ABSTRACT
While biographical analysis has received novel, contemporary elucidation it is, in fact, a perspective that goes back to early concerns in the social sciences. It is well represented in sociology in the work of the Chicago School, and in psychoanalysis and psychology it had formative elaboration by, respectively, the Freudians and William James. A particularly important text in the history of the biographical approach within social science was Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-1920)—the first example of sustained sociological research in which personal documents were used as primary data. In more recent times, one of the most influential texts of post-war sociology, C.Wright Mill’s The Sociological Imagination (1959) argued that sociology can be defined as the interaction between biography and history. However, it would not be unreasonable to argue that much of this way of thinking, in a welter of abstracted empiricism, was generally lost sight of until the publication of Daniel Bertaux’s edited volume, Biography and Society (1981). In turn, this publication was supported by the earlier theorizations behind oral history incorporated in Paul Thompson’s The Voice of the Past (1978). From this time-receiving further fillips from Denzin’s Interpretive Biography (1989) and a special edition of the journal Sociology (1993)—the field of biographical
studies has steadily burgeoned in Britain. It has now begun to develop various specialist themes of which the present volume represents a particularly important one-education. The chapters gathered for this book (all specially written for the volume) indicate the range of biographical work being carried out, both theoretically and empirically, in the educational field. A point that all contributions make is that while major, structuring features of the social formation (e.g. class, gender, race) play a clear part in influencing personal identity, they do not in any automatic way create groups with uniform selves. The experiences of the structuring features of the social order are often very differently felt and reacted to even within markedly similar groups.
