Power and autonomy in the sociology of education

Abstract

This critical analysis of the literature in the sociology of education has shown that investigators who emphasize the dependence of the school on other structures in society or on their elites tend to have a much more global conception of power than do investigators who treat the school as autonomous. The deficiencies in the conception of power of these two groups, although different, have led both to serious problems in their analyses and conclusions. The first group lumps together power to command, power to constrain, and power to profit from. It fails to distinguish between these fundamentally different capacities which are included under its broad, imprecise, and usually undefined rubric “power”. Although it has been able to show the functions the school serves for sustaining the wider society or its dominant groups and show the correspondences between school structures and other social structures in society, it has not much advanced our understanding of the causal processes which have resulted in those functions and correspondences. This has at times led members of this group to a quasi-mechanistic conception of the subordination of the school to other social structures. It has at other times led to a sliding between meanings of the concept “power” which has promoted undemonstrated implications of a successful ongoing conspiracy by economic elites to command that a particular content and process of education be imposed on schools. Both of these consequences obscure the important role of the formal autonomy of the school system in legitimating inequalities in advanced capitalist societies. If the paradox of the school being autonomous and yet serving the interests of society's dominant groups is to be understood, and if the autonomy of the school is to be seen as something more meaningful than that of a service station delegated power by a large company, then it is necessary to distinguish clearly the power of society's dominant groups to command the school from their power to exert constraints on the school through their other (e.g., economic) activities and it is necessary to distinguish both of these capacities from the power of such groups to profit from the consequences of a school system which is autonomous in a sociologically significant sense. Investigators who treat the school as more orless autonomous, on the contrary, conceive of power as if it referred mainly to what I have called power to command. They tend to ignore power to constrain and power to profit from as essential dimensions of power when carrying out their analyses. Because they observe that the school and its members are rarely obliged to obey commands coming from other structures or their elites, for example from the economic elite, these investigators conclude that the wider society has relatively little power over the school or they carry out their studies as if this were the case, by largely restricting their analyses to ad hoc practices within the school. Their narrow conception of power has led them to ignore relationships between the school and other structures which should properly be seen as power relationships and which must be included in the analysis in order to understand what occurs in the classroom. Curiously, then, both the global, unrefined and the narrow conception of power have led to much the same result, of failing to direct attention to the causal processes involved in the relationship between the school and the wider society. The first conception has tended to assume that the description of the structural correspondences between the school and the wider society and the description of the functions the school serves for sustaining the wider society demonstrate the power over the school of the wider society whose needs are met. The specification of the causal processes which have brought about the correspondences and functions is reduced to the rank of a detail of secondary importance. The second or narrow conception of power has promoted the description of everyday, face-to-face, ad hoc, classroom interaction and its taken-for-granted assumptions, which in turn has similarly resulted in a failure to analyze the power relations and causal processes by which the wider society constrains and profits from classroom interaction and leads its assumptions to be taken for granted. The distinctions between the three different types of power have been proposed here in order to direct research towards specifying and investigating the causal processes involved in the power relationship between the school and the wider society. Two causal processes particularly important for understanding that relationship have to be differentiated. The power of the bourgeoisie to impose arbitrarily its bourgeois culture on the school, seen as so important by Marxists, For example, Baudelot and Establet. must be analytically distinguished from the power of the bourgeoisie to acquire the scholastic culture of the school and profit from it in order to reproduce and legitimate social classes. Scholastic culture in the latter sense does not have to be assumed universal and absolute. It may in large part be the arbitrary imposition of the educational and intellectual elites. The bourgeoisie will have little need to adapt the school to itself if it has the power to adapt itself to the school. The latter enables the school to remain autonomous and appear fair to all, which is the key to the successful legitimation of the process of social class reproduction by the school. Distinguishing the different capacities underlying power makes it possible to understand how the school can be autonomous and yet at the same time contribute to the reproduction and legitimation of the existing social class structure of society. Although the autonomy of the school is mutually exclusive with the power of society's dominant groups to command the school, it is not mutually exclusive with their power to profit from the school or to constrain it in the course of their other activities, e.g., their economic activities. External constraints on the school may make certain alternatives appear less sanguine than others to educators, students, and parents, and thereby influence their choices and subsequent actions, without denying them the possibility of choosing and taking independent initiative, and without obliging them to obey commands from external sources. The process involved will be incorrectly analyzed if the constraints are seen to determine in a mechanistic or authoritarian fashion the functioning of schools or if the external constraints are ignored. The autonomy of the school is of course only formal, in the sense that the school is not formally obliged to obey the commands of society's dominant groups, such as the economic elite. This does not mean that its autonomy is unreal - indeed, its reality is crucially important in legitimating inequalities. The school is, however, far from being fully autonomous because it is informally and indirectly subject to constraints which result from the actions of society's dominant groups and because the school does not have the power to control the use that will be made of the consequences of schooling. In a capitalist society it is especially owners of large enterprises in the market-place who have the power to constrain and to profit from the school. The content, structure, and processes of the school are subject to the constraints resulting from the development of an advanced capitalist economy. It is precisely the fact that power to constrain and power to profit from are less visible forms of power than power to command that leads dominated groups to misrecognize the power relations involved between the school system and the wider society, and this makes the formal autonomy of the school system an effective mechanism for legitimating and transmitting inequalities in capitalist society. Thus the key element for understanding the contribution of the school system to the transmission and legitimation of inequalities in advanced capitalist societies is its formal autonomy, according to which society's dominant groups have the power to constrain the school in the course of their activities, especially economic activities, and the power to profit from it without having to resort to the power to command the content, structure, processes, or form of schooling. Although authoritarian power to command may characterize the relationship between the school system and the political system in existing societies which call themselves socialist, I would suggest that it is power to constrain and power to profit from which characterize the relationship between the school system and the economic system in capitalist societies. The three-fold distinction presented here among the types of power is essential for understanding the relationship between the school system and the economic system in capitalist society. I have limited my discussion to the school here. I would suggest, nevertheless, that these distinctions among the types of power could lead to a constructive critique of theories of the “relative autonomy” of other apparata of the state in capitalist society and to directing research towards the more precise specification of the meaning of the concept “relative autonomy” in the case of each state apparatus.