Towards a Sociology of Assessment

This paper is entitled ‘Towards a Sociology of Assessment’. As a result it has probably already offended a significant proportion of readers who see in such grandiose claims a desire for instant glory based on superficially appealing, but essentially glib, analyses put forward at the expense of genuine, patient and detailed scholarship. We have become familiar with the necessity for specific sociologies such as those of religion or education whose legitimacy is testified to by the existence of courses and posts in appropriate departments of higher education. This is because, as in any other discipline, there is continual pressure for greater specialization – the application of the rules of the subject to ever more finely demarcated aspects of social life. Thus in recent years we have seen the emergence within the sociology of education of identifiable sub-areas of concern – the sociology of deviance, the sociology of teaching, the sociology of curriculum, and the sociology of school organization – to name but a few. ¹ Each of these specialist areas has had to justify itself in terms of its independent contribution to the parent discipline, to the substantive area of concern, or both. Thus too, the sociology of education must justify itself in terms of the insights it can afford into general areas of sociological concern, whether this is the construction of social action at the micro level or, at the other extreme, the nature of advanced capitalist societies at the macro level. Alternatively, it must justify itself in terms of the insights it affords those involved in the practice of education itself – notably teachers.