ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the conceptual origins of what has become something of a signature position in United States's Radical Sociology of School Knowledge (RSSK) namely, Michael Apple's "Parallelist Position". It focuses on the analytical logic of this Structural Neo-Marxist agenda. The chapter establishes that the research in RSSK is open to these methodological criticisms and to argue that the conceptual framework represented in the Parallelist Position carries serious limitations for attempts to persuasively respond to such methodological problems. It explains that the conceptual apparatus set up by the US New Sociology has proven vague and difficult to employ and defend. The chapter presents an argument that while the political interests of the US New Sociology offered some consistent plausibility to its inclusion of gender and race among its central categories, this conceptual move has translated into a descriptively inconsistent theoretical framework. This theoretical inconsistency, has given the New Sociology potential responses to most specific criticisms.
