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

Abstract 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. Keywords: Social RealismCritical Realismsocial constructionismpostmodernismpositivism Notes 1. Archie Lush was a Welsh miner, educationalist and socialist. http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/content/2/1/183.abstract. 2. SR in the sociology of education emerged in the late 1990s out of discussions between John Beck, Karl Maton, Rob Moore, Johan Muller and Michael F.D. Young. Muller's time in Cambridge as a visiting scholar resulted in a paper (Moore and Muller Citation1999) to which Young (2008) responded. At the same time, Maton (Citation2000) had been working on his 'languages of legitimation' paper and Moore and Maton (2001) on the 'epistemic device'. Further papers followed both individually authored and in various combinations. The original group was later joined by Leesa Wheelahan. Some of these early papers have been collected in Maton and Moore (Citation2010). In 2008 an international colloquium took place in Homerton College, Cambridge bringing together a 'second generation' of scholars and researchers taking up these ideas. This paper draws inter alia on discussions over the years with my colleagues and friends and on their insights to which I cannot here do proper justice – see, in particular, Beck (Citation2008), Maton (Citation2011), Muller (Citation2000), Rata (Citation2012), Wheelahan (Citation2010), Young (Citation2008) and also Moore (Citation2009). I do not presume to speak on their on their behalf, but hope they will be satisfied with my account and that those new to these ideas will find this paper a useful introduction. I am especially grateful, here, to Brian Barrett and Karl Maton. 3. Bourdieu is not a 'constructionist' and, indeed, criticizes constructionism, but his relational field theory that reduces knowledge relations to a homological transubstantiation of the economic field and on the basis of the principle of the 'arbitrary' mobilizes concepts such as 'cultural capital, 'misrecognition' and 'symbolic violence', in the final analysis, produces the same epistemic result. 4. Excellent introductions to CR can be found in Collier (1994), Sayer (2000) and Cruickshank (Citation2003). 5. Constituting what Bernstein (Citation2000) termed a 'horizontal knowledge structure with a weak grammar'. SR draws upon aspects of Bernstein's later ideas on knowledge structures that were an early catalyst. 6. 'Apparent' because CR has been an established position in the philosophy of science for some time. Bhaskar's Realist Philosophy of Science was first published in 1975 and Benton's, Philosophical Foundations of the Three Sociologies in 1977 (see Benton Citation1977). Both were students of the Realist philosopher of science Rom Harré at Oxford. It is of interest that the sociology of education has shown little interest in this approach to the knowledge debate, opting instead for 'soft' forms of relativist constructionism in its original American form and then later Parisian postmodernist/poststructuralist versions. 7. In their own time, the positivists conceived of their project as radical and emancipatory and as challenging received arbitrary authority, and were in the case of the Vienna Circle, like those of the Frankfurt School, subject to Nazis persecution and murder. Their depiction as reactionary social order theorists by radical constructionists in the 1960s is a calumny. The members of the Vienna Circle, like Russell in Britain, were champions of the Left and believed that by grounding knowledge in immediate material experience they were producing a philosophy of 'workers' knowledge' as much as one of science. 8. See also Collins' (Citation2000) seminal work.