Introduction

The new sociology of education (NSE) marked a departure from existing traditions in seeking new measures and weights to reckon with inequality in schooling. Laid out on the table for analytical appraisal were classifications and valuings of knowledge—those of schools and those of different social and professional groups invested to varying degrees in education (Bernstein, 1971). Differentiations in linguistic practices and the prestige they bear were also calibrated against social status and classroom demands (Bourdieu, 1991; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). The differential importance and value of school itself entered into analytical view, in examinations of middle-class ‘reconversion’ strategies, working-class alienation and of the false ideological attributions of meritocracy (Bourdieu, 1984; Young, 1971). In short, the scaling of educational inequality was undertaken in distinctive ways by the new sociology of education. The retrospective task of reflecting on the contributions of the NSE further involves a kind of scaling or rescaling from a different temporal and spatial vantage point.

My purpose here is to draw upon the notions of scale and scaling as a way of reviewing the contributions and limitations of the NSE, and of drawing connections to alternative scales upon which inequalities may be identified. I draw on an understanding of scale as the “establishment of perspectives in discourse that make visible dimensions such as relative proximity, importance, legitimacy, classification, affinity, and so on” (Windle & Moita-Lopes, 2021, p. 131; see also, Carr & Lempert, 2016). My focus is on the work of Bourdieu, whose influence beyond the temporal and spatial contexts of its production has perhaps been widest among the names typically associated with the NSE (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1979, 1990). However, in considering the uptake of the NSE, I am also interested in processes of recontextualization, a concept used by Bernstein (2000) to examine the transformations of knowledge into pedagogical forms. This term is related to the wider analytical perspective of entextualization, “the process by means of which discourse is successively decontextualised and recontextualised, and thus made into a ‘new’ discourse” (Blommaert, 2005, p. 47). In the present contribution, the NSE is considered as a multifaceted discourse that continues to be recontextualized and, hence, to gain new meanings. I argue, following Silverstein and Urban (1996) that a ‘ focus on processes of entextualisation allows for examination of roles involved in the production, circulation, and reception of a given text, as well as the shifts in meaning that occur when these roles or other contextual elements alter in subsequent appropriations of the text’ (Windle, 2020, p.292).

Temporal scale

The self-referential ‘newness’ of the NSE, evident in Young’s (1971) title and quickly taken up in the contemporary literature, referred to a shift in intellectual direction. However, this newness also marked its temporal horizon. The NSE was concerned with elements of schooling visible in fairly stable and relatively wealthy societies in a period of economic and educational expansion—the 1950s to early 1970s. In this temporal scale, the social violence behind educational inequalities was muted and masked; to be made visible precisely through the analytical work of sociologists sensitive to the relational qualities of social domination embedded in institutions.

Perhaps strangely, the social upheavals evident in industrial struggles, university student protests, ‘new’ social movements (second-wave feminism, gay rights, etc.), and the dismantling of colonial empires are largely absent from the considerations of the NSE. Recent critique of Bourdieu, for example, has pointed both the sense of social stasis in his work, as well as to the failure to recognize connections between Europe and the colonized world (Connell, 2020). The ‘old’ sociology of education represented by Durkheim, by contrast, established a far wider spatio-temporal scale with sweeping theoretical moves contrasting ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ societies, and placing schooling within the problems of maintaining social coherence in the latter (Durkheim, 2012, 2014).

To understand the temporal reference points of the scholarship being produced by the NSE, it is necessary to turn to a problem that appeared to be beyond the grasp of empiricist studies of socially unequal returns on education—why did universal provision not eliminate inequalities in schooling? The availability of free public education should see merit replace privilege, according to the logic of rational modernization. In his later work, Bourdieu referred to the ‘excluded from within’ (les exclus de l’interieur) in relation to students who remain in classrooms but alienated from the cultural world and rewards of schooling (Bourdieu, 1999). In the France of the 1960s, these inequalities were evident in the unequal chances of attending prestige academic classes rather than vocational classes, and in reaching university (Bourdieu, 1966). Bourdieu’s ‘newness,’ in the French context, was to denounce school as a conservative rather than a modernizing or democratizing force. A similar newness could be claimed for the English context; however, elsewhere, the picture was different.

Spatial scale

The spatial horizon of the NSE is northwestern Europe (England and France), with echoes in neo-Marxist writings in the USA. If the 1950s to the 1970s marked the massification of public education and its growing visibility as an object of critique in these spaces, the same cannot be said for much of the rest of the world. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ promises of access to education (United Nations, 1948) remain unfulfilled across many parts of the Global South. Only in the USA did a majority of students complete secondary education by the 1940s and 1950s. Furthermore, states such as Australia, where school completions approach 90% in the twenty-first century, Indigenous completions in remote areas remain well below 50% (Lamb & Huo, 2017).

Therefore, it is possible to locate the NSE within the problems of a distinctive spatio-temporal nexus. And furthermore, within an institutional-intellectual nexus that paid little attention to major social conflicts, including those of anti-colonial struggles. Perhaps ironically, the conservative French lycées Indochina and West Africa were, against all institutional wishes, training grounds for revolutionary consciousness building and organizing (Anderson, 2006; Kelly, 1975). In one of the most prolonged and bloody anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century, mass literacy campaigns were a major part of the resistance efforts of the Vietnamese people. Just as in Brazil, adult literacy campaigns inspired by Freire went hand in hand with progressive social demands.

These limitations in the scale at which the NSE largely operated are indicative of a subsequent shift in sociological theory: from micro–macro to local–global. The spatiality of the NSE was focused on mediations between macro-social forces and micro-social interactions in schools, families, and workplaces. The macro in this relationship refers to structures shared across societies—primarily the class divisions of capitalism (evident in practices of social closure, positional competition, domination, and symbolic violence). Indeed, these mediations, while typical of masked social violence, are also in evidence in situations where physical violence and explicit divisions based on race, for example, are also present. For example, the encoding and internalization of domination through judgments of speech are commented upon in the anti-colonialist writings of Fanon (1970) in ways that are recognizable to readers of Bourdieu’s (1991) writings on language.

Rescaling the new sociology of education

The commentary here, in applying a retrospective lens, necessarily undertakes the work of rescaling, using reference points that have grown in prominence and proximity to the task of educational sociology. From an ‘internalist’ perspective, the insights of the NSE have been integrated (entextualized) into qualitative accounts that place greater emphasis on family mobilization and to understanding exceptions to ‘social destiny’ (what Bourdieu called the miraculés). The figure of the ‘inheritor’ who merely ‘accepts’ their inheritance in the form of educational success has been replaced by the harried middle-class (or occasionally working-class) family engaged in an extensive regime of reading, tutoring, and organized leisure (Lahire, 2008; Lareau, 2011). Quantitative accounts have moved away from reference points of collective meaning-making and toward what Bourdieu’s collaborators term methodological individualism which, in France, is associated with the outlook and methods of Boudon (1974). Nevertheless, Bourdieu remains a key reference for the sociology of education across methodological traditions but, increasingly, divorced from the critical nexus that defined the NSE (Davies & Rizk, 2018).

Bourdieu also attempted to rescale his own analytical framework to account for inequalities beyond social class, applying notions of symbolic domination and capital to discussions of gender (Bourdieu, 2001) and race (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999), for example. These attempts have generally been less successful than appropriations of his concepts by other scholars (Adkins & Skeggs, 2004; McLeod, 2005; Moi, 1991). The NSE more widely has also been productively entextualized in new ways as school knowledge and curriculum hierarchies have come to be shaped by the forces of marketization and neoliberalism across multiple geographic scales (Power & Whitty, 1996; Windle, 2015). Global flows of information and capital, visible in the rise of edu-businesses such as Pearson, have added new layers to the ways in which knowledge is recontextualized into pedagogical forms and circulated across contexts.

A more radical rescaling of the sociology of education is required if we consider the formation of a world-capitalist system on the back of European colonialism (Quijano, 2007). Such a task requires stretching back to the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the Americas and the establishment of race as a category for not only differential but dehumanizing treatment. This may seem like too wide a stretching of temporal and spatial scales to make sense of contemporary educational inequalities, however the accounts of both oppression and resistance generated by decolonial scholarship have gained traction internationally (Takayama et al., 2017). Such work has involved a re-evaluation of the Anglo-European sociological tradition, including the NSE (Takayama et al., 2015; Windle, 2019, 2020).

Concluding remarks

Paying attention to how scale shapes analytical concerns is necessary in order to move beyond the limitations of work that has become foundational to the sociology of education. Such attention can be given by historicizing and localizing knowledge production. Even greater attention needs to be paid when insights from the NSE, or any other school of thought, travel to new spatio-temporal settings—carried either by their own authors or by others. Bourdieu’s writing on race in Brazil (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999) is perhaps one of the most spectacular failures of an attempted recontextualization (Healey, 2003; Windle, 2020). However, other entextualizations have been more nuanced and recognize the tangled logics of inequality that stretch far across space and time. Decolonial thought is a current high-point in the rescaling of educational inequalities and in the re-evaluation of prior work on this topic but it faces similar challenges to some addressed by the NSE—identifying mediating processes between macro-social structures (coloniality in this case) and micro-social interactions. My own recent work has, like Bourdieu’s and Bernstein’s, sought these connections in speech acts and evaluations of language (Dos Santos & Windle, 2021; Windle & Amorim Possas, 2023; Windle & Moita-Lopes, 2021; Windle et al., 2020).