ABSTRACT
Our purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, we seek to make a case for the relevance of Bernstein’s sociological enterprise both for current research in education and in the context of recent directions taken by educational policy-makers in most of the developed countries of the world. Our second and more particular purpose is to consider them in the light of some of the most important debates in current French scholarship, not least in the hope that they become more accessible to an English-reading audience. It is important to note that in setting this target we are merely extending one of the features of Bernstein’s sociology which is built, to a not insignificant extent, on an unfaltering engagement with French sociological research. Reading in French was never an easy task for him, yet his firm and productive commitment was to engage as closely as possible with research which he sometimes referred to, perhaps somewhat hastily, as ‘Parisian versions of the sociology of reproduction’ (Bernstein, 2000: 5). Not only did Bernstein read all of Bourdieu’s works, he also displayed keen interest in the work of Bourdieu’s heirs and opponents. Yet there is a striking paradox here for, while in France Bernstein’s work has long been caricatured and undermined by misunderstandings of Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 1 (1971), translated and published in France in 1975, the label ‘Parisian versions of the sociology of reproduction’ has frequently served, for English-speaking sociologists, to conceal his three decades of reflection on, beyond and against Bourdieu’s sociology. The object of our endeavour is to contribute to renewed critical engagement with French sociology by outlining, for the purposes of illustration, some post-Bourdieu sociological directions and ‘voices’ that may gain from a comparison with Bernstein’s analyses. We intend to highlight some littleknown facts about French sociology by outlining alternative sociological directions among the many that can be seen to lie at the margins of Bourdieu’s work. We wish to draw attention to relationships between certain logics that are specific to the intellectual field, such as the visibility/invisibility of academic research and current political, social and discursive shifts
within educational systems. In other words, this chapter is driven by an interest in issues in the sociology of knowledge, though it also addresses issues raised by the profound transformation observed in current discourses on education in particular and sociology in general. We readily acknowledge our commitment to the biased and partial nature of this outline, a full development of which is beyond the scope of this chapter. Moreover, the subjectivity and possible incompleteness of this approach needs to be acknowledged, and we may run the risk of being criticised for the ‘bookishness’ of our presentation.
