The potential for academic knowledge to "interrupt" inter-generational reproduction in education is located in the structural contradictions that shape knowledge and democracy. Since the late 1990s research in the sociology of education, which theorises curriculum knowledge using the ideas of Durkheim, Vygotsky and Bernstein, suggests…

The article identifies and discusses three stages in the critical policy methodology used in the sociology of education. These are: firstly, employing a political economy theoretical framework that identifies causal links between global forces and local developments; secondly, analysing educational policy within that theoretically conceptualised…

This article contributes to the growing social realist literature in the sociology of education. A world systems approach is used to explain the shift to the various forms of localisation, including the emphasis on experience in the curriculum, as a strategy of globalisation that contributes to the decline of universal class consciousness and…

Post-Marxist critical sociology of education has influenced the development of indigenous ("kaupapa") Maori educational theory and research. Its effects are examined in four claims made for Maori education by indigenous theorists. The claims are: indigenous kaupapa Maori education is a revolutionary initiative; it is a cultural solution…

The sociology of education in New Zealand, as in other countries, is affected by the dilemma inherent to the discipline, namely: is it a sociology "of" education or a sociology "for" education? In this article I analyse three factors in which the dilemma is played out: "cultural oppositionism" in the indigenous…