ABSTRACT
Faculty of Education at the Open University. Employing Kuhn’s notion of
the ‘paradigm shift’ which characterises scientific revolutions, Gorbutt saw the intention of the new sociologists to be that of replacing what they took to be a
positivist orientation in traditional sociology of Education by an alternative
paradigm, through focusing attention upon the curricular implications of
sociology of knowledge. Indeed, the new sociology of education is located
within the sociology of knowledge: the ‘management of knowledge’ is its central
concern. This is in contrast to the ‘old’ sociology of education which was
allegedly located within the structural-functionalist sociological paradigm,
a ‘value-free’ social science based on the assumption that fundamental truths
about society can be derived from empirical investigation. Its reference is to an
objective social world, not of man’s own making, to which he must passively
adjust. Hence, the school’s role is concerned with socialisation in relation to
given social norms. For this ‘normative paradigm’, the new sociologist
substitutes an ‘interpretative paradigm’ derived mainly from Marxism and
phenomenology. The innovative text for the new sociology is taken to be Young’s
Knowledge and Control, especially the essays by Young, Keddie and Esland.
