Bringing Bourdieu to policy sociology : codification, misrecognition and exchange value in the UK context

The task of social scientists is to find ways of investigating and understanding the social, political and economic world, in order to offer insights into everyday and public life in the past, present and future. Bourdieu’s tool kit offers a particular way of theorizing the rules, narratives and self-held truths of social phenomena and of educational policy as a specific object of analysis. In this article I develop a series of propositions about the ways in which field theory might be applied to explain the abrupt public policy shift effected by the Thatcher government and the adjustments made to it by the Blair government. I suggest that a Bourdieuian approach shows policy working as a means of codification, as a doxa of misrecognition and as currency exchange within and across fields. I conclude with some thoughts about the difficulties of explicating interactions between fields.

Incorporating both positive and negative association rules into the analysis of outbound tourism in Hong Kong

This article presents a novel approach to data mining that incorporates both positive and negative association rules into the analysis of outbound travelers. Using datasets collected from three large-scale domestic tourism surveys on Hong Kong residents' outbound pleasure travel, different sets of targeted rules were generated to provide promising information that will allow practitioners and policy makers to better understand the important relationship between condition attributes and target attributes. This article will be of interest to readers who want to understand methods for integrating the latest data mining techniques into tourism research. It will also be of use to marketing managers in destinations to better formulate strategies for receiving outbound travelers from Hong Kong, and possibly elsewhere.

Digital technology policies in Canada and Australia: an analysis of new rules for ‘new tech'

As mobile touch screen digital devices (MTSD) have moved into a more prominent position in classrooms and schools, the development of new policies to address these devices have also emerged at a rapid pace. While policy documents aimed at MTSD usage in schools are evident at range of levels, from school-based to education ministries and departments, there is relatively little research that examines such documents or their impact on teaching and learning. This paper reports on initial analyses of educational digital media and MSTD policies in education departments and schools in Victoria, Australia and Alberta, Canada. We examined these policy documents in relation to implications for resourcing, usage and teaching practice, as a part of a large-scale Canadian-funded comparative research project studying digital tools and practices. Schools must mediate and negotiate complex entangled environments that are all at once enabling and dis-abling of innovation, in relation to digital technologies. These complex environments are made visible through a closer reading of artifacts such as policy documents guiding technology use in schools and classrooms. Our paper will interrogate such documents, across both countries (Canada and Australia) and regions (Victoria and Alberta), in relation to several emergent themes: private vs. school funded ownership, attitudes towards ‘bring your own device' (BYOD) initiatives and "co-contributions", equity and access, and surveillance and control. As well, we will address how hopes and fears and understandings of digital literacy are represented, described and enacted through such policies. Our analyses will also contextualize our data in terms of the broader cultural, political and educational considerations that framing and undergirding policies in both countries, and, finally, we will address the different (and similar) assumptions that are communicated within the digital policy documents.