‘The more things change the more they stay the same’: The continuing relevance of Bourdieu and Passeron’s Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22325/fes/res.2022.116Keywords:
Reproduction, Structure, agency, resistance, social class, educational inequalitiesAbstract
The publication of Bourdieu and Passeron’s Reproduction had a mixed response. On the one hand the work was criticised for its determinism and pessimistic prognosis of the possibilities of educational change and, on the other hand, praised for its complex analysis of the relationship between education and class inequalities, and the workings of class domination through the educational system. This paper explores the reception Reproduction, and its companion text The Inheritors received before examining the contribution they have made, and continue to make, to understandings of social class inequalities in education. It argues that the work has continuing significance in contemporary England just as it had in 1960s France. As well as examining the relevance of Reproduction for the twenty-first century, it also focuses on the potential of Bourdieu and Passeron’s analysis for enabling animated and agentic conceptualisations of educational and social reproduction by drawing on recent case-study data from English schools. However, it also argues that the lack of sufficient questioning of the dominant educational code, as well as the absence of any moral dimensions of class culture make their study a work in progress which needed the insights of Bourdieu’s later work to bring its analysis to fruition.
References
Abrahams, J. (forthcoming). Schooling Inequality.
Alston, P. (2018). Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights in the UK.
Atkinson, W. (2015). Class: key concepts. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Atkinson, W. (2021). The social space and misrecognition in 21st century France. The Sociological Review, 69(5), 990-1012.
Backer, D., & Cairns, K. (2021). Social reproduction theory revisited. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 42(7), 1086-1104. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2021.1953962
Baker, T. (2017). Doing things differently in East London. Nesta. https://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/school-21-doing-things-differently-in-east-london/
Ball, S. J. (1981). Beachside Comprehensive: a Case-Study of Secondary Schooling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Beck, U., & Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2002). Individualization. London: Sage.
Bourdieu P., & Boltanski, L. (1975). Le Fétichisme de la langue. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 4, 2-32.
Bourdieu, P (2018) Classification Struggles Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, P and Wacquant, L. (1992). An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1985a). The genesis of the concepts of Habitus and of Field. Sociocriticism, 2, 11-24.
Bourdieu, P. (1985b). From rules to strategies: an interview with Pierre Bourdieu, Cultural Anthropology, 1, 110-120.
Bourdieu, P. (1989). Social Space and Symbolic Power. Sociological Theory, 7(1), 14-25.
Bourdieu, P. (1990). In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1993a). Concluding remarks: for a sociogenetic understanding of intellectual works. In C. Calhoun, E. Lipuma, and M. Postone (Eds.), Bourdieu: critical perspectives. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bourdieu, P. (2000). A Sociologist in the World. Revue d’etudes palestiniennes, 74(22), 3-13.
Bourdieu, P., & Delsaut, Y. (2002). “Entretien sur l’esprit de la recherche. In Y. Delsaut and M.- C. Rivière, Bibliographie des travaux de Pierre Bourdieu. Pantin: Le Temps des Cerises.
Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J-C. (1977). Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage Publications Ltd.
Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J-C. (1979). The Inheritors. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bright, N. G. (2011). Insubordinate Spaces: School Disaffection, Refusal and Resistance in a Former English Coalfield. European Educational Research Journal, 10(4), 502-515.
Burawoy, M., & von Holdt, K. (2012). Conversations with Bourdieu: The Johannesburg Moment. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
Butler, J. (1999). Performativity’s social magic. In R. Shusterman (Ed.), Bourdieu:A critical reader (pp. 113-128). Oxford/Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Cameron, D. (2015). The Tory Party Conference: David Cameron’s speech in full The Independent 7th October 2015.
Charlesworth, S. (2000). A phenomenology of working class experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cipollone, K., & Stich, A. E. (2017). Shadow capital: The democratization of college preparatory education. Sociology of Education, 90(4), 333-354.
Collini, S. (2010). Blahspeak. London Review of Books, 32(7), 29-34. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n07/stefan-collini/blahspeak
DfE (2021) Academic Year 2019-20 Widening Participation in Higher Education. Gov.uk. https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/widening-participation-in-higher-education/2019-20
Economic Policy Institute. (2017). State of Working America Data Library Compensation, Wages and Benefits. New York: EPI.
Evans, G., & Tilley, J. (2017). The new politics of class: The political exclusion of the British working class. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Flecha, R., & Soler, M. (2013). Turning difficulties into possibilities: engaging Roma families and students in school through dialogic learning. Cambridge Journal of Education, 43(4), 451-465. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2013.819068
Flemmen, M,. Toft, M,. Andersen, P,. Nordli Hansen, M,. & Ljunggren, J. (2017). Forms of Capital and Modes of Closure in Upper Class Reproduction. Sociology, 51(6), 1277-1298.
Fowler, B. (2020). Pierre Bourdieu on social transformation, with particular reference to political and symbolic revolutions. Theory and Society, 49, 439-463. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09375-z
Friedman, S,. O’Brien, D,. & McDonald, S. (2021). Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self. Sociology, 55(4), 716-733.
Friedman, S., & Laurison, D. (2019). The Class Ceiling: Why it pays to be privileged. Bristol: Policy Press.
Friedman, S., & Savage, M. (2018). Time, accumulation and trajectory: Bourdieu and Social Mobility. En S. Lawler, and G. Payne (Eds.), Social Mobility for the 21st Century (pp 67-79). London: Routledge.
Frye, M. (2019). The myth of agency and the misattribution of blame in collective imaginaries of the future. British Journal of Sociology, 70(3), 721-730.
Giroux, H. (1983). Theories of Reproduction and Resistance in the New Sociology of Education: A Critical Analysis. Harvard Educational Review, 53(3), 257-293.
Goldthorpe, J. H. (2007). “Cultural capital”: some critical comments. Sociologica, (2). https://doi.org/10.2383/24755.
Gramsci, A. (1996). Prison Notebooks. (Trans. J. A. Buttigieg, & A. Callari). New York: Columbia University Press.
Halsey, A. H., Heath, A. F., & Ridge, J. M. (1980). Origins and Destinations. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Harker, R. (1984). On Reproduction, Habitus and Education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 5(2), 117-127.
Harris, A., & Dobson, A. S. (2015). Theorizing agency in post-girlpower times. Continuum, 29(2), 145-156.
Hilton, A. (2018). Academies and Free Schools in England. London: Routledge.
Horowitz, J., et al. (2020). Trends in income and wealth inequality. Pew Research Center.
Hutchinson, J., Reader, M., & Akhal, A. (2020). Education in England: Annual Report 2020. London: Education Policy Institute.
James, D. (2019). How Bourdieu bites back. In D. Reay (Ed.), Bourdieu and Education. London: Routledge.
Jenkins, R. (1982). Pierre Bourdieu and the Reproduction of Determinism. Sociology, 16(2), 270-281.
Jenkins, R. (1992). Pierre Bourdieu. London: Routledge.
King, A. (2000). Thinking with Bourdieu against Bourdieu: A 'Practical' Critique of the Habitus. Sociological Theory, 18(3), 417-433.
Kulz, C. (2017). Factories for Learning: Making race, class and inequality in the neoliberal academy. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Kulz, C., Morrin, K., & McGinity, R. (2022). Inside the English education lab: critical qualitative and ethnographic perspectives on the academies experiment. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Kuppens, T., Spears, R., Manstead, A., Spruyt, B. and Easterbrook, M. (2018) Educationism and the irony of meritocracy: negative attitudes of higher educated people towards the less educated. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 76, 429-447. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2017.11.001
Lahire, B. (1998). L’Homme pluriel: Les ressorts de l’action. Paris: Nathan.
Lamont, M. (2019). “From ‘having’ to ‘being’: self-worth and the current crisis of American society. British Journal of Sociology, 70(3), 660-707.
Lane, J. F. (2006). Bourdieu’s Politics. Problems and Possibilities. Abingdon: Routledge. http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/10182/1/101.pdf.pdf
Lareau, A. (1989). Home Advantage: Social Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary Education. Falmer Press.
Lareau, A., & Ferguson, S. (2017). Cultural Exclusion of Upwardly Mobile College Students. Paper presented at the American Sociological Association August 12, 2017, Montreal.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lawler, S. (2004). Rules of engagement: Habitus, power and resistance. In L. Adkins and B. Skeggs (Eds.), Feminism After Bourdieu (pp 110-128). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Lee, H. (1960) To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: Harper Collins.
Littler, J. (2018) Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power, and Myths of Mobility. London: Routledge.
Mahar, C. (1990). Pierre Bourdieu: the intellectual project. In R. Harker,. C. Mahar,. and C. Wilkes (Eds.), An introduction to the work of Pierre Bourdieu: the practice of theory. London: MacMillan.
Medvetz, T., & Sallaz, J. (2018). Introduction: Pierre Bourdieu, a twentieth century life. In T. Medvetz, & J. Sallaz (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu. (pp 1-21).Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Morrin, K. (2018). Tensions in Teaching Character: How the ‘Entrepreneurial Character’ is Reproduced, ‘Refused’, and Negotiated in an English Academy School. Sociological Research Online, 23(2), 459-476. https://doi.org/10.1177/1360780418769670
Mortimore, P. (1993). School Effectiveness and the Management of Effective Learning and Teaching. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 4(4), 290-310.
National Education Union [NEU]. (2017). Groupings in Early Years and Key Stage 1: A Necessary Evil?. London: National Education Union.
Obama, B. (2020). A Promised Land. New York: Viking.
Obama, M. (2018). Becoming. New York: Penguin
OECD. (2021). Education at a Glance. Geneva: OECD
Office for National Statistics [ONS]. (2021). Household income inequality, UK: financial year ending 2020. London: ONS.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD]. (2019). Combined Executive Summaries PISA 2018. Geneva: OECD. https://www.oecd.org/pisa/Combined_Executive_Summaries_PISA_2018.pdf
Papilloud, C., & Schultz, E-M. (2018). Pierre Bourdieu and Relational Sociology En F. Dépelteau (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology (pp 343-358). New York: Palgrave.
Peters, M. A. (2017). From State responsibility for education and welfare to self-responsibilisation in the market. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 38(1), 138-145.
Reay, D. (1998). Class Work: Mothers’ involvement in children’s schooling. London: University College Press.
Reay, D. (2004). 'Mostly Roughs and Toughs': Social class, race and representation in inner city schooling Sociology, 38(4), 1005-1023.
Reay, D. (2017). Miseducation: Education, Inequality and the Working Classes. Bristol: Policy Press.
Reay, D. (2019). Introduction: Comprehension through Use: Working with Bourdieu in Educational Research En D. Reay (Ed.), Bourdieu and Education (pp 1-11). New York: Routledge.
Reay, D. (2020). The Perils and Penalties of Meritocracy: Sanctioning Inequalities and Legitimating Prejudice. The Political Quarterly, 91(2), 405-412.
Reay, D. (2022a) A conflictual legacy: being a coal miner’s daughter. In R. Simmons, and K. Simpson (Eds.), Education, Work and Social Change in Britain's Former Coalfield Communities. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Reay, D. (2022b). From worse to worse: Why is it so difficult to change English education for the better?. FORUM, 64(1), 9-18. https://doi.org/10.3898/forum.2022.64.1.01
Reynolds, D. (2010). School Effectiveness. London: Bloomsbury Press.
Robbins, D. (2006). On Bourdieu, Education and Society. London: The Bardwell Press.
Robbins, D. (2019). The Bourdieu Paradigm: The Origins and Evolution of an Intellectual Social Project. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Robertson, S., Harris, A., & Baldassar, L. (2017). Mobile transitions: a conceptual framework for researching a generation on the move. Journal of Youth Studies, 21(2), 203-217. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2017.1362101
Sassatelli, R., Santoro, M., & Willis, P. (2009). An Interview with Paul Willis: Commodification, Resistance and Reproduction. European Journal of Social Theory, 12(2), 265-289. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431009106205
Sayer, A (2005). The Moral Significance of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sewell, W. H. (1992). A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation. American Journal of Sociology, 98(1), 1-29.
Social Mobility Commission. (2021). State of the Nation 2021. London: Social Mobility Commission.
Song, X,. Massey, C,. Rolf, K,. Ferried, J,. Rothbaume, J., & Xie, Y. (2020). Long-term decline in intergenerational mobility in the United States since the 1850s. PNAS, 117(1), 251-258.
Spohrer, K., Stahl, G., & Bowers-Brown, T. (2018). Constituting neoliberal subjects? ‘Aspiration’ as technology of government in UK policy discourse. Journal of Education Policy, 33(3), 327-342.
Sumroy, A (2022): ‘We’re not robots!’: the interaction of cooperativism and neoliberalism for students at a Co-op academy. British Journal of Sociology of Education 43(2), 278-295. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2021.2018649
Thompson, G., Lingard, B., & Ball, S. J. (2021) ‘Indentured autonomy’:headteachers and academisation policy in Northern England. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 53(3-4), 215-232.
Wacquant, L. (1992). Towards a social praxeology: the structure and logic of Bourdieu's sociology. In P. Bourdieu, and L. Wacquant (Eds.), An Invitation to reflexive sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Wacquant, L. (1993). From Ruling Class to Field of Power: An Interview with Pierre Bourdieu on La Noblesse d’État. Theory, Culture & Society, 10(3), 19-44. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327693010003002
Weininger, E., & Lareau, A. (2018). Pierre Bourdieu’s Sociology of Education: Institutional Form and Social Inequality. In T. Medvetz, and J. Sallaz (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu (pp. 253-272). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
West, A (2021) Privatisation of education in the English school system. Revue internationale d'éducation de Sèvres, (82), 76-84.
Williams, R. (1981). Culture. London: Fontana Press.
Willis, P. (1981). Cultural Production is Different from Cultural Reproduction is Different from Social Reproduction is Different from Reproduction. Interchange, 12(2-3), 48-67. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01192107.
Wright, R. (2019, April 30). UK social mobility has stalled, warns commission: Class privilege entrenched at ‘virtually all life stages’. The Financial Times.
Young, M. (2009). ‘What are schools for?’. In H. Daniels, H. Lauder, & J. Porter (Eds.), Knowledge, Values and Educational Policy: A critical perspective (pp. 10-18). London: Routledge.
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Diane Reay
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
• The transfer of the copyright of the article to Revista Española de Sociología.
• The assignment to the Revista Española de Sociología of the rights of commercial exploitation of the article to third parties both in the offset and digital formats, as well as to the search engines and platforms that may serve as intermediaries for the sale or knowledge of the article.
