ABSTRACT
For social mobility theorists, intergenerational transmission involves a threesided relationship between the family, education and occupation. While the cumulative direction of social mobility studies leaves us with some puzzles about the relationship between educational policy, changes in the education system and patterns of equality and attainment, research has shown that education increasingly mediates the direct relationship between the family (origin) and occupation (destination). More precisely, the specific education and credentials that are acquired crucially regulate who gets what in the labour market. Yet puzzles remain. Why, for example, has the shift from selection to comprehensivisation had so little effect on ‘gaps’ in attainment and why have middle and professionalclass children not only retained but seemingly increased their capacity to capture jobs in desirable sectors of the labour markets? Does this represent a ‘failure’ of policy or simply its incapacity to transform aspects of the social structure that enable the transmission of inequalities to persist regardless of policy attempts to interrupt social reproduction? These are questions that social mobility theorists cannot really answer without sociologically rich accounts and insights into structure and processes in the two sites which regulate inter-generational transmission of opportunity and equality, the family and school. Whereas the relations and conditions of production ultimately determine the possibilities for ‘reproduction’, the family and school are the sites where social, linguistic, cognitive, cultural and educational identities are created and transmitted. For a greater understanding of the role of the family, the school and their interrelationships with respect of intergenerational transmission we turn to Bernstein’s work.
