this case student work products. This external language is thus more context-­dependent; the external language for using the same concept to investigate, for example, classroom interaction takes a different form because semantic gravity is realised differently in other contexts and practices. It also exhibits relatively weaker semantic density, with (albeit succinct) descriptions of the concepts and their realisations within the data. (One difficulty in publishing articles that include external languages can be the number of words they can involve.) This L2 (or grammar) can thus be characterised as SG+, SD–. Just as important is what it does to meanings. Reading Table 2.1 from right to left, the external language works to: weaken semantic gravity by moving away from the concrete specificities of student work products; and strengthen semantic density by condensing what are in the data lengthy descriptions. Reading from left to right, the external language also works to successively strengthen semantic gravity by moving from: abstract concepts (in this example, differing strengths of SG); to what forms these take in this kind of object of study (‘abstraction’, ‘summarising description’, etc); to how these forms are in turn realised in student work products (‘Presents a general principle . . .’, etc.); and to examples of how these are realised in the empirical phenomenon being studied (quotes from student answers). At the same time condensed concepts are fleshed out, successively weakening semantic density by filling in progressively more empirical detail. In short, the external language works by shunting meaning (so to speak) both up and down the continua of strengths of both SG and SD. Bourdieu’s external ‘gaze’ Like Bernstein, Bourdieu emphasised that his central concepts of field, capital and habitus were intended to engage in a dialogue with data: There is no doubt a theory in my work, or, better, a set of thinking tools visible through the results they yield, but it is not built as such . . . It is a temporary construct which takes shape for and by empirical work. (in Wacquant, 1989: 50; original emphases)

32   K. Maton In terms of relations between theory and data Bourdieu argued against both empiricism and theoreticism. On the one hand, he described ‘the tradition I represent’ as based on the notion ‘that the scientific fact has to be fought for’ (1992: 42), arguing against accepting unproblematically the accounts of participants in the object of study. On the other hand, he warned against confusing the model of reality with the reality of the model (1977: 29) and emphasised differences between ‘the theoretical aims of theoretical understanding and the practical and directly concerned aims of practical understanding’ (1994: 60). These come together in the necessity for a double ‘epistemological break’, first from the viewpoints of participants and, second, from the viewpoint of the detached observer. ‘The important thing’, according to Bourdieu, ‘is to be able to objectify one’s relation to the object’ (1993b: 53) in terms of the effect of one’s relational social positioning. Relations between theory and data are thus typically understood in terms of the social positions of actors and their situated viewpoints, rather than differing forms of discourse and knowledge (Maton, 2003, 2005). In this mode of theorising there is no explicit external language of description for moving between theory and data. Instead, Bourdieu attempted to create concepts of sufficient versatility to be flexible enough for any research. As Wacquant argues, ‘Bourdieu has not exhibited the “obsessive preoccupation” with achieving relatively unambiguous meaning in his concepts’ (in Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 35–36). The problem, as Swartz (1997: 109) summarises, is that ‘this very appealing conceptual versatility sometimes renders ambiguous just what the concept actually designates empirically’. As has been widely suggested, this opens up the possibility of circularity and ad hoc explanations, for example: an actor makes bourgeois choices because of their bourgeois habitus; their bourgeois habitus is shown by the bourgeois choices they make (Maton, 2003, 2005; Moore, 2006). Bourdieu acknowledged this possibility and claimed to be ‘keenly aware of this danger’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 129), but did not explicate how it could be avoided, except through vigilance. Though Bernstein would describe this mode of theorising as exhibiting a ‘weak grammar’, giving the impression of a deficit, I argue it possesses strong external relations but of a different kind. Where Bernstein has the idea of an external language, Bourdieu has the notion of a sociological ‘gaze’. Rather than procedural principles for relating theory to data, Bourdieu emphasises inculcating the right habitus: ‘a system of dispositions necessary to the constitution of the craft of the sociologist in its universality’ (1993a: 271): The task is to produce, if not a ‘new person’, then at least a ‘new gaze’, a sociological eye. And this cannot be done without a genuine conversion, a metanoia, a mental revolution, a transformation of one’s whole vision of the social world. (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 251)

Knowledge-building   33 The emphasis is thus on the gaze of knowers rather than explicit procedures of knowledge – a knower code rather than a knowledge code (Maton, 2000, 2007). As I argue elsewhere, one can distinguish two kinds of grammar: knowledge-­grammars which relate concepts to data via explicit procedures (L2 in Bernstein’s model), and knower-­grammars which relate concepts or ideas to data via the ‘gaze’ of knowers (Maton, 2010). All intellectual and educational fields consist of both knowledge and knowers, so every field involves a specialised gaze. A key difference is whether the gaze defines legitimate procedures or knowledge of specialised procedures enables the gaze. For example, training and experience in scientific practices enables a trained gaze, but knowledge of and experience in the specialised procedures of science form the gaze rather than the gaze defining the procedures (though it affects when and how those procedures are employed). In contrast, Bourdieu’s mode of theorising relies on a knower-­grammar based on a cultivated gaze, where immersion in exemplary works shapes the habitus in ways which define the appropriate procedures of enquiry and means of judgement: You have some general principles of method that are in a sense inscribed in the scientific habitus. The sociologist’s métier is exactly that – a theory of the sociological construction of the object, converted into a habitus. When you possess this métier, you master in a practical state everything that is contained in the fundamental concepts: habitus, field, and so on. (Bourdieu et al., 1991: 253) What matters is experience in ‘the craft of sociology’. Of course, much the same can be said of the construction of the object in the Bernsteinian mode of theorising: it provides a gaze that views (to take an example from Bourdieu) that the real is relational. The difference is that the Bernsteinian mode additionally provides and privileges an external language, a knowledge­grammar. A knower-­grammar is less of a stimulus to cumulative knowledge­building, having no procedures for the specificities of different problems to speak back to the theory. This has to occur via the actor’s habitus. Bourdieu describes habitus as changeable but also durable and transposable, typically taking repeated and lengthy exposure to circumstances for it to change significantly. Thus, to ‘master in a practical state everything that is contained in the fundamental concepts’ takes time, prolonged practice and typically intimate pedagogical relations (such as master-­apprentice) to enable a ‘genuine conversion, a metanoia, a mental revolution’, i.e. to reshape one’s dispositions (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 251). Once established, these dispositions are again durable and transposable across contexts. Indeed, Bourdieu describes ‘hysteresis’ of the habitus, when one’s dispositions remain the same despite changed circumstances. Thus, a knower-­grammar provides more slowly changing and mediated means of dialogue between data and theory than the external language of description of a knowledge-­grammar. It

34   K. Maton is unsurprising that though Bourdieu described his concepts as a ‘temporary construct’, the framework remained relatively unchanged, developing primarily through an accumulation of topics and a growing range of applications, rather than the creation of new concepts of greater generality and abstraction. Though the concept of habitus evolved slowly in this direction over time in Bourdieu’s hands (e.g. from a more cognitive focus to embrace the corporeal; see Maton, 2008b), its development across an intellectual field also depended on other practitioners sharing the same gaze. In other words, the theory’s external relations are more contextually dependent on the knower’s specific gaze and less symbolically condensed: SG+, SD–. Indeed, development of Bourdieu’s theory by other scholars has been in the direction of less generality and abstraction; for example, a growing proliferation of adjectives prefix ‘habitus’ and ‘capital’ (‘institutional’, ‘gendered’, etc.) to denote the arena of social life or kinds of actors being studied. Though Bourdieu can do a Bourdieuian analysis, it is less easy for others to do so in the way Bourdieu argues it should be done: it depends on the knower.

Conclusion: building cumulative knowledge Bernstein’s model of ‘knowledge structures’ suggests that two key dimensions shape the capacity to build cumulative knowledge over time which he terms verticality/grammaticality (for intellectual fields) and internal (L1)/ external (L2) languages of description (for individual theories). Simply put, each of the dimensions of these couplets refers to internal relations among ideas and to external relations of ideas to data, respectively. However, it is not clear what each of these dimensions comprise and how they are related together to enable cumulative knowledge-­building. I have proposed two underlying principles: semantic gravity, or the context-­dependency of meaning; and semantic density, or the symbolic condensation of meaning. As well as advancing Bernstein’s model from ideal types towards analysis of underlying principles, these concepts have greater explanatory reach than previous ones. They can be applied to both knowledge structures and theories, enabling these different levels and both dimensions of the couplets, verticality and grammaticality, L1 and L2, to be brought into relation within the same analysis. These concepts were used to analyse the modes of theorising illustrated by Bernstein’s and Bourdieu’s frameworks, focusing on how their concepts were related to one another (internal relations) and to empirical data (external relations). In both cases the two modes exhibited different strengths of semantic gravity and semantic density, enabling or constraining cumulative knowledge-­building in different ways. This analysis suggested that stronger L1/verticality is where a theory relates concepts to lower-­order or already-­ established concepts through relations of lower context-­dependence (or greater generality and abstraction) and higher condensation. Stronger L2/ grammaticality can be understood as where a theory relates concepts to data

Knowledge-building   35 through relations of higher context-­dependence (lower generality and abstraction) and lower condensation. In sum, stronger L1/verticality is characterised by weaker semantic gravity and stronger semantic density (SG–, SD+) and stronger L2/grammaticality is characterised by stronger semantic gravity and weaker semantic density (SG+, SD–). In relation to individual theories, it follows that a capacity for enabling cumulative knowledge-­building depends on the semantic codings of L1 and L2 being inversely related, with the strengths given above, or what may be termed the cumulative modality of semantics. The capacity for enabling knowledge-­building lies with this modality by virtue of what it does to meanings in empirical data and concepts. The cumulative modality lifts meaning out of the gravity well of a specific context through abstracting and condensing the principles underlying that context into a compact language, freeing up space in the discourse. It both ‘earths’ or concretises analysis and ‘fleshes out’ condensed concepts through a dialogue with the particularities of the context. What is crucial here is that it enables both the strengthening and weakening of both semantic gravity and semantic density, allowing meanings to be moved up and down both their continua of strengths, between abstract and concrete and between condensed and expanded. It does this within both the internal and external epistemic relations of a theory: between lower-­order and higher-­order concepts within the theory and between theory and data. The cumulative modality thus works as an elevator of meaning upwards and downwards through both internal and external languages. Crucially, it thereby enables the recontextualisation of knowledge. By moving up and down (or down and up) the continua of strengths of semantic gravity and semantic density, the cumulative modality enables knowledge to build across different contexts and over time. It does so because: 1 SG–, SD+ of the internal language enables both height in the vertical extension of the theory (its capacity to be integrative and generalising) and strengthens vertical relations within it (how well integrated each conceptual strata of the theory is with higher- and lower-­order concepts); and 2 SG+, SD– of the external language enables not only the theory to engage with the empirical (so it is not freely floating) but also horizontal extension of the empirical phenomena and range of substantive problems encompassed by the theory (use of the theory across an expanding range of different, segmented contexts). These two dimensions also underpin the dynamic nature of this mode of theorising. Its internal relations are characterised by each conceptualisation of abstract principles (e.g. +/–C, +/–F ) raising the question of what in turn generates those principles (e.g. the pedagogic device). Each answer raises a new question; each moment of theorisation pointing forward to a future

36   K. Maton moment of further theorising of greater generality, abstraction and condensation. Its external relations, based on a knowledge-­grammar, are characterised by each enactment of the theory within a new concrete problem situation enabling the specificities of that context to speak back to the theory. Each interaction between the theoretical and the substantive asks questions of the theory, so there are two stimuli to cumulative knowledge-­ building. In contrast, the mode of theorising exemplified by Bourdieu does not enjoy these stimuli because of its weaker vertical relations of condensation and abstraction between concepts and emphasis on a ‘cultivated gaze’ rather than an external language of description. Internally, the questions soon stop, constraining vertical extension of the theory. Externally, the knower-­ grammar of the actor’s ‘gaze’ offers a less explicit means for data to ‘speak back’ to theory. Its combination of strengths of semantic gravity and semantic density, which can be termed the segmental modality, tends towards horizontal development, both in terms of relations between concepts and the applications of these concepts across different topics. This is not to say that knowledge does not build in this modality, especially in the work of an individual author, but that it provides relatively weaker enabling conditions for cumulative knowledge-­building across an intellectual field. Bernstein and Bourdieu were arguably the strongest advocates in the sociology of education for building cumulative knowledge. Both thinkers argued for work in Sociology and Education to be a serious enterprise that should have something to say about the world and which should progress. However, I have shown that theorising in the cumulative modality better enables building knowledge across contexts and over time than the segmental modality. This is not to claim that Bernstein’s theory is exemplary or Bourdieu’s offers little. Bernstein was not always systematic in relating new to existing concepts, while Bourdieu was highly prolific in providing exemplary analyses for others to follow. My focus is on their modes of theorising and, specifically, their semantic codings. As such, this necessarily brief analysis simply aims to offer ideas that further our understanding of how ideas can advance. As Bourdieu (1990: 1) wrote, in the social sciences ‘the progress of knowledge presupposes progress in our knowledge of the conditions of knowledge’. In that spirit, the concepts put forward here build cumulatively on Bernstein’s framework to enable progress in ana­ lysing the cumulative development of ideas.

Notes 1 For example, Moore and Maton (2001), Maton (2009) and papers in Maton and Moore (2010). 2 For examples of external languages using Bernstein’s concepts, see Morais and Neves (2001), Morais et al. (2004) and Hoadley (2007). See Carvalho (2010), Chen (2010), Doherty (2008) and Lamont and Maton (2008) for examples drawing on Legitimation Code Theory, which extends Bernstein’s framework. The example analysed in this chapter is intended to be illustrative rather than exem-

Knowledge-building   37 plary. Though scholars using Bernstein have different ideas of what an L2 should comprise, the key issue for my analysis here is the ways it transforms meanings.

References Bennett, S. (2002) Learning about design in context: An investigation of learners’ interpretations and use of real life cases within a constructivist learning environment created to support authentic design activities. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Wollongong. Bernstein, B. (1977) Class, codes and control, volume III: Towards a theory of educational transmissions. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bernstein, B. (1990) Class, codes and control, volume IV: The structuring of pedagogic discourse. London, Routledge. Bernstein, B. (2000) Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity. Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. London, Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice. Cambridge, Polity. Bourdieu, P. (1992) Thinking about limits. Theory, Culture and Society 9: 37–49. Bourdieu, P. (1993a) Concluding remarks: For a sociogenetic understanding of intellectual works. In C. Calhoun, E. LiPuma and M. Postone (eds) Bourdieu: Critical perspectives. Cambridge, Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1993b) Sociology in question. London, Sage. Bourdieu, P. (1994) In other words: Essays towards a reflexive sociology. Cambridge, Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J.-C. (1977) Reproduction in education, society and culture. London, Sage. Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. J. D. (1992) An invitation to reflexive sociology. Cambridge, Polity Press. Bourdieu, P., Chamboredon, J.-C. and Passeron, J.-C. (1991). The craft of sociology: Epistemological preliminaries. Berlin, Walter de Gruyter. Carvalho, L. (2010) A sociology of informal learning in/about design. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Sydney. Chen, R. T.-S., (2010) Knowledge and knowers in online learning: Investigating the effects of online flexible learning on student sojourners. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Wollongong. Doherty, C. (2008), Student subsidy of the internationalized curriculum: Knowing, voicing and producing the Other. Pedagogy, Culture and Society 16 (3): 269–288. Hoadley, U. (2007) The reproduction of social class inequalities through mathematics pedagogies in South African primary schools. Journal of Curriculum Studies 39 (6): 679–706. Lamont, A. and Maton, K. (2008) Choosing music: Exploratory studies into the low uptake of music GCSE. British Journal of Music Education 25 (3): 267–282. Maton, K. (2000) Recovering pedagogic discourse: A Bernsteinian approach to the sociology of educational knowledge. Linguistics & Education 11 (1): 79–98. Maton, K. (2003) Reflexivity, relationism and research: Pierre Bourdieu and the epistemic conditions of social scientific knowledge. Space & Culture 6 (1): 52–65.

38   K. Maton Maton, K. (2005) The sacred and the profane: The arbitrary legacy of Pierre Bourdieu. European Journal of Cultural Studies 8 (1): 121–132. Maton, K. (2007) Knowledge–knower structures in intellectual and educational fields. In F. Christie and J. Martin (eds) Language, knowledge and pedagogy: Functional linguistic and sociological perspectives, 87–108. London, Continuum. Maton, K. (2008a) Knowledge-­building: How can we create powerful and influential ideas? Paper presented at Disciplinarity, Knowledge & Language: An international symposium, University of Sydney, December. Maton, K. (2008b) Habitus. In M. Grenfell (ed.) Pierre Bourdieu: Key concepts. London, Acumen. Maton, K. (2009) Cumulative and segmented learning: Exploring the role of curriculum structures in knowledge-­building. British Journal of Sociology of Education 30 (1): 43–57. Maton, K. (2010) Progress and canons in the arts and humanities: Knowers and gazes. In K. Maton and R. Moore (eds) Social realism, knowledge and the sociology of education: Coalitions of the mind, 154–178. London, Continuum. Maton, K. and Moore, R. (eds) (2010) Social realism, knowledge and the sociology of education: Coalitions of the mind. London, Continuum. Moore, R. (2001) Basil Bernstein: Theory, models and the question of method. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 4 (1): 13–16. Moore, R. (2006) Knowledge structures and intellectual fields: Basil Bernstein and the sociology of knowledge. In R. Moore, M. Arnot, J. Beck and H. Daniels (eds) Knowledge, power and educational reform: Applying the sociology of Basil Bernstein, 28–43. London, Routledge. Moore, R. (2010) Knowledge structures and the canon: A preference for judgements. In K. Maton and R. Moore (eds) Social realism, knowledge and the sociology of education: Coalitions of the mind, 131–153. London, Continuum. Moore, R. and Maton, K. (2001) Founding the sociology of knowledge: Basil Bernstein, intellectual fields and the epistemic device. In A. Morais, I. Neves, B. Davies and H. Daniels (eds) Towards a sociology of pedagogy, 153–182. New York, Peter Lang. Moore, R. and Muller, J. (2002) The growth of knowledge and the discursive gap. British Journal of Sociology of Education 23 (4): 627–637. Morais, A. and Neves, I. (2001) Pedagogical social contexts: Studies for a sociology of learning. In A. Morais, I. Neves, B. Davies and H. Daniels (eds) Towards a sociology of pedagogy, 185–213. New York, Peter Lang. Morais, A., Neves, I. and Pires, D. (2004) The what and the how of teaching and learning. In J. Muller, B. Davies and A. Morais (eds) Reading Bernstein, researching Bernstein, 75–90. London, Routledge. Muller, J. (2007) On splitting hairs: Hierarchy, knowledge and the school curriculum. In F. Christie and J. Martin (eds) Language, knowledge and pedagogy, 65–86. London, Continuum. Swartz, D. (1997) Culture and power: The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. London, University of Chicago Press. Wacquant, L. (1989) Towards a reflexive sociology: A workshop with Pierre Bourdieu. Sociological Theory 7 (1): 26–63. Young, M. F. D. and Muller, J. (2010) Knowledge and truth in the sociology of education. In K. Maton and R. Moore (eds) Social realism, knowledge and the sociology of education: Coalitions of the mind, 110–130. London, Continuum.

3 Social life in disciplines Johan Muller

It seems to me that we are driven to this, that logicality inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited. They must not stop at our own fate, but must embrace the whole community. This community, again, must not be limited, but must be extended to all races of beings with whom we can come into immediate or mediate intellectual relation. It must reach, however vaguely, beyond this geological epoch, beyond all bounds. He who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world is, as it seems to me, illogical in all his inferences collectively. Logic is rooted in the social principle. C. S. Peirce, retrieved from The Commens Dictionary of Peirce’s Terms: www.helsinki.fi/science/commens/dictionary, 14 December 2009.

Introduction This chapter is concerned with social life in disciplines. More specifically, it seeks to address the question: are evaluative cultures in disciplines able to generate stable judgements, irrespective of their knowledge structure, and despite shifting norms of truth and adequacy? Many in the humanities would doubt it (see Lamont, 2009). Furthermore, disciplines are semi-­virtual communities, and most members of the discipline will never know each other or meet face-­to-face, which makes the generation in all disciplinary evaluative cultures of a (relatively) stable basis for cognitive judgement all the harder to imagine for many sociologists. Recent work in the Bernsteinian scholarly community, including my own, has concentrated on relations ‘within’, on the internal structuring of knowledge fields. This has led to a set of interesting departures which have, in one or another way, stressed the intrinsic differences between knowledge structures (Maton and Moore, 2010). This work has opened up new areas of enquiry of critical importance for education but at the same time has deflected attention away from an equally important set of considerations that Basil Bernstein (1996: 170) flagged in his landmark paper on discourses, namely the question of their similarity, not their difference:

40   J. Muller I, on the contrary [marking out the distinctiveness of his approach from that of Bourdieu’s], want to point to their similarities. I am not concerned with fundamental similarities of logic. The similarity I have in mind refers to the role of distributive rules in both forms of knowledge and in the social relations which optimise the discourse. (emphasis added) It is the latter that is the concern of this chapter. Bernstein was referring to the forms of what he called ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ discourses. The analysis is by now well known. Within vertical discourse he further distinguished between horizontal and hierarchical knowledge structures, which make up the extended field of the disciplines, my composite conceptual object in this chapter. My own recent forays into the social organisation of discourse communities (Muller, 2008) has led me to re-­pose, for myself at least, the Durkheimian dictum that social relations and symbolic relations, relations ‘to’ and relations ‘within’, necessarily work in tandem. The first implication for this analysis is that if the discourse is symbolically vertical, so too then must be the social relations. To put that more formally: in order for a vertical discourse to be classed as a vertical discourse, there must always be a hierarchy of social relations composing the social life of the discourse. Whether this social hierarchy varies strictly with the hierarchy in the conceptual spine is often assumed but rarely shown, and implicit doubt has been cast on a simple view of concordance by the argument that since there are different kinds of ‘theory’ (‘subsumptability’) in the natural sciences and the humanities that perhaps social hierarchies might also look different in different disciplines (Young and Muller, 2007). Bourdieu (1988) has famously been concerned with hierarchy in scientific fields. Scientific standing in this hierarchy is objectively conferred by means of various forms of capital, and it creates in turn a disposition to match the position. This means that dispositions vary with positions. It is true that Bourdieu also discusses the scientific habitus in terms of a libido sciendi, a commitment to truth, but he nowhere speaks of a specific disciplinary consciousness that might account for stability of judgement, which is my concern here. I am concerned to show not only that disciplinarity implies hierarchy but that this hierarchy is constantly being instantiated by disciplinary judgements and, more controversially, that these judgements of variable worth are grounded in a more stable degree of consensus than an approach that starts with disciplinary differences or one that assumes that dispositions follow position might suggest. In what follows below, I will set out to establish these claims conceptually and illustrate them empirically. The concerns of the chapter grow out of my own relatively recent involvement in what can best be called the management of academic judgement. I have by drift rather than conscious decision become involved in a relatively wide variety of sites where disciplinary innovation is appraised, judged and

Social life in disciplines   41 arbitrated – from overseeing the assessment of examiner’s reports for master’s and doctoral theses, assessing the scientific contribution of research publications for the national Department of Education, to the assessment of the scientific standing of individual researchers on national panels in a range of disciplines for the National Research Foundation. I will discuss this latter instance in greater detail below, since it will form the basis for the empirical part of the chapter. In all of these activities I am constantly struck by how much faith is placed in the probity of anonymous judgement. I am struck by how an archipelago of rarely examined assumptions is taken on trust: for example, that relatively neophyte members can judge a paper submission with the same sure judgement as a seasoned senior, for example; or that members in societies and economies routinely judged as different (more or less developed, say) can exercise disciplinary judgement that concurs in all the important ways. I am pointing here to the generalised faith academics display in the reality of the disciplinary community as a global social system when they accept, for example, judgements from editorial boards on article submissions, from panels on proposal submissions and judgements from selection and tenure panels. In all these decisions, real judgements have real consequences for the disciplinary field and its members. If we accept that, to what extent can we go on to claim that they operate as a social system? What are the parameters of that sociality? It is illuminating to turn to Durkheim.

Social life in disciplines after Durkheim The path to analysing disciplinary life is strewn with what Merton (1992: 419) has called ‘instructive ambiguities’. The first ambiguity of consequence here is that academic identity is constitutively multiple (Henkel, 2000). Academics undergo apprenticeship and induction into disciplines, and their consciousness is specialised into disciplinary ‘thought collectives’ (Fleck, 1979); yet empirically they live in universities, which hire, fire and retire them under social conditions far removed from the life of the mind of their primary sociality, the disciplinary community. In another view, academics might be said to live in universities for teaching purposes but in scientific or scholarly communities for research purposes. These views might lead to the conclusion that disciplines are not socially real, and are no more than an abstract archive or set of cognitive resources for solving social problems, for generating new perspectives and so forth. This view assumes a pragmatic, empirical view of sociality where agreement-­generation requires face-­to-face interaction (see Lamont, 2009). The Durkheimian and Bernsteinian view goes beyond this, as I hope to show below. Randall Collins (1990: 109) remarks that for Durkheim, ‘society’ is ‘any instance of prolonged sociation, whatever its boundaries in space and time’. It is defined by rituals which establish a

42   J. Muller girdle of sanctity . . . protecting the domain from any trespass by outsiders. To cross this zone and enter the little island insulated from the rest of the land by ritual, was reserved for those alone who had carried out the rites. (Durkheim, 1973: 171) For each ‘society’ then, the question becomes: what are the rites and what kind of sociality do they constitute? In the Durkheimian canon, societies can be differentiated in terms of their degree of internal differentiation. Low-­differentiation societies have few levels of hierarchy, the collective conscience is characterised by cognitive reification, there is high moral density and strong pressures to conform, and consequently low degrees of complexity and autonomy. The resultant form of solidarity Durkheim calls ‘mechanical’. In high-­differentiation societies, there are many levels of hierarchy, there is less cognitive reification, the moral density is low, policed by formalistic and restitutive regulations, and there is a high degree of complexity and autonomy. This generates organic solidarity. The virtue of seeing social life in these terms does not lie in polarising them into frozen opposites. In organic societies mechanical sociality or its vestiges lives on under the overlay of organic sociality (Collins, 1998: 790). As Durkheim noted in The Division of Labour: ‘Social life (in any society) comes from a double source: from the likeness of consciences and the division of social labour’ (Durkheim, 1973: 110). Translated, that means that if we consider disciplines as mini-­societies, we need to consider both their mechanical rituals and their organic rituals, both the rituals that establish similitude (likeness of consciences) and the rituals that establish difference, distinction and hierarchy. From this viewpoint, social life in disciplines can be seen as comprising protracted periods of humdrum organic labour in the trenches of teaching and research, punctuated by episodes of more formal organic ritual – being asked to serve on a dissertation committee, for instance, or reviewing a paper or grant submission. These Goffmanian backstage organic rituals together constitute the ceaseless work of hierarchy, symbolically and socially. They are interrupted by periodic front-­stage rituals like annual conferences, which can be considered as atavistic mechanical rituals in that they generate a paradoxical communal sense of the discipline and its collective membership in a social milieu of specialisation and differential achievement. These are face-­ to-face rituals of frisson and effervescence (Durkheim, 1995), generating a sense of renewal and renewed enthusiasm for the discipline, rituals of similitude against the backdrop of the more anonymous, formalistic, organic rituals of difference. Together this ritualised composite – of predominantly organic back-­stage rituals studded by periodic, vivid effervential rituals – creates the curious dual mentality of disciplinary being, that of being a peer (relations of similitude) in a hierarchical social structure (relations of difference).

Social life in disciplines   43 Bourdieu (1988) endeavours, in ways reminiscent of Freud’s account of the self-­deception of repression, to explain how members come to accept, if not like, a lowly status in the hierarchy amid the illusio of peerness, but the account is ultimately unconvincing. With palpable rewards for high status in the offing, why would anyone agree to defer the highest rewards? Stephen Cole (1983, 1994) makes two useful distinctions that help us in this regard. The first is between the core of a discipline and its frontier. The core is the repository of knowledge accepted by all disciplinary members; the frontier is where all researchers labour to discover something that will make it into the core. Very little produced at the frontier ever makes it into the core. It follows that there is always more consensus in the core than at the periphery. Cole (1983) goes on to show that when people talk about the difference of consensus between disciplines, they are talking about consensus in the core; because there is a larger core in the natural sciences, there is a larger consensus than in the social sciences or humanities. This recalls the Bernsteinian distinction between hierarchical and horizontal knowledge structures. However, Cole crucially goes on to claim that ‘My data shows that, at the research frontier the social sciences display as much consensus as the natural sciences’ (ibid.: 136). In other words, ‘there are no large systematic differences in the type of consensus between fields’ (ibid.: 120), which leads him to the conclusion that ‘consensus at the research frontier is created and maintained by social processes which tend to be similar in the various scientific fields’ (ibid.: 136). Consensus is thus a ‘necessary condition’ (ibid.) for doing scientific or scholarly work. This is the formal corollary of the Bernsteinian dictum that all vertical discourse has a recontextualising principle in the symbolic structure; therefore it also produces a necessary degree of consensus in the social structure. Cole also distinguishes in Parsonian vein between normative and functional integration. Normative integration refers to the degree of cognitive consensus in a field, functional integration to the degree of mechanical solidarity. These do not vary together; mathematicians, for example, have high cognitive consensus – they can all agree for example that Fermat’s Theorem has now been solved – but they rarely if ever all go to the same conferences: they have high normative verticality but horizontal functional solidarity, as Bernstein (1996) said. Educationalists are the opposite: they have vanishingly small normative integration, but many of them go to huge jamboree conferences like AERA to be with people with whom they have very little intellectually in common.

Disciplines or networks? I have so far established that disciplines must necessarily be able to produce consensus. I have also established that consensus is greatest in the core, yet it is at the frontier that new knowledge is produced. Here too a necessary degree of consensus must operate. Most of the recent sociology of science has

44   J. Muller followed Kuhn (1970) in studying scientific networks, ‘invisible colleges’ (Crane, 1972), elite conclaves of scholars who produce the next core consensus (see also Collins and Evans, 2002). This is sociology of science as the study of local networks in contextual, local sites, with face-­to-face routines and rituals and tacit local knowledges as the propulsive forces. In some quarters science became described as just another local variety of mechanical solidarity. With that, the universalistic project of organic sociality disappears from view. In his Foreword to Fleck’s (1979) late published classic, Kuhn draws attention to the distinction between ‘scientific networks’ and what Fleck called ‘thought collectives’, which Kuhn dubbed a ‘hypostatized fiction’. Fleck, for his part, was trying to capture the ethos of a virtual community whose conditions of thinking and judging did not depend on face-­to-face interaction, analogous too to C. S. Peirce’s notion of community (see Peirce, 1931; Young and Muller, 2008). It is this sense of a larger ‘thought collective’ of scholars I am trying to grasp in this chapter, a collective which includes the most visible and eminent in the discipline’s ‘core set’ of experts (Collins and Evans, 2002) to the most neophyte and anonymous struggling for recognition at the frontier. As argued above, whether the discipline is weakly or strongly normatively integrated, I share Cole’s view that in order to be a discipline at all, a minimal degree of consensus must be present, a weakly shared sense of appropriate recontextualisation, in order for the collective not to resolve back into the segmental forms of mechanical solidarity. This consensus may take no more form than a shared sensibility, but it must extend across space and time, and be shared by past as well as present members. In other words, the sensibility must endure beyond the sustaining effervescences of face-­to-face rituals (Cole, 1983). This cannot be captured by the concept of ‘network’ without some contortion. More controversially perhaps, I make the claim that judgement consensus ‘at the frontier’, as Cole (1983) has it, is not necessarily the result of pragmatic or other adjustments in face-­to-face settings as the micro-­sociological tradition has it (Lamont, 2009). Rather, it denotes a sensibility anchored in the thought habits (Fleck’s ‘denkstijl’) acquired during induction into a disciplinary social division of labour, where we might say, following Peirce, Durkheim and of course Bernstein, that the intersemiosis is highly mediated. Besides Bernstein’s breakthrough analysis of discourse, the most significant other recent contribution to the sociological characterisation of intellectual life in Durkheimian vein has been Randall Collins’s (1998) epic, an Elementary Forms for our times. Here we see Collins struggling with this self-­ same instructive ambiguity – disciplines or networks? Taking his cue from the Elementary Forms, which characterises religious life in mechanical societies, Collins begins at the micro-­social level: ‘Intellectual life hinges on face-­ to-face situations because interaction rituals can take place only on this level’ (ibid.: 26). Interaction rituals are key because they generate the effervescence

Social life in disciplines   45 and emotional energy necessary to create enduring ‘intellectual sacred objects’. Collins would seem to be planting his flag firmly in network territory, but not much later we find him accounting for the generation of novel ideas in this way: Thinking is a conversation with imaginary audiences . . . High degrees of intellectual creativity come from realistically invoking existing or prospective audiences, offering what the marketplace for ideas will find most in demand . . . creative individuals experience such interaction rituals inside their head. (ibid.: 52) Collins drifts here closer to a Peircian and Durkheimian account of mental frisson in differentiated organic social collectives, a drift he seems to acknowledge: ‘An intellectual network is a community of implicit awareness amongst its members . . . As Durkheim held, abstraction [in differentiated collectives] develops so as to maintain unification across diverseness’ (ibid.: 790). Collins spends much of his masterwork tracing networks, not too surprising since influence in implicit communities is hard to illustrate empirically, as Cole (1983) also remarks. However, he continually drifts back to the ‘invisible community’ (ibid.: 790), to ‘imaginary rituals’ (ibid.: 52) and the ‘vicarious community of the mind’ (ibid.: 34: see Hugo’s (2009) interesting account of a Bernsteinian sub-­community in analogous terms). Collins is not alone in equivocating between the two. When Bourdieu (1988: 25) describes ‘the discrete polemics of academic hatred’ and E. P. Thompson (1980: 15) ‘the dull thud of academic knives in other academic backs’ it is hard to know whether they are talking about rivalries of priority in the discipline, or local rivalries in the departmental tea-­room. Similarly, in countless evaluative panels discussing the merits of this or that candidate, the debate crops up – is the candidate well-­known because of the impact of her work, or is she well-­known because she is highly visible on the circuit? Does the candidate have standing based on originality and priority, or is it personal reputation based on skilfully working the networks? In this chapter I am interested solely in standing, not reputation; the focus is on position in a differentiated social division of labour, not in popularity in segmental networks.

Recognition and priority The scientific field is unique in that its principal regulative and governing mode is disinterestedness: ‘to be in a scientific field is to be placed in conditions in which one has an interest in disinterestedness’ (Bourdieu, 2004: 52). This is not optional, and it implies ‘unconstrained submission to the imperative of disinterestedness’ (ibid.: 51). This is the illusio or belief in the game central to the scientific habitus. One cannot be a scientist without it.

46   J. Muller The sanctions attendant on its infraction, on scientific fraud or plagiarism discovered, are reputationally ruinous. At the same time, however, and propelling the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, is the desire for priority, to be first with original new knowledge and to be recognised for it. The illusio of disinterestedness routinely propels scientists to disavow this desire for priority, but history is full of awkward evidence to the contrary. When the Double Helix first appeared, the scientific community was scandalised to see in print Watson unashamedly crow about the fact that he and Crick had pipped Linus Pauling to the Nobel post. Ernest Jones, Freud’s biographer has said: ‘Freud was never interested in questions of priority, which he found merely boring’ (Merton, 1992: 385). But there are no less than 150 recorded instances where Freud obsessed about priority, even dreaming about it (ibid.: 386). Freud notoriously also feuded with Adler, Jung and Breuer about questions of priority (with the latter about the concept of repression). Newton was, despite all the lustre heaped on him in his lifetime, obsessed with establishing his originality. His contemporaries, among them Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed, found him ‘always insidious, ambitious, and excessively covetous of praise’ (Merton, 1992: 394). His lifelong attempt to establish the priority of his invention of calculus (when he was just 23) over Leibnitz’s rival claim (Cassirer, 1943) led him to mount at least 12 defences in print of his claim. Eventually, when president of the Royal Society, he packed the committee with his supporters, himself writing the preface to the report, anonymously, which declared him the winner (Merton, 1992: 335). Such was the value placed on originality already in Newton’s time. From the examples already given it should be clear that at the top of the tree, at the head of the discipline, rivals will be intimately known to each other. The rivalry is consequently all the more personal and frequently bitter, a bitterness laced with real or perceived feelings of betrayal: Freud (Adler and Jung among others), Darwin (Wallace) and a host of others whose reputations we, from the vantage point of history, regard as secure. At least, as we might say today, they knew face-­to-face who their peers and rivals were. In the middle strata of eminence, contact with and knowledge of all the relevant peers is more uncertain, and competition, perhaps less vicious, is also more anonymous. At the lower or entry reaches of the field, the anonymity can seem crushing, and the question of eminence or standing must leave the reflexive neophyte with a feeling of oppressive anxiety as to how to break through into visibility. This would be all the more the case in low-­ codified/autonomy fields like sociology, where getting noticed is much more difficult because the criteria for recognising novelty are all the more blurred and indistinct. One might conclude from the above that the pursuit of priority was a quaint pathology of scientists, were it not for the fact that it is indelibly fused with the drive for new knowledge: ‘the deep concern with establishing priority or at least independence of discovery is only the other side of the

Social life in disciplines   47 coin of the socially reinforced elation that comes with having arrived at a new and true scientific idea or result’ (Merton, 1992: 401). Risking trivialisation, one might say that the promise of recognition is the nectar that keeps the worker bees going in the science hive. It is not to be regarded as an optional extra, for it is fused to knowledge growth: ‘Rather than being mutually exclusive, joy in discovery and eagerness for recognition by scientific peers are stamped out of the same psychological coin’ (ibid.: 402). They can both express a basic commitment to the value of advancing knowledge. Or as Bourdieu might have put it, achievement (what you have produced) and recognition (what the peer community recognises as the worth of what you have produced) are obverse sides of the coin of scientific capital. Not the one without the other, and no new knowledge without both.

Putting peer judgement to the test The chapter has so far produced arguments in support of two claims about disciplines. The first is that, as organic solidarity forms, they exhibit differentiation which is hierarchical. The second is that this hierarchy is produced in the exercise of disciplinary judgement, that this judgement exhibits a certain minimum measure of agreement or consensus, and that this consensus does not need face-­to-face contact in order to meet the consensus condition. In the rest of the chapter, I set out to investigate whether disciplinary peers, who do not necessarily know the candidates they are evaluating, are able to judge the standing of candidates on the basis of the quality of their published work, and that these judgements exhibit an acceptable degree of consensus. In order to get an indication of whether the discipline operates as a global field, I will also investigate the degree of consensus between local peers (peers from South Africa) and international peers from other countries. The South African National Research Foundation (NRF ) is a statutory body dedicated to ‘nurture scholarship and grow the country’s research capacity’ (NRF, 2007: 4). Among its various functions, such as awarding research grants, it has also, since 1984, run an evaluation and rating system of individual researchers not unlike systems in New Zealand and Mexico. The rating is entirely voluntary, although institutions have been known to put pressure on researchers to submit an application, and many offer financial rewards for rating. The ratings categories are simple, as shown in Table 3.1. There are two kinds of A and three each of B and C. Nevertheless, these are the main categories. The rest are residual categories of various kinds of ‘promise’ which will not be explored further here. Two points are relevant: • The classifications are defined solely in terms of the criterion of ‘peer recognition’; • The system is based wholly on peer-­review reports, but although the

48   J. Muller Table 3.1  The NRF rating classification

A

‘Researchers who are unequivocally recognised by their peers as leading international scholars in the field for the high quality and impact of their recent research outputs’.

Leading international researchers

B

‘Researchers who enjoy considerable Internationally acclaimed researchers international recognition by their peers for the high quality and impact of their recent research outputs’.

C

‘Established researchers with a sustained recent record of productivity in the field who are recognised by their peers as having produced’: •  A body of quality work; •  The ability to conceptualise.

Established researchers.

peers are asked to comment on quality and standing, they do not actually rate the candidates as A, B, C. This is done by Specialist Panels who review all reports (between six and ten normally, though it can be fewer), decide on what each report means to say (‘this one is saying a low B’, for example) and decide on an overall score for each candidate. This score is moderated by an outside Assessor and by an outside Chair. The Secretariat records the consensus vote, or refers the rating to the Executive Committee for arbitration. There is an appeals process. Everything hangs then on the peers, how they are chosen and how seriously they take the task. Candidates are asked to nominate up to six possible reviewers. The panel finalises a set, with the rule of thumb being about half from the candidate’s list, the other half those deemed appropriate by the Panel. There is no extra check on appropriateness. The data pool was the set of reviews for the applicants for NRF rating in three disciplines in 2007, Law, Psychology and Historical Studies (henceforth ‘History’). As described above, each reviewer will have been specially handpicked to judge the standing of each candidate. Here I am not interested at all in the candidates and their eventual ratings, although it is informative to see the distribution of ratings and hence the calibre of the pool in any given year. The choice of discipline was not guided by any strong assumptions. My supposition would be that all disciplines should display the effects I am investigating; there are no strong reasons to suppose that knowledge structure should play a part. To recall the beginning of the chapter – these are all vertical discourses, and like Bernstein, I am interested in similarities not dif-

Social life in disciplines   49 Table 3.2  Local and international peer reviews by discipline in 2007

Disciplines

No. of candidates

Local reviews

International reviews

Psychology Law History

22 29 14

58 65 38

  58 100   68

Table 3.3  Ratings in the disciplines in 2007

Disciplines

A

B

C

Other

Psychology Law History

– 4 –

 6 12  3

13 11  9

3 2 2

ferences. It might well have been better to have had a wider spread of disciplines, but I also wanted to keep the number manageable in order to explore whether field effects would show up at all before I took the full array of disciplines. I proceeded by constructing a linear scale for the ratings from 1 to 12, and giving each rating a numerical score as shown in Table 3.4. I then coded all the ratings for each of the disciplines, by local or international rating. The data was transferred into an MS Access database to create output files for simple statistical analysis.

Results and analysis First the means and standard deviations were calculated. The joint interdisciplinary means for international and local judgements respectively (5.35; 3.73) indicates a fairly impressive-­looking difference consistent with the second hypothesis: the internationals score almost 2 points above the locals. The standard deviations (SDs) for locals and internationals (2.80 and 2.76) are very similar which permits further analysis using an ANOVA test. There is more variability in the SDs within the disciplines (History: 2.71; Law: 3.02; Psychology: 2.46), with Law on the high side, Psychology the lowest. Table 3.4  Transforming ratings into numerical scores Rating

RU RU/C, C C/RU,C−

Numerical score 0

1

Note ‘RU’ means rating unsuccessful.

2

C+ C/B B/C B− B

B+ B/A A/B

A− A

3

8

11

4

5

6

7

9

10

12

50   J. Muller The differences between the disciplinary means are also quite suggestive (Law 5.52; History 4.23; Psychology 3.57). On the basis of the above, it was decided to test the hypothesis using a factorial ANOVA calculated using least squares means by the sequential (Type III) method. The results confirm that internationals were rating more generously than locals. The question then arises: if there are indeed significant differences between the local and international judgements in each of the disciplines, are these random, or do the local and international judgements correlate systematically down the judgements for each of the candidates? This would tell us whether the local and internationals were operating in the same ‘thought collective’ or not. Pearson’s correlation coefficient was calculated for the following comparisons: (i) All local vs. all international (r = 0.76; p = 0.0001); (ii) History local vs. History international (r = 0.93; r2 = 0.86; p = 0.0001): (iii) Law local vs. Law international (r = 0.82; r2 = 0.67; p = 0.0001): (iv) Psychology local vs. Psychology international (r = 0.46; r2 = 0.21; p = 0.0400). The correlations within discipline and across locality are all acceptable which indicates a significant relationship between local and international scores. The correlation for all disciplines across locality is slightly weaker (0.76) but still strong. The weaker correlation when all disciplines are grouped can be explained by the extra variability introduced by the different disciplines. We can infer that the internationals and locals were rating the same attributes, just at a different level of generosity or strictness.

Conclusion: the discrete charms of noblesse oblige In contrast to what happens when one classifies beetles, one is here classifying classifiers who do not accept being classified, who may even dispute the criteria of classification or the very principle of classification, in the name of principles of classification which themselves depend on their positions within the classifications. (Bourdieu, 2004: 93) Across three diverse disciplines, then, the Pearson correlation results reveal a real concordance of judgement between local peer reviewers who belong to the national disciplinary community – in Kipling’s phrase, the folks ‘over the way’ – and those who for want of a better term I have called internationals – the folk who ‘live over the sea’. On the one hand, why should one find this surprising? We all, after all, belong to the same community of discourse. Yet it remains impressive that across a geographically diverse set of judges who nominally share a disciplinary label, most of whom have never met one another, apparently judge recognition and standing in measurably similar ways. All the more impressive since these three disciplines – Law,

Social life in disciplines   51 Psychology and History – are not regarded as among the ‘harder’ of the disciplines, and where originality is consequently less easy to identify (Merton, 1992). I am tempted to suggest that the results show a certain objectivity of judgement operating here. Another way of putting it: it seems from these results that when asked to act as a peer, that is, to conduct oneself as an authorised representative of the field for the purpose of rendering a judgement of worth and standing on behalf of the field, noblesse oblige kicks in – the responsibilities attendant on you yourself having attained recognition and standing in the field. At the level of the collective, I take the results as lending support to Bernstein’s position that vertical discourse – disciplines – display hierarchy at the social as well as at the symbolic level, and that the instantiation of this hierarchy is an ongoing collective accomplishment of the community itself. In closing, let me reflect briefly on the recognition-­anxiety of our field’s two titans, Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein. Bourdieu throughout his life felt that he didn’t ‘fit in’, and was nowhere properly appreciated for what he had tried to do; or perhaps he could not accept the recognition because he himself knew what he had not managed to do. He had what he called a ‘cleft habitus’, which can be loosely translated as a love/hate relationship with the institution of education. This led him to forgo a promising career as a philosopher, and to try to make a full go of the then budding discipline of sociology, to make it into a science, to remain committed to the rationalist vision – rather than simply using the social sciences, like Foucault or Derrida, so as to reduce them or destroy them, while practising them without saying so and without paying the price of a genuine conversion to the constraints and demands of empirical research. (2004: 106) Yet for all his achievements, he feels that what has gone unrecognised was his ‘overarching intention of a collective, cumulative scientific project, which would integrate the theoretical and technical advances of the discipline in a logic akin to that of the natural sciences’ (ibid.: 108), with the field largely preferring to see his research group as a ‘sect’. Much the same could be said for Basil Bernstein. His early stellar trajectory of recognition was all but derailed by the wilful misunderstanding of sociolinguists like Rosen and Labov, but through patient theory-­building together with his PhD students, he persevered, and the collective body of work that we now have cannot easily be ignored or dislodged. This is increasingly being recognised outside the circles of the Bernstein priests and heretics (see, for example, Gewirtz and Cribb, 2009). Indeed, most of us have built our reputations on the back of this giant. The thrust of this chapter is that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. The ethical imperative is simply to give credit where credit is due, as we hope to be

52   J. Muller credited and judged when the time periodically comes around for peer judgement.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Liesel Collins for help with data capture, Caroline Duff-­Riddell for help with the statistics, and Colin Tredoux for sage advice on how the numbers should run.

References Bernstein, B. (1996) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity, London: Taylor & Francis. Bourdieu, P. (1988) Homo Academicus, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (2004) Science of Science and Reflexivity, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cassirer, E. (1943) ‘Newton and Leibnitz’, The Philosophical Review, 52, 4: 366–391. Cole, S. (1983) ‘The hierarchy of the sciences?’ American Journal of Sociology, 89, 1: 111–139. Cole, S. (1994) ‘Why sociology doesn’t make progress like the natural sciences’, Sociological Forum, 9, 2: 133–154. Collins, R. (1990) ‘The Durkheimian tradition in conflict sociology’, in J. C. Alexander (ed.), Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, R. (1998) The Sociology of Philosophies: A global theory of intellectual change, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Collins, H. and Evans, R. (2002) ‘The third wave of science studies: Studies of expertise and experience’, Social Studies of Science, 32, 2: 235–296. Crane, D. (1972) Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Durkheim, E. (1973) On Morality and Society: Selected writings, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Durkheim, E. (1995) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. K. Fields, New York: The Free Press. Fleck, L. (1979) Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. T. Trenn and R. Merton, foreword T. Kuhn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gewirtz, S. and Cribb, A. (2009) Understanding Education: A sociological perspective, Cambridge: Polity Press. Henkel, M. (2000) Academic Identities and Policy Change in Higher Education, London: Jessica Kingsley. Hugo, W. (2009) ‘Spiraling reference: A case study of apprenticeship into an academic community of practice’, South African Journal of Higher Education, 23, 4. Kuhn, T. S. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lamont, M. (2009) How Professors Think: Inside the curious world of academic judgment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maton, K. and Moore, R. (eds) (2010) Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education: Coalitions of the mind, London: Continuum.

Social life in disciplines   53 Merton, R. K. (1992) The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and empirical investigations, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Muller, J. (2008) ‘La tension essentielle: essai sur la sociology du savoir’, in D. Frandji and P. Vitale (eds), Actualité de Basil Bernstein: Savoir, Pédagogie et Société, Rennes: University of Rennes Press: 182–191. National Research Foundation. (2007) Evaluation and Rating: Facts & figures 2007. Pretoria. Peirce, C. S. (1931–1958) Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 volumes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thompson, E. P. (1980) Writing by Candlelight, London: Merlin. Young, M. and Muller, J. (2007) ‘Truth and truthfulness in the sociology of educational knowledge’, Theory & Research in Education, 5, 2: 173–201. Young, M. and Muller, J. (2008) ‘The cosmic community: A response to Maria Balarin’s “Post-­structuralism, realism and the question of knowledge in educational sociology” ’, Policy Futures in Education, 6, 4: 519–523.

4 Knowledge theory and praxis On the Anglo-­French debate on reproduction Daniel Frandji and Philippe Vitale

Introduction Our purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, we seek to make a case for the relevance of Bernstein’s sociological enterprise both for current research in education and in the context of recent directions taken by educational policy-­makers in most of the developed countries of the world. Our second and more particular purpose is to consider them in the light of some of the most important debates in current French scholarship, not least in the hope that they become more accessible to an English-­reading audience. It is important to note that in setting this target we are merely extending one of the features of Bernstein’s sociology which is built, to a not insignificant extent, on an unfaltering engagement with French sociological research. Reading in French was never an easy task for him, yet his firm and productive commitment was to engage as closely as possible with research which he sometimes referred to, perhaps somewhat hastily, as ‘Parisian versions of the sociology of reproduction’ (Bernstein, 2000: 5). Not only did Bernstein read all of Bourdieu’s works, he also displayed keen interest in the work of Bourdieu’s heirs and opponents. Yet there is a striking paradox here for, while in France Bernstein’s work has long been caricatured and undermined by misunderstandings of Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 1 (1971), translated and published in France in 1975, the label ‘Parisian versions of the sociology of reproduction’ has frequently served, for English-­speaking sociologists, to conceal his three decades of reflection on, beyond and against Bourdieu’s sociology. The object of our endeavour is to contribute to renewed critical engagement with French sociology by outlining, for the purposes of illustration, some post-­Bourdieu sociological directions and ‘voices’ that may gain from a comparison with Bernstein’s analyses. We intend to highlight some little-­ known facts about French sociology by outlining alternative sociological directions among the many that can be seen to lie at the margins of Bourdieu’s work. We wish to draw attention to relationships between certain logics that are specific to the intellectual field, such as the visibility/invis­ ibility of academic research and current political, social and discursive shifts

Knowledge theory and praxis   55 within educational systems. In other words, this chapter is driven by an interest in issues in the sociology of knowledge, though it also addresses issues raised by the profound transformation observed in current discourses on education in particular and sociology in general. We readily acknowledge our commitment to the biased and partial nature of this outline, a full development of which is beyond the scope of this chapter. Moreover, the subjectivity and possible incompleteness of this approach needs to be acknowledged, and we may run the risk of being criticised for the ‘bookishness’ of our presentation.

Bourdieu and Bernstein In our view, one of the major interests of Bernstein’s work is its capacity to reconsider and render operational ordinary sociological positionings through the elaboration of a praxeological sociology which implies conceptualisation of the social as action and elaboration of a descriptive language. This approach enables us, among other things, to articulate and integrate different levels of observation (micro–meso–macro), structural relationships and pragmatic dimensions, as well as issues of change and possibility in sociological analysis. In providing a theory of action and praxis concerning both order and change Bernstein’s approach draws on ‘classical’ sociological tradition, particularly the generic questioning of the French Durkheimian school concerning the possible conditions of social order. What he refuses and what generates a particular dynamic in his work are models that underlie theories of socialisation that are based ultimately ‘on some mystical process of “internalisation” of values, roles and dispositions’ (Bernstein, 2000: 89). He repositions these at the heart of theoretical reflection and empirical analysis in his project elaborating a theory of internal observation of social pedagogical practice which seeks to give voice to the events, knowledges within it, not merely those that are held to determine its character from without. Bernstein’s constant engagement and debate with Bourdieu’s work was driven not only by the many differences between his own work and developments at that time under way in the name of the sociologies of education and reproduction but also by his ambition to elaborate a ‘theory of praxis’. These sociologies raised serious issues since they sought to denounce the continued existence of social inequalities or the perpetuation of relations of domination but failed to provide an analysis of the factors which enable power to be maintained, making no attempt to reconstruct what these phenomena tend to alter or prevent in terms of possible action and democratically shared knowledge. In the context of Bourdieu’s sociology, this emphasis, which we might call ‘domino-­centred’ (see below for further elaboration), is somewhat paradoxical, since it constitutes an aporia at the very heart of critical social science that seeks to be guided by an interest in emancipatory knowledge (Habermas, 1970). How might anyone claim to liberate

56   D. Frandji and P. Vitale actors from what their analytical framework tends ultimately to define as a constitutive feature of any social relation, i.e. ‘symbolic violence’ (Girard, 1996)? How might knowledge of the most probable or likely (reproduction) enable the advent of other possibles, if the latter are not granted any status within the theory (Muller, 2010; Rochex, 2010)? The problem of closure towards such concerns is particularly apparent in the development of Bourdieu’s ideas between the publication in 1964 of The Inheritors and Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture in 1970. In The Inheritors, the object of criticism is not school culture in itself so much as relations with this culture, particularly those regarded as having a charismatic basis. The concept of symbolic violence which serves to account for issues of social inequalities in school appears to be not a characteristic of all pedagogical action so much as a feature of some of its forms in practice. In the conclusion to The Inheritors, Bourdieu and Passeron make a claim for the rationalisation of school work, focusing on potential ‘democratisation’ of the school system, requiring the elaboration of an ‘explicit pedagogy’ that might act as an alternative to the ‘implicit pedagogy’ observed in practice. These categories recall the opposition between visible and invisible pedagogies articulated by Bernstein (1973) in one of his very few articles published in French (Bernstein, 1975), written while he was a visiting scholar at the Centre de Sociologie Européenne headed by Bourdieu. Yet six years on, the discussion had altogether disappeared from view in Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, the first axiomatic proposition of which tends to essentialise reality far more than it serves to outplay it: here, all pedagogical action is objectively conceived as a form of symbolic violence. While a detailed history of the development and diffusion of these two key conceptual oppositions, visible/invisible and explicit/implicit, has yet to be done, there remains one certainty: Bernstein’s views on theories of reproduction, particularly ‘Parisian versions’, were still very firm, at best, tending merely to provide a diagnostic, since they articulate a diagnostic school pathology that lacked a theory of description (Bernstein, 2000). He reminds us of the need to re-­articulate the conceptual framework of habitus and fields, the theory of pedagogical practice as ‘symbolic violence’ and of cultural distance and cultural relativism, whose diagnoses are supported by ideas having explanatory intent but which serve in the end merely to erect into a law and nomological statement what is merely collectively maintained and, therefore, potentially alterable social construction. We will see how this criticism may still apply to current sociologies elaborated in France, even though claiming in some way or another to imply revision of Bourdieu’s theory. The fact is that the recent publication in French of Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity (2007) has not yet helped to widen the debate beyond a small, albeit highly productive, community of researchers who have been engaging with Bernstein’s theory for a number of years. In itself, the mere articulation of the model of ‘pedagogical rights’ that opens the volume and tends to direct sociological work towards an epistemology that is particu-

Knowledge theory and praxis   57 larly intent on avoiding the pitfalls of dominocentrism and relativism is merely an agenda. Yet it pertains primarily to a relational form of reasoning that is careful to avoid essentialising and systematising past statistical regularities or, indeed, any kind of observable data, such as provides a rebuke to much past and present French sociology of education and is capable of inspiring new standards of theory and research practice in questioning necessity.

Bourdieu: reflections and critiques Since the publication of Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, research has struggled somewhat to operationalise alternative paradigms, a very brief overview of which are given below. Some work has sought to develop analyses by elaborating concepts and defining tools that appear to both complement and confront Bernstein’s theory. Revisions by former collaborators In 1989, the publication of Le Savant et le Populaire (Grignon and Passeron, 1989) produced some fruitful reflections on Bourdieu’s theory of cultural legitimacy, primarily those developed in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Bourdieu, 1984) and the operationalisibility of the concept of ‘symbolic domination’. Grignon and Passeron rejected the notion of cultural and scientific relativism gaining widespread acceptance in the social sciences, identifying two alternative stances in research on the culture of dominated groups regarding the need to see dominated culture as autonomous and popular, that is to say, as a culture in its own right; and analyse it from the perspective of the dominating, prevailing culture which defines and shapes it. However, they recognised that two pitfalls of these alternatives were ‘miserabilism’ and populism. Based on several studies of Bourdieu’s theories of class-­based practices, they argue that the meaning of cultural differences is ultimately tantamount to the different strengths of social groups. A theory of cultural legitimacy is an attempt to objectify the cultural arbitrariness of dominating class meanings, in doing so, legitimising dominating culture and failing to isolate and define dominated culture and constituting a form of dominocentrism, i.e. a form of legitimisation that arises when sociologists analyse a culture viewed as ‘popular’ or ‘dominated’ exclusively from the perspective of the dominated culture. The concept of ‘cultural capital’, widely used after Bourdieu, incorporates this legitimising and dominocentred character. The work of Luc Boltanski, one of Bourdieu’s former collaborators, provides a second theoretical development. Along with Laurent Thévenot, Boltanski had initially set out to make a case for the need to move away from a sociology of critique or ‘paradigm of revelation’ towards a ‘critical sociology of society’ (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991). This sociological paradigm has

58   D. Frandji and P. Vitale since developed significantly as a result of a large number of empirical studies in a range of different areas aiming to break away from dominocentrism which renders invisible different kinds of relations, such as cooperation, love, friendship and sense of justice which are all irreducible to relations of domination. Boltanski (2009) seeks to re-­articulate the two approaches, the sociology of critique and domination and the pragmatic sociology of critique, and his latest research entails a novel conceptualisation of the notion of emancipation that still needs to be confronted with Bernstein’s model. Passeron (1991) adopted a more distinctly epistemological position in Le Raisonnement Sociologique, which presented an impassioned analysis of the contemporary sociological landscape and indicated abandonment of the Bachelardian claims of The Craft of Sociology (1968) to the possibility of nomological sociology. Passeron realigned himself with Weberian epistemology, asserting the historicity of sociology in which there can be no such thing as normative, empirical description or isolation of concepts from their historical context. His non-­Popperian sociology is inscribed in a Weberian relativism which is not a version of radical scientific relativism. In accordance with this hypothesis, Passeron went back over the theories of reproduction which he had developed in conjunction with Bourdieu in the 1970s and emphasised their links to Hegel. For Passeron, these theories denied history and change. Passeron’s analysis may provide a way out of the sociology of reproduction in particular and the epistemological shackles that tend to restrict sociology in general, enclosed, as it is, in an epistemology of in-­betweenness, caught between common sense and a semi-­formalised language, where there is no question of speaking of horizontal or vertical discourses. Yet it is precisely in this context that Bernstein’s work appears to be most useful, since, without denying the epistemological problems raised for sociology, Bernstein seeks to address these issues while simultaneously suggesting ways of going beyond them. His way of envisaging reproduction attests to this constant concern to open new possibilities and boundaries. Theory and research in progress The second area of sociological output that we will discuss is even more topical since it refers to research in progress that claims to be ground-­ breaking by Bernard Lahire and François Dubet, who draw on contrasting theoretical positions. Lahire sees himself as a ‘new heir’ to Bourdieu, claiming the mantle while criticising the theories. Dubet, by contrast, is one of Alain Touraine’s disciples, situated in a line of descent from the development of a sociology of social movements and desire for ‘a return of the subject’ in sociology. Both attempt to move away from structural-­ functionalist perspectives, like Bernstein returning to a model of socialisation conceived as the internalisation of the social and questioning the postulate of the unity, continuity and homogeneity of actors. Yet, while they

Knowledge theory and praxis   59 specifically reposition the theory of field and habitus as an object of sociological questioning and develop a complex, rich and resourceful line of thought, their analyses still ultimately leave no room for conditions which allow the possibility of appropriation of pedagogical rights as envisaged by Bernstein. Their research remains within a sociological tradition that either leaves out the question of knowledges and school activity from their object domain (the ‘within’) or renders their potentialities invisible. Dubet (1994) had earlier developed a sociology of school experience as part of a wider sociology of experience in line with his thesis concerning the decline of the idea of society and his conception of it as something formed as a result of the juxtaposition of several conflicting functions and logics of action, asserting that the social whole is ‘no longer structured by the principle of internal cohesion’. The aim of his sociology of experience is to study the development of such cohesion and resulting conflicts by actors themselves as they create a subjective unity that does not emanate automatically and ‘naturally’ from the system. In Dubet’s view this is particularly the case in schools which are neither integrated worlds nor institutions. In his view, both Durkheimian and reproduction theories share a conception of socialisation construed as the setting into play of processes that enable the transformation of values into norms and norms into personality. While arguing that institutions claim to make use of disciplines that help to liberate individuals, his aim is to show that they, in this instance pupils, tend to ‘liberate themselves’ outside and against disciplines through, among other things, deviance, taking refuge in the world of peers and youth culture, their quest for authenticity and pursuit of strategic or consumerist interests. School experience is described in terms of increasing distance between socialisation and subjectivation which, for some, the losers in educational competition, is extreme: school may go as far as preventing the process of subjectivation, to the point of destroying subjectivities (Dubet and Martucelli, 1996). However, the problem is that their work appears to make no connection between this socialising function and aspects of cognitive and intellectual work that guarantee the right to enhancement of every individual’s potential, an issue which Bernstein seeks to address. Their framework conceives pupils independently of learning activities and, therefore, outside ‘any poss­ ibility of experimenting with an impersonal register’ (Rochex, 2000: 143). Oddly enough, their sociology of school experience has yet to examine relationships to learning and branches of study in terms of school work and knowledge. The issue of school work appears to be reduced either to ‘its appropriation by the logic of selection and hierarchisation of pupils and pupils’ performances, or to a norm imposition, which appears to bear no relation to the nature of learning activities . . . and intellectual work’ (ibid.: 142). That this applies to the experience of pupils or, at any rate to the experience of some of them, appears to be beyond any doubt. Yet the issue with this particular sociology is that the alternative is never addressed or referred to, or even conceived of or made possible within the framework of

60   D. Frandji and P. Vitale the analysis. In our view, Dubet’s work on school has, over time, contributed to a shift in the debate on school issues in French society, which have tended to be articulated not in terms of a struggle against learning inequalities so much as a fight against exclusion. The aim of transforming schools, hopefully to reduce or avoid the forms of pathology observed, a project publicly upheld by Dubet, is defended in terms that are closely related to a policy of acknowledgement and implementation of a ‘minimal foundation’ of competence and knowledge for the losers of educational competition. This foundation or ‘survival kit’, which is in the process of taking root both in France and in many other European countries, must be made an object of critical questioning. Bernard Lahire makes a case for a complex version of determinism by developing a ‘theory of the plural actor’. In his original work on school failure, Lahire (1993) appeared to elaborate an analytical approach that developed a critique of ‘implicit pedagogies’ and ‘Invisibles’. In L’Homme Pluriel (1998a), Lahire levelled a number of criticisms against the theory of habitus which a Bernsteinian reader will no doubt readily share, including an absence of empirical analyses of its genesis, the overly general nature of the phrase ‘internalization of externalization’ and a questioning of the postulate of the coherence and homogeneity of schemas, dispositions and practices in the same actor or a group of actors under the pretext that they share the same social position. Lahire asserts that social actors can only hold such homogeneous and consistent dispositions in very specific social contexts and, in marked contrast to that of internalisation models, he develops a thesis of actors connected to the plurality and heterogeneity of social worlds in which they build their identity. Rochex, whose ideas we utilise extensively, has rightly identified a number of limitations in Lahire’s ideas. Lahire himself later identified and rejected the notion of actors’ homogeneous dispositions and the idea of the unity of actors, thus adopting a theoretical position close to behaviourism. Yet he ‘never considers the possible existence of an integrative yet non-­ homogeneous subjective unity’ (Rochex, 2000: 165) and persists in privileging a determinist pattern, even if he does consider the plurality of socialising principles and authorities. But here, as in any classical conceptualisation, there is little room for what Canguilhem calls ‘the debate between the living and its environment’ encapsulated in the concept of ‘normativity’ (Canguilhem, 1966). In other words, the theory of habitus can simply be construed as one of plural habituses and the personalities of plural actors as endowed with different components that overlap and coexist in mutual indifference or, perhaps, in radical cleavage. Lahire’s views on the question appear to vary, in one of his texts (1998b) going so far as to see this cleavage, present in every pupil, caught, as every child is, between family and school socialisation, as a condition for the possibility of academic achievement for the working classes, indeed, constituting the sole facilitator of working-­class success at school that may even be regarded as the ‘production of happy schizophrenics’ (Rochex, 2000: 167).

Knowledge theory and praxis   61 It is apparent that in the work of both Dubet and Lahire the desire to go beyond theories of reproduction and related concepts is limited by a view of persons and change that tends, in one way or another, to conceptualise transformation and its intertwined learning processes in terms of normalisation, subjection or social and subjective cleavage. These sociologies would no doubt benefit from greater integration within their analytical frameworks of the possibility of ‘living boundaries’, to use Bernstein’s (2000: xiii, xx, 5, 206–207) metaphor.

Bernstein and the integration of the possible: some relational approaches The final area of sociological research that we will discuss seeks to avoid these ambiguities, taking routes that are quite similar to Bernstein’s. In education the early work of Viviane Isambert-­Jamati (1971), initiated at the same time as that of Bourdieu and Passeron, was probably somewhat overshadowed by the success of the latter. Isambert-­Jamati developed an analysis of school knowledges and their modes of transmission, in short, of the within, as referred to by Bernstein, thereby offering significant revision of reproduction theory (see Establet, 2010). It is not for nothing that it was her followers who made the most productive use of Bernstein’s work, albeit limited by the curious refusal of French academic education to acknowledge the sociological aspects of pedagogical activity, its refusal of the within. Reference also needs to be made to research which remains close to Bernstein’s work, carried out from a multidisciplinary perspective involving sociology, psychology and linguistics, by ESCOL (Research Centre in Education and Schooling, University of Paris VIII) on processes of differentiation and knowledge relationships. Moreover, for many years Jean-­Yves Rochex has made a significant contribution to important interdisciplinary debate involving activity theory and sociology, to which we have already made reference in presenting our own argument. Suffice it to say that this interdisciplinary debate is sustained by reflections on cultural, language-­based and subjective changes represented by school experience (Rochex, 1995, 2000, 2010). At the same time Bautier (2010) is currently in the process of using Bernstein’s work to describe and reflect upon the influence of a ‘school discursive genre’ which appears to prevail in French educational practice with socially differentiating effects, particularly on children from working-­class backgrounds. Bautier documents what is often considered, though rarely described quite as precisely, as pertaining to the adaptive trend of teaching. This discursive genre contributes in particular to turning what Bernstein calls horizontal discourse, the everyday and local, into that which chiefly governs pedagogical relations which, once established, tends to prevent the development of resources needed for the appropriation of knowledge privileged by official school expectations of achievement which continue to pertain to vertical discourse, the ‘specialised symbolic structures of explicit knowledge’ (Bernstein,

62   D. Frandji and P. Vitale 2000: 160). Paradoxically, the former may stem from values identified as democratising notions, such as participation, respect of individual identity and requalification of ordinary and spontaneous experience which, in the long run, may contribute to deceiving pupils about these institutional expectations. The work of the LAMES (Mediterranean Laboratory of Sociology) group Work is being carried out in our own research centre in Aix-­en-Provence under the academic leadership of Nicole Ramognino in partnership with several doctoral students who have been working on Bernsteinian themes for four years. Ramognino has long argued for the shifts implied by the analysis presented in this chapter for, in her opinion, sociology can benefit from being seen not only as a historical (see above, Passeron, 1991) but also as an anthropological science. For her the purpose of sociology extends beyond description of empirical ‘realities’ to their reconsideration in the light of the social operations that maintain them and ensure their existence within historical and cultural processes of realising the social (Ramognino, 2007: 15). The issue at stake here, as in Bernstein’s work, is the transition from a formal ontology of the social inscribed within the individual/society dichotomy to a material ontology the elements of which are threefold: individual/society/ activity. The analysis of activity is intimately connected with our own work and facilitates the implementation of a dynamic, analytic model whose starting point is sociology of knowledge and whose ambition is to develop a praxeological sociology. In our research and analyses of education, schools are conceived of as collective, cognitive institutions. The primary question for educational systems since the development of written culture is ‘how is knowledge transmitted and shared?’ This epitomises a societal necessity; children need to acquire knowledge so as to be able to live in their ‘natural’ and ‘social’ environments. Schools are not alone in seeking to achieve this objective, though they are alone in seeking to do so within the specific context of the historical development of new knowledges that have transformed the very nature of the world and the conditions of its ‘inhabitability’. Historically, the natural and social worlds in which we live have become increasingly more complex, and continue to do so as a result of the various cultural inventions that relate to them. The ‘natural’ world, with its erudite forms of knowledge, at the foundation of which is written culture, like the social world itself, is gradually becoming more open to more societies and cultural forms. ‘Inhabitability’ entails acquisition of new and increasingly diverse knowledges by an increasingly wide range of actors. We suggest that it is precisely these demands that raise new questions for the specific mechanisms of schooling invented to broaden knowledge and control relations beyond the first known forms of transmission connected with family, work and religious activity. These ques-

Knowledge theory and praxis   63 tions have particular urgency because, across a variety of socio-­historical contexts it is palpable that the practices of educational institutions are not well related to achievement of such societal necessity, epitomised by the obvious selectivity of educational systems and their perennial authority-­based pedagogical relations. These socio-­historical forms are perpetuated by polarised debate involving multiple categories of consideration that confuse privilege with necessity. Any objective analysis of the current context requires a wholesale revision of these categories and questioning of policies, practices and forms of educational organisations in the name of societal need for much more widely shared knowledge. In work at LAMES such anthropological hypotheses are combined with a relational approach where schools are conceived of as collective cognitive organisations that enable pupils to develop their cognitive abilities while revising already acquired and socially distributed knowledge. School activity is perceived as revising knowledge of everyday life, giving it both visible and invisible curricular presence. In this context, a school is neither viewed as a place of socialisation, social regulation or division of labour, nor is it merely characterised by the acculturation of pupils who lack the required cognitive capacities and the knowledge which it is assumed to transmit. Far from being a mere ‘black box’ in which the transmission–reception of knowledge occurs, school becomes the place and time for the revision of socially distributed ordinary and academic knowledge. Using an original methodology based on linguistics and semiology, this approach takes a very serious view of Bernstein’s work, he once having showed a marked interest in the work of Nicole Ramognino. Far from any form of scholasticism, the work carried out at LAMES is designed to encourage the use and critical questioning of Bernstein’s ideas in developing empirical studies carried out by some of the centre’s doctoral students, such as that of Nadège Pandraud on the written form and narrative in classrooms (Pandraud, 2010), Sophia Stavrou on the regionalisation of knowledge in higher education (Stavrou, 2010), Carole Murati on curricula within the social and economic sciences and Célia Poulet on the use of oral language, classification and framing and the crossing of boundaries in Masonic lodges.

Conclusion: the visibility of alternatives and the closure of possibilities In concluding we wish, first of all, to apologise for the subjective, incomplete and even frustrating sketch of French research outlined in this chapter, restricted to outlining selected sociological perspectives and directions with a view to suggesting their greater or lesser relation of complementarity with Bernstein’s thought. Yet the only alternative in casting our net wider would have been to discuss other works or discourses on education, mostly with an essentialist bent, which currently epitomises the development of a marked desociologisation of educational issues.

64   D. Frandji and P. Vitale It is for this reason that we believe it important to risk the misrecognition entailed by repetition of Bernstein’s struggles, for, in current intellectual debates in France, there is a symbolic struggle against all sociological perspectives rejected as defeatist, deterministic, denunciatory and the like in the name of reproduction theory. Such rejection of sociological analyses is not a recent phenomenon but is growing at a time when there is marked neo-­ liberal pressure for reform in France. Funding allocated to sociological research is gradually shrinking away to nothing and in this difficult context educational debates tend to focus on new forms of essentialisation. French reforms are currently being drafted that an English reader will easily recognise concerning school choice, the self-­management of educational institutions, regulation through assessment and shifts in the curriculum focusing on proficiency or generic models of performance. In research there is emphasis on school effectiveness variables, a quest for ‘good practice’ and evaluative research geared to implementation of officially desired forms of evidence-­ based policy. There is also a marked development of research on individual motivation or cognitive diversity – the diversity of ‘talents’ – recalling the ideology of talents denounced by Bourdieu and Passeron (1964). There is also currently emphasis on cognitive difficulties, lack of motivation and psychological blocks which all result in increased individualisation of preventive and remedial measures (Bautier, 2010). At the epistemological level, the arguments given here provide a perfect illustration of what Popper called the common-­sense problem of induction, which assumes that it is legitimate to make predictions concerning regularities observed in the past and to believe in their validity, even their inevitability, inasmuch as they are founded on a large number of observations (see Crahay, 2006: 141). The current era is thus marked by search for ‘good practices’ and efficiency factors that limit and enclose the possible. In such circumstances, it is its contribution towards reflection on significant transformations of educational policies, knowledges and pedagogical discourse observed currently in France that engenders significant interest in Bernstein’s work. It is further invigorated by the realisation that Bernstein was extremely productive, not least as a result of his engagement with a global field of research in which a theory of reproduction in its ‘Parisian version’ was particularly important. It would be paradoxical indeed if we now allowed the pursuit of his endeavours to provide weapons for policy-­ makers’ disqualification of sociological thought. In pursuing such analysis, particularly of the new essentialist discourses that are currently being developed, we ought to consider any account of viable alternatives in the global academic field, however invisible or unreadable, as possible bases for action. In a current climate where closure of possibilities tends to be justified in the name of a rupture with a certain form of fatalism consubstantial with sociological analysis, rendering invisible any attempt to devise alternatives, the relevance of Bernstein’s work has never been greater.

Knowledge theory and praxis   65

References Bautier, E., 2010, ‘The analysis of pedagogic discourse as a means of understanding social inequalities in schools’, in D. Frandji and P. Vitale (eds), Knowledge, Pedagogy and Society: International perspectives on Basil Bernstein’s sociology of education, London, Routledge (forthcoming). Bernstein, B., 1971, Class, Codes and Control: Theoretical studies towards a sociology of language, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul. French translation: Bernstein, B., 1975, Langage et classes sociales. Codes socio-­linguistiques et contrôle social, Paris, Le sens commun. Bernstein, B., 1975, ‘Classes et pédagogies: visibles et invisibles’, CERI, OCDE, reprinted in J. Deauvieau and J.-P. Terrail (eds), 2007, Les sociologues, l’école et la transmission des savoirs, Paris, La Dispute, pp. 85–112. Bernstein, B., 2000, Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, research, Critique, rev. edn, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. French translation: Bernstein, B., 2007, Pédagogie, contrôle symbolique et identité, Laval, Presses Universitaires de Laval. Boltanski, L., 1990, L’Amour et la Justice comme compétences. Trois essais de sociologie de l’action, Paris, Métailié. Boltanski, L., 2009, De la critique. Précis de sociologie de l’émancipation, Paris, Gallimard. Boltanski, L. and Thévenot, L., 1991, De la justification. Les économies de la grandeur, Paris, Gallimard. Bourdieu, P., 1980, ‘Une science qui dérange’, interview with Pierre Thuillier, La Recherche, 112, June 1980. Reprinted in Questions de sociologie, Paris, Minuit, pp. 19–36. Bourdieu, P., 1984, Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste, Oxford, Polity [1979]. Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J.-C., 1977, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, London, Sage [1970]. Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J.-C., 1979, The Inheritors, Chicago, Chicago University Press [1964]. Canguilhem, G., 1991, The Normal and the Pathological Le Normal et le Pathologique, New York, Zone Books [1966]. Crahay, M., 2006, Un bilan des recherches processus-­produit. L’enseignement peut-­il contribuer à l’apprentissage des élèves et, si oui, comment?, Genève, Carnet des sciences de l’éducation. Dubet, F., 1994, Sociologie de l’expérience, Paris, Seuil. Dubet, F. and Martucelli, D., 1996, A l’école, sociologie de l’expérience scolaire, Paris, Seuil. Establet, R., 2010, ‘The current relevance of Basil Bernstein in the sociology of education in France’, in D. Frandji and P. Vitale (eds), Knowledge, Pedagogy and Society: International perspectives on Basil Bernstein’s sociology of education, London, Routledge (forthcoming). Frandji, D. and Vitale, P. (eds), 2010 (forthcoming), Knowledge, Pedagogy and Society: International perspectives on Basil Bernstein’s sociology of education, London, Routledge. Girard, A., 1996, Expériences touristiques et régime du patrimoine culturel-­naturel: éléments pour une sociologie critique du tourisme, Thèse de doctorat nouveau régime, Université de Provence. Goody, J., 1987, The Interface between the Written and the Oral, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

66   D. Frandji and P. Vitale Grignon, C. and Passeron, J.-C., 1989, Le savant et le populaire. Misérabilisme et populisme en sociologie et en littérature, Paris, Gallimard. Habermas, J., 1970, ‘Technology and science as ideology’, in Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics, Boston: Beacon Press [1968]. Isambert-­Jamati, V., 1971, Crises de la société, crise de l’enseignement, Paris, Bibliothèque de sociologie contemporaine, Presses Universitaires de France. Isambert-­Jamati, V., 1990, Les savoirs scolaires. Enjeux sociaux des contenus d’enseignement et de leurs réformes, Paris, Editions Universitaires. Lahire, B., 1993, Culture écrite et inégalités scolaires. Sociologie de ‘l’échec scolaire’ à l’école primaire, Lyon, Presses Universitaires de Lyon. Lahire, B., 1998a, L’homme pluriel. Les ressorts de l’action, Paris, Nathan. Lahire, B., 1998b, ‘La réussite scolaire en milieux populaires ou les conditions sociales d’une schizophrénie heureuse’, in Ville École Intégration, Paris, CNDP-­ CRDP, 114. Lessard, C., 2007, ‘Les usages politiques de la recherche en éducation’, in V. Dupriez and G. Chapelle (eds), Enseigner, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, pp. 69–79. Molino, J., 1989, ‘Interpréter’, in C. Reichler (ed.), L’interprétation des textes, Paris, Editions de Minuit. Mons, N. (ed.), 2008, ‘Évaluation des politiques éducatives et comparaisons internationales’, Dossier thématique de la Revue française de Pédagogie, Lyon, INRP, 134, July–September, pp. 5–98. Muller, J., 2010, ‘The essential tension: an essay on sociology as knowledge’, in D. Frandji and P. Vitale (eds), Knowledge, Pedagogy & Society: International perspectives on Basil Bernstein’s sociology of education, London, Routledge, 2010 (forthcoming). Pandraud, N., 2010, ‘The recontextualization of scientific knowledge and learning activities: Translating the French language curriculum into the writing of a tale in a classe de 6e’, in D. Frandji and P. Vitale (eds), Knowledge, Pedagogy and Society: International perspectives on Basil Bernstein’s sociology of education, London, Routledge (forthcoming). Passeron, J.-C., 1991, Le Raisonnement sociologique, Paris, Nathan. Ramognino, N., 2007, ‘Normes sociales, normativités individuelle et collective, normativité de l’action’, in Langage et société, Paris, Maison des sciences de l’homme, 119, pp. 13–41. Ramognino, N. and Verges, P. (eds), 2005, Le français hier et aujourd’hui. Politiques de la langue et apprentissages scolaires, Aix-­en-Provence, Presses Universitaires de Provence. Rochex, J.-Y., 1995, Le sens de l’expérience scolaire. Entre activité et subjectivité, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. Rochex, J.-Y., 2000, Expérience scolaire et procès de subjectivation. L’élève et ses milieux, Note de synthèse pour l’Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches, Université Paris VIII. Rochex, J.-Y., 2010, ‘The work of Basil Bernstein: A non-­sociologistic and therefore non-­deterministic sociology’, in D. Frandji and P. Vitale (eds), Knowledge, Pedagogy and Society: International perspectives on Basil Bernstein’s sociology of education, London, Routledge (forthcoming). Stavrou, S., 2010, ‘Reviewing recontextualization of knowledge at university: From Bernstein’s theory to empirical research’, in D. Frandji and P. Vitale (eds), Knowledge, Pedagogy and Society: International perspectives on Basil Bernstein’s sociology of education, London, Routledge (forthcoming).

Part II

Shifting cargo From singulars to regions and generic knowledge forms

5 Changing knowledge in higher education Antigone Sarakinioti, Anna Tsatsaroni and George Stamelos

Introduction As part of globalised policies on knowledge change in institutions of higher education, those of the European Union and Bologna Process seek to promote curricular reorganisation. Our exploration of national and institutional responses to such policies assumes that understanding them requires analysis of global, regional and national contexts. As the locus of specialised knowledge and research lacking an official recontextualising field (Bernstein, 2000: 60), differences between higher education institutions provide an important dimension in any analysis of change in knowledge organisation. We also assume that academics working in the wide field of Educational Studies tend to feel the embedded contradictions and pressures of policies more than others. Education as a field of study within universities provides a privileged point of entry into questions of how policies (or reforms) influence organisational structure, activity and curriculum. First, the importance attributed to education at present by politicians and media inclines the boundary between its public and academic discourses to become more permeable (Nóvoa, 2007). Research findings are often appropriated by supranational (e.g. EU) and international (e.g. OECD) organisations and agencies in the creation of dominant discourses on societal change and transformation. Second, renewed interest in school teachers’ ‘professionalism’ is a source of pressure upon educational academics and researchers (Hextall et al., 2007; Ball, 2005; Goodson and Norrie, 2005). Third, as educationists seek opportunities, including funding of research projects, that ‘take them out’ of their academic and institutional boundaries, there is an increased risk of being pulled in the direction of doing only policy-­driven work focusing on what is ‘useful’, ‘relevant’ and ‘what works’ (Tsatsaroni et al., 2009). It is likely that university departments of education in countries that are otherwise very diverse share certain historical features that tend to affect staff positioning on dominant policy discourse. Historically, departments of education have tended to resolve identity conflict entailed by changes in their institutional status by sometimes cutting themselves off from school developments. While current

70   A. Sarakinioti et al. p­ ressures on academics might reinscribe hard-­won positions and understandings of what it means to be educational researchers, what counts tends to be only what is rewarded in research-­assessment processes. Simultaneously, requirements to develop research or teaching activities of relevance to schools (Middleton, 2004; Goodson, 1999; Nixon et al., 2000) raise questions of how tension between orientation to schools’/teachers’ professional formation and to academic research and disciplines is played out by education academics seeking to exploit an outward-­looking identity but lacking elite status.

Education policy as a multi-­scalar field: an exemplar Education policy processes today take place in flexible, multi-­scalar fields of activity and power (Dale, 2004; Dale and Robertson, 2007) involving supranational, national and institutional interrelations of agencies. Policy agents, bureaucrats, academics, technocrats and ‘technopreneurs’ (Kenway et al., 2006) are involved through different procedures and different terms of engagement in an extremely complicated, changing field which we exemplify with reference to the Tuning Educational Structures in Europe project (Tuning Project, 2003, 2006), an instance of evidence-­based European education policy operationalising the ‘language of competencies’ (Moore with Jones, 2007; Muller, 2008). Proposed and coordinated by two European universities, Deusto, Spain and Groningen, Netherlands, it now involves more than 175 institutions seeking to adjust higher education curricula by achieving comparability of European programmes of study over nine subject fields, including education, in partnership with 19 subject networks. It is financially supported by the European Commission through Socrates-­Erasmus and Tempus. Significant working documents of the Bologna Process (Adam, 2004; Bologna Follow Up Group, 2005) extol the contribution of its piloting work and diffusion learning outcomes methodology as a basis for curricular reorganisation and assessment. The Project also serves our research purposes as a policy exemplar as to how open methods of coordination function within various European policy fields (Dale, 2004; Alexiadou, 2007) in search of conditions of quality improvement, effectiveness, transparency, compatibility, comparability and competitiveness of curricular and educational structures in academic, workplace and labour market contexts.

Discourse and pedagogic discourse In conceptualising changes in the organisation and transmission of knowledge in higher education institutions we attempt the difficult task of juxtaposing Foucauldian analysis of policy, the distinctive perspective of Steven Ball (2006, 2008) and Bernstein’s approach to pedagogic discourse. We seek to ask basic and clear questions about how policy works, what it does and whose interests it serves, given the importance of relationships between ­education policy and the ‘contradictory requirements and necessities of the

Changing knowledge in higher education   71 management of the population’ (Ball, 2008: 4). We conceptualise higher education curricula as products of social processes which transform knowledge and position subjects as particular kinds of learners and teachers (Young, 2006, 2008; Moore, 2004; Young and Muller, 2007). Ball (2008: 5) attends to the language of policy in a thoroughly Foucauldian manner. Discourses ‘work to privilege certain ideas and topics and speakers and exclude others’, constituting social reality by organising specific rationalities, making particular sets of ideas sound commonsensical and ‘true’. He interrogates policy texts which articulate ideas and translate policy abstractions into roles, relationships and practices within institutions that may change ‘what people do and how they think about what they do’ (ibid.: 6). Policy is ongoing, interactional and unstable, made and remade in many sites and about ‘re-­imagining’; the logical rationality of policy is not to be overestimated (ibid.: 8). Market, management and performance are generic policy technologies in governing education institutions, creating distinctive subject positions, disciplines and values. While Bernstein acknowledges that his notion of pedagogic discourse owes something to Foucault (Bernstein, 1990: 134, 2000: 205; Kanes et al., 2010; Evans et al., this volume), the intellectual origins of his conceptual framework lie more fundamentally in Durkheimian ideas worked out through a long period of systematic engagement with what is specific to pedagogical practices, widely defined, in all sorts of social settings (Gamble and Hoadley, this volume). Young (2008: 152) contends that three aspects of Bernstein’s work should guide approaches to knowledge change in higher education: focusing on the structure of knowledge relations – not simply content – and boundary relations; identifying links between forms of knowledge organisation and learner and professional identities; and insisting upon clear ‘languages of description’. The latter, alone, would mark off his approach decisively from the descriptive accounts of most policy discourse work in education. Pace Bernstein, Young (2006: 25) observes in higher education ‘a shift from a reliance on generalising principles associated with specialist professionals to a reliance on procedural principles associated with regulatory agencies’; from an epistemological form of accountability to an administrative one reliant on generic criteria, applicable to all professional or research fields, weakening insulation of knowledge forms ‘expressed in external criteria defined by regulatory bodies (and indirectly by government)’ (ibid.: 26). Schools and universities are turned into ‘delivery agencies’. Much of this draws on Bernstein’s own identification of singulars, regionalisation and genericism in educational subject structures and identities. Bernstein (2000: 70) explicates identities formed through ‘procedures of introjection’, finding ‘its core in its place in an organisation of knowledge and practice’ and those based on ‘procedures of projection’, reflecting external contingencies (see also Beck and Young, 2005). Differences between the three knowledge structures and two modes of identity formation can be

72   A. Sarakinioti et al.

Eductional code

Orientation to meaning Introjection

Projection

C�F� (/�)

Singular (academic)

Old professional (regions)

C�F� (/�)

Interdisciplinary (academic)

New professional (generic)

Figure 5.1  Knowledge forms and identity positions in the academic field. Notes C+/–: Classification (strong, weak). F+/–: Framing (strong, weak).

schematically presented by placing them into two axes that Moore (2001) claims represent the two key pressures for change embedded in recent, dominant policies. In Figure 5.1 the vertical axis represents the shift from high levels of autonomy within disciplinary groupings to patterns of teamwork across disciplinary boundaries, that is to say, from a strong to a weak form of subject insulation. The horizontal axis represents a shift from introjected towards projected orientation (Moore, 2001; Tsatsaroni et al., 2003; Clegg and Ashworth, 2004; Clegg and Bradlay, 2006; Sarakinioti, in preparation). Like all university departments, those of education have tended to operate with relatively strongly insulated subject specialisms, within and without. Though research performance criteria may be pushing them towards reconstructed singulars (Moore, 2001), dominant policy discourses have invited academics to move from singular knowledge forms (Academic), with their inward-­looking orientation, to those projected outward towards given professional fields (Old Professional). Much of the work in some education institutions focuses on products with an exchange value in the market (New Professional), focusing on ‘exploration of vocational applications rather than upon exploration of knowledge’ (Bernstein, 2000: 169–170). Some university departments of education may be interested in creating ‘an integrated modality of knowing and a participating, co-­operative modality of social relation’ (ibid.: 68) (Interdisciplinary). The key distinction between Interdisciplinary and New Professional curriculum construction is whether content selection is driven by criteria that emerge from disciplinary knowledge bases or those determined by job market contingencies (Moore, 2001: 8). Current, overall pressure exerted upon higher education institutions is to move towards New Professional modes involving processes whereby institutions create a language the rules of which are tacitly acquired, allowing students and teachers to recognise and realise legitimate possibilities of orthodox and heterodox texts without apparent, explicit, external regulation. Bernstein’s

Changing knowledge in higher education   73 theory allows us to explore distinctions between programmes of study that set out to be the basis for ‘specialised identities’ for teachers and other educational professionals, enabled to project themselves meaningfully and recover a coherent past, and those that aim at ‘flexible identities’ where students are able to respond to ‘intermittent pedagogies’, re-­forming themselves according to external contingencies (Bernstein, 2000: 55, 59). Each has consequences for the legitimisation of certain disciplines and forms of research. In this theoretical context, our exploration is based on data from a questionnaire survey of Greek Education academics on curriculum change concerning their views of the desirability of generic and subject-­specific competencies promoted by the Tuning Project.

The responses of Greek academics to changes in educational knowledge forms Description of the sample A questionnaire, originally developed within Tuning Educational Structures in Europe, was adapted to seek Greek Education academics’ views on generic and subject-­specific competencies and preferred choices for the direction of possible change in their own institutions, informed by Bernstein’s analytical model developed in the context of the present study (Sarakinioti, in preparation). Choices were to be made in response to statements presented as possibilities about curricular organisation, pedagogy and student assessment. The survey was administered by the first author who visited all 18 university departments of education around the country. Data was analysed by applying techniques of descriptive statistics. Its qualitative treatment required us to work with Bernstein’s (2000) approach that demands translation devices and appropriate languages of description, in order to move between the theory, the analytical model and the empirical field. One of these tools is presented in Appendix 5.1. Out of the total population of teaching staff (N = 422) in all Greek university departments of education, 164 responded to the survey (39 per cent). The collection of a sufficiently large sample proved to be a challenging operation despite the very good network of key persons, academic and administrative, established through initial visits, as well as our connections in the field. Even taking into account the work-­load of academics and the fact that questionnaire completion required some considerable effort, this reluctance to respond is probably not without significance. Some respondents openly expressed their ideological/political opposition to the spirit of European higher education policies, arguing that its culture of ‘transparency’ and ‘evaluation’ was reflected in the questionnaire. There was also a complaint about the technical and confusing language that ‘competencies’ entailed in this instrument. The rate of response calls for caution but the data is still sufficiently interesting in showing trends in respondents’ viewpoints. The

74   A. Sarakinioti et al. Table 5.1  Academics’ characteristics Categories Sex  M  F   Total Academic status   Professors   Associate Professors   Assistant Professors   Lecturers   Total Age   30–40   40–50   50–60   60+   Total

N

%

94 70 164

57.3 42.7 100.00

43 29 49 40 161*

26.7 18 30.4 24.8 100.00

21 60 61 21

12.9 36.8 37.4 12.9

163*

100.00

Note * Missing answers are due to respondents’ concern with anonymity.

gender, academic status and age distributions of respondents who were professors and assistant professors are given in Table 5.1. Non-­respondents were mainly women. Views of generic competencies Respondents were asked which generic competencies from among those included in the Tuning survey should be developed by graduates by the end of the first cycle of their studies. Table 5.2 presents their ranking. The original survey questionnaire of the Tuning Project comprised 17 generic competencies and 30 subject-­specific competencies for the field of educational studies/teacher education (Tuning, 2003: 273). In our analysis, both ‘generic’ and ‘subject-­specific’ competencies (29 after adjusting for the Greek context) have been placed in the two sub-­categories of our analytical model: old and new professional types. The decision to classify these two sets of competencies in the two out of the four types of curriculum organisation is based on the view that the language of competencies has, by definition, a projected orientation to meaning. These methodological choices are supported by Beck (2009), Moore and Jones (2007) and Muller (2008, 2009). Means varied between 4.8 and 12.9 for what seemed to consist of two basic groups of competencies, a relatively high importance Group 1 with mean values varying between 4.8 and 7.6 and a low Group 2 varying

Changing knowledge in higher education   75 Table 5.2  Academics’ ranking of generic competencies Items

N

Mean

Std. deviation

  3. Basic knowledge of the field of study   6. Capacity for applying knowledge in practice 10. Critical and self-critical abilities   7. Capacity for generating new ideas (creativity)   9. Capacity to learn   5. Capacity for analysis and synthesis   4. Basic knowledge of the profession   8. Capacity to adapt to new situations 11. Decision-making 16. Oral and written communication in your native language 14. Interpersonal skills   2. A  ppreciation of diversity and multiculturality 13. Ethical commitment   1. Ability to work in an interdisciplinary team 17. Research skills 12. Elementary computing skills (word processing, Database, other utilities) 15. Knowledge of a second language Valid N (listwise)

153 153 153 153 153 153 153 153 153 153

4.8312 6.0000 6.5455 6.5649 6.9412 7.0327 7.6364 9.1503 9.2468 9.7403

4.59725 4.27640 3.99688 3.89725 4.06726 4.50207 5.30115 4.24073 3.49287 4.94520

153 153

9.8105 10.1895

4.04376 4.50110

153 153 153 153

10.4902 11.2418 11.6558 12.5229

4.41457 4.43228 4.55092 4.00178

153 12.9935 153*

3.67333

Note * Missing answers are due to participants’ refusal to answer or difficulties they had had with the instructions in this part of the questionnaire.

Table 5.3  Academics’ ranking of generic competencies by professionalisms Description

Group 1 (high importance)

Group 2 (low importance)

Competencies of old professionalism

3, 6, 10, 4,

13, 16

Competencies of new professionalism

7, 9, 5

8, 11, 14, 2, 1, 17, 12, 15,

between 9.15 and 12.9. Their distribution on our old/new professionalism dimension is given in Table 5.3. It is clear that these teaching staff in university education departments continued to privilege traditionally recognised knowledge and skills among primary school teachers and other educational professionals. The generic competencies they consider most important to be cultivated through their programmes of study are those that have specialised scientific and profes-

76   A. Sarakinioti et al. sional knowledge fields as their immediate reference. They are associated with the old professional model for teachers, entailing theoretical knowledge of the field of study, as well as ability to apply knowledge in practice and display reflective qualities (see Appendix 5.1). In contrast, the second, less important group relates to flexible competencies characteristic of the new professional type of teacher which resonates with contemporary policy discourse, such as ‘capacity to adapt to new situations’, ‘decision-­making’ and ‘interpersonal skills’. Subject-­specific competencies: a correlation analysis of their importance and achievement Respondents’ views were sought on the level of importance and achievement of subject-­specific competencies that graduates should develop by the end of

Concentration (I�/A�) 2.

9. 10. 11.

IMPORTANCE (I) �

12. 13. 14. 15. 21. 22. 23.

�

29.

Maintenance (I�/A�)

Ability to identify potential connections between aspects of subject knowledge and their application in educational policies and contexts Ability to do educational research in different contexts Counselling skills Ability to manage projects for school improvement/development Ability to manage educational programmes Ability to evaluate educational programmes/materials Ability to foresee new educational needs and demands Ability to lead or coordinate multidisciplinary educational teams Ability to make use of e-learning and to integrate it into the learning environments Ability to manage time effectively Ability to reflect upon and evaluate one’s own performance* Ability to adjust the curriculum to a specific educational context.

1. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Ability to analyses educational concepts, theories and issues of policy in a systematic way Ability to reflect on one’s own value system** Ability to question concepts and theories encountered in education studies Ability to recognize the diversity of learners and the complexities of the learning process Awareness of the different contexts in which learning can take place Awareness of the different roles of participants in the learning process Understanding of the structures and purposes of educational systems** Commitment to learners’ progress and achievement Competence in a number of teaching/learning strategies Knowledge of the subject to be taught Ability to communicate effectively with groups and individuals Ability to create a climate conducive to learning Awareness of the need for continuous professional development Ability to assess the outcomes of learning and learners’ achievements Competence in collaborative problem solving Ability to respond to the diverse needs of learners Ability to improve the teaching/learning environment

Low priority (I�/A�)

Excess effort (I�/A�)

Blank

Blank

�

� ACHIEVEMENT (A)

Figure 5.2  Relations between level of importance and level of achievement. Notes * The competence 23. ‘Ability to reflect upon and evaluate one’s own performance’ is a borderline case to concentration category (A–). ** The competencies 3. Ability to reflect on one’s own value system, and 8. Understanding of the structures and purposes of educational systems are borderline cases to maintenance category (A+).

Changing knowledge in higher education   77 the first cycle of their studies. The 29 items were classified according to four categories (Tuning Project, 2006: 27): 1 2 3 4

Concentration: very important, little achievement; Low priority: not very important, little achievement; Excess effort: not very important, high achievement; Maintenance: very important, high achievement.

The 29 subject-­specific competencies are grouped exclusively in the Concentration (12/29) and Maintenance categories (17/29). Respondents regarded them all as of high importance while differentiating level of achievement. Filtering the result through the model that we have developed for the classification of competencies into ‘old’ and ‘new’ professionalism, the 29 competencies are classified, by number, as in Table 5.4. The concentration category (high importance/low achievement) contains 12 out of the 29 competencies, all belonging to our analytical model of new professionalism, designating new, flexible and decontextualised professional activities for future teachers. They relate to either school environment management skills, such as ‘ability to manage projects for school improvement/ development’ (11), or flexible competencies, such as ‘ability to foresee new educational needs and demands’ (14) and ‘ability to reflect upon and evaluate one’s own performance’ (23). In contrast, the maintenance category (high importance/high achievement) appears more dense and diversified in terms of old (7/17) and new professionalism (10/17) competencies. Here, all the old professionalism competencies, such as the ‘ability to analyse educational concepts, theories and issues of policy in a systematic way’ (1) are included. The new professionalism competencies that appear, such as ‘ability to create a climate conducive to learning’ (20), are oriented to school environments and refer to learning procedures, describing ways through which teachers can improve the context of their day-­to-day educational practice. These findings provide strong indications that respondents accepted the multiplicity of characteristics and roles currently projected upon teachers by key agencies in the field of policy promoting the language of competencies. These Education academics seem to contend that knowledge and competencies of the kind we classify as old professionalism are already part of the Table 5.4  Relations between level of importance and level of achievement by professionalisms

Description

Concentration (I+/A–)

Maintenance (I+/A+)

Competencies of old professionalism

–

1, 3, 4, 8, 16, 17, 18

Competencies of new professionalism

2, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 21, 22, 23, 29

5, 6, 7, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28

78   A. Sarakinioti et al. existing curricula, including some of those of the new professionalism, to do with education as a specialised context for promoting, supporting and accomplishing learning. In contrast, what needs paying attention to are the flexible competencies of new professionalism related to school management, ‘innovative’ educational practices and e-­learning which are reported not to have been developed enough as yet. Subject-­specific competences: grouping of variables Principal Component factor-­analysis techniques applied to importance and achievement variables led to extraction of two main factors, the remainder having eigen values less than 1. They explain 62 per cent of the total variation of the data, deemed a satisfactory threshold for our data variability. Note that in order to have meaningful interpretations we have kept only factors with loadings larger that 0.50. Table 5.5 presents factor A. The variables grouped in factor A are almost exclusively new professionalism competencies, mostly flexible ones describing skills that promote student learning and effective management of the classroom environment, such as: ‘awareness of the different contexts in which learning can take place’ (6), ‘awareness of the different roles of participants in the learning process’ Table 5.5  Description of factor A

Importance

I T E M S

  3. Ability to reflect on one’s own value system   6. Awareness of the different contexts in which learning can take place   7. Awareness of the different roles of participants in the learning process 11. Ability to manage projects for school improvement/ development 19. Ability to communicate effectively with groups and individuals 20. Ability to create a climate conducive to learning 22. Ability to manage time effectively 23. Ability to reflect upon and evaluate one’s own performance 24. Awareness of the need for continuous professional development 26. Competence in collaborative problem solving 27. Ability to respond to the diverse needs of learners 28. Ability to improve the teaching/learning environment 29. Ability to adjust the curriculum to a specific educational context

Variance explained by the factor

Factor loading 0.57 0.51 0.51 0.51 0.56 0.59 0.56 0.76 0.74 0.81 0.82 0.75 0.62 24%

Changing knowledge in higher education   79 (7) and ‘ability to improve the teaching/learning environment’ (28). Competencies identified in our scheme with old professionalism, with the exception of the item ‘ability to reflect on one’s own value system’ (3), are not included in factor A. Table 5.6 presents factor B consisting mainly of new professionalism competencies for future teachers. The majority of them, as in factor A, are skills for improving the educational environment and for facilitating conduct of student learning processes, such as ‘ability to recognise the diversity of learners and the complexities of the learning process’ (5) and ‘ability to assess the outcomes of learning and learners’ achievements’ (25). The majority of competencies not in factor B are identified with old professionalism and relate to the macro-­level of Table 5.6  Description of factor B

Achievement

I T E M S

  3. Ability to reflect on one’s own value system   5. Ability to recognise the diversity of learners and the complexities of the learning process   6. Awareness of the different contexts in which learning can take place   7. Awareness of the different roles of participants in the learning process   9. Ability to do educational research in different contexts 10. Counselling skills 14. Ability to foresee new educational needs and demands 15. Ability to lead or coordinate multidisciplinary educational teams 16. Commitment to learners’ progress and achievement 17. Competence in a number of teaching/learning strategies 19. Ability to communicate effectively with groups and individuals 20. Ability to create a climate conducive to learning 22. Ability to manage time effectively 23. Ability to reflect upon and evaluate one’s own performance 24. Awareness of the need for continuous professional development 25. Ability to assess the outcomes of learning and learners’ achievements 26. Competence in collaborative problem solving 27. Ability to respond to the diverse needs of learners 28. Ability to improve the teaching/learning environment 29. Ability to adjust the curriculum to a specific educational context

Variance explained by the factor

Factor loading 0.59 0.56 0.72 0.69 0.53 0.53 0.69 0.56 0.56 0.67 0.78 0.82 0.63 0.73 0.60 0.69 0.71 0.79 0.81 0.74 38%

80   A. Sarakinioti et al. e­ ducation analysis and specialised academic knowledge, such as ‘ability to analyse educational concepts, theories and issues of policy in a systematic way’. The three old professionalism competencies that are contained in factor B are: ‘ability to reflect on one’s own value system’ (3), ‘commitment to learners’ progress and achievement’ (16) and ‘competence in a number of teaching/learning strategies’ (17), describing skills to do with interpersonal relations and the micro-­level of educational practice. This finding indicates that when Education academics are called to choose among such attributes they selectively appropriate knowledge and skills recognised within old professionalism and reinterpret them within a policy discourse of competencies. Summing up these results on subject-­specific competencies in terms of their imputed importance and achievement, we might say that there are indications that the apparently stable field of teacher education in Greece, where many respondents insisted that nothing had changed, is moving towards greater expansion and openness regarding curriculum role prescriptions of future teachers. While there is a desire to preserve many old professional characteristics of teachers, a large set of new professional competencies are recognised as worthy of promotion through undergraduate curricula. Direction of curriculum change Academics were asked what kind of changes they would like to introduce to the undergraduate curriculum of their departments, assuming the opportunity to do so. A range of statements were offered for each of the ‘message systems’ of the curriculum (Bernstein, 1971), content, pedagogy and student assessment. Respondents were permitted to make more than one choice for each. Table 5.7 presents their responses. Regarding content organisation, the ‘generic’ (23.97 per cent) and the ‘subject-­specific’ competencies-­based courses (11.86 per cent), being the most representative of the educational discourse of new professionalism, appear to be quite popular among academics. Even taken together, however, they are not as highly chosen as the discipline-­based (11.08 per cent), professionally oriented (22.42 per cent) and interdisciplinary courses (30.67 per cent). Note, however, that though curricular types with weak insulation are Table 5.7  Academics’ preferences on content organisation

Categories

N

%

1. Discipline-based, insulated courses 2. Interdisciplinary courses 3. Professionally oriented courses 4.1 Generic competencies-based courses 4.2 Subject-specific competencies-based courses

43 119 87 93 46

11.08 30.67 22.42 23.97 11.86

Total

388

100.00

Changing knowledge in higher education   81 Table 5.8  Academics’ preferences on pedagogy

Categories

N

%

1. Transmission of disciplinary-based knowledge 2. Active construction by students of knowledge from interdisciplinary contexts 3. Acquisition of school-oriented professional knowledge 4. Problem-solving skills in different professional and social contexts

26 117

7.88 35.45

85 102

25.76 30.91

Total

330

100.00

high in the preference of respondents, there are differences in terms of meaning orientation. In terms of pedagogy, the most popular categories are ‘active construction by students of knowledge from interdisciplinary contexts’ (35.45 per cent), ‘problem-­solving skills in different professional and social contexts’ (30.91 per cent) and ‘acquisition of school-­oriented professional knowledge’ (25.76 per cent), confirming the contradictory picture given above on content organisation. Preference is expressed for pedagogic contexts where weak boundaries are combined either with introjected or projected orientation to meaning, while indicating high preference for academic and new professional types of curricula which are contradictory in terms of their organisational principles. Table 5.9 presents responses to questions on assessment. There is, again, a complex distribution of response which, while least concerned with assessment of knowledge content taught, is divided between ‘assessment of knowledge that students actively build during the learning process’ (36.07 per cent), ‘non-­formal assessment’ (28.2 per cent), both linked to reflection, feedback and development of introjected orientations to meaning, and ‘assessment of specific predetermined and well described learning outcomes’ (23.93 Table 5.9  Academics’ preferences on students’ assessment

Categories 1. Assessment of students’ acquisition of the knowledge content taught 2. Assessment of knowledge that students actively build during the learning process 3. Assessment of specific predetermined and well described learning outcomes 4. Non-formal assessment Total

N

%

36

11.8

110

36.07

73

23.93

86

28.2

305

100.00

82   A. Sarakinioti et al. per cent), an indication of a methodology associated with performativity and teacher control over students accomplishments.

Concluding remarks Global, regional and national education policy contexts and their intersections cannot be ignored in attempting to understand fundamental transformations in the production, transmission and acquisition of knowledge. There has been an increasing flow of information and ‘cross-­cutting’ initiatives involving hybrid agencies. These constitute a grid of power ‘above, across, as well as within, state boundaries’ (Cerny, 1997: 253, cited in Ball, 2009a: 91) through which particular forms of discourse about education and its institutions and practices are ‘distributed, embedded and naturalised’ (Ball, 2009a: 91). In our research we have taken the Tuning Educational Structures in Europe project to be a specific ‘technology’ facilitating and enabling the language of competencies as ‘best practice’ in knowledge organisation for transmission purposes to become part of the thinking and sensibilities of actors across levels and divides where educational policy is currently formed and enacted. Our substantive findings, which may refer to trends of wider significance, suggest that in the Greek context old professionalism competencies remain popular among Education academics, while flexible, new professional ones are discerned as somewhat important in the education of teachers today. The most strongly preferred among 29 subject-­specific competencies, representing both old and new professionalism, appear to describe teachers’ control over students’ knowledge accomplishments and skills of classroom management and learning facilitation. These seem to constitute a narrower focus than formerly on the essential activities and responsibilities of school teachers. Concerning direction of curriculum change there appears to be a weakening of classifications in knowledge organisation in the name of interdisciplinarity combined with ‘progressive’ forms of pedagogy that presuppose learners’ involvement and a legitimising of both introjection and projection in the way professional identities are oriented to meaning-­making and valuation of knowledge forms. The opposed criteria that are revealed in what is articulated as a ‘discourse on curriculum change’ by academics’ responses in this study indicate that teacher education in Greece is a higher education sector in a transitional phase, ostensibly moving towards what has been referred to as new professionalism for teachers (Ball, 2005; Young, 2008; Cunningham, 2008; Gewirtz et al., 2009). Beck’s (2009) analysis of new professionalism in England pays attention to three aspects of relevance to our findings. First, its performative emphasis, manifest in the relevant policy texts and the discourse framing them, the cumulative effect of which is profoundly reductive, suggests that being a professional educator is a matter of acquiring a limited corpus of state-­ prescribed knowledge and skills. Second, it has a quality of ‘insidiousness’;

Changing knowledge in higher education   83 the pedagogic forms that it suggests for teacher (re)formation have the ‘capacity to marginalise and even silence competing ideas precisely by not entering into debate with them, but instead by tacitly presuming their irrelevance’ (Beck, 2008: 12; original emphasis). Third, the ‘versatility’ of the type of pedagogy appropriated and incorporated within its discourse ‘having no inherent principles of its own apart from managerialism and performativity, . . . is a perfect vehicle for both specifying and recurrently updating the “necessary” knowledge base of the profession at all levels’ (ibid.: 10; original emphasis). Our approach and analytical tools have helped us identify and describe a somewhat similar form of pedagogic discourse in European higher education policy and teacher education in Greece. Its main characteristics of interdisciplinarity, progressive pedagogies, such as versions of ‘problem-­solving’ and the privileging of the field of professional practice, framed by performativity, suggest a knowledge organisation form with weak classification, strong framing and projected orientations to meaning that contains the danger of becoming empty of any ‘esoteric’, ‘vertical’ content (Bernstein, 2000). Although in Greece competency discourse is not yet a strong element in official discourse on higher education and seems to be marginal in current teacher education curricula (cf. CHEPS, 2007), the trend towards courses that are organised in the form just described creates the symbolic and organisational conditions for official introduction of a language of competencies in teacher education and higher education more generally. Bernstein’s approach to knowledge distinguishes between disciplinary and curricular knowledge (Bernstein, 1971; Muller, 2009), emphasising the inevitable selections making up the curriculum. Current changes in educational knowledge forms involve changes in arrangements aiming to reorder relations between the academic field of knowledge production, the policy field and the world of work. ‘Recontextualisation’ (Bernstein, 1990) precisely describes the pedagogising of disciplinary knowledge and policy agencies acting as recontextualising agencies in selectively filtering academic discourses for ideas and methods appropriate for their objectives, producing particular representations of aspects of working life, as well as their own rules for evaluating people’s performance within them (Moore with Jones, 2007). We see that crucial in this reordering are the changing relations of the two sub-­fields identified by Bernstein (1990) with reference to school education which he referred to as official and pedagogic recontextualising fields. What is happening today in higher education institutions, through processes of restructuring knowledge forms, is that the former is progressively exerting increased control over activities. ‘Governmental professionalism’ (Beck, 2008), which increasingly prescribes the forms ‘legitimate’ professionalism is allowed to take, seems to accord with an alternative modality of governing (Ball, 2009b), involving a projected mode of identity change and requiring that future professionals increasingly ‘govern themselves’ in approved ways.

84   A. Sarakinioti et al. While we owe much to Foucault-­inspired discourse analysis of policy for engendering close attention to such developments we can only systematically describe the nature of such pedagogising using Bernstein’s refined theoretical tools. The particular version of interdisciplinarity identified and related to the language of competencies in our research, the potency of which cannot be underestimated, might be seen as aimed at preparing teachers and other future professionals for a new regime where they must possess the disposition to accept ‘re-­current official re-­training’ throughout their professional lives (Beck, 2009: 10; Bernstein, 2000). Bernstein’s theory helps us to see that it is the emptying of disciplinary contents which creates the conditions for social regulation. This point is both underlined in his analysis of ‘genericism’ and implied in his writings about the relationship between ‘instructional’ and ‘regulative’ discourse (1990, 2000; Power and Whitty, 2008; Gamble and Hoadley, this volume). Put succinctly, ‘[p]edagogic discourses can vary in the degree to which they impose a particular, normative framework upon social practices or create the possibilities for their critical questioning and reinterpretation’ (Moore with Jones, 2007: 134).

continued

Content: Knowledge organisation similar to academic-singulars, but legitimate selection of knowledge is defined by the projected orientation to meaning-making, related to the school field and its practices. Pedagogy: Traditional pedagogy of transmission of pre-specified knowledge. Teachers maintain control over selection and transmission of knowledge. Assessment: Traditional assessment of performance with reference to what is considered to be legitimate knowledge in the field of school practice. Identities: Professional identities of old type, defined by their orientation to the field of practice; but strong engagement with the academic field, through strong classification and framing.

Content: Specialisations based on maintaining strict boundaries vis-à-vis other fields of knowledge (singulars) – condition for social cohesion, and for strict delimitation of academic fields (e.g. Education) from other social fields of action. Pedagogy: Pedagogy of transmission, related to traditional forms of pedagogy; emphasis on transmission of pre-specified content drawn from established and traditionally recognised scientific fields of knowledge production. Teachers maintain control over pedagogic relations through methods such as lectures. Assessment: Traditional practices of assessing students’ realisations, related to the (specialised) knowledge taught. Visible criteria of legitimate realisations. Oral and mainly written examinations and tests dominate. Identities: Identities formed through introverted orientations to meaning-making, producing durable engagement of individuals with a specialised cognitive field, recognised in itself as having value.

Type of Characteristics curriculum

Appendix 5.1  Translation device for relating the theoretical and the empirical dimensions in the research process

Singular (academic) (C+F+I)

Old professional (regions) (C+F+P)

Content: Programmes characterised by weak classifications of knowledge, while orientations to meaning are projected, related to the needs and values of various practical fields and the market. Contents relate to developing certain generic competencies, e.g. problem solving skills. In extreme versions, programmes represent a set of flexible skills (generisism). Pedagogy: New forms of transmission pedagogy that combine teachers’ strict control over selection, sequencing and pacing of educational process, with students’ ‘active’ engagement though specific methods, e.g. ‘project work’. Assessment: New practices of assessing performance and of legitimate criteria, aligned to the values of economy, local community and the labour market. Students’ achievements typically assessed on the basis of predetermined ‘learning outcomes’, described in terms of targets for acquiring competencies and skills. Identities: Decentralised identities, orientated to context-dependent meanings and values of the market. Basic criteria for the formation of pedagogical and professional identities are flexibility, effectiveness and accountability.

Note C+/-: Classification (strong/weak) F+/-: Framing (strong/weak)

I: Meaning Orientation: Introjection P: Meaning Orientation: Projection

Source: Bernstein (2000), Brown & Dowling (1998).

Content: Knowledge organised in broader cognitive areas as a result of weakening insulation among different academic fields of knowledge. However, the selection of contents is driven by the principles of the academic fields, preserving the academic character of the programmes. Pedagogy: The selection of knowledge is regulated by the teachers, e.g. through proposing specific reading lists, and is based on the meanings of the academic fields of knowledge. Assessment: Strong framing is retained through the dominance of the academic criteria, shaping assessment practices and keeping control over students’ performance. Identities: The pedagogic identities are formed by the weak boundaries among the fields of academic knowledge and the conditions of participation and collaboration that this form of interdisciplinarity produces.

Type of Characteristics curriculum

Appendix 5.1  continued

Interdisciplinary (Academic) (C−F+I)

New professional (generic) (C−F+P)

Changing knowledge in higher education   87

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6 Teachers’ conceptions of knowledge structures and pedagogic practices in higher education Guðrún Geirsdóttir Introduction Research and writing on higher education (HE) curriculum has tended to lack general overview or approach (Tight, 2003) and has received relatively limited sociological attention (Kelly, 2004). Why this is the case is unclear, possibly reflecting either the inadequacy of established curriculum theory when applied to HE or a lack of coherent conceptions of curriculum in what may be regarded as a young field (Knight, 2002). It has rarely featured in policy analyses of higher education (Barnett, 1990; Barnett and Griffin, 1997; Gellert, 1999; Kogan et al., 2000). Given almost universal effort to align HE institutions with the needs of national economies in the hope of increasing international competitiveness (Ensor, 2004a; Karseth, 2005), this is an interesting absence. My aim was to explore the role of university teachers as curriculum developers, examining how their ideas about the curriculum affected the way they understood teaching and learning and how curriculum decisions were made (Geirsdóttir, 2008). I wanted to approach this task from a disciplinary and cultural standpoint in comparing how university teachers within different disciplinary fields made curriculum decisions and which factors or forces, external, disciplinary or institutional, were perceived by them as important for their curriculum planning. The study was conducted at the University of Iceland, which in 2010 had 643 teaching staff and 14,139 students, spread across five academic schools and 25 faculties offering 165 lines of study at the undergraduate level and over 200 at the graduate level in all main disciplines. Despite its relatively small size, as the oldest, national university of Iceland, it has experienced much of the political, social and cultural change that has taken place in the global system of higher education (Jónasson, 2004).

Theoretical framework An often criticised characteristic of research of higher education curriculum is the tendency to isolate teaching and learning from other aspects of

Teachers’ conceptions   91 p­ ractice, such as disciplinary knowledge development. One outcome has been many publications of the ‘how to’ variety on HE teaching and learning (Tight, 2003). Teaching and instructional experience tends to be treated as generic practice devoid of ideological, disciplinary and political connotation, rendering apolitical and technical views of curriculum and the curriculum process (Barnett and Coate, 2005; Malcolm and Zukas, 2000, 2001). To avoid such pitfalls in this analysis, Bernstein’s notion of pedagogic discourse (Bernstein, 1990, 1996, 2000) was used to capture the complex and ‘multilevel nature’ (Goodlad, 1984) of the curriculum and the specific practices of university teachers in curriculum planning processes. According to Sadovnik (1995: 10), Bernstein’s notion of pedagogic discourse is concerned with ‘the production, distribution and reproduction of official knowledge and how this knowledge is related to structurally determined power relations’. Knowledge realisation takes place through the operation of the pedagogic device across three fields, of its production, recontextualising and reproduction. University teachers are uniquely active participants within all three. As researchers they are creators of knowledge within the production field (Bernstein, 2000: 28–30) and as teachers they hold a central role in reproducing pedagogic practice (Bernstein, 1990: 22). However, the main focus here is their recontextualising activity, their participation in the creation of shaping pedagogic discourse as they delocate knowledge from its primary context and shape it into curriculum structures. In higher education, subjects and disciplines have often been studied in ways that underestimate disciplinary differences and inadequately account for the impact of local contexts and actors, which also give rise to differences. In this analysis, the term ‘disciplinary curriculum’ is used to denote a specialised knowledge and pedagogical domain created by instructional and regulative discourse (Bernstein, 2000: 32). The latter refers to the rules that form the hierarchy of relations in pedagogic situations, including expectations of conduct, manner and character often historically loosely referred to as ‘the hidden curriculum’ (Margolis, 2001) or its moral order (Ylijoki, 2000). Instructional discourse, in turn, refers to the selection, sequencing, pacing and criteria of knowledge that is always embedded in regulative discourse (Bernstein, 1990). Bernstein (1971: 48) initially developed a conception of two broad types of curriculum with collection and integrated structures. In a collection code curriculum, elements, usually subjects, are strongly insulated or classified and there are tight controls on what new knowledge enters the curriculum. In an integrated curriculum structure, knowledge classification is relatively weak and knowledge entities are held together by a ‘relational idea’ (ibid.: 53). Bernstein (2000: 52) subsequently further characterised disciplines as singulars or regions, where singulars are protected by strong boundaries and hierarchies and regions are where singulars become recontextualised into larger units directed towards both their intellectual fields and external practice. These concepts are employed to examine teachers’ conceptions of knowledge structures and pedagogical practices and to explore the ways in which

92   G. Geirsdóttir curriculum planning was carried out in disciplinary departments by highlighting specific features of their internal cultures across three subject departments in the University of Iceland where it was evident that the two curriculum modes were further reflected in the structuring of different organisational or institutional codes. In university departments, boundaries, power relations, communication modes and management structures create special identities and different possibilities for curriculum development and change (Bernstein, 1996: 10) and concepts of collection and integrated code types can be used, as Bernstein intended, to characterise institutional structures.

Methodology and research design Bernstein (1996: 24) pointed out that institutional structures that resemble collection type codes are less vulnerable to external influences than those with integration code types. In applying these concepts to activity within university departments, I wanted to investigate the limits and possibilities to university teachers’ agency in curricular developments and the consequences of this for knowledge creation and reproduction in contemporary HE sites. The study was conducted between 2002 and 2007 at the University of Iceland and framed within a socio-­cultural and critical theoretical framework, emphasising interpretive and phenomenological perspectives. Curriculum development was explored as taking place within the social context of disciplinary departments, in socially situated time and space (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Vygotsky, 1981; Wertsch et al., 1995). Rather than approaching curriculum decision-­making as technical or instrumental pro­ cesses, focus was laid on concepts of power and agency and contesting curriculum ideologies within and between departments. The choice of the three disciplines was partly based on theoretical ideas about the foundations of knowledge constructed within them that took account of goals, structures and epistemological differences (Becher and Trowler, 2001) and Bernstein’s notions of disciplinary types and curricular formations. The departments within which they were located were considered to share some features, working within the same institution, subject to the same institutional rules and regulative framework. The main case study undertaken was of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, with two others, in the Departments of Anthropology and Physics, providing comparison of curriculum development (Stake, 2006) in university disciplinary contexts, theoretically sampled (Creswell, 2005). With the permission of each department head, the study was introduced at faculty meetings where further permission to conduct it within each department was granted. As a researcher, being a member of the university’s community both helped and hindered in study. It provided an easy access to departments and individual participants that saw me as ‘one of us’ and therefore a trustworthy researcher. Yet, within the departmental cultures I was a

Teachers’ conceptions   93 Table 6.1  An overview of interviews and observations Department of Industrial and Mechanical Engineering

•  Open-ended interviews with 7 teachers •  Focused interviews with 4 teachers •  Five observations at department meetings •  One observation at a faculty meeting •  Two email conformational interviews with faculty head and faculty office manager

Department of anthropology

•  Open-ended interviews with 4 teachers •  Focused interviews with 2 teachers •  One observation at department meeting

Department of physics

•  Open-ended interviews with 4 teachers •  One observation at a faculty meeting •  One email conformational interview with faculty head

Other

•  One focused interview with the head of the Division of Academic Affairs

stranger. In the study, I made use of Haraway’s (1988) idea of the split subject in being part of academia but at the same time critical of it. Data was assembled from a variety of course and curriculum texts but was mainly based on interviews and observations, as given in Table 6.1. In interviews, teachers’ curriculum ideas in general as well as specifically related to their taught courses were explored while observations at faculty meetings provided insight into the departmental cultures, mode of communication and curriculum decision-­making processes.

Local pedagogic discourse In this context, ‘local’ denotes sites where disciplinary knowledge is assembled, transmitted and acquired, that is to say, where curriculum actualisation takes place (Barnett and Coate, 2005). Teachers’ perceptions of the disciplinary curriculum were explored in terms of: the organisation and structure of knowledge within programmes as integrated or collection code types, composed of singulars or regions; the aims of the programme; student identity in terms of their ‘model of the learner’ (Bernstein, 2000: 35); their roles as teachers, including their relationship hierarchies and the nature of control over the selection of communication and its sequencing; ways of teaching (instructional discourse concerning selection, sequence, pacing and criteria of knowledge); and ‘way of being’ (regulative discourse relating to expectations of conduct, manner and character). Each department, to some extent, lived its own disciplinary life, and created its specific pedagogic discourse, as illustrated in Table 6.2.

C+ Very strong grammar

  5 Classification (‘what’) of knowledge within the undergraduate programme

C– Weaker grammar being made stronger. Determined globally, locally and by teachers’ participation in the field of reproduction

Singular moving to more regional

Pragmatic skills, problems solving, utility of knowledge, performatory focus (acting and being)

Highly academic focus, critical thinking. Recent performatory focus (knowing – being)

Regional being moved to more singular

  4 Disciplinary changes

Collection code

  7 Aims of programme

Integrated code

  3 Curriculum structure

Horizontal

C– Weak grammar. Determined globally, locally and by teachers’ participation in the field of reproduction

Hierarchical

  2 Knowledge structure

Collection mode but changing towards integration

Anthropology

  6 Classification (‘what’) of C– knowledge within the graduate Weaker grammar, locally programme determined

Integrated model

Engineering

  1 Organisational structure of department

Features

Highly academic with focus on research abilities. Recent (reluctant) performatory focus (knowing – acting)

C– Weaker grammar, determined by teachers’ participation in field of reproduction

C++ Very strong grammar, globally determined

Singular

Hierarchical integrated code

Hierarchical

Strong collection mode

Physics

Table 6.2  Demonstration of the essential and distinctive features of the pedagogic discourses of the three disciplines at undergraduate and graduate levels

F– Weaker framing

11 Framing of instructional discourse in the graduate programme

F– Weaker framing

F++ Very strong framing

F– → F+ Weak but the strength of framing increasing

F++ Very strong framing

10 Framing of instructional discourse in the undergraduate programme F– Weaker framing

F++ → F–

F– → F+

F+ → F–

  9 Framing of teachers’ role

F++ → F– Very strong framing at undergraduate level. At graduate level, students participate in teachers’ research and become legitimate practitioners in the production of knowledge

F– Weak framing. Students described in active terms such as ‘active’ and ‘critical’. The graduate program moves students further into academic practice

F++ → F– Move from strong to weak framing. Students described in active terms as ‘confident’ and ‘fearless’. Through graduate projects students are moved into the vocational field

  8 Framing of students’ identity

96   G. Geirsdóttir The distinctive character of each discipline was evident. The first row of the table refers to the organisational mode of each of the disciplinary departments, while rows 2 and 3 depict the structures of knowledge and curriculum of disciplines. Row 4 refers to ideological changes taking place within them. Rows 5 and 6 refer to the classification of disciplinary knowledge at undergraduate and graduate levels and row 7 the main aim of the disciplines. Rows 8 and 9 refer to the positioning of learners within them, student identities being differentiated by the content, knowledge structures and modes of acquisition of disciplinary knowledge. Finally, rows 10 and 11 refer to the framing of instructional discourse of the disciplines for undergraduate and graduate programmes, respectively.

Local and the universal pedagogic discourse Distinctive features of each local disciplinary pedagogic discourse were created in specific social contexts, their uniqueness arising when that discipline was transformed or recontextualised in specific pedagogic settings. Local pedagogic discourse is a recontextualised, ‘universal’ or ‘imaginary’ discourse of a discipline, portraying the shared view of university teachers of the actualisation of an idea of a universal disciplinary curriculum within their specific context. To such local pedagogic discourse which is, at the same time, both local and universal, teachers (and departments) often stand in an ambivalent relationship, though in different degrees across our three departments. University teachers of a discipline are also members of its universal community and strong classification of the discipline creates stronger ties to its universal discourse, such that it becomes teachers’ primary community of practice. In physics, for example, where classification of knowledge is strong, the universality of the discipline and the internationality of research are stressed; there is ‘nothing Icelandic’ about physics: There is nothing Icelandic within astronomy, there is nothing Icelandic about solid state physics, there is nothing Icelandic in mathematical physics. Yet those are the groups that get the largest fund, have the international connections . . . we think primarily from the research. (university teacher, physics: field notes, 18:12) The universality of physics is emphasised in the globally understood content presented in international textbooks that not only give strongly classified criteria for valid knowledge within the curriculum but also its mode and framing of instruction. This is especially true at the undergraduate level, whereas at graduate level, teachers’ research areas form student curriculum, ‘locally’ selected and aligned to teachers’ special fields of knowledge and available resources for research. In engineering, the undergraduate curriculum is also depicted as universal and the use of international textbooks stressed. Yet, the relation of the

Teachers’ conceptions   97 discipline and the department to its vocational field requires teachers to take the needs of local industry into account, thus weakening the classification of the discipline and its boundaries. Teachers prepared their students for the engineering profession in Iceland as well as for more advanced academic work and local ties are evident in the selection of course content where forestry and the car industry are not seen to be as relevant as geothermal heat and fisheries. As new local and European standards of work methods are introduced, as required, teachers make ample use of their own experience in the field in framing pedagogic practice. At graduate level student projects undertaken within the field are seen as valuable for engineering companies and other institutions and as stepping stones for students into the field of practice. This relationship with the field opens up communication between the department and the outside world and weakens classification of the discipline. In anthropology, teachers’ research interests formed the dominant part of curriculum content. While emphasis on disciplinary methodology has always tended to be a strong thread within curricular and knowledge domains, a need was felt for basing it on teachers’ research interests and local research during the establishment of the programme in 1970. This was seen as differentiating the department from a more universal way of doing anthropology and gave it a distinctive ‘local’ character. While measures were taken later to employ academics with more ‘global’ research interests, recent changes within the discipline have put the department more at ease with its own ‘localness’. There is agreement, understood by all teachers and which remains tacit and rarely discussed, that there is some knowledge that is ‘traditional’ and belongs to ‘the major area’ of anthropology that should be included in the curriculum but the weak classification of disciplinary knowledge means that there is none that is seen as essential, aside from methodology.

The contextualisation of local pedagogic discourse The strongest influence on local pedagogic discourse was the experience of teachers as university students, the different, individual ‘local’ pedagogic discourses they brought with them to their departments. Teachers within all three were educated in various universities around the world and brought to them experience of various disciplinary pedagogic discourses, often referred to as examples of the universal one – ‘the right way’ of doing engineering, anthropology or physics. The experience of disciplinary enculturation undergone as students was strong, one interviewee, a professor of engineering, noting it ‘has somehow put its mark upon you . . . you are stuck on it being the only right thing’. Such prior disciplinary experiences became the foundations for local ones: ‘I think I teach in a similar way as I have been taught’ was quite a common response from teachers asked about the origins of their curriculum and instructional ideas. How influential these discourses were

98   G. Geirsdóttir within the culture of the departments may be related to strength of classification of the discipline; the stronger the classification of knowledge, the stronger the association with the universal discourse (see rows 5 and 6 in Table 6.2). In physics, classification of knowledge is strong and its structure hierarchical. There was strong agreement within the department as to what knowledge should be included within the curriculum, in contrast to anthropology where classification of knowledge was weak, structure horizontal and the curriculum ideas or ‘gaze’ of teachers varied. Such variance was accepted and agreed upon, seen as an essential part of the discipline and clearly reflected in the ‘academic freedom’ of the teachers within the department, limited only by the ‘relational idea’ of a ‘basic foundation’: Maybe this is different in other departments but I think for us it is quite normal, if we take for example this course, I think everyone would find it quite normal if I had other perspectives or emphasis than [other teachers] as long as there was some similar basic foundation. (teacher, anthropology: field notes, 16:22) Another strong influence on local pedagogic discourse was the cultures of departments as organisational units, with different disciplinary or departmental cultures becoming apparent during fieldwork. Each specific discipline’s departmental location was seen as the primary cultural context or ‘basic unit’ of curriculum planning and development (Becher and Kogan, 1992). Departments provided the cultural contexts that were most influential for curriculum thinking and planning, both in terms of disciplinary ideas and institutional responsibility. Within them, as communities of practice, the pedagogic discourses of disciplines were structured and actualised through mutual engagement and the disciplinary traditions of regulative discourse (Wenger, 1998: 83). In that sense, the three departments were not only the basic units of curriculum practice and development in terms of the formal institutional responsibility but also the communities in which local curricula were created. Interviewees frequently referred to ‘us’ as different from ‘them’, explaining their departmental way of doing things with phrases like ‘this is how we do it here’ or ‘different from what I hear in other departments’. Bernstein’s concepts of classification and framing, used to distinguish them in terms of collection and integrated codes, picked out organisational modalities strongly related to the images and perceptions that teachers held of their departments, reflecting the pedagogic and especially regulative discourses of disciplines, and were influential in understanding both the what and the how of curriculum decisions made within them. The organisational structure of the departments provided insight into curriculum modalities and the framing of communications characterising regulative discourses. They were affected by type of curriculum, the classifi-

Teachers’ conceptions   99 cation of knowledge (see Table 6.2, rows 5 and 6) and the strength of framing of the teacher’s role and student identities (see Table 6.2, rows 8 and 9), indicating the existence of three different departmental cultures. The Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering was portrayed by teachers as a close-­knit social community where teachers had easy access to each other in an integrated mode of department organisation. The classification of the departmental organisation was weak, its relation to the vocational field requiring communication which made boundaries between inside and outside more permeable. Within the department social relations between members were strengthened by informal social traditions, such as going hunting or sharing a summer-­house over a weekend. There was an emphasis on straightforward social communication and easy access between teachers and with students which was increasingly visible to the latter as they progressed through the course, opening up possibilities for new kinds of communication and cooperation (Bernstein, 2000). Anthropology teachers portrayed themselves as members of a stable and tranquil community, in common agreement over academic freedom and with the trust to carry out work without interference from other members evident in its collection code modality. Discussion of programme aims and goals was rare and irregular. Teachers were free to select preferred texts and there were no shared offices or work spaces. During the study, some teachers introduced new modes of instruction based on a collaborative model, which resulted from new leadership within the department calling for more communication and cooperation between members. The Department of Physics exemplified organisation in terms of a strong collection code, with teachers distributed by areas of expertise and research to separate buildings. Discussions about aims and goals of the undergraduate programme, as with anthropology, were and had been rare and irregular. Respondent teachers portrayed themselves as autonomous individuals exhibiting considerable agreement over ‘small matters’. They perceived physics as an elite discipline and said that their department was highly respected, claiming they had to remind themselves not to be arrogant. There was strong loyalty to the discipline and emphasis on research. Collaboration between teachers was rare and their communication with students was strongly framed in the undergraduate programme, though weaker at graduate level where students participated fully in knowledge production as research assistants and junior collaborators. The third essential influence on local pedagogic discourse was the organisational saga which Clark (1983: 374) defined as a ‘unified set of publicly expressed beliefs about the formal group that is a) rooted in history, b) claims unique accomplishments, and c) has a strong group sentiment’. In similar terms, Vitale (2001: 122–123) uses the concept of ‘Koïnè’ to refer to a culturally bound way of doing a discipline based on the shared epistemological stance of teachers within it. Teachers in each department ascribed local cultural influence, the regulative discourse of the department, to

100   G. Geirsdóttir various social factors, events and persons who, or which, were part of the departmental saga. While academically strong predecessors were often mentioned by physicists, the collegiality of engineering was attributed to a charismatic teacher and in anthropology the curriculum was regarded as shaped by external social conditions at the time when the programme was established. The knowledge base of the curriculum was said to have been shaped by the appointment of teachers within certain research areas in physics and anthropology and the leadership qualities and ideologies embodied in sitting department heads. However, local pedagogic discourses were not stable. During the time of the study, competing ideologies within disciplinary ­discourses, as well as intrinsic and extrinsic forces, affected the classification and framing of disciplines in various ways (Geirsdóttir, 2009). An example of such changes was the introduction of a strong research mission of the ­university in 2006. The emphasis on research was well aligned with the regulative discourse favoured by the teachers in physics, one of whom claimed that it was now finally possible to create a ‘true’ university. The mission had little effect within anthropology where the curriculum was already strongly rooted in teachers’ research. In engineering the new research mission was seen as increasing the academic drift of the discipline, supporting its move from hard applied to more pure and thus strengthening its classification.

The uncontested curriculum Having sought to portray local pedagogic discourse within departments, teachers’ perceptions of their contribution to curriculum decision-­making and development were investigated. If the story thus far suggests that teachers hold a powerful role in curriculum processes that were crucial for their students, this was not a perception which they commonly shared. Curriculum decision-­making was experienced as part of the normative practice of departments and rarely questioned, teachers experiencing their roles in knowledge production (i.e. as researchers) and reproduction (i.e. as teachers) more strongly than as recontextualising agents (i.e. curriculum developers). Their lack of awareness of their powerful role in the latter may be explained by their, so far, uncontested and secure dominance over the curriculum. Teachers’ muted appreciation of themselves as curriculum-­makers might be explained by Foucault’s (1980) idea of power as circulating among them rather than being located in the hands of individuals. Such a notion suggests that power relations circulate within disciplinary departments and are embedded in curriculum decision-­making where teachers act as its vehicles, action being taken only when the circulation of power is interrupted or attacked. Yet, power circulated differently within the three departments depending on their organisation modes and strength of disciplinary classification. For example, the organisational structure of the Anthropology Department and the social culture of Engineering provided spaces and social networks through which power could easily circulate, while within the

Teachers’ conceptions   101 strong collection code organisation of the Physics Department this was less possible. However, the most likely explanation for teachers having an unproblematic view of the curriculum and its development was that it was strongly embedded within regulative discourse, rarely questioned or seen as problematic on a day-­ to-day basis; the hidden moral order of the discipline only became visible when disrupted or contested. Formal departmental discussions about curriculum and programme structure were rare and usually revolved around organisational issues, such as which courses to offer next year or how research leave should be allocated. Decisions were made in order to ensure the continuity and smooth running of programmes and issues relating to regulative discourse were rarely touched upon or contested. While teachers within the three disciplines felt they had different opportunities and spaces for making decisions about curricula, their opportunities to affect instructional discourse varied depending on how it was embedded in regulative discourse. Departmental meetings usually had a full agenda of practical issues and teachers’ time was precious. In the university, teachers’ agency with regard to curricular content and structure had rarely been questioned. The state, as a part of the official recontextualising field, had very little influence on the higher education curriculum in Iceland until recently. However, this is changing, with new state requirements for accreditation of curriculum programmes and the implementation of the Bologna Process, especially given the requirement to define knowledge in terms of learning outcomes (Menntamálaráðuneytið, 2007). State intervention will, if successfully carried out, project new working conditions and identities for academics (Henkel and Kogan, 1999; Singh, 2002).

Curriculum spaces within different disciplines: selecting appropriate knowledge At the undergraduate level, physics and industrial and mechanical engineering shared strong classification and hierarchical structure of knowledge within the curriculum (see Table 6.2, rows 5 and 2). Teachers within those two disciplines reported limited criteria for the selection of curricular knowledge. This was especially true within physics where knowledge was seen as pure, true and uncontested, thus strongly classified. Courses were arranged in sequential and hierarchical order and the content of knowledge or pedagogical texts covered within each was preset, highly structured and agreed upon by the department and anchored through ‘tradition’: You see we don’t select the material for the courses, we come to an agreement what is in the courses. It is more and less a departmental tradition. If you teach Electrodynamics this is the material you cover, if it is Physics 1 you are teaching this is the material you cover and if you teach a laboratory group these are the experiments you teach. (teacher, physics: field notes, 18:26)

102   G. Geirsdóttir In engineering, students moved from basic engineering (physics and mathematics) courses to ‘real’ ones. Teaching ‘real’ engineering courses meant relating pedagogic texts and tasks to the field. This could be seen as a weakening of disciplinary classification which opened up spaces for local curriculum decision-­making. Teachers overtly distinguished between the limitations of local pedagogic discourse in relation to the universal: And no matter how we look at it, if we are going to be doing something reasonable in research oriented education here it is quite clear we will never compete with MIT in status except in geothermal heat and fish . . . I would think for the faculty as such, OK I will broaden this and include civil engineering and say: geothermal heat – fish – earthquakes [knocks on the table emphasising each word]. Finito. In other fields we don’t stand a chance. (teacher, engineering: field notes, 12:34) In anthropology, weak disciplinary classification and weakly framed criteria for selection of knowledge (see Table 6.2, rows 5 and 6) required teachers to use their ‘gaze’ when selecting knowledge or pedagogic texts for their courses. Its horizontal knowledge structure (see Table 6.2, row 2) made it difficult for them to expect students to arrive at specific courses with preliminary knowledge except for that provided in a few introductory and methodology courses. Teachers changed course texts frequently and new courses could easily be established, providing them with ample scope to manipulate and stamp their mark on curricula: Then you change the course and update it in alignment with what is happening today and then somehow you feel that it must be included. For a while people were wondering – should this be included or not and? – now one feels it is quite a must. (teacher, anthropology: field notes 16:12) At graduate level, the framing of instruction within all three disciplines became weaker and teachers felt more able to select and assemble knowledge within the curriculum. This was less marked in anthropology where classification of knowledge was weak to begin with and more apparent in engineering and physics (see Table 6.2, row 6). In engineering, weaker classification of knowledge and framing of communication allowed teachers more scope, within the limitations of the disciplinary context, to put their personal mark on courses and adapt them to what they felt important, based on their personal theories of teaching (see Handal and Lauvås, 1990). The mediation of expressed needs of the vocational field and the specificity of the discipline locally were taken into account and addressed. Even though the direct influence of the professional or vocational field was not seen as strong, it was based on ‘respect and trust’ and teachers were connected to fields of practice

Teachers’ conceptions   103 in various ways through personal connections and students projects. The integrated organisational mode of the department thus opens up possibilities of communication between the discipline and its vocational field, thus weakening the classification between the two. In physics, the graduate programme was strongly structured around final research projects undertaken under the supervision of teachers, often as part of their research. As students entered into apprenticeships with teachers in the field of knowledge production, framing became weak.

Discussion and implications Bernstein’s theories have been applied successfully within a large variety of educational research settings (for example, Bourne, 2004; Daniels et al., 2004; Ensor, 2004b; Neves et al., 2004). This study also reveals the power and usefulness of his concepts in analysing complex processes of curriculum development in HE, while seeking to do justice to the socio-­cultural context within which they take place. In particular, it has sought to demonstrate how they make it possible to analyse specific curriculum structures and modalities to reveal what here has been termed the local pedagogic discourse of a discipline and how ‘universal’ pedagogic discourses of different disciplines are recontextualised or ‘localised’ within a specific site, here the disciplinary departments (Becher and Kogan, 1992). The organisational structures of three departments revealed very different communities of practice that gave a strong indication of mode and possibilities of curriculum development. Within the Physics Department, while teachers’ autonomy was stressed, curriculum discussions and debates were rare. Given its strong collection code type organisational modality and the vertical knowledge structures of the discipline, the lack or limitations of curriculum discussions and debate are logical. What is there to debate? As members of a singular, the loyalty of physics teachers was stronger towards the ‘universal’ discourse of physics than their departmental community of practice. The Department of Anthropology was characterised as a collection code type organisation at the beginning of the study, with teachers demonstrating little need for cooperation and communication. Changing ideas within the community of practice, as well as external demands, called for a weakening of the classification of the discipline. The curriculum structure of anthropology (horizontal knowledge structure and weak classification of disciplinary knowledge) allowed for changes that teachers felt were needed within the department to strengthen their community of practice. Thus, stronger networking and higher level of communication over curriculum issues sought to move the department towards a more integrated type mode. The integrated type mode of the departmental organisation of the Department of Engineering allowed for greater communication between members of the departments as well as between the departments and the vocational field served by the discipline. The needs of the vocational field were discussed at faculty meetings were

104   G. Geirsdóttir advocates of the field were granted access. At such meetings, new curriculum ideas were introduced, debated and integrated into the curriculum programme. Analysis of different departmental organisation and pedagogic discourses that operated within them further demonstrated teachers’ differing agency in making curriculum decisions, enhancing our understanding of the possibilities, as well as boundaries, of curriculum development in higher education. While departmental structures, such as found here within engineering and anthropology, may be more open, even vulnerable, to external influences than those characterised by those such as physics, their organisational structures permit collaborative types of communities of practice seen as productive, even essential, for curriculum development and reform (Fullan, 2001; Merton et al., 2004; Parker, 2003). Given the indications of lack of critical and problematic approach to the curriculum, where its immutability is explained by the normalisation of disciplinary regulative discourses and the organisational modes of departments that do not encourage much cooperation and collaboration, the findings indicate that their critical analysis is important for development of greater understanding of such processes within higher education. They suggest and stress the importance of seeing teaching and learning as embedded in disciplinary discourse and acknowledge the different boundaries or spaces which teachers experience within the curriculum. Narrow and technical conceptions of the curriculum often found in higher education research inadequately represent the importance of cultural and social contexts in understanding curriculum continuity and change.

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Teachers’ conceptions   105 B. Davies and A. Morais (eds), Reading Bernstein, researching Bernstein (pp. 61–75). London: RoutledgeFalmer. Clark, B. R. (1983) The higher education system: Organization in cross national perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press. Creswell, J. W. (2005) Educational research: Planning, conducting and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research (2nd edn). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education. Daniels, H., Creese, A., Hey, V. and Leonard, D. (2004) Gendered learning identity in two modalities of pedagogic discourse. In J. Muller, B. Davies and A. Morais (eds), Reading Bernstein, researching Bernstein (pp. 123–136). London: RoutledgeFalmer. Ensor, P. (2004a) Contesting discourses in higher education curriculum restructuring in South Africa. Higher Education, 48(3): 339–359. Ensor, P. (2004b) Towards a sociology of teacher education. In J. Muller, B. Davies and A. Morais (eds), Reading Bernstein, researching Bernstein (pp. 153–168). London: RoutledgeFalmer. Foucault, M. (1980) Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books. Fullan, M. (2001) The new meaning of educational change (3rd edn). New York: Teachers College Press. Geirsdóttir, G. (2008) We are caught up in our own world: Conceptions of curriculum within three different disciplines at the University of Iceland. Unpublished doctoral dissertation: Iceland University of Education, Reykjavík. Geirsdóttir, G. (2009) Responding to change: The responsiveness of disciplinary curriculum towards different change forces. Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, Vienna, September. Gellert, C. (1999) Introduction: The changing conditions of teaching and learning in European higher education. In C. Gellert (ed.), Innovation and adaptation in higher education (pp. 9–31). London: Jessica Kingsley. Goodlad, J. I. (1984) Curriculum inquiry. New York: McGraw-­Hill. Handal, G. and Lauvås, P. (1990) Vejledning og praktisk yrkesteor [Mentoring and practical professional theories]. Oslo: J. W. Cappelans forlag. Haraway, D. (1988) Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3): 575–599. Henkel, M. and Kogan, M. (1999) Changes in curriculum and institutional structures: Response to outside influences in higher education institutions. In C. Gellert (ed.), Innovation and adaptation in higher education (pp. 66–92). London: Jessica Kingsley. Jónasson, J. T. (2004) Higher education reforms in Iceland at the transition into the twenty-­first century. In I. Fagerlind and G. Strömqvist (eds), Reforming higher education in the Nordic countries: Studies of change in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden (pp. 137–188). Paris: International Institute for Educational Planning. Karseth, B. (2005) Curriculum restructuring in higher education: A new pedagogic regime. Paper presented at the Third Conference on Knowledge and Politics at the University of Bergen, May. Kelly, A. V. (2004) The curriculum: Theory and practice (5th edn). London: Sage. Knight, P. T. (2002) Learning from schools. Higher Education, 44: 283–298. Kogan, M., Bauer, M., Askling, B., Marton, S. G., Marton, F., Bleiklie, I., et al. (eds) (2000) Transforming higher education: A comparative study. London: Jessica Kingsley.

106   G. Geirsdóttir Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Malcolm, J. and Zukas, M. (2000) Becoming an educator: Communities of practice in higher education. In I. McNay (ed.), Higher education and its communities (pp. 51–65). Buckingham: SRHE and Open University Press. Malcolm, J. and Zukas, M. (2001) Bridging pedagogic gaps: Conceptual discontinuities in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 6(1): 33–42. Margolis, E. (ed.) (2001) The hidden curriculum in higher education. New York: Routledge. Menntamálaráðuneytið (2007) Samningur milli menntamálaráðuneytis og Háskóla Íslands um kennslu og rannsóknir [Contract between the Ministry of Education and the University of Iceland on teaching and research]. Retrieved 21 February 2007 from: http://brunnur.stjr.is/mrn/logogregl.nsf/FF6C260B2319251 D002567BA004D88CB/B68CC69B30D39B150025726400492EBD?Open Document. Merton, P., Froyd, J., Clark, M. C. and Richardson, J. (2004) Challenging the norm in engineering education: Understanding organizational culture and curricular change. Paper presented at the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition. Salt Lake City, Utah, June. Neves, I., Morais, A. and Afonso, M. (2004) Teacher training contexts: Study of specific sociological characteristics. In J. Muller, B. Davies and A. Morais (eds), Reading Bernstein, researching Bernstein (pp. 168–189). London: RoutledgeFalmer. Parker, J. (2003) Reconceptualising the curriculum: From commodification to transformation. Teaching in Higher Education, 8(4): 529–543. Posner, G. J. (1998) Models of curriculum planning. In L. E. Beyer and M. W. Apple (eds), The curriculum: Problems, politics and possibilities (2nd edn, pp. 79–100). Albany: State University of New York Press. Sadovnik, A. R. (ed.) (1995) Knowledge and pedagogy: The sociology of Basil Bernstein. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Singh, P. (2002) Pedagogising knowledge: Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 23(4): 571–582. Stake, R. E. (2006) Multiple case study analysis. New York: Guilford Press. Tight, M. (2003) Researching higher education. Buckingham: SRHE and Open University Press. Vitale, P. (2001) The teaching of sociology: Towards a European comparison of curricula. In A. Morais, I. Neves, B. Davis and H. Daniels (eds), Towards a sociology of pedagogy: The contribution of Basil Bernstein to research (pp. 113–127). New York: Peter Lang. Vygotsky, L. S. (1981) The genesis of higher mental functions. In J. V. Wertsch (ed.), The concept of action in Soviet psychology (pp. 134–143). Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of practice, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wertsch, J. V., del Río, P. and Alvarez, A. (1995) Sociocultural studies of mind. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ylijoki, O.-H. (2000) Disciplinary cultures and the moral order of studying: A case-­ study of four Finnish university departments. Higher Education, 39: 339–362.

7 Curriculum development processes in a Journalism and Media Studies Department Jo-­Anne Vorster

Introduction Our analytic purpose is to illuminate the dynamics of a process of collaborative curriculum development in a Department of Journalism and Media Studies (JMS) officially opened in 1970 at a ‘research intensive’ (Boughey, 2009) university in South Africa. Bernstein (1996, 2000) argues that recontextualisation processes, whether within official (ORF ) or pedagogic recontextualising fields (PRF ) create discursive gaps that constitute spaces for the play of ideologies. In a field such as JMS, as elsewhere, university lecturers operate within fields of knowledge production as: researchers and producers of media; pedagogic recontextualisers in their curriculum developer roles; and as reproducers as they teach. This creates complex dynamics, especially when they endeavour to collaborate as recontextualisers. The university was committed to the promotion of democracy foregrounded in the South African context through provision of: Higher education that serves the purposes of democracy [and] helps to lay the basis for greater participation in economic and social life more generally . . . By creating opportunities for social advancement on the basis of acquired knowledge, skills and competencies, higher education also enhances equity and social justice. (Council on Higher Education, 2004: 16) According to Barnett (2000: 50), the notion of democracy is underpinned by ideas of ‘justice, citizenship and community’, values evident in the department’s Vision Statement (Rhodes University: URL). Departmental policy documents clearly subscribed to the view that in achieving democracy within educational contexts, as in life in general, it was necessary to interrogate ‘the ever growing discourse and influence of neo-­liberalism, corporate power and corporate politics’ (Giroux 2002: 432). During the 1970s and 1980s, at the height of the apartheid regime in South Africa, when the university and the department were both small, there had been relatively close cooperation between lecturers teaching Media

108   J. Vorster Studies (MS) and Media Production (MP) operating under a unifying regulative discourse of opposition to the apartheid state and endeavouring to engender in their students a critical stance towards the apartheid regime (Steenveld, 2006). Whereas some of the MP lecturers had taught both theory and practice courses, as student and staff numbers increased in the department in the early 1990s, the number of staff specialities grew and a clear division of labour became established between those concerned with theory and practice. Over the years boundaries strengthened and developed into intellectual and ideological schism; Garman (2005: 202), an MP lecturer in the department, claimed that lack of integration or congruence between theory and practice created ‘schizophrenia in the students we share’, while Amner (2005: 3), another MP lecturer, lamented that his students, and sometimes he, would ‘leave at the door the theoretical understandings taught in the media studies classroom’. In 2003 the department initiated an extensive, long-­term, collaborative curriculum development process aimed at bridging this divide (Du Toit, 2009). It envisaged that greater collaboration, if not integration, between theory and practice programme elements would: develop greater understanding among academics in the department in the various fields that made up JMS; contribute to healing divisions that had developed between MS and MP teachers, leading them to interrogate the nature of the knowledge taught in the department; and create coherence between the theoretical and practical components of the JMS curriculum.

Data collection, analysis and presentation The research reported on in this chapter forms part of a bigger study into collaborative curriculum development processes in the JMS department. As an education development practitioner, I was interested in understanding the dynamics of collaborative curriculum development, hoping it would inform similar deliberations in other contexts. The Department of JMS promised to constitute a critical case in this respect for a number of reasons. Staff and student numbers were large in comparison to other departments within the Faculty of Humanities at the university, in 2006 consisting of six MS lecturers (three professors, one senior lecturer and two lecturers) and 12 MP staff members (one senior lecturer and 11 lecturers). MS lecturers as a group occupied the majority of senior positions in the department and had more status within the institution. The department offered two routes to achieving a bachelor’s qualification in Journalism, either as one of two majors for a three-­year BA degree, or a four-­year Bachelor of Journalism (BJourn) degree. BJourn students followed the same programme as those who opted for the BA degree, the fourth year being regarded as their ‘professionalising’ year during which they chose one of six journalistic or media practice specialisations for in-­depth study throughout. A second specialisation was chosen from the remaining five practice disciplines and studied

Curriculum development processes   109 as an elective for one of four terms. In total, fourth-­year practical specialism constituted 80 per cent of its formal curriculum. The Department’s curriculum review and development process was an extended one, starting in 2003 with the first year. It was to be collaborative throughout, with MS and MP staff working together to integrate the two components whose links were recognised but had come to be dealt with separately in curriculum planning and execution. Several new structures were created. Year Boards were established to oversee the implementation and evaluation of all curriculum decisions, which met at least once a term. Thus, in 2003, as the first-­year curriculum was overhauled, those teaching first-­ year courses were invited to be part of its curriculum working group and, in 2004, a second-­year group was established, and so on. In addition to these year-­focused structures, the department also established a Curriculum Forum which met once a term, attendance at which was compulsory for all lecturers in the department. All issues decided upon by curriculum working groups had to be discussed and ratified by the Forum, which often requested them to rethink issues that lacked wider agreement. My fieldwork in 2006 focused specifically on the remaking of the curriculum undertaken by the fourth-­year working group, all but two of whose nine meetings I attended, as well as three of the four meetings of the Forum. I believed that focused inquiry into the nature of recontextualisation into professional courses was likely to be most fruitful when students’ time was devoted entirely to JMS and relations between theory and practice were likely to be thrown into sharpest relief.1 In enquiring about lecturers’ views and experiences of the curriculum project since its inception in 2003, I conducted interviews with all members of the fourth-­year curriculum working group (one for each of the six specialisations taught in the department) and one MS lecturer, as well as two other MS lecturers who attended four group meetings at various times during fieldwork to offer the MS perspective and a number of other key agents, such as the initiator of the project (an MS professor), the Head of Department (also an MS professor), the MS senior lecturer and a writing and editing lecturer who had very strong views on the process. All interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim, as were meetings of the curriculum working group and the Forum. NVivo was used to code the data which was analysed using categories distinguishing, for example, cultural, structural and agential properties and powers and coded for degrees of classification and framing of agents, structures, ideas and the epistemic and social relations to knowledge and knowers. The writings of JMS academics and departmental documents were also analysed, including the departmental Vision Statement (Rhodes University: URL) which committed it to: produc[ing] self-­reflexive, critical, analytical graduates and media workers, whose practice is probing, imaginative, civic minded and

110   J. Vorster o­ utspoken. Such graduates [would be] equipped to act as thoughtful, creative and skilled journalists and media practitioners able to make meaningful and technically proficient media productions. Such analysis was aimed at explicating relations to and within JMS in order to build understanding of the structuring principles underpinning its recontextualisation dynamics and in awareness of the fact that the ways in which curriculum choices were legitimated in these texts might be different from those developed in others by these same academics. In offering the main findings of this investigation within the limits of this short chapter, an attempt is made to interweave them with the growing, relevant, theoretical literature.

Regionalisation and new professions One of the department’s principal activities was and is the education and training of journalists. Bernstein (2000) describes Journalism as a field of study as ‘a contemporary region’, while Muller (2008) would categorise it as a ‘new profession’. The JMS course combination of theoretical media studies and a number of practical production specialisations ensures a knowledge structure which was ‘regional’ in form. While the MP specialisations offered encompassed writing and editing, design, radio, television, photojournalism and new media (the Internet and mobile technology as journalistic media), MS drew on sociology, linguistics, politics, psychology and cultural studies, among other disciplines, so that it might even be regarded as a region within a region. Staff academic and professional identities were diverse so that bringing together disciplinary communities of academic specialists and communities of practice involved in practice-­based fields was a major departmental task (Becher and Parry, 2005). While all JMS staff operated in a university department engaged in knowledge production in the field of symbolic control, their allegiances and orientations towards various occupational fields differed; MS lecturers’ orientation could be depicted as predominantly ‘academic’, while MP staff occupied space within both the cultural and economic fields, since they produced work for cultural as well as symbolic control ‘market places’ (Bernstein, 2001), so that their orientation was predominantly outwards to the fields of journalism and other media. Any curriculum change around academic/practice divisions inevitably involved renegotiation of departmentally based discourses and identities. For Bernstein (2000: 52), ‘(i)ncreasing regionalisation necessarily is a weakening of the strength of the classification of discourses and their entailed narcissistic identities and so a change of orientation of identity towards greater external dependency: a change from introjected to projected identities’. Within the JMS department both MS and MP lecturers experienced threat to their introjected field identities when required to work together towards developing a curriculum that aimed at a more integrated

Curriculum development processes   111 pedagogic project. MS lecturers were required to relate the content of their fields more closely to the day-­to-day production work of their students, while MP lecturers had to consider disciplinary understandings of journalism and the media in addition to the needs of the various journalistic and media professions for which they were preparing students.

Collaborative curriculum development Understanding very complex collaborative processes requires appreciation of cultural, structural and agential factors at play in organisations. Archer (1995) uses the term ‘culture’ to refer to the ideas, beliefs, values, etc. that underpin practices within a particular context. In this case, knowledge of the department and the structuring principles of the JMS programme and its underlying disciplines, within the context of the research-­intensive university where they were situated, were essential. The wider study on which this chapter is based aimed to examine many facets of culture, structure and agency within the department and its programmes which are beyond our present scope (Vorster, 2010). Enhancing understanding of them contributed to knowledge of how ‘individual academic values, forms of knowledge and practice’ interact with the values, forms of knowledge and practices of others in the same context (Henkel, 2005: 145) and, specifically, of those that required individuals to cede some traditional academic autonomy in the service of a larger institutional purpose. In social sciences in a traditional university, context-­transcendent, theoretical work is often more highly valued than more context-­dependent, practical work. In courses that include theory and practice components, such as JMS, the former tends to command a larger proportion of curriculum time. Movement towards closer integration of theory and practice and greater emphasis on theoretically informed, critical reflection on production work sought to alter this relation. For example, institutional structures were modified to give greater recognition to production work in terms of the marks that students could score for that component of their course. But, at the same time, theory lecturers still commanded greater status, had more senior positions, did more research, published their work in academic journals and supervised more master’s and PhD students than practice lecturers, whose media publishing and teaching and learning responsibilities were more time-­consuming (Muller, 2008). They had not achieved master’s and doctoral qualifications at similar rates to their MS counterparts, or attracted students at these levels. In curriculum meetings they brought forward different forms of academic capital, such as allowed MS lecturers to dominate discussion. One of the lecturers articulated this distinction between staff thus: in this Department, there are multiple disciplines and people don’t only speak from ideological political assumptions about the world, pedagogy,

112   J. Vorster the university, . . . but also particular and different disciplinary backgrounds. So there are multiple schisms. And often some people do not speak from the rigour of any particular discipline, either. So there are people who have no disciplinary training, but speak from praxis or years in industry or whatever, so there are those distinctions as well. Which makes it harder to have a conversation about a political curriculum in a university in 2006 in a framework of higher education transformation – if there is so much distinction that some people come to the table with less capital than others and so their arguments can only be articulated at the level of emotion and feeling and desire or want. And not necessarily in the language of structure, that taps into the language of the more powerful figures in the Department in the curriculum development process are able to do. (Jason, MS lecturer) Jason alludes to the distinction between what could be regarded as a technical-­rational and a neo-­conservative traditionalist approach to curriculum and pedagogy (Moore and Young, 2001), a viewpoint similarly expressed by a number of other interviewees, underscoring critical fault lines between different agents within this context.

Vertical and horizontal discourses Senior members of the department saw theoretical course components as congruent with the project of the university, especially commitment to the production and teaching and learning of powerful, disciplinary-­based forms of knowledge. In Bernsteinian terms, the disciplinary underpinnings of Media Studies constituted vertical discourse while Media Production courses matched the majority of the criteria for horizontal discourse. Practice specialisations evince relatively high degrees of subjectivity and intimacy and require close relationship to a context, in some cases requiring spontaneous interaction with the context and process of production (Bernstein, 2000). However, there is verticality in terms of the principles that underpin journalistic and media practices and it was held that practitioners needed to establish critical or interpretive distance from their contexts and subjects; technical proficiency had to be underpinned by a critical gaze. In pursuit of infusing more verticality into production and more horizontal discourse into theory courses, MS lecturers were expected to make more apparent connections between the content they transmitted and the media production work that students did, while MP lecturers were enjoined to infuse their teaching with theoretical understandings of production and media studies. However, such movement was resisted to a greater or lesser degree by most staff, primarily on the grounds that it would undermine the integrity of teaching and learning of the field.

Curriculum development processes   113

Journalism: a discipline in flux Becher and Parry (2005: 134) assert that disciplines ‘resemble living organisms in a constant state of flux’ and there are certainly different understandings of how Journalism as a field of study ought to be constituted. Some Journalism educators believe that it should prepare students to practise the craft of journalism in the service of democracy, equipping them with ‘knowledge of the ages’ and the intellectual capacity to apply it to current conditions (see du Toit, 2007: 2), appropriately located in university contexts. According to du Toit, the theoretical components of Journalism courses have tended to take the form of Communication Studies focused on ‘quantitative audience surveys, effects studies, and experimental research’, Cultural Studies or Media Studies. While ‘courses which draw on cultural studies may deconstruct the epistemological framework within which journalistic practice is based . . . they generally also fail to assist students in developing an approach to their practice based on an alternative set of principles’ (2007: 7), ‘Media Studies approaches journalism primarily as textual analysis, and the reception of such texts by audiences’ (ibid.: 13). In addition to these, about which and their perceived effects there was considerable staff contention, the Department of JMS upon which this analysis is based also offered the Sociology of News, Ethics, Media Law, Media History and the political economy of the media as part of undergraduate theoretical study. Many writers have noted that Journalism as a field is not settled in terms of its theoretical base and has not focused sufficiently on its object of knowledge, journalism itself (Steenveld, 2006; Amner, 2005), except, as noted by du Toit (2007), where theories have been given more direct relation to it as the object of knowledge. Du Toit goes on to suggest a perspective on Journalism education which aims to establish it as an academic discipline in its own right as ‘an intellectual practice that is capable of reflection on its own theoretical foundations’, a research-­based activity that includes the ‘systematic gathering, analysing and communication of information’ (Medsger, 1996: 9–10). In turn, Tomaselli and Caldwell have argued for the need for the discipline of Journalism to ‘pay attention to the epistemology or research approaches to journalism itself ’, while, for du Toit (2007: 16), Journalism education should present students: with a full range of options with regards to the epistemological and ontological frameworks that could frame their practice, and to provide them with an opportunity to experiment with the methods and techniques that are associated with these frameworks . . . teaching should necessarily operate as a process of conscientisation, in which staff challenge students to reject certain aspects of traditional reporting practice, and to construct alternative methods in their place. This process of conscientisation should operate not only at a reflective level, but should . . . also be experimental in nature. In particular, students should be

114   J. Vorster c­ hallenged to engage in modes of research which offer them positions that are different from those of traditional reporting, and sets up different kinds of relationships with the communities they report on, and the audiences they write for. The strength of such intellectual and ideological currents, as well as the craft necessities of production, underlay why curriculum development processes in the JMS department proved to be fractious. As we shall see, deliberations within it around the selection of curriculum content constituted a complex version of the perennial struggle for control of the epistemic-­pedagogic device that characterises pedagogic discourse.

The relationship between forms of knowledge and curriculum forms Muller (2008) draws attention to factors that generate internal coherence in curricula which consist of different kinds of knowledge. He distinguishes broadly between those curricula that require conceptual and contextual coherence. Conceptual coherence curricula need ‘a hierarchy of abstraction and conceptual difficulty’ and normally are necessary for highly codified disciplines with an ‘epistemological core’ (Parry, 2007, quoted in Muller, 2008: 20), while curricula that depend on contextual coherence ‘are segmentally connected, where each segment is adequate to a context and sufficient to a purpose’. In a nutshell, it could be argued, according to Muller (ibid.: 21) that ‘conceptual coherence curricula are regulated by adequacy to truth (logic); contextual curricula by contextual adequacy, to a particular form of practice’. At Rhodes University, Media Studies claimed to draw its logic, in part, from a relation to conceptual coherence with reference to context, while Media Practice’s logic was contextual, albeit circumscribed by ‘adequacy to truth’ in the ethical or axiological sense. According to departmental curriculum documentation, the MS course was relevant to the context of practice: The Media Studies programme includes a focus on context and text. It begins with a broad (international) historical media frame in year one, the South African historical context in year two and moves to a local focus in year three when [students] have chosen their media specialisation. Other aspects of Media Studies (Narrative, Genre, Semiotics, Media Sociology, etc.) include a focus on journalism throughout. (Rhodes University, 2005: 20) The MS curriculum was presented as highly relevant to media production. However, it was not the contextual application of MS which was problematic for either students or MP staff but those parts of the field that were more abstract and decontextualised. Ingrid, an MP lecturer, argued that this issue

Curriculum development processes   115 was very important for JMS taught within the context of a research-­intensive university: which is a very peculiar animal. We teach vocational subjects as well as a subject that has specifically to do with critical reflection on that vocation and those kinds of things can pull against each other very nastily. It’s what people think about as the distinction between theory and practice which is not a distinction that I would use. I think there is theory in my work and practice in MS as well. (interview) Katherine, an MS lecturer, also recognised that integration as a project had its limits and that ‘one of the problems of integration is it can, and it sometimes did lead to that notion of theory serving practice’ (interview). The nature of successful integration required investigation and she recognised that ‘some things also can’t be integrated’. The same conclusion was reached by Frank, an MP lecturer: I found it so difficult to show the link between the theory and the practice; not because I cannot do it, it is just that some of these things are impossible . . . There are moments where you can actually do that. There could be some moments in contemporary history where you can actually link it. But for the most part it was very, very difficult. (interview)

Different kinds of knowledge Striking a balance between knowledge which was practical, vocational and theoretical in orientation animated the curriculum change that was attempted in the JMS department. Gamble (2006) defines practical knowledge as context-­dependent and particularistic, while theoretical knowledge is general and context-­independent. In JMS, teaching and learning was acknowledged to require both, alongside a strong orientation towards the need to ‘face both ways’, towards the field of application so that students were ‘industry-­ready’ at the end of their studies, as well as towards the academy to allow for educational progression later on. Jason, an MS lecturer, articulated the differences between the two aspects of the curriculum: There is a contradiction, I think, between the valuing of technical ability in one set of practices in the Department and the kinds of things students have to do there – the valuing of the analytical, critical ability which doesn’t stand outside the technical ability. The technical ability does not stand outside of the analytical-­critical abilities. It’s divided between different kinds of teaching. So technical ability is tested in . . . the primary space for production teaching and critical analytical ability

116   J. Vorster is the primary space for what is called theory teaching, analysis teaching. And certainly production has some critical and analytical elements, but that’s not its primary focus. And analysis has some technical elements, but that’s not its primary focus. (interview) Should these primary foci not be upheld, there is the danger that Gamble (2006) warns against, of the one kind of knowledge becoming the other, for the relationship between the theory and practice components of vocational or occupation-­specific courses is complex. In contextualising the conceptual curriculum so as to render it more accessible to students there was a danger that it might lose its context-­independence, just as there was in presenting its practical side in a manner that was too theoretical, causing it to lose its context-­dependence. Their relationship cannot be too directly stated since they are different kinds of knowledge. There is need for vocational curricula to include context-­independent theory where ‘the ordering of meaning comes from outside a specific object or context’. This kind of knowledge holds the possibility of elaboration and ‘inferences can be drawn because there is a forward projection towards an order more “ideal” than the one at hand’ (Gamble, 2001: 196). This is the domain of what Bernstein (2000) calls the not-­yet-thought, of new knowledge. Theoretical knowledge is necessary for academic progression and to enable new thinking and innovation. Since it is not tied to particular contexts it establishes a discursive gap, enabling new thought and connections. Young (2008) and Wheelahan (2007) argue even more generally that it is important for students, as part of vocational education and training, to be inducted into theoretical knowledge as part of a whole system of meaning allowing them to participate in and extend society’s conversation about itself. Arguments in JMS curriculum meetings revolved around the extent to which Journalism education needed to look both ways and, given the limited time afforded to MP in the undergraduate curriculum, around the extent to which students could be taught to be good writers, photojournalists and so on, while also being given the wherewithal required for critical engagement with the social and political contexts within which they would practise (Garman, 2005; Amner, 2005).

Softening of boundaries between theory and practice Staff participating in the curriculum deliberations for the fourth year of the JMS course spent a great deal of time trying to understand where the legitimate boundaries of the field of Journalism were in the fourth year of a university course through a process of establishing the regulative discourse that should underpin it at that level. This entailed deciding what forms of journalism were regarded as legitimate or appropriate for students to learn about or engage in, given the department’s aim of producing ‘self-­reflexive, crit-

Curriculum development processes   117 ical, analytical graduates . . . whose practice is probing, imaginative, civic-­ minded and outspoken’ (Rhodes University: URL). The development team noted that ‘the curriculum emphasises the kind of journalism and media productions that prioritise social awareness and act as catalysts for education, cultural understanding and social action’ (minutes, Curriculum Forum Meeting, June 2006). For this reason, the curriculum also prioritised innovative media production. This clearly excluded some forms of journalism and media, such as tabloid, and encouraged students to think beyond the current confines of the field. Some lecturers thought that the curriculum required greater coherence and some students had complained that they did not see the relevance of theory. Students who chose JMS did so generally because they were interested in acquiring journalistic skills. Staff thought an integrated curriculum, where boundaries between theory and practice were blurred and links between them were more explicit, would encourage students. Some recognised danger in too close a relationship between theory and practice, MS lecturers in particular arguing that the field could not be employed as a ‘handmaiden’ to MP and a number making a case for MS to be taught not only to show its relationship to production work, but as a field in its own right, with its own integrity. Ingrid (MP lecturer and key agent in the departmental curriculum development structures and processes) argued for the potential danger of seeing theoretical ideas merely in relation to practice: we should be incredibly careful not to simplify theoretical concepts to the extent that they become banal in the way that students use them. So, an example here might be, the way in which the work that Jason has been doing with students around whiteness gets incorporated into students’ lexicons, but at such a simplistic level that is very often contrary to the original intent of the theory. And that has to do with the extent to which they have actually grounded themselves in the roots from which that theory comes rather than just skimming off the top and then in a fairly narrow way applying it to practice. And that implies spending time on getting to grips with the concepts in an intensive way. (curriculum meeting minutes) There was an ongoing struggle about the importance of Journalism Theory in relation to MS theory within the programme. MS included Journalism Theory, as well as a focus on Critical Cultural Theory, text analysis and a range of postmodern theories of the media; its focus was critique of the media and their impact on consumers. Journalism Theory was about the nature of journalism and journalism practices, as well as theory related to the production, reception and critique of media. Within the departmental ideational context there seemed to be a constraining contradiction in terms of which was most appropriate. Specialisation teachers were partial to teaching theory components within Journalism Theory directly relevant to their

118   J. Vorster p­ articular journalistic specialisation, while MS lecturers argued that their offering was the more appropriate in developing the critical and reflexive capacities within students to which the departmental Vision Statement referred. A further struggle emerged around who was most qualified to teach theory. Most MP teachers involved in the fourth-­year curriculum development process thought they were able and willing to teach the theoretical components of their specialisation at this level, where students specialised in one production discipline, while some MS lecturers did not consider them to have the requisite ‘critical’ perspective and academic depth to do so. A further, complicating factor was that some theoretical languages were incommensurate, exemplifying Muller’s (2007: 81) claim that ‘the same particulars play different roles in different generals’: So that, in the past where people have taken their proposals to, because my students all write proposals as it is, when they’ve taken them to the MS people, they’ve normally come away from them with ideas diametrically opposed to what I’m trying to teach them. So I don’t particularly see a benefit to that in terms of that being isolated from the production staff. I think that if those proposals are going to be discussed with the students by the MS staff, that actually has to incorporate the production staff, it has to be an integrated process. (Henry, MP lecturer, curriculum meeting minutes) MP teachers also believed that the limited curriculum space available to specialisation teaching and learning limited the amount of practice-­related and Journalism Theory that they were able to teach their students. In some cases, MP lecturers required third- and fourth-­year students to study specialisation theory (over and above the theory studied in MS courses) in their production courses, believing that practice-­specific theory was paramount but not taught within MS components. Moreover, the critical stance taken in MS towards the media was seen to ‘set itself up in opposition to journalism/media’. The criticisms that it levelled at media production often caused disjuncture in the minds of students, as was evident from their comments in course evaluations over the years, about what they were taught in MP and, for some MP lecturers, undermined what they tried to teach.

Recontextualisation and the epistemic device The training of journalists and other media workers is peculiar since there is no official recontextualising field in the form of an accreditation body or professional board, as is the case in many other professional fields. This means that the politics of curriculum decisions is localised to particular teaching and learning contexts and the peculiarities of culture, structure and agency

Curriculum development processes   119 within a particular recontextualisation context tend to impact significantly on choices made with regard to curriculum and pedagogic structures. In analysing the dynamics of curriculum development in the JMS course, Bernstein’s (2000) theories of knowledge, curriculum and pedagogy and Maton’s (2000) elaboration of the pedagogic device within his notion of the epistemic device were particularly useful in understanding the dilemmas to which this gave rise. Maton (2000, 2007) argues that a focus on the underlying structuring principles of a field or discipline allows one to understand more fully the basis upon which recontextualising choices are made. He asserts that disciplines are specialised: either in relation to knowledge or epistemology (with focus on specific objects of knowledge or relations to knowledge, skills, methods and procedures); or in relation to characteristics of knowers, through emphasis, for example, on who they are (their dispositions, aptitudes and attitudes). Thus he differentiates between a field’s or discipline’s focus on the epistemic relation (ER) to knowledge and the social relation (SR) to the knowers of the field. If a field privileges the epistemic relation (ER+ SR–) it uses a knowledge code grammar as its specialisation principle while a focus on the social relation (SR+ ER–) denotes a knower code grammar. If, however, neither the epistemic nor the social relation is emphasised the field is said to evince a relativist code (ER− SR−), while foregrounding both the epistemic and the social relation indicates an elite code (ER+ SR+). These ideas are particularly apposite to analysis of factors influencing decision-­making in relation to what journalism practice and media studies knowledge were to be recontextualised and what form the curriculum would take. In other words, the nature of the discipline for which knowledge was to be recontextualised was an important consideration for all agents within the particular social and cultural context of the JMS department. One of the struggles for the epistemic device within the JMS curriculum centred, in part, on differences in lecturers’ conceptions of the nature of the specialisation principle of their field. It may be contended on the basis of our data that theoretical and practice exponents (and components) of the discipline used different ER and SR settings. Analysis of curriculum documentation indicated that MP courses evinced an elite code, with strong focus on technical skills and procedures and knowledge about theories of the media so that a critical stance could be taken in relation to one’s own production work as well as that of others. Furthermore, students who were expected to develop the practices of professionals within their field had to become very particular kinds of people. On the other hand, the fourth-­year theoretical MS course, focusing predominantly on issues of race, identity and ethics, clearly evinced a knower-­code grammar. Even though students studied theoretical knowledge in MS, the epistemic relation was weakened in favour of a stronger social relation. MS required students to develop a critical gaze while, for MP, they needed to develop a gaze that was both critical and trained. Incorporating such differences, the kind of JMS curriculum that came to be regarded as appropriate within the research-­intensive university under scrutiny was very demanding of students and staff.

120   J. Vorster Such a state of affairs may have been rendered inescapable, given the role played by the departmental Vision Statement that was produced in 2002 and to which reference has already been made, which committed the department to an ethos of using media for social change. An important part of the curriculum development process, from the start and throughout deliberation on the fourth-­year JMS programme, lay in response to the way the media had used to support the apartheid state during the previous regime, shaping its regulative discourse around the notion of media for social change or social action, integration of media studies and media practice and informing industry as to more appropriate forms of media production. Much of the struggle evidenced in the data revolved around the nature of the respective pedagogic requirements of theory and practice courses. Media Studies as a theoretical discipline foregrounded an epistemic relation which combined strong focus on theoretical knowledge about the media with strong axiological focus on its role of developing critical producers and consumers. MS, taught for the sake of developing knowledge about the field, was also taught with the view of developing students with particular kinds of dispositions towards the media as a field of study and practice. Such theory lecturers’ endeavours to develop students’ academic and dispositional identities coexisted with practice specialisation colleagues’ attempts to develop reflexive professional, underpinned by strong academic, identities in their students. Here the focus was on how theoretical knowledge might be used to critique the media in general and media practices in particular. In terms of Maton’s further distinction between ontic and discursive epistemic relations, where the former refers to the relation to the object of knowledge or relations to the object, the latter to relation to other knowledge or procedures, skills and methods, the data indicated that practice-­based courses across the four-­year JMS curriculum foregrounded the ontic, while MS courses privileged discursive relations to knowledge of the field. MP lecturers were partial to teaching Journalism Theory which focused on journalism as such, including the social histories and the ethics of particular specialisations. While this greater degree of context-­dependence in kinds of theoretical knowledge was favoured by MP lecturers, the focus of MS teaching lay on discursive knowledge relations privileging the role of journalism and media in the construction and representation of race, gender and so on, establishing different settings of the epistemic-­pedagogic device and, concomitantly, evincing different notions of pedagogy.

Conclusion The collaborative curriculum development process in the JMS department can be seen as constituting a critical case. It proved to be extremely difficult and contentious from the start and clearly demonstrated how control of the pedagogic device was, in Bernstein’s terms, both ‘privileged and privileging’ (Maton, 2004: 50). From its earliest expression in classification and framing (1971) and typologising as collection and integrated codes (1975), Bernstein

Curriculum development processes   121 seemed to imply that where the nature of a discipline or field was contested, agents are, to some extent, in a position to set a code for them while, at the same time, they may not be open to any encoding. Our analysis, which draws on the more recent theoretic elaboration of these notions in terms of the pedagogic and epistemic devices, suggests that, given the nature of the host institution, theoretical (academic) courses and those who taught them had privileged position in terms of the status that they commanded within the institution. I argue that the knowledge structure of a field is a major determining factor in curriculum decisions and that this consideration within a university context, particularly one strongly committed to a high-­ranking research identity, may be more important than axiological, regulative principles. In the JMS department it was not surprising, therefore, that MP specialisation lecturers experienced the curriculum development process as privileging the agenda of MS staff. It is to be hoped that the insights developed here will suggest potentially useful tools for understanding underpinning or structuring principles of curriculum development within other complex regions, particularly departments that offer professional qualifications within traditional university contexts. They may also be relevant to universities of technology within the South African context and comparable institutions elsewhere where academic staff are now expected to produce more research and supervise more master’s and PhD projects, particularly in contexts largely, even increasingly, oriented to regional or generic curricular structures that face outward to vocations.

Note 1 In contrast, during the first three years, students studied JMS as part of a broader curriculum, in the first and second as one of four others and in the third one of two major courses, though, in practice, given the practical work required for JMS courses, they took up much more of students’ out-­of-class time than most others.

References Amner, R. 2005. Educating journalists for democracy and development: Foregrounding ‘reformist’, ‘alternative’ and ‘oppositional’ journalisms in the Journalism and Media Studies curriculum. Paper presented at the Teaching South African Journalists 1994–2014 conference, Grahamstown: Rhodes University. Archer, M. 1995. Realist social theory: The morphogenetic approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barnett, R. 2000. Realizing the university in an age of supercomplexity. Reading: SRHE and the Open University Press. Becher, T. and Parry, S. 2005. The endurance of the disciplines. In M. Henkel and I. Bleiklie (eds), Governing knowledge: The study of continuity and change in higher education – A festschrift in honour of Maurice Kogan. Dordrecht: Springer. Bernstein, B. 1971. On the classification and framing of knowledge. In M. F. D. Young (ed.), Knowledge and control. London: Collier-­Macmillan.

122   J. Vorster Bernstein, B. 1975. Class, codes and control, volume 3: Towards a theory of educational transmission. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bernstein, B. 1996. Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique. London: Taylor & Francis. Bernstein, B. 2000. Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity. Oxford: Rowan & Littlefield. Bernstein, B. 2001. Symbolic control: Issues of empirical description of agencies and agents. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 4 (1): 21–33. Boughey, C. 2009. A meta-­analysis of teaching and learning at the five research intensive South African universities. Commissioned Report. Pretoria: Council on Higher Education. Christie, F. and Martin, J. R. 2007. Language, knowledge and pedagogy. London: Continuum. Council on Higher Education. 2004. South African higher education in the first decade of democracy. Pretoria: CHE. Du Toit, J. 2007. Journalism education and its ‘shot-­gun weddings’: A review of institutional partnerships. Paper presented at the World Journalism Education Conference, 25–28 June, Singapore. Du Toit, J. 2009. Department of Journalism and Media Studies: Curriculum forum report 2009. Unpublished Report, Rhodes University. Gamble, J. 2001. Modelling the invisible: The pedagogy of craft apprenticeship. Studies in Continuing Education 23 (2). Gamble, J. 2006. Theory and practice in the vocational curriculum. In M. Young and J. Gamble (eds), Knowledge, curriculum and qualifications for South African further education. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council Press. Garman, A. 2005. Teaching journalism to produce ‘interpretive communities’ rather than just ‘professionals’. Ecquid Novi 26 (2): 199–211. Giroux, H. A. 2002. Neoliberalism, corporate culture, and the promise of higher education: The university as a democratic public sphere. Harvard Educational Review 72 (4). Henkel, M. 2005. Academic identity and autonomy revisited. In M. Henkel and I. Bleiklie (eds), Governing knowledge. Dordrecht: Springer. Maton, K. 2000. Languages of legitimation: The structuring significance for intellectual fields of strategic knowledge claims. British Journal of Sociology of Education 21 (2): 147–167. Maton, K. 2004. The wrong kind of knower: Education, expansion and the epistemic device. In J. Muller, B. Davies and A. Morias (eds), Reading Bernstein, researching Bernstein. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Maton, K. 2007. Knowledge-­knower structures in intellectual and educational fields. In F. Christie and J. R. Martin (Eds). Language, knowledge and pedagogy. Functional linguistic and sociological perspectives. London: Continuum. Medsger, B. 1996. Winds of change: Challenges confronting journalism education. Virginia: The Freedom Forum. Moore, R. and Young, M. 2001. Knowledge and the curriculum in the sociology of education: Towards a reconceptualisation. British Journal of Sociology of Education 22 (4): 445–461. Muller, J. 2007. On splitting hairs: Hierarchy, knowledge and the school curriculum. In F. Christie and J. Martin (eds), Language, knowledge and pedagogy: Functional linguistic and sociological perspectives. London: Continuum.

Curriculum development processes   123 Muller, J. 2008. Forms of knowledge and curriculum coherence. Paper presented at the ESRC Seminar Series – Seminar 2: Epistemology and the curriculum, 26–27 June, University of Bath. Parry, S. 2007. Disciplines and doctorates. Dordrecht: Springer. Rhodes University. 2005. Review of Journalism and Media Studies, dossier 1: Departmental review – Making strides in realizing a new vision. Grahamstown: Rhodes University. Rhodes University. 2009. The curriculum forum handbook. Work in progress documents, January 2009. Grahamstown: Rhodes University. Rhodes University: URL www.ru.ac.za/jms/aboutus/visionstatement (accessed 25 February 2010). Steenveld, L. 2006. Journalism in South Africa? Context, context, context. In A. Olorunnisola (ed.), Media in South Africa after apartheid: A cross-­media assessment, New York: Edwin Mellon Press. Tomaselli, K. G. and Caldwell, N. 2002. Journalism and education: Bridging media and cultural studies. Communicatio 28 (1): 22–28. Vorster, J. 2010. A social realist analysis of collaborative curriculum development processes in an academic department at a South African university. Unpublished PhD thesis, Grahamstown: Rhodes University. Wheelahan, L. 2007. How competency-­based training locks the working class out of powerful knowledge: A modified Bernsteinian analysis. Journal of the Sociology of Education 28 (5): 637–651. Young, M. 2008. Bringing knowledge back in: From social constructivism to social realism in the sociology of education. London: Routledge.

8 Vocational qualifications and access to knowledge Leesa Wheelahan

Introduction Basil Bernstein argued that democratic access to abstract, theoretical knowledge matters because society uses it to conduct its conversation about what it should be like and the kinds of values and norms that it should have. He argued that access to knowledge is associated with social power because society uses it to think the ‘unthinkable’ and the ‘not-­yet-thought’. Equitable access to knowledge is a question of distributive justice and central to democratic society. Education is aimed at realising this normative ideal as the main way in which people are provided with access to knowledge and learn how to use it. However, as Bernstein (2000: xix) explains, this ideal is far from realised: Education is central to the knowledge base of society, groups and individuals . . . like health, [it] is a public institution, central to the production and reproduction of distributive injustices . . . Biases in the form, content, access and opportunities of education have consequences not only for the economy; these biases can reach down to drain the very springs of affirmation, motivation and imagination. In this way such biases can become, and often are, an economic and cultural threat to democracy. The structure and content of pedagogic discourse are relays for social power; indeed, the former is the means through which the ‘voice’ of power is expressed. Exploration of how pedagogic discourse is structured shows that it can both include and exclude. This chapter is a contribution to that task; it examines the ways in which professional and vocational qualifications in tertiary education mediate unequal access to abstract, theoretical knowledge. The curriculum content and structure of two degree programmes in higher education and one advanced diploma in vocational education and training (VET) in Australia are examined to raise questions about relative access to forms of knowledge in vocationally oriented qualifications which extend from preparation for elite professions in universities, to courses located in

Vocational qualifications   125 vocationally oriented tertiary education institutions – such as further education colleges in the learning and skills sector in England and technical and further education (TAFE) institutions in the VET sector in Australia – that lead to lower-­status occupations. It finds that education for the elite professions provides most access to theoretical knowledge, while lower-­level qualifications, particularly in ‘new’ industries such as hospitality and tourism, provide the least, particularly if they are offered in the vocational tier of tertiary education. A Bernsteinian analysis suggests that this is in part due to the nature of the occupational field of practice for which students are being prepared and the way in which curriculum is structured. Bernstein’s concepts of classification, which refers to the ‘what’ of curriculum knowledge, and framing, which refers to the ‘how’ of pedagogic practice and the presentation of knowledge, are used to explore relationships between the ways in which knowledge and curriculum are organised, and academic and vocational pathways are structured as a consequence. It uses Bernstein’s distinction between the academic disciplines which are structured as singular bodies of knowledge, and the applied academic disciplines which are constructed as regions as they integrate different, singular bodies of knowledge. Bernstein refers to the process whereby knowledge is translated from the field in which it is produced (predominantly in universities) and reproduced as curriculum in tertiary education institutions and schools as recontextualisation; it will have been selectively reorganised according to the principles that structure pedagogic discourse. A discussion of different types of vocational pathways is exemplified through using formal curriculum documents from a dual-­sector university in Australia which offers both higher education and VET programmes, as based on entries in the university’s handbook on its website.1 Formal curriculum documents for different qualifications that outline programmes, structures of study, broad subject descriptions and processes of assessment provide an initial statement about ways in which different knowledge domains are classified in the design, structure and naming of areas of knowledge. Programme rules about subject enrolments provide initial evidence of framing concerning subject choice and the way in which knowledge is selected, sequenced and assessed. While formal curriculum documents do not fully determine teaching and learning outcomes, as teachers may recontextualise official curriculum according to principles that they think are important (Bernstein, 2000; Morais and Neves, 2001), they cannot ignore them by unilaterally altering the arrangement or division of knowledge. Although there may be some flexibility, teachers do not normally change the rules about programme structure, subject selection and sequencing which formal curriculum documents provide as the recontextualising framework, though staff may seek to further modify curriculum content as they reproduce it in their own teaching practice. The importance of formal curriculum structure is demonstrated by frequent contests between the educational institutions in which staff work and professional or industry bodies over how areas of knowledge are

126   L. Wheelahan specified, structured and divided. These are contests within fields of practice over ‘what matters’. The organisation of knowledge and curriculum The purposes of curriculum differ for academic qualifications on the one hand, and vocational and professional qualifications on the other. Academic qualifications induct students into a body of knowledge organised through academic disciplines, whereas vocational and professional qualifications induct students into fields of practice and their underpinning theoretical knowledge as the basis for their integration and synthesis. There is continuity between vocational and professional academic qualifications in the way they relate to theoretical knowledge, and both are distinguished from academic qualifications. Bernstein (2000: 52) referred to academic disciplines as singular knowledge structures with strongly classified bodies of knowledge and strongly insulated boundaries. Each has specialised languages and rules that stipulate what is included as knowledge and how it is to be created, with specialised texts, rules of entry and authoritative speakers. Classification refers not only to structures of knowledge and insulation of boundaries between them but, in pedagogic terms, the way in which they are presented in curriculum (Barnett, 2006). Framing refers to the way knowledge is selected, sequenced, paced and evaluated in curriculum. Strongly framed curriculum invests greater control in teachers; weaker framing invests students with greater, apparent control over these processes. In contrast to his designation of academic disciplines as singular knowledge structures, Bernstein (2000) referred to the space in tertiary education institutions and elsewhere in which students are prepared for particular fields of practice as regions because they sit at the interface of singular knowledge structures and fields of practice. Some consist of singulars that have been recontextualised into larger units, as we see in new and emerging fields of knowledge like management studies. Some regions may draw from a range of academic disciplines and claim to have become disciplines or fields in their own right but with more applied focus (such as medicine), while others may have more singular relationships with particular academic disciplines (such as psychology). Like academic disciplines, regions of knowledge can be more or less strongly classified and framed (Bernstein, 2000). Knowledge that is strongly classified in regions shares similar features to strongly classified singulars. Boundaries between different fields of knowledge are defined and insulated to varying degrees so that students will not confuse chemistry with physics, or micro-­economics with sociology. Knowledge that is strongly framed in regions also shares similar features to strongly framed disciplinary knowledge, with explicit selection, sequencing, pacing and evaluation of knowledge. It may be the case that different elements of pedagogic practice may

Vocational qualifications   127 be strongly or weakly framed so that, for example, students are given greater control over selection, sequencing and pacing of knowledge (indicating weak framing), while evaluation of knowledge (assessment) is strongly framed (Morais and Neves, 2001). If knowledge is strongly framed in vocational qualifications it is more likely to be strongly sequenced, with limited student choice in the range of subjects they can undertake. Young (2006) and Barnett (2006) have used Bernstein’s theorisation on regions to examine the two-­stage process of recontextualisation and reassembly of singulars as applied disciplinary knowledge used in occupational fields of practice (the first stage) and its translation into curriculum (the second stage). Barnett (2006: 147) refers to the first stage as creating a ‘ “toolbox” of applicable knowledge’, saying that this ‘is how the knowledge base of professions such as engineering and medicine are assembled’. There is an iterative relationship between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ academic disciplinary knowledge as each develops through insights provided by the other. Young (2006: 55) explains that occupationally recontextualised disciplinary knowledge then undergoes a second stage of recontextualisation, which is a process of pedagogic recontextualisation ‘that takes into account what can be taught and to whom’. In contrast, singular knowledge structures that have been recontextualised and translated for curriculum undergo a single process which maintains their boundaries, so while physics in curriculum is different to physics as it is produced in universities and research institutions (because it has been recontextualised as pedagogic knowledge), it is still recognisably physics (Muller, 2006). It has not been translated, integrated and synthesised with other singulars as the basis for occupational practice (for example, as occupational knowledge for engineers), and then recontextualised as pedagogic knowledge (the curriculum for engineers). Barnett (2006: 148) says that processes of occupational knowledge recontextualisation have implications for those of pedagogic recontextualisation; occupational knowledge must be related to an occupational field of practice within the curriculum if the theoretical bases of practice are to be explored. Vocational pedagogy also has to recontextualise the field of practice itself and translate it into curriculum and, while many features of practice may have properties that transcend particular contexts, ‘vocational pedagogy also has to make some accommodation for the situated knowledge that is usually closely associated with particular job tasks’ (ibid.: 2006: 146). Such knowledge is context-­specific and not easily translatable outside those contexts; it is partly the focus of practical and work-­based components of curriculum while, hopefully, also providing opportunities for students to relate theory to practice. Vocational pedagogy must face both ways, to disciplinary knowledge and fields of practice, with these multiple processes of recontextualisation presenting more and different demands on vocational teachers than those teaching single disciplines.

128   L. Wheelahan Differentiating between vocational fields of practice The ways in which vocational knowledge is classified and framed in curriculum is also shaped by the nature and complexity of vocational practice, the social relations that underpin fields of practice and the extent to which communities of interest within them articulate views about and are able to influence the structuring of knowledge in the curriculum (Muller, 2009; Young, 2008). These relationships are different, depending on whether a curriculum is based in ‘newer’ regions, such as hospitality, tourism, business studies, community ser­ vices, recreation and so forth, in higher education and VET, both of which seek to prepare students for employment in these fields, or in traditional regions. Traditional regions, characteristic of the elite professions, such as law and medicine, and the traditional trades such as the electrical trades, have had stronger relationships to the disciplines that inform their practice (Young, 2008). Traditional regions also have stronger relationships to a particular occupation within the field of practice, for example, being a doctor and not healthcare in general, even if they also learn about the broader field of practice as the context for their own specific occupation. In contrast, newer vocational pathways often focus on preparing students for a field rather than a more or less specific occupation as, for example, in the newer case of ‘business studies’. Such regions have variable relationships to disciplinary knowledge as the demands of occupational fields differ, particularly those that have emerged over the last 30 years. Muller (2009: 219) argues that the conceptual demands of all occupations are increasing and access to conceptual knowledge is important ‘for epistemological, economic and social justice reasons’. However, the relationship between the conceptual and the contextual differs depending on the nature of practice within occupations, and this has implications for the structuring of knowledge in curriculum. Bodies of knowledge underpinning practice vary in complexity, depth and level of abstractness so that some qualifications will provide access to more strongly classified bodies of knowledge needed as preconditions of practice, whereas others will have more emphasis on knowledge breadth and context. Conceptual and contextual relationships also differ in new and traditional fields of practice, at least in part, because the latter have had longer to develop stronger communities of interest which are more or less structured, and more or less able to articulate views, however contested, about the bases of knowledge that underpin practice (Young, 2006). Newer fields of practice are more likely to be ‘more diffuse, fluid and less organised, and consequently [send] out more ambiguous, frequently contradictory signals about professional requirements to the academy’ (Muller, 2009: 214), as is illustrated in the next section.

Comparing traditional and new regions We compare a pre-­registration Bachelor of Nursing with a Bachelor of Business specialising in hospitality management at one dual-­sector university.

Vocational qualifications   129 Both are located within ‘regions’ of knowledge that face inwards to disciplinary knowledge and outwards to the field of practice, although in different ways. While nursing is not an elite profession like law or medicine, the nursing degree is closer to traditional regions as its knowledge base, though contested from time to time, is largely shaped by a nursing community of interest. In contrast, the hospitality management degree curriculum, more indicatively of newer regions, has been shaped to a greater extent by the criterion of market relevance as its leading principle of curricular recontextualisation. While market relevance is increasingly pervasive in educational policy, reflected through the emphasis on generic attributes and employability skills in almost all educational qualifications, its effects are strongest when market exigencies are used to constitute the field of practice and are, in turn, used to constitute curriculum. Consequently, while access to strongly classified theoretical knowledge is partly mediated by the complexity of the knowledge base that underpins the field of practice, it is also mediated by the extent to which curriculum has been designed to be responsive to the market rather than shared agreement among practitioners in the field about its knowledge base. Table 8.1 compares the subjects and electives in each qualification. The nursing degree takes three years, the hospitality management degree four. As with comparable arrangements in other countries, nursing degrees must be registered by nursing boards in Australia’s eight states and territories and graduates must seek registration with them as a legal requirement of practice (Heath, 2001). This means there is significant negotiation between universities and the boards around content and processes of learning and assessment. Nurses must draw on theoretical knowledge and knowledge of technologies in their practice, which was one of the key arguments for their training to be shifted from hospitals to universities in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the need to expand their scope of practice and claim to be a profession (Heath, 2001: 34–35), again, as in other countries. There is only one elective in this nursing degree which must be a theory elective. Subject titles indicate that at least some theoretical knowledge has been recontextualised for the nursing field, as indicated by bioscience, psychology and pathophysiology subjects. The regionalisation of theoretical knowledge specific to nursing is indicated in subjects such as nursing theory. There are very strong rules about subject prerequisites and sequencing, indicating strong framing. In contrast, hospitality management is a field of practice that is characteristic of the newer regions of knowledge in universities and the degree is structured so that students undertake seven core subjects common to all business degrees in the university, seven specialist hospitality management subjects, five approved electives, three subjects in professional development and two work-­integrated learning subjects. Students are required to spend their third year on an industry placement, their ‘cooperative education’ year. First-­year subjects indicate that the programme does provide students with

130   L. Wheelahan Table 8.1 Comparison of nursing and hospitality degrees offered at one university in 2007a Bachelor of Nursing

Bachelor of Business (Hospitality Management)

Year 1 Semester 1 Bioscience 1: Human Body Structure and    Function Health Psychology across the Lifespan Frameworks for Nursing Practice

Common core units Accounting for Decision Making

Year 1 Semester 2 Bioscience 2: Human Body Structure &    Function Working with Evidence In Practice Health Priorities & Nursing Clinical Practicum 1

Introduction to Marketing Business Law

Year 2 Semester 1 Pathophysiology & Quality Use Of    Medicines 1 Working with Evidence in Practice Health Priorities & Nursing 2 Clinical Practicum 2

Food and Beverage Management I Food and Beverage Management II

Year 2 Semester 2

Hospitality Facilities Planning and    Development Five approved electives

Pathophysiology & Quality Use of    Medicines 2 Health Priorities & Nursing 3 Clinical Practicum 3 Health Priorities & Nursing Year 3 Semester 1 Health Priorities & Nursing 5 Nursing and Complex Care Clinical Practicum 4 Issues in Professional Practice

Information Systems for Business Economic Principles Business Statistics

Management and Organisation Behaviour Specialisation units of study – Hospitality Introduction to Hospitality

Accommodation Management F ood and Beverage Management III Human Relations

Professional Development units of study Professional Development 1 Professional Development 2 Professional Development 3 Work-integrated learning units of study Cooperative Education 1 Cooperative Education 2

Year 3 Semester 2 Nursing Specific Populations Clinical Practicum Theory Elective Notes a Bachelor of Nursing: https://vuwebapps01.vu.edu.au/handbook/Search.aspx?CourseID=34649 (accessed 29 November 2009). Bachelor of Business (Hospitality Management): https://vuwebapps01.vu.edu.au/handbook/Search. aspx?CourseID=26914 (accessed 29 November 2009).

access to disciplinary knowledge and the titles of those in subsequent years in which students undertake their specialisation also indicate that it draws from management as a discipline (although, as explained below, this is not evident from the subject descriptors), while being strongly shaped by the field of practice. The description for the introductory subject ‘Introduction to Hospitality’ shows the attempts by practitioners to establish the field as distinctly devel-

Vocational qualifications   131 oping and drawing on its own knowledge frameworks, establishing Barnett’s ‘tool-­box’ and demonstrating that the process of occupationally recontextualising knowledge is iterative with pedagogic recontextualising, at least within university, if not VET or school contexts. The content descriptor for this subject says that: The purpose of this unit is to give students a basic understanding of the study of hospitality as an emerging discipline worthy of rigorous study and to orient the students to the hospitality industry and the issues which confront it. This will include introducing students to the depth and scope of hospitality as a concept that permeates society, with an emphasis on developing a sensitivity to and understanding of the derivatives and contemporary manifestations of the hospitality industry and management therein. Topics to be covered include: hospitality as a field of study; introduction to the hospitality industry; the philosophy of hospitableness; the origins of modern hospitality; the structure and dynamic forces of the hospitality industry; consuming hospitality; the commoditisation of the hospitality industry.2 A generous reading of the content descriptor for this subject implies that the field draws on philosophy, history, management, economics and perhaps some sociology. However, theoretical foundations are not made explicit and there is no attempt to explicitly identify theoretical underpinnings of practice. In contrast, the theoretical foundations of at least one aspect of nursing practice are introduced and recontextualised specifically for nursing in ‘Bioscience 1: Human Body Structure and Function’: In this unit, human anatomy and physiology will be introduced and placed in context with nursing in an integrated fashion. The subject begins with an overview of the organisation of the human body. Basic concepts in chemistry and biochemistry are presented as essential background for understanding pharmacology and the structure and function of cells and tissues. Students are introduced to microbiology and the importance of infection control. After these fundamental concepts have been covered, students will study the structure and function of the skeletal and muscular systems, the nervous system, and the endocrine system.3 Knowledge is not strongly classified according to traditional disciplinary structures but the role of theoretical knowledge in practising in the field is more evident than in the introductory hospitality management subject. At least some of the disciplines that inform nursing are made explicit in a way that they are not in a descriptor in an early subject in the hospitality management degree, ‘Food and Beverage Management I’, whose purpose is expressed as:

132   L. Wheelahan To introduce students to the core principles and practices of food and beverage management in order to optimise the managerial and operational efficiency of foodservice operations. Topics include: introduction to food and beverages, food and beverages menu, food production methods, recipe development, standardised recipe, food safety and hygiene and dining experience.4 This list of topics is organised around workplace issues or problems, processes and tasks whose theoretical foundations are not evident from the descriptor. It does not indicate explicit links with the discipline of management as one that informs the hospitality field in the same way that Bioscience I as a nursing subject explicitly invokes human anatomy and physiology, chemistry, biochemistry, pharmacology and microbiology. There is no attempt in Food and Beverage Management I to relate occupational practice to particular fields of theoretical knowledge within the descriptor, unlike that for the introductory nursing subject. While this does not preclude the theoretical classification and framing of knowledge in the detailed subject outline for F&B I, which may well specify theory, or in the teaching of this or other hospitality subjects, an initial orientation to theoretical knowledge is not provided, as it is in nursing Bioscience I. Moreover, none of this demonstrates that nursing students have more exposure to the structure of disciplines, their boundaries and degrees of insulation than their counterparts in hospitality management, for which comparison of detailed syllabi and actual teaching would need to be undertaken. All it does is demonstrate that the initial structuring of the degrees and their division of domains of knowledge into specific disciplinary areas between and within subjects is more clearly signalled to students in the nursing degree material that presents programme design, structure and description where classification and framing of disciplinary knowledge is stronger, the latter demonstrated through stronger sequencing and the limited range of electives than those available to hospitality students.

Comparing VET and higher education qualifications in a ‘new’ region While the demands of practice within occupational fields have implications for the way in which curriculum is structured they do not determine its nature. Bernstein argued that pedagogic discourse carries the message of power in the way knowledge is classified and framed because of the access it provides to ‘orientations to meanings’. Strongly classified knowledge provides more access to the theoretical and abstract because it more clearly signals boundaries between different knowledge domains that students can ‘recognise’. This is particularly important for working-­class students who, unlike middle-­class students, tend to have less access to a ‘second site of pedagogic acquisition’ at home (Arnot and Reay, 2004: 149). Some Bernsteinian theorists have argued that assess-

Vocational qualifications   133 ment needs to be strongly framed so that working-­class students can ‘recognise the goalposts’, while processes of learning should be paced and sequenced so as to engage them in learning. At times this may involve giving them more control over these processes (Morais et al., 2004), while at others it may require strong sequencing so that students learn what comes ‘before’ as the basis of understanding the ‘after’ (Muller, 2009). Curriculum in the newer regions can be more or less strongly classified and framed, even if the demands of practice do not require access to complex and highly abstract bodies of knowledge that have been developed over long periods by communities of interest. Arguably, vocational qualifications in newer regions offered in the higher education sector provide more access to theoretical knowledge than do those in the second, vocationally oriented tier of tertiary education, such as VET in Australia. All publicly funded VET qualifications in Australia must be based on competency-­based training models of curriculum derived from ‘training packages’ which comprise ‘industry-­specified’ units of competency that tie learning outcomes to specific workplace tasks or roles (DEST, 2006). Competency is defined as the application of specified knowledge, skill and attitudes needed to undertake a work role or task to the required standard in the workplace (ibid.: 69). Training package qualifications are similar to National Vocational Qualifications in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Scottish Vocational Qualifications in Scotland and vocational qualifications in South Africa, New Zealand and a range of other countries. Table 8.2 compares and contrasts a higher education and a VET programme in hospitality management, a four-­ year Bachelor of Business (Hospitality Management) in the former and the national competency-­based, two-­year Advanced Diploma of Hospitality in the latter,5 which is designed to prepare people to become senior managers in the hospitality industry who are able to ‘analyse, design and execute judgements using wide-­ranging technical, creative, conceptual or managerial competencies’ (CoA, 2008a: 219). In most universities in Australia, students who undertake advanced diplomas will be provided with around 18 months’ credit in a degree in the same field. The table lists the subjects in which students must enrol in the degree and the core units of competency in the advanced diploma. In addition to the latter, students are required to undertake 18 electives not included in the table. While the degree in hospitality management may provide access to more weakly classified knowledge than other vocationally specific programmes in higher education, such as nursing, the table suggests that a stronger disciplinary base is provided than is the case in the Advanced Diploma of Hospitality, where students are enrolled in discrete units of competency which are not subjects based on occupationally recontextualised disciplinary knowledge. The advanced diploma is structured so that ‘spaces’ (the units in which students enrol) are defined and distinguished through their relationship to work tasks or roles, which is the basis upon which units of competency are developed in VET qualifications. Disciplinary knowledge

134   L. Wheelahan Table 8.2 Comparison of a higher education and VET program in hospitality management Bachelor of Business (Hospitality Management)

Advanced Diploma of Hospitality

Common core units Accounting for Decision Making Information Systems for Business Economic Principles Business Statistics Introduction to Marketing Business Law Management and Organisation Behaviour Specialisation units of study – Hospitality Introduction to Hospitality Food and Beverage Management I Food and Beverage Management II Accommodation Management Food and Beverage Management III Human Relations Hospitality Facilities Planning and    Development Five approved electives Professional Development units of study Professional Development 1 Professional Development 2 Professional Development 3 Work-integrated learning units of study Co-operative Education 1 Co-operative Education 2

Core units Provide quality customer service Manage quality customer service Work with colleagues and customers Work in a socially diverse environment Deal with conflict situations Interpret financial information Manage finances within a budget Prepare and monitor budgets Manage physical assets Manage financial operations Develop and update legal knowledge    required for business compliance Coach others in job skills Recruit, select and induct staff Roster staff Lead and manage people Monitor staff performance Manage workplace diversity Receive and store stock Control and order stock Monitor work operations Develop and implement operational plans Develop and implement a business plan Establish and conduct business relationships Develop and manage marketing strategies Follow health, safety and security procedures Follow workplace hygiene procedures Implement and monitor workplace health,    safety and security practices Establish and maintain an OHS system

is weakly classified, neither distinguished from ‘everyday’ knowledge nor other disciplinary fields, nor strongly classified within units of competency. This is clearly illustrated if we compare and contrast the subject ‘Management and Organisation Behaviour’ in the degree with the unit of competency ‘Lead and Manage People’ from the advanced diploma. Both are ‘generic’; the degree subject is included in a range of business degrees and the unit of competency is included in a range of advanced diplomas. The unit descriptor for ‘Management and Organisation Behaviour’ says that: The aims of this unit of study are to provide students with an understanding of organisational behaviour and management theory; to assess critically the underlying values of these theories; to assess critically the utility and application of the management practices informed by these theories in the Australian context; and to analyse critically the values of Australian managers concerning behaviour in organisations and to eval-

Vocational qualifications   135 uate the effectiveness of these assumptions. This unit of study includes the following topics: overview of the development of organisation/management theory; analysis of scientific management, human relations theory; individual behaviour/perception, personality, learning, motivation; group behaviour: group dynamics, conflict resolution, leadership, concentrating on Australian case studies and incorporating a consideration of issues of gender, ethnicity and age; applications of management/ organisation theory in Australia; communication processes, and quality of working life.6 This suggests that the subject aims to induct students into a disciplinary style of reasoning in management through accessing different theoretical frameworks as a means of understanding the Australian context. It signals that there are debates and controversies within this field of practice by referring to multiple theories and the need to critically appraise them. Students are introduced to the notion that knowledge domains in this subject include areas such as organisation/management theory, scientific management theory and human relations theory, as well as specific topics, such as group dynamics and conflict resolution. Boundaries are signalled, even if students might not yet have an idea of what they mean. Compare this to the unit descriptor for the unit of competency in the advanced diploma, ‘Lead and Manage People’: This unit describes the performance outcomes, skills and knowledge required to lead and manage teams of people in the workplace, including volunteers where appropriate. The unit focuses on modelling high standards, developing commitment and managing team performance through effective leadership. No licensing, legislative, regulatory or certification requirements apply to this unit at the time of endorsement. Application of the unit This unit applies to frontline managers and supervisors who are responsible for leading and motivating teams in any industry context. It requires the application of highly developed communication, interpersonal and leadership skills with a strong focus on team development. (CoA, 2008b: 475) There is no hint of debate and controversy around management theory and organisational practice in this unit descriptor. The knowledge, skills and attitudes that students need to demonstrate are elaborated through the elements of competency, which break down units of competency into demonstrable assessable outcomes or actions, and performance criteria which specify standards that must be used in assessing students. These are presented in Table 8.3 where the complexity and contested nature of management and leadership are absent, while an idealised notion of management and leadership is presented, contextualised by unproblematic notions of work in which

Performance criteria

3.1  Assess the skills of team members and provide opportunities for individual development 3.2  Monitor team performance to ensure progress towards achievement of goals 3.3 Delegate tasks and responsibilities appropriately, identify barriers to delegation and implement processes to overcome them 3.4  Provide mentoring and coaching support to team members 3.5  Provide recognition and reward for team achievements

3  Manage team performance

Source: CoA (2008b: 475–476).

2.1  Develop and clearly communicate plans and objectives in consultation with the team 2.2  Make plans and objectives consistent with organisation goals 2.3 Communicate expectations, roles and responsibilities of team members and leaders in a way that encourages individuals and teams to take responsibility for their work 2.4  Encourage teams and individuals to develop innovative approaches to work 2.5  Identify, encourage, value and reward individual and team efforts and contributions 2.6  Model and encourage open and supportive communication styles within the team 2.7  Seek and share information from the wider environment with the team 2.8  Represent the team’s interests appropriately in the wider environment.

2 Develop team commitment and cooperation

1 Model high standards of performance 1.1  Make individual performance a positive role model for others and behaviour 1.2  Show support for and commitment to organisation goals in day-to-day work performance 1.3  Treat people with integrity, respect and empathy

Elements of competency

Table 8.3  Unit of competency ‘Manage and Lead People’

Vocational qualifications   137 all share the same commitment to the enterprise, regardless of what that may be. It specifies the nature of individuals’ subjectivities but not the means critically to evaluate whether these are appropriate. Required knowledge is specified later in the unit, and this also is listed as unproblematised concepts that have been decontextualised from disciplinary systems of meaning, such as ‘typical causes of workplace conflict, including cultural differences’. While students must demonstrate that they know about ‘theories of motivation and their application to different workplace contexts’, everything else is presented as given, such as ‘different leadership styles and the characteristics of effective leadership principles of teamwork’ (CoA, 2008b: 477). This analysis suggests that there is considerable difference in the way the degree and the Advanced Diploma in Hospitality mediate access to knowledge, demonstrated here in the way in which spaces are defined and insulated in formal curriculum. The requirement that VET qualifications be based on competency-­training models of curriculum provides a poor basis for students to access theoretical knowledge. Though our earlier caveat that more detailed work on curricular particulars and classroom teaching and learning must be repeated, our presumption is that VET qualifications tend to provide less access to disciplinary knowledge than higher education qualifications in the same disciplinary knowledge field.

Conclusion Vocational pathways can be differentiated by the way in which they mediate access to theoretical knowledge depending on the nature of the field of practice they are oriented to, whether they are in traditional or newer regions of knowledge and by the sector of tertiary education in which they are offered. Those in traditional regions with strongly classified and framed knowledge are likely to provide most access, those in new regions, particularly in VET, the least. Examining vocational pathways, such as in nursing, where knowledge is more strongly classified than in newer regions, provides insights into how it could be structured in all vocational qualifications so that students might have access to the abstract and theoretical. Arguably, all qualifications, including those in VET, require increased access to conceptual knowledge, regardless of the nature of differing fields of practice because of changes to the nature of work and society. Gamble (2004: 192) reminds us that while different areas of VET curriculum ‘have different histories and different relations to the market, none are independent of bodies of knowledge. There is constant movement in what counts as theory’. She cites the way in which secretarial work has become embedded in management and retail in marketing and logistics and argues that students need to be able to move to higher levels of study in their field to support their occupational progression, and

138   L. Wheelahan their qualifications need to provide them with access to higher levels of study by equipping them to engage with theory if they are to do so. Students also need access to theoretical abstract knowledge as matter of distributional justice so that they may participate in debates and controversies shaping their fields of practice and society more broadly. In Australia nursing is an important pathway into the professions for working-­class students, particularly women, who are, in the main, able to ‘cope’ with the theoretical demands of their qualifications. If they do not need watered-­ down qualifications that make the boundaries between areas of knowledge opaque in the interests of keeping them ‘engaged’ through a more ‘practical’ curriculum, neither do others, in other fields.

Notes 1 Five of Australia’s 39 publicly funded universities are dual-­sector, which means that they have two divisions: a higher education and a technical and further education (TAFE) division. TAFE is the publicly funded provider of VET in Australia. 2 Source: https://vuwebapps01.vu.edu.au/handbook/CourseSubjects.aspx?SubjectCo de=BHO1110&HBID=101 (accessed 29 November 2009). 3 Source: https://vuwebapps01.vu.edu.au/handbook/CourseSubjects.aspx?SubjectCo de=RBM1102&HBID=101 (accessed 29 November 2009). 4 Source: https://vuwebapps01.vu.edu.au/handbook/CourseSubjects.aspx?SubjectCo de=BHO1121&HBID=121 (accessed 29 November 2009). 5 VET qualifications are nationally endorsed and contained in training packages. All educational ‘providers’ are required to offer the specified units of competency, and to adhere to the rules around electives. 6 Source: https://vuwebapps01.vu.edu.au/handbook/CourseSubjects.aspx?SubjectCo de=BMO1102&HBID=121 (accessed 28 November 2009).

References Arnot, Madeleine and Reay, Dianne (2004), ‘The framing of pedagogic encounters: Regulating the social order in classroom learning’, in Muller, Johan, Davies, Brian and Morais, Ana (eds), Reading Bernstein, Researching Bernstein, London: RougledgeFalmer. Barnett, Michael (2006), ‘Vocational knowledge and vocational pedagogy’, in Young, Michael and Gamble, Jeanne (eds), Knowledge, Curriculum and Qualifications for South African Further Education, Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council: 143–157. Bernstein, Basil (2000), Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Commonwealth of Australia (2008a), SIT07 Tourism, Hospitality and Events Training Package Volume I, Sydney: Service Skills Australia. Online: www.serviceskills.com. au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=942 (accessed 28 November 2009). Commonwealth of Australia (2008b), SIT07 Tourism, Hospitality and Events Training

Vocational qualifications   139 Package Volume II, Sydney: Service Skills Australia. Online: www.serviceskills. com.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=942 (accessed 28 November 2009). Department of Education Science and Training (2006), Training Package Development Handbook, Canberra: Department of Education Science and Training. Online: www.dest.gov.au/sectors/training_skills/publications_resources/profiles/Training_ Package_Development_Handbook.htm (accessed 16 March 2007). Gamble, Jeanne (2004), ‘A future curriculum mandate for Further Education and Training Colleges: Recognising intermediate knowledge and skill’, in McGrath, Simon, Badroodien, Azeem, Kraak, Andre and Unwin, Lorna (eds), Shifting Understandings of Skills in South Africa: Overcoming the Historical Imprint of a Low Skills Regime, Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council. Heath, Patricia (Chair) (2001), National Review of Nursing Education Discussion Paper, Canberra: Department of Education, Science and Training. Online: www.dest. gov.au/archive/highered/nursing/pubs/discussion/default.htm#contents. Morais, Ana and Neves, Isabel (2001), ‘Pedagogic social contexts: Studies for a sociology of learning’, in Morais, Ana, Neves, Isabel, Davies, Brian and Daniels, Harry (eds), Towards a Sociology of Pedagogy. The Contribution of Basil Bernstein to Research, New York: Peter Lang. Morais, Ana, Neves, Isabel and Pires, Delmina (2004), ‘The what and the how of teaching and learning: Going deeper into sociological analysis and interventions’, in Muller, Johan, Davies, Brian and Morais, Ana (eds), Reading Bernstein, Research Bernstein, London: RoutledgeFalmer. Muller, Johan (2006), ‘Differentiation and progression in the curriculum’, in Young, Michael and Gamble, Jeanne (eds), Knowledge, Curriculum and Qualifications for South African Further Education, Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council: 66–86. Muller, Johan (2009), ‘Forms of knowledge and curriculum coherence’, Journal of Education and Work 22 (3): 205–226. Young, Michael (2006), ‘Reforming the Further Education and Training curriculum: An international perspective’, in Young, Michael and Gamble, Jeanne (eds), Knowledge, Curriculum and Qualifications for South African Further Education, Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council. Young, Michael (2008), Bringing Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism to Social Realism in the Sociology of Education, London: Routledge.

Part III

Multiply anchored subjectivities

9 ‘Psychic defences’ and institutionalised formations of knowledge Claudia Lapping

Introduction The position of ‘psychic defences’ within Basil Bernstein’s sociology of knowledge Bernstein invokes the notion of ‘psychic defences’ in relation to the principle of classification, that which constitutes distinctions between discourses or categories of knowledge. He suggests that the basis of differentiation is always related to power, acting to naturalise arbitrary power relations. In its function of disguise, the principle of classification relates not only to external social relations but also to ‘relations within individuals’ that Bernstein describes as ‘a system of psychic defences’: .

externally, the classificatory principle creates order, and the contradictions, cleavages and dilemmas which necessarily inhere in the principle of a classification are suppressed by the insulation. Within the individual, the insulation becomes a system of psychic defences against the possibility of the weakening of the insulation, which would then reveal the suppressed contradictions, cleavages and dilemmas. So the internal reality of insulation is a system of psychic defences to maintain the integrity of a category. (2000: 7) What Bernstein articulates here is the psychic structuring of fields of knowledge. The order or coherence that appears to underlie the construction of disciplinary fields or systems of knowledge is achieved through suppression of ‘the contradictions, cleavages and dilemmas which necessarily inhere in the principle of a classification’, individually maintained through ‘a system of psychic defences’. One way of interpreting this might be to suggest that it is the aspect of any form of knowledge serving the interests of a specific social group that is repressed, both in organisational discourses of legitimate knowledge and in individual construction of psychical objects. These social and individual mechanisms defend subjects against threats to their identity

144   C. Lapping posed by new forms of knowledge and hierarchies, thus, ‘the principle of classification comes to have the force of the natural order’ (ibid.). Bernstein invokes specific defence mechanisms in his conceptualisation of contemporary forms of institutionalised knowledge, describing disciplinary and institutional identities as constructed through processes of ‘projection’ and ‘introjection’. Bernstein does not elaborate his interpretation of these terms but implicitly references Melanie Klein, both in his use of these concepts and also in a joking neologism, ‘the pedagogic schizoid position’, which must, for anyone who knows her work, evoke Klein’s very words. This brazen, unacknowledged use of Klein’s conceptualisation of psychic defences invites speculation on what Bernstein might mean when he deploys terms with such psychoanalytic resonances. This chapter sets out to elaborate some possible implications of Bernstein’s introduction of Kleinian and post-­ Kleinian concepts into his account of knowledge within educational institutions as a basis for further exploration of psychical relations within institutionalised formations of knowledge. Recontextualisation of a theory from the setting in which it was developed in order to analyse a new object is likely to do violence either to the original theory or to the new setting: either some core principles of the theory will have to be transformed, or else significant aspects of the new research environment will be ignored. Uses of Klein’s theorisation of the psychic defences within organisational and sociological analysis provide useful illustrations of both of these forms of analytic violence, as constructing a trajectory of its uses from work emerging from the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, a therapeutically oriented consultancy integrating psychoanalytic approaches into organizational study (Jacques, 1951/1990; Lyth, 1959/1988), to Bernstein’s account of knowledge modes within educational institutions will show. Jacques’ usage, in his consultancy/research into industrial relations in a factory, constitutes an overly obedient application of psychoanalytic approaches, focusing too much on individual and interpersonal defences, producing a reductive account of the setting. In contrast, Isabel Menzies Lyth’s study of a nursing service pays attention to the setting and extends Klein’s conceptual vocabulary, while Bernstein’s cheerfully selective appropriation of Kleinian vocabulary effectively decapitates her theory. The conceptual tussle taking place is over the centrality, or not, of the individual as the site of psychical identity. In order to explore Bernstein’s appropriation of the language of the psychic defences it is useful to distinguish two aspects of Klein’s theory: a speculative story about the development of the infant in the earliest stages of ego formation; and a set of concepts that enable us to describe observable, empirical instances. The former narrates the infant’s construction of an internal world of good and bad objects and their development, from a sense of being persecuted by dangerous part objects, to a sense of whole objects that are ambivalent and vulnerable in nature, characterised, in turn, by the infant’s unobservable, successive deployment of violent, then more conciliatory, defences. It is through their changing relation to these objects that

‘Psychic defences’ and knowledge   145 infants begin to develop a more stable sense of their own identity. The second aspect of Klein’s theory is her specification of the psychic defences: the mechanisms of splitting, projection and introjection. One argument I am making in this chapter is that sociological work drawing on Klein’s ideas should put into question the relation between these two aspects of her theory. I suggest that Bernstein’s work implicitly achieves this, and that in doing so it also puts into question the position of the individual as the focus for analysis of psychical processes.

Melanie Klein’s account of the development of the infant ego and the psychic defence mechanisms Melanie Klein’s account suggests that experiences of infant drives and the external world are internalised, gradually building up a parallel world of inner objects inaccessible to the child’s accurate observation and judgement and ‘phantastic’ – the product of unconscious fantasy – giving rise to an overwhelming sense of doubt and anxiety (1940/1986: 149). Klein relates this anxiety to the death drive, the infant’s own destructive impulses, and to painful experience of bodily needs and functions, felt as persecuting and attributed to ‘objects’ over which they have no control. Direct experience of an internal drive, the ‘destructive impulse’, is transformed into an inner object experienced as ‘uncontrollable and overpowering’, while experience of the external frustration of bodily needs is transformed into an inner object that is the cause of its distress. Klein’s conceptualisation of ‘inner objects’ provides a powerful metaphor for infants’ initial, unstable relation to sensations that arise in response to their experience of both inner drives and external world. Early external objects are only partially represented internally, only experienced in relation to immediate bodily needs and satisfying or frustrating, good or bad. The concepts of ‘inner object’, ‘part object’ and, later on, ‘whole object’ are integral to her account of infant development. At this early stage the infant does not have a sense of itself as differentiated from the external world, leading to a sense of overwhelming persecution, of attack from internal bodily sensations and frustrating part objects that fail to gratify bodily needs. It gives rise to great anxiety and fear of annihilation, defended against by attempted control of attacking objects by interrelated processes of splitting, projection and introjection (Klein, 1946/1986: 182): in phantasy, the infant splits off the good and bad parts of the object so as to control them through largely destructive processes of denial, idealisation, projection and introjection, gaining incomplete relief from persecutory anxiety. According to Klein, the paranoid schizoid position dominates the infant in very early ego development as unconscious defences bring relief from the overwhelming sensation of destruction but weaken the ego and impede integration and stability. In normal infant development, paranoid schizoid is followed by depressive dominance where the infant begins to recognise whole objects that

146   C. Lapping contain both good and bad aspects and to learn to tolerate ambivalence. This brings with it a new array of difficult feelings as the infant experiences some of the feelings of guilt and remorse, some of the pain which results from the conflict between love and uncontrollable hatred, some of the anxieties of the impending death of the loved internalized and external objects. (Klein, 1946/1986: 142) In the depressive position the infant comes to recognise other objects as also vulnerable, experiencing guilt related to its own feelings of hatred and destructive attacks on these objects, both internally and in the external world. While paranoid fears are reduced in the depressive position, feelings of guilt, remorse and responsibility for loved objects come to the fore and ‘the anxiety and feelings of suffering are of a much more complex nature’ (Klein, 1946/1986: 124). For Klein, these positions, first experienced in early infancy, are the basis for our experience of the world in later life and we continue to shift between them. This story of the shifts between the persecutory anxieties of paranoid schizoid and the anxious guilt and remorse of depressive positions, through development of an inner world of partial and whole objects, constitutes Melanie Klein’s account of infant development and its continuing effects in adult mental life. I suggest that, while the implications it might have for adult mental lives are inaccessible to empirical elaboration, elements within it can be elaborated to describe empirical instances observable in clinical work or in research. Klein’s theorisation of specific psychical mechanisms constitutes a descriptive language that can be used in analyses of empirical material. For example, processes of internalisation or introjection are suggested where we get a sense of separate elements within the psyche and there is some reference to an external source for these elements. In contrast to introjection, processes of projection are suggested when we get a sense that the subject’s own feelings or characteristics are being attributed to another object. Klein’s theorisation of an inner world made up of part and whole objects that represent our feelings and experiences provides a vivid metaphorical language for the development of these kinds of interpretations. However, it is not necessary to incorporate her narrative of infant development into analysis of psychical defence mechanisms. The theoretical elaboration of projective and introjective processes within psychoanalysis provides models that help us to describe the relational constitution of objects within empirical research, and, more specifically, within Bernstein’s account of fields of educational knowledge. The literature discusses possible distinctions between identification, internalisation and introjection. Sandler (1988: 7) notes Freud’s distinction between ‘the internalization of external prohibitions and regulations’ and the ‘internalization of aggression, the turning of aggressive impulses inward’ and between,

‘Psychic defences’ and knowledge   147 for example, identification, which involves an alteration in the subject’s self-­ representation and introjection in which the internalised object is kept apart from the sense of self (ibid.: 11). A similar range of theoretical distinctions is evident in debates over the meanings of projection and/or projective identification. In general, projection is understood as the attribution of one’s own feelings or aspects of one’s character to an external object. The term ‘projective identification’ is sometimes used to suggest the way in which this process has effects that go beyond the subject’s image of the object, into the object itself: the object of the projection will in some way either respond to or take on the elements attributed to them. Joseph (1988: 65–66) provides a useful summary of some forms of the three different instantiations of projective identification suggested in Klein’s work (1946/1986: 183). The first of these, ‘splitting off and getting rid of unwanted parts of the self that cause anxiety or pain’, is probably the meaning that is most assimilated into everyday language. If I am deeply competitive and yet ashamed of my competitive feelings, I may project this characteristic of mine onto those around me, so that, for example, I fear others’ envy of my success. This is an unconscious identification in which I deny my own feelings and in phantasy project them onto the other. Joseph describes two further instantiations of projective identification: ‘projecting parts of the self into an object to dominate and control it and thus avoid any feelings of being separate’; and ‘getting into an object to take over its capacities’. The former describes instances where the unconscious assumption of sameness can be a mechanism for control and exploitation. The latter describes a different kind of merging, where the subject seeks to construct an identity from the characteristics of the other. These processes can protect against painful feelings of separateness but can evoke difficult feelings, ‘persecutory anxieties, claustrophobia, panics and the like’ (Joseph, 1988: 66), when the object in some way reasserts its separate identity. Within psychoanalysis these conceptualisations of projection and introjection are used to describe individual and interpersonal relations. However, the forms of projective identification described by Joseph can also help us to explore the construction of social and institutional identities. Bernstein invokes these psychical defences in his account of institutionalised knowledge formations. It is possible to interpret Bernstein’s analysis as making use of the descriptive aspect of the concept of projective identification while leaving aside Klein’s speculative, individualising developmental narrative. In a similar way, David Armstrong (2005: 93) marks out a distinction between work that conceptualises psychical defences in the context of individual development and work that conceptualises the defences in the context of the organisation in his analysis of psychoanalytically oriented organisational research and consultancy, pointing out that work within this field can focus too much on individual or group relations, missing out what he describes as ‘the organization as an independent variable’. He suggests that there is a psychic logic that is specific to organisations that should not be subordinated to theories of individual or group development.

148   C. Lapping

From psychic defence to social defence: the development of Kleinian ideas in organisational analysis The work of Jacques (1951/1990) exemplifies the approach that Armstrong criticises, focusing on observation of interpersonal relations, ignoring the way specific organisational objectives and practices might constitute them, in a study of an industrial conflict. He interprets the way workers, workers’ representatives, supervisors and managers involved in negotiations project their own fears, uncertainties and suspicions onto other groups or individuals, each group finding a shared object through which to defend against their anxieties. Because of this constitution of a shared object of projection, Jacques (ibid.: 427) suggests that the process should be understood as a social rather than psychical defence mechanism, aggression directed at the object by the ego being sanctioned within the shared practice, meaning that denial of unconscious hatred and destructive impulses against internal objects can be reinforced by turning these impulses against a publicly hated real external enemy. He goes on to elaborate the psychical function of social legitimation, suggesting that the social sanction of destructive impulses is introjected and supports the ego in its denial of aggression and avoidance of associated anxiety and guilt, where ‘social’ merely denotes ‘more than one person’ without taking into account the specificities of the factory social context in which industrial conflict took place. Jacques’ account also invokes elements of Klein’s speculative narrative of infancy, suggesting that interactions he has observed can be interpreted as a ‘retreat to the paranoid schizoid position’ (1951/1990: 433), reinscribing participants within a Kleinian trajectory of ego development. This presumes a link between interpretations of projective mechanisms and ‘processes of working through the unresolved conflicts of the infantile depressive position’ (ibid.: 429) and detaches interpretation from the context of the institution, reinserting it into the story of the development and integration of the ego. This constitutes the role of ‘social’ defences, such as shared processes of projection as one of helping individuals to ‘find relief from their own internal persecution’ (ibid.: 426). The organisational analysis developed by Isabel Menzies Lyth (1959/1988) references Jacques’ work and at several points it echoes his recourse to the language of individual psychical development. It also constitutes a much more precise articulation of the production of anxiety within social systems and organisations, shifting analysis from individuals or groups of individuals to organisational practices and purposes. She contextualises the production of anxiety within the nursing service in relation to the objectives, or ‘primary task’, of the hospital. She suggests that the emotions related to the ‘objective situation’ of the hospital ‘stimulate afresh’ the ‘primitive levels of the mind’ associated with ‘early situations’ (ibid.: 46–47), foregrounding features of nurses’ relations to illness, patients and relatives within the hospital. Her analysis gives equal weight to the everyday, ‘objective’ practices of the hos-

‘Psychic defences’ and knowledge   149 pital and the internal objects of nurses’ inner representational world, whose associated emotions are evoked when distinction cannot be maintained between ‘objective reality’ and inner-­world ‘phantasy situations’. The link between the two is inherent to the anxieties experienced by nurses which cannot be separated from hospital organisational context. In exploring the institutionalised practices constructed to alleviate anxiety, Lyth suggests that organisation members, in this case, of the nursing service, develop ‘socially structured defence mechanisms which appear as elements in the organisation’s structure, culture and mode of functioning’ (1959/1988: 50). For example, in order to avoid the intense anxieties likely to be provoked in personal relations with severely ill patients, the service is organised to limit the development of such relations by dividing the care of individual patients into ‘tasks’ allocated to several nurses. ‘This prevents her from coming effectively into contact with the totality of any one patient and his illness and offers protection from the anxiety this arouses’ (ibid.: 51). Lyth interprets a ‘task list’ as a mechanism for organising nurses’ practice that aids ‘depersonalisation’ and the ‘elimination of individual distinctiveness in both nurse and patient’, contributing to ‘an almost explicit “ethic” that any patient must be the same as any other patient’ (ibid.: 52), so that nurses avoid or suppress preferences for or relationships with individual patients. General denial of the disturbing feelings and emotional strain that arise in response to distressing situations they face within their work is exemplified when a student nurse ‘is usually reprimanded rather than helped’ (ibid.: 54) for making a mistake. Lyth concludes that the system of social defences within the nursing service ‘itself arouses a good deal of secondary anxiety as well as failing to alleviate primary anxiety’ (ibid.: 65), covering over unbearable feelings of anxiety, rather than addressing or coming to a more considered understanding of their source. Nurses’ anxieties must be contextualised within the hospital’s primary task relating to illness, patients and relatives. In interweaving organisational objectives, social defences and individual anxieties, her analysis disrupts the individualised narrative of ego development as a progression from the paranoid schizoid to the depressive position, and places the emotional life of the organisation at the centre of the analysis. The distinction between Jacques’ and Lyth’s work lies in contrasting theorisations of institutional contexts. For Jacques, a social defence is simply a shared psychical one while, for Lyth, a defence system is instantiated as an aspect of organisational practice and should be understood in relation to organisational primary objectives. Further development of Lyth’s analysis might lead to explicit re-­theorisation of the relations between psychic and social defences and organisational structures that might, in turn, displace traditional recourse to Klein’s individualising narrative of ego development. It might be argued that this is precisely what is achieved in Bernstein’s theorisation of knowledge modes in contemporary educational settings. Indeed, it might appear that the subject as a concrete individual disappears within

150   C. Lapping Bernstein’s account, to be replaced with an ideal type that is primarily associated with the social institution.

Psychical mechanisms within knowledge practices Bernstein’s use of the vocabulary of psychical defence mechanisms merits elaboration in terms of possible interpretations or meanings evoked. He suggests that three modes of knowledge are to be found within formal educational settings: singulars, rarified forms of knowledge that are considered discrete, strongly classified and autonomous or self-­legitimating; regions, forms of knowledge that combine knowledge from singular disciplines for application in fields beyond the school or university; and generic modes, forms of knowledge that originate outside educational institutions and are imported into educational settings, typically in the construction of skills-­ based vocational qualifications. Each serves an economic goal and can be considered ‘instrumental’ (2000: 54). However, the explicitness with which the instrumental goal of knowledge constitutes a part of the identity of the field varies according to mode. Similarly, in Bernstein’s account, the psychic defences associated with fields of knowledge vary from mode to mode. Singulars Bernstein suggests that traditional disciplines, such as classics, English, history, physics, chemistry, economics and the social sciences are all examples of singulars. He associates these knowledge structures with historical developments of nineteenth-­century nationalism, Empire, new material technologies and the market and its associated ‘management of subjectivities’: Classics provided privileged access to the administrative levels of the Civil Service. The specialized sciences provided the basis for material technologies. However, despite these external linkages singulars are like a coin with two faces, so that only one face can be seen at any one time. The sacred face sets them apart, legitimizes their otherness and creates dedicated identities with no reference other than to their calling. The profane face indicates their external linkage and internal power struggles. Organizationally and politically singulars construct strong boundary maintenance. From this point of view singulars develop strong autonomous self-­sealing and narcissistic identities. These identities are constructed by procedures of introjection. (2000: 54–55; emphasis original) He distinguishes what he calls ‘the sacred face’ of singular modes: aspects of knowledge that appear as pure intellectual activity, defined and legitimised with ‘no reference other than to their calling’. In contrast, ‘the profane face’

‘Psychic defences’ and knowledge   151 represents ‘external linkages’, instrumental aspects of knowledge that appear unrelated to legitimised, intellectual activity. However, ‘strong boundary maintenance’ keeps these two aspects of singular identities apart: ‘from this point of view, singulars develop strong autonomous self sealing and narcissistic identities’ (ibid.). In defining these knowledge structures as ‘narcissistic’, Bernstein seems to suggest the direction of libido towards specialised, disciplinary characteristics, the ‘sacred elements’, and the denial of characteristics associated with external linkages. This might be consistent with the projection of the profane ‘external linkages’ onto other objects/disciplines/contexts. Yet Bernstein describes these identities as ‘constructed by procedures of introjection’. This is consistent with a Kleinian account of narcissism as ‘love for and relation with the internalized good object’ (1951: 204) and this formulation reminds us of the idealised and phantasmatic nature of the characteristic that is here the object of narcissistic love: idealised because intellectual values can never be abstracted from their interdependency with social contexts; phantasmatic because the splitting off of the idealised object is a product of unconscious phantasy. However, it is not clear why Bernstein wants to claim that introjection is more significant than processes of projection in the establishment of ‘singular’ identities. This may be related to his tendency to produce slightly homogenising, static models, with the result that he seems, here, to simplify the dynamic and interrelated aspects of projection and introjection. The terms ‘projection’ and ‘introjection’ are partly deployed to construct a distinction between ‘singulars’ and more externally oriented knowledge structures (regional and generic modes). He claims that if the procedures of introjection construct the identities produced by singulars then those of projection construct the identities produced by the new regionalisation of knowledge (2000: 55). But he revises this homogenising claim a few paragraphs later, when he acknowledges both processes within the singular mode: The ‘autonomous’ [singular] mode is ambiguous as the context acts selectively upon whether autonomy is emphasized and dependency masked or dependency is pragmatically embraced. Thus the identity here is split but manageable when introjected elements and projected elements can be actualized in discrete contexts. (ibid.) Both the tendency to construct static, homogenising models and the inconsistency illustrated here are characteristic of Bernstein’s theorising. It is also worth speculating a little more on Bernstein’s claim that the identity of singular modes ‘is split but manageable’. Splitting arises here because of the need to defend against profane elements by separating (bad) dependency from (good) autonomy. Bernstein suggests that this split is manageable as long as the institution instantiates separate sites for the

152   C. Lapping a­ rticulation of these contrasting elements of identity, for example, teaching and research vs. committees and administration. It seems plausible that the provision of ‘discrete contexts’ allows the detoxification of the dependency that is otherwise likely to remain as a persecuting ‘bad object’. However, some settings might support a more integrated and ambivalent understanding of these disciplinary identities. Certain institutional contexts might be able to contain (in the psychoanalytic sense) the contrasting aspects of the identity. In these instances, there would be no need for the splitting that Bernstein suggests, so that a singular mode might be instantiated within a ‘depressive’ rather than a ‘paranoid schizoid’ position. It is worth noting here that Lyth’s account of the nursing service would suggest that the instantiation of the ‘depressive’ or ‘paranoid schizoid’ position might be dependent not just on institutional context, but also on individual disciplinary subjects: the combination of dependency and autonomy might be felt as an unbearable attack by some individuals, but as a bearable ambivalence by others. There is a clear distinction between the perspectives of the two authors. Lyth’s account of the hospital foregrounds instances where individual psychical histories come into contact with the psychical logic of the organisation. Bernstein’s models, in contrast, conceptualise knowledge modes as social identities and the individual emerges only as a type within the social, not as a subject with its own psychical history. Regions Bernstein (2000) defines regional modes as fields of knowledge that relate to both the specialised intellectual field of singular academic disciplines and external fields of practice. Examples include medicine, engineering and architecture, each of which incorporates ideas from several singular disciplines for application in settings beyond the university. Bernstein suggests that one feature of regional modes is their construction through processes of projection: Regions are recontextualisations of singulars and face inwards towards singulars and outwards towards external fields of practice . . . Identities produced by the new regions are more likely to face outwards to fields of practice and thus their contents are likely to be dependent on the requirements of these fields. Identities here are what they are, and what they will become, as a consequence of the projection of that knowledge as a practice in some context. (ibid.: 55; emphasis original) The suggestion that regions are constructed through projection requires some elaboration. The distinction between ‘projection’ and ‘projective identification’ might help to clarify this process. One interpretation of projective identification suggests a process whereby the ego does not merely split off a

‘Psychic defences’ and knowledge   153 part of itself and project it into an object, but, in addition, then identifies with the object of the projection (Mitchell, 1991: 20). Another variation suggests that the object of projection takes on the identity projected onto it by the ego. If we consider the identity of regional knowledge modes, analogous processes might be inferred. Regional knowledge structures – disciplinary fields situated within higher education – might first project meanings or concepts onto external practices and, then, following the projection, identify with the external practice. So, for example, medical researchers might identify with doctors, or educational researchers with teachers. Or, alternatively, it might be the case that ideas and concepts from the regional mode will not just be projected onto the contextualised practice of engineering, medicine or education but will be taken in as a part of the identity of this external object. Where professional bodies and individual professionals construct their identities by reference to knowledge developed within an academic context, when professional practice comes to be evaluated in the terms of a recontextualised academic language, we might describe this as a process of projective identification. However, there is also likely to be some movement the other way, i.e. ‘regional’ knowledge structures taking in (introjecting) idealised aspects of the contextualised external practice. Again it might be possible to question the extent to which this should be understood as an individual or a collective process and also whether, and in what way, these processes might be conceptualised in terms of the unconscious. And again, in contrast to Lyth, Bernstein seems to be constructing his models at the level of social identities: disciplinary fields or knowledge modes. The invocation of the unconscious inherent in his use of psychoanalytic vocabulary is suggestive of the psychical life and the fragility of social organisations as organisations. In more Lacanian terms, we could describe both of these processes – the introjection of knowledge from external practice into the academy and also the projection of knowledge from the academy into external practice – in terms of the master discourse (Lacan, 2007). The process of recontextualisation transforms knowledge from S2, the chain of signifiers, into S1, the master signifier. Lacan describes these as ‘the two aspects of knowledge’, embedded knowledge or ‘know how’, represented by S2, and ‘articulated knowledge’, S1 (ibid.: 22). The point of articulation, S1, abstracts knowledge from its context to assert it as a regulatory reference point, initiating new chains of signification. This occurs when a particular aspect of professional practice is taken up to be researched within the university, but also when knowledge produced within the university is inserted into the regulatory systems of professional practice. Both processes involve the extraction of knowledge for the purposes of the master or, Lacan says, ‘betrayal, of the slave’s knowledge, in order to obtain its transmutation into the master’s knowledge’ (ibid.: 22).

154   C. Lapping Generic modes A third mode of educational knowledge that Bernstein (2000) distinguishes within the contemporary context is what he calls ‘generic’. As this term perhaps suggests, this mode incorporates a wide range of practices within the category of ‘knowledge’ including practices and experiences that do not originate within the traditional disciplinary regimes of higher education. The value of these modes originates outside formal educational settings, as they are ‘essentially directed to extra school experiences: work and “life” ’ (ibid.: 53). He suggests that they are produced through ‘a functional analysis’ (ibid.) of ‘a set of general skills underlying a range of specific performances’ (ibid.: 55). However, he also says: generic modes and the performances to which they give rise are directly linked to instrumentalities of the market, to the construction of what are considered to be flexible performances. From this point of view their identity is constructed by procedures of projection. (ibid.) Thus Bernstein claims that, while from the perspective of the practical development of these fields of knowledge, there is a process of functional analysis of the general skills associated with a practice outside education, from another perspective, the identity of generic modes is ‘constructed by procedures of projection’. Joseph’s (1988: 65) account of Kleinian forms of projective identification can help us to make sense of Bernstein’s use of ‘projection’ here where she suggests that one form of projective identification consisted in ‘getting into an object to take over its capacities and make them its own’. If we recontextualise this idea, we can think of pedagogic identities as forced to project themselves into the values of the market. If all worth appears to be attributed to something other than pedagogic values, pedagogic identities, full of worthlessness, will, in phantasy at least, take over the capacities of the market and make them their own. This is, of course, only a phantasy and the production of pedagogic identity through this violently defensive mechanism is likely to produce a fragile and potentially unstable institutional identity. A similarly violent, psychical process is suggested in Bernstein’s account of the psychical construction of the identity of higher education institutions in an era where funding is tied to performance indicators, such as research output in ‘prestigious’ journals. He describes the way the identity of elite universities is bound up in their ability to attract appropriately productive members of the academic staff: Elite universities can maintain their position by buying in research leaders, and as a consequence will have less need to change their dis-

‘Psychic defences’ and knowledge   155 course or its organization to maintain their power and position . . . The identities formed in elite institutions are likely to be formed by introjection of knowledge. That is the identity finds its core in its place in an organization of knowledge and practice. (2000: 70) The suggestion is that elite universities introject aspects of knowledge found in other objects (research leaders) and incorporate these into their identities. Reading this example alongside Julia Segal’s (1992) account of introjection can help us to develop a more elaborated picture of the psychical relations that may constitute the institutional identities that Bernstein is describing. She suggests: Phantasies in which parts of others are taken into the self (introjection) are also extremely important. Where this takes place under the influence of the paranoid schizoid position the parts taken in will be split and idealized: larger than life and wonderful or excessively persecuting and dangerous. The boundary between self and other is in some way denied, and the self may be felt to be attached to or identical with a very powerful idealized other who can do no wrong. This idealization covers a conviction that this other is really frightening and aggressive, diminishing the self, humiliating and destructive. (ibid.: 35) Both aspects of this account, the idealisation of the object and denial of the boundary between self and other, might be applicable to the relation between academic institutions and certain, celebrated members of academic staff. The further suggestion that this relation ‘covers a conviction that this other is really frightening and aggressive’ and that the idealised other in some way diminishes the self is also insightful as an account of the institutional insecurities that exist within higher education.

Conclusions: the productivity of Bernstein’s use of Kleinian vocabularies Bernstein does not elaborate the conceptual implications of his introduction of the language of psychic defences in his account of educational practices. Apart from a joking reference to ‘a new pathological position at work in education’ which he terms ‘the pedagogic schizoid position’, there are no traces of Klein’s individualised, developmental narrative in his models of contemporary forms of knowledge. The productivity of his use of Klein’s terms lies in the potential they have to articulate the fragile relations between social identities and the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ objects in relation to which these identities are constituted. They offer a language through which we might reconceptualise this relation within empirical analysis.

156   C. Lapping Bernstein’s brazen introduction of unelaborated instances of Kleinian psychoanalytic vocabulary into his conceptual apparatus invites us to play, to move beyond the models that he has constructed. A more Lacanian approach, I have suggested, might help to rearticulate discursive aspects of knowledge practices, emphasising the instantiation of knowledge and subjectivity within symbolic systems of power that are not so clearly captured, perhaps, in the Kleinian language with its psychologising metaphors of internal world and individual ego. By tracing the extraction and recontextualisation of signifiers from one context to another, in a development of Bernstein’s models, we might begin to map shifts in the political and symbolic regulation of academic and professional contexts and their interdependencies in the production of regulatory codes.

References Armstrong, D. (2005) Organisation in the Mind: Psychoanalysis, group relations and organizational consultancy, London, New York: Karnac. Bernstein, B. (2000) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, research, critique (rev. edn), New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Jacques, E. (1951/1990) Working through industrial conflict: The service department at the Glacier Metal Company, in E. Trist and H. Murray (eds) The Social Engagement of Social Science, London: Free Association Books. Joseph, B. (1988) Projective identification: Clinical aspects, in J. Sandler (ed.) Projection, Identification, Projective Identification, London: Karnac Books. Klein, M. (1940/1986) Mourning and manic-­depressive states, in J. Mitchell (ed.) The Selected Melanie Klein, London: Penguin. Klein, M. (1946/1986) Notes on some schizoid mechanisms, in J. Mitchell (ed.) The Selected Melanie Klein, London: Penguin. Klein, M. (1951) The origins of the transference, in J. Mitchell (ed.) The Selected Melanie Klein, Penguin Books, 1986, 201–210. Lacan, J. (2007) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The other side of psychoanalysis, New York, London: W. W. Norton and Co. Lyth, M. I. (1959/1988) The functioning of social systems as a defense against anxiety, in Containing Anxiety in Institutions, London: Free Association Books. Mitchell, J. (1991) Introduction, in The Selected Melanie Klein, London: Penguin. Sandler, J. (1988) The concept of projective identification, in J. Sandler (ed.) Projection, Identification, Projective Identification, London: Karnac Books. Segal, J. (1992) Melanie Klein, London: Pelican.

10 Positioning the regulative order Jeanne Gamble and Ursula Hoadley

Introduction This chapter derives its impetus from the interface between two research traditions within the sociology of education. Since the 1960s school effectiveness studies have shown social-­class background constraints on educational achievement (e.g. Coleman et al., 1966; Rothstein, 2004). However, classroom studies conducted within a Bernsteinian frame are starting to demonstrate how schools can make a difference through modes of pedagogic practice that interrupt the reproduction of educational inequality and lead to the success of all students (e.g. Morais, 2002; Rose, 2004). Muller and Gamble (in press) summarise such pedagogies as mostly characterised by strong framing over external selection and evaluation criteria and weak framing over pacing and teacher–pupil relations. Our own data (Gamble, 2004; Hoadley, 2005) supports these findings, especially strong framing over evaluative criteria, but does not allow unequivocal endorsement of claims that only weak framing over teacher–pupil relations facilitates entry of working-­class students into the verticality1 of school knowledge. Here, predominantly theoretically, we interrogate the potential, inductive capacity of positional modes of control, acknowledging shifts in the way Bernstein conceptualised regulative order (Singh, 2002; Davis, 2005a, b; Muller, 2006) and a reading of some of his earlier work which connects these shifts to corresponding changes in homes, schools, curricula and classrooms. This has led us to understand why it is that personal and positional control relations that emanate from his early sociolinguistic thesis have become the standard interpretation of hierarchy in the classroom, even though there are other versions of regulative order at the level of school and curriculum, as delineated in the pedagogic device. What we are suggesting here is consideration of the potential of positional modalities in the induction of working-­class learners into the verticality of school knowledge. It is particularly the Durkheimian foundations of the expressive order of schools, linked to Mary Douglas’s (1970) interpretation of personal and positional modes of control, that lead us to view positional modes of control (i.e. strong framing over teacher–pupil relations),

158   J. Gamble and U. Hoadley recognised by working-­class students from their home backgrounds, as a necessary condition for initial induction into verticality. We start this interpretation with a discussion of different conceptions of the regulative order in Bernstein’s work from the 1960s to 2000.

Conceptions of regulative discourse The expressive order of the school: the abstracting function of ritual The first conception of regulative discourse is read off the first three papers of Class, Codes and Control, vol. 3 (1975), which contain Bernstein’s early analytical introduction of the instructional and the regulative orders at school level. Here instructional and regulative orders are referred to as instrumental and expressive and Bernstein draws on the language of Parsons (whose schema is located within a Durkheimian analysis) in defining them. The expressive order refers to activities and behaviours in school to do with ‘conduct, character and manner’. Its function is ‘to bind the school together as a distinct moral collectivity’ (ibid.: 38–39), explicitly conceptualising moral order as Durkheimian, drawing particularly on Moral Education (2002), Education and Sociology (1956) and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1915). We wish to draw attention to four features of Bernstein’s early theorising of regulative order: the general idea of the moral order of the school; the concepts of ritual and role; the notion of the induction into abstraction; and reflection on the mediating role of teachers. In these early papers Bernstein is concerned with changes in the moral order of society and the school and how systems of meaning, value and instrumentality are transmitted. He is also concerned with relations between schools and families and the ways in which schools act on the identities of pupils. For Durkheim (2002) the primary purpose of education is internalising moral order without separation between it and the instructional order; expressive or moral order is carried in instructional order. What is central to the purpose of education is the inscription of basic categories of thought in persons, principles of social order becoming translated, through education, into ‘the structuring principles of consciousness’ (Moore, 2004: 126). What this statement condenses is Durkheim’s concern with the relation between the self and the social and, in relation to education, how the ‘outer’ (social) becomes the ‘inner’ (self ). Movement is from the individual to the collective, egotism to altruism (Muller, 2006) and, in Bernstein’s (1975) analysis of the orders of meaning in the school, from individuals within families to potentially more socially and cognitively beneficial associations outside. Following this line, Bernstein considers relations between families and schools in understanding and accepting instrumental and expressive orders of meaning. His concern is with the role of the school in giving students

Positioning the regulative order   159 access to other ‘styles of life and modes of social relationships’ (1975: 37) and his enduring interest is in the potential of the school as an interrupter of social reproduction: Irrespective of the family, the school is an independent force in the pupil’s definition of his role. What the school does, its rituals, its ceremonies, its authority relations, its stratification, its procedures for learning, its incentives, rewards and punishments, its very image of conduct, character and manner, can modify or change the pupil’s role as this has been shaped initially by the family. (ibid.: 48–49) Notions of role and ritual are central to Bernstein’s discussion of the regulative order at this point. The school potentially functions to effect the ‘emancipation of the pupil towards his [sic] acceptance of a wider referent group’ (ibid.: 56) than that of individual ego, or of the family. This expressive order is seen in assemblies and various ceremonies, uniforms, signs, totems, scrolls and other symbolic features. Through consensual rituals children are transformed into pupils, the purpose being to orient to ‘special classes of behaviour and . . . specific consciousness of age, sex, school and kinship status’ (ibid.).2 Finally, in the ‘Ritual in Education’ (1975) paper, Bernstein introduces a further dimension to the moral order and to what will later become regulative discourse, the notion of submission to the impersonal. What is suggested here is that consensual rituals under the expressive order facilitate detachment from family and local community and attachment to school (from child to pupil) towards verticality. Bernstein argues that the function of consensual rituals is to ‘facilitate the transmission and internalization of the expressive order of the school, create consensus, revivify the social order within the individual, deepen respect for and impersonalise authority relations’ (ibid.: 65). The latter impersonalising of authority relationships is an appeal to a discipline, that which lies outside of the self. The notion of the impersonal rule is attributable directly to Durkheim (2002), the social relation is potentially homologous with a relation to vertical knowledge. Though not directly addressed by Bernstein, the teacher in Moral Education (2002) is crucial in relation to this notion of the impersonal as interpreter of the moral ideas of the time. Impersonal rule is invested in them until pupils come to understand it obliges them both, grasping a more general and abstract conception of law and respecting it as such, rather than only fulfilling duties and obligations through fear of sanctions. Pupils first believe in the rules because they believe in their teachers but gradually it is impersonal rules themselves that must be deemed worthy of respect. In Durkheimian terms how is regulative order understood? Bernstein recruits Parsons to effect a separation between instructional and regulative orders, located within a Durkheimian notion of moral order. The moral

160   J. Gamble and U. Hoadley order of the school varies in terms of forms of solidarity that emerge from changes in the division of labour. The role system is crucial in this regard in providing a particular social location to students and an identity in relation to others. Ritual further instils the conduct, character and manner of the school in the child, effecting a separation between home and school and creating the possibility of a social world away from egoistic pursuits. In Durkheim’s terms, ritual and role contain the possibility for instilling a sense of the sacred, a sense of impersonal rule or abstraction. In later work Bernstein makes the concept of the division of labour less visible but his methodology is relatively consistent, taking and showing its implications for changes in the moral order of the school. However, he overlays this analysis with class, showing how it relates to the division of labour through structuring its moral basis: Class acts fundamentally on the division of labour by structuring its moral basis; that is by creating the underlying relationships of production, distribution and consumption. Class relationships regulate the transmission, participation in and the possibility of changing the dominant cultural categories. (ibid.: 23) How these develop different orientations to meaning and different forms of the specialisation of consciousness become later concerns. Bernstein’s early work presents both sides of the coin in the functioning of the moral order in the school. While the class analysis tends towards a reproduction thesis, recruitment of Durkheim’s concept of the moral order introduces potential for interruption of this process. Considerations of deficit or arguments around social alienation aside, it is possible to recognise the possibilities offered by school in effecting desirable separation from home through the practice of school discipline – a spirit of impersonal discipline, as opposed to that acquired in the family. The aim of such discipline is to get students to ‘sense the moral authority in the rule, which renders it worthy of respect’ (Durkheim, 2002: 154); the regulative order of the school, especially in ritual and modes of authority, contains an abstracting function.3 The regulative relation between family structure and communication structure The second conception of regulative order is derived from the first volume of Class, Codes and Control (1971: 144), which connects social relationships and forms of speech, usually referred to as the sociolinguistic thesis, and predicts that different forms of social relation generate very different speech systems or linguistic codes which, in their turn, ‘create, for their speakers, different orders of relevance and relation’. The linguistic aspect of the thesis held that

Positioning the regulative order   161 forms of communication may be distinguished in terms of what is rendered implicit and explicit, representing ‘the extent to which the principles underlying the social structuring of relevant meaning were made public and elaborated through the use of language in the process of socialisation’ (Bernstein, 1973b: 70). The implicit/explicit distinction underwent various transformations, its first formulation in the late 1950s as implicit ‘public language’ and explicit ‘formal language’ eventually becoming restricted and elaborated codes. The semantic base of restricted codes referred to particularistic, local meanings in which principles and procedures are relatively implicit, while that of elaborated codes referred to universalistic, less local meanings in which principles and procedures are made linguistically explicit. It was suggested that restricted codes draw on metaphor through condensed symbols while elaborated codes draw on rationality through articulated symbols (see Bernstein, 1971: 175–176, 1990: 94–96). The early, theoretical grounding for the social relations that generate these different orders of meaning is found in an unpublished paper, which Bernstein wrote in 1962 (as discussed in Bernstein, 1971: 167–168, 247), in relation to the family role systems of controller (parent) and controlled (child). When parents emphasised general child attributes, such as age, sex or age relation/seniority control was termed positional, whereas personal control placed the focus on particular or specific child attributes. Moreover, reduced or extended role discretion determined the linguistic options or alternatives available (as discussed in Bernstein, 1971: 16, 168). Role options were causally connected to linguistic options so that communications tended to focus either on positional or personal attributes of family members, with their realisation regulated by elaborated or restricted codes. The two aspects of the thesis were somewhat at odds with each other sociologically, having their roots in roles directed to interactional contexts or situations, while linguistically defining codes independently of context or situation (see Bernstein, 1973b: 72, 1996: 151–152). So what was the relation between code and context? Several major research enquiries were launched by the Sociological Research Unit (SRU) from the mid- to late 1960s examining code realisations in different contexts.4 Bernstein (1973a, b) describes how he deliberately decided not to use Chomsky’s transformation grammar, dominant at the time, which divorced linguistics from semantics. It was not appropriate to an enquiry about relationships between the social structuring of relevant meanings and the form of their linguistic expression. Halliday’s linguistic theory did satisfy the requirements of the sociological aspects of the thesis, putting forward a set of interrelated linguistic contexts in which children were socialised into language. Bernstein selected four of them, regulative, instructional, imaginative and interpersonal (1990: 97) and related them to Hasan’s (1968) theory of cohesion: whether speech stands apart from its context so that meanings are made explicit (anaphoric or cataphoric reference), or is part of the context, such

162   J. Gamble and U. Hoadley that it is necessary for speakers to refer to the context of speech or their ­situation to establish understanding (exophoric reference). Such speech contains implicit meanings, requiring information from sources other than the verbal items themselves to be understandable (see Cook-­Gumperz, 1973: 136–149). Elaborated and restricted codes could now be conceptualised as referring to context-­independent or context-­dependent meaning in minimally two contexts: regulative, as authority relationships where children are made aware of the rules of moral order and their various backings; and instructional, where they learn about the objective nature of objects and persons and acquire skills of various kinds (Bernstein, 1971: 181). These concepts allowed control relations to be operationalised in the form of semantic networks where the emphases and range of choices taken up showed whether the context had evoked a restricted or elaborated code variant (Bernstein, 1973a, b). Once the relation between code and context had been theorised in a way that brought the sociological and linguistic features of the thesis together, the socio-­cultural notion of role linked to family type was subsumed into a more abstract model of differing control relations between mothers and children which distinguished the: imperative, where no reasons are given to children and no options accorded except explicit challenge of authority; positional, where the reasons given refer children’s behaviour to a rule governing a particular status or social category (e.g. sex, age, seniority); and personal, where reasons refer to the consequences (parent-­oriented, child-­oriented or other-­oriented) of children’s behaviour for self and others (see Bernstein, 1996: 95–97; Bernstein and Brandis, 1970: 94–96; Cook-­Gumperz, 1973: 50–52). The regulative context now became a linguistic context of differential specialisation of communication (open or closed discourse) and its expected consequences. The regulative order of the classroom This model, generated in the context of mother–child communication in the home, entered the classroom via Pedro’s (1981) research which analysed both instructional and regulative orders as distinct contexts in terms of their linguistic features. In his original formulation of classification and framing Bernstein (1971) focused on transmission/acquisition of a competence (i.e. a curriculum subject), with framing defined in terms of locus of control over selection, sequencing, pacing and evaluative criteria of the discourse to be acquired. Moreover, in earlier work on the school, as we have shown, there had been separation between expressive (transmission of conduct, character and manner) and instrumental (transmission of skills) orders without the ideological positioning inherent in the moral regulation of pedagogic practice being made explicit. As he later noted, this had the consequence that ‘hierarchical relations and the concept of order were confounded with the more spe-

Positioning the regulative order   163 cific rules for the transmission of particular subject competences’ (Bernstein, 1996: 104). This changed when Pedro applied Cook-­Gumperz’s model of imperative, positional and personal modes of control in the home to those between teachers and students. Imperative control was conceptualised as non-­verbal (physical punishment) and verbal (explicit or implicit commands or threats), asserting power relations which made hierarchical relations explicit. Positional control was taken to exist where inter-­personal and intra-­personal features of control relations were not the explicit focus, taking two forms: announced rules where no more is given than the statement of the rule; and grounded rules where some explanation is given: referring to some previous agreement about the rule or to a particular social status or category (e.g. sex, age, seniority). Personal control was deemed to focus explicitly on transmitters and acquirers as individuals, rather than explicitly upon the formal statuses of relationships. Importantly, Pedro (1981: 223) viewed positional control as invisibly present in personal control, such that ‘the visible power relations of the hierarchy are temporarily disguised or masked’ to give acquirers a wider range of options. She also noted that the appeal system in personal control depends upon previous socialisation, predisposing middle-­ class children to this form of control: (1) it demands that a space is accorded to the acquirer; (2) it demands that the child is able to create and maintain the role relations of interactional practice; (3) it requires that the child can both produce and receive the discourse necessary for the mode and (4) it presupposes that the acquirer can cope with a context in which the boundaries are not explicit but may be blurred and ambiguous. (ibid.: 225–226) Such weak framing over hierarchical rules applies to contexts where learners can deal with ambiguity and where meanings are negotiated rather than given. Pedro operationalised instructional discourse at classroom level in terms of strong or weak framing relations over selection, sequence, pace and evaluative criteria. Regulative discourse referred to modes of personal and positional control between transmitter and acquirer.5 Strong framing over hierarchical rules was deemed to display modes of positional control, weak ones personal. Family communication structures in the early years of socialisation became the template for modelling classroom regulative contexts described in terms of the extent of verbal elaboration between teachers and students. While we return to the conditions associated with this later, we note at this point that it was Pedro’s (1981) simultaneous empirical analysis of classroom pedagogy, in terms of specific instructional discourse (SID) and regulative discourse (RD) in her study of Mathematics and Portuguese, that led

164   J. Gamble and U. Hoadley Bernstein (1990: 64–183, 1996: 105, 2000: 11–13) to revise the concept of framing to refer to control over two embedded discourses, instructional, transmitting specific skills and regulative, transmitting the rules of social order, formulated as: ID instructional discourse RD regulative discourse Regulative discourse was dominant, making explicit the ideological positioning inherent in the moral regulation of pedagogic practice and making it possible, within one conceptual language, to describe: the moral order regulating interaction in the classroom, or the moral order of the agency, or the relation between the moral order and the instructional order or between the moral order of the agency and the external constraining moral order . . . Comparison could be made for both discourses between the level of the school and the level of the classroom and the level of pupils. (Bernstein, 1996: 104) In principle, framing relations over instructional and regulative discourse could differ. Here Bernstein clearly returned to earlier formulations of the expressive order of the school and attempted to link school and classroom more securely. However, the retrospective coherence that he suggests is not borne out by our reading of the theory. Regulative order in the pedagogic device Regulative discourse was most comprehensively conceptualised in the notion of the pedagogic device that enables transformation of knowledge into pedagogic communication. For Bernstein it consisted of a hierarchical relation between three sets of rules, distributive, recontextualising and evaluative, which, together, describe the process of transformation of knowledge from the field of its production to its recontextualisation in curriculum and reproduction in classrooms. Readers are often puzzled by the positioning of pedagogic discourse in the pedagogic device. The notion of instructional embedded in regulative discourse, originating in classroom research, is transposed to the level of curriculum knowledge, recontextualising rules, while reproductive pedagogic practice resides at the level of evaluative rules. What was previously pedagogic discourse as a framing relation (see Bernstein, 1990: 36–37) is now transformed into something constructed by a recontextualising principle which selectively appropriates, relocates, refocuses and relates other discourses to constitute its own order . . . The recontextualising functions then become the means

Positioning the regulative order   165 whereby a specific discourse is created. Formally we move from a recontextualising principle to a recontextualising field with agents with practising ideologies. (Bernstein, 2000: 33) An Althusserian (1971) influence is definitely discernible in this positioning of pedagogic discourse where what is at stake is the autonomy of education in the struggle between the official recontextualising field (ORF ), created and dominated by the state and its selected agents, and the pedagogic recontextualising field (PRF ) which consists, inter alia, of departments of education, pedagogues in school and specialised journals. The effect of the dominant ideological order on curriculum and classroom practice is unambiguous: Often people in schools and in classrooms make a distinction between what they call transmission of skills and the transmission of values. These are always kept apart as if it were a conspiracy to disguise the fact that there is only one discourse. In my opinion there is only one discourse, not two, because the secret voice of this device is to disguise the fact that there is only one. (Bernstein, 2000: 32) The social/ideological nature of the moral order regulates what counts as character, conduct and manner (e.g. what counts as responsible citizenship) and classroom practice. Taking physics, Bernstein suggests how its original subject discourse passes through ‘ideological screens’ via pedagogic discourse to assume a new form as school physics. In relation to the what of instruction, recontextualising involves selective appropriation, relocation, refocusing and relating of a discourse as it moves from its site of production to become a school subject; ‘the rules of order of physics in the school (selection, relation, sequence and pace) are a function of the regulative discourse’ (ibid.: 34). Likewise, the how of instructional discourse is effected by the pedagogical ideology that inheres in a particular theory of instruction (e.g. behaviourism or constructivism) through the kinds of decisions that are made about selection, sequence, pace and relation of the knowledge to be pedagogised. Figure 10.1 summarises regulative discourse within the pedagogic device, as generally constituting social order and specifically producing both the what and the how of instructional discourse. Pedagogic discourse operates at different levels in both the device and pedagogic practice (or communication). The device creates the condition for and transforms knowledge into pedagogic communication. In the taut and highly compressed redefinition of regulative discourse in the device, which explicitly contains the instructional order, Bernstein possibly reverts to the Durkheimian position that moral is transmitted through instructional order, in other words, ideology is written into it. In the development of the socio-

166   J. Gamble and U. Hoadley

Regulative discourse

produces

social regulation

instructional regulation

the moral order of society

the what of instructional discourse

the how of instructional discourse

the school

structure of curriculum subject in terms of its selection, relation, sequence, pace

selection, sequence, pace in pedagogy as determined by the theory of instruction

Figure 10.1  Regulative discourse in the pedagogic device.

linguistic thesis and subsequent empirical work at classroom level this complex notion of the relation between instructional and regulative orders appears to have been lost. When pedagogic discourse becomes part of recontextualising rules, a structural similarity is created between pedagogic discourse at the level of recontextualising (the constitution of the curriculum) and pedagogic discourse at the level of reproduction (the classroom). The relation between them, like that between recontextualising rules and evaluative rules, is hierarchical. Control over the device means control over the educational ideology at play. The regulative order in the work of Basil Bernstein: a summary Thus far we have discussed the notion of regulative order in Bernstein’s work in terms of how shifts in the definition of the concept are coupled with shifts in the empirical site of the work that generated the theory. At the level of the school the Durkheimian regulative order reflects the broader moral order of society in relation to changes in the division of labour and forms of social solidarity. At the level of curriculum (i.e. what counts as educational knowledge) regulative discourse refers to ideological contestation over the what and the how of curriculum and pedagogy. Orientations to meaning into

Positioning the regulative order   167 which children are socialised through positional or personal social relations of control in the family are extended into the classroom in terms of hierarchical rules that distinguish between positional control involving implicit linguistic realisation of principles and procedures and closed communication relations and personal control characterised by explicit linguistic realisation of principles and procedures and open communication relations. We have reviewed how the acquisition of elaborated codes, as institutionalised in the school, is premised on forms of personal control which continue the home codes of middle-­class pupils. Positional control and its interpretation have consistently been backgrounded in terms of generative potential. Some empirical signals challenge this subordination and we turn to these in the next section.

Challenges to a restricted notion of regulative order The relation between positional and imperative control Pedro’s (1981: 250) overall findings depicted regulative control in a lower-­ working-class school as 79 per cent imperative, 8 per cent positional and 13 per cent personal, while a middle-­class school showed a pattern of 40 per cent, 15 per cent and 45 per cent, respectively. In both, positional control strategies were least frequent, with the biggest contrast lying between the predominantly imperative mode of the working-­class and personal mode of the middle-­class school. This led Pedro (ibid.: 291) to conclude that ‘the pedagogical codes realized in classroom discourse lead to a specialization of discourse according to the social class composition of the school class . . . and illuminate how the social classes are reproduced by the educational process’, in a system where on the one hand the outer form of the classroom discourse is given by the frames created by the state (curriculum, timetable, material, class size, etc.) and on the other hand the inner form of classroom discourse will be given by the society through the social positioning of the pupils in the society which constitutes the school class. (ibid.: 287) Positional control itself features only marginally in Pedro’s findings; she foregrounds the distinction between personal and imperative modes of control and backgrounds the role of teachers whose ‘space seems to be rather limited’ (ibid.: 252). In contrast, a number of empirical studies pertaining to different levels of the education system and sites have suggested that, in certain pedagogies, positional modes are both prevalent and functional. This was found to be the case in Hoadley’s (2005) sample of schools at the lower end of primary schooling. Ensor (1999, 2001) interrogated the notion that weakly framed

168   J. Gamble and U. Hoadley pedagogic strategies are key to academic success at school for prospective teachers from working-­class backgrounds who struggled to ‘crack the code’ of their course, confessing to being perplexed by the strong, individualising message of the therapeutic practices that left them not knowing what was expected of them. Expert practitioners gave them glimpses of a form of teaching practice to which they had never previously been exposed and, while strongly attracted to aspects of it, they acknowledged that they had not acquired the principles to generate it themselves. In Gamble’s (2004, 2006) study of tacit craft transmission both teacher (cabinet-­making ‘master’) and students were working class. Strong positional control and explicit transmission of universal principles of ‘wrong’ and ‘right’ in relation to how apprentices should conduct themselves made available a lexical conduit for the relay of an orientation to meaning that enabled them to deal with some measure of abstractedness. None of these studies offer conclusive evidence of the capacity of positional codes to induct working-­class students into vertical school knowledge; yet, if nothing else, they certainly signal that there is a need for empirical work that looks specifically at the pedagogic potential of positional codes, rather than conflating them with imperative codes to become the opposite of personal codes. The relation between hierarchical rules and evaluative criteria Davis (2005b: 7) argues that Bernstein’s inclusion of a third category of rule in the pedagogic device, namely the evaluative rule which focuses on the criteria for the production of legitimate utterances in pedagogic contexts, reflects a dawning realisation of the necessity to write into the theory a term which captures the fact that although pedagogic subjects may well be pre-­disposed to specific class-­based forms of cognitive orientation or coding orientations, all have to contend with criteria that are specific to the discourses to be acquired. In empirical terms, it is perhaps in the research of Ana Morais and her colleagues in Lisbon where a finding of reciprocal relation between strong framing over evaluative criteria and weak framing over the rules of hierarchy has emerged most consistently. Morais (2002) refers to the research of Morais and Miranda (1996) in putting forward a model of the interrelations of the framing values of ID and RD in assessment contexts. With reference to a four-­point scale (from F– – to F++), relating to an indicator for control relations over evaluation criteria (ID), she asserts that: A teacher who behaves according to the first point [F– –] does not make the criteria of evaluation explicit and, as such, does not give to the

Positioning the regulative order   169 student the possibility of learning the legitimate text and of how to give a correct answer in the future. The message is therefore left implicit. The mode of control, at the level of regulative discourse, is imperative/ positional; i.e. framing is strong at the level of RD (hierarchical rules). In contrast, a teacher behaving in terms of the last [F++], explicates the text considered to be legitimate and, as such, gives to the student the possibility of self-­evaluation and of giving a correct answer in the future. The message is explicit. In this case the teacher uses a personal control; i.e. framing is weak at the level of RD (hierarchical rules). The student gets the means to discuss the mark accorded. (Morais, 2002: 563) Few would argue that it is not the case that students are more likely to access elaborated codes when they are given opportunities to interrogate their teachers’ knowledge and verbally elaborate their learning. But can we unequivocally state that it is only weak framing over hierarchical rules that give such access? If this is so then hierarchical rules lose their dominant status in the pedagogic context and become irrevocably yoked to evaluative criteria, with only personal modes of control (masked or invisible control relations) deemed beneficial to student learning. In secondary school curricula based on clearly defined, disciplinary-­ derived subjects there is a strong case to be made for visible pedagogy with ‘explicit hierarchy, explicit sequencing rules, explicit and specific criteria’ (Bernstein, 1975: 119), where control relations position teacher as teacher and student as student in clearly defined hierarchical, non-­constructivist roles. Given that Bernstein viewed hierarchical relations as ‘a prerequisite of any enduring pedagogic relation’ (1990: 66), personal modes of control may not be the only route in, not even at primary school level. Recapturing the positional control relation Bernstein identified individualised old middle-­class and personalised new middle-­class modes of socialisation which give rise to very different pedagogies, visible and invisible, in which different social relations underpin knowledge transmission and acquisition. As both pedagogic forms have their origins within fractions of the middle class (Bernstein, 1975), it follows that an unreflecting institutionalisation of either form is unlikely to be to the advantage of working-­class students. While for those of new middle-­class origin a seamless transition from home to school is created, it is less clear what is needed for working-­class students. Even though some empirical studies suggest that a ‘mixed pedagogy’ is required, Lubienski’s (2004) study showed their inability to grasp and consequent confusion with the operation of personal modalities. Hoadley and Ensor (2009) argue that the gap between home and school is at its widest for working-­class children in new middle-­class, progressive primary schools. If we accept that home social

170   J. Gamble and U. Hoadley r­ elations support particular orientations to meaning we need to seek ways of narrowing gaps between working-­class homes and schools so that schools are more closely aligned to and build on home relations. We need greater sensitivity to the social relations of both and we conclude by showing how these might be aligned in ways that allow greater working-­class access to verticality.

From ritual to reason Durkheim and early role system theorising point to important aspects of personal and positional forms referred to in Bernstein’s early work that have subsequently been subordinated in later theoretical development. Returning to his early work on schools, roles and rituals, a number of points arise in considering the socialisation of working-­class students into the verticality of school knowledge. Understanding the essential function of redundancy through ritual in the move from indexical to symbolic meaning is crucial: Indeed, ritual is still a central component of ‘symbolic’ education in modern societies, although we are seldom aware of its modern role because of the subtle way it is woven into the fabric of society. The problem for symbolic discovery is to shift attention from the concrete to the abstract; from separate indexical links between signs and objects to an organised set of relations between signs. In order to bring the logic of [sign–sign] relations to the fore a high degree of redundancy is important. (Deacon, 1997: 402–403; as cited in Bellah, 2005: 186) The notion of redundancy also relates to pedagogic practice. Hoadley (2005) shows that positional social relations and the demand for repetitive and highly visible learning of rules and patterns in early primary school classrooms lay the ground for later access to a broader disciplinary field, i.e. the move from the indexical to the symbolic. Gamble (2004: 197) similarly shows how repetition is valued in craft transmission, even though the master-­trainers ‘may not be able to put forward a pedagogically referenced explanation of its importance’. Ritual is crucial in another way, potentially establishing clear role patterns and external, communally constituted authority, the ‘impersonal rule’ to which we referred earlier. As a Durkheimian anthropologist, Mary Douglas is particularly insistent about the important role of ritual and illuminates this issue in relation to Bernstein’s positional and personal family types and restricted and elaborated codes. Like Bernstein, Douglas (1970: 31) views elaborated code as a product of the division of labour, arguing that most of the professions that increasingly dominate the contemporary occupational world require people well versed in personal control and elaborated speech modes:

Positioning the regulative order   171 by using elaborated speech to review and revise existing categories of thought [and thus] practice a professional detachment towards any given pattern of experience . . . With such validation, they are likely to raise their children in the habit of intellectual challenge and not to impose a positional control pattern. In contrast, children’s curiosity in working-­class families is harnessed to the task of sustaining their social environment. In aristocratic families role structures are clearly ascribed while, in certain middle-­class professional families in fields, such as law, the military and engineering, concerns are primarily with abstract relations between material objects. Across these settings ‘the positional family develops on the assumption that roles should be defined clearly and the elaboration of speech, in so far as it is used to sustain role patterns, reduces ambiguity’ (ibid.: 30–31). While Bernstein in the development of code theory focused almost entirely on elaborated code, leaving restricted codes and positional control systems behind (Davies, 1995: 48), Douglas insists that we all need both forms of control and both codes. ‘Elaborated code challenges its users to turn around on themselves and to inspect their values, to reject some of them, and to resolve to cherish positional forms of control and communication wherever these are available’ (1970: 157). Much of our argument so far has foreshadowed Douglas’s position that brings clear role patterns and communally exerted authority, through ritual, back into focus. Our contention is that, as educational theorists and researchers, we would do well to return our attention to the generative potential of strong framing over hierarchical rules as a possible entry point for working-­ class learners into the elaborated code of the school. As Halliday (1995: 140) reminds us, although Bernstein labelled codes ‘in terms of two poles, restricted and elaborated, he was well aware that a number of different dimensions of meaning were involved and that the overall pattern was one of gradience, not discrete categories’. Cook-­Gumperz (1973: 73) similarly refers to ‘a kline of control from the most imperative to the most person-­ orientated’. Conceiving of the relation between codes and control as a continuum with a number of developmental gradations may assist us in de-­linking positional from imperative modes of control. Such a conceptualisation opens up the notion of positional control as a crucial transitional mode for working-­class students in their acquisition of elaborated codes. The theorisation of the regulative order in the pedagogic device also reminds us that the struggle to assert appropriate social relations between teachers and taught is not just a struggle over dimensions of classroom practice but over the device itself: what theory of instruction drives the recontextualising of knowledge for pedagogic transmission and who has control over the ideological constitution of the subject? Finally, what Durkheim indicated in his notion of the expressive order and what Pedro dodged is the crucial role of teachers in the reinsertion of

172   J. Gamble and U. Hoadley positional social relations. It is only teachers who command legitimate authority based on expertise who can feasibly lead students to respect impersonal rules and abstraction. A social system based on ascribed roles where ritual functions cohesively may also hold the potential for assisting teachers to recognise and realise this position. We are not arguing against the crucial importance of verbal elaboration by both teacher and taught and the acquisition of elaborated codes in gaining entry into verticality. What we are suggesting is that reducing ambiguity (cf. Lubienski, 2004) for working-­class students at initial entry into elaborated code may be crucial to their success in school. We seek to open up a point in the theory that seeks empirical investigation: how to bridge positional modes of control and elaborated code. Return to a Durkheimian sense of moral order and identity, aspects of an ascribed role system and elements of ritual may be beginning points. They are the forms of relation potentially recognised by working-­class students who may experience greater opportunities for access in an ascribed role system and who may ultimately grasp abstraction through a regulative discourse which does not make invisible the authority relations they eventually need to recognise, negotiate, challenge and ultimately master.

Notes 1 Verticality refers to ‘the degree to which the development of a knowledge structure is characterised by the integration and subsumption of knowledge into more overarching and generalising propositions’ (Maton and Muller, 2007: 26), as well as to a corresponding cognitive ability ‘to manipulate knowledge objects in virtual space’, or ‘the ability to move between subordinate and superordinate levels of classificatory abstraction’ (Muller, 2002: 182). 2 On the other hand, ‘the separation of statuses – for example, in possessing a distinct school and family status – increases the degree of control the school can exert on both the pupil and the kin’ (Bernstein, 1975: 56). Our focus here is on consensual rituals rather than on differentiating ones. 3 Once more we note that Bernstein (1975) introduces differentiating rituals as well as consensual rituals so this is a partial reading of his early work. 4 For example, Robinson and Rackstraw (1972), Robinson (1973), Bernstein and Henderson (1973) and Henderson (1973) explored mother–child instructional contexts while Cook (1970), Cook-­Gumperz (1973) and Turner (1973) explored mother–child regulative contexts. 5 Imperative control was subsumed in positional control.

References Althusser, L. (1971) ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses: Notes towards an investigation’, in L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, London: New Left Books. Bellah, R. (2005) ‘Durkheim and ritual’, in J. C. Alexander and P. Smith (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bernstein, B. (1971) Class, Codes and Control Volume 1: Theoretical Studies Towards a Sociology of Language, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Positioning the regulative order   173 Bernstein, B. (1973a) Class, Codes and Control Volume 2: Applied Studies Towards a Sociology of Language, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bernstein, B. (1973b) ‘A brief account of the theory of codes’, in Social Relationships and Language: Some Aspects of the Work of Basil Bernstein, Reading: Open University Press. Bernstein, B. (1975) Class, Codes and Control Volume 3: Towards a Theory of Educational Transmissions (2nd edn), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bernstein, B. (1990) Class, Codes and Control Volume 4: The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse, London: Routledge. Bernstein, B. (1996) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique, London: Taylor & Francis. Bernstein, B. (2000) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique (rev. edn), Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Bernstein, B. and Brandis, W. (1970) ‘Social class differences in communication and control’, in W. Brandis and D. Henderson (eds) Social Class, Language and Communication, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bernstein, B. and Henderson, D. (1973) ‘Social class differences in the relevance of language to socialization’, in B. Bernstein (ed.) Class, Codes and Control Volume 2: Applied Studies Towards a Sociology of Language, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Coleman, J. S., Campbell, E. Q., Hobson, C. J., McPartland, J., Mood, A. M., Weinfeld, F. D. and York, R. (1966) Equality of Educational Opportunity (295–325), Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Cook, J. (1970) ‘An enquiry into patterns of communication and control between mothers and their children in different social classes’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of London. Cook-­Gumperz, J. (1973) Social Control and Socialization: A Study of Class Differences in the Language of Maternal Control, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Davies, B. (1995) ‘Bernstein, Durkheim and the British sociology of education’, in A.R. Sadovnik (ed.) Pedagogy and Knowledge: The Sociology of Basil Bernstein, Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Davis, Z. (2005a) ‘Pleasure and pedagogic discourse in school mathematics: A case study of a problem-­centred pedagogic modality’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cape Town. Davis, Z. (2005b) ‘On the notions of the instructional and regulative discourses in the work of Basil Bernstein’, Mimeo. School of Education, University of Cape Town. Deacon, T. (1997) The Symbolic Species: The Co-­evolution of Language and the Brain, New York: Norton. Douglas, M. (1970) Natural Symbols, London: Barrie and Rockliff; The Cresset Press. Durkheim, E. (1915) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology, trans. J. W. Swain, London: George Allen & Unwin. Durkheim, E. (1933) The Division of Labour in Society, New York: Macmillan. Durkheim, E. (1956) Education and Sociology, Toronto: The Free Press. Durkheim, E. (2002) Moral Education, trans. Everett K. Wilson and Herman Schnurer, New York: Dover Publications Inc. Ensor, M. P. (1999) ‘A study of the recontextualizing of pedagogic practices from a South African pre-­service mathematics teacher education course by seven secondary mathematics teachers’, Collected Original Resources in Education, 24: 3. Ensor, P. (2001) ‘From preservice mathematics teacher education to beginning

174   J. Gamble and U. Hoadley teaching: A study in recontextualising’, Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 32: 296–320. Gamble, J. (2004) ‘Tacit knowledge in craft pedagogy: A sociological analysis’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cape Town. Gamble, J. (2006) ‘Exploring the transmission of moral order as invisible semiotic mediator of tacit knowledge’, paper presented to the Fourth Basil Bernstein Colloquium, Rutgers University, New Jersey. Halliday, M. A. K. (1995) ‘Language and the theory of code’, in A. R. Sadovnik (ed.) Pedagogy and Knowledge: The Sociology of Basil Bernstein, Norwood NJ: Ablex. Hasan, R. (1968) ‘Grammatical cohesion in spoken and written English, part one’, Paper 7 of Programme in Linguistics and English Teaching, London: Longmans Green. Henderson, D. (1973) ‘Contextual specificity, discretion and cognitive socialisation: With special reference to language’, in B. Bernstein (ed.) Class, Codes and Control Volume 2: Applied Studies Towards a Sociology of Language, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hoadley, U. (2005) ‘Social class, pedagogy and the specialization of voice in four South African primary schools’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cape Town. Hoadley, U. and Ensor, P. (2009) ‘Teachers social class, professional dispositions and pedagogic practice’, Teachers and Teacher Education, 25: 876–886. Lubienski, S. T. (2004) ‘Decoding mathematics instruction: A critical examination of an invisible pedagogy’, in J. Muller, A. Morais and B. Davies (eds) Reading Bernstein, Researching Bernstein (pp. 108–122), London: RoutledgeFalmer. Maton, K. and Muller, J. (2007) ‘A sociology for the transmission of knowledges’, in F. Christie and J. R. Martin (eds) Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy: Functional Linguistic and Sociological Perspectives, Sydney: Continuum. Moore, R. (2004) Education and Society: Issues and Explanations in the Sociology of Education, Cambridge: Polity Press. Morais, A. (2002) ‘Basil Bernstein at the micro level of the classroom’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 23, 4: 559–569. Morais, A. M. and Miranda, C. (1996) ‘Understanding teachers’ evaluation criteria: A condition for success in science classes’, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 33, 6: 601–624. Muller, J. (2002) ‘Splitting hairs: A sociological approach to educational change’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cape Town. Muller, J. (2006) ‘The odd couple: The regulative and the instructional re-­visited’, paper presented to the Fourth Basil Bernstein Colloquium, Rutgers University, New Jersey. Muller, J. and Gamble, J. (in press) ‘Curriculum and structuralist sociology: The theory of codes and knowledge structures’, in B. McGraw, E. Baker and P. Peterson (eds) International Encyclopaedia of Education. Third edition. Pedro, E. R. (1981) Social Stratification and Classroom Discourse: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Classroom Practice, Stockholm: Stockholm Institute of Education, Department of Educational Research. Robinson, W. P. (1973) ‘Where do children’s answers come from?’, in B. Bernstein (ed.) Class, Codes and Control Volume 2: Applied Studies Towards a Sociology of Language, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Robinson, W. P. and Rackstraw, S. J. (1972) A Question of Answers, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Positioning the regulative order   175 Rose, D. (2004) ‘Sequencing and pacing of the hidden curriculum: How indigenous children are left out of the chain’, in J. Muller, B. Davies and A. Morais (eds) Reading Bernstein, Researching Bernstein, London: RoutledgeFalmer. Rothstein, R. (2004) Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black–White Achievement Gap, New York: Teachers College/Economic Policy Unit. Singh, P. (2002) ‘Pedagogising knowledge: Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 23, 4: 571–582. Turner, G. J. (1973) ‘Social class and children’s language of control at age five and age seven’, in B. Bernstein (ed.) Class, Codes and Control Volume 2: Applied Studies Towards a Sociology of Language, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

11 Bernstein, body pedagogies and the corporeal device John Evans, Brian Davies and Emma Rich

Introduction I have always written with my whole body: I do not know what purely intellectual problems are. (Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Pascal, 1957: xvi) We take as our starting point Basil Bernstein’s two ‘interrelated levels of mediation’ which Gabrielle Ivinson and Gerard Duveen (2006: 111) referred to as, first, ‘the imaginary subjects that teachers construct and which regulate modalities; and second, the constructive activities of children’. They emphasise that ‘(C)hildren do not simply internalise the recognition and realisation rules available in classrooms; rather they reconstruct knowledge according to developing socio-­cognitive resources’, analyses of which take us beyond the ‘two kinds of practice projected by two opposing models which represent recontextualised knowledge’ (ibid.) defined by Bernstein (1996: 58) as ‘competence’ and ‘performance’ models. These, we suggest, are not exhaustive of the codes dominating formal education at the present time. Unlike Durkheim, Bernstein was not particularly concerned to interrogate how social relations are ‘embodied’ and, in our view, his characterisation of two contrasting modes as models for heuristic purposes, if adapted insensitively, could obfuscate both the presence and significance of other codes and their modalities that have their social and intellectual origins outside the social, psychological and behavioural sciences. Some have their social bases in the economic interests of business, industry and the media and the medical and health fields, centring, unlike performance and competency codes and their modalities, on the dynamic between body and nature, and biology and culture. We refer to the latter as ‘relations of ’ the body rather than ‘relations to’ (competency modes) or ‘differences from’ (performance modes) individuals and agencies outwith ‘the self ’. If we were using a more Foucauldian language we would, no doubt, here refer to ‘relations to one’s embodied self ’ best characterised within contemporary society, we suggest, as body-­centred perfection codes (Evans and Davies, 2005). These codes regulate the grammar and syntax of the pedagogic device, shape the voice of

Bernstein and body pedagogies   177 education and, when embedded in contemporary education/health policy, frame the actions and thinking of teachers and ‘the imaginary subjects’ that they then construct through the body pedagogies of classrooms. Our previous work on education, disordered eating and obesity discourse documented the class and cultural origins of this ‘projected subject’, showing that social value and moral virtue are ascribed to ‘its’ corporeality. It also demonstrated that some young people are badly damaged by the interplay of perfection and performance codes in contemporary education (Evans et al., 2008). Concentration on the second ‘act of mediation’ referred to by Ivinson and Duveen suggests that here, too, current educational theory rather underplays the way in which the interpretive activity of children is subject not only to developing socio-­cognitive resources but also corporeal resources (not least of which are levels of physical maturation) over which they have little control. This raises fundamental questions concerning relationships between biology and culture and their refraction, for example, in the embodied actions and meaning systems expressed in the policies and pedagogies of teachers in schools. In the discussion which follows we suggest that Basil Bernstein’s (1996) notion of the ‘pedagogic device’, when reworked around the concept of a ‘corporeal device’ (CD), may provide one way of conceptualising such relationships so as to avoid some of the fault lines and dualistic thinking inherent in other perspectives. Reflecting the ‘corporeal realism’ which Chris Shilling (2005: 12) has outlined, the CD neither separates nor essentialises biology and culture, yet retains the principle that ‘the body and society exist as real things, that cannot be dissolved into discourse, possessed of causally generative properties’ (ibid.; Grosz, 1994). If sociologists of education and educational practitioners are to address the agency of ‘the body’ in cultural reproduction and the corporeal realities of children in classrooms, they must deal with the ‘somatic mediations’ of lived experience (Evans et al., 2009). This will mean giving as much attention to the biological dimensions of embodiment as its discursive representation receives (Cromby, 2004; Williams, 2006).

Why bodies matter when reading and researching education and health The brain, the body and the genome are locked, all three, in a dance. The genome is as much under the control of the other two as they are controlled by it. That is partly why genetic determinism is such a myth. The switching on and off of human genes can be influenced by conscious or unconscious action. (Ridley, 1999: 148) Amanda: 

When I first started secondary school I’d like . . . I’d started sort of . . . puberty quite early I’d say cus emmmmm . . . I started getting like acne and stuff ra (Interviewer):  Yeah

178   J. Evans et al. Amanda:  when I was just about ten. ra:  Really Amanda:  Nobody had really mentioned anything about it before at primary

school but when I went to secondary school . . . a couple of the lads started picking on me about it. RA:  Ahh Amanda:  Like I’d get pizza face and horrible stuff. ra:  Ahh Amanda:  Nothing really to do with weight or anything though . . . it was all just like . . . the way I looked. ra:  That’s really horrible . . . it must have been really hard to cope with. Amanda:  Yeah . . . I went on like medication and used creams . . . but it was like so bad at one stage that I had to like go and see a dermatologist. ra:  Really . . . it’s really horrible that people picked on you about it then . . . it’s hard enough to cope with as it is! (Amanda: one of the young women in our study; RA: Research Assistant/ interviewer; . . . signals a pause.) We cannot begin to understand the significance of the social processes recounted above in the lives of young people, such as Amanda, or their effect on their educational success or failure in school, without addressing how biology and culture are inextricably intertwined in a ‘dance of brain, mind and genome’. Over recent decades there has been growing appreciation of the need to study ‘the body’ as a corporeal presence in social settings, including schools, if we are to better understand how, why and what young people learn. A good deal of the work of reinstating the body’s importance in social theory (e.g. Butler, 1993; Grosz, 1994; Shilling, 2000, 2005) has been productively refracted in research in education, especially on curriculum areas explicitly associated with how the body is schooled (e.g. Sport, Health and Physical Education). Much of it has alluded to ways in which subjectivity and identity are embodied and inscribed with particular meanings, for example, around social class, race, gender and ability, and how ‘the body’ is monitored and controlled to serve social control functions in and outside schools (Sykes, 2007; Pronger, 2002). Notwithstanding such attention, we are going to suggest (also see Evans et al., 2009) that, with notable exceptions (e.g. Prout, 2000; James, 2000; Zembylas, 2007; Wright and Harwood, 2009), the body’s presence as a flesh-­and-blood, thinking, feeling, sentient species being, a ‘body with organs’1 whose very presence – moving, growing, changing over time – is generative of a meaning potential to which both the self and others must respond, has remained rather a shadowy presence. Ironically, in the sociology of education, just as in the sociology of illness, health and medicine, the body is still no more than an organic entity, especially its ‘biogenetic foundation’ (Vygotsky, 1978; Hasan, 2004) ‘everywhere and nowhere’ to be seen (Williams, 2006: 6).

Bernstein and body pedagogies   179 Our interest in the nature of relationships between body/mind and biology/culture arises from work that we have been doing over recent years exploring the connections between formal education and health discourse around obesity and eating disorders (Evans et al., 2008).2 At one level, that work has been an exercise in the sociology of knowledge. Reflecting commitments to social constructionist principles, it has demonstrated how health knowledge(s) produced in the primary field of knowledge production, for example, in science communities, flow across nations and come to be considered ‘the thinkable’ and ‘sacred’, that is to say, official truth as to what populations ought to believe about their bodies and their capacity for health, fit to be purveyed in schools. We have described how ‘the body’ is constructed through particular health knowledge(s), typically with reference to weight and shape, and how, in the process, certain populations are defined either as ‘healthy’ and ‘good’ or deviant, lacking and irresponsibly ‘bad’ and the purposes this serves. We have articulated health discourse as an instance of ‘bio power’ (Bunton and Petersen, 1997; Howson, 2004; Wright and Harwood, 2009), functioning to normalise and control certain reproductive behaviours around food, diet and exercise and family life. At the same time, our work has explored embodied subjectivity, for example, how health knowledge(s) recontextualised within popular culture (through TV, websites and other media imagery), translate into education/health polices directed at the pedagogies of schools. These, we suggest, are ultimately mediated by the classes and cultures (through the ‘knower structures’; see Maton, 2006) of parents, teachers and pupils, via their lived experience and what we refer to as the workings of the ‘corporeal device’ (see below). And it is this latter element of our work, involving the interrogation of the lived experience of young people and how they actively interpret and react ‘agentically’, through ‘practices of the self ’, to the transmission of health knowledge(s) in school, that has brought to the fore the significance of ‘the body’ – not just as a discursive construction, a conduit for the relay of messages outside itself – but as a biological body, a material relay of and for itself in processes of reproduction. Concomitantly, it has also highlighted the limitations of our own and others’ thinking on the relationships between mind/body and biology and culture and the inadequacies of the languages of description available to deal with them in a way that neither essentialises, privileges nor dislocates the ‘agency’ (and restraints) of mind or body, biology or culture. The concept of the CD, we suggest, provides but a starting point for addressing these concerns. The corporeal device (CD) Our data demonstrate that discourses are always inevitably mediated for individuals through their material (flesh-­and-blood, sentient, thinking and feeling) bodies, their actions and those of their peers, parents/guardians and other adults. And as a way of articulating the materiality of the lived experi-

180   J. Evans et al. ences typically associated with acquiring the attributes required by obesity discourse and ‘the actual embodied changes resulting from this process’ (Shilling, 2005: 13), we have been inclined, pace Bernstein, to talk of the ‘corporeal device’, to focus on the body as not just a discursive representation and relay of messages and power relations external ‘to itself ’ but as a voice ‘of itself ’. As a material/physical conduit it has an internal grammar and syntax given by the intersection of biology, culture and the predilections of class, which regulate (facilitate and constrain) embodied action and consciousness, including the ways in which discursive messages (and all other social relations) are read and received. This concept, we suggest, privileges neither biology nor culture and endorses Frank’s (2006: 433) view that neither ‘the experience of embodied health nor the observation of signs of health circulating outside bodies has to trump the other as being the real point of origin. Instead each is understood as “making the other possible” ’. Our research barely begins to touch the complexity of such relationships (see Grosz, 1994, 2008), though it illumines how the CD finds expression as conscious and subconscious embodied action and is subjectified (given shape, form and definition as ‘personality’) in schools. As a model of embodied action/communication the CD not only facilitates exploration of the relationships between mind/body and body/culture but also the features of each of these elements (see Figure 11.1). Bernstein (1996: 41) claimed to derive his understanding of the pedagogic device (PD) from Noam Chomsky’s controversial views but was properly critical of his rather reductive and over-­determined view of ‘rules’ governing language, mind and consciousness, agreeing with Halliday (1978, 1993) ‘that the rules of the language device are not ideologically free, but . . . reflect emphases on the meaning potential created by dominant groups’. What appears to have been most important to him and to our argument is that, across these devices, acquisition is not possible without interaction so that the language device, simply put, ‘is that which mediates between the meaning potential of a discursive order and the actual meanings realized’ (see Davis, 2004: 44) and, although there are differences, the CD resembles both the quintessentially kinetic language and the pedagogical devices in a number of ways. The inherently ‘bio-­social’, internal rules of the CD are the product of evolution, socialisation and development which regulate the body’s cognitive, social, affective and kinetic resources (A). Such rules are neither stable nor ideologically free but reflect dominant groups’ meanings routinised by frameworks of value created by significant others, particularly family members and peer-­group friends, so as to have proximal and enduring influence on the maturation and development of individuals’ embodied consciousness. We may productively conceptualise such ‘rules’ as ‘effects’ (or products) of affectively loaded actions in which individuals learn to classify and categorise (differentiate and separate) experiences as either positive or negative. They always include a somatic component (Cromby, 2004) and not only help structure and regulate individuals’ tastes, desires, judgements and

Bernstein and body pedagogies   181 Language device Stable rules?

Contextual rules

LD

Communication (language)

Stable rules?

Contextual rules

Meaning potential (somatic/kinetic)

CD

Communication (embodied action)

B

A

C

Meaning potential (symbolic/semiotic)

Corporeal device

Figure 11.1 Meaning potential, communication and the corporeal device. Notes LD, language device; CD, corporeal device (from Evans et al., 2009: 395). A – Dispositional structures; sometimes referred to as habits, habitus, enablements, abilities or intelligences (see Stones, 2005: 85). B – Meaning potential; given by the body’s corporeal presence in time, place and space. C – Embodied action; ‘the way in which the agent either routinely and pre-reflectively, or strategically and critically, draws upon his/her internal structures’ (Stones, 2005: 85) in context. Contextual rules/‘external structures’ frame and regulate the conditions of action and are relatively ‘autonomous from the agent in focus’ (ibid.: 84).

dispositions, consciously and subconsciously ‘chosen’ but also simultaneously forge a developing sense of ‘personal’ embodiment. These include the feelings we each hold, only some of which we consciously articulate, towards our own and others’ body presence and value in time, place and location. Furthermore, there is a meaning potential (somatic and semiotic) (B) generated by the presence of ‘the body’s’ geography in space, time, location, which lies outside (or at least, ‘relatively independently’) of and activates the CD and the resultant, embodied communication.3 Socially, affectively and cognitively encoded, somatically mediated communication feeds back on meaning potential, ‘either in a restricted or in an enhancing fashion’ and ‘regulates fundamentally the communication which the device makes possible’. The rules of the CD (like those governing the language and pedagogic devices) are activated, for example, through various regimes of authority and bio-­ power reflecting interests and hierarchies of social class and culture. We are less concerned with whether these devices can be said to have built into them ‘some very fundamental classifications, in particular gender classifications’, as Bernstein (1996: 41) appears to have inclined to, but to accept that the corporeal (like the language and pedagogic) devices make possible a

182   J. Evans et al. potential range of communicative outcomes but does not determine them. The forms of its realisation, however, are subject to rules and social, moral and ethical conventions (Cromby, 2004: 17) which vary with the context (C), constrained not only by distinctive semiotic rules for communication but also by the somatic. How we communicate – speak, act or ‘perform’ interaction – varies with context, for example, depending on whether we were having a drink or talking to a teacher. A, B and C (see Figure 11.1), thus, highlight different aspects of embodied communication, each having distinctive features/qualities and a degree of relative autonomy, though none alone can account for either generative (productive) or constraining (reproductive) elements of embodied action and social reproduction. A draws attention to biological (or rather, the bio-­sociogenetic) aspects of corporeality; B, the meaning potential of ‘the body’ brought into play in social context; and C, contextual rules and power relations that strongly influence or ‘determine’ them. To a degree, our development of this concept resembles Zembylas’ (2007, 2008) and Ekman and Davidson’s (1994) attempts to conceptualise the body as a ‘multi componential phenomena’. However, in this model individuals are perceived as physical bodies resourced not just with ‘emotions’ (Zembylas, 2008), ‘desires’ (Sykes, 2007) or ‘jouissance’ (Pronger, 2002; Davis, 2004) but a range and variety of cognitive, affective, social and kinetic capabilities or resources that are always encoded by the device (Evans et al., 2008). This echoes Zembylas’ (2008, p.  4) notion that ‘human beings have universal corporeal potential’ (A), enacted in particular socio-­cultural and political arrangements that provide them somatic and semiotic meaning (B), and that they are always ‘socially and culturally specific persons engaged in complex webs of power relations’ (C). It also announces the body as always both ‘being’ and ‘becoming’, capable of action and performance (see Grosz, interview of Ausch et al., 2008).4 Biology and culture, ontology and epistemology, are inextricably entangled via the interminable dialectics of the CD, clearly denoting a ‘structural orientation’ but without neglecting the phenomenological/lived body. It signals a regulative but not a determinative power over the characteristic experiences and bodily orientation outcomes of those subject to it. In essence, it describes an intended embedded relation between the three elements which is, however, not guaranteed. The realist impact of the CD is that it both ‘captures a relation between means/experience/outcomes that had happened in the past (but wasn’t guaranteed in the future) and specifies the parameters of a potential relation between the three’.5 The body made flesh: corporealism, the material body and schooling Attention to the body’s materiality has been reflected both in Shilling’s (2005) empirical work and that of many others (e.g. Prout, 2000; James, 2000; Burrows and Wright, 2007; Evans et al., 2008; Wright and

Bernstein and body pedagogies   183 Harwood, 2009; Luttrell, 2009; Sparkes, 2009). James (2000), for example, has demonstrated ‘how material differences in size and weight present young people with a series of problems which must be negotiated by working representational transformations that can render them nearer to or further from bodily appearances of their peers’ (Prout, 2000: 5). Children are understandably hypersensitive to somatic changes occurring to their body, perhaps because they have only limited degrees of control over them. They may experience these changes as being relatively independent of culture but not occurring outside it. James, for example, noted ‘five aspects of the body that seemed to have particular significance for the children she studied: height, shape, appearance, gender, and performance’ (quoting Prout, 2000: 8). Each acted as a flexible and shifting resource for their children’s interactions, emergent identities and relationships. Our research documented similar processes, clearly demonstrating that children and young people do not simply passively absorb cultural stereotypes, for example, with respect of the five embodied features which James described but ‘actively apprehended and used them in experiencing not only their own body but also its relationship to other bodies and the meanings that were forged from these encounters’ (ibid.). Indeed, much of our work endorses James’ central finding that ‘children have to come to terms not only with their own constantly changing bodies’ (the body’s generative meaning potential) ‘and those of their peers but also with the changing institutional contexts within which meaning is given to these changes’ (ibid.). As James (2000: 29) points out, ‘children’s experience of embodiment is the experience of the embodiment of time’. The following extracts from our data (see note 2) are indicative of our central problematic, documenting the interminable dialectic struggle between body/mind and biology/culture: Lara: 

I had started to develop much quicker than everyone else and I was interested in lads etc. All the girls turned against me and started calling me a slag and I felt like I had to live up to it so I started wearing short skirts but I hated how I looked but I tried to pretend that I was happy and that I didn’t care that I was getting called names. I went on anti-­ depressants and I felt so weird and stupid compared to all the other girls but I convinced them I didn’t care about them. (poster) Rebekah:  Yeah cus like I hit puberty early so I was always taller and like . . . naturally bigger than everyone else . . . emmmmm . . . so that was always an issue cus you always feel like . . . out of it . . . you know . . . with all your little friends still in like . . . you know . . . really small clothes and stuff like that . . . emmmmm . . . so that was a major factor . . . and . . . so when I sort of tried to stop all that they caught up . . . so yeah . . . that was a big thing. (interview) vicky:  And at my new school I do remember like being really upset because . . . I like . . . had like a growth spurt and I got like quite a bit bigger

184   J. Evans et al. than what I was . . . and I thought . . . I have to cut down a bit and then I just went to like healthy eating over the summer. (interview) In these cases the body had presence but little authority, it was generative of meanings over which it has little control (Figure 11.1, B). These were bodies out of kilter with contextual rules and meaning systems that would not let them easily fit in (Figure 11.1, C). By default, in virtue of their appearances they were deviant (inadequate/lesser) bodies to ‘others’. These young women’s reactions to their bodies were neither arbitrary, nor positive nor non-­judgemental. They were attributed the status ‘dangerous and abnormal bodies’, threatening the values of peer group sub-­culture, that other bodies did not understand, did not like and, as a result, did not let in. Many others, during interview, expressed similar concerns: Clair: 

When I was at school I was like bullied loads . . . like all through my school . . . so I just thought I was like crap basically. I thought . . . ermmmm . . . I thought cus people didn’t like me for who I was then there must be something wrong with me so I thought that anyway I could like change myself . . . I though of all the things I could change about myself . . . I thought ‘well I know one thing which I could change and would see results in is like . . . my figure.’ (interview) Tracey:  Everyone at school’s got like food issues . . . all the girls are always looking for like what’s got the least fat and that . . . and people will comment on each other like if someone has two chocolate bars someone will say like ‘oh haven’t you had one already’ and stuff. (interview) As we have elsewhere pointed out (Evans et al., 2008; Evans et al., 2009), an insensitive and cursory reading of this data might inadvertently lead us to conclude that these young people were simply dupes, or their problems merely discursive reflections of pressures endemic in society and schools. But it is clear that they neither simply read nor internalised these messages and meanings uncritically, or merely ‘cognitively’, through disembodied ‘knower structures’, the intellectual schemas into which they have been socialised by virtue of their culture and their class. Rather, they were mediated by their flesh and blood, developing bodies, by chemistries, biologies and physiologies. These were punctuated by levels of maturation, the grammar and syntax of their ‘textured feelings’ (Figure 11.1, A), their idiosyncratic ‘body knowledge’ influenced, if not determined, by their sub-­cultural location in a specific time and space. Time and again these young people located their difficulties with peer or academic expectations viscerally and always relationally in their antecedent experiences of fast-­changing, sometimes awkward, less than ‘perfect’ bodies, among their teachers and peers. Their changing bodies, over which they had little or no control, were inescapably subjected both to their own and others’ evaluative gaze, at home, at leisure and amid the pressures of totally pedagogised schools.

Bernstein and body pedagogies   185 Tracey: 

The pressure to look perfect took over your study work . . . everyone used to look at you . . . you wouldn’t go to school if you had a spot. (interview)

Avoiding the pain of being ‘othered’, made to feel different, less worthy and excluded, by engaging in radical body modification involving excessive exercise and eating little or no food, experiencing the joy of achieving the distinction of ‘thin’ beyond the slender ideal, became, for some, a perfectly rational, morally acceptable goal. On our evidence, a comprehensive account of ‘failure’ either to meet formal school or informal peer-­group expectations and associated disaffection or alienation in education among young people, has to address the institutional and social settings that generate the conditions and meaning systems under which failure and its associated feelings is possible. Failure and its expressions, for example, in depression, disaffection and alienation may interrupt, even end, the careers of pupils at key points in their educational progress (James, 2000; Prout, 2000). In the cases we studied minor troubles were mediated somatically through the material body of pupils and translated (in some cases) into serious problems expressed as serious weight loss. The notion of the CD allows us to take proper account of the physical experience of success and failure along with its personal dimensions and social context. In Bernstein’s terms, we would say, it centres attention on the classification and framing of embodied consciousness. It also invites us to recognise, however, that the ‘experience of embodiment’ (see Walkerdine, 2009: 204) and one’s ‘body knowledge’ can not always be easily or consciously articulated; ‘even if felt and the body recognises it; the recognition, for example, of the sensation of disgust, humiliation, and what this produces for the body’ is ‘why Bollas calls it the “unthought known” ’. Williams (2006) and Prout (2000) claim that this is not simply a question of addressing the different aspects or dimensions of biology but of rethinking biological factors, conceived as living, animating processes and principles, not all of which, when experienced by individuals, can be consciously articulated in the process of their embodied enactment.

Conclusion Like Shilling, Grosz, Prout, James, Walkerdine and others, we have endeavoured to provide insight into the connections between corporeal bodies as agentic entities, ‘lived experience’ and culture. But ours (like theirs) is an unfinished project, still stronger on conceptualising and documenting relationships between biology and culture than analysing particularly the first of these elements. As Crossley (2007: 1) observed, ‘having announced that the body and society have analytically distinct properties and that each impinge upon and shape the other, we still need to consider what those properties are’. Although interrogation of the regulative and generative properties of the body,

186   J. Evans et al. by whatever language we chose to describe them, takes us in that direction, more searching questions of the body’s materiality need to be asked. This is no straightforward or easy matter to address.6 Such a critique of contemporary social theory offers a salutary reminder of how far we are removed from being able to articulate adequately the nexus of biology and culture, despite valiant efforts in bringing elements of the ‘material’ body back into the sociological gaze. As others have pointed out, we are not yet able to account either for the nature of ‘biological enablements and constraints’ or the ‘critical potential of the biological in exposing rather than legitimating oppressive social practices (helping us, in other words, to say what oppressive social practices are oppressive of and do damage to [Nussbaum, 1992; Sayer, 2000]’ (Williams, 2006: 15). Our study, explicitly seeking to trace the visceral effects of meaning systems and contextual rules on young women’s embodied communicative actions in schools, points to the importance of but makes few inroads on processes impinging on their bodies’ biologies, chemistries, physiologies and physics, leaving their agency and unexplicated core elements of the CD insufficiently emphasised and explored. Approaching these issues in sociological and educational research without both separating or essentialising biology and culture becomes our continuing, primary task. Accepting this enables us to register both the value and complexity of the CD as concept and process. As bio-­social process, its intrinsic grammar and syntax encodes and so facilitates and constrains (classifies and frames) ‘potentialities’ and ‘capabilities’, as well as how somatic and semiotic meaning systems and contextual rules regulate emerging communication and action. The device is to be viewed neither as mechanism nor immutable attribute but as processes of classification and categorisation of experiences involving affective learning of embodied knowledge (B and A), always and inescapably within relations of authority and power over which individuals experience varying degrees of control (framing). In certain respects, then, we share Williams’ (2006: 13) view that what now is required is a ‘material-­corporeal’ project which attempts to ‘marry’ the biological and the social in a ‘truly’ embodied fashion (Newton, 2003a). At one level this will mean further elaborating on the nature of ‘somatic mediation’ and the CD, as well as exploring other innovative theoretical perspectives, for example, Prout’s (2000: 11) notion of children as ‘hybrids of culture and nature’. The project becomes not just one of doing better sociological theory or method but actively pursuing different relationships between the ‘academic’ disciplines in order to throw light on the complexity and nuances of biology in culture and the workings of the corporeal device. If the body is to be invoked in sociological enquiry and especially if medical sociology wishes ‘to come to terms with ‘corporeal realities . . . the place of the biological sciences (as well as the biological dimensions of experience) has to be more clearly appreciated’ (Bury: 1997: 199–200) (cited in Williams, ibid.: 16). Our use of Bernstein’s work to develop an understanding of the CD and the body/culture nexus helps avoid the excesses of essentialism and the solip-

Bernstein and body pedagogies   187 sism that sometimes seem to blight social constructionist and post-­structural approaches to these matters. Any enduring contribution of the notion of a CD must lie in disavowal of body/mind, biology/culture dualisms, making redundant the question ‘which is the more efficacious, biology or culture?’ to which the answer must always be ‘neither and both’.7

Acknowledgement We are extremely grateful to Rachel Allwood and the staff and young people at the clinic in which this study was based, for their invaluable contribution to our research.

Notes 1 We refer intentionally to the ‘body with organs’ because of the centrality of its counter position, the ‘body without organs’, in post-­structural theory and the latter misnomer’s culpability in the disappearance of the organic body from social investigation, for: In Guattari and Deleuze’s perspective the goal in constructing a ‘Body without Organs’ is not to do away with the organs; it is to do away with ‘organism’, the received genetic hegemony of biological organization. The goal is not to end the biotic process, but to become more than biological, to provide yourself with that essence which Nature has so cruelly and stupidly neglected. (http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1194012) 2 Over a period of three years our research centred on the lives of some 40 girls and young women, all of whom had suffered from anorexia nervosa or bulimia. All were resident full time at a centre located in England specialising in the treatment of such conditions, having been referred there either via a general practitioner, child psychiatrist or paediatrician for a duration usually of two to four weeks; their costs met either by the National Health Service or private means (usually the family). As participants in our research they were asked to record and reflect on their experiences of mainstream schooling and how it may (or may not) have had a bearing on the development of their ‘eating disorder’. The young women were aged between 14 and 18 (all have been given pseudonyms), white, of UK origin and able-­bodied. Reflecting a wider demography of eating disorders (see Doyle and Bryant-­Waugh, 2000) they, like most others attending the centre, came from middle-­class families and attended what might be described as high-­ status comprehensive, grammar or private schools across the UK. 3 Others have referred to affectively loaded bodily states ‘called out within streams of interaction, experienced in the form of feelings and utilised to assess alternatives’, as ‘somatic markers’ (Cromby, 2004: 15). 4 We echo Grosz’s view that while ‘identity is performed through action and not simply, as psychoanalysis suggests, through identification’, a distinction must also be made between action and performance. ‘An action doesn’t require an audience in the way that a performance does.’ Grosz calls this ‘the politics of imperceptibility’ suggesting ‘it is not the subject who acts . . . but forces in and through the

188   J. Evans et al. subject . . . it is a theory of agency which situates it below the level of the subject’. Thus we can ask, ‘what acts are forces, and these forces are not the effects of a subject but its causes, they are not the intentional object of a subject, but something altogether outside the subject’ (Grosz, in conversation with Ausch et al., 2008: 4). This re-­centres attention to ontology while recognising that ‘we can’t have any access to ontology except through epistemology’ (ibid.: 10). 5 We are indebted to Chris Shilling for his observations on this aspect of the CD (personal conversations, 2008). 6 As Davies (2000: 43) has pointed out, ‘We can struggle to retrieve memory that exists before it is called one thing or another and in doing so arrive at something that can be recognised as truthful, though elusively so’. 7 Some of the ideas and material in this chapter are developments of those published in Evans et al. (2009).

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Index

Page numbers in italics denote tables. academic disciplines: Bernstein on 125–6 academic identity 41 access, to theoretical knowledge 124–38 act of mediation 176, 177 Amner, R. 108 announced rules 163 apartheid regime 107–8, 120 apprenticeship 3, 8–9 Archer, M. 111 Armstrong, David 147 Australia: tertiary education study 124–5, 128–38 Ball, Steven 70, 71 Barnett, Michael 127 Barnett, R. 107 Basil Bernstein Symposium 1 Bautier, E. 61 Becher, T. 113 Beck, J. 74 behaviourism 60 Bennett, S. 31 Bernstein, Basil: access to knowledge 124, 132–3; and Bourdieu 54, 55–7; classification and framing 11, 26–7, 125; classification of formal knowledge 4–5; external language 29–31; institutionalised knowledge forms 147; internal language 26–7, 29; on journalism 110; knowledge structures 23–5, 34, 39–40; not-yetthought 116; pedagogic discourse 71–3, 91, 180; progressive pedagogy

26; psychic defences 143–5, 150–6; recognition-anxiety 51; recontextualisation 107; regionalisation 110; regulative order 158–67; sociology of knowledge 6–11; theory of knowledge 119; vision of pedagogic processes 2 bio power 179 the body: with organs 178; study of 177–87 body-centred perfection codes: relations of the body 176–7 body/mind: biology and culture relationships 179, 183 Bologna Process 70, 101 Boltanski, Luc 57–8 boundary relations 71 Bourdieu, Pierre: on classification 50; external ‘gaze’ 31–4; hierarchical status 43; internal language 27–9; recognition-anxiety 51; reflections and critiques 57–8; rivalries 45; scientific hierarchy 40 Caldwell, N. 113 Canguilhem, G. 60 CD (corporeal device) see corporeal device celibacy 7 Chomsky, Noam 180 Christianity 5–7, 10 Clark, B. R. 99 class analysis 160 Class, Codes and Control, vol. 1 54, 160

192   Index Class, Codes and Control, vol. 3 158 classification: Bernstein on 11, 26–7, 125, 126; Bourdieu on 50; formal knowledge 3–6; and psychic defences 143–5 classroom: regulative order of 162–4 code theory 171 cohesion, theory of 161–2 Cole, Stephen 43, 45 collaborative curriculum development 111–12 collection code curriculum 91, 99, 103 Collins, Randall 41, 44–5 competence-type models 8, 176 conceptual coherence curricula 114 consciousness: self-reflexive form 5 consensual rituals 159 consensus 43, 44, 47–52 contextual coherence curricula 114 control relations: mother and child 162 Cook-Gumperz, J. 171 Cook-Gumperz’s model 163 corporeal device (CD) 177, 179–85 corporeal realism 177, 186 corporeal resources 177 Corrosion of Character, The 8 Craft of Sociology, The 58 criteria, evaluative 168–9 Crossley, C. 185 cultural capital 57 cultural legitimacy, theory of 57 cultural relativism 56, 57 cumulative knowledge 23, 34, 36 cumulative modality: of semantics 35 curriculum development: Department of Journalism and Media Studies ( JMS) see JMS department study curriculum development research: discussion 103–4; implications 103–4; local pedagogic discourse 93–6, 97–100; methodology 92–3; research design 92–3; selection of curricular knowledge 101–3; teacher’s perceptions 100–1; theoretical framework 90–2; universal pedagogic discourse 96–7 curriculum forms: and forms of knowledge 114–15

Davidson, R. J. 182 Davis, Z. 168 Deacon, T. 170 democracy 107 Department of Journalism and Media Studies ( JMS): curriculum development see JMS department study depressive dominance position 145–6 determinism 60 disciplinary beings: dual mentality 42–3 disciplinary curriculum 91 disciplinary enculturation 97–8 disciplinary judgements 40–1 disciplines: social life in 41–52 discursive epistemic relations 120 disinterestedness 45–6 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste 57 Division of Labour, The 42 dominated culture 57 ‘domino-centred’ emphasis 55 dominocentrism 57, 58 Double Helix 46 Douglas, Mary 6, 157, 170–1 du Toit, J. 113–14 Dubet, François 58–69 Durkheim, E. 2, 4, 41–2, 158, 159, 170 Durkheimian School 55 Duveen, Gerard 176 eating disorders 179 Eckman, P. 182 education policies: globalised 69–70 education policy processes 70 educational knowledge forms, changes in: Greek Education academics’ questionnaire 73–84 elaborated codes 161–2, 170–1 Elementary Forms 44 elite institutions 154–5 emancipation 7–8, 58 Ensor, P. 167–8, 169 equality: and early Jewish-Christian community 7–8 ESCOL (Research Centre in Education and Schooling, University of Paris VIII) 61

Index   193 evaluative criteria 168–9 exclusion 60 expressive order: of schools 158–60 external ‘gaze’: Bourdieu 31–4 external language: Bernstein 29–31 fields of practice: new and old 128–32 Fifth International Basil Bernstein Symposium 1 Flamsteed, John 46 Fleck, L. 44 formal knowledge: classification 3–6 forms of knowledge: and curriculum forms 114–15 Foucauldian analysis of policy 70, 71 Foucault, M. 100 framing: Bernstein 26–7, 125, 126–7 France: Durkheimian School 55; exclusion 60; reforms 64 Frank, A. 180 Freud, Sigmund 46, 146–7 functional integration 43 Gamble, J. 115, 116, 137, 168, 170 Garman, A. 108 gaze: Bourdieu 32–3 generic modes 154–5 generic pedagogy 10 genericism 71 globalised policies: influence of 69–70 God: Judaic characteristics 6–7 grammaticality 23–5, 29–34, 34–5 Greek Education academics’ questionnaire: changes in educational knowledge forms 73–84 Greek idea 3–4 Grignon, C. 57 grounded rules 163 guilds 8–9 habitus: concept of 27–8, 31, 33–4; theory of 60 Halliday, M. A. K. 161, 171, 180 Haraway, D. 93 Hasan, R. 161 Hegel, G. W. F. 58 hierarchical knowledge structures 23, 40 hierarchical rules: and evaluating criteria 168–9

high-differentiation societies 42 higher education qualifications: and VET (vocational education and training) 132–7 Hoadley, U. 167, 169, 170 horizontal discourses 61, 112 horizontal knowledge structures 23, 40 hospitality management degree study 128–32 Hugo, W. 45 humanities, the 3 identity positions: knowledge forms and 71–2 imperative control 162, 163, 167–8 individualism 9 infant ego development: Melanie Klein’s account 145–7 Inheritors, The 56 instructional discourse 91, 164 integrated curriculum structure 91, 99, 103 interaction rituals 44–5 internal language: Bernstein 26–7, 29; Bourdieu, P. 27–9 introjection 144, 145, 146–7, 151, 155 invisible pedagogies 56 Isambert-Jamati, Viviane 61 Ivinson, Gabrielle 176 Jacques, E. 144, 148, 149 James, A. 183 Jewish-Christian community 6–8 JMS department study: analysis 108–10; background 107–8; collaborative curriculum development 111–12; data collection 108–10; presentation 108–10 Jones, Ernest 46 Jones, L. 74 Joseph, B. 147, 154 journalism: as field of study 110, 113–14, 116–18 Judaic communities 6 judgements, disciplinary: stability of 40–1 Klein, Melanie: Bernstein and 144–5; theory 144–7

194   Index Kleinian ideas: in organisational analysis 148–50 knower-grammars 33 knowledge: and apprenticeship 3; Greek ideal 3–4; latest recontextualisation 9–11; Latin classification 4; and social organisation 6–11 knowledge forms: and identity positions 71–2 knowledge-grammars 33 knowledge markets 9–11 knowledge relations: structure of 71 knowledge structures 39–40; horizontal 23; verticality and grammaticality 23–5 knowledge transmission 62 Kuhn, T. S. 44 Küng, H. 7–8 Lacan, J. 153 Lahire, Bernard 58–9, 60 LAMES (Mediterranean Laboratory of Sociology) 62–3 language of policy 71 languages of description 24–5, 71 Le Raisonnement Sociologique 58 Le Savant et le Populaire 57 L’Homme Pluriel 60 Liberal Arts (115–27 bc) 4 low-differentiation societies 42 Lubienski, S. T. 169 Lyth, Isabel Menzies 144, 148–9, 152 Maton, K. 119, 120 mechanical solidarity 42, 44 medieval guilds 8–9 medieval monasteries 5–6, 8–9 Mediterranean Laboratory of Sociology (LAMES) see LAMES Merton, R. K. 41 Midgley, M. 4 mind/body: biology and culture relationships 179, 180, 183 ‘minimal foundation’: of competence 60 Miranda, C. 168 ‘miserabilism’ 57 monasteries, medieval 5–6, 8–9 monasticism 5–6 Moore, R. 29, 72, 74

Morais, Ana 168–9 moral discourse 5 Moral Education 159 moral order: of schools 158–60 Moscovici, Serge 17 mother–child communication 160–2 Muller, J. 24, 29, 74, 110, 114, 128 multiply anchored subjectivities 16–17 Murati, Carole 63 narcissism 151 National Research Foundation (NRF) see NRF National Vocational Qualifications 133 networks 43–5 new professionalism 72, 74, 75, 76, 77–80, 82–3 new regions: comparison with traditional 128–32; VET and higher education qualifications 132–7 Newton, Isaac 46 Nietzsche, Friedrich 176 normative integration 43 normativity 60 not-yet-thought 116, 124 NRF (National Research Foundation) 47; rating classification (peer reviews) 48 nursing degree study 128–32 obesity 179 occupational knowledge recontextualisation 127 old professionalism 72, 79–80, 82 ontic epistemic relations 120 organic solidarity 42, 44 organisational analysis: Kleinian ideas in 148–50 organisational saga 99–100 Pandraud, Nadège 63 paranoid schizoid position 145, 146 Parry, S. 113 Passeron, J.-C. 57, 58 pedagogic discourse 2–3, 5, 124, 164–6 pedagogy: competence-type models 8; new understanding 10; performancetype model 7, 176

Index   195 Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity 56–7 Pedro, E. R. 162–3, 167 peer judgement 47–52 peer review reports 47–8, 49 Peirce, C. S. 39, 44 performance-type model 7, 176 personal control 162, 163, 167 Plato 3–4 plural actor, theory of 60 policy: language of 71 populism 57 positional modes of control 157–8, 162, 163, 167–8, 171 positional relations: teachers and 171–2 Poulet, Célia 63 power relations 100–1 praxis, theory of 55 priority: desire for 46–7 professional qualifications 126 professionalism, old and new 72, 74, 75, 76, 77–80, 82–3 projection 144, 145, 146–7, 151, 152–3, 154 Prout, A. 185, 186 psychic defences: Bernstein 143–5, 150–6; Melanie Klein’s account 145–7 Quadrivium 4–5 Ramognino, Nicole 62 rating classification (peer reviews) 49; NRF 48 recognition 45–7, 51 recontextualisation 17, 96, 107, 118–20, 125, 127, 144, 153 recontextualising 91 redundancy 170 regionalisation 71, 110–11 regions 13–14, 16, 91, 125, 126, 128–32, 152–3 regulative discourse 91, 158–67, 164 regulative order: Bernstein 158–67; restricted notion 167–70 relations of the body: body-centred perfection codes 176–7 relativism, cultural 56, 57 Renaissance artists 9

Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture 56 reproduction, theories of 56–7, 58 reputation: and priority 45–7; standing and 45 Research Centre in Education and Schooling, University of Paris VIII (ESCOL) see ESCOL restricted codes 161–2, 171 Ridley, M. 177 ‘Ritual in Education’ 159 rituals 159, 160, 170–2 rivalries 45 Rochex, J.-Y. 60, 61 role and ritual 159–60, 170–2 Sadovnik, A. R. 91 Sandler, J. 146–7 school curriculum: origins 3–4 school experience: sociology of 59–60 school failure 60 the sciences 3 scientific networks 44 Scottish Vocational Qualifications 133 Segal, Julia 155 segmentalism 23 self-reflexive form: of consciousness 5 semantic density 25–9, 31, 34–5 semantic gravity 25–9, 30, 31, 34–5 Sennett, Richard 8, 9 sexuality: of women 7–8 Shilling, Chris 177, 182–3 singulars 13–14, 16, 71, 91, 125, 126, 150–2 social inequalities 55–6 social legitimation 148 social life: in disciplines 41–52 social power 124 social relationships: and forms of speech 160–2 sociolinguistic thesis 160–2 sociology of knowledge 143–5; Bernstein 6–11 sociology of school experience 59–60 South Africa: collaborative curriculum development 107; National Research Foundation (NRF) 47 split subject 93 splitting 145, 151–2

196   Index standing: and reputation 45 the state 9–10 Stavrou, Sophia 63 ‘symbolic domination’ 57 symbolic violence 56 Tavistock Institute of Human Relations 144 teachers: and positional relations 171–2 tertiary education study: Australia 124–5, 128–38 theories of reproduction 56–7, 58 theory and practice integration 111, 116–18 theory of cohesion 161–2 theory of cultural legitimacy 57 theory of habitus 60 theory of praxis 55 theory of the plural actor 60 Thévenot, Laurent 57–8 Thompson, E. P. 45 thought collectives 44 Tomaselli, K. G. 113 Touraine, Alain 58 traditional regions: comparison with new 128–32 trainability 10 translation device: theoretical and empirical dimensions 85–6 Trivium 4–5 Tuning Educational Structures in Europe project 70, 73

university curriculum: origins 3–4 university teachers: as curriculum developers 90, 92 verticality 23–5, 26–9, 34, 40, 103, 112, 157, 159, 170 VET (vocational education and training): and higher education qualifications 132–7; study 124–6, 128–38 visible pedagogies 56 Vitale, P. 99 vocational education and training (VET) study see VET vocational field needs 102–3, 103–4 vocational fields of practice 128 vocational pedagogy 127 vocational qualifications 126, 133 Wacquant, L. 31, 32 Watson, James D. 46 Weberian epistemology 58 Wheelahan, L. 116 Williams, S. J. 185, 186 the within 61 women: and early Church 7–8; sexuality of 7–8 working-class learners 132–3, 157–8, 168, 169–72 Young, M. F. D. 24, 71, 116, 127 Zembylas, M. 182