Download British Journal of Sociology of Education

British Journal of Sociology of Education
Audio Interview with Madeleine Arnot, Editor
Jesus College, University of Cambridge, UK, 24 January 2011
Interview transcript
Q1: For researchers and students who have never encountered the journal, what’s it about
in a nutshell?
We call it the BJSE - British Journal of Sociology of Education – and we would consider it the leading,
most renowned sociology of education journal. Although it’s got ‘British’ in the title, it is actually an
international journal. It’s been based in Britain, and we use our British editors as well as our
international editors to develop a journal that will be of interest to anyone, in any part of the world,
who is involved in sociological research. The journal was founded in order to give the discipline a
voice and an outlet for its research, its theorizing, the development of ideas, the review of its books
in the field, so it was founded some 30 years ago in order to establish, if you like, the sociology of
education as a discipline. It’s based in the sociology discipline, but at the same time is also based in
the educational field, so we are in that sense in the space between the two areas of sociology and
education. It’s iconic in a way of what the discipline is doing through its research and its teaching.
We think that it’s a journal that is relevant to people teaching sociology of education courses, to
people researching the social in the real world, thinking about what is the social, what are the social
aspects of how people live, how people experience education, what people do with education in
their lives, the differences between how individuals can develop themselves and their talents, what
opportunities are available to them. And that of course means that we are interested in differences
between people’s experience, not just saying that there is something common across the
educational field. The space that we’ve created allows people to research and think about issues of
commonality and diversity in the human world.
Q2: What do you see as the strengths of the journal compared to other titles in the field?
I think the major strength of the journal is that it has a sustained identity. It knows what it is and
what its task is. And as a result of knowing what it is, it can achieve the highest academic and
publishing standards. The journal has had a long history and one of its strengths is in its continuity.
This is a journal with some 50 Editors, many of whom have been on the journal for a long, long time,
and they have been adjoined by new Editors who are taking up new themes and extending that
continuity into the new decades. The continuity is there because there is a community out there,
internationally, of sociologists who understand the parameters of the discipline and understand the
forms of knowledge we’re trying to publish. We can see in the history of the journal a continuity of
concern for issues of social justice, for issues of social equality. We can see that we’re concerned to
give voice, by publishing our research, to those groups who are marginalised, who would not
normally be heard. Sociologists are intrepid researchers and they tend to go into spaces and fields
and communities that are often neglected by mainstream educational researchers or by policy
makers. So there is that community of knowledge and the community of individuals that hold
together, so that’s one of its greatest strengths. The second strength is that it always aims to be
innovative. It aims to push the field forward; it’s not a static journal. It’s a journal that wishes to find
new ways of thinking about the social world, the social order, the social structure, the social
experiences in education. It wants to be intellectually challenging and it wants to be innovative, and
it does succeed in that, because if one looks at the record of the journal over the last 30 years, it has
moved considerably in how it has evolved theoretical frameworks and the styles of research that are
now being conducted. Increasingly, the journal has also opened up and has focussed attention on
the interfaces between the global, the national and the local, and the sociological concerns that
might have started in the Seventies, which were very British, have now moved outwards to thinking
what we have in common with education and its role in other societies, but also how we’re bound
together within a globalising context and the global influences, the relationships between countries
and also the types of experiences of communities and individuals and groups within other countries.
So it has become more and more global, and that is carrying that body of knowledge to a larger
context, a larger geography if you like.
We’ve seen a considerable expansion of the authorship, of the contributions coming in from
different authors, different people based in different institutions in many different countries around
the world. We have authors who write in a North American context, in the United States and
Canada, there is a strong Mediterranean interest from for example Germany or Malta or Spain.
There are many authors who are reading and thinking about the issues in the journal and then
contributing to it from China, Japan, Malaysia. Sociology of education is booming in many new
countries now, where they are interested in looking at the quality of the educational experience. For
example in the Tiger economies they have moved on to think about the quality of life, the sense of
wellbeing that people have, and then sociology of education has a lot to contribute. Some countries
are very concerned about their youth and what is happening to youth and whether they are
disaffected, whether they are engaged as civic actors in society, and they too are interested in
sociological research. We also have a very strong body of writers that come in, as one would expect,
through the English-speaking world, for example Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. There are
many different authors who have been writing for years in our journal, and what is so interesting is
how much we have in common in how we perceive the problems that need to be understood and
the theories that need to be developed, so in that sense it is a very powerful international site for
that dialogue.
Q3:What do you look for when considering articles and submissions for the journal?
If I could just take a moment to describe the procedures of what we do when we receive an article,
because it’s very important to note that this is a journal where all contributions are anonymously
refereed by two editorial board members. We actually use the editorial board, whether it’s the
executive or the editors - to referee the articles. Many journals have reviewers outside the editorial
board. We only use the editorial board. This gives us a tremendous advantage because the quality of
the reviewing is consistent, it’s informed and the editorial board members know what has been
published in the journal before they review it. As a result, when they are reading an article, they will
expect a contributor to have some knowledge of what was previously published, and some
referencing to previously published articles would be important. That again relates to the continuity
of keeping the sociological debate moving forward. The procedures are very simple and very clear.
The dialogue on a particular article takes place when the two referees offer constructive advice on
how to improve the submission. Many articles are sent really high quality comments on how to
revise and resubmit an article for consideration, which will make it more suitable for the journal. The
ethos of the journal is not to drop authors, or remove areas for consideration, it is rather to
encourage and promote high quality submissions into the journal. So there is no topic that is
unacceptable as such, the question is: how can it be made acceptable for the actual audience for the
BJSE? That international audience for the BJSE has to be taken into account when preparing a
submission because if one is writing in a national context – people often use acronyms instead of
organisation’s names, they don’t realise that the audience don’t understand the structure of the
education system in that country, or they might be referencing concepts and ideas that are familiar
in a national context but are not understood in an international context. Len Barton, the founder of
the journal, used to describe the reviewers’ reports as a gift, it was a gift to authors. The reviewers
take considerable time and energy to think how to best help the author engage with the problem
that they have raised in that particular article. This may be advice on the structure of the piece, it
may be that the theory needs more development, the claims that have been made are not
sufficiently based in evidence, the article doesn’t understand its own purpose – it needs to clarify
that purpose, whether it’s in the abstracts or whether it’s in the sections of the article. These are the
sorts of comments that a reviewer will make. The aim is to achieve an article that will be used in the
field.
The journal is recognised as a top outlet for research assessment purposes. And therefore reviewers
are aware that each contribution must reach that standard. Anyone considering submitting an article
to the journal needs to consider whether it is a sociological piece and whether this is the right place
to place it. This means not only the quality of sociological thinking - but also to locate the article
within the field of sociology of education, to find its place within the debates that have already
occurred, that it engages and moves forward the knowledge in the field, in that sense it has to be an
original piece of sociological thinking or research. There are different ways of doing that. Some
authors put in articles which deal directly with theories of particular individuals, or a body of
theories. For example there might be an article on Bernsteinian theory, and one would expect that
author to understand the chronology of Bernstein’s thinking and how he himself has addressed his
own conceptual framework. Therefore there would have to be some serious scholarly work on that
particular theory in order to satisfy the reviewers. Another type of article is where the particular
sociological interpretive frames are compared and contrasted. A number of authors wish to consider
how best one might understand, for example, identity, a young person’s identity, using different
theories of identity or different theories of sexuality, and again that would be entirely appropriate
for this journal. Many articles in the journal offer empirical data, some of them offer quantitative
data, some of them are deep, qualitative studies, whether they are narrative approaches, whether
they are ethnographies, whether they are the use of photography in research, there are many
different methodological approaches that can be published in the BJSE. If they are to be published in
the BJSE they need to locate that empirical data within the theoretical frameworks. They need to
indicate either how the theoretical framework informed the choice of research question, or how the
theoretical framework was used in the analysis of data. This is a common issue that is raised by
reviewers: whether that theoretical framework is up to date, whether it is informed on what was
previously published in the journal, and whether it is applied successfully to the empirical data. One
of the dangers in empirical research is that authors submit very descriptive pieces and they don’t
necessarily meet the standards of the journal, unless they have really engaged critically and
reflexively in their own empirical research. A comment by the reviewers is: “Does the data support
the claims made in the article?”
These are the sorts of issues that the reviewers raise in their comments and their comments are
extensive. There are no strict boundaries of how they understand what is suitable for education.
Sometimes we are asked ‘Is this suitable for the journal?’, ‘Is this the sort of topic that you would
publish?’ It is not so much the topic that’s the issue, it’s actually how that topic is located in an
article and worked on in the article so for example whether it’s the study of medicine, whether it’s
the study of culture, whether it’s a study of sporting activity of young people, whether it’s the study
of the media. We recently had an article on Barbie Dolls and how that affected young people. These
are topics that authors can publish in the BJSE because we don’t have a narrow definition of what is
education. It is not just based in the institutions of education it’s also based in the informal worlds of
education and culture. Similarly there can be research on the economy and politics that have a high
relevance for education and this journal has carried many contributions on the politics of education
and the ways in which government policy making has shaped the educational experiences of
communities and individuals.
Q4: What advice would you give to authors who are interested in writing for the
journal?
I think I would have three key pieces of advice for new authors. The first one is why do you want to
publish and why do you want to published in BJSE? I think you have to have a very clear sense of
your reasons for publishing in this journal, that you want to place your work and it might well be a
doctoral thesis or it might be a new piece of work that has started to seriously engage with
sociological writing, even if you weren’t trained in sociology, you are now engaging and wish to
engage with sociological writing and theorising and research.
The second thing you ask yourself is your research worth publishing? Are you at a stage where you
have sufficiently identified what is original about it? All knowledge is in some senses worth
publishing but it has to be developed enough to be published. It has to have an original idea in it,
perhaps one or two ideas that are clearly expressed and their originality is visible to the readers. It’s
worth publishing if it moves thinking forward, if it moves the boundaries of knowledge forward.
The third one: is it ready for publishing? Has the research reached a sufficient stage where the data
has been comprehensively analysed? You can get deep insights from a very small exploratory study.
These are two very different types of papers. We do publish a deep analysis of exploratory projects
but they can’t just be exploratory for the sake of it. Or you might say ‘no, I’m not yet ready’, you
need to actually work up the data to a further level before it is ready for publishing, only you can
make that judgment.
Some people ask about what is the particular style of article that they need to write and we can see
a great diversity of styles within the BJSE but it is a social science journal and in that sense the
articles tend to be shaped in a very similar way. They all have to provide an abstract that gives a
clear indication of what the aims and purposes of the article were and some of the findings and
ideally would also locate the interpretive framework and methodological choices that were made in
the article. Often submissions need to be advised on how to make explicit their purpose. The quality
of the piece is dependent on that purpose of the article being made quite explicit to the reader to
know what to expect and what their contribution of the article is to the field. This is where the
reviewers are looking for signs of originality and intellectual challenge. Our readership is
intellectually sophisticated and they wish to be challenged by an article in the journal. In terms of
the writing style we obviously expect all articles to be up to the professional standards in terms of
referencing, presentation and in terms of the polish of the writing. Sociologists are often accused of
using too much jargon, there is obviously quite a density of conceptual writing in the journal but at
the same time we must ensure that all contributions are accessible to non-national readers and that
the concepts are carefully defined and explained.
There are a number of different issues that are raised n terms of ethics, not just in terms of
copyright, for example the ethics in terms of how particular groups and societies are represented in
the writing. The journal is very aware that there should be no negative labelling of a particular group
by the use of offensive or derogatory language. There is an ethical duty not to make generalisations
on the basis of a particular sample of participants in a research project and generalising across a
much larger group, making too strong inferences or inaccurate inferences on the basis of the original
research.
The ethics of the journal are that it is committed to improving the lives of individuals and groups in
society, not just to research them and in that sense it has a political ethos around notions of social
justice and social equality. This ethos is one which has supported the work of sociologists in a variety
of different ways. There is no single definition of social justice or social equality but it does provide a
yard stick with which to consider contributions in terms of what positive addition they can give to
our thinking about how to help those who are disadvantaged or oppressed in a particular social
context, those whose lives have been held back if you like by their society. The contribution of
research to policy and to professional practice, to institutional reflection is very important for the
reviewers and the Editorial Board and in that sense there is a broader ethic that authors may wish to
consider when contributing to the journal.
Q5. Which issues or topics that have come through the journal recently have been
particularly successful or satisfying? (Marker 1)
The Editorial Board is particularly proud to have published a recent Special Issue on the Sociology of
Disability in Education. The reason we published this Special Issue was on the one hand as a tribute
to our founder Len Barton. What Len wanted to do was to encourage sociologists working on
disability in education to publish in British Journal of Sociology of Education. There are a number of
journals which focus on disability in education issues but our particular interest is in looking to
develop sociological theory in that field. The Special Issue has been a great success and we have
received great feedback from that initiative. We commissioned a number of leading writers and
asked them to comment both on Len’s contribution but also on the direction that the research was
taking in terms of the sociology of disability. What they highlight are the shifts in the ways in which
disability has been conceptualised from medical discourses to the social model of disability. They
highlight the importance of studying what Len himself would refer to as the politics of definition, the
power of some to define and regulate the identity and lives of others. The contributors to this
Special Issue point out how important it is to engage with the sociology of disability and the
experience of those affected by disabilities in terms of broad international concerns about universal
pedagogies or human rights or the concept of autonomy and dignity. Very often the experiences of
those who have disabilities are not connected to other issues of social inequality whether it’s social
class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and the journal wishes to mainstream these concerns into other
areas of research that are published in the journal and this Special Issue is quite a major statement
that we wish to encourage contributors to see our journal as the space within which to publish.
Q6: What topics do you hope to see in the journal in the next 5-10 years?
The context in which the BJSE is working has shifted dramatically in the last decade and our topics in
a sense reflect the changing role of education in society and what we are now looking at is the role
of education within what some people would call post-welfare society. This is fundamentally a very
different position for education to find itself in since our current education systems in what was
called the Global North was closely associated with a welfare state. What we are now seeing is the
coupling of that welfare state and the shifting position of education in relationship not just to the
state but also the communities that it serves. In Britain we see the rise now of free schools, whether
they want to set up their own schools, the relationship of those schools to government shifts
dramatically, the funding arrangements shift, the priorities shift. We also were witnessing curricula
reform, the changing role of teachers. Every aspect of education in the British context is seriously
under review. In a context where apparently we’re going to have something called the Big Society.
Now the Big Society is an empty space that is going to be filled by new types of institutions, new
types of alliance and new types of structures. There will be series consequences as we know in terms
of social inequality and how the poor cope with that post welfare environment, what will happen to
children living in poverty, what will happen to families living in poverty, what will happen in terms of
social class relationships, ethnic relationships, gender relationships. This is a sequence of issues that
are coming through we can see in the British context but it’s not just in the British context, it is
happening in many parts of the world and we can easily find common understandings and common
concerns about the reshaping of society as a result of this transformation.
Globalisation affects us in many, many different ways and the journal aims to map at any and every
level possible how that affects the local, and the institutional but also the personal moments of
change, the personal lives of individuals. So if we have any agenda for this century and for the next
two, three, four decades it will be to understand this shift in politics, this shift in political economies
around the world. At the same time of course we have this extraordinary explosion of the
communication industries and the ways in which individuals communicate and ally across the world
that education is no longer just in institution but it is through the world wide web, it’s through the
new technologies that are being introduced, inside the home, and the new issues that we will have
to start understanding, or better understanding if you like, will be to think of the consequences of
moving learning as Bernstein talked about the pedagogy society, of moving learning outside the
traditional frameworks of schooling and even of universities. There has been a tremendous growth
of interest in what has happened in universities globally and we find a number of articles and
contributors engaging with the transformation of higher education in many different international
context. This will lead to studies of the transformations of knowledge, the transformations of global
elites, the migrant student population and how that is playing out in the social development of a
country.
These themes are already being seen through articles being submitted to the journal but we hoping
to find a space in the Special Issues to engage with these sorts of topics, in the current fiscal global
crisis and its social effects at national level and also at the other levels. Our Special Issue we are
thinking of focusing on in the future is on “State Education and the Great Recession” and we are
hoping that will attract authors to contribute to that issue.
Q7: Are there any significant events on the academic calendar that you see being of
strategic importance to the journal?
There are a number of different international and national conferences where sociologists of
education gather and they present articles and many of those articles are published at a later point
in the British Journal of Sociology of Education. There’s the Sociology of Education strand within the
British Sociological Association, the American Sociological Association. Many sociologists of
Education first present their research within the special interest group within the British Educational
Research Association conference, there’s a Special Interest Group on social justice and social theory
in Education, and there are other international conferences such as the European Educational
Research Association again where sociologists of education run symposium or present their papers.
These conferences play a particularly important role in testing out the research as it were and are a
very good stepping stone to publishing in the BJSE. Our journal is often represented at these
conferences and it is always valuable to attend journal round tables where the British Journal of
Sociology of Education is discussed. For example there is a journal round table at the AERA where I
will be happy to talk to any potential contributor about their research and potential suitability for
the journal.
Q8. How do you see the journal developing in the future?
We started 2011 with a new look for the journal, we have a new cover and the journal has
integrated the international and national editors into the same panel. This is symbolic of the way
that we wish to go now which is to ensure that colleagues in Britain and abroad word together to
share their understanding of the global context of education. The editors are now united into the
same framework and the journal has clearly signalled on its back page that it wishes to encourage
analysis of global developments whether they are new theoretical approaches that will come in from
other parts of the world, not just the Global North, that we would be interested in exploring, the
economic development and education, encouraging authors in the Global South to contribute to the
journal. This new look is extending our existing work but also signalling clearly that we would like to
see new ideas and new ways of thinking about education in the contributions to our journal issues.
We have also invited a number of new editors to join the journal both British and International and
this will extend our spheres of interest and we hope that it will also move our thinking forward in
terms of emergent topics and concerns.