ABSTRACT
Contemporary accounts of school subjects arise from two major perspectives-the sociological and the philosophical. Sociological accounts have followed a suggestion made in 1968 by Musgrove that researchers should:
…examine subjects both within the school and the nation at large as social systems sustained by communication networks material endowments and ideologies. Within a school and within a wider society subjects as communities of people, competing and collaborating with one another, defining and defending their boundaries, demanding allegiance from their members and conferring a sense of identity upon them… even innovation which appears to be essentially intellectual in character, can usefully be examined as the outcome of social interaction.1
