ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with social life in disciplines. More specifically, it seeks to address the question: are evaluative cultures in disciplines able to generate stable judgements, irrespective of their knowledge structure, and despite shifting norms of truth and adequacy? Many in the humanities would doubt it (see Lamont, 2009). Furthermore, disciplines are semi-virtual communities, and most members of the discipline will never know each other or meet face-to-face, which makes the generation in all disciplinary evaluative cultures of a (relatively) stable basis for cognitive judgement all the harder to imagine for many sociologists. Recent work in the Bernsteinian scholarly community, including my own, has concentrated on relations ‘within’, on the internal structuring of knowledge fields. This has led to a set of interesting departures which have, in one or another way, stressed the intrinsic differences between knowledge structures (Maton and Moore, 2010). This work has opened up new areas of enquiry of critical importance for education but at the same time has deflected attention away from an equally important set of considerations that Basil Bernstein (1996: 170) flagged in his landmark paper on discourses, namely the question of their similarity, not their difference:
I, on the contrary [marking out the distinctiveness of his approach from that of Bourdieu’s], want to point to their similarities. I am not concerned with fundamental similarities of logic. The similarity I have in mind refers to the role of distributive rules in both forms of knowledge and in the social relations which optimise the discourse.
