Rob Moore

Appropriating Competence: the competency movement, the New Right and the ‘culture change’ project

Abstract This paper raises some critical issues concerning ‘competency’ as represented, today, by the National Council for Vocational Qualifications and, earlier, by the Manpower Services Commission. It is argued that the narrowly behaviouristic model supported by the ‘competency movement’ is only one of the many ways in which competence has been approached within the social sciences. The issue of why those agencies should have promoted this particular model of competence is explored, using Bernsteins concept of ‘pedagogic discourse’. It is argued that competency should be located within the political context of the policies with which it is associated. The promotion of competency can be understood in terms of political aspirations of the New Right to change the culture of British institutions and economic life in the direction of a neo‐liberal market ideology. The problems of competency are explored with reference to its methodology and the manner in which it represents ‘the world of work’ and competenc...

Cultural capital: objective probability and the cultural arbitrary

This paper attempts to explicate and locate the concept of ‘cultural capital’ in terms of Pierre Bourdieus more general theory of the forms of capital and their transubstantiations. It examines the manner in which the relationship between the economic field, and its relations of inequality and power, and the cultural field involves a process of systematic misrecognition on the basis of which the positions and relations of the cultural field come to be recognized as ‘arbitrary’. In these terms, pedagogic action is defined as ‘symbolic violence’. It is suggested that the relationship between ‘objective probability structures’ and cultural fields can be usefully approached through the ‘dual aspect’ theory of the philosopher, Benedict Spinoza. Finally, a tension is noted between the manner in which educational differences between classes are explained and the manner in which differences within classes are explained.This paper attempts to explicate and locate the concept of ‘cultural capital’ in terms of Pierre Bourdieus more general theory of the forms of capital and their transubstantiations. It examines the manner in which the relationship between the economic field, and its relations of inequality and power, and the cultural field involves a process of systematic misrecognition on the basis of which the positions and relations of the cultural field come to be recognized as ‘arbitrary’. In these terms, pedagogic action is defined as ‘symbolic violence’. It is suggested that the relationship between ‘objective probability structures’ and cultural fields can be usefully approached through the ‘dual aspect’ theory of the philosopher, Benedict Spinoza. Finally, a tension is noted between the manner in which educational differences between classes are explained and the manner in which differences within classes are explained.

For Knowledge: Tradition, Progressivism and Progress in Education--Reconstructing the Curriculum Debate.

This paper draws upon realist theories of knowledge and naturalised epistemologies in the philosophy of science in order to argue that databases around the school curriculum could benefit from such approaches. It is suggested that the traditional/progressive distinction that has structured much of the curriculum debate for a long time is both of little value in describing how schools actually work and outmoded in terms of understandings of knowledge. Realist approaches make a reappraisal possible because they begin from the understanding that knowledge is socially and historically constructed but do so in a way that avoids the relativism and reductionism that results when epistmology and the sociology of knowledge are seen as opposed rather than complementary. The paper reviews a number of ways in which knowledge has been conceived of as social in educational thinking and, from a realist perspective, criticises their reductive and relativist tendencies whilst outlining a realist epistemological alternative.

Social Realism and the problem of the problem of knowledge in the sociology of education

This paper examines from a Social Realist perspective a set of issues in the sociology of education regarding the problem of knowledge. It focuses upon the issue of relativism associated with the constructionist approach that since the time of the New Sociology of Education in the 1970s has constituted in different forms the dominant perspective in the field. It identifies features shared between constructionism and the ‘positivist’ approach with which it contrasts itself. It is argued that these two positions have more in common than is often recognized and draws upon Critical Realism as an alternative to both. Social Realism explores the sociological implications of Critical Realism for education.

The growth of knowledge and the discursive gap

This article raises the question of the character of Bernsteins theory. It draws upon a set of key concepts elaborated in some of his later papers, although we suggest that it is possible to discern the origins of these ideas in much earlier work. In the first section, Bernsteins diagnosis of the sociology of education as a horizontal knowledge structure with a weak grammar is discussed and an apparent paradox identified: if the sociology of education has this form, how can we account for Bernsteins own theory? The remainder of the paper uses the case of Bernsteins own work as a way of exploring the conditions for knowledge growth in sociology as a vertical knowledge structure with a strong grammar.

Back to the Future: the problem of change and the possibilities of advance in the sociology of education

Abstract With reference to the ‘meritocratic’ and ‘equal opportunities’ (EO) paradigms, the paper discusses the problem of explaining the relationship between changing differentials in educational attainment and changes in social opportunities more generally. It is argued that, for the former, progressive changes expected to follow from social democratic educational reforms failed to occur and, for the latter, unanticipated improvements in the relative attainments of girls and blacks have occurred. In both cases, the paradigms fail to provide systematically‐convincing explanations of these events. Essentially, there is a conflict between accounts of the ideological positioning of categories of pupils within education and their positions within the system of relative attainment. It is argued that this situation relates to the manner in which the sociology of education in Britain has been, to a significant degree, relocated within the educational field through its association with teacher training and funct...

Education and the Ideology of Production

Abstract This paper addresses the issue, ‘what is new in the new vocationalism?’ It concentrates on ‘behavioural occupationalism’, i.e. the derivation of ‘educational’ objectives from behaviourally defined occupational skills as constructed through occupational skills inventories. It contrasts this approach to ‘the world of work’ with that current in the ROSLA period under the influence of the Newsom Report. It is argued that the two approaches present radically different ways of contextualising ‘the world of work’ within educational discourse. The distinction between the behavioural and the liberal education approaches is explored in terms of a proposed restructuring of educational practices in terms of their relationship to (a) elaborating and potentially critical knowledge and (b) production as represented in a particular ideological form. It is argued that the ‘new vocationalism’ is expressing a new ‘hidden curriculum’ of the possessive individualism of market economics and that this reflects politica...

Going critical: the problem of problematizing knowledge in education studies

This paper raises the issue of what it is to be ‘critical’ in education studies and in social theory more generally. It argues that this idea has for a long time been associated with forms of social constructionism and sociological reductionism. These understand the idea that knowledge is social in terms of reducing it to the experiences and interests of the groups whose perspective knowledge is held to represent. In this way knowledge is conflated with knowing. This approach has the consistent problem of collapsing into a relativism that denies of possibility of objectivity in knowledge or an epistemologically independent basis for knowledge claims. This paper offers an alternative view based in critical realism that attempts to provide non‐relativist, though fallible, grounds for knowledge claims that restore a sense of autonomy to fields of knowledge production by understanding the sociality of knowledge in terms of emergent materialism. In this manner, the argument provides an alternative to both social constructionism and to Bourdieus relationalism.

Liberal‐Humanist Education: the vocationalist challenge

ABSTRACT This paper argues for the need to move beyond the ideological analysis of recent educational change. The current crisis of liberal education (both traditional and progressive) should not be seen exclusively in terms of New Right criticisms. The challenge presented by the National Council for Vocational Qualifications’ vocationalism in the ‘competency’ form predates the New Right and is opposed to both market economics and neo‐conservative traditionalism. Factors intrinsic to the development of liberal education in the post‐war period of expansion were inherently destabilising. A legitimation crisis resulted from differentiation represented in the distinction between traditionalism and progressivism and in developments such as anti‐sexist and multicultural education. Credential inflation produced diminishing returns to individual ‘investment’ in education. The cultural capital of the high status variants of liberal‐humanist education remained inaccessible to newly incorporated groups. Educational ...

The Intergenerational Dimension of Credentialisation and its Implications for Vocational Change in Education

Abstract This paper focuses upon the problem of the relationship between academic and experiential knowledge in the construction of vocationally relevant courses and qualifications. The issues are illustrated through a detailed account of the development of an advertising degree course at a higher education institution in New Zealand. A broader context is provided by locating the issues within a sociological account of the dynamics of ‘credential inflation’ and the way in which it generates changes in the relationships between educational levels and occupational groups and between different types of ‘capital’ for successive generations of practitioners. This further develops an argument presented earlier by Hickox and Moore.