The "problem" of boys' achievement in the United Kingdom has emerged as part of a policy response to a crisis in the post-war social settlement. Post-Fordism has become the dominant meta-policy of education reform in the United Kingdom, constituting both policy problems and solutions as gender-neutral. However, the economic and political…

Drawing analogies with the crisis in understandings of culture that led to the development of cultural studies, I suggest in this article that a similar crisis in the understanding of language may give an important impetus to the development of language studies. Arguing for the need to rethink the notion of language as commonly formulated in…

Ideas about leadership in education, as in other areas of professional practice, increasingly borrow from management and business thinking. In this article I provide a commentary and critique of contemporary leadership in the form of a narrative of my own experience as an educator in a business school. My experience as a woman teacher of largely…

We examined the reasoning of children and adolescents in the island of Macao regarding the bases of legitimate authority across social contexts. We asked 101 children in 3rd, 5th, and 7th grades to evaluate the authority of persons issuing commands to children in two events. In one, persons with varying combinations of authority attributes issue a…

Social stratification may be one of the most difficult topics covered in sociology classes. This article describes an interactive learning exercise, using a modified version of the game Monopoly, intended to stress the structural nature of social inequality and to stimulate student reflection and class discussion on social stratification in the…

A model of work-related learning based on intentionality and developmental relatedness is proposed here. A shift is called for from an educational perspective on work-related learning to a noneducational perspective in which learning is construed as largely implicit and spontaneous. That is, work-related learning can happen both deliberately and…

This paper argues that Foucault's conception of "governmentality" provides a powerful tool for understanding learning and education and links the organisation of learning to both politics and economics in developed Western societies. What is offered by Foucault's conception, I will argue, is a new version of superstructural sociology, which…

The prevailing performance discourse in education claims school improvements can be achieved through transparent accountability procedures. The article identifies how teachers generate performances of their work in order to satisfy accountability demands. By identifying sources of teachers' knowledge that produce choreographed performances, I…

Higher education--particularly the research-intensive university, which is the focus of this article--is the subject of global/national/local effects, and is shaped by hierarchy and uneven development on a world scale. The article theorises social competition in higher education, and traces inter-university competition and stratification on the…

Linguistic landscape (LL) refers to linguistic objects that mark the public space. This paper compares patterns of LL in a variety of homogeneous and mixed Israeli cities, and in East Jerusalem. The groups studied were Israeli Jews, Palestinian Israelis and non-Israeli Palestinians from East Jerusalem, of whom most are not Israeli citizens. The…

Maughn Rollins Gregory's essay raises questions about power and authority that are at the heart of the teaching enterprise. Each of Gregory's four episodes illuminates this essential conundrum from a different angle: the disempowerment of a teacher by an administrator responding to student homophobia; the effort to normalize difference through…

In this study, we examined the use of power in the supervisory relationship from supervisees' perspectives. Semistructured interviews of 11 supervisees in a Commission on Accreditation for Marriage and Family Therapy Education training program were conducted. From analysis of interview transcripts, themes about the ways in which supervisors and…

In April 2004, all national universities, which had previously been legally subordinate to MEXT (Ministry of Education, Sports and Culture), were given a legal personality and became "National University Corporations". With this change, each national university now enjoys greater autonomy vis-a-vis the government in terms of how it uses…

Since the Crick Report, active citizenship has been promoted as a vehicle for enhancing community involvement and political literacy among school and higher education students. This ostensibly progressive educational and social goal is beset with a number of tensions and contradictions, notably around the nature of participation and between…

This article discusses the findings from a recently completed two-year study of women principals' lived experiences with leadership. It focuses on the six women's lived experiences with leading change in their school. Data were collected using in-depth, phenomenological interviews, observations of the principals' work in schools, and field notes.…