Basil Bernstein

The thinker and the field

Rob Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136734861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Basil Bernstein: The Thinker and the Field provides a comprehensive introduction to the work of Basil Bernstein, demonstrating his distinctive contribution to social theory by locating it within the historical context of the development of the sociology of education and Sociology in Britain. Although Bernstein had a particular interest in education, he did not see himself as a sociologist of education alone. By exploring Bernstein's intellectually collaborative character and the evolving system of ideas, drawing upon anthropology and linguistics, the originality of Bernstein's contribution to the social sciences can be truly identified.

Rob Moore's text offers a provocative and challenging account both of Bernstein, and of British sociology and education, approaching Bernstein's work as a complex model of intertwining ideas rather than a single theory. Continued interest in Bernstein's work has opened up a world-wide network of scholarship, and Moore considers contemporary research alongside classical sources in Durkheim and Marx, to provide a historical analysis of the fields of British Sociology and the sociology of education, pinpointing Bernstein's position within them.

The book is organised into two main parts:

The Field

• Background and Beginnings

• 
  
  

• Durkheim, Cosmology and Education

The Problematic

• The Structure of Pedagogic Discourse

• 
  
  

• Bernstein and Theory

• 
  
  

• Bernstein and research

• 
  
  

• The Pedagogic Device

Written by a leading authority in the field, this text will be valuable reading for post-graduate students of sociology and education, along with active researchers and their research students.

Section 1

The field

1 Background and beginnings

Durkheim’s work is a truly magnificent insight into the relationships between symbolic orders, social relationships and the structuring of experience.

(Basil Bernstein 2009I: 171)

Introduction

The main purpose of this chapter is to sketch the broad background from which Bernstein’s thinking emerged. The context in which Bernstein’s thinking began was liminal, in that it was the period when sociology was starting to coalesce as a subject in British universities but before its rapid expansion in the 1960s and the emergence of the sociology of education in the 1970s. It is in this time and space that the key to Bernstein’s thinking is to be found. The argument, in terms of the history of ideas, is that to locate Bernstein within British sociology it is necessary to appreciate, first, the significance of anthropology in that field in his intellectually formative stage and then, within that, of a particular reading of Durkheim and of the place of religion in Durkheim’s thought. Bernstein’s problematic, within the general matrix of the field of sociology, has its origins within a certain configuration of ideas, issues and influences in that period and the ways in which they were positioned and valorized. The sociology of education, as it developed slightly later, came to be configured in a significantly different way, within which the ‘reading’ of Bernstein was refracted through a different lens (see Davies 2011). Essentially, the sociology of education could not ‘see’ Bernstein in terms of the matrix within which his ideas were originally located and where they acquired their particular meaning and force. His ideas and some of the key concepts of his early work such as ‘elaborated’ and ‘restricted’ codes were recontextualized and frequently misrecognized in terms of principles or preoccupations very different from his. This is why it is important to begin with a sense of the time and place of Bernstein’s starting point.

The sociology of education emerges as a distinct field of study when it migrates from a small number of mainstream sociology departments in universities to schools of education and education studies departments in institutes and colleges of education as one of the ‘foundation’ disciplines in a time of expansion in education in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Moore 2009 ch. 4). But the ‘sociology of education’ that came to be as a result of this relocation was some way removed from Bernstein’s deeper and more general sociological interests. The major programme of the sociology of education became preoccupied with education as an agency of social reproduction and reproduction in the areas of class, gender and race has remained its overriding concern. The figure of Bourdieu comes to loom large here.

The key piece of the jigsaw in these alignments and realignments is Durkheim or, perhaps, ‘Durkheim’ because the way in which he is constructed and positioned within these different configurations is symptomatic of radically different problematics. In the sociology of education in the early 1970s, Durkheim came to be constructed, for many, as that which ‘we’ are not – Durkheim as the arch positivist ‘other’. If, as I suggest, Bernstein’s relationship to the sociology of education is in a sense ‘oblique’ then it is because he comes at it from Durkheim’s big question and in a way informed by structural anthropology in the tradition that Durkheim and Mauss inaugurated. It is probably fair to say that little of this would have been visible to those in the vanguard of the new sociology of education (nothing in the literature of the times suggests that it was¹. To them, Durkheim was a very different kind of figure: the one received (second-hand) through the radical constructionist critique of Parsonian functionalism and, within that, Parson’s reading of Durkheim. Susan Steadman-Jones (2001), in her scholarly and perceptive study of Durkheim, captures what is at stake here:

It is important to remember that Durkheim wrote before Parsons, but from the way Durkheim is viewed in sociology’s oral tradition, we have to conclude that although formally it is recognized that he died in France in 1917, he suffered a veritable rebirth in America! Paradoxically for a French thinker, this has become the dominant culture in the interpretation of Durkheim. Here he becomes a born-again conservative, not only by the perceived identification of him with the concerns of a particular form of structural functionalism, but also by the characterization of him imposed by significant thinkers within this movement.

(Stedman-Jones 2001: 5)

It was in this recontextualization of Durkheim that he came to be seen as a conservative ‘positivist’ – a view still widely encountered today. Bernstein, from the very beginning, saw Durkheim so differently because he came to him before he had been ‘born again’ in his American incarnation. British social anthropology, deeply influenced by Durkheim via Radcliffe-Brown, presented a different view. These different types of understanding of Durkheim imply two radically different structurings of the field of the sociology of education – two radically different problematics – because the core problems are of fundamentally different orders.

Hence, whereas Durkheim, understood earlier in one way, was the positive pole in Bernstein’s thought, understood later in a quite different way, he was the negative pole for the sociology of education. Within this tension, the figure of Bernstein is ambiguous and problematical. The exegesis of Bernstein’s theory is, in effect, the excavation of this alternative, though immanent or ‘subterranean’, problematic (as described by Alexander 1990) and the matrix within which it is embedded. In these terms, the purpose of the exercise attempted in this chapter and the next is not to locate Bernstein’s theory as a particular kind of ‘ism’ but to reconstruct the matrix of ideas and circumstance in which his ideas really ‘make sense’. Particularly significant is the place of concepts that are more usually associated with religious beliefs and practices and it will be argued that the sociology of religion is the best starting point for understanding Bernstein’s relationship to the sociology of education. This point will be further developed in the next chapter.

Social anthropology, and especially the study of religious thought (cosmology), is crucial to understanding Bernstein’s approach. British sociology was, as it were, only ‘half-formed’ in the time when Bernstein was studying at the London School of Economics (LSE) and anthropology flowed into the empty spaces that sociology had yet to make its own, especially in the form of ethnographic community studies. Consequently, there was a close link between anthropology and the fledgling sociology, including notable anthropologists assuming professorial roles in sociology departments. Collins, in his overview of the historical development of sociology, describes the situation in this way:

In Britain, sociology scarcely made it into the academic world at all. The intellectually and socially elite universities at Oxford and Cambridge would not admit a discipline they regarded as plebeian and lacking serious scholarly content. British sociology first found its home in the London School of Economics… where it managed to pick up some theoretical clothing by associating itself with anthropology.

(Collins 1994a: 43)

In the ‘Forward’ to Class, Codes and Control volume I (Bernstein [1971] 2009I) Donald MacRae, who taught Durkheim to Bernstein at the LSE (Bernstein 2009I: 3), describes the book as follows: ‘with these papers we are concerned with aspects of the enormous, single but many-faceted issues at the heart of sociology: how is society possible.’ (Bernstein 2009I: xiii) and links this directly to Durkheim and the Elementary Forms (ibid: pxiv). Bernstein came to Durkheim, not through what MacRae refers to as, ‘the Durkheim of the textbooks’ but, rather, through what becomes an alternative ‘subterranean’ legacy. It is within this environment that Bernstein would first have encountered Durkheim and this was a very different ‘Durkheim’ from the one later constructed in the radical forms of interpretative sociology that were so influential in the sociology of education that came into being in the 1970s.

Collins makes another point of particular significance: Durkheim ‘made no distinction between sociology and anthropology’:

Durkheim and his followers used the term ‘ethnology’ for the empirical description of tribal societies, whereas ‘sociology’ meant the theoretical analysis of any society, tribal or modern…Durkheim was particularly interested in inducting the laws of all societies by the study of tribal and non-Western societies: partly because he thought that they were simpler and more likely to reveal the ‘elementary forms’ of social life, but also because they showed more plainly the nonrational sentiments and the symbolism that he believed were involved in every society. The strength of Durkheim and his followers was that they saw modern society through the lens of tribal society. [my emphasis]

(Collins 1994a: 183)

The distinctive feature of Bernstein’s problematic very much reflects this interplay between sociology and anthropology and a Durkheimian perspective upon the modern through ‘the lens of tribal society’ within which the category of ‘cosmology’ is crucial. The concern, there, was not with how ‘tribal societies’ differ from modern but with the ways in which they are similar. Essentially, Bernstein followed Durkheim in approaching education systems in modern societies as equivalent to religious systems in premodern societies, in that both are the primary sites of symbolic production and control and also as potential sites of change – of thinking the ‘unthinkable’.

However, there is a further complication. The stream of anthropological thought within which Bernstein should be located has its initial source in Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim 1995). To properly understand Bernstein’s concerns, it is necessary to read that revolutionary work in the way that Bernstein did (Moore 2004 ch. 5). But, following the insights of the anthropologist Robin Horton (1973, see Chapter 2) it becomes apparent that Bernstein’s position on Durkheim was itself a minority one, though shared by other eminent authorities such as Mary Douglas, with whom Bernstein enjoyed an important intellectual collaboration in the second part of the 1960s, as well as by Horton himself. Thus, if we begin, as many have done, by approaching Bernstein from the sociology of education, we have to take two sharp turns, as it were, the first into social anthropology and the second into a particular understanding within that discipline of the Elementary Forms and of the fundamental categories of the sacred and the profane. It is necessary, then, to advance like the knight in chess: forward, but also to the side.

Although Bernstein certainly did have a passionate interest in education, his attitude to the sociology of education was complex and he did not see himself primarily as ‘a sociologist of education’ or as positioned in its field. He said:

I can offer as evidence for this absence of a field, or mode of engagement, the fact that I have written only one paper on the sociology of education itself. And I wrote that paradoxically to show how the so-called new sociology of education was a spurious construction. I remember that the paper ended with ’what is required is less an allegiance to an approach but more dedication to a problem’. [my emphasis]

(Bernstein, 2001: 364)

A perusal of Bernstein’s bibliographies supports the claim that he had little interest in the conventional sociology of education. It is for reasons such as this that, to understand Bernstein’s relationship to the sociology of education, it is necessary to begin the journey from somewhere else and to follow the ancient advice to the traveller asking directions in a foreign land: ‘don’t start from here’. The systemic functional linguist, Frances Christie, indicates a better starting point:

Bernstein’s early endeavours led him to test a number of language theories, including for example, those of Goldman-Eisler on hesitation phenomena, while he also briefly considered the work of Chomsky. He was, however, much more attracted to functional linguistic theories of the kind represented by Sapir, Whorf and Firth, for example, and he was familiar with Malinowski. Bernstein’s endeavours brought him into contact with Michael Halliday and his colleagues including Ruqaiya Hasan, who in the late 1950s and the early 1960s were developing their first formulations of what in time became known as systemic functional (SF) linguistic theory. Bernstein directed the Sociological Research Unit at the University of London in the 1960s, and Halliday moved in 1963 to the same university, where he became Head of the Communication Research Centre, which was later absorbed into the Department of Linguistics, of which Halliday became the Head. Hasan was one of the group working for a time with Bernstein. Mary Douglas, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of London, was another significant colleague, interested in and supportive of the sociology Bernstein and his colleagues were developing. By a series of happy convergences, the sociological theories Bernstein was formulating in the 1960s were brought into fruitful dialogue with the linguistic theories Halliday and his colleagues were developing.

(Christie 1999: 1)

There are a number of points to be taken from the matrix of influences and associations described in Christie’s account. First, there is the central influence of cultural anthropology that unites the interests of each of the thinkers she mentions and, in particular, that of cultural linguists such as Sapir and Whorf. Secondly, the streams of thought and concerns that each represents complement one another and, although each represents a different discipline, their thinking is ‘open’ to each other’s ideas. Each has their own distinct centre of gravity but there is also a mutually productive area of overlap: ‘less an allegiance to an approach but more dedication to a problem’. Hasan (1999) describes this as ‘exotropic’ theory, which is not ‘confined within the bounds of its object of study’ (Hasan 1999: 13) – see Chapter 3. Thirdly, this ‘series of happy convergences’ constitutes a nexus of personal and institutional relationships – University College London (UCL), where Halliday and Douglas were based, is ‘around the corner’ from the University of London Institute of Education where Bernstein and Hasan worked – that translates into an intellectual matrix of ideas or a ‘meta-dialogue’ (Hasan 1999), across disciplines (see also Moore 2009 on the new sociology of education). Finally, although the time about which she is writing is the late 1960s, the time when she was writing was the late 1990s, in a volume she edited that continues the work that began in the earlier period and contains a new paper by Bernstein.² This indicates that the issues being addressed in this chapter are not simply of a historical interest: they construct the foundation of an enduring and active problematic and its diverse research programmes.

Bernstein’s thinking about education and knowledge begins with religious thought (as did Durkheim’s). What all of this entails will be explored in depth in the next chapter in relation to ‘cosmology’ and the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ but it is necessary, first, to cover a considerable amount of ground so as to begin at the beginning. The purpose, now, is to identify the centre from which Bernstein’s problematic unfurls.

Although the issues here are profoundly intellectual, it is probably the case that Bernstein’s special sensitivity to them is grounded in his early life experiences.

Starting points

Piecing together the biographical fragments in Bernstein’s writings, the following picture emerges. Basil Bernstein was born in 1924 in Stepney in the working-class East End of London. His family were Jewish immigrants from Continental Europe. His father worked in the fur trade. Bernstein attended Christ’s College, Finchley; a Church of England school in a traditional mould. He left at fourteen. There is no suggestion here that he left at that age because the school was as it was and he was Jewish. It is possible that, in Finchley, Jewish pupils were not unusual at such a school and it was not uncommon at that time for working-class children to leave school at fourteen. But it is interesting that from an early age he would have been on a daily basis conscious of things that became central to his future concerns: hierarchy and ritual and the interplay between different forms of religious belief, cultures and speech.

At that time, the East End was poor; it had a large Jewish population, unemployment was high and support for the Communist Party strong. In 1936, Sir Oswald Mosley had attempted to march his fascist Blackshirts through the streets, fiercely opposed by the workers’ movement and the Jewish community. They were routed at the Battle of Cable Street. There is little that is personal in Bernstein’s writing but it is very unlikely that he would not have been affected by such circumstances and events. It is, perhaps, indicative that during the war, he lied about his date of birth, joined the Royal Air Force underage and saw action as a bomb aimer – this would have been, according to Fred Inglis (an ex-member of the Parachute Regiment, so he should know), ‘a job in which he learned lots about verbal condensation and redundancy in the imperative sense’ (Inglis 2001: 77). Bernstein’s thought is complex and behind it is a complex man. These complexities are suggested by Christian Cox, the representative from Chile at the tribute to Bernstein at the University of London Institute of Education following his death:

He was a deeply political man. He was part of a generation who fought in the cruellest war on ideological grounds. He was enlisted before the age of consent, to fight Nazism. He was a man for whom the relationship between his faith and Christianity was central and generative, not only for his own existential position, but also as a sociologist who enquired relentlessly into the nature of the relationship between social bonds and the sacred.

(Cox 2001: 51)

There are deep influences behind Bernstein’s thought – personal, political,...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Basil Bernstein
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• SECTION 1 The field
• SECTION 2 The problematic
• Afterword
• Basil Bernstein 1924–2000
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index