Download (Manuscript for Jopi Nyman (ed.) Studies in the

(Manuscript for Jopi Nyman (ed.) Studies in the Sociology of Education and Culture. Publications
of the Department of Sociology 6/2005, University of Joensuu)
CLASSICAL SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES AND THE MODERN SOCIOLOGY OF
1
EDUCATION
Ari Antikainen
1. Classical Social Theory and the Sociology of Education
In European sociology, the latter half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th was the
period of the classics. Karl Marx (1818-1883), Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) and Max Weber
(1864-1920) each presented their own critical commentaries on the economic, political and social
processes shaping society and the world in the process of modernization. They gave rise to classical
social theory (cf. Holton 1996) that was becoming independent from moral philosophy and political
philosophy, albeit somewhat lacking in definition in terms of time and space. Two social changes,
namely the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, are considered to have had a decisive
impact on its content.
Industrialization and the development of capitalism, secularization and individualization,
rationalization and the development of modern bureaucracy, as well as urbanization and the
development of democracy, were the processes in the midst of which the classics of sociology lived
and which they addressed in their works. Many of these processes have continued at least up to the
present day, and thus the classics’ thinking has been the source of ever new influences for modern
sociology, too, although some scholars consider their significance to be largely historical.
Social Structure
One of the pivotal contributions of the classics may be crystallized in the concept of social structure
(Holton 1996, 27). By ‘structure’ they meant those systems of social interrelations that appeared to
affect the lives of individuals as external forces. The idea of social structure originated from 18th
century Enlightenment philosophy, but the works of Marx and Durkheim are the definitive classical
sources of the concepts of structure and action.
Durkheim, like Marx, drew a clear distinction between nature and society (Holton 1996, 32). He
defined it by saying that social reality is the unique reality (sui generis), or that social or social
‘facts’ – as he wrote – should be explained by the social, i.e. other social facts, and not by the
biological or psychological. This argument thus justified sociology as its own autonomous science.
Today, we can also criticize it and emphasize the importance of multidisciplinary and
interdisciplinary approaches. Durkheim, formerly Professor of Education, was subsequently
appointed Professor of Sociology at the University of Sorbonne in 1912, occupying the first Chair
of sociology in Europe. For him, the central question concerning social structures was: How is
society possible under modern conditions? That is, conditions, where traditions were broken and
individualism flourished. His reply was that the prevailing model of social solidarity keeps society
intact. By social solidarity he meant consensus of values, or moral consensus, and society’s
normative regulation. While Marx maintained that the means of production was the glue that kept
1
The paper is based on my manuscript of Chapter 11, “Monet kasvatussosiologiat? (Many Sociologies
of Education?)” in Antikainen, A., Rinne, R. & Koski, L. 2000. Kasvatussosiologia (Sociology of
education). Helsinki: WSOY.
society together, in Durkheim’s view it was moral duty. But it is also social, external and coercive,
rather than personal commitment. In his book The Division of Labour in Society and in his later
writings, he examines the transition from collective and rigid mechanical solidarity towards more
individual and permissive organic solidarity. Due to Durkheim’s functional approach and normative
explanation, he has sometimes been seen as a conservative thinker. If Durkheim is a conservative,
then the majority of sociology shares his conservatism. In his own time, he was a political and
cultural radical. Alongside an economic explanation, Durkheim brought into sociology a normative
explanation.
Social Action
If the question ‘How is society possible?’ is changed to the form ‘Why do people act the way they
act?’, Max Weber’s contribution to classical sociological theory (Holton 1996, 40) may be more
naturally described. In addition to Marx and Durkheim’s placing of structures above action and
human agency, they may be deemed – in their emphasis of the material (Marx) or the moral and
normative (Durkheim) – to represent an one-dimensional, causal explanation of action. Weber, on
the other hand, strove to develop a multidimensional approach to social action, where structure and
human agency, and the material and the normative were combined. Weber’s point of departure was
individual action and the idea that people act on the basis of the meanings they give to the social
world around them. Consequently, according to Weber, people do not act coerced by social facts,
but in accordance with socially constructed meanings. Thus, his sociology is understanding
(verstehen) of the action of actors. In Europe, it is called the verstehende method, and often in
America, the interpretative approach. Society, in turn, is only possible if it enables action that is
relevant to the individual, which in practice means the existence and implementation of different
values and interests.
Weber, too, did see coercive forces in modernization. For him, the central process was
rationalization, or the growth of impersonal logics led by calculativity, intellectualism and
instrumental goals. Like an ‘iron cage’, they can govern meaningful human action and lead to the
‘disenchantment of the world’. The triumph of bureaucracy as an organizational model or the view
of technological development as an intrinsic value would be good examples of this iron cage–like
development. We should also mention Weber’s concept of legitimate dominance as an example of
the fusion of structure and action in his works. Weber distinguishes between the concepts of power
(Macht) and dominance (Herrschaft). Power represents action which can succeed in fulfilling its
objectives even when the objects of power are in opposition or in a position of resistance. War and
class conflicts are examples of such action. Legitimated dominance, on the other hand, precludes
the voluntary commitment of those under dominance, and thus enables meaningful action.
Dominance can acquire legitimacy through three alternative principles: tradition, rational
legitimacy, represented by e.g. prescribed law, or through charisma. Charisma refers to leaders’
personal qualities. Weber believed in charisma as a counterforce for rationalization and
bureaucratization. This idea also has its weaknesses, as we find, if we list charismatic political
leaders, starting with Hitler and Stalin.
G.H. Mead (1934) developed the social analysis of the self much further than the European
theorists. For him, the self was a social unit. It cannot be placed, unlike the psyche was placed by
the Greeks, in the heart, the head or in any organ. It is a social entity which must be related to the
whole body (Holton 1996, 47). Thus, Mead cleared the way for the current concept of the embodied
self, and for breaking the Cartesian mind/body dualism. Thus, the self is formed in social
interaction, but it is not a puppet of social forces. A wider symbolic order is similarly formed in
social interaction between people, but also with ideas and objects. The crucial idea is that not only
interaction but active communication is necessary for it. The key factor is ‘gesture’, whether verbal
or non-verbal – speech, body language or equivalent. It is said that Mead invented the concept of
gesture while observing the behaviour of dogs. Gestures carry meanings and information. Play or a
game would seem to be Mead’s model or metaphor for the mechanism of creation of a symbolic
system. For a child, it was such in a concrete way, since a child enters a network of relationships
through the ‘generalized other’ – or social values – through games and the internalization of their
rules. So, like Durkheim, Mead ended up with a symbolic system that was above individuals, but
for him, that system was based on human agency and interaction between human individuals. Thus,
Mead’s contribution was the combination of individual and social observations of social order. He
has faced the criticism that his sociological theory does not show a clear connection between
interpersonal micro level and macro level structures.
Classical sociological theory posed at least the following theoretical questions: the question of
structure and human agency, the question of the problem of social order, the question of the place of
meaning, and the question of the nature of self. It talked of markets, capital, the state, but little of
race and ethnicity. It was largely silent on questions of gender and the world outside Europe and the
United States – with the exception of Weber’s study of world religions.
The Sociology of Education
All three classics, Marx, Durkheim and Weber, have extended a strong influence on the sociology
of education. Durkheim is generally held to be the actual ‘father’ or founder of the discipline, or its
first representative. For decades, he held the post of Professor of Education at the universities of
Bordeaux and Sorbonne – a fact often kept quiet by sociologists – before the founding of the Chair
of sociology at the Sorbonne. He was also the only one of the three to engage in research directly
concerning education. Durkheim’s output is so wide-ranging and multidimensional that it is subject
to different interpretations. From the perspective of educational research, his output contains
important aspects both in terms of theory and content, as well as methodology. Perhaps the first
thing to mention is that he engaged in systematic study of education and proposed a programme of
sociology of education. It states e.g. the need for a historical and comparative study of the education
system, study of the social functions or tasks of education, scrutiny of the school community and
the roles of teacher and pupil, and study of the processes in a school classroom. It had a marked
impact on later sociology of education, and it is apparent that many later general proposals of
sociology of education have shadowed this programme, discussed in his book Education and
Sociology (1956).
The second key aspect in my view is that Durkheim examined morality, or actually societies and
communities as moral units. He was interested in the integration of societies, held together by social
solidarity. Here, too, education played an important role. In a secularized society, education and the
school was taking the place of religion and the church. In an industrial society differentiated in
terms of division of labour and containing diversity, governed by organic solidarity, formal or
systematic education represented the official form of socialization. Teachers were like the priests of
a secularized society, in any case representatives of society. The core of the community is what is
held to be sacred, as opposed to the secular. What is sacred is not only God or his equivalent, but
also many other things representing the community and its preservation. They are reproduced, that
is their continuity is produced, largely in everyday established rituals, but also in festive occasions
and other representations where the community – like in an act of religious worship – is celebrated.
Morality was discussed by Durkheim in his book Moral Education (1961). Classifications of
knowledge, too, originate in the methods of social organization, as Durkheim convincingly shows
in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1954).
As the third aspect worthy of examination, I would name his theoretical-methodological thinking.
Durkheim is often cited as the founder of sociological functionalism, and actually his social facts –
that is, his idea of the object of sociological study – may be understood with the aid of social
functions, one of the aspects of which is keeping an ever wider social community alive and
functioning. Sociology is, for him, ‘the science of institutions, their origins and functions’. Function
offers a methodology for the study of social facts, study which should be objective as in the natural
sciences, or external, with the object of study precisely defined and its observation executed as if it
was an object. The Rules of Sociological Method discusses this, and his work Suicide has been read
by many generations of sociologists as a case study. When the main weakness of functionalism has
been held to be its inability to explain social change and conflict, this criticism may be directed at
Durkheim, too. However, his output also contains other than functionalistic studies. His study of
the history of education in France, The Evolution of Educational Thought (1977), reveals clear
characteristics of conflict theory. The same applies to his thinking on change in society’s division
of labour, and on how people can change their action and the values and norms that govern it by
‘coming together’, or through increasing communication and interaction. Education, to Durkheim,
is methodical or systematic socialization, or society’s official means of transmission its culture and
social order to a new generation.
Marx addresses education and training throughout his works, but only as one of many subsidiary
topics. Later Marxist studies have examined in more detail e.g. the ideological role of the state in
education and education as reproducer or maintainer of class society from one generation to the
next.
Weber, too, failed to directly address education. Yet, his importance in the sociology of education is
great. Through seeing social stratification and conflicts as more multidimensional than Marx,
Weber cleared the way for thinking on knowledge – at least in the form of credentials – as the
mechanism of competition between social groups. Starting from the 1960s, the interactionist, or in
America the interpretative school of research, influenced by the verstehende method, quickly gained
ground. In the study of the school organization, Weber’s idea of bureaucratization of society has
been pivotal. For him, the characteristic features of bureaucracy were:
• precise division of labour, including definition of tasks and duties,
• a highly developed system of rules and regulations,
• hierarchical structure and clear definition of authority,
• impersonal and distant approach to other people,
• written documents and archiving,
• separation of administrative personnel and ownership, and
• mapping of progress and career structure. (Weber 1947)
G.H. Mead’s theory of action may be even more prevalent and significant than has been hitherto
understood. A large proportion of Meadian empirical studies have concerned school interaction.
Mead’s approach, however, has much to offer also to the study of learning in general. His approach,
in its emphasis on the learner’s self-definition and definition of the situation, and their maintenance
or development in social interaction, conflicts with the kind of study of learning that analyses
learning as a function of the learner’s intrinsic ability. In this respect, he is near the thinking of e.g.
L.S. Vygotsky (MacLennan 2003). The influences of symbolic interactionism passed to the
sociology of education e.g. through Florian Znanieck and Karl Mannheim. It is interesting that
Mannheim, forced to move to England from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, used particularly the ideas
of John Dewey and G.H. Mead in his programme of social (third way) reconstruction. Society or
plurality of societies as educator and the goal-oriented concept of man were ideas he adopted during
his London period.
2. One or Several Sociologies of Education?
In the 1980s, the condition and situation of sociology was often characterized by references to
‘many sociologies’. The plurality of sociological theory and methodology had resulted in a
situation where even a common core was no longer deemed to exist. However, it could be argued
that the plurality of sociology may also be exaggerated, and that unifying factors and attempts at
synthesis are also to be found.
In any case, fundamental theoretical and methodological differences have resulted at least from
differences between structure and agency, macro level and micro level, and quantitative and
qualitative method. Furthermore, opinions have been divided by postmodernism.
The sociology of education was born at the turn of the century both in America and Europe as
educational sociology, which endeavoured to solve the social problems of education using
sociological thinking and research. The sociology of education emerged to respond to social
challenges of its time, for example in the United States to multiculturalization of American society,
and to carry the ideas represented by scientific thinking of the time. In the early decades of the
century this meant that empirical sociological research modelled on the natural sciences combined
with the traditional normativity of education or pedagogics was thought to solve social problems,
once decision-makers were made aware of research results. In the United States this manifested as a
technological orientation, a kind of social engineering, and in Europe as the advent of social
pedagogics.
The concept of educational sociology was first used by John Dewey, one of the founders of
pragmatic philosophy. George E. Payne, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Educational Sociology,
the discipline’s first American journal founded in 1927, defined it as follows:
By educational sociology we mean the science which describes and explains the
institutions and social forms through which the child gains and organizes his experiences
and those institutions and social forms in relation to which the child must function in
adult life. These institutions and social forms are regarded particularly in their relation to
the educational system in its evolution and changing functions. (Card 1959, 361).
The institutional development of early educational sociology was rapid. According to Banks (1971),
the number of universities offering courses in educational sociology in the United States and Britain
alone rose from 40 in 1910 to 194 by the year 1927. Between the years 1916 and 1936, 25 general
textbooks of educational sociology were published in these countries. Conversely, educational
sociology did not become a professional discipline, unlike educational psychology or didactics, but
for example educational administration sought its influences mainly from the teachings of business
management.
The later stages of the sociology of education vary depending on national and academic context.
Therefore, I will not attempt to describe them here. Instead I will try to outline the sociological
theories of education, as the basic coordinates of the field. Naturally, popularity of theories, too,
has varied by nationality and ideology. Through the decades, however, a certain idea has been
formed of the strengths and limitations of different theories in different research tasks or
applications (cf. Turner & Mitchell 1997; Morrow & Torres 1995; Demaine 2001; Izquierdo &
Minguez 2003). It should be noted that sociological theory is a part of more general development in
society and the social sciences. Furthermore, students of education have, as researchers, often been
more interested in application of ready-made theories to the observation of their field and their
practice, than in their creation.
Sociological theories in sociology, politology, as well as in economics, often focus on one of the
three levels of human social behaviour.
• The micro level observes the behaviour of individuals. Society and other social environments,
such as institutions, are seen as contexts that allow, direct, interpret or limit the individual’s
actions. The objects of study are social consciousness, evolution of models of meaning and
social interaction, and, for example, production of identities or assumption of roles.
• Intermediary or meso level theories deal with institutions and organizations. The targets for
observation are groups and structures and the processes they contain, such as leadership and
decision-making, role structure, professional careers and social identities.
• Macro level theories examine social order, social stratification and interaction between social
institutions. The theories of the classics are a good example. Although socio-educational
research is usually targeted at micro and meso levels, the theoretical map of the macro level is
perhaps the most highly developed or at least the clearest.
Sociological research into education has been largely dominated by four macro level theoretical
approaches. They are functionalism, economic theories such as the exchange theory and the rational
choice theory, conflict theories and interactionist theories. Interactionist theory most clearly also
extends into micro levels.
Functionalism
Functionalism looks at how social structures and prerequisites and aims of a more confined social
system, such as the education system, meet. In its basic form, functionalism is system thinking,
which views society as a self-governing total system akin to a biological organism, where its
structural parts (subsystems, for example social institutions) have their own cohesive functions
(tasks).
The fundamental question posed by functionalism is: how does this object of study (institution, role
or ritual) further the integration of society. The most common object of study in the sociology of
education has been the classification of the social functions of education, for instance,
differentiation between the educational functions of qualification, socialization and selection. In the
tradition of the sociology of education, the originator of this movement is Emile Durkheim, and the
American Talcott Parsons’s (1959) structural functionalism its most authoritative exponent. Parsons
also had his own theory of action, which diverged from the thinking of Max Weber and economic
liberalism precisely in its normativity. Parsons and Shils (1961, 150) express it as follows: ”What
people want most is to be responded to, loved, approved and esteemed.”
Parsons viewed social action as systems on three levels.
• The social system consisted of roles corresponding with status and the norms governing them.
• ‘Above’ it, culture comprised the values that integrate norms applied to roles.
• The system of personality thus consisted of the individual and his needs. The individual’s action
consists of choices of aims and means.
Society is reproduced through individuals performing their roles in an environment delineated by
values and norms. Functionalism has retained its position of authority, although its emphasis has
shifted from macro level to meso level. In addition, it has widened in the direction of general
system theory (Vanderstraeten 2003).
Economic Theories
In economic, or more accurately utilitarian theories, social order is seen to evolve as the unplanned
result of exchange activity between people. Rational choice theory emphasizes the rationality of
actors and the hierarchic nature of values. Most utilitarian theories also make the assumption that
actors endeavour to maximize their benefit in exchanges of resources with other actors. Thus, man
is mainly a homo economicus, who acts selfishly in striving for benefit based on his personal
preferences. Rational choice theories or more commonly rational action theories have been
developed in many sciences, and there are several types of rationality (cf. Coleman & Fararo 1992).
Following Weber’s model, the subjective rationality of the individual may be the most natural
starting point in sociological study. In many empirical studies of education, a certain general
rationality of e.g. educational choices is acknowledged, but the results show that it does not alone
explain choices, but the explanation also requires consideration of unequal distribution of resources,
such as a family’s cultural capital (e.g. Gambetta 1987).
However, the human capital approach is the most influential representative of economic thinking in
the sociology of education. Often, it operates both at micro and macro levels. In principle, human
capital is generated in any action that raises the productivity of the individual worker. In practice,
studies have focused on full-time education and training. According to the results of Gary Becker
(1964) and other researchers of this approach, individual incomes vary in accordance with the
amount of investment in human capital, when other variables have been standardized. On micro
level, individuals are seen to calculate the ratio between the benefits gained by participation in
training (such as higher pay or status) and the cost of training (such as time spent and lost pay), and
to act accordingly. Here they are assisted by mass media, by its dissemination of information about
wages and costs. On macro level, societies are seen to invest in education in order to improve
accumulation of human capital, and thus to increase productivity. These theories have been
favourite targets of sociological criticism. Critics of micro level question the rationality of actors,
or its possibilities. Individuals are not deemed to possess the necessary comprehensive information,
and on the other hand, social and cultural structures set constraints on individual action. On macro
level, assumptions of social and economic productivity of training have been questioned. I am
minded to think that the advent of new information technologies as an intermediary factor has
increased the life span and popularity of human capital theory, and this thinking in general. For
many critics, an alternative is provided by conflict theories.
Conflict Theories
Thus, functionalism is grounded on the idea that social order is founded upon some degree of
acceptance and consensus of values and norms, and it sees conflicts as dysfunctional, as disorder.
Economic theories, on the other hand, see exchange processes as pivotal, and conflicts as
interruptions or disorder in these exchange relationships and activities. Conflict theories consider
benefits or interests more important than values and norms, and see conflicts as a normal part of
social life, and not as dysfunctional or exceptional. In that sense, social order is based on power and
coercion rather than consensus of values. Marxist theories stress economic conflicts and
consequently class conflicts, Weberian theories stress conflicts of power and dominance between
status groups with more undefined boundaries.
The relationship between pupils’ cultural background and the school has been described using e.g.
the concept of resistance (Willis 1978; Giroux 1983). The concept of resistance is rather nebulous,
and it is comprehensible only in relation to reproduction theories. According to resistance theories,
reproduction does not take place directly and immediately, but pupils and students may resist the
school’s objectives and actions. A well-known case study by Willis concerned English working
class boys. The boys knew that they would end up working on the factory floor, and by their action
– e.g. by making fun and ridiculing the school’s activities – paradoxically brought about this fate
conforming to their background.
Weberian conflict theories, too, address the relationship between the stratification of education and
society and its reproduction. Weber’s concept of dominance, however, is wider that the Marxist
concept of power. Similarly, status groups do not struggle like classes for not only power, but also
honour, appreciation and cultural resources. Randall Collins’s The Credential Society (1979) is a
good example of Weberian conflict theory. For him, schools are instruments for maintaining
cultural differences between individuals and groups. Status groups compete with each other and
credentials are the central arena in this struggle and conflict. To Collins, compalsory education is
associated with maintenance of military and political discipline, rather than knowledge and skills
required by the world of work. The expansion of education and particularly of higher education is
essentially the result of competition between status groups, and not as such particularly related to
society’s need and labour force requirements.
The Marxist and Weberian conflict theories can also be seen as complementary. In this respect, the
contribution of Pierre Bourdieu (1977; 1984) has been decisive. Finnish sociologists of education
express their influences by Bourdieu as follows:
Education is capital and an object of investment. It is amassed, sold and developed.
Through education, everyone travels to his position in society. Education classifies,
distinguishes and selects. It produces status, knowledge, style and wealth. The lot of
some is also stupidity, lack of style and poverty. Education opens and closes routes in
people’s lives. (Kivinen, Rinne & Ahola 1989).
Interactionist Theories
Interactionist theories emphasize the meso and micro levels of human action and the social world.
One could also talk about theories of symbolic interaction or symbolic interactionism (Blumer
1969; Plummer 1996). In the study of education, there are three clearly distinct interactionist
approaches: symbolic interactionism and role theory, dramaturgical sociology and
ethnomethodology, and phenomenological sociology. Symbolic interactionism was mainly
developed by the so-called Chicago school, and in particular by George Herbert Mead (1934). The
fundamental concept is that people act on the basis of meanings, and the object of study is how
meanings originate in interaction. The self, too, is seen as a social product and it has at least two
facets: the subjective self (I) and the objective self (me). The former is the creative side of the self
and the latter the passive, ‘social’ side that mirrors others. The self can also be seen as even more
multidimensional. In interaction, there naturally are ‘others’, who may be people or ideas or objects.
As a child develops, particularly through different kinds of play, he develops morality and values,
or the ‘generalized other’. As well as in theory of socialization, symbolic interactionism has been
applied in biographical research and in studies of school interaction. Thus, e.g. teachers’ and pupils’
concepts of self, definitions of situations and roles have been studied (Hargreaves 1967; Delamont
1976; Woods 1983; Pollard 1985). School interaction has been construed as a process of
negotiation.
Erving Goffman (1983) in his original output sought ‘interaction order’ to connect the micro and
macro levels. The object of his study was what people – and different people and in different
situations – do, when others are present. He based his studies largely on Emile Durkheim’s ideas of
the significance of rituals and symbols in everyday life. They are far from meaningless, but transfer
the ‘sacred’ and collective consciousness to a new generation. In his early works, he analysed social
life in the light of a theatrical metaphor, saying that on different stages and different stage settings
or frames people perform different roles and try to give different impressions (Goffman 1959). For
him, social order is a consequence of any such group of moral norms that govern the way in which
people strive to achieve their goals (Goffman 1963). So, everyday interaction models are systems or
codes that reflect the whole rule system of the society, the ‘interaction order’. ‘Face’ was an
important object of study to Goffman, and he thought that people strive in every way to maintain
face. One group of stages were total institutions, such as mental hospitals and prisons, but partially
also schools that may label or even stigmatize their members (Goffman 1990). From this
perspective, he studied the moral career of psychiatric hospital patients. Goffman’s influences are
visible for example in a study of school interaction, where his concept of encounter – or conscious
and planned interaction – or the closely related concept of strategic interaction, or the concept of
constitutive actions in a school’s activity is applied (Woods 1983; Mehan 1992). So, attempts have
been made at analyzing the tangles of ‘interaction order’. Goffman’s insightful set of concepts of
face-to-face interaction has also been called ‘mini concepts’.
According to phenomenological philosophy, consciousness is the only phenomenon of whose
existence we can be certain. The study of consciousness has been particularly founded on the
philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Alfred Schutz based his own sociological study on Husserl’s
phenomenology, intent on examining how people construct the objects of consciousness and the
information pertaining to them from an undifferentiated stream of experience, and how we ‘take for
granted’ the course of our everyday lives. The basic process (first order) of consciousness is
typification, and the task of sociologists in turn is to construct (second order) typifications based on
them, rational models within which people act like puppets. The so-called new sociology of
education was influenced by phenomenology when it proposed that it should analyse those
assumptions, held to be self-evident, that in the world of education are associated with definitions of
school knowledge, success and failure, or a good and poor pupil (Young 1971; 1998). The new
sociology of education brought school knowledge and the curriculum also to macro level, to social
power, in its view that those in power – for instance in the world of education the academic elite of
universities – try to define what is considered to be knowledge, what chance different groups have
of becoming party to knowledge, and what is the nature of the relations between fields of
knowledge and actors. However, Whitty (1985, 22) holds the view that the new sociology of
education transferred micro level thought processes to macro level in too simplistic a manner.
Ethnomethodology, too, is indebted to phenomenology. Garfinkel (1967) may be deemed to have
founded it as a critique of Parsons and as a turning point towards Schutz’s thinking. It studies the
rules, structures and processes that make everyday life possible. Mostly, these deep-rooted ‘taken
for granted’ assumptions are examined as linguistic expressions, or definitions of people.
Ethnomethodology has been received in a number of ways. In my view, however, a certain
ethnomethodological stage or take is necessary in most empirical studies. It is also reflected in the
title of ‘folk sociology’ bestowed on ethnomethodology. The researcher must necessarily
familiarize himself with the everyday life and language of the group he wants to study.
The founders of social constructionism, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1967), define reality
as a class of phenomena that exist regardless of our will and which we cannot wish away. They say
that social reality is a result of people’s creative action in two respects: made by people and
constructed from meanings given by people. Thus, the evolution of social order is characterized by
the following dialectics:
• Society is a human product.
• Society is an objective reality.
• Human being/individual is a social product.
Constructivism as a general approach has gained great popularity. From a methodological
viewpoint, symbolic interactionism and phenomenology, too, can be included within its boundaries.
I come back to symbolic interactionism, which I consider to be the central interactionist theory.
Traditionally, interactionism has taken a realistic view of interviews or people’s narratives in
general, or thought that they reflect reality, or ‘how things are’. However, construing the social as
text – the so-called linguistic or narrative approach – has naturally had an effect on interactionism,
too. Studies have been undertaken on the strategies of writing and the organization of narration. But
Plummer (1996, 242) reminds us that the core of interactionist theory of meaning is able to compete
with these new trends. He condenses it in four points:
• Meaning is never fixed and coded, but ever changing. It does not reside in ‘objects’ or ‘heads’,
but is generated in shared action.
• Meanings are not unambiguous. Many meanings are replicated and transformed to become
‘customs’ or ‘shared perspectives’, but they have no final clarity.
• Meaning is formed in a triad. It depends on the gesture of one, the response of another, and the
shared act that emerges between them.
• Meaning is always dependent on the interpretative process, and this process is ever readjusting
itself in the collective social process.
He expresses the same more concisely: meaning is not a fixed code, but struggle over signs or
‘social dialogue about signs’.
But how can interactionism be applied to the study of education? The first answer is, in exactly the
same way as to any other everyday object of study. The second answer is that in many respects it is
eminently suitable precisely for the study of education, since education in itself is interaction, it
takes place in encounters and in societies such as schools, and systems of education and training are
quite clearly constructs of multi-level and multidimensional interaction. For instance, the concept of
negotiation has been used in studies of classroom interactions. It has been applied to strategies of
interaction used by pupils and the teacher in defining mutual, often non-verbal and casual modes of
orientation, behaviour codes and modes of working in relation to the lesson (Woods 1983).
Postmodernism and Poststructuralism
Postmodernism and poststructuralism are related to the crisis of the modern project. They refer to a
certain trend of culture and thinking rather than a more specific approach. In epistemological terms
they encompass the critique of Kantian reason and of the autonomous and rational subject.
Naturally, this critique is not accepted by many approaches and researchers. Conversely, most
accept that change has taken place in culture and society, increasing uncertainty and blurring the
boundary between so-called high culture and low culture, or equivalent boundaries, resulting in
diversity of values, perspectives and philosophies. We are familiar with Lyotard’s (1993) idea that a
shift away from enlightenment and certainty has taken place. Postmodernism is mistrust of metanarratives or great narratives, such as science, or the Enlightenment narrative in general. New
information technologies and their application have meant the transformation of knowledge –
whether it is research knowledge or learning – into a significant productive force. In the race of
technology, it is no longer a question of what is true, but what works in practice and is efficient.
Structuralists make the assumption that societies may be studied as meaning making systems that
under the observable surface possess structures that require deeper theoretical scrutiny. Durkheim’s
thinking is a good example of this. Structuralists always have some subject or centre outside signs,
giving meanings to things, whereas certain poststructuralists have abandoned this principle, and
thus moved over to postmodernism.
3. Towards a Synthesis?
Finally, I would like to argue, that
1. The agenda of contemporary sociology of education is based on the contribution of the
classics. They did not, however, dealt with for instance gender and ethnicity. Anyway, more
coherent contemporary theories have been largely developed from the corpus of their work.
2. What I have presented above, is a map of theories. I would like to emphasize that a major
part of the sociology of education has been only loosely theoretical and more concerned on
the problems of policy and practice.
3. The structuration theory of Anthony Giddens (1984) and the theory of fields of Pierre
Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1980; Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992) are the most ambitious attempts to
resolve the dualisms of sociological theory. Both of them reject the Parsonsian tradition of
systems theory and argue for a sociology built on the notion of reflexivity.
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