British Journal of Sociology of Education Vol. 25, No. 4, September 2004
Change in the ®eldÐchanging the ®eld: Bourdieu and the methodological practice of educational research Michael Grenfell*a and David Jamesb a
University of Southampton, UK; bUniversity of the West of England, Bristol, UK
Bourdieu's social theory offers a way of understanding some of the most important features of the ®eld of educational research, while also providing educational researchers with a rich conceptual apparatus for their practice. This article addresses both of these methodological themes and the connections between them. We begin by outlining some key trends in educational research, mainly in Britain, over recent decades in terms of Bourdieu's Field Theory. Special attention is given to the relative positioning of researchers and the formation of an `avant-garde'. We refer to the impact of educational policy and attacks on educational research, with attendant effects on the ®eld, and on the formation and legitimacy of knowledge about educational processes. This analysis is followed by an example taken from a contemporary research project in which principles derived from Bourdieu's approach have been adopted in framing methodology. We give particular attention to the terms of the programme in which the project forms a part, and key aspects of it such as `user engagement'. Both methodological justi®cations and consequences are discussed, as well as tensions with dominant expectations of research processes and outcomes. Finally, we argue that, following Bourdieu's own public strategies of sociopolitical action, educational research methodology that is radically re¯exive has the capacity to found a critically effective discourse with practical consequences.
Introduction This article addresses issues of methodological practice in educational research from the perspective of Bourdieu's ®eld theory. It concerns the changing methodological topography of educational research. We draw attention to the consequences of change for successive generations of researchers and the knowledge they create. In a previous publication (Grenfell & James, 1998), we argued that `research in terms of Bourdieu's theory of Practice offers insights and understanding not readily visible in other approaches' (p. 2). We also presented details of Bourdieu's `thinking tools', together with their applications in practice. The present article takes these basic *Corresponding author. Michael Grenfell, School of Education, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ. Email: grenfell@soton.ac.uk ISSN 0142±5692(print)/ISSN 1465±3346 (online)/04/040507-17 ã 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/0142569042000236989
508 M. Grenfell and D. James analytical instrumentsÐhabitus, ®eld, capital, legitimacy, structure,1 and so forthÐas axiomatic to our discussion.2 However, Bourdieu's was a dynamic theory, which evolved over time. In later works, he asserted the primacy of `®eld theory' (see Bourdieu, 1996/92, p. 182ff) as the main determinant of objective scienti®c knowledge in analysing the purpose of research and the limits of the `objectitifying subject' (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, pp. 175±185). Our article takes this latter principle of re¯exivity as its main point de deÂpart, in discussing research practice and consequent knowledge arising from it. We do this by taking educational research itself to be a `®eld', and thus open to analysis using Bourdieu's theoretical perspective.3 It is by addressing the implications of such an approach that we may enhance our understanding of educational research practice and its outcomes. We consider an exemplar range of methodological approaches available to the would-be educational researcher, and argue that the structural relations between them constitute a ®eld. We look at the consequences of regarding educational research as a ®eld, the dynamics of relations both within it and externally, and the overall effect on the constituent knowledge production in terms of scienti®c objectivity.4 The discussion is illustrated with an example taken from a current research project. We refer to the aims of the project and the use that principles derived from Bourdieu's work have in addressing its speci®c research issues. We extend the discussion to consider the context of the project, and how the terms of its deployment set limits and condition its conduct and warranty. We do this in order to highlight the way sociology can inform the terms and practice of research methodology. As Bourdieu argues: [sociology] continually turns back onto itself the scienti®c weapons it produces. It is fundamentally re¯exive in that it uses the knowledge it gains of the social determinations that bear upon it, and particularly the scienti®c analysis of all the constraints and all the limitations associated with the fact of occupying a de®nite position in a de®nite ®eld at a particular moment and with a certain trajectory, in an attempt to master and neutralize their effects. (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1989, p. 55)
Our discussion attempts such a re¯exive process as a way of making explicit the way ®eld conditions condition the object of research and shape its product. The methodological ®eld In Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu launches an attack on scholastic reason: It is ¼ from the social history of educational institutions ¼ and from the history of our singular relationship to these institutions that we can expect some real revelations about the objective and subjective structures (classi®cations, hierarchies, problematics, etc.) that, in spite of ourselves, orient our thought. (2000, 9)
Put at its simplest, the issue here is the role of institutional ways of thinking in what we know and how we come to know it. The question is not just about the limits of knowledge, but also what goes misrecognized in the knowledge we produce, and what is the source of that misrecognition. This preoccupation with the social construction of knowledge goes back to Bourdieu's earliest work. For example, in Les heÂritiers (Bourdieu, 1964) he uses a passage from Margaret Mead's Continuities in Cultural
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Education, which describes how the experience of `vision' among North American Indians is de®ned and authenticated as legitimate according to membership of elite family groups. What is thinkable and unthinkable, expressible and inexpressible, and valued or not, is the product of the ®eld structures within which they arise and the principles of legitimation operating there. This legitimation establishes an orthodoxyÐ or doxa (see Bourdieu, 1977, pp, 164±171). What happens if we bring this perspective to educational research? It is possible to consider the change in educational research methods over time. A comprehensive history of educational research is clearly beyond the scope of this paper. However, even the briefest account of methodological developments in the twentieth century would describe a move away from a positivist towards a more qualitative, naturalistic paradigm. Up until the 1960s, what educational research that did take place was mostly small, part-time and based on psychometric tests of pupils' intelligence and learning. The alternative to this approach stemmed from a philosophical critique of its founding assumptions to mimic the physical sciences and stressed instead the social and contextual aspects of education (see Hirst, 1966, 1974). What emerged was a de®nition of educational theory in terms of the so-called `foundational disciplines': sociology, philosophy, history, psychology. The qualitative paradigm developed throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, giving rise to a range of ethnographic and naturalist methodologies, including the postmodernist. However, a sustained attack (see Hillage et al., 1998; Tooley & Darby, 1998) against this research was mounted during this last decade of the century; claiming to ®nd its methods insuf®ciently rigorous, its data collection small scale and its outcomes biased. Moreover, it was argued that such research had little impact on institutional practice; while what was needed was research of the nature that answered questions such as how to improve pupil achievement. Researchers were urged to return to quantitative methods, with experiments and randomized controlled trials seen as capable of producing suf®ciently `hard' evidence (see Fitz-Gibbon & Morris, 1987; Boruch, 1997; Fitz-Gibbon, 2001).5 It is possible to understand these successive shifts in methodological approach as generations, much in the way that Bourdieu sets out generations of artistic movements (see the diagram of the `temporality of the ®eld of artistic production' in Bourdieu, 1996/92, p. 159; also, see an application to educational research of the same ®eld principles in Grenfell [2000]). A broad chronology of methodological trends over the past 50 years or so would include the main approaches to conducting educational research: quantitative (psychometric testing); qualitative (naturalism, case study, ethnography, action research, re¯ective practitioner, post-modernism); and quantitative (evidence-based practice).6 The mechanism of change In The Rules of Art (1996/92), Bourdieu develops his ®eld theory in terms of the artistic ®eld but makes it clear that the approach should apply to other parts of the social world and its constituent ®elds. For Bourdieu, a ®eld is a `con®guration of relations between
510 M. Grenfell and D. James positions objectively de®ned, in their existence and in the determinations they impose upon the occupants, agents or institutions' (1992, pp. 72±73). The medium of these relations, these determinations, is capital, which is hence both product and process within a ®eld. All capitalÐeconomic, social and culturalÐis symbolic, and the prevailing con®gurations of it shape social practice. Ultimately, capital is derived from economic forces and gives rise to economic consequences, but economic capital per se is often expressed by social and cultural capital; which means that the economic implications of capital are often misrecognized in social and cultural phenomena. For example, the social and cultural capital derived from schooling is most often seen as an expression of individual talent rather than family and cultural background, and is operationalized to acquire economically rewarding jobs in a process of class reproduction (see Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977/70). In a ®eld such as educational research, symbolic capital takes the form of knowledge, and the manifestations of this capital include grants and various key markers of standing. A great deal of activity is geared accordingly: in other words, academic products structure practice. Any ®eld is also `bounded', and there is that which is included in it and that which is excluded. If we regard educational research as a ®eld, as a `con®guration of relations', then it is constituted by all that is methodologically possible within it; in other words, its topography amounts to the range of research activity and the principles that guide it. As in our brief history earlier, a research-®eld con®guration is also temporal in that successive generations follow each other according to a chronology or trend. However, there are two other features which are important in understanding the mechanisms of change within the ®eld. First, the notion of an avant-garde, as a collective movement that challenges the status quo. Bourdieu's point is that change is generated by such challenges, so that one avant-garde displaces a previous avantgarde. Recognition is followed by consecration. So, in the course of time, we might predict that a cutting-edge avant-garde will become acknowledged, established as a consecrated avant-garde, and then pass into rear-garde position. The second feature of ®elds and how they change concerns time. Within a ®eld at any given moment, there are those elements that are passing through quickly and those with established, semi-permanent positions. The latter are particularly true of the rear-garde which partly de®nes itself in terms of its continuing, if historic, position. Within a ®eld, therefore, there are at least ®ve facets of time: ®rst, the real time of past, present and future; second, social time in terms of months, years, centuries, and so on; third, the synchronic presentÐa cross-section frozen at a particular instance; fourth, the rate of the passage of timeÐmeasurable in terms of real and social timeÐof individual generations; and ®fth, the temporal trajectory of any one individual's passage though the generation and the ®eld as a whole. All these features can be exempli®ed from the case of the educational research ®eld (see Grenfell, 2000). There are other features that follow from the character of ®elds and the avant-garde. First is the question of autonomy. Bourdieu argues that in `heroic times' (cf. 1996/92, p. 48) the avant-garde formed by perceiving, moving to and opening up a space that runs counter to the present orthodoxy. In this sense, the avant-garde articulates the
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`immanent necessity' of the ®eld, but it does so only by displacing other activity and, of course, the people involved in it. To impose a new producer, a new product and a new system of taste on the market at a given moment means to relegate to the past a whole set of producers, products and systems of taste, all hierachized in relation to their degree of legitimacy. (Bourdieu, 1996/ 92, p. 160)
To employ ®eld as a tool of analysis, therefore, is to use a concept that by de®nition is dynamic and ever-changing. The source of that change can lie within the ®eld itself, or (and) occur in response to outside in¯uences.7 For Bourdieu, ®elds lie along a continuum between autonomy and heteronomy, de®ned in terms of the degree to which a ®eld can `generate its own problems rather than receiving them in a ready-made fashion from outside' (2000/1997, p. 112). He describes the critical community of a scienti®c ®eld de®ning what is `objectively real' for them; indeed, scienti®c objectivity becomes dependent on the degree to which autonomy from outside in¯uence allows the critical faculties of the ®eld to operate (Bourdieu, 2001). Only when such conditions are provided can the ®eld attain the universal; in other words, that which can be accepted as providing some sort of objectivity in the knowledge produced. Bourdieu makes the point that this autonomy is particularly important for ®elds in social sciences, such as education, because: Their object, and therefore what they say about it, is politically contentiousÐa fact which brings them into competition with all those who claim to speak with authority about the social world, writers, journalists, politicians, priests, etc.Ðthey are particularly exposed to the danger of `politization'. It is always possible to import and impose external forces and forms into the ®eld, which generate heteronomy and are capable of thwarting, neutralizing and sometimes annihilating the conquests of research freed of suppositions. (2000/1997, p. 112)
He uses (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 103) a phrase from Bachelard to describe a dynamic situation of delineated social practices as `a ®eld of possible forces'. In a sense, there is a continual tension between the potential avant-garde and existing consecrated elements. The status quo is always susceptible to challenge from new formsÐfor example, the growth of qualitative techniques noted earlier, which themselves are then challenged. But, what makes such a ®eld scienti®c is the fact that `competitors agree on the principles of veri®cation of conformity to the "real", common methods for validating the theses and hypotheses, in short, on the tacit contract, inseparably political and cognitive, which founds and governs the work of objecti®cation' (ibid., p. 112). If this scenario seems idealistic, its opposite is probably less so but equally true: that a ®eld is less scienti®c, the less consensus there is around principles of veri®cation and with what is accepted as `objective'. The point we would wish to make is that over recent decades, change in educational research methodology has occurred through both an internal dynamic and, increasingly, external interventions. The critique levelled at educational research needs to be understood as part of structural shifts within the educational ®eld itself, and the forces acting on and within it. For Bourdieu, structures are constituted according to logical principles. Consequently, we need to understand that there is a
512 M. Grenfell and D. James consistency of logic and practical sense (sens pratique) in the way knowledge has been constructed across diverse areas of the education ®eld and the use to which that knowledge has been put. We have room for one example: the rise of CompetencyBased Teacher Education, in which items of teaching practice are prescribed and performance assessed. When this approach was adopted in Britain in the early 1990s, Elliott (1993, p. 22) argued that the movement was a perfect example of the application of neo-liberal economic principles to teacher education.8 For Bourdieu, this might be understood as an example of `unconscious inclusion', where a whole world-view is imported into a discourse in the name of common sense; in this case, the view that what makes good teaching can be itemized in descriptions of performance, taught and assessed. Another `misrecognized' inclusion might be the way such an approach establishes a system of control, since those who control the competency list (central government) control the practice. More recently, we can see the same logic in `third way' politics, with its stress on accountability and direction (see Fairclough [2000] for a discussion of how this logic is represented in language). This is a case, therefore, of where politics enters a knowledge ®eld and rede®nes its principles of operation. In Bourdieu's terms, it is a form of symbolic violence. The same can be seen in recent trends in educational research, with the call for `evidence-based work' (a phrase that itself implies research hitherto has been nonevidence-based!) (see Hargreaves, 1996). Hargreaves calls for more research of a type `that if teachers change their practice from x to y there will be a signi®cant and enduring improvement in teaching and learning' (1996, p. 5). Of course, there is nothing wrong in research with this aspiration. However, the argument does raise a whole set of dif®cult questions concerning the relationships between theory and practice, research and teaching, and teaching and learning; about which we know quite a lot and yet which seems to be by-passed in the common-sensical language with which the agenda for future research practice is set. We know it is very dif®cult to ®nd direct linkages between particular pedagogic approaches and resulting achievement; particularly given the shifting cultural contexts of schooling. Where input±output systems are seen to work, it is often according to narrowly identi®ed criteria. Even in the case of the National Literacy Strategy, the general raising of pupil achievement in the classroom may well be due to holistic conditions and extraneous factors, as much as discrete items within it. Yet the very act of stating this complexity in the conduct and interpretation of research is taken by some to indicate a lack of clarity and rigour, and may subsequently be used to discredit educational research. In its place, the need for `practical applicability' is asserted, but in terms de®ned by those from outside of the education research ®eld: politicians and government-sponsored agencies.9 While it may embrace a wide range of activity, the academic ®eld is predicated, and thus legitimated, on the autonomy of knowledge in pursuit of objective `truth'10 (i.e. knowledge that is more dependable than other sources). Bourdieu sees that this autonomy can be taken over by external forces and argues that the scholastic view is prone to economic and political in¯uence. Recent developments in England may be an overt form of this `take-over'Ðthe colonizing of an academic area, or occupation, by controlling the means of legitimation. We can identify a number of developments in
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educational research, all of which originate from outside the ®eld, rather than within it, and all stemming from political in¯uence: the `practical' focus of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP), combined in its early days with a strong steer towards randomized controlled trials; the National Forum for Educational Research, with its de®ning of research priorities, academic journal `coordination' and funding `management'; and the involvement of the Teacher Training Agency in research funding. We should also include the accent on `evidence-based research' itself, promoted as it has been by the successive departments for education and by the inspection agency (OfSTED).11 These developments can be understood as the exerting of in¯uence to change a ®eld of knowledge by the imposition of de®nitions of legitimacy and the re-grounding of institutional relations, and thus structures. In short, capital is rede®ned and its currency values altered. Knowledge itself changes in some cases; this is achieved by necessary concomitant shifts in funding and the consequent gains and loses in power and in¯uence. In other cases, it is achieved simply be discrediting at an of®cial level the principles of one form of research knowledge and promoting others. The argument so far illustrates how Bourdieu's thinking can be used to promote re¯exivity at the broad level of the changing nature of the ®eld of educational research. We now turn to look at an example of researchers using this way of thinking. The following shows the in¯uence Bourdieusian thinking can have in the construction of a contemporary research project, and how the imperative to a strong form of re¯exivity gives rise to dif®cult questions about both the ®eld of educational research and the project's place within it. The Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education project The project Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education (TLCFE) is funded within Phase Two of the ESRC's TLRP12 (award number L 139251025). Its ultimate aim is to improve teaching and learning in further education (FE); speci®cally to deepen understanding of the complexities of learning while identifying, implementing and evaluating strategies for its improvement, as well as adding to research capability. The outcomes are intended to be both theoretical and practical. The project has a longitudinal, nested case-study design that looks in depth at a cross-section of FE provision within four colleges. A group of four part-time research directors and four half-time research fellows, based in four universities, work in a partnership with four college-based teams (each comprising a 0.4 researcher and four `participating tutors', each of whom have a small amount of funded secondment from teaching each week). These four partnerships are augmented by a research Director and Research Fellow who focus on quantitative data collection and analysis and its relationship to the qualitative. In all, some 30 people are therefore involved in various interlocking part-time roles. Data is gathered from: (a) interviews with students, tutors and line managers; (b) a questionnaire survey with all students across 16 `learning sites' and (c) through observation and shadowing by researchers and fellow tutors. Research questions include a focus on the relationship between the
514 M. Grenfell and D. James dispositions of students/tutors, and teaching/learning activities, and on how a research process itself can be used to transform learning cultures and/or add to research capacity in a college setting. The project may be characterized as critical and interpretative, based on a series of case studies. It also embodies a form of action research, in that participating tutors respond to and monitor externally imposed change, or make conscious efforts to innovate and monitor the results, supported by a series of meetings. Examples of the latter would include tutors deciding to change a regular feature of the way they teach, or perhaps arriving, after a process of supported re¯ection, at a changed balance between elements of their work or between their personal and professional lives. In the period prior to submission of proposals, TLRP events gave strong encouragement to bids that would demonstrate rapid impact on practice, and held up dominant notions of `evidence-based practice', particularly from medicine, as a model. The events also stressed the importance of having a range of engagements with `users', at all stages. This latter theme is re¯ected in the current TLRP website section on users, which explains: Project teams and research users collaborate at least two levels. Most directly, interested practitioners are involved in key processes of regular research activity. This normally includes discussion at the project design stage, and continues during data collection and analysis in the speci®c settings in which practitioners work. This engagement enhances the relevance and groundedness of the research. Additionally, there is liaison with national user organisations. (TLRP, 2003, http://www.tlrp.org/links/index.htm)
The TLRP's emphasis on researcher/user collaboration found a strong af®nity with the values and practices of the proposers of the TLCFE project, who had a history of working closely with ¯edgling research organizations in FE at college, regional and national levels, and a shared desire to produce practical knowledge (see, for example, Bloomer & James, 2003). It is probable that the authenticity of a range of prior connections with users was a signi®cant factor in this particular project's success in the competition for funds, as was its multi-layered partnership design that included an innovative element of funding for the active longitudinal part-time participation of some 16 FE tutors who would share in the generation and interpretation of data as well as in the practical application of ®ndings. We will return in the following to the issue of the relationship with users and will argue that the enhancement of `relevance and groundedness' is problematic and more complex an issue than it seems. First, however, it is worth noting that there was, within the project team, a collective recognition of the potential signi®cance of Bourdieu's thinking. There were four main (although overlapping) reasons for this. First, the project adopted a relational approach to educational questions, emphasizing the mutual interdependence of social constraint and individual agency. The relevant distinction here, within which Bourdieu follows Cassirer, is between substantialist and relational thinking. The former: ¼ is inclined to treat the activities and preferences speci®c to certain individuals or groups in a society at a certain moment as if they were substantial properties, inscribed
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once and for a all in a sort of biological or cultural essence ¼ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 4; emphasis in original)
In contrast, a relational way of thinking accepts that such `activities and preferences' as the research uncovers are understandable in terms of social spaces, positions and relationships pertaining in a particular time and place. Bourdieu's own illustration is very helpful here, with reference to one of his most well-known works, Distinction (1986/79): ¼ what is commonly called distinction, that is, a certain quality of bearing and manners, most often considered innate (one speaks of distinction naturelle, `natural re®nement'), is nothing other than difference, a gap, a distinctive feature, in short, a relational property existing only in and through its relation with other properties. (Bourdieu, 1998/94, p. 6; emphasis in original)
Thinking relationally in the project meant seeing `learning' in relation to people, organizations, times and places (for example, Who? When? Where?); in other words, the ®eld site or context. Rather than taking the validity or utility of speci®c individual or institutional de®nitions of learning at face value, one might seek to understand them in terms of their location among a series of possible socially positioned de®nitions and in relation to other de®nitions in use. Second, a Bourdieusian approach would enable a focus on culture and would promote working across disciplinary boundaries, challenging the project team to think in new ways about the disciplinary location of familiar variables; for example, conscious/unconscious, motivation (themselves normally delineated according to orthodox academic disciplinary boundaries). A range of contemporary arguments support Bourdieu's position on this issue: his focus on culture and his recognition of the interests of different academic disciplines have strong parallels in sociocultural theory (for example, Wertsch, 1998) and in cultural studies (for example, Smith, 200013). A Bourdieusian approach, then, appeared to help the project to focus on its object of study (i.e. learning in a particular institutional context as a set of practices to be understood, explained or transformed). Given the dominance of some pre-existing models of learning, this was an important consideration. Third, the strong notion of re¯exivity running through Bourdieu's approach, mentioned earlier in this article, was an important element for the project. For Bourdieu, ¼ to say we are interested in a problem is a euphemistic way of naming the fundamental fact that we have vital stakes in our scienti®c productions. Those interests are not directly economic or political; we experience them as disinterested. The distinguishing feature of intellectuals is that they have disinterested interests, that they have an interest in disinterestedness ¼ The subject of scienti®c discourse needs to be asked the same questions that are put to the object of that discourse. (1993/84, p. 49)
The acknowledgement of interests leads to a particularly rich and important line of discussion and analysis in a project that includes FE practitioners as researchers. This is not to suggest that the outcomes of research merely represent this or that set of interestsÐjust that we all `have vital stakes in our scienti®c productions', and that these matter.14 They have a bearing on what we study, how we study it,
516 M. Grenfell and D. James and even who will listen to the outcomes. Bourdieu encourages the researcher to make explicit these aspects of research and their relation to the object of study to map the ®eld. Fourth, the project team shared a wish to be enabled rather than constrained by `theory', so was attracted by the Bourdieusian idea of `theory as method'. This principle relies on a distinction between alternative conceptions of theory.15 Bourdieu says: ¼ I never set out to `do theory' or to `construct a theory' per se ¼ There is no doubt a theory in my work, or, better, a set of thinking tools visible through the results they yield. (Bourdieu, in Wacquant, 1989, p. 50; emphasis in original; see also Grenfell & James, 1998, pp. 152±158)
All four of these reasons for adopting a broadly Bourdieusian approach continue to be signi®cant in the project. For example, with regard to the ®rst, in several of the learning sites, the attempt to develop a relational understanding has led to an appreciation of stark differences in the de®nitions of learning and assessment activity held by different parties, but also to an understanding of how these differences actually serve a range of different interests. Furthermore, the wish to work within a strong notion of re¯exivity, while adopting Bourdieu's `thinking tools', has seen the project develop a strong emphasis on the role of tutor disposition in pedagogic practices.16 At the time of writing, the project is just over half-way through its planned time-scale.17 Early ®ndings are being reported and they appear to warrant a rejection of some of the most widespread and fundamental prevailing assumptions about teaching and its improvement in colleges of FE. Two such assumptions are: (a) the idea that good teaching has characteristics that are broadly common across situations (and can therefore be de®ned in standards and through parts of inspection frameworks); and (b) that retention, completion and quali®cations are valid and effective ways of measuring the effectiveness of learning. However, our main point here is how a Bourdieusian approach encouragesÐeven necessitatesÐre¯ection on some key methodological issues. We are also concerned with what this suggests about the nature of the ®eld of educational research as already discussed, within which the project is located. The rest of this paper addresses these two aspects. The project we have brie¯y described forms part of a programme speci®cally targeting research into teaching and learning. The submission of bids formed part of a highly competitive process that attempted to represent a range of different interest groups. The fact that this project application was successful in the process can be attributed, at least in part, to an af®nity between the values and practices represented in the proposal, and the goals and values of the TLRP (some of which were written down, others of which emerged and became re®ned over time). Those submitting bids knew the terms of the TLRP, and were able to mobilize both social and cultural capitalÐas symbolic capitalÐto support their bids. It is therefore unsurprising to see a high pro®le given in the project to involving practitionersÐteachers/lecturersÐand
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quantitative methods. Here, the terms speci®ed by the ®eld logic and capital held by the applicants matched. These points may now sound more mundane than they should. In the late 1990s, and as part of the criticisms outlined earlier in this paper, there was a major shift in the ®eld of educational research, re¯ected in the expression of such goals and values across a range of agencies, towards greater and more explicit `user engagement' at all stages of the research process. In particular, the TLRP represented a new departure in the funding of educational research, and sought to address this issue speci®cally. The TLCFE project was, consequently and from the outset, high on user engagement by virtue of having been discussed in a number of established FE-based groups that met regularly to talk about research in the sector. Partly as a result of these discussions, the design of the project put FE practitioners and students at the centre, with methods that would get very close to the action. Indeed, the project uniquely diverted an element of research funding into supporting research time for such FE practitioners, something that had seemed dif®cult or impossible in the past. The point is that this would not have happened a few years earlier, and it indicates a fundamental shift in the wider ®eld. While the ®eld of educational research already contained many examples of practitioner-focused research, we can suggest that the speci®cation of TLRP should be read as a signi®cant rede®nition of the parameters of what constitutes good (and therefore, worthy of public resources) educational research; in effect, de®ning the terms of a new research movement, or `avant-garde' (see note 9). A number of powerful interests were present in this process; some of them no doubt seeking to defend the autonomy of the ®eld, others wishing to reduce it. In practice, the formation and operation of new types of partnership with practitioners can be seen to be an exciting, but at times challenging and problematic, dimension to research. For example, the project makes full use of ongoing re¯ection, intervention, shadowing and discussion on the part of the participating tutors, yet it cannot limit itself to this if it is also to ful®l its wider goals. There is no clear rationale for representing the interests of practitioners over and above other interests-at-stake. If practitioners are privileged in the analysis (rather than, say, students, funders or the taxpayer), as they are in some practices of action research, what will the effects be on the utility of the knowledge coming out of the project? This potential tension does not just apply to analysis and publication, but is felt in a more `day to day' sense as well. In a nutshell, the project expects an honest and re¯exive stance from participating tutors, yet while supporting and engaging with them, cannot pretend that it will limit its ®ndings to ones that practitioners will ®nd comfortable or acceptable, or even, on occasions, `relevant'. Practitioner participation in substantial educational research projects may take us well beyond questions of will, value and practicality and may give us very dif®cult epistemological and ethical issues to deal with. Furthermore, in contemporary discussions of the `warrant' of research ®ndings and outcomes, there appears to be the assumption being made that research designed to connect with practitioners and users at every stage is bound to be superior to research that does not. It is as if rigour and validity of the research methods themselves, and
518 M. Grenfell and D. James theoretical grounding and ambition, have become baseline expectations, and that what matters now is whether the research process and its outcomes can be held close enough to current practices to be deemed as relevant by the political ®eld. We must leave aside the question of whether or not this is a recipe for conservatism, for `neutering' research. The more immediate point is that it is, surely, too heavy a burden for the range and variety of user relationships to bear. It is not a question of whether user and practitioner engagement are a good thing, but rather what epistemological expectations are being placed upon it. The way in which user engagement is currently framed might be seen in Bourdieu's terms as `the triumph of common-sense over research (scienti®c) practice'. The reshaping of the educational research ®eld described has proceeded by downgrading certain of its own founding principles and replacing them (under political in¯uence) with others external to the ®eld. We have seen how funding (economic capital), and the symbolic capital it confers, ensures a consecration and reaf®rmation of these new principles as a form of constructed legitimation, but at a cost. Bourdieu warns of a situation where `social sciences (are) condemned to serve the directly interested orders of company bureaucracies or the state or to die through lack of ®nance' (2002, p. 352). Conclusion It is perhaps a truism to state that no-one ever thanks you for pointing out misrecognitions. Academic knowledge and research predicates itself on claims to objectivity, science and universalityÐor at least, independence and rigour. On the face of it, what Bourdieu gives us is an option: a set of `thinking tools'Ðhabitus, ®eld, capitalÐto illuminate the social world. These tools (we have focused on ®eld and capital in this paper) are highly charged epistemological energy matrices brought to sociological questions in general and educational issues in our present case. The present volume attests to their value in educational research. Employing such a theoretical perspective in practice takes us beyond issues of agency and context. Bourdieu's approach includes principles, which are signi®cant in a broader sense and pertain to the conduct of research itself. In this paper, we have seen how questions concerning relations, re¯exivity, culture, and theory deriving from a Bourdieusian perspective underpinned a current research project. We have suggested that an important aspect of this research project was to understand what was achievable in the terms of its conception. This necessity, in Bourdieu's words, not only to say something about the object of research, but about the apprehension of the object of research (see Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 236), involves consideration of the way the research ®eld was constructed at a given time and how its internal structure and logic determined what was done, why and the consequent outcomes. For Bourdieu, such knowledge begins to constitute scienti®c knowledge as a form of `radical doubt' (ibid.); in other words, a form of understanding that is both rigorous and contingent. The pre-constructed is everywhere, Bourdieu argues, and we have seen that
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research projects and indeed methodological trends represent the `pre-given' of the ®eld, in which researchers work, and thus the way the individual researcher's own personal contributions are more of less valued. Yet, that ®eld is constantly changing. Our case example shows how tensions remain between researcher and the practitioner caught in a common discourse of practical relevancy, warranty, validity and reliability if the pre-given indicators of `good' research were to be followed. Bourdieu refers to intellectuals as occupying a `dominated position within the dominated class' (1993/ 84, p. 43), and thus educational researchers will always be dependent on state funding to support their activities. This situation puts them in a `double bind' (see Bourdieu, 2000/1997, 160ff.) of claiming legitimacy of position in terms of independent, objective knowledge, while being dependent on others who set the terms of that legitimacy. This condition is true of most cultural ®elds. However, what makes it particularly critical to a knowledge ®eld such as educational research is that its ®ndings do indeed have practical implications, in that they may be used to form policy and subsequent practice in schools, colleges, universities and elsewhere. Following the logic of Bourdieu's argument to its limit, we would have to acknowledge that if research is constructed and carried out in terms derived from `outside' of the scienti®c community under political in¯uence, it would not be surprising if resultant knowledge bases prove to be of limited value in practice. In effect, the interests (and thus structural logic) of the status quo are reproduced rather than those of the scienti®c community. It follows that educational research never gains suf®cient autonomy to impact on practice. It is not, therefore, simply a question of relative knowledge, but knowledge with substantive consequences.18 In this article, we have shown that Bourdieu's sociology can be used outside of the usual sociological concerns of inequalities of race, class and gender, and their mechanisms of operation. We have used it to bring attention to the processes of the ®eld of education research. We have argued that engaging with a particular research agenda in the form of speci®c programme projects inevitably brings with it the terms of that agenda, and that these terms can be misrecognized in the research contract. The more forces external to the knowledge ®eld shape what is possible in it, the more it loses its objectifying potential because it tends to reproduce the external misrecognized interests. This situation only replaces one form of illusio (see Bourdieu, 1992, 116ff.) with another, as the rules of one game gain over the other. What Bourdieu is arguing for is the development of a genuine ®eld knowledge, which is dependent only on the ®eld itself and the control mechanisms immanent there, and the individual libidos sciendi (Bourdieu, 2000/1997, 111ff.) included within it. We have seen here how, in attempting to provide an epistemologically robust methodological approach for research, there is, in the case of education at least, a tension between the researcher, their practice and the world of politics with its own interests. The title of this article refers to change in the ®eld and changing the ®eld. We have wanted to show that Bourdieu's perspective can be used to account for how the ®eld of educational research has changed and the way it has been changed. We have highlighted what brought about such change and considered some possible
520 M. Grenfell and D. James consequences. In a sense, this special edition of the British Journal of the Sociology of Education and other books such as our own on Bourdieu and Education (Grenfell & James, 1998) might themselves be understood as interventions into the ®eld of educational research, and an attempt at changing that ®eld; to encourage educational researchersÐnot only sociologistsÐto think differently by thinking differently about themselves and their work. In this case, it is pertinent to recall the assertion that Bourdieu makes on several occasions: that such a rethinking is personally revolutionary and entails a `total conversion' of the way we look at the world. When a large number of individuals in a ®eld do so, however, they free themselves from what is pre-de®ned as the rules of the game, from the `rear-garde', and the ®eld does (or at least can) change. In Bourdieu's epistemology, such an endeavour should be seen as an attempt at providing the foundations of universal knowledge, or objectivity, which is an expression of our scienti®c interest as educational researchers. Notes 1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Throughout this paper, we italicize words referring to concepts derived directly from Bourdieu's work; for example, to distinguish the difference between the everyday use of a word such as `®eld' and the ideas implicit in Bourdieu's employment of ®eld. We would recommended that newcomers to these ideas refer to Grenfell and James (1998); in particular, for a fuller account of how to operationalize these concepts in practice. An introduction to the potential for ®eld as an analytical tool can also be see in Ladwig (1994). Ladwig applies the concept to the area of north American educational policy in the 1980s, and in doing so illustrates the dif®culties and limitations of a more conventional view that might see `educational policy' as just one part of a general `educational ®eld'. He concludes that educational policy is an autonomous ®eld in its own right, which overlaps with two other ®elds (`education' and `the State') and shows this has major implications for how such policy is studied and understood (e.g. `¼ the position of a policy player may have as much to do with the strategic struggles among policy players themselves as it does with any speci®c player's in¯uence on what actually happens in schools' [Ladwig, 1994, p. 347]). A number of issues arise from considering educational research as a ®eld in a Bourdieusian sense: for example, the way the ®eld is constituted; ®elds within ®elds; the relationship between ®eld position and knowledge formation; in¯uences on the ®eld; mechanisms of change, and so on. We use the term `scienti®c objectivity' with care and knowing Bourdieu's use of words such as `science' and `objectivity' are very distinct from a common empiricist position and from the scienti®c theory and objective knowledge of the founder of the principles of contemporary science, the philosopher Karl Popper (see Grenfell, 2004). We would, however, use the terms to denote the knowledge and understanding that is possible given a degree of independence and rigour on the part of researchers who are suf®ciently equipped with expertise, resources and opportunities and who contribute and receive a level of scrutiny from others with a range of interests. (See also Bourdieu [1977, pp. 3±5].) A concrete example of this shift was the setting up of the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information Coordinating Centre. The particular de®nition of systematic review in operation here has been the subject of some debate (see Elliott, 2001; Evans Bene®eld, 2001; Hammersley, 2001; Oakley, 2001; Simons et al., 2003).
Methodological practice of educational research 6. 7. 8.
9. 10. 11. 12.
13. 14. 15.
16.
17. 18.
521
Various issues arise from this generational account: for example, the mechanisms of change and the leading players/institutions; the principles underlying the consensus on qualitative techniques; the philosophy of educational practice, which underpinned each approach. Bourdieu closely associates his analysis of research, knowledge and ®eld with the notion of `paradigm' and the work of Thomas Kuhn, all while drawing some important distinctions (Bourdieu, 2001, 34ff.). By implication, we might argue that similar neo-liberal principles could be found in the `marketization' of schools of recent years, along with their `performance culture'. However, the intent behind this article is less to address such political issues as to indicate how such `change from without' impacts on the nature of knowledge formation (and thus product) within the research ®eld, with consequences for the scienti®c objectivity of outcomes (and, as we argue later, ultimately practical application). Here, we are arguing that the research ®eld is recon®gured in a way to match a particular de®nition to education and pedagogic practice. As note 4, we use the word `truth' reservedly, knowing that many would contest discussion in these terms, but in recognition of the way Bourdieu uses the term (for example, with reference to Spinoza, see Bourdieu [2002, p. 325]). See also Hodkinson (2004) for a critique of the `new orthodoxy' in educational research. The Teaching and Learning Research Programme is now the largest education research programme in the United Kingdom, with a series of projects in three phases covering the period 2000±2007. The total Programme budget is some £26 million, with major contributions from the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Scottish Executive, the National Assembly for Wales, the Northern Ireland Executive and the (English) Department for Education and Skills. The TLRP is managed by the Economic and Social Research Council. The project mentioned in this article was one of nine to be funded in the second phase of the Programme. The view of it presented here is that of one of its ®ve Directors, and may or may not coincide with the views of other people involved. Smith speaks of social science disciplines having been `shored up' up by the perpetuation of closed systems of analysis and classi®catory practices that give us versions of normality and pathology rather than understanding (op.cit., pp.111, 132±133). This is an example of how ®eld position is instrumental in constituting distinct knowledge. As Mouzelis (1995) has pointed out, social scientists use two kinds of theory and it is best not to confuse them. The ®rst is theory as `tools for thinking', while the second is a set of statements about the social world that can be supported or contested by empirical investigation. Althusser also distinguished between theory as a tool/means, which he termed `Generalities II', and theory as a provisional end-product: `Generalities III' (Althusser, 1969, pp. 183±190). It is worth noting here that as well as being partially framed by a Bourdieusian approach, the TLCFE project also adapts and uses speci®c tools in the collection, interpretation and analysis of data: for example, vocational habitus, where despite appearances, a key part of the learning process in particular education and training programmes, is the shaping of learner dispositions in terms of the requirements of the vocational ®eld; and the examination of tutor habitus in trying to understand why it is that some tutors work so hard to support their learners in the face of discouragement to do so. The concept of ®eld, as the natural corollary of habitus, is of considerable importance in the analytical work of the TLCFE project. Project ®ndings are posted on the project website as they become available (see www.exeter.ac.uk/education/tlc). The National Curriculum is a good example of whole-scale curricular and pedagogical reform carried out with little reference to educational research; although our argument here is that
522 M. Grenfell and D. James such research in effect reproduces the existing logic of educational practice, often in a misrecognized way, rather than offering (scienti®cally based) alternatives.
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