ABSTRACT
Sociology is carried out in an historical context, and its approaches and problems are an expression of that context. Contemporary sociology offers a weakly co-ordinated body of thought and practices, but it is extraordinarily prolific in approaches. The chapter traces a number of influences in both the USA and here, which lead to a rather different approach to the sociology of education. The first approach placed its emphasis upon macrostructural relationships as these controlled the relationships between levels of the educational system, the organisational features of schools and their selective principles, and the interrelationships with the division of labour, social stratification and social mobility. The sociological imagination should make visible what is rendered invisible through the society's institutional procedures, and through the daily practices of its members. Structural relationships do not necessarily imply a static social theory, nor do they imply features which are empirically unchanging.
