Karl Maton: Knowledge and knowers: towards a realist sociology of education

Abstract

In this book, Karl Maton draws together his scholarly work over more than a decade to offer an accessible route into the sociology of knowledge. He locates this work within a corpus that has called for the ‘reclaiming of knowledge (Moore 2009; Muller 2000; Young 2008). The lay person might wonder somewhat about this endeavour, given that it might be assumed that education research, if nothing else, would be centred on concerns around knowledge. Yet, as Maton and others have cogently shown, somehow we got distracted. In focusing on valid concerns about, for example, access to higher education and its broader role in reproducing or challenging social relations, we lost sight of what is at the heart of what we do in education. Maton terms this ‘knowledge blindness’. The key impetus for the work in this book is the sociology of Basil Bernstein (2000), described here as a ‘launching pad for theoretical innovation’. Maton takes the foundational Bernstein concepts and shapes these into a larger and expanded framework. At pains to demonstrate the very cumulative knowledge building that is argued to be crucial for the progress of scholarship, in this book he takes the reader on a close journey through the evolution of this framework, termed Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). In LCT, Bernstein’s notions of classification and framing are reworked into ‘specialization codes’, which describe the basis for legitimation in knowledge fields. Maton distinguishes both epistemic relations (to knowledge) and social relations (to knowers) from which can be identified a range of disciplinary configurations. Although the powerful shorthand of ‘knowledge code’ and ‘knower code’ disciplines is used at points in the analysis, Maton is emphatic that this does not imply a dichotomy—these code settings lie