Education in a New Society: Renewing the Sociology of Education

By Jal Mehta and Scott Davies

In recent decades, sociology of education has been dominated by quantitative analyses of race, class, and gender gaps in educational achievement. And while there’s no question that such work is important, it leaves a lot of other fruitful areas of inquiry unstudied. This book takes that problem seriously, considering the way the field has developed since the 1960s and arguing powerfully for its renewal.
The sociology of education, the contributors show, largely works with themes, concepts, and theories that were generated decades ago, even as both the actual world of education and the discipline of sociology have changed considerably. The moment has come, they argue, to break free of the past and begin asking new questions and developing new programs of empirical study. Both rallying cry and road map, Education in a New Society will galvanize the field.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Apr 26, 2018
• ISBN: 9780226517568

Book preview

Education in a New Society

Education in a New Society

Renewing the Sociology of Education

Edited by Jal Mehta and Scott Davies

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51739-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51742-1 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-51756-8 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226517568.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mehta, Jal, editor. | Davies, Scott, 1962– editor.

Title: Education in a new society : renewing the sociology of education / edited by Jal Mehta and Scott Davies.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017039550 | ISBN 9780226517391 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226517421 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226517568 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Educational sociology. | Educational sociology—United States.

Classification: LCC LC191 .E4248 2018 | DDC 306.430973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039550

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Foreword / A Much-Needed Project / Michèle Lamont

ONE / Education in a New Society: Renewing the Sociology of Education / Jal Mehta and Scott Davies

PART ONE / Theoretical Perspectives

TWO / Social Theory and the Coming Schooled Society / David P. Baker

THREE / The Deepening Interpenetration of Education in Modern Life / Scott Davies and Jal Mehta

FOUR / An Institutional Geography of Knowledge Exchange: Producers, Exports, Imports, Trade Routes, and Metacognitive Metropoles / Steven Brint

FIVE / Professional Education in the University Context: Toward an Inhabited Institutional View of Socialization / Tim Hallett and Matt Gougherty

PART TWO / Substantive Contributions

SIX / Talking Pigs? Lessons from Elite Schooling / Shamus Khan

SEVEN / What’s Up with Assessment? / Richard Arum and Amanda Cook

EIGHT / College and University Campuses as Sites for Political Formation: A Cultural-Organizational Approach / Amy Binder

NINE / Digital Badges and Higher Education in a New Society: A Bersteinian Analysis / Michael Olneck

TEN / Research Universities and the Global Battle for the Brains / John D. Skrentny and Natalie M. Novick

PART THREE / Old Themes, New Perspectives

ELEVEN / The Expansion of the School Form and Deepening Inequality / David Karen

TWELVE / Reopening the Black Box of Educational Disadvantage: Why We Need New Answers to Old Questions / Janice Aurini and Cathlene Hillier

THIRTEEN / Schools as Great Distractors: Why Socioeconomic-Based Achievement Gaps Persist / Douglas B. Downey

FOURTEEN / Race and White Supremacy in the Sociology of Education: Shifting the Intellectual Gaze / John B. Diamond

FIFTEEN / Race, Ethnicity, and Cultural Processes in Education: New Approaches for New Times / Natasha Kumar Warikoo

SIXTEEN / Claim No Easy Victories: Some Notes toward a Fearless Sociology of Education / Charles M. Payne

EPILOGUE / What Next for the Sociology of Education? / Mitchell L. Stevens

Index of Authors

Index of Subjects

Foreword: A Much-Needed Project

Michèle Lamont

Education in a New Society represents a timely pathbreaking effort to renew and recalibrate the sociology of education so that it is better equipped to understand education as it exists today. In this book, Jal Mehta and Scott Davies have invited a number of talented researchers to take stock of the field and think through its current limitations and the challenges ahead. They have also written an informative introduction that draws on a detailed empirical study of the field of education as it has manifested itself in the leading sociology journals over the last five decades. This contribution in and of itself is worth the price of admission. Their analysis reveals some of the blind spots of the field as it has grown around the seminal contributions of a handful of leading theorists: James Coleman, Randall Collins, John Meyer, Pierre Bourdieu, and others. Without downplaying the importance of these experts’ work, Mehta and Davies show that the scholarship has left important stones unturned. They point to paths for future development that can be pursued by approaching the study of education through the prisms of culture, institutions, politics, knowledge, comparative education, and values. They want sociologists of education to build on their disciplinary strengths to develop a perspective on education that is different, but complementary, to that of economists of education. The latter remain too often unaware of many of the questions that our multimethod intellectual field is particularly well equipped to answer. Sociology should mobilize its unique analytical tools to flesh out a multidimensional framework for capturing the institution of education in all of its manifestations. This volume takes a huge step in showing the way forward.

Concretely, what does this mean? From the perspective of knowledge production, it means looking at education as it is pursued and achieved not only in school and college settings, but also in other contexts: family, daycare, religious organizations, leisure activities, and so on. It also means focusing not only on the inequalities produced in educational settings, but also on inequalities that result from other outcomes, whether the selection of partners or the development of moral worldviews. It also means developing a more finely grained understanding of the cultural processes involved in the production of inequality by connecting with relevant literatures not yet considered by the field of education (e.g., the literature on omnivorousness referenced by Davies and Mehta in chapter 3). Finally, it means taking on the challenge of thinking bigger and differently about the place of education in larger society; reconsidering the theoretical notions that sociologists of education most often use to make sense of phenomena; inventing a novel approach outside well-traveled paths; and choosing not to spend time writing papers that add additional bricks to an already well established paradigmatic wall, or papers whose conclusions utterly lack surprise.

Against this background, the contributors to Education in a New Society are responding to a call to arms from the coeditors to demonstrate the likely heuristic payoff from a broadening of the sociology of education. For this particular volume, the main anchors for creating new analytical bridges come out of neo-institutional analysis, cultural sociology, the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of professions, and the sociology of morality. The contributors to this book are acutely aware of the many ways in which their own research agendas have been enriched by considering questions that lie beyond the traditional terrain of the sociology of education. They make the gamble that the field as a whole would be strengthened by debalkanization and a greater engagement with the surrounding subfields. I find their arguments most convincing, especially given that each chapter makes the case for a specific area of empirical inquiry. But the devil is in the details; it falls to the reader to determine whether the authors deliver on their promises, and to evaluate where this new gamble is likely to lead.

In bringing these authors together, Mehta and Davies pursue one more objective: they crystallize a movement that has been building over the last decade as a number of important books and articles have laid the groundwork for an intellectual agenda for a renewal of the sociology of education. Here I have in mind award-winning books such as Paying for the Party by Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton, Becoming Right by Amy Binder and Kate Wood, The Best of the Best by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, and Creating a Class by Mitchell Stevens, to name only a few. Such books have fed not only the sociology of education but also other research areas such as the sociology of evaluation, gender and sexuality, organizations, political socialization, and social movements. They have also looked backward and sideways, and have been in conversation with a growing American literature on race and class cultures: books such as Annette Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods, Karyn Lacy’s Blue-Chip Black, Lauren Rivera’s Pedigree, and my own Money, Morals, and Manners, The Dignity of Working Men, and How Professors Think. It should be remembered that it is precisely when a subfield becomes generative—a point of reference—for other subfields that its status increases. While the sociology of education has been viewed as being a bit inward-looking or even insular at times, it may now be in a position to act as a point of reference for researchers who are working far afield. This is all for the best.

It is without hesitation that I put my money on Education in a New Society and on the set of creative minds who have contributed to the book. Together, they propose a welcome intellectual renewal of our thinking concerning one of the most important social institutions. This is a significant achievement, which could well become a crucial impetus for strengthening sociology as a distinct contributor to the broader enterprise of the study of education.

ONE

Education in a New Society: Renewing the Sociology of Education

Jal Mehta and Scott Davies¹

This volume considers the development of the sociology of education over the past fifty years, beginning in the 1960s and continuing to the present day. Our argument is that the field needs to be renewed: specifically, that many of the dominant ideas, concepts, and theories in the sociology of education were created by a few well-known theorists in a highly generative period between 1966 and 1979, and that much of the work since has followed the tracks laid down by these giants. We argue both that over the intervening period the real world of education has changed considerably (often in ways that were not anticipated by the early theorists) and that the broader field of sociology has evolved in ways that have not been integrated into the sociological study of education. We also argue that there are new strands of sociological thinking about education which are not recognized within what is commonly known as sociology of education, but which provide templates for fresh modes of study. Taken together, these developments suggest the moment has come to ask new questions and develop new theories, drawing together disparate strands of inquiry and creating new programs of empirical research.

The rest of this introduction seeks to develop that case. First, we examine the key ideas of James Coleman, Daniel Bell, John Meyer, Samuel Bowles and Herb Gintis, Paul Willis, Pierre Bourdieu, and Randall Collins, whose theoretical frameworks have proven so influential to this day. Second, we explore empirically which topics have been taken up in the sociology of education since 1965. We do this in part through an original content and citation analysis of Sociology of Education, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Annual Review of Sociology. We then suggest that this analysis of leading American sociology journals misses other visions of the sociology of education which also have wide followings; we delineate five sociologies of education that have succeeded in different niches of the academic landscape. Third, we examine key trends that have shaped the educational world over this period, and consider the ways in which these are or are not captured by either the theories or the empirical work examined above. Finally, we conclude by examining strands of newer work, including those by many contributors to this volume, which begin to meet the challenges we have outlined.

Given the potential scope of this enterprise, it is important to specify what we are and are not seeking to accomplish. Our work does not purport to be a comprehensive review of the sociology of education. There are a number of existing reviews which, in different ways, cover the field (Dreeben 1994; Sadovnik 2007; Hallinan 2006; Bidwell and Friedkin 1988; Karabel and Halsey 1977). Rather, we are attempting something more pointed: (1) to document the distribution of topics that have received scholarly attention within the sociology of education from American sociology departments and journals over the past 50 years; (2) to suggest that this analysis reveals that there are a few central topics, particularly status attainment research and school effects, that have been critical to establishing sociology of education as a legitimate and respected subfield, but which have also crowded out other potentially important topics and ideas; (3) to point to a range of other approaches which are well-developed in their own niches but are not well recognized within American sociology departments; (4) to argue that, in particular, that there has been a neglect of questions related to culture, institutions, politics, knowledge, comparative education, and values, which are critical to understanding education in all its manifestations in the twenty-first century; (5) to conclude, based on a summary of these points, that sociology of education is both highly fragmented and heavily reliant on a small number of classic theories from forty to fifty years ago, and that the moment has come for new, more integrative theorizing and research in the field.

We fully acknowledge that someone else might look at the field and see different strengths and lacunae; we would welcome other sociologies of the sociology of education. But whether or not readers accept our specific assessment, we hope to convince them that the time is long overdue to get on the balcony and map the ecology of the field as a whole. This view allows us to consider not only the debates within the field, but to look at the contours of the field—to take stock of which topics are explored, which are not, and why. More theoretically, we employ a sociology of knowledge approach to understand how the contexts of production and reception have shaped the kinds of sociological knowledge that have been produced, legitimated, and located.

Overall, since the modern field of the sociology of education was created under the influence of a small number of theories and methods in the 1960s and 1970s, the world has changed considerably, and the field has developed many more conceptual tools. The moment has come to develop a new sociology of education for a new society.

Sociology of Education on the Eve of the 1960s

While our main topic is sociology of education over the past fifty years, it is important to set the stage by describing the field as it stood on the eve of the developments we are about to describe. Roughly speaking, there were a few classic texts, specifically Durkheim’s discussion of schooling as a moral enterprise, Waller’s treatise on the conflict between student and adult visions of school, and Sorokin’s studies of social mobility patterns (Dreeben 1994). Education was also a major theme in well-known community studies, such as the Lynds’ Middletown and Hollingshead’s Elmtown’s Youth. However, most overviews of the sociology of education at the time were not kind in describing the field (Gross 1959; Brookover 1955; Floud and Halsey 1958). For instance, Harvard sociologist Neal Gross (1959: 128) took stock of the sociology of education in a prominent Robert Merton-edited volume, Sociology Today, and concluded: The sociological analysis of education may be described as a relatively underdeveloped and unfashionable subfield of sociology. There are currently only a handful of sociologists who make this field their specialty. Relatively few students in graduate training aspire to be known as educational sociologists, and few courses are offered in this area in American universities.

Why was education such an unfashionable field? Gross continues: With a few notable exceptions, the literature is characterized by an undue emphasis on description in contrast to analysis. Many of the research studies lack theoretical orientation, and they have yielded few hypotheses of sociological importance. In addition the majority of the studies have not met the methodological standards generally accepted as minimal criteria for competent research. Although these criticisms might be applied to the research literature in other subdivisions of sociology, they appear to be especially applicable to the literature in the sociology of education.

What accounted for this bleak state of affairs? Gross argued that one cause was the absence of even an effort to develop significant empirical scholarship on schools. Gross (1959:129) writes that much of the literature published under the rubric of ‘educational sociology’ . . . has little or no sociological relevance, largely consisting of hortatory essays. Essays pleading for a reorientation of the goals of American education or reporting educational practices in foreign countries have their place; but they are not, as they have been termed, ‘studies’ in the sociology of education. As we will document later in this chapter, a review of the early years of the journal that would become the Sociology of Education supports Gross’s analysis; the vast majority of contributions were essays rather than studies based on empirical research.

A related challenge, Gross argued, in what would become a familiar refrain, was that sociologists of education might become associated with or be employed by schools of education. In most institutions of higher learning, the educational faculty ranks at or near the bottom of the academic prestige hierarchy. Connecting too closely with such low-status colleagues is to risk further loss of prestige for members of a discipline which itself has not yet received full acceptance by many members of more entrenched departments. Additionally, the traditional ‘applied’ emphasis in the field has not especially enhanced the prestige of sociologists who have been associated with it.

In retrospect, perhaps as interesting as Gross’s analysis of the field were his predictions of what the next decade might yield. Reflecting the reigning influences of sociology in the 1950s, he argued that schools would be good sites through which Parsons’ structural functional lens could be developed; he thought that Howard Becker’s early work on the occupation and career trajectory of teaching might be extended; he thought that questions about teaching as a profession should be explored; he argued that Waller’s work was worth revisiting and testing more systematically; and he thought that schools were intriguing organizational sites to study questions of organizational control and change. While some of these predictions would be born out, particularly the ones concerning school-as-organization and teaching as a profession, notably absent in retrospect was any interest in measuring the impact of schools versus family background, or in quantitatively understanding the roles that schools play in social reproduction and mobility.

Overall, sociology of education on the eve of the 1960s was neither strong on its own feet nor well respected within sociology. Viewed from this perspective, what was to come would be nothing less than a revolution in the study of education, one which yielded a growing science of schooling and which secured a significant place for the sociology of education in the broader sociological discipline.

Classics: 1960s and 1970s Theorizing and Its Influences

We begin the modern story of the empirical study of education with the Coleman report, which by many accounts was the single most influential document in the sociology of education in the second half of the twentieth century (Walters 2009). As is well known, the report emerged from a federal government request to analyze whether measurable school factors were creating inequalities, particularly between blacks and whites. Coleman found that family background and peer composition of classes were the most important two factors in predicting student achievement, while many of the measurable variables about schools were less influential in explaining student outcomes. In a similar vein, a Christopher Jencks–led study, Inequality, used a range of data sets to argue that schools were much less important than previously thought in predicting adult outcomes.

While the results themselves continue to be both cited and debated, in the longer run perhaps the most important consequence of the Coleman report was the template it offered for how to do sociological research on education. Its vision was methodologically individualistic; the dependent variable was individual student achievement, and the independent variables were features of schools or families that could be easily quantified and entered into a regression. Its core questions were about differences across groups—in this case blacks and whites—and the factors that predicted those differences. Its underlying normative ethos was convergent with a prominent strain of equal-opportunity liberalism, which suggested that the problem was less the distribution of wealth or economic power than whether the link between parents and children’s life chances could be broken through quality schooling. It promised policy relevance, because policymakers, working within a similar normative paradigm, also wanted to know what factors were important in helping more students get ahead. And, finally, it gave social scientists a tool that differentiated them from lay inquirers: any journalist could write about how large classes were worse than small ones, but the power of large quantitative data sets and the regressions they enabled seemed to allow social scientists to provide definitive evidence about whether such a claim was actually true.

A related line of work was developing at the University of Wisconsin and elsewhere, which came to be known as the status attainment school. Led by Peter Blau, Otis Dudley Duncan, William Sewell, and later Robert Hauser, this work took a methodologically similar stance to Coleman’s, although with a less explicit focus on policy and more attention to patterns in intergenerational mobility. Drawing on the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey and other sources, these scholars computed whether children’s educational and occupational status exceeded that of their parents, as well as the role played by mediating factors, such as students’ aspirations. While the initial research focused on white farm boys, over time as more and different data became available, the work expanded to explore different patterns of mobility by race and gender. The core empirical argument of these theorists also converged with Talcott Parsons’s famous thesis that society was moving from a world of ascription to one of achievement—namely, that advantage was no longer directly passed on from parents to children, but instead was largely mediated by children’s educational attainment. In mapping these dynamics, the status attainment theorists also won a place for the sociology of education in the larger sociological discipline by establishing empirically the importance of education to the broader processes of social reproduction and mobility.

At the same time, the success of the work of Coleman and the status attainment researchers meant that the attention of the field was directed to some dynamics and not others. In particular, what happened inside schools was largely a black box—the mechanisms and processes of schooling were not visible within the status attainment picture (see Karabel and Halsey 1977). Higher education was largely ignored, except for its contribution to measuring years of schooling. The focus was primarily on the American system, with little interest in comparative perspective. Questions of history and politics were abstracted away in favor of a macroscopic vision of schools as conduits of social reproduction and mobility. And in their focus on differences across groups and factors that produced individual social mobility, the status attainment theorists did not examine the broader question of the growing role that schooling as a whole would play in society.

After the Coleman Report, the 1970s became the golden age of theorizing about schooling and society. A series of ambitious works, written in a remarkably short time span, offered accounts of modern school systems in contemporary society. Each of these classics observed how the expansion of schooling since World War II, particularly at secondary and post-secondary levels, was reshaping life courses and labor markets. In individual ways, each challenged prevailing human capital and functionalist thinking both in the academy and in policy circles. These theories are still major touchstones, continuing to demarcate important issues in the field; they are regularly taught to this day, and are cited by the thousand forty years later.

In 1973, Daniel Bell published The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, a sprawling forecast which named schooling as the major engine of post-industrial society. In 1976, Bowles and Gintis published Schooling in Capitalist America, a Marxist treatise whose correspondence principle regarded schooling as a major instrument of social control in the historical evolution of capitalism, one that necessarily generated class inequalities. In 1977, the English translation of Bourdieu and Passeron’s Reproduction offered a cultural variant of that thesis, coining Bourdieu’s signature concept cultural capital to highlight processes by which schools necessarily reproduce social class inequalities. Across the 1970s, Basil Bernstein’s three-volume set Class, Codes and Control focused on the linguistic dimensions of reproduction, arguing that the particularistic speech codes of poor and working-class children were largely incompatible with the norms of middle-class schooling, which favored the more universalistic codes of middle-class children. In 1977–78, John Meyer used organizational and institutional thinking to theorize about school expansion and explicitly reject both functionalist and Marxist accounts. And, in 1979, Randall Collins published The Credential Society, which linked the expansion of higher education to stratification and identified credential inflation as a key mechanism by which schooling reshaped status attainment processes in labor markets.

These theories offer a strategic reference point for charting subsequent empirical trends and thinking about evolving links between schooling and society. The study of stratification was reoriented by notions of reproduction, with structural variants elaborated by Bowles and Gintis and cultural variants elaborated by Bourdieu. Their main message was that school necessarily maintained inequality, despite massive educational expansion, due to its very design. The main mechanisms by which stratification was seen to reoccur were through structural processes (tracking, unequal school resources across neighborhoods) and cultural biases (teacher expectations, curricular bias). Soon afterwards, the notion of resistance (Willis 1977; MacLeod 1987) served to round out this argument by noting that working-class children had few aspirations for schooling in the first place and discounted themselves from educational competitions, sometimes in ways that could be interpreted as signaling a type of social protest. The study of school organizations was similarly reoriented by new institutional theory, which saw schools as legitimacy-seeking organizations, not efficiency-seeking organizations, in which loose coupling and isomorphism created increasingly standardized school organizations, first domestically and then internationally. The signaling function of credentials was similarly identified as a key process by which education connected to labor markets, challenging the human capital view. Daniel Bell’s work highlighted ideas about knowledge and schooling, while Willis and Macleod’s studies became staples in various analyses of cultures and subcultures.

Overall, the 1970s bore real fruit for educational theorizing of all varieties. The shift from an industrial to a knowledge economy, combined with the political turbulence of the 1960s, generated an array of theses about the current and future relationships between schools and society. These had profound impact not only on the sociology of education, but also on sociology as a whole: they provided key ideas to connect the study of education to broader thinking about stratification, organization, and culture. But what has happened in the sociology of education since?

We offer a detailed empirical answer to that question in the pages that follow. But to summarize in broad strokes: the quantitative methodological individualism that characterizes both the Coleman report and the status attainment tradition became the staple orientation for the field, a shift consistent with the broader turn towards quantitative methods and large-scale data sets in the social sciences. Substantively, the focus on reproduction and its mechanisms became the orienting question for the field; both quantitative and qualitative work has elaborated and further specified these patterns and the mechanisms which sustain them. A smaller body of work has built on New Institutional theory, with major currents applying it to World Culture theory, microlevel analysis (Inhabited Institutions), and to new private educational organizations. Perhaps surprisingly, Collins has not generated his own empirical branches. There has been little work advancing the themes of Bell or charting the evolution of schooling as a whole. Perhaps most consequential, there has been scant new theorizing. Many older theories have been operationalized, but very few new theories have been created.

Taking Stock: Sociology of Education over the Past Fifty Years

In this section, we explore the evolution of the sociology of education over the past fifty years. We do this in two very different ways. First, we conduct an empirical analysis of four of the major sites of American sociological research as conducted by scholars in American sociology departments: Sociology of Education, American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and the Annual Review of Sociology. Second, we consider more broadly the range of sociological writing on education over the period. From this view, there are at least five sociologies of education that have developed niches in different corners of the academic ecology. We suggest that more conversation across these strands would be intellectually generative; we also note that there are critical questions that are not addressed by any of them.

Sociology of Education: A Content Analysis

One way to explore how the sociological mind has taken up educational questions is to examine the major sociological journals over time. We begin with the discipline’s flagship journal, Sociology of Education. We conducted two kinds of analyses. First, we examined all of the issues every fifth year, beginning in 1950 and continuing to 2010. We had two research assistants, Kyle Siler and Stefan Beljean, code these articles on a number of dimensions. Specifically, we recorded whether the articles were quantitative, qualitative, mixed-method, or essays, as a way of viewing the methodological bent of the field. We also used Steven Brint’s (2013) categories for different topics to investigate whether his conclusions about the distribution of subjects in Sociology of Education would hold up over a longer period. Second, we used a citation analysis method to see which articles were the top-cited pieces in the journal each decade.

Sociology of Education until 1963

It is important to realize that what is now the Sociology of Education journal was until 1963 The Journal of Educational Sociology: A Magazine of Theory and Practice, a general-interest magazine published by New York University’s Educational Sociology Program.² Some of the pieces in our sample between 1950 and 1960 were written by people who were not scholars, including pieces by undergraduates, chaplains, consultants, and members of labor unions. The topics were highly varied, including pieces on what athletics means to me, literature and human relations, and popular hero symbols and audience gratification, as well as more familiar sociological topics such as The Structure of Role and Role Conflicts in Teaching Situations. The modal method was the essay: of the 109 articles in our sample between 1950 and 1960, 79 percent were essays, 11 percent were qualitative, and 10 percent were quantitative.

As a whole, this period reflects a vision of the journal that was less academically professionalized and thus much more diverse in both topic and method. In contrast, in the articles we examined after 1963, only 13 of 187 samples articles were essays (7 percent); of 120 articles since 1980, only 1 was an essay. There also has not been a single article since 1965 which lists its author as anything other than a professor, lecturer, or graduate student at a university.³

Sociology of Education since 1963

In 1963, the journal was transferred to the American Sociological Association and renamed Sociology of Education. We coded the post-1963 articles using the Brint (2013: 9) codes. Brint uses the following categories: (1) inequality; (2) non-structural sources of achievement; (3) culture/ideology; (4) school effects; (5) state/politics; (6) labor market/labor market transitions; (7) comparative historical; and (8) methods. Brint distinguishes between major sources of inequality in American society (i.e., class, race, immigration status, and gender) and non-structural sources of achievement for social structures and behaviors that vary within this wide strata (such as effects of work effort or obesity on achievement). Culture/ideology includes articles on how culture influences schools as well as how schools influence culture. To this group we added one category, professional culture, which captures how professional norms affect practice.

The patterns we found from 1965 to 2010 are very similar to those Brint observed in a more recent sample between 1999 and 2008. In our larger sample, 43 of the articles were on inequality (23 percent), 35 on nonstructural sources of achievement (19 percent); 28 on culture/ideology (15 percent); 23 on labor market mechanisms (12 percent), and 18 on school effects (10 percent). Less featured topics included 10 on professional culture (5 percent), 8 that were comparative/historical (4 percent), and 4 on states/politics (2 percent). Of the articles that could be clearly coded by level of education addressed, 147 were about primary and secondary education (91 percent) and 15 were on postsecondary education (9 percent). Reflecting the quantitative orientation of the post-1963 field, 154 of these later articles were quantitative, 19 were qualitative, 13 were essays, and 1 was mixed methods.

¹ The remaining 10 percent were distributed across a range of topics.

² Brint did not have a category for professional culture in his coding.

Table 1.1 compares our results to Brint’s. These results suggest that his recent observations reflect much longer-standing patterns in Sociology of Education. Since 1965, publications in the journal have been largely quantitative and have focused on primary and secondary education. The key questions that have occupied the minds of sociologists of education are the major axes of stratification: both structural causes and more proximate features which affect achievement. Conversely, questions of politics, states, history, and comparative work have been much less prevalent.

Turning to citation counts, Table 1.2 presents the ten most-cited articles in Sociology of Education by decade. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the most referenced was Turner’s famous argument about sponsored versus contest mobility, suggesting the importance of broad theory at the time. We can also see the influence of large-scale community studies of schools, such as Hollingshead’s Elmstown’s Youth (2) and Coleman’s Adolescent Society (5), as well as synthetic, integrative works like W. Lloyd Warner et al.’s Who Shall be Educated? (4). Before the creation of large-scale national data sets, these were some of the most well-known sociological works, as indicated in the rankings. Philip Jacobs’ synthetic book on how colleges shape the attitudes and values of their students (3), and Samuel Stouffer’s book reporting on surveys of attitudes toward communism and civil liberties (6) also make the list. Making an appearance towards the bottom of the top ten are two of William Sewell’s early status attainment studies, indicating the initial influence of that paradigm. Five of the top six are books, all of which were aimed at a broad public audience, a stark difference from the more focused scholarly discourse which would follow.

In contrast, citation counts from the 1970s were dominated by quantitative research on the impact of schools as well as the status attainment tradition. The Coleman report (1) was the most cited piece; Jencks et al.’s Inequality study was also highly cited (3); and familiar status attainment authors Blau (2), Sewell (4 & 6), and Duncan (8) assumed prominent places in the rankings. The Adolescent Society (5) continued to be the most prominent work from outside the school-effects and status attainment traditions; it was joined by Feldman and Newcomb’s (7) integrative book on the impact of college on students, Merton’s (9) classic book on social theory and social structure, and Rosenthal and Jacobson’s (10) famous Pygmalion study about the power of academic expectations.

The 1980s citation counts are more varied. Theory is important: the most cited work is Bowles and Gintis’s Schooling in Capitalist America (1); Bourdieu and Passeron’s Reproduction of Education in Society (8) also appears on the list. However, as Olneck (2012) and others have noted, much of this work in the sociology of education has operationalized Bourdieu’s theory with variables for cultural capital, which means that while theory is cited, it is not being taken up in its fullest form. Tracking and curriculum placement were also increasingly of interest to sociologists of education, as no fewer than four of the works on the list—Alexander (4 and 10), Heyns (6), and Rosenbaum (9)—take up this issue. Coleman, Hoffer, and Kilgore’s study comparing public, Catholic, and private schools (3) is also highly cited, and we can see the continuing influence of the Coleman report (2) and Jencks et al.’s work on Inequality (7).

The 1990s citation counts again reflect a mixed picture. Theory is again well represented, with Bowles and Gintis (1), Bourdieu (8), and Collins’s Credential Society (9) making the top ten. Status attainment and school effects continue to be a concern for the field, with the Coleman report (3), Blau and Duncan (4), Coleman’s work on Catholic schools (5), and Featherman and Hauser (10). Tracking continues to be a focus, as indicated by the placement of Oakes’ Keeping Track (2) and Gamoran’s quantitative examination of the distribution of learning opportunites (7). We also see the first methodological work on the list, Bryk and Raudenbaush’s Hierarchical Linear Models, reflecting sociologists’ increasing interest in disentangling the effects of different levels of schooling on academic outcomes.

The period from 2000 to 2010 revisits many long-standing topics and opens up some new ones. In the most cited work, Lareau and Horvat build on Bourdieu’s work (and preview Lareau’s later work) by offering a qualitative case study of the intersection of cultural capital, race, class, and schools’ receptivity to parents’ claims. (We do not present the results from 2010 to 2015 because the sample is small, but Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods is at the top of that list.) We also see two pieces developing and then disputing the oppositional culture hypothesis, Fordham and Ogbu (7) and Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey (3). There is also the continuing influence of old favorites Blau and Duncan (2), the Coleman report (4), Oakes on tracking (5), Coleman’s Adolescent Society (8), and Bryk and Raudenbush’s work on HLM (9). Bryk et al.’s book on Catholic schools (5) is also highly cited.

Overall, the work published in Sociology of Education over the past fifty years is broadly consistent with what we might expect, but there are some exceptions. The vast majority of the research has been quantitative and focused on K–12 schooling. Status attainment and the Coleman report have been the two largest influences on the field. These conclusions are consistent with Brint’s analysis of Sociology of Education between 1999 and 2008, and show that similar dynamics have governed the journal since the 1960s. At the same time, theorists like Bourdieu, Collins, and, more recently, Lareau, are consistently among the most-cited pieces. While, as Olneck (2012) points out, many of these citations occur in pieces which operationalize variables quantitatively in ways that may not be fully consistent with the original theories, their prevalence does suggest that these theorists are continuing to influence the field. The citations on tracking and oppositional culture indicate that the field at times becomes focused on particular debates, which generate widely referenced articles. Thus while school effects and status attainment are the most prominent strands, theory and substantive debates on specific issues do continue to play a role. The evidence suggests that the field is less monolithic than it appears, and that if new theory or different substantive debates were created, they could play an important role in the discipline.

Annual Review of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and American Journal of Sociology

We also explored how the sociology of education was represented in sociology as a whole—specifically in the Annual Review of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, and the American Journal of Sociology. This analysis enables us to see which parts of the subfields have been elevated to become part of broader sociological debates and arguments.

The Annual Review of Sociology is an invitation-only publication that asks selected scholars to review areas of the discipline. It began publication in 1975. We had our research assistant, Stefan Beljean, conduct a search using the word education in either title, abstract, or keyword. We then read these articles and excluded ones that related only tangentially to education. In total, we found twenty-three articles focused on education in the ARS from 1975 to June of 2015. We coded these with the Brint codes. Because they were review essays, many of them touched on multiple topics, and thus our totals do not add up to twenty-three.

We found that nineteen of the twenty-three were about inequality in schooling, showing the overwhelming interest in processes of stratification by scholars in the sociology of education and in the broader discipline. These included many of the major structural dimensions of stratification in society, including race, gender, class, and immigration status. Five of the reviews contained discussions of school effects, frequently in the context of the roles schools play in larger processes of social reproduction. Of the pieces focused less directly on inequality, one reviewed the Meyer/world-systems perspective; one on higher education by Stevens, Armstrong, and Arum considered the different roles institutions of higher education play in society; one focused on school reform; and one described the social and economic returns from college attendance. Judging by the ARS, the contribution that the sociology of education has made to the broader literature centers almost exclusively on the roles that schools play in processes of social reproduction.

We also coded all articles from 1950 to June 2015 that mention education in the American Journal of Sociology (AJS)) and the American Sociological Review (ASR). AJS yielded 59 articles. Of these, 52 were quantitative, 4 were qualitative, 1 was mixed-methods, and 4 were essays (several using quantitative or qualitative data). This result reflects the quantitative orientation of the broader field of sociology as well as of the sociology of education. Topically, 16 articles were about inequality in schools (27 percent), 14 were about the connection between schools and the labor market (24 percent), 11 were about group processes in schools (19 percent), and 10 were about school effects (17 percent). All of these topics are roughly consistent with the sociology of education field as a whole. Topics which made fewer appearances included 5 on culture and ideology (8 percent), 5 on comparative education (8 percent), and 5 on states and politics (8 percent).

A similar picture emerges from American Sociological Review. In ASR there were 117 articles on education between 1950 and June 2015. Of these, 103 were quantitative (88 percent), 8 were qualitative (7 percent), 11 were essays, and 2 were mixed methods.⁴ Topically, 59 were on schooling and inequality (50 percent), and 26 were on school effects (22 percent), showing again the dominance of those two topics in the sociology of education. Less prominent categories included 18 that were comparative and historical (15 percent), 17 on culture or ideology (14 percent), 15 on labor market mechanisms (13 percent), 13 on nonstructural sources of inequality (11 percent), 9 on group processes (8 percent), and 8 on family structure (7 percent). Taken together, the findings in AJS and ASR suggest that the distribution of topics in the broader disciplinary journals parallels those in the subdiscipline.

Overall, if we compare the sociology of education as practiced in America today to where it was in 1960, we see that it has taken a quantum leap forward both as a subfield and in winning a place in the broader discipline. By embracing quantitative methods, using large-scale data sets, asking questions compatible with broad notions of reformist liberalism, and developing increasingly refined knowledge about the roles that schools play in social reproduction and mobility, the field has developed an identity, a cumulative knowledge base, and a solid place within sociology (see also Bills, DeLuca, and Morgan 2013). But it has also done these things at the expense of other topics and approaches, reifying a small number of theories, questions, and research methods as central to the sociology of education enterprise. It also has missed opportunities to connect to sociologies of education that have emerged in other sectors of the scholarly ecology. We turn to these next.

A Broader View: Five Sociologies of Education

While from the point of view of publication in American sociological journals, the sociology of education has been focused on status attainment, school effects, and a few other topics, that is not the only way to see the field. In the section that follows, we delineate five different sociologies of education that have emerged over the past fifty years: (1) the status attainment and social reproduction traditions, (2) an organizationally oriented sociology of education focused on school and policy improvement, (3) a critical sociology of education, (4) a sociology of higher education, and (5) the new institutionalist view of sociology of education (see table 1.3). Building on Frickel and Gross’s (2005) view of the basis of intellectual movements, we suggest that each of these strands has been able to develop a set of core capabilities which have sustained its work, including an intellectual community, organizational resources, prominent scholars, a core technology for doing the work, and a constituency that is interested in what is being produced. If the previous picture suggested a heavy focus on one topic, this view suggests a much more pluralistic ecology, with different strands seeking out different niches in the intellectual landscape.

¹ This chart represents only strands of research on higher education that focus on the evolving broad public priorities of universities. A more complete discussion of the different strands within the study of higher education can be found in the text.

It is important to note that our goal here is to be illustrative and not exhaustive. We chose these five because they take