ABSTRACT
The survey of the literature has provided a kind of ‘Cook's tour’, with the conceptual framework of chapter acting as a kind of map. The ‘countries’ have been the various approaches ranging from the study of the school as a bureaucracy to investigatons of the interactional practice. The divisions in this literature are not, however, so easily spanned as geographical units, since often we seem to be looking at different continents, under different systems of projection, using differing sets of compass bearings. This may seem remarkable, since there often appear to be obvious points of contact. Is not the ‘divided school’ of the interactionists in some sense also ‘loosely coupled’? Do not the ‘myths and ceremonies’ of the established bureaucratic structures present a framework for studying situated encounters? It is perhaps only in the structuralist perspective that the opposed traditions of functionalism and interactionalism converge, as in Bernstein's theory of codes which ‘set the terms for the crucial encounters in the classroom context of teachers and pupils’ (1985), or in Goffman's frame analysis which sets out bundles of rules by which situated meanings are generated.
