ABSTRACT
The sociology of education has undergone rapid change since the 1950s, when British sociologists first took an interest in education, through the establishment of a professional discipline in the late 1970s, to the current situation. This development is paradoxical in that the discipline achieved an intellectual standing and political influence in the 1950s that has not been seen since. If we are to consider the future of the discipline then we need to ask why its intellectual and political influence has declined. At a time when we can expect fundamental change to the discipline through retirements and cost-cutting this is a pressing question, but it has been asked before and continues to be asked since reflexivity can be seen as an integral element of the discipline (Dale, 2001a, 2001b; Shain and Ozga, 2001; Ball, 2008; Whitty, 2008). What makes this decline all the more puzzling is that each of the theoretical, methodological and institutional changes that have occurred in the field over this period can be seen to have addressed, albeit sometimes in new ways, fundamental questions about the nature of education in modern societies. Some of the key questions that have structured the discipline over the past 40 years are these:
1 What role does education play in the life chances of different groups in society?
