Internally the device controls the unthinkable, but in the very process of doing so 'makes the possibility of the unthinkable available' [deviance is the same as the principle of conformity in Durkheim's terms] (38).  Externally the distribution of power outside itself has potential challenges and oppositions, and the device shows this background struggle: it  'creates an arena or of struggle for those who are to appropriate it'.

Chapter 5.  Thoughts on the Trivium and Quadrivium: the divorce of knowledge from the knower

 [Rehearses the example already given in an earlier chapter, apparently based on an original essay by Durkheim.  I think the point is that the Trivium and Quadrivium were different but linked together, both by sequence, and by Christian thought - understanding the word preceded understanding the world.  His particular emphasis, however is on consciousness and how Christianity brought about a particular division between the outer world and the inner word.  The Christian inner is given first, while the sacredness of the world is guaranteed.]

 Similarly, the Christian notion of conversion involves a change of the inward.  This in turn implies that the inner is separated from outer practice, 'which becomes the site for a new awareness'(83), a gap with outward culture.  This is a new gap not found in Greek thoughts or in Judaism.  The Jewish god is invisible, producing a maximum distance between god and people.  Holiness has to be demonstrated through rituals and through the law.  The social bond joins god and people: there is no dislocation but a perfect community.  However, this text is incomplete, and has to be constantly adjusted and elaborated.  The emphasis on the self in Christianity, however least a doubt questioning and interrogation, a new 'interrogative mode' (85). 

 Thus the Trivium is really about the inner, and the Quadrivium the outer.  This also provided the foundation for the professions.  A 'humanising secular principle' then emerged and lead to a new specialisation of the study of the outside in the Quadrivium, and 'the disciplines of symbolic control - the social sciences'in the Trivium.  There is less of a gap between the two, esp. with a new principle, relating to the market and its managers.  'Market relevance is becoming the  key orientating criterion for the selection of discourses, their relation to each other, their forms and their research' (86), and it is affecting all levels of the education system.  This is 'a truly secular concept', where knowledge becomes money, divorced from people and their commitments, divorced from inwardness and 'literally dehumanised' turning people into resources.

 The inner relationship no longer guarantees legitimacy integrity or the value of knowledge and thus status of the knower.  Now there are two markets, one for knowledge and one for potential creators and users.  The disconnection between inner and outer has produced a crisis, 'and what is at stake is the very concept of education itself'. [NB despite Maton, the divorce of knowledge and knower is a bad thing here?]

Chapter 6 Codes and Research

The first three volumes of Class, Codes and Control was the first stage of a theory of pedagogic discourse and modes of symbolic control, but this does not become clear until vol. 3.  The whole projects was rooted in the issue of classroom-regulated class differences in school successes.  Earlier notions of socialization seem to depend on the internalisation of values and roles, but this seemed 'mystical'.  Symbolic interactionism and the focus on communication seems more promising.  Durkheim addressed the social basis of symbolic forms, Marx pointed to class specialisation.  'I linked the unlinkable -Durkheim's analysis of mechanical and organic solidarity to our own specialized, homogenous occupational functions on the one hand, and specialized interdependent functions on the other in relations of differential power' (89).  Modalities of communication were identified, and these were differentially valued by schools and differentially effective in it.

The first empirical studies reported elaborated and restricted codes and their modalities in families and children, using closed questionnaires and interviews.  The findings were confirmed by more naturalistic studies carried out later.  It was wrong to think of this is a deficit theory.  Codes were ‘trivialised and confused with dialect’ (90) making it look biased against the working classes.  Micro and macro levels were often separated out, as were the linguistic and the sociological bits, misunderstanding the theory.  This argument was developed over a series of papers, they were often taken out of context.  An early collection of empirical papers, Christie 1999, shows the applications best. As more research was undertaken, by colleagues and doctoral students, the focus shifted to look at the modalities of elaborated codes institutionalised in education, leading to a more general account of pedagogic discourse and its various practices – emphasizing symbolic control.

It is now possible to list some criteria for a good theory.  This is not to say that others hold the same criteria.  The criteria include links between the different levels of the theory through concepts which described aspects at each level, especially interactional and structural.  Macro constraints should be visible, and interaction should be allowed a potential to change those constraints.  The problem will be to distinguish between variation in and change of the agencies and fields.  A good theory should provide an explicit description of the objects, not just a specification at the theoretical level, but agreed rules to recognise and describe them at the empirical level.  A good theory should provide the rules for the description of empirical cases, to avoid circularity: there must be an interaction with the empirical, and this depends on adequate descriptions.  The good theory should ‘have the potential of exhausting [describing all] the possibilities of contextual displays’ (91).  At the substantive level, the goal is to explain a process where principles of control and power become principles of communication distributed differently to social groups and classes, and how these shape the formation of consciousness of members.  The link between power and control and communication becomes essential.  Finally, the principles of communication and their social construction, the modalities of transmission and acquisition in pedagogy, and the various relations of the members and groups and classes should all be described explicitly [‘explicit rules are required for writing’ them].

However, these criteria themselves developed in the course of an 'uneven journey.'  External commentary often engaged in ‘epistemological botany’ (92), locating the approach in various theoretical categories, and then evaluating them.  None of these general categories really fit – for example structuralism through Durkheim does not describe internal construction and development.  It is not just a matter of spelling out the implications of [axiomatic] concepts, more a matter of seeing the concept ‘as a necessary limitation on the stories which can be told’.  The descriptions arising from the theory are crucial, and they should not simply prescribe a classification.  The very ambiguity inherent in social order should find a place, and it does in the concept of code, ‘which at the same time as it relays ordering principles and their related practices necessarily opens a space for the potential of their change.  Inherent in the concept code is a choice about itself’.  Similarly, the pedagogic device includes an inherent arena of conflict.

A number of specific studies have been important.  Early work focused on modes of family control, the social origins of codes in the family, and the subsequent interaction with the primary school.  The theory, ‘however primitive’ came before the research as ever.  Conceptual clarification emerges from engagement with the empirical, and there are some other conceptual developments.  The papers that resulted represented different stages of this development.  An early interest was analysing family types in terms of how roles were allocated and the relations between them, and this leads to a ‘shorthand’ account of positional and personal modes, each with different ‘sociolinguistic realizations’ (93).  Subsequent empirical research ensued improving the language of description of modes of control, by asking more questions, including some hypothetical ones of mothers and then children.  An overall ‘index of communication and control’ was constructed, and scores on the index correlated with measures of the child’s IQ and with the parents' social class [a stronger correlation with the IQ].  There were also correlations with teacher estimates of the children at school.  Although the closed questionnaire was a problem, we cannot just dismiss this research, and some other research tended to confirm it.  Nevertheless, a more sensitive measure was required, and a model was developed including modes of control, areas of discretion for the child, general attributes of the child and particular ones unique to the child.

From this complex model, more complex principles of descriptions of the speech of parents and children were developed in the study with Cook-Gumperz.  This saw control as operating in a number of subsystems, each with a network of choices, and an accompanying ‘rationale system’ which justified controls in each case.  There was a system of strategies, a system of concessions, ‘concerned with diverse bargaining choices’ (95),  a punishment system, an appeals system, a reparation system, and a motivational system, each offering a network of choices.  The analysis turned on which subsystem was taken up, in what order, and with what choices.  The subsystems are seen as ‘the realizations of the formal model’, and this shows how principles of description are related to theory.

The effort then turned to describing school structures.  Again the simple model involved the social division of labour producing modes of control which had communicative outcomes.  At the same time, a more detailed analysis of the school was going on in terms the instrumental and expressive orders of the school and the expressive order of the school [the possible forms of involvement appear as a table on page 96, which looks rather like Merton’s classification of possible responses to social strain]. The model itself did not describe contents of the two orders, but it did provide the basis for an empirical study, by Ron King [!  I encountered him very early in my own career].  The earlier work on positional and personal modes of control was also incorporated in subsequent papers, through a discussion of school organisation as a variable. Stratified schools produced social divisions based on fixed attributes like age and gender or ability [= positional], or school subjects, and this in turn leads to horizontal and vertical structures of control.  The possibilities to produce consensus, were left ambiguous, however.  If the basic units and categories were not fixed and specialized, they produced a differentiated school structure and here, extensive ritualization was required to maintain the expressive order to compensate for the weak organisation of the school itself.  This offered a form of ‘therapeutic control’ based on personalised communications.

Reading Mary Douglas on purity and danger lead to new thoughts about boundaries and ritualization, and the ways in which categories of discourse might be separated or combined.  This was linked to Durkheim on types of solidarity.  Stratified schools were now seen as integrated through mechanical solidarity, with differentiated ones integrated through organic solidarity, at first.

Here, someone else, King, did the empirical work, and happened to conclude that there was very little evidence for the expected relations, even though his own work was subsequently criticised.{Contrary evidence did not stop the bandwagon, evidently]

The theory was still unable to link macro constraints to micro processes, however, and schools structures [‘elaborated codes institutionalised in schools’, 97] were still to be analysed in more detail, especially the distinction between power and control.  Nor was social class anything more than a ‘shadow concept, more hidden than revealed’. 

By then, extensive empirical research was being taken on by a team of researchers, and Bernstein was focusing more on the sociology of education than the sociolinguistics, the institutionalising of codes rather than primary socialization.  However, one study on the ‘coding orientation of children’ was completed with Holland.

[A marvellous diagram on page 98 shows the complexity and detail of the descriptions of the various instrumental and expressive orders, and the pure vs. mixed forms that they take.  These descriptions are supposed to lead to detailed empirical work, by providing a kind of checklist]

The transmission systems of the school needed more work, and to be focused on ‘the micro level of pedagogic practice’ (99).  Before, the discourse contents were not separated from the form of its transmission and evaluation.  The term classification was borrowed from Durkheim, and framing from symbolic interactionism, although both were modified.  Classification is defined as relations between categories and the degree of insulation, maintained by power.  Classification can also go on within categories.  Communication can claim to be legitimate if it is constructed to follow these boundary rules and principles, and this will help us describe specific pedagogic practices as forms of translation and acquisition of the principles.  [Contents are assumed to be arbitrary, provided by subject discourses, or somehow determined by classifications?  In any event, they also carry messages about classifications].  Framing refers to control over ‘selection, sequencing, pacing and criteria of the knowledge to be acquired’ [can’t really see a link with symbolic interactionism here].  Teacher control is associated with strong framing, whereas with a weak framing ‘control lies apparently with the student’.  Framing might differ within schools and outside them, for example when they communicate with local communities.  This produces the famous diagram for the pedagogic code – school code is elaborated, and it is embedded in classification and framing values, which can be strong or weak, internal or external.

We still have a connection with the social division of labour and the forms of communication, through the concept of classification, since each category ‘refers to a given social division of labour’ (100) [determined by them?] , although these are also connected to power relations [capable of change] – hence both horizontal and vertical or hierarchical relations are involved.  The concept also relates macro to micro.  Framing refers to the social relations of a given division of such labour, since it relays its practices, or rather its principles.  This is also why a wide range of practices can be analysed.  Everything turns on boundaries and whether they are made explicit, and this is a reformulation of family types, the boundaries between positions, and various kinds of control including the personal.

So everything is now integrated through the notions of classification and framing, and we can use the terms to refer to families, and schools.  The two can be compared, and an intensive study was undertaken of families to construct their pedagogic code and compare them to the school class [this was Neve].  Again the task was to produce detailed descriptions, and then to describe modalities of elaborated code in schools.  It was even possible to suggest different kinds of pedagogic practices, and this was done by Morais [Spanish reference unfortunately] who designed three different practices in terms of variations of classification and framing values, and then produced a detailed teaching protocol for each one and trained a teacher to use the different modalities over two years.  Observations were gathered to make sure that the protocols were used consistently.  A mixed group of pupils were then given tests of scientific reasoning, like those in Piaget, and Neve’s work on families was added.  This ‘remarkable study’ shows exactly the right relationship between theory description and research.

The team then realized that the same language could be used to describe ‘any transmission relation of control’, including those between doctor and patient, social worker and client, prison staff and prisoners and even industrial relations.[They 'realized ' this how -- from empirical observations or as a structuralist commitment?] However, there had been up to then an undue emphasis on the transmission or acquisition of a particular competence, like a curriculum subject [ Morais studied science teaching], not the discourse itself, the subject- specifics of sequencing etc not the general issues. Framing also had to be modified to include the differences between expressive and instrumental orders, so they could be clarified and interrelated.  Ideology was a feature particularly of the moral order so that needed to be made more explicit and descriptions improved.

Another research project, Pedro, attempted to pursue the new developments, following systematic classroom observations of pupils studying maths and language in primary schools in Lisbon.  Tape recordings were then described using the framing at work in the newly specified instructional discourse and regulative discourse [used to be instrumental and expressive orders].  The two could now be different and related.  These two types of discourse also lead to new investigations of classification for both.  A marvellous model on page 103 shows the details and the scope.

Attention now returned to acquisition not just transmission and recognition.  Early work suggested there might be ground rules to guide pupils in the way in which they read what was legitimate in a particular context.  Again social class would act selectively on these.  Ground rules were supplemented by performance rules to produce a text.  Acquisition needed further investigation, and without that, we could not see how codes would ‘bias consciousness’ (104).  The same problem affects Bourdieu in explaining the acquisition and functioning of the habitus.  Ideology here was originally seen as ‘the mode of making relations’ [managing boundaries?]. There was a connection between classification and framing, since these would act selectively on the rules of the acquirer to produce the required text.

Classification for example orientates the speaker to what is expected and what is legitimate, although some children fail to realise this.  Those who are already aware of the difference between the family context and the school context will do much better, and these are more likely to be middle class children.  All depends on a strong classification between family and school, produced by the ‘symbolic power of the middle class family’.  [The implication so far is that all this is arbitrary – at least, it could have been otherwise, with schools valuing lower working class families].  Performance rules to construct specific texts are still required, ‘realization rules’ (105), and these referred to requirements once within the context, so they relate to framing, which now comes to include regulating realization rules.  However, individuals are not simply passive.

The relation between classification and framing and recognition and realization rules was further explored, in a study of the texts offered by children from different social classes.  This included the attempts to classify foodstuffs [described above and here].  The importance of the relation to context became clear, although the data were still not specifically constructed to indicate this [I’m not sure if this is a good or a bad thing – I think the argument is that it might help guarantee that the results were not tautologous?]. 

In another study, Daniels, four schools were selected according to how they varied in their values of classification and framing, following some initial observation and study, with some respondent validation.  Classes were then observed and pedagogic codes described.  Children were asked to talk about topics in art and in science while they were actually taking the lessons, and the responses were offered to teachers to classify in terms of whether they were legitimate text in terms of being either art or science.  Children with different competences were then further interviewed, and teacher judgments were correlated with their competences.  The artwork produced by children was also examined in terms of [teacher?] classification and framing.  The study found that all children had adequate recognition rules to discriminate between science and arts, which was ‘taken to mean that these recognition rules were probably acquired outside the schools’ (107), but realization rules depended on the pedagogic practice and its classification and framing [weak classification and framing lead to ambiguous texts]. Schools apparently failed to teach children to recognise the difference between art and science or how to produce them.  This raises important issues about where these rules originate.  Evidently outside the school, they might relate to more fundamental ways of organizing experience.  In this case, the theory had generated ‘new empirical problems of some importance’.

Another study by Morais examined how pedagogic practices might affect the acquisition of recognition and realization rules in science, focusing on how scientific problems might be solved.  In the Portuguese curriculum, science is divided into knowledge of definitions and formulae, and knowledge of application, and children were invited to identify examples of each.  Then there were given a set of five problems and asked questions about them, resulting in oral responses,  choice of alternative answers, or choice between different statements.  Some children had both recognition and realization rules, others possessed only one or neither.  Both social class background and pedagogic practice were correlated with these characteristics, again with strong framing seeming to produce more acquisition.

It might be useful to clarify what a code is at this stage – ‘a regulative principle, tacitly acquired, which selects and integrates relevant meanings, the form of their realization and evoking contexts’ (109).  This definition is unpacked to produce the conceptual language required to study the distribution of power and control and its connections with pedagogic communication.

Another theme connected pedagogic practices to social class location and ideology.  Initially, this generated the notion of visible [explicit] and invisible pedagogic practice in a range of modalities.  The invisible pedagogies ‘were derived from complex theories of child development, linguistics, gestalten theories and sometimes derivations from psychoanalytic theories’ (109-10).  With invisible pedagogy ‘it is as if’ the pupil is the author of the practice and the authority, implying weak classification.  Visible forms came to be regarded as conservative and invisible ones as progressive, but both had social class assumptions, and both show that acquisition depended on economic and symbolic practices in the family.  Different class fractions sponsored different kinds, within the middle classes.  That fraction located in the field of production, especially economic production supported visible.  The other fraction, located in the ‘field of symbolic control’, working in communication, social services, education or the civil service, supported invisible forms.  That is because those working in symbolic control, ‘control discursive codes’, while producers ‘dominate production codes’.  Either type could actually  work in different sectors, but location produces distinct forms of consciousness and ideology within the middle class, based on divisions of labour in symbolic control and in the economic field, produced largely by the new technologies.  The analysis was pursued in more detail [with a nice diagram on page 111]. [NB this division within classes is used by Bernstein to defend himself against marxist accusations -- actually by the Althusserian Demaine -- that he does not explain class]

Again some empirical research was undertaken, by Jenkins, on the ‘social class basis of progressive education in Britain’.  Progressive educators were identified as members of the New Education Fellowship, active between the wars, and once quite powerful.  Jenkins analysed their journal, the authors and their occupations.  She identified it as advocating invisible pedagogy, deliberately opposing visible forms, and designed to produce emancipation from authoritarian modes of socialization and encourage internationalism.  Most of the authors were found occupied in the field of symbolic control.

In another piece of work, Holland looked at adolescent perceptions of the domestic and industrial division of labour, featuring both sexes and members of both main classes.  Parental occupations were located into different fields.  Adolescent responses classified, with different amounts of strength, gender positions, and hierarchies and movements between classes.  Additional data was reanalysed on socialization practices, divided into positional and personal modes of control.  Mothers located in the symbolic field were more personal and offered weaker classifications of gender boundaries.  However, an unexpected finding was that boys and girls with parents located in the economic field also differed, with boys holding stronger classificatory principles.

Finally, there was a sociolinguistic study by Faria, on how different social groups used languages to refer to themselves.  Again differences between those working in the field of symbolic control and in the economic field were apparent, although they also occupied different social classes.  Differences were found with respect to both field location and class position, although the numbers were small. 

Again we can see how the theory developed through greater articulation to empirical study.  In particular, concepts of social class were refined, so were differences in ideology and pedagogic sponsoring.

[It went the other way too].The specific focus on pedagogic codes was placed in a wider context of symbolic control.  First pedagogic discourse itself was seen as divided according to the actions of groups of specialised agents with their own interests, sometimes competing ones [eg ORF and PRF as above].  They were operating in fields of production, reproduction, and recontextualization.  The latter activity involved selective delocation and relocation, a form of ‘ideological transformation according to the play of specialised interests among the various positions’ (114) [presumably occupational ideology].  At the same time, state regulation was increasing.

This led to work on the pedagogic device and the various ways in which it was realized, the distinction between the relay and what is relayed.  In particular this highlighted the grammar of pedagogic discourse – distributive rules, recontextualizing rules and evaluative rules [explained in other chapters].  The pedagogic device is ‘a symbolic ruler, ruling consciousness, in the sense of having power over it, and ruling, in the sense of measuring the legitimacy of the realizations of consciousness’ [the power and notions of legitimacy of the professional agents at work in the pedagogic field, which might include the state?].  There is always a struggle between social groups [agents as above?] over the device, and this is about ‘perpetuating power through discursive means’.

Empirical research on these models lead to work by Bernstein and Diaz, and by Cox, with the latter also relating back to the notions of symbolic control occupations.  The work was focused on educational change in Chile, and the support for different options by the different political parties.  Policies were described and compared, and the implementation of these policies in the education system were described.  The struggle for control over the education system was then seen as the struggle between different class fractions [in alliance] , whose interests arose from their class habitus.  Again considerable specification had to take place to do empirical research, and the activities of the official recontextualizing field compared to those of the pedagogic recontextualizing field.  These were established by examining educational documents and interviewing key personnel.  The occupational composition of the different parties was examined, comparing their roots in either production or in discourse.  Those rooted in discourse ‘were concerned to declassify the educational system and weaken all classification and framing, in particular between education and production (similar to the Chinese model)’ (117).  Those rooted in production upheld strong classifications and frames, but in the interest of empowering the working classes.  The crisis led to a broader political crisis. Cox’s empirical explorations clearly influenced the development of the theory, and the requirements of his research led to clarification at different levels and relationships.

Swope investigated informal pedagogy with adults, sponsored by the catholic church in Chile.  There was a struggle over groups known as the Base Christian Communities, and the theological discourse in this case was compared with the actual practice of these Communities.  Here, there was no recontextualizing field, however, between strongly classified and framed theological discourse, and actual pedagogy, few guides to practice: the church relied on its own institutional forms of control.  Again considerable observation of meetings and interviews took place.  Actual pedagogy consisted of the discussion of every day problems brought forward by members, which were dealt with by the theological codes of different kinds, all varying according to their secular elements.  This was a successful application to nonofficial pedagogic discourse in informal contexts, and showed the flexibility of the theory.

Singh studied the introduction of computing as a specialised discourse in primary schools, using ethnographic techniques to examine interactions with a computer in four Australian primary schools.  There were also interviews in ‘an exceptionally systematic study’ of how computing became a pedagogic discourse and how it was institutionalised (119).  There was a special interest on gender differences among the students.  Singh was able to apply pedagogic rules of production recontextualization and evaluation to actual discursive interactions.  She argued that the results showed the emergence of a form of technocratic masculinity to privilege the boys, against a more domestic form provided for the girls.  This introduced a new element for the theory to incorporate – ‘the process of production, fixing and canalising of desire’ (120).  It was also the first study of the emergence of computing as a pedagogic discourse, relating to both macro and micro levels.

Overall, theory and research have been closely related, and earlier concepts have been refined into later ones.  The concepts of classification and framing were decisive.  Looking back on the criteria for a good theory, the issues of clarification have been successfully adapted, and there has been a useful focus on actual modalities of transmission and acquisition.  However, there is less support for the project to identify ‘the various realizations of members, groups/classes/agencies as cultural displays of a specialised consciousness’, despite the efforts to clarify the effects of different locations in occupational systems or families.

The project was carried forward by a number of Ph.D. students, with Morais (Domingo) producing the most exhaustive study.  All the concrete researchers made demands upon the theory and helped develop strong principles of description.  They also created further theoretical issues, as suggested.  [An addition is the discovery by Faria that forms of self referents could either be metaphoric or metonymic, and again this varied according to occupation in symbolic or production fields].  Other researchers picked up gender differences of various kinds.  There was a process of subsequent rationalisation of the theory, but in practice much ‘depended upon who knocked on the door and with what problem’ (121).  Others not connected with Bernstein also did some research, but many outsiders did not appreciate the context or the detailed processes involved in applying the models.  [One example turns on the rebuke by Bourdieu that Bernstein’s elaborated code is fetishized: ironically, he then goes on to argue that language and its categories, including decoding should depend on the complexity of the language spoken in the family environment!]. Textbooks and commentaries have also produced a misleading impression of the theory and its range of research, partly because the research crossed subject disciplines.  More research is still required, however.

On methodology, the issue is forms of symbolic control as regulators of cultural reproduction and change, especially those forms appearing as pedagogic practices, both formal and informal.  The modelling agencies and agents and practices themselves reveal varieties or modalities; the organising principles themselves reproduce class relations, so the two issues are connected, even though the theory might be more successful in one case than the other, and we might think that the first issue is logically prior.

It looks as if the theory offers opposed dichotomies with each side as an ideal type [elaborated/restricted and so on] yet these are not ideal types, which assemble a number of features abstracted from a phenomenon [those are empirical types -- ideal; types have a notion of the 'ideal', that is the essential] .  These categories are generated by a principle, however, which can produce a number of different forms.  Some early categories [positional/personal, stratified/differentiated, open/closed] were generated on the basis of boundary rules keeping some things apart and others together. We could ask about the interests involved, seeing boundaries as a matter of power.  However, the ‘generating grammar’ of these early dichotomies was weak, and this had to be strengthened – hence the development of classification and framing.

In terms of theoretical traditions, the whole approach has always had ‘Durkheimian roots’ (124), Durkheim is often seen as a conservative functionalist positivist, a view which originated in the USA and the reception of Suicide, and which connected Durkheim to Parsons.  In response, Bernstein perhaps ‘unashamedly waved the Durkheim banner’.  However, the structural emphasis, especially connecting with linguistics was the main influence, although it would still be ‘a little too excluding of other influences’ to describe the whole approach as structuralist.  There is an interest in discovering the systems of rules involved, and to make explicit conventions which govern the production of meaning, but this does not always involve the notion of a linguistic system external to the actors involved.  In particular, social change is given more emphasis, relating to the acquisition of codes, but also to extrinsic influences.  In particular, codes also provide us with ‘the potential of disordering’ [I must say I think this is only acknowledged as a formal possibility, as a kind of deviance arising from necessary complexity or cultural lag.  The conflicts described are not really traced to ambiguities or contradictions in codes].  External contexts are also important, especially the power relations attach to different social groups and how they lead to struggle.

Overall, systems do not determine practices.  At the micro level, message can change voice, framing in interaction can change classifications [still not the explicitly addressed].  Thus ‘the theory of ideology I have found the most congenial, in the sense of resonating with the problems addressed, is that of Althusser: the imaginary subject’ (125) [very baffling –Bernstein agrees on economic determinism in the last instance? On social class?  Does Althusser provide a sufficient description of disorder and the potential for change?].

The work on pedagogic discourse shows the limits of calling this structuralism.  It shows both the openness of discourse and the attempts to close it, and here there is a link with Foucault [just seems like hat doffing to me rather than a serious attempt to locate his work in other traditions].  Any attempt to label the project tends to overemphasise particular sections of it: ‘one’s allegiance is less to an approach and more to exploring a problematic’.

The process is best described in terms of the theory producing models to produce modalities of control on the basis of the set of rules, with hypothetical consequences.  Models should be capable of identifying particular specifications, recognition rules to identify something external.  Usually, this will identify more information than the model itself calls for.  Realization rules of the model should regulate the description and produce relevant data, but not simply by limiting data to what appears consonant, to avoid circularity.  There must be a discursive gap between the rules and their realization, which will protect ‘the integrity of something to exist in its own right’ (126). Principles of description will never exhaust the information provided, but some descriptions are more open than others.  Theory saturates the process up to the stage of description, but it need not constrain the steps excessively.  Models, descriptions and criteria are essential in all research, but the criteria should be explicit, and so should the voice of the person speaking – at least this will lead to subsequent deconstruction.

Subsequent notes take up the cruelties of some of the commentaries, and their selective focuses.

An appendix refers to subsequent work by Hasan and her colleagues on the occupational background of groups of mothers as they are undertake book reading to their children, describing the activities in terms of functional grammar and semantic variations.  The latter has been developed, partly through an enormous empirical study with 20,000 examples of spontaneous conversations between mothers and children.  Differences between high autonomy professionals and low autonomy professionals emerged strongly, ranging from constructing the individual as the unique subject to using various kinds of invisible pedagogies, with clear links to positional and personal modes in families.  Great care is taken not to support deficit theories, and she does identify the differences in terms of maintaining or challenging hierarchy respectively rather than as a matter of the superiority of middle class practices.