ABSTRACT
Western industrial nations in the post-war period have experienced two conflicting trends: an almost unprecedented expansion of the productive forces and an increase in the rate of capital accumulation. The phase of expansion was characterized by a recovery of optimism and self-confidence within bourgeois society. This was the era of the end of ideology thesis. By the middle of the 1960s, however, a more pessimistic outlook was developing with the appearance of the symptoms of a crisis in the western world. Against such a background, it is hardly surprising that sociology has undergone some major shifts in orientation. Despite a pretence that sociology provides explanations of social phenomena in the real world, most of the liveliest discussions in the discipline in recent years have been concerned with meta-questions concerning ontology, epistemology or methodology. The sociology of education suffers from incorporation, fragmentation, and empiricism.
