Sociology, Gender and Educational Aspirations: Girls and their Ambitions

This study helps develop an overall understanding as to why some students achieve where others don't. Debate on the effects of class on educational attainment is well documented and typically centres on the reproductive nature of class whilst studies of the effect of class on educational aspirations also predict outcomes that see education reinforcing and reproducing a student's class background.Despite a number of government initiatives to help raise higher education participation to 50 per cent by 2010, for the working class numbers have altered little. Using data from an ethnographic case study of a low-achieving girls school, the author explores aspirations and argues that whilst class is very powerful in explaining educational attainment, understanding educational aspirations is somewhat more complex. The purpose of this book, therefore, is to question and challenge popular assumptions surrounding class-based theory in making sense of girls' aspirations and to question the usefulness of the continued over reliance of such broad categorisations by both academics and policy makers

Reflections on the sociology of law: A rejection of law as 'socially marginal'

Rejecting the concept of law as subservient to social pathology, the principle aim of this article is to locatc law as a critical matter of social structure - and power - which requires to be considered as a central element in the construction of society and social institutions. As such, this article contends that wider jurisprudential notions such as legal procedure and procedural justice, and juridical power and discretion are cogent, robust normative social concerns (as much as they are legal concerns) that positively require consideration and representation in the ernpifical study of sociological phenomena. Reflecting upon scholarship and research evidence on legal procedure and decision-making, the article attempts to elucidate the inter-relationship between power, 'the social', and the operation of law. It concludes that law is not 'socially marginal' but socially, totally central. (c) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The sociology of childhood as scientific communication - Observations from a social systems perspective

This article begins by identifying a close relationship between the image of children generated by several sociologists working within the new sociology of childhood perspective and the claims and ambitions of the proponents of children's autonomy rights. The image of the child as a competent, self-controlled human agent are then subjected to observation from the perspective of Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory. The new sociology of childhood's constructivist approach is compared and contrasted with Niklas Luhmann's theory of 'operational constructivism'. The article applies tenets of Luhmann's theory, to the emergence of the new childhood sociologist's image of the child as a competent, self-controlled social agent, to the epistemological status of this image and, in particular, to claims that it derives from scientific endeavour. The article proceeds to identify two theoretical developments within sociology - sociology of identity and social agency - which have brought about fundamental changes in what may be considered 'sociological' and so 'scientific' and paved the way for sociological communications about what children,really are'. In conclusion, it argues that the merging of sociology with polemics, ideology, opinion and personal beliefs and, at the level of social systems, between science and politics represents in Luhmann's terms 'dedifferentiation'- a tendency he claims may have serious adverse consequences for modern society. This warning is applied to the scientific status of sociology - its claim to be able to produce 'facts' for society, upon which social systems, such as politics and law, may rely. Like the mass media, sociology may now be capable of producing only information, and not facts, about children.