Introduction

The work of the French social theorist, Pierre Bourdieu, has attracted increasing interest in recent years. Since initial publications in the late 1950s and early 1960s he has demonstrated considerable intellectual rigour and insight in engaging with the main social science debates of the day. The list of topics and themes he has covered takes in most of the major fields of study. However, it is education to which his attention has repeatedly turned, and it is probably in education that his ideas have had the greatest impact. Much of his early work dealt with educational issues, topics and themes and appeared in two major books: Les Héritiers (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964) and La Reproduction. Eléments pour une théorie du système d’enseignement (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970). The latter was published in English in 1977 and quickly became a classic text in the sociology of education canon. Bourdieu also contributed two chapters to the seminal book, Knowledge and Control (1971), which was edited by Michael Young and represented a new sociological direction in the study of the processes of classroom knowledge construction.