During a period of 45 years working in higher education, I have accumulated many books. now I’m sorting through that backlog and trying to decide which one to keep and which one to pass on to others. In making this classification, I have been reminded of those particular books that have made me what I have become: a sociologist of education. what follows is a list of the 10 most significant in that elaboration.
1) b. Jackson & d. Marsden (1962). education and working class
This is the book that made me want to be a sociologist. denis marsden was my course tutor at essex and her book had a huge impact on me when i first read it. it was about me, my experience, my education, my trials. The book looks at the home-school relationships of 88 “successful” working-class students who attended primary school in Huddersfield; mine was in london. it made sociology something real, immediate, exciting and necessary for me, something I wanted to contribute to, something worthwhile. Denis later acted as external examiner for my Ph.D.
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2) c. lacy (1970). hightown grammar: school as a social system
this book was published in my second year at essex. again, it was about me and my school experience, but this time the focus was primarily on school and not home. it was one of the first attempts by a sociologist to enter and question the “black box” of schooling. this is a careful and rigorous mixed-method study (decades before the term was coined). reading hightown grammar led me to think about doing a doctorate myself to explore the experiences of working-class students in a comprehensive school. I did it in sussex with colin as my supervisor, and the doctorate became complete by the beach (1981).
3) c. wright-mills (1970). the sociological imagination
this was a basic introductory text for essex undergraduate sociology, and remains central to my practice and thinking; I still recommend it to my students. Wright-mills describes what he calls “the sociological imagination” as that which “enables us to grasp history and biography and the relationships between the two within society…”. Those relationships, thought of in different ways using different concepts, have been the pillars of doing sociology for me throughout my career. they are repeated in various forms in the texts that follow and imply, as wright-mills goes on to say, “the capacity to encompass from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate characteristics of the human being.”
4) m. Foucault (1970). the order of things
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This is probably Foucault’s most difficult and challenging work, and that wasn’t where I started, that was discipline and punish. order is a tour de force, a rewriting of the intellectual history of Western social science, a completely original way of thinking about knowledge, based on the central claim that all periods of history have possessed certain underlying epistemological principles. assumptions, conditions of truth and discourse that determined what was acceptable as scientific discourse. in other words, the possibilities of thought make certain truth claims possible and exclude others.
5) m. Foucault (1977). discipline and punish
this was the first foucault I read and it was a revelation, providing a completely different way of thinking about education and school. Actually, there is a lot about schools in it, and it contains Foucault’s question: “Is it surprising that prisons look like factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which look like prisons?” This started me on a 30-year commitment to Foucault’s work. , which has forced me to rethink, both in ethical and practical terms, what education is and what it could be.
6) m. apple (1979). ideology and curriculum
Michael’s book, now in its fourth edition, was one of the first attempts to outline a political economy of education; that is, to explore the relationships between the cultural, political and economic forces that affect the school. the book addresses the issue of ‘how the kinds of cultural resources and symbols that schools select and organize are dialectically related to the kinds of normative and conceptual awareness ‘required’ by a stratified society’ (p. 2). again, it is about structure and meaning, economics and everyday experience.
7) a. Strauss (1987). qualitative data analysis for social scientists
anselm strauss’s book offers a way to articulate and practice ethnography as a rigorous process without losing sight of its creativity, as a form of representation rather than discovery. the book opens the epistemology of ethnography to question through its technical practices of coding. I was lucky enough to meet Anselm on a couple of occasions.
8) p. bordieu (1986). distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste
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distinction is a rich toolbox of ideas and possibilities, both empirical and conceptual, and an extraordinary source of insights into what bourdieu calls ‘social class in the head’ and the relationships between aspects structural and subjective. of class. it is a book I have returned to many times for inspiration, and it was a key resource for a body of studies on education and social class in which I participated in the 1990s and 2000s.
9) d. Harvey (1989). the condition of postmodernity
This was arguably the first book to link the socioeconomic processes of globalization and neoliberalism with the social, psychological, and emotional experiences of globalization and neoliberalism. In particular, through the notion of space-time compression, Harvey made clear some of the ways in which the new global economic order inserts itself into and changes our daily lives, both as workers and consumers, and interpolates us as global subjects. . the global is both transcendental and mundane.
10) b. jessop (2002). the future of the capitalist state
in some ways, jessop’s book is a companion piece to harvey, but jessop’s focus is, as the title says, on the state and the reworking of the forms and modalities of the state by and in relation to neoliberalism : change of government. to governance. This book offers a set of concepts that were central to my interest in educational reform and the role of non-state actors in education policy and delivery. As with Bourdieu and Harvey, Jessop provides a set of starting points and possibilities, resources for investigation and interpretation.
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So, these books are guardians. I will never separate myself from them: they are part of me, of what I think, of what I do, of how I think, of how I do what I do.
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