Introduction

This book is intended to fill a gap in the literature of educational research. It aims to find an alternative to mathematical modelling and its unconsidered empiricist underpinnings on the one hand and hermeneutic or interpretive frameworks on the other. It is unashamedly realist, albeit in a transcendental sense. Roy Bhaskar (1979, p. ix), writing twenty years ago, suggested that ‘both the dominant naturalist tradition, positivism, and its naturalistic hermeneutical foil rest on an ontology rendered obsolete by new collateral theories of philosophy and ideology. The time is therefore overdue for a “sublation” of their historic confrontation.’ Since then little has changed, except that, in the field of education, the dominant ideology of positivism/ empiricism has become perhaps even more dominant. New developments in statistical methods have led some (cf. Goldstein, 1998) to suggest that the criticisms addressed at mathematical modelling, ie. its reductive and trivialising orientation, can finally be overcome.1 At the bridgehead between two millennia, this increasingly seems to reflect hope rather than achievement. Furthermore, educational research has been recently subject to a number of trenchant criticisms, from both within (cf. Hargreaves, 1996a; Tooley with Darby, 19982) and outside (cf. Woodhead, 1998; Barber, 1996). These criticisms have centred on its obtuseness, its irrelevance to the real concerns of practitioners and, even more so, its boldness in making claims which it cannot sustain. Hargreaves (1996b, p. 7), for example, suggests that there is a considerable amount of ‘frankly second rate educational research which does not make a serious contribution to fundamental theory or knowledge; which is irrelevant to practice; which is uncoordinated with any preceding or follow-up research; and which clutters up academic journals that virtually nobody reads’. It is therefore appropriate to revisit its roots; to examine how it is possible to research educational activit ies and environments.