EDUCATIONAL THEORY Fall 1991, Vol. 41, No. 4 0 1991 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Review Essay: Social Analysis of Education: After the New Socio/ogy*

By Allen Hunter

Philip Wexler’s Social Analysis of Education: After the New Sociology will probably bring joy to critics of radical perspectives in education. Its density, obtuseness, and disor- ganization will confirm the view that radical theories are incoherent, contribute nothing to the study of education, and that their democratic pretensions are belied by their coded, exclusionary language. Exasperated as I am by the book, I do not hold this view, hence I want to offer an appraisal of the book which clarifies its theoretical concerns and contributions to the study of education. First I present the argument of the book, and second I critique it.

The inaccessible style and near incoherence of much of the book is disconcerting. But rather than harp on this criticism throughout the review, I will register two points. His poor writing and use of an arcane vocabulary are ironic because Wexler criticizes earlier radical educational theorists for using inaccessible language to legitimate themselves as serious academic professionals and isolate themselves from the very people in whose name they were claiming to speak. Yet his main contribution to that literature, The Sociology of Education: Beyond Equality,’ is much easier to read than this book. Indeed Social Analysis of ECjucation at times verges on the incoherent. The following is representative: “The symbolic energy which is released by decompositional practices of de-centering or dispersing the structure is reintegrated into the eno- symbolic, ‘the sign.”’ (p. 148)

It is also difficult to read, and for some people probably intimidating andfor irritating, because he continually tosses off references to theorists and theories. However, unlike some classically-trained European social theorists who actually theorize by critically engaging with the ideas of other theorists, Wexler’s references are more like gestures which link him to particular traditions of thought. Intended or not this style works to identify him with the cognescenti and distance him from the uninitiated.

I.

Wexler intends to reconstruct the theoretical foundations of the study of education. This is less a book about education than an argument for an approach to the sociology of education, or as Wexler prefers, a social analysis of education. It is a critique of prevailing radical theories in the sociology of education, and a gloss on a series of post-structuralist theories which he thinks can be fruitfully utilized to study schools and education. To his credit, he mainly criticizes the so-called new sociology of education, the school of educational studies to which he has contributed. Yet his critique is odd: demanding self- reflexivity on the part of social theorists he is not at all self-critical of his own contributions to the new sociology of education.*

Correspondence: A. E. Havens Center, 81 12 Social Science, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706.

Philip Wexler, Social Analysis of Education: After the New Sociology (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987).

1. Philip Wexler, The Sociology of Education: Beyond Equality (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1976).

2. See, for instance, Wexler, The Sociology of Education: Beyond Equality; Philip Wexler and Tony Whitson, “Hegemony and Education,” Psychology and Social Theory 3 (Fall 1982), 31-32; Philip Wexler, Tony Whitson and Emily J. Moskowitz, “Deschooling by Default: The Changing Social Functions of Public Schooling,” Interchange 12, no. 2-3 (1981): 133-50.

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He has several criticisms of the new sociology of education: complicity with liberal assumptions, class-bias, pessimism, ahistoricism. First, even though the new (radical) sociology of education criticized an older (liberal) sociology of education for its assumptions (such as its focus on individual social mobility within existing institutions and between classes), it remained in the same “episteme.” For Wexler, the new sociology of education, remaining wedded to a realism which posits reality as “out there,” and “saw education, its social context, and sociology of education as separate domains.” (p. 185) As a result, new sociologists of education were complicit with “the hegemonic class’s misleading definition of the socially formative power of schooling.“ (p. 171) The new sociologists of education were not self-reflexive, and did not understand the extent to which the categories of analysis they adopted were not “natural” but had been constructed by uncritical approaches to education. For instance, they did not question the ideology of schooling itself as did other radical critics as lllich and Reimer. (Pa 171)

Second, he wants to deflate these objectivist pretensions of the new sociology of education in two ways. He stresses the class origins of the new sociology of education in the professional middle classes, arguing that the intellectual products of these aspiring academics are expressions of “an ambivalent professionalism” driven by the optimism and guilt of an expanding class whose egalitarian ideals were at odds with its relative privileges. (p. 26, emphasis in original) In addition, the new sociology of education “neglected its own historicity;” following the decline of 1960s student radicalism, the new sociology of education arose as a post-movement discourse which “recapitulates that defeat, restating it abstractly and obsessively.” (pp. 4, 27) He argues that in the wake of activism, former student radicals, now young professors of education, were more impressed by the power of dominant institutions, including schools, to reproduce themselves and systemic patterns of domination, than the ability of students and others to transform them.

Third, he criticizes the main intellectual contribution of the new sociology of education - the analysis of cultural reproduction - for inscribing political pessimism within an objectivist and ahistorical theory of schooling. Following the decline of the student movement the new sociologists of education neither continued to celebrate activism nor (re)turned to liberal theories of education; rather they developed a theory which could simultaneously provide a critique of liberal status attainment studies and an explanation of the failures of radical movements to transform schools. Drawing on Althusser’s agentless and anti-historicist structuralism and Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction, they argued that the schools did not alleviate social inequalities, but actively reproduced the economic inequities and cultural divisions of class society. Wexler argues that this stress on cultural reproduction of existing social relations focussed too exclusively on relations within schools: was too ahistorical in stressing the power of elites to impose their will on subordinate populations; and did not attend to contemporary cultural dynamics infusing and transforming educational politics. As a consequence theories of reproduction - even when modified by attention to resist- ance - are blind to the diversity of influences on education and deflect attention from historically concrete analyses.

Impressed by the variety of contemporary changes in education Wexler argues that theories of reproduction and the new sociology of education need to be replaced by more open, subtle analyses attuned to contemporary social and cultural changes. His argument has three parts. First, he thinks sociology should be replaced by what he terms social analysis. Sociology has traditionally taken society (the bounded nation- state) as its given unit of analysis, yet the concept of society should be questioned because “its” boundaries are often arbitrary and reified in ways which constrain analysis of the problems at hand. He argues that analysts of education need to recognize “the production rather than givenness of society.” Models of reproduction should be replaced with studies of “historical movements in society and education” (p. 88) in which social movements are not only central social actors in identity formation, but also construct the social setting in which identities are formed. Indeed, if reproduction models pessimistically predict the continuity of patterns of domination, it is almost as if he is

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optimistically suggesting that the shift to social analysis influenced by post-structuralist literary theory can actually help form new collective identities and new social movements.

Second, he thinks it is important for social analysts to appropriate literary methods because of the importance of signs, symbols, and texts in the emerging post-modern, information-based “society.” Indeed, the shift to social analysis is part of the societal shift to post-industrial or post-modern society. The increased power of imagery, symbols, and systems of signification in contemporary society creates the context in which “literary theory displaces social theory.” (p. 149) Like other theorists who stress that we are currently in a period of societal transition Wexler believes we are witnessing “the emergence of a qualitatively new social formation” (p. 152) characterized by the “rise of informationalism” (p. 153) in which the production and distribution of information increasingly determines the (re)organization of social relations, the networks within which power is wielded, and the bases of individual and collective identity f~rmation.~

Third, these macro-social changes have influenced schooling and the politics of education. Unfortunately, for this is the crux of his social analysis, it is at this point that he becomes casual, anecdotal, and even less coherent than in his discussions of changes in the society. Wexler joins other commentators in noting that the right-ward shift in politics has had an impact on public education. The language of Reaganism which combines the market and morality, efficiency and traditional values, has been invoked to justify restructuring education through “marketization” and the reordering of curricular priorities to enable conservatives to control schools as a “central means of national integration.” (p. 64) More interesting, Wexler sees the organization of schools - in the liberal or conservative political economies - as regressive in relation to the rising informational society. Neither the schools as organized for most of the postwar period nor as they are now being restructured by conservatives help develop individuals with the skills and identities which will be “functional” for the developing postmodern society. Partly for this reason, the meaning and context of education is escaping from its institutional confines in schooling. He contextualizes the break down of the institutional confining of education within schools in the rise of a new mode of signification. Education in his view ought to be seen as oriented toward non-commodified collective identity formation through which people actively seek to control their lives and the direction and pace of change.

I t .

There are several problems with Wexler’s critical analysis of the new sociology of education: he is vague about who he is criticizing, overstates their objectivism, is unclear about the implications of his critique of their class position, and is unduly harsh in his criticisms of theories of cultural reproduction.

First, in his critique of the new sociology of education we are not clear just which authors and body of scholarship he is criticizing. In part the problem is that the term “new sociology of education” has been used both in Britain and the US, but in reference to only somewhat overlapping groups of theorists. In Britain the term clearly designates education theorists who, starting in the late 1960s, shifted from macro-sociological structural concerns to the micro-sociological process-oriented analyses of classroom interactions and social constructionist approaches to the curriculum drawing on eth- nomethodological and phenomenological approaches: It was a development distinct

3. Recent books which address the increased role of information and communications include Timothy W. Luke, Screens of Power: Ideology. Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989) and Mark Poster, Critical Theory and Poststructuralism: In Search of a Context (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

4. For discussions of the British new sociology of education, see Jerome Karabel and A.H. Halsey, ”Educational Research: A Review and an Interpretation,” in Power and Ideology in Education, ed. Karabel and Halsey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 1-85; Gerald Bernbaum, Knowledge and ldeology in the Sociology of Education, (London: MacMillan Press, 1977); Olive Banks, “The Sociology of Education, 1952-1 982,” British Journal of Educational Studies XXX, no. I (February 1982): 18-31; and David Blackledge and Barry Hunt, Sociological Interpretations of Education (London: Croom Helm, 1985).

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from the rise of neo-Marxist approaches which continued to do structural analyses, but with assumptions about and emphases on class conflict rather than structural functional assumptions about consensus. The Birmingham cultural studies approach - developed by Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and their students, and in the field of

education best known through Paul Willis’s Learning to LabouP - did seek to combine the micro-and macro-levels of analysis, but is not considered part of the (British) new sociology of education even though it also drew from American sociology in its approach to classroom interactions and student subcultures.

In the United States the new sociology of education was also launched from outside of sociology departments, finding its home in education schools, especially in departments of curriculum studies. It chronologically followed, but only marginally overlapped with the revisionist historiography (e.g., Michael Katz, Paul Violas, Joel Spring, David Tyack), and as an academic discourse does not include the writings of such radical critics of education as Jonathan Kozol and James Herndon. From the beginning it combined the neo-Marxist approach to macro- structural questions - first and preeminently expressed in Bowles and Gintis’s Schooling in Capitalist America6 - with a radical appropriation of micro-analyses of classrooms, texts, and the curriculum. Thus in both Britain and the United States, the rise of the new sociology of education was associated with a shift away from sociology departments to institutes and schools of education. Many of the leading American - as well as British - contributors to the new sociology of education were trained as curriculum theorists not sociologists. These theorists in the United States have been as intent on criticizing existing approaches to curriculum theory as questioning the liberal, individualist assumptions of status attain- ment studies and the conservative assumptions of value consensus, societal harmony, and equilibrium in Parsonian structural functionalism, the theory which informed the sociology of education in the postwar years until the late 1960s.’ These new curriculum theorists - especially Henry A. Giroux and Michael W. Apple - have self-consciously sought to rethink the study of curriculum through an interdisciplinary approach which integrates political economy and cultural analysis with sociology and curriculum studies, and freely drew on the Birmingham approach to cultural studies and education.

The migration to education schools of some of the most exciting theorizing about schools and education has unfortunately meant - as suggested by several recent review essaysE - that the sociology of education has not redefined its province to include the newer questions raised by the new sociology of education. While the term new sociology of education is appropriate because new curriculum theorists use sociological approaches, it is also a misnomer because the study of education within sociology departments has been relatively unaffected by the new developments.

With this brief clarification of the object of Wexler’s critique, what about his criticisms? His critique of the field’s unexamined assumptions of realism and objectivism are overstated. At the beginning these studies were not informed by the post- structuralist emphases on indeterminacy nor a thorough constructionist position which continually questions the givenness of the object of study. And Wexler is right that few American new sociologists of education systematically interrogated compulsory schooling as the institutional site of education. But even according to Wexler’s own criteria, he exag-

5. Paul Willis, Learning to Labour (Westmead, England: Saxon House, 1977). 6. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: fducational Reform

and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976). 7. Karabel and Halsey, “Educational Research.” 8. See, for example, Sarane Spence Boocock, “The Social Organization of the Classroom,”

in the Annual Review of Sociology, 4 (1978): 1-28; Francisco 0. Ramirez and John W. Meyer, “Comparative Education: The Social Construction of the Modern World System,” in the Annual Review of Sociology, 6 (1980): 369-99: William B. Tyler, “The Organizational Structure of the School,” in the Annual Review of Sociology, 1 l(1985): 49-73; M. T. Hallinan, “Equality of Educational Opportunity,” in the Annual Review of Sociology, 14 (1988): 249-68; and Charles E. Bidwell and Noah E. Friedkin, ”The Sociology of Education,” in Handbook of Sociology, ed. Neil J. Smelser (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1988), 449-71.

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gerates their objectivism. Part of the impetus for the reconceptualization of curricular studies was to question naturalistic assumptions about knowledge by taking a con- structivist position. Further, Wexler underestimates the self-reflexivity of the new sociologists of education in two ways. As radicals they self-consciously saw themselves as engaged in a critical conversation with existing disciplinary approaches. Recent radical scholarship on education has been quite aware of itself relative to existing schools of thought about education, other currents of radical scholarship, and has been in explicit and implicit dialogues with mainstream views in different disciplines. In addition, they have been quite critical of their own previous work including their approach to cultural reprodu~tion.~

Third, how shall we evaluate Wexler’s explanation of the bases of objectivism and ahistoricism in the class position of the new sociologists of education? His argument about class origins is either a truism or overly vague. Karabel and Hasley provide an intra-class analysis for the development of the new sociology of education in Britain; by self-consciously proclaiming an intellectual agenda at odds with the dominant sociology of education, theorists in schools and institutes of education sought to legitimate a new approach which they controlled. The content of the new sociology of education was, they argue, partly determined by the desire to produce a novel perspective which would help marginal professionals establish themselves at the core of the (reconstituted) field.1° Wexler has no such analysis; rather he is arguing two much vaguer points. Studies about the effects of education on working class youth and about resistance to schooling by those youth are affected by the fact they are produced by professionals. In addition, the pessimism in the content of the new sociology of education legitimates political inaction on the part of professionals who - whether they know it or not - are more interested in committing their time and energy

to professional advancement than political change. In our age, influenced by relativism and the sociology of knowledge, the first point is a truism; and because it holds true for previous educational sociologists, it does not help explain recent changes in the sociology of education. Now, there is nothing wrong with stating truisms as a prelude to specific analyses about how a general phenomenon works, but Wexler does not elaborate. Further, he assumes that pessimism is an unwarranted posture and offers a class analysis of it; yet it could be that pessimism about recent attempts to change schools was a reasoned response to the defeats and partiality of victories recently experienced.

Wexler’s argument about the class identity of the new theorists not only reduces an intellectual current to its class interest thereby underestimating its intellectual project, but is more finger pointing than analysis. Even on his own terms, he is unclear whether he is conceiving class in terms of backgrounds and/or intended (or probable) class trajectories: he conflates the class position of intellectuals with the social uses of the knowledge they produce; and he does not explain why class is the critical category here. Couldn’t he have just as readily argued that in the wake of the civil rights movement (professional male) white radical intellectuals were establishing their cre- dentials through pessimistic assessments of the efficacy of affirmative action to alleviate racism, or that they were predominantly (professional) male (white) radical intellectuals engaged in theorizing which privileged capitalist over gender social relations thereby

9. See Michael W. Apple, “Reproduction, Contestation and Curriculum,” the first chapter of his Education and Power (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, rev. ed. 1985). 1-37; Robert W. Connell, ”The Black Box of Habit on the Wings of History: Critical Reflections on the Theory of Social Reproduction, with Suggestions on How to Do It Better,” in his Which Way Is Up?: Essays on Sex, Class, and CUltUfe (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1983): 140-61; Henry A. Giroux, “Reproduction, Resistance, and Accommodation,” in his Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1983), pp. 72- 11 1; Paul Willis, ”Cultural Production is Different from Cultural Reproduction is Different from Social Reproduction is Different from Production,” Interchange 12, no. 2-3 (1 981): 48-67.

10. Karabel and Halsey, “Educational Research,” 50.

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marginalizing the concerns of feminists struggling to establish themselves in the academy?

Wexler’s criticism of ahistoricism is more accurate. While particular new education theorists have commented extensively on current crises in education, they have not situated these comments within their previous theorizing or used their analyses of these new developments to refine their theory.’’ Wexler is also right that the new sociologists of education have not self-reflexively examined the ways in which the historical context in which they write has influenced their work. While they have clearly drawn on the revisionist historiography and some - like Michael Apple have undertaken historical analyses of education and schooling12 - on the whole the new sociology of education’s attentiveness to the social contruction of the curriculum has not been complemented by historical grounding.

Many of Wexler’s criticisms of the new sociology of education theories of repro- duction are on target, but contain an odd combination of references to earlier criticisms of the literature with a style which suggests that he is alone in critiquing it. Indeed criticisms of theories of reproduction for determinism, functionalism, political pessimism, and a singular stress on capitalist social relations have been made both by critics of the new sociology of education and by its leading e~p0nents. l~ Oddly he does not even identify himself with criticisms of the reproductionist literature for an overly narrow emphasis on the reproduction of capitalist class relations; in their own second thoughts new sociologists of education have acknowledged - if not adequately theorized - that theories of reproduction need to account for the persistence of racial and gender as well as class hierarchies.

Yet there are substantive and analytic weaknesses in even the more sophisticated theories of reproduction, which Wexler could have noted. Substantively, to the best of my knowledge, theorists of cultural reproduction have not treated the ways in which mass public schooling works to promote ideologies of nationalism and consolidate nation-states. While it is broadly recognized that compulsory education is a part of nation-building, that in the United States schools promoted Americanization, and that state-institutions generally work to legitimate the nation-states of which they are a part, these concerns have not been explicitly integrated into the reproductionist 1iterat~re.l~ The role of schools in promoting national integration is not only a political issue because of issues like bilingualism, but is also analytically interesting because it raises the issue of the relationship between curricular content and institutional form. There are broad similarities in the form of schooling across polities, yet the content in each promotes identification not only with the nation-state in general, but with a nationality in particular.

11. See, for instance, chapters 5 and 6 in Michael Apple’s Teachers and Texts: A Political Economy of Class and Gender Relations in Education (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 106-149; and Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, €ducation Under Seige: The Con- servative, Liberal and Radical Debate Over Schooling (South Hadley: Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1985).

12. See Michael W. Apple, “Teaching and ‘Women’s Work,’ ” chapter 3 in Teachers and Texts, 54-78; and Michael W. Apple, “Regulating the Text: The SocioHistorical Roots of State Control,” Educational Policy 3, no. 2 (1989): 107-123.

13. See references in endnote #9 above: other interesting criticisms include Dennis Carlson, “Teachers as Political Actors: From Reproductive Theory to Crisis of Schooling,” Harvard Edu- cational Review 57, no. 3 (August 1987): 283-307; and Richard Rubinson and John Ralph, “Methodological Issues in the Study of Educational Change,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986),

14. For a sociological account of the expansion of education driven by nation-building social movements see John W. Meyer, David Tyack, Joanne Nagel, and Audri Gordon, “Public Education as Nation-Building in America: Enrollments and Bureaucratization in the American States, 1870- 1930,” in the American Journal of Sociology 85, no. 3 (1979): 591-613. Bruce Fuller seeks to combine macro-analyses of the role of states in the expansion of education with a classroom level analysis of the capacity of states to affect processes of schooling itself in Growing Up Modern: The Western State Builds Third World Schools (New York: Routledge, 1991).

275-304.

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Or does it? We know that the issue is more complex for colonial and neo-colonial polities, for then the educational systems often facilitate(d) colonial control of the colonized or newly independent states. But what happens to the production and reproduction of nationalist ideologies when curricular materials are produced and marketed by multinational corporations for transnational markets? An explicit focus on the interactions between different re/productive tendencies would strengthen this literature.

Wexler’s criticisms of ahistoricism are also relevant in trying to move beyond current theorizing about cultural reproduction. After the initial stress on the systemic quality of cultural transmission, some new sociologists noted that student resistance to schooling also helped produce new educational settings and practices. But the stress was on reproduction from above and attempts at the production of different social relationships from below. Yet in historically dynamic societies such as the United States, elites are always trying to combine reproduction of some elements of the past (especially their dominance) with the production of new beliefs, habits, practices, and knowledge. Thus it cannot be assumed that either elite or subordinate groups are more involved in reproducing existing relationships and practices or trying to produce new ones. Further, when the patterns of hierarchy around gender, class, and race are disaggregated, it becomes obvious that Wexler is right that a unitary stress on reproduction is too simple. Historically concrete analyses of educational change should be facilitated by attention to the production as well as reproduction of educational practices in schools, to tensions between different goals particular elites seek in schooling, and to the divergent agendas of different elites.’’ Thus we could have expected that critical attention to the current crisis of education would have been theorized in terms of the breakdown and/or reconstruction of social relations of re/ production. Without theorizing the current educational crisis it is too easy to see the crisis as merely a cost of transition from one phase of cultural reproduction to the next, which misses the ways in which the forces at work in periods of transition produce the terrain and institutional arrangements in which a new phase of (more stable) economic and cultural reproduction will operate.

While going even further than Wexler in criticizing the current state of theories of cultural relproduction, I still think he rejects too much. Wexler is right that we do not need holistic models of society or of schools within society; but reproduction models need not draw upon such assumptions. The challenge is to explain how the production and reproduction of social relations are enacted without resorting to holistic or functionalist assumptions. That is, Wexler’s plea for historically specific analyses of individual and collective social practices is appealing, but such an approach would need to provide a better model for phenomena currently analyzed in terms of theories of re/production, not merely highlight other phenomena. He writes that the alternative “is to recognize the production rather than the givenness of society.” (p. 88) Yet this theoretical position does not preclude substantive findings which stress continuity over change. It is possible to reject foundational assumptions and still recognize that many patterns of social action are quite durable, that groups with more power are better able to achieve their goals than groups with less power, whether they seek to maintain stability or promote change. That is, the concerns theories of re/production were developed to address remain crucial even if the theories of re/production so far enunciated are not adequate to the task. Functionalist and reproductionist theorizing may assume what has to be analyzed, namely the ways in which the results of activities within particular institutions facilitate the maintenance of dominate features of the overarching social structure: but they have at least pointed to how the past weighs heavy on the present. Wexler may prefer the term production to reproduction, but he will still find the practices and identities produced in schools as well as other settings owe much to the past as well as to the creative efforts of individuals and groups in

15. For an analysis which begins to move in this direction see Michael W. Apple, “Social Crisis and Curriculum Accords,” Educational Theory 38, no. 2 (1988): 191-201.

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the present. We want a social theory that can overcome determinist or reductionist theorizing which can explain stability and change.

Just as Wexler’s deconstruction of the new sociology of education gets mixed reviews so do his own reconstructive claims. He argues that social analysis should replace sociology at two quite different analytic levels which he does not sort out. On the one hand he is claiming that new theoretical approaches should be adopted for all social theorizing; on the other hand he makes the historically specific argument that it is necessary to adopt textualist social analysis to adequately apprehend the emergent informational society.

At the level of a general social theory there are important ways in which the new theoretical developments which promote greater attention to indeterminancy, mutuality of determinations, extensive in(ter)dependence of diverse discursive domains and social structures is important. Whether termed social analysis, social theory, sociology, or textualism, the kind of non-reductionist, integrative perspective which at once questions the assumptions and findings of existing scholarship and builds upon them is useful. Yet the retrospective significance of new theories needs to be clarified. A new approach to previously studied phenomena does not necessarily mean that everything that has been said about them needs to be rethought from scratch (although it could mean that). The problem with Wexler (and he is not alone in this regard) is that he implies a thorough rejection of previous scholarship, yet freely draws on its findings.

The new sociology of education at first sought to shift the paradigm for analyzing education by shifting the focus of attention. It could thereby ignore much that had been previously written about education. But if a theoretical shift is predicated on reconcep- tualizing a whole field, not highlighting a different domain, then it has to engage in ideological critiques and appropriations of existing literatures. For example, part of Wexler’s claims for social analysis is that the study of social movement dynamism can help avoid the objectification of “society” or the reification of particular institutions. Social movements do not only happen on a ground of set social relations and existing institutions, they also transform the context in which they exist. They not only modify society, but actively constitute it. Theoretically I have little trouble with this, but this formulation is stated at such a high level of abstraction that it does not necessarily invalidate the findings (as opposed to assumptions) of other approaches. Wexler is right that the politics of educational change will be better grasped by looking at social movement activism and the educational agendas of broader political bodies as well as the routinized political decision-making within those institutions specific to education. For instance, one can gain important, but ultimately very partial views of the relationship between education and race by focussing on schools and school committees. A social movement framework can encompass transactions within these institutions and also be alert to other social dynamics which have influenced educational institutions, ideologies, the social formation of the teaching profession, the attitudes of parents and students, the content of texts, the expectations different groups have of schooling, etc.

Wexler also argues that textualist analyses are important because they attend to new developments. “Textualism is both a practice and itself a sign of the emergence of a qualitatively new social formation or society.” (p. 152) He writes that “textualism, and, less evidently, symbolic economies of identity, are forms of social speech that are historically appropriate to a society where discourse is a central means of social reproduction, and where the mobilization of collective energies is mediated through individual identity.” (p. 178-9) Taken with post-structuralist, literary theories which emphasize the text, Wexler is not uncritical of these theoretical developments. He argues that textualism itself tends toward reification if it is not socio-culturally situated. He is thus attentive to the links between changes in social practices and changes in the symbolic order, but does not privilege either the material or symbolic domains as more basic. While recognizing the newness of the emerging era, he also recognizes the continued importance of the logic of commodification and of the role of imagery in the sphere of consumption. He seeks to hold onto analyses of the whole without recourse to totalizing or reductive “grand narratives.” Still, Wexler’s attempts to provide materiality to textualism and culturalist sensitivities to materialism more insists on their

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mutual importance than works toward a new synthesis. Even here, however, his analytic scope is narrower than one assumes his politics are. While his insights into the unifying tendencies of a new information order are joined to social psychological insights, he remains more narrowly focussed on capitalist relations of production and consumption than one would expect from one who recognizes the importance of the textualist attention to difference. He does not incorporate gender, race, or nationality as critical determinants of identity formation.

His third main point - that these macro-social changes are of critical importance for understanding changes in education - is what one would expect to be the core of the book, the pay-off, as it were. It is not. While Wexler does discuss some recent changes, he contributes neither new descriptive richness nor explanatory insights to the existing radical literature about the current period of crisis in education.16 Much of the current radical discussion of current developments in education are framed by attention to the influence of conservativism in and on education. His discussion of contemporary developments in schooling is informed by his grand theorizing, but more at the level of particular insight than extended analysis. He argues that the increased economic importance of information, images and the symbolic mean that central tendencies of the political economy themselves address socialization and education. He argues against mere curricular reform to improve the schools without also challenging the institutional features of education and the ways those features help determine educational content. Schools are so unsuccessful in achieving their educational mission because they are based on institutional parallels with an “older mode of production” (p. 175).

He also notes that the increased prominence of information and knowledge production mean that it is all the more important for university-based sociologists of education to be institutionally self-reflexive because the universities and their intellectual fads are very closely intertwined with the broader tendencies of the economy. Unfor- tunately these intriguing notions are not developed, and his major plea for research is not embedded in these concerns. As a research agenda he seems to be suggesting that social analysts of education should be ethnographically concerned with the ways in which identity- formation takes place as much against the pedagogic and institutional logics of schools as within them. Yet he does not clarify how the social practices of students in schools in “semiotic society” contribute to indentity formation differently than in previous stages of mass schooling within capitalist societies. That is, his main plea for a research agenda retreats from the insights which link schools to the larger changes.

He suggests that the informational society forms identities differently, but is unconvincing. Are there not less grand explanations for much of the social movements activism and individual and collective attempts at modifying identity? A good case can be made for arguing that many aspects of the move toward cultural restoration - whatever their ultimate relationship to the reordering of the world political economy - have more proximate contexts such as the rise of civil rights, feminism, youth culture and gay liberation and the backlash movements they helped to call into being. Similarly the defeat of the United States in Vietnam still works its effects upon United States culture and school curricula.

To summarize, the book is billed as a theorization of the sociology of education, but is really more interesting in its commentary on contemporary social theory in general than in its application to education or schooling. It is not clear to me how distant his own theoretical prescriptions are from the more recent, nuanced and open- ended work by the new sociologists of education. Further, as intriguing as his own

16. In addition to the references in endnote #11 see Ann Bastian, Norm Fruchter, Marilyn Gittell, Colin Greer, and Kenneth Haskins, Choosing Equality: The Case for Democratic Schooling (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Henry A. Giroux, Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life: Critical Pedagogy in the Modern Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) and Ira Shor, Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration 1969-1984 (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

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theoretical proposals are he barely uses these in his own discussion of education. His analysis of changes in education owes no more to his proposals for a contextualized textualism than the new sociologists of education discussions of the current educational crisis are a working out of theories of economic and cultural reproduction.

Still his perspective is useful because programmatically it underscores the need to describe and analyze institutional developments like schooling as part of larger socio-historical patterns. One of the challenges for theorists attracted to deconstruction but impatient with its asocial focus on discourse is to develop analyses of institutions - their politics, internal developmental tendencies and their interactions with their envi- ronments -that do not reify their environments or their own institutional patterns. Wexler’s challenge to study changes in education as an integral aspect of the rise of commodified informationalism is one well worth addressing. Still, it is not merely the notion of linkages which is important. After all, as Aronowitz and Giroux have pointed out, neo-conservatives intent on restructuring education to assist in the pursuit of new forms of profit-oriented productivity are also well aware of the fact that schools are important for the nation’s political economy.” Thus, Wexler could have done more to indicate what he sees as the substantive themes to be addressed.

There is a research agenda associated with Wexler’s perspectives. Most generally it demands ideological critique of existing studies of education as well as a careful appropriation of facts and findings from those studies. It also calls for an expanded definition of the political economic and social cultural determinants of educational change. As he suggests this involves not merely attention to school-society interactions and institutional environments, but also study of the changing nature of educational institutions and changes in the interplay between families, the economy, social move- ments, and schools. More fundamentally, it calls for linking thick description, broad statistical and institutional studies with historical analyses of current changes in education. There is a general recognition that we are in a period of fundamental transformation, but lack of explanatory consensus about what are the determinants or likely outcomes of this period of transformation. Theoretically informed analysis of particular institutions like schools and social processes like education can provide laboratories for refining our understanding of the broader changes and also alert us to the ways in which those changes are working themselves out in particular arenas. Wexler’s call for a social analysis of education attuned to those changes, attentive to the particular developments in education, and self-conscious of its own historical context, assumptions, and values can contribute to that effort.

I am grateful to Michael Apple for comments on an earlier draft of this essay although he may not agree with all my interpretations.

17. See Aronowitz and Giroux, Education Under Seige: The Conservative, Liberal and Radical Debate over Schooling, p. x.

FALL 1991