This paper is drawn from a recent microhistory of teacher stress, a genealogical inquiry that reveals the debilitating effects of a 'game of truth' called 'economic rationalism' on South Australian teachers during the last two decades of the twentieth century. It explores the everyday stresses of teaching through extracts from the teachers' oral…

Unlike most papers on education and ecology, this one is not concerned with the content of education but its organisation as a system and hence its "purpose" or "finality". The central contention of the paper, which takes English education and training (or "learning") as a case in point, is that in a new market-state formation the pursuit of…

This paper draws upon a range of ideas and concepts developed by the British sociologist Basil Bernstein to examine recent challenges and changes encountered by members of professional occupations, including those who teach and research in higher education. The paper discusses and seeks to develop Bernstein's analysis of how particular…

The market as educator has become firmly lodged at the centre of popular and scholarly debate commenting on the nexus between children, consumption and education/learning. In this paper, I appreciate this scholarly debate from the point of view of the sociology of consumption. The latter has been relatively silent on children's consumption and…

While economic capital is not synonymous with cultural, social or symbolic capital in either its constitutional or organizational form, it nevertheless remains the more flexible and convertible form of capital. The convertibility of economic capital has particular resonance within "Celtic Tiger" Ireland. The states reluctance to fully…

Maintains that although Canada's private schools attempt to reproduce dominant cultural ideology, meritocracy and recruitment have created paradoxical effects. Academic competition results in fewer private school graduates being admitted to top universities. Further studies reveal no correlation between private school and financial success. (MJP)

Analyzes school choice in terms of inter-school student transfer and explains choice as the result of two factors: organization of student mobility among schools in terms of vacant positions and student body composition; and the influence and position of the school within the educational market. (MJP)