Knowledge and Knowers

Towards a realist sociology of education

Karl Maton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134019632
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

We live in 'knowledge societies' and work in 'knowledge economies', but accounts of social change treat knowledge as homogeneous and neutral. While knowledge should be central to educational research, it focuses on processes of knowing and condemns studies of knowledge as essentialist. This book unfolds a sophisticated theoretical framework for analysing knowledge practices: Legitimation Code Theory or 'LCT'. By extending and integrating the influential approaches of Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein, LCT offers a practical means for overcoming knowledge-blindness without succumbing to essentialism or relativism.

Through detailed studies of pressing issues in education, the book sets out the multi-dimensional conceptual toolkit of LCT and shows how it can be used in research. Chapters introduce concepts by exploring topics across the disciplinary and institutional maps of education:

-how to enable cumulative learning at school and university
-the unfounded popularity of 'student-centred learning' and constructivism
-the rise and demise of British cultural studies in higher education
-the positive role of canons
-proclaimed 'revolutions' in social science
-the 'two cultures' debate between science and humanities
-how to build cumulative knowledge in research
-the unpopularity of school Music
-how current debates in economics and physics are creating major schisms in those fields.

LCT is a rapidly growing approach to the study of education, knowledge and practice, and this landmark book is the first to systematically set out key aspects of this theory. It offers an explanatory framework for empirical research, applicable to a wide range of practices and social fields, and will be essential reading for all serious students and scholars of education and sociology.

1 Seeing knowledge and knowers

Social realism and Legitimation Code Theory

Seeing what is hidden by a blind spot requires a new gaze, a different insight.

The knowledge paradox

Knowledge is everything and nothing. This paradox marks the heart of debate over social change. For over fifty years, successive accounts have proclaimed the birth of a new era in which knowledge is paramount to a new kind of society. The names of eras are legion: ‘late capitalism’, ‘postmodernity’, ‘the information age’, among many others. The roll call of new societies is voluminous: ‘post-industrial society’ (Touraine 1971; Bell 1973), ‘information society’ (Masuda 1981), ‘knowledge society’ (Drucker 1969; Stehr 1994), ‘network society’ (Castells 2000), and so on. These countless proclamations of profound change differ in their choice of labels and the specific changes they emphasize. However, all foreground knowledge as reshaping every aspect of social life.

‘Knowledge economies’ based on the creation, circulation and consumption of information rather than material goods are said to require workers to engage in ‘lifelong learning’ to keep pace with the resulting fluidity of labour markets. Politics is characterized as concerned with information management and public relations rather than parliamentary procedure and policy enactment. Exponential growth in the volume, complexity and sources of knowledge is proclaimed as undermining traditional notions of authority and expertise. In particular, the rise of new information and communication technologies are heralded as democratizing the creation of knowledge and allowing anyone with Internet access to have ‘all the world's knowledge at their fingertips’ (Friedman 2005: 178). At the same time, these potentially all-knowing citizens are themselves said to be subject to unparalleled levels of information-gathering in a ‘superpanopticon’ (Poster 1990) managed by a growing army of professionals whose disciplining gaze reaches into every minutiae of everyday life.

Such claims are commonly found and repeatedly made across the social sciences. Their shared import is to proclaim knowledge as everything. Never has knowledge been viewed as so crucial to the nature of society. Yet, understanding knowledge is not viewed as crucial to understanding society. For what unites accounts of social change is not only their emphasis on the centrality of knowledge but also their lack of a theory of knowledge. Knowledge is described as a defining feature of modern societies, but what that knowledge is, its forms and its effects, are not part of the analysis. Instead, knowledge is treated as having no inner structures with properties, powers and tendencies of their own, as if all forms of knowledge are identical, homogeneous and neutral.

There resides a further irony here. Writing of how social change is reshaping education, Bernstein argued that:

there is a new concept of knowledge and of its relation to those who create it and use it…. Knowledge should flow like money, to wherever it can create advantage and profit. Indeed knowledge is not like money, it is money.

(Bernstein 2000: 86; original emphasis)

This view of knowledge is held by many sociological accounts to characterize contemporary advanced societies. However, in a circular manner, this conception is also adopted by those accounts: they treat knowledge as interchangeable tokens, like money. The central concern of research has thus become exploring the extent, intensity and comparative value of flows of knowledge, rather than its forms and their effects. For example, in Manuel Castells' seminal and otherwise brilliant three-volume work on The Information Age, ‘a definition of knowledge and information’ is relegated to a footnote in which Castells declares:

I have no compelling reason to improve on Daniel Bell's (1976: 175) own definition of knowledge: ‘Knowledge: a set of organized statements of facts or ideas, presenting a reasoned judgement or an experimental result, which is transmitted to others through some communication medium in some systematic form. Thus I distinguish knowledge from news and entertainment’. As for information … I would rejoin the operational definition of information proposed by Porat in his classic work (1977: 2): ‘Information is data that have been organized and communicated’.

(Castells 2000: 17, n25; original emphases)

This way of defining knowledge represents what Popper (2003a: 29) terms ‘methodological essentialism’: it attempts to establish universal definitions or demarcation criteria between ‘knowledge’ and ‘not-knowledge’ (such as ‘news and entertainment’). Such asociological and ahistorical essentialism offers little insight into the knowledge held to be central to society. It invariably leads to broad descriptions of generic attributes that obscure differences within ‘knowledge’. As Stehr argues, ‘our knowledge about knowledge remains unsophisticated … knowledge is treated as a black box’ (1994: x). Knowledge is thus one of the most discussed and one of the least discussed issues in academic debate. Knowledge is everything to society but nothing to social science.

This book contributes towards resolving the knowledge paradox by introducing a conceptual framework, Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), that enables knowledge practices to be seen, their organizing principles to be conceptualized, and their effects to be explored. Since LCT first emerged in the late 1990s, it has evolved into a sophisticated toolkit. Research using LCT is growing rapidly. Having begun with a focus on knowledge practices in education, studies are embracing a widening range of fields and practices (Chapter 10). LCT is far more than a sociology of knowledge or education – it is a sociology of possibility. Nonetheless, education and knowledge remain key points of departure and central foci of studies for the framework.

Accordingly, in the course of unfolding two dimensions of LCT, this book addresses a range of educational issues. Concepts are introduced in the context of analyses of: the peculiar position of British cultural studies in higher education (Chapter 2); proclaimed ‘revolutions’ in social science (Chapter 3); what is at stake in the ‘two cultures’ debate, why school qualifications in Music are so unpopular, and what relates such different issues (Chapter 4); the role of canons in the humanities and how these fields can develop cumulatively (Chapter 5); the conditions for cumulative learning at school and university (Chapter 6); the conditions for cumulative knowledge-building in research (Chapter 7); how ideas with little empirical basis, such as ‘student-centred learning’, become so powerful in education (Chapter 8); and why seemingly minor differences in intellectual fields can have major effects on their development (Chapter 9).

What these diverse topics share is a concern with knowledge-building: all chapters explore how powerful and cumulative knowledge can be built in research or learning (Chapter 10 explores the development embodied by concepts from and studies using LCT). A theme running through this book is building knowledge about knowledge-building. However, exploring these diverse topics (denoted by the subtitle of each chapter) is not the book's sole purpose: they occasion the unfolding of the framework. Each chapter introduces new concepts (indicated by its main title) that build cumulatively into a conceptual toolkit and analytic methodology for substantive research. The book is thereby intended to contribute towards developing a realist sociology that resolves the knowledge paradox. In this chapter I begin with why this is necessary by discussing knowledge-blindness in educational research, a field ostensibly concerned with knowledge. Second, I introduce ‘social realism’, a school of thought that takes knowledge seriously as an object of study. Third, I briefly sketch the contours of LCT, highlighting its relations to social ontologies and research studies and introducing its conceptual architecture.

Knowledge-blindness in education

The knowledge paradox extends to the intellectual field one might expect to explicitly address knowledge: educational research. Knowledge is the basis of education as a social field of practice – it is the creation, curricularization, and teaching and learning of knowledge which make education a distinctive field. Yet a subjectivist doxa in educational research reduces knowledge to knowing, and a deep-seated tendency towards constructivist relativism, based on a long-established but false dichotomy with positivist absolutism, reduces knowledge to power. The result is knowledge-blindness, leaving knowledge under-researched, the study of education underdeveloped, and the sociology of knowledge unaware of its ostensible object of study.

The subjectivist doxa

‘I am,’ Popper remarked, ‘a great admirer of, and believer in common sense. But common sense is sometimes seriously mistaken. It is so in connection with the theory of knowledge … For the commonsense theory of knowledge is subjectivist and sensualist’ (1994a: 132). Popper was referring to the widespread belief that ‘knowledge’ entirely comprises a state of mind, consciousness or a disposition to act, is wholly sensory in source, and must be inextricably associated with a knowing subject. This subjectivist account of knowledge is also a doxa of educational research: it goes without saying that the study of ‘knowledge’ is exhausted by exploring processes of and influences on knowing. Indeed, this subjectivist view is so taken for granted across the field that what Popper (1979, 1994a) called ‘objective knowledge’ – including intellectual problem-situations, theories, critical discussions and arguments – has become almost entirely suppressed as a potential object of study.

The specific forms taken by the doxa in research depends on their underlying disciplinary influences. Psychologically informed approaches, for example, typically construe ‘knowledge’ as subjective states of consciousness and mental processes or, in more ‘social’ versions (such as activity and situated cognition theories), as aggregates of the workings of individual minds or communities of practice. In short, ‘knowledge’ represents processes of knowing within the minds of knowers. This perspective has been widely propagated by the rise of constructivist ideas which hold that:

knowledge, no matter how it be defined, is in the heads of persons, and that the thinking subject has no alternative but to construct what he or she knows on the basis of his or her own experience.

(von Glasersfeld 1995: 1)

Over recent decades, the theory of learning offered by constructivism has become propagated as a theory of everything, including teaching, curriculum, and research. Different knowledge practices have thereby been reduced to a logic of learning, based on the belief that ‘the more basic phenomenon is learning’ (Lave and Wenger 1991: 92). From this perspective, what is being learned is of little significance. Accordingly, research typically focuses on generic processes of learning and sidelines differences between the forms of knowledge being learned. An influential text, for example, states that:

scientific understanding of learning includes understanding about learning processes, learning environments, teaching, socio-cultural processes, and the many other factors that contribute to learning. Research on all of these topics … provides the fundamental knowledge base for understanding and implementing changes in education.

(Bransford et al. 2000: 233)

Research into knowledge as an object, into what is being learned, is thus not viewed as integral to ‘the fundamental knowledge base’ of educational research and policy. Indeed, while ‘knowledge’ is reduced to knowing, ‘what is being learned’ (that which is being mentally processed) is typically understood as the world rather than a system of knowledge about the world – the physical world rather than physics, the social world rather than sociology, etc. Bypassing knowledge, this subjectivist empiricism thereby commits what can be called the learning fallacy of confusing ‘epistemology’ with learning (see, for example, diSessa 1993).

Though couched in less explicitly mental terms, sociologically informed approaches to education offer a similar picture. Dominant approaches share a subjectivist account of knowledge, whether externalist analyses of relations between education and social structures or internalist studies of practices within education. From Hegel, through Marx, Mannheim, reproduction theories and onto stand-point theories, externalist sociologies have focused on how nationality, social class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, geographic region, or other socio-historical factors shape actors' ways of viewing, being and acting in the world. In short, they foreground the effects on knowing of the social circumstances of knowers (cf. Popper 2003b; Moore 2009). Internalist accounts typically focus more on relations among knowers but similarly view knowledge in terms of thinking, acting and being. From phenomenological studies of classroom practice underpinned by symbolic interactionism during the 1970s to discursively focused Foucauldian, Deleuzian and other ‘critical’ theories in recent years, research has explored how actors' identities are shaped by interactions with others, or, in current parlance, the capacity for discursive practices to form, construct or assemble subjectivities.

Despite their many and significant differences, most sociological approaches to education thereby share a subjectiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Praise for Knowledge and Knowers
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Seeing knowledge and knowers: Social realism and Legitimation Code Theory
• 2 Languages of legitimation: The curious case of British cultural studies
• 3 The epistemic-pedagogic device: Breaks and continuities in the social sciences and mathematics
• 4 Knowledge-knower structures: What's at stake in the ‘two cultures’ debate, why school Music is unpopular, and what unites such diverse issues
• 5 Gazes: Canons, knowers and progress in the arts and humanities
• 6 Semantic gravity: Cumulative learning in professional education and school English
• 7 Semantic density: How to build cumulative knowledge in social science
• 8 Cosmologies: How to win friends and influence people
• 9 Insights, gazes, lenses and the 4-K model: Fiercely fought struggles and fundamental shifts in fields
• 10 Building a realist sociology of education: To be continued …
• References
• Index