Education Policy and Contemporary Theory

Implications for research

Kalervo N. Gulson, Matthew Clarke, Eva Bendix Petersen, Kalervo N. Gulson, Matthew Clarke, Eva Bendix Petersen

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317816829
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Pedagogía
• Categoría: Educación general

This book aims to posit theory as a central component to the study of education and education policy. Providing clear, introductory entries into contemporary critical theories and their take up in education policy studies, the book offers a generative invitation to further reading, thought and exploration. Instead of prescribing how theory should be used, the contributors elaborate on a set of possibilities for researching and critiquing education policy.

Education Policy and Contemporary Theory explores examples of how theoretical approaches generate a variety of questions for policy analysis, demonstrating the importance of theory as a necessary and inevitable resource for exploring and contesting various policy realms and dominant discourses. Each chapter provides a short overview of key aspects of a particular theory or perspective, followed by suggestions of methodological implications and recommended readings to extend the outlined ideas. Organized around two parts, the first section focuses on theorists while the second section looks at specific theories and concepts, with the intention that each part makes explicit the connection between theory and methodology in relation to education policy research.

Each contribution is carefully written by established and emerging scholars in the field to introduce new scholars to theoretical concepts and policy questions, and to inspire, extend or challenge established policy researchers who may be considering working in new areas.

PART I Theorists

1 Bourdieu and doing policy sociology in education

Shaun Rawolle

Bob Lingard

10.4324/9781315818429-3

Introduction

In this chapter we draw on the social theories of practice and fields of Pierre Bourdieu (1990a; 1993), which were major contributions of his writing. However, and given Bourdieu’s approach to research, we discuss these theories in relation to the methodology and research approach adopted in his work. While Bourdieu drew on a variety of traditions of intellectual thought to inform his theories, they were also open to engagement and change in relation to different social phenomena. This is the reflexive theory/empirical data relationship we will touch on later in the chapter, which was generative in his work and also for those in education research.

Our overarching claim is that Bourdieu’s work provides a specific form and application of the sociological imagination, which carries within it a generative way of worldmaking (Goodman, 1978). This is a world populated and made meaningful through concepts like agents and habitus, practices and fields, but also capitals, logics and strategies. For our work, one of the key strengths has been Bourdieu’s conceptual and theoretical flexibility – he rejects ‘theoreticism’, where formal theories are developed in absence of empirical encounters. In doing so, Bourdieu developed a wide range of resources for research, as well as a language base for representing problems in education policy. He also rejects an atheoretical empiricism, in which the categories and language of everyday life are taken for granted and accepted without interrogation and then used as the basis for statistical, descriptive, explanatory or representational analyses.

This engagement with Bourdieuian theory and methodology aims to explore its utility for education policy analysis and policy sociology in education. The initial premise of this account is that the adaptation of Bourdieuian theory and concepts to education policy, though not impossible, does raise some initial problems that require resolution. As will be discussed later, much of this can be attributed to the historical unfolding of Bourdieu’s research and theoretical developments, and the incompleteness of his overarching theory of social fields (Bourdieu, 1993). Though challenging, these problems are not insurmountable and have proven quite productive for some researchers. Indeed, Bourdieu has been the source of inspiration for a variety of researchers in education, of which many have drawn directly on aspects of his work to understand and research problems either explicitly or implicitly related to education policy (Albright and Luke, 2008; Kenway and Koh, 2013; Ladwig, 2014; Reay and Ball, 1997; Thomson, 2005).

In outlining this account of Bourdieu’s theory, we start with two premises. The first premise is that Bourdieu’s concepts and theories are adaptable as a methodological base for research on education policy and useful to describe and understand the connections between the field of education policy and other education fields and sub-fields, such as schooling, university, VET, early childhood and so on. This implies that Bourdieu’s concepts and theories can be extended and applied to new objects of research, with the caution that further refinement and additional theorisation may be required to develop coherent accounts of practices in each field or sub-field, which may equally loop back and cast light on Bourdieu’s own theories and concepts. The second premise is that Bourdieu concepts are useful to understand broad processes of social change, which apply also to fields and sub-fields, particularly those related to mediatisation, globalisation and continuous education policy change.

This second premise is in opposition with some prominent critiques of Bourdieu’s theory (e.g. Connell, 1983: 151), but we would point to our own and other researchers’ work drawing on Bourdieu to explain broad processes of change like globalisation and mediatisation (Lingard and Rawolle, 2004, 2011). Here we agree with Wacquant’s (2014: 5) critique of this criticism that Bourdieu is only about social reproduction rather than change and emergence, when he makes the important point that habitus never necessarily results in a specific practice, rather,

it takes the conjunction of disposition and position, subjective capacity and objective possibility, habitus and social space (or field) to produce a given conduct or expression. And this meeting between skilled agent and pregnant world spawns the gamut from felicitous to strained, smooth to rough, fertile to futile.

This dis- or con- junction between disposition and position, between habitus and field, is a source of either change or reproduction. In order to elaborate on this account, we will draw primarily on and emphasise developments in Bourdieu’s own writing, in particular his theoretical, conceptual and methodological approaches. As an illustration of the felicity of Bourdieu’s work, we also provide brief accounts of the use of Bourdieu’s concepts by researchers in education that relate to education policy.

Although Bourdieu never directly offered an approach to education policy analysis in relation to schools or universities (van Zanten, 2005), he did offer one example and approach to policy analysis drawn from his work. In an account of the development and effects of a housing policy in France, described in The social structures of the economy (Bourdieu, 2005), Bourdieu provided something of an approach to policy analysis in respect of housing. This work, linked to research on the preconditions, introduction and effect of the French housing policy of 1977 during a time of restructuring of housing policies and markets in France, was revisited in a latter account of the role of the state and the abdication of the neo-liberal, managerialist state from its obligations, in The weight of the world (Bourdieu et al., 1999). Bourdieu’s account of housing policies in France involved a close analysis of state decision-making in the creation of market conditions and demand for housing (Bourdieu, 2005: 89–122).

It is thus our contention that Bourdieu’s theoretical ensemble, his ‘thinking tools’, including the concepts of habitus, capitals, field and practice, which sit in synergistic relationship to each other, can assist research on education policy, especially important is their relationality. Bourdieu’s work on language and symbolic power, including the classificatory capacities of the state, policy and schools, is also useful for policy analysis. As Swartz (2013: 39) notes, ‘Symbolic power creates a form of violence that finds an expression in everyday classifications, labels, meanings, and categorisations that subtly implement a social as well as symbolic logic of inclusion and exclusion’. Policy can be seen to function in this way and is linked to Bourdieu’s extension of Weber, who saw the state having the capacity and monopoly for expressions of legitimate violence (e.g. through the work of armies, the police, etc.), which Bourdieu extended to include the legitimate right to symbolic violence. Bourdieu’s work on language also draws our attention to the significance of the language of policy texts and their role in symbolic violence, especially when connected to the state’s claim for the universal application of policy.

Our use of Bourdieu in policy sociology of education moves beyond a straightforward application of his thinking tools to understanding the policy cycle and the inevitable refractions in policy implementation or enactment across competing logics of practice. In Bourdieu’s (1998: 57) terms, the state holds a monopoly on the constitution and application of the ‘universal’, while we know classroom practices are contingent and specific. Herein resides the basis of a Bourdieuian approach to understanding implementation infidelities: policy production and enactment sit within different fields with different logics of practice. Here we might see policy in these terms as simplifying and seeking to be applied universally across a schooling system to all schools. In contrast, the logics of practice of schools and classrooms, including pedagogies are more complex and much more contingent and specific – each school has its ‘thisness’ (Thomson, 2002), as does each classroom. Herein we see in Bourdieu’s terms an argument about gaps between policy texts and policy enactment. We note the usefulness of Bourdieu’s thinking tools – his concepts and theories – in policy sociology in education and also some necessary additions derived from his approach. The fruitfulness of Bourdieu’s thinking tools, however, is intricately linked with his methodology.

Bourdieu’s methodology

Bourdieu’s concepts of rejecting epistemological innocence, being reflexive, and ‘objectivating’ one’s self as researcher demand that the policy sociology researcher deal with their ‘positionality’ within the field of policy sociology and within putative national education policy fields (Hardy, 2009). Positionality here refers to the researcher’s position in relation to the object of study and in relation to the relevant or cognate academic field. In Bourdieu’s terms, we might define researcher positionality as position within various fields, encompassing the field of the object of research and the academic field/s in which the research is positioned. Rizvi and Lingard (2010: 47–48) suggest that such positionality demands reflexivity and consideration of the researcher’s position in relation to the field and object of research, actual location in respect of analysis, theoretical/methodological stance, spatial location, temporal location and so on. In a sense, this is the reflexive application of Bourdieu’s concept of ‘socioanalysis’ to the positionality of the policy sociology researcher. Socioanalysis for Bourdieu is a way of understanding how individuals are social products and that people’s dispositions and engagements with practices relates to their social history, which is embodied in their habitus. Socioanalysis involves providing a context for examining the relationships between a researcher’s own arguments about social objects and their social history; this context involves a recount of the significant social events and social trajectory through different fields that are relevant to the research. In this way, socioanalysis represents a rethinking of a researcher’s declaration of interest, and of the impossibility of disinterested research. Bourdieu’s argument here is that acknowledgement of this produces better social science research.

In field terms, we also see policy developed within an international organisation such as the OECD and its implementation within nations meaning there are often times slippages between text and enactment, given the competing logics of practice of the field of policy text production and policy practice and particularly when spread spatially across the globe. In his later work, Bourdieu (2003) also noted that the amount of national capital possessed by a given nation mediated to varying extents global impacts. Think here of the contrast between World Bank policy impact on developing nations and OECD impact say on the USA.

An education policy field

The first and most direct account treating education policy as a field was outlined by James Ladwig (Ladwig, 1994). The key innovation that Ladwig (1994) provided was an account of education policy as a field through an examination of its emergence in the USA during the 1990s. We would note that Ladwig equated the policy field in the USA with federal policy making in education, a shortcoming in our view, given the weakness of the federal presence in education policy at the time. There were two ways in which Ladwig’s argument was important for education policy sociology. The first is that it took a coherent and broad scale account of Bourdieu’s work and applied it systematically. From this, a number of methodological applications of the field concept can be discerned. Secondly, Ladwig’s use of the term policy field and in particular of the idea of policy effects highlighted the limitations of a Bourdieuian account of policy, if not supplemented with additional concepts. In particular, Ladwig argued that policy effects should be used to designate effects of policy and policy practice on policy makers within the field of education policy. That is, that the development and maturation of an education policy field meant that its effects did not travel beyond the field and that debates were largely academic and located within a field of political discourse, rather than classroom practice. Ladwig’s intent here in using Bourdieu was to highlight this disconnect and t...