Recent readings of social reproduction: Four fundamental problematics

Abstract

Since the inception of the discipline, social reproduction has been arguably the central theme in the sociology of education. Much, if not most, work in the field has been implicitly informed by a theory of social reproduction even where there has not been an explicit engagement with the concept. In recent years ideas about social reproduction have become more sophisticated, as sociologists have attempted to grapple with and respond to some of the weaknesses in earlier, radical left theories of social reproduction (weaknesses which were first discussed in debates about the concept in the early 1980s). In this article, we want to identify some of the key questions and problematics brought to the surface by these more recent and more sophisticated readings of social reproduction. These problematics, we suggest, all reflect shifts in dominant conceptions of knowledge and the social world, and of the relationship between sociological knowledge and agency, and they have important ethical as well as epistemological implications for reproduction theory.