ABSTRACT
Introduction Analysing Bourdieu’s contribution in the area of educational policy appears at first sight a strange undertaking. We know that though he was intensely interested in, indeed fascinated by, the role of schools in advanced capitalist societies, he actually wrote very little on what is usually thought of as policy. As Wacquant (1997) noted in the Preface to the English translation of Bourdieu’s (1989) La noblesse d’etat, and this applies even more to his earlier major works on the educational system, Les héritiers (Bourdieu and Passeron 1964) and La reproduction (Bourdieu and Passeron 1970),1 there is little reference in his work on educational institutions to official state structures, policies or personnel. And even if we move from the level of policy formulation to policy enactment, i.e. what actually occurs inside educational institutions and classrooms (the main focus of Bourdieu’s analyses), there is once again little analysis of the micropolitics of schooling: agents’ reinterpretations, negotiations and resistances (Ball 1987). Should we then conclude that it is irrelevant or uninteresting to examine this major French sociologist’s work on education from a policy perspective? I will argue that it is neither, for two main reasons.
