Customer Reviews

Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power

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This is a book that you can complete in a single sitting for the wrong reasons -- it has hardly much to offer you. The book consists of a set of empirical studies and was written much before Bourdieu's other works, but was introduced to English readers much later than his better works.

The book shows how the education system rewards certain kinds of articulations which subscribe to its jargon and rejects points of view differently articulated (either in terms of the language of articulation or the content of articulation).

The insights of the books are a pre-cursor to Bourdieu's educational masterpiece 'Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture', which exposed the mechanisms of power that operate in determining educational oppurtunities and rewards.

This particular book, however, pales in comaprison to the writer's later work and the monumental work of Basil Bernstein (Class, Codes and Control, 3 vols.) who preceded Bourdieu and inspired him.

The biggest weakness of the book perhaps is that it is empiricism in the way the French do it, rather than the way Germans or Anglo-Saxons do it. It is more journalistic than based on rigor of method. The questionnaires administered are lop-sided. Statistical quality control is almost absent.

This is not to deny that it offers insights of value. But it is preferable to seek the insights in Bourdieu's more mature works, rather than spend the same amount of time over this half-way house of poor empiricism and weakly articulated theory.