Basil Bernstein: agency, structure and linguistic conception of class

Abstract

The paper outlines an interpretation of Bernstein's contribution to the sociology of education that stands in contrast to the common interpretations of Bernstein's work. It is commonly assumed that Bernstein constructed a simplistic ‘deficit model’ of educational failure, or alternatively, that Bernstein was a structuralist who did not give any significance to human agency within his theorising. In addition, many authors argue that Bernstein had little original to say about social class. In this paper a much greater emphasis is placed upon Bernstein's radical reading of Durkheim, that shaped Bernstein's conception of agency, the role of agency in the formation of codes, frames and discourse, and the way in which the agent draws upon language as a resource in the processes of class formation. In the course of which Bernstein explains that all—classification and framing—are social facts. Although in his later works, Bernstein had an epistemological break from the central role of human agency in the process of social construction and embraced a more explicitly Marxian form of social analysis in which all discourse is assumed to have a material base.