Abstract
Jal Mehta and Scott Davies on expanding ed as a site of analysis.
Go to ASA or read Sociology of Education, and you might think the only sociologically worthy topic in education is its role in processes of social stratification. Our content analysis of top journals—Sociology of Education, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and the Annual Review of Sociology—over the past 50 years shows that the vast majority of articles focus on status attainment and differential access to educational opportunities across by class, gender, and race. Much rarer are pieces on education and culture, organizations, politics, and comparative studies.
Several years ago, we began a series of conversations with colleagues who felt that this focus on stratification had stunted the intellectual potential of our field. Over time, we swapped ideas with Mitchell Stevens, Steve Brint, Amy Binder, Tim Hallett, Elizabeth Armstrong, Charles Payne, and Michele Lamont. These conversations led to a Radcliffe Institute seminar as well as the new collection Education in a New Society: Renewing the Sociology of Education.
In proposing new directions, we do not want to minimize what has been accomplished. The developments in the field during the 1960s and 1970s were critical in putting sociology of education on the map. In realm of theory, Coleman, Bell, Bourdieu, Bowles and Gintis, Meyer, and Collins all published landmarks that continue to be taught to this day. With respect to empirical research, status attainment models professionalized a previously amateurish field into a powerhouse characterized by large-scale data sets and state-of-the-art statistical techniques. While these developments have been critical in winning the subfield a place in the discipline and in policy debates, their dominance has meant that there has been little new theorizing since the 1970s, and few connections to other parts of the discipline.
In particular, the collective conscience of the field seems to have lost sight of education’s multiple roles in our evolving society. Formal schooling has extended its reach downward to the pre-school years and upward into lifelong learning. It shapes where people live, who they marry, how long they live, and even what they eat. Education is implicated in welfare state debates and elections animated by battles between “educated elites” and a “populist backlash.” These topics are explored by journalists, political scientists, and historians, but they should also be central to sociologists.
Moving forward, sociologists of education must draw on more of the tools and theoretical insights that have emerged in the field at large. Notions of cultural toolkits, repertoires, fields, institutional logics, linked ecologies, path dependence, frames, and boundaries are just a few of the many prominent ideas in cultural, organizational, and political sociology that are too rarely connected to schooling.
Thus Education in a New Society aims to show what a renewed sociology of education might look like. Some sections present extended empirical results, others offer new theories, some synthesize literature, and a few offer short provocations. All are intended to show new ways of thinking in the sociology of education. For instance, Shamus Khan connects writings about education to theorizing about elites, Steve Brint considers the relationship between different knowledge-producing entities inside and outside the university, Tim Hallett takes an inhabited institutionalism perspective on professional education, and Charles Payne suggests that the educational sociological imagination has been imprisoned in ways that limits its insight and utility.
We also suggest that longstanding topics might require some new theorizing. A section of the volume begins to develop some new perspectives on stratification, exploring moving beyond a Black/White paradigm, making the study of stratification more international, and integrating new theorizing about race. A few brave contributors remind us that education is a productivity-enhancing, as well as an inequality-generating, institution, and ask why we have ceded questions about the positive functions of schooling to economists.
Education is one of the most powerful forces in modern life. It structures individual life chances, develops authoritative knowledge, organizes professions, and remains our most popular public institution—critiques notwithstanding. Education is too important and too interesting to remain within a set of paradigms forged before Ronald Reagan came into office. Education deserves a sociology as varied and robust as the institution itself.