The Anomalous Beasts: Hooligans and the Sociology of Education

Author(s): Sara Delamont

Source: Sociology, Vol. 34, No. 1, Special issue: Society and Sociology: Britain in 2025
(February 2000), pp. 95-111
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/42856154
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Sociology Vol. 34, No. i, pp. 95-111. Printed in the United Kingdom 2000 BSA Publications Limited

The Anomalous Beasts: Hooligans and the

Sociology of Education
Sara Delamont
SOCAS
Cardiff University

abstract This paper argues that the subspecialism of sociology of education has, for a
century , been ambivalent about the 'hooligan. It has both celebrated and excoriated the
anti-school working-class boy. Similarly, the mainstream of sociology has been ambivalent
about sociologists of education, both relying on them and ignoring them. Thirdly, the
paper speculates on the position of hooligans in Britain in 2025 and the relationship
between mainstream sociology and the sociology of education in that year.

keywords abominations, anomalies, anti-hero, education, Grand Narrative, hooligans.

1

The title pays homage to Mary Douglas, who reminds us that: 'Some tribes
reject and fear anomalous beasts, some revere them' (1975:174). This paper explores
the fear/reverence tension at two levels: first, it treats sociology of education as a tribe
and explores how it handles the hooligan; secondly, it treats the discipline of
sociology as a tribe and explores how it handles the sociology of education. I am
arguing that the hooligan is an anomalous beast for sociologists of education, who,
paradoxically, revere him: while the sociology of education is an anomalous beast for
the parent discipline, whose practitioners reject and fear it. The paper therefore
operates at two levels: first, inside a sub-speciality; secondly, inside the discipline as a
whole. The analysis of the past is used to speculate about Britain in 2025, with
particular emphasis upon troublesome young men and the sub-specialism of the
sociology of education.
The paper is not a review of the sociology of education in Britain since 1944, nor
an evaluation of the current state of the subspecialism. Rather it is first a targeted
critique of one colourful and much-cited strand of work in the sociology of educa-
tion and a particular anti-hero it has created. Secondly, it is an analysis of the whole
discipline of sociology in Britain and its uneasy relationship with its Cinderella
subspecialism, the sociology of education. Two of the grand narratives of the
sociology of education are scrutinised, and then the grand narratives of sociology
itself are outlined, before predictions for 2025 are made.
The analyses draw on previously published histories of the sociology of educa-
tion in Britain including Hammersley, Atkinson and Delamont (1988), Delamont 95

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96 SARA DELAMONT

(1989), and Atkinson and Delamont (1997); on research about gender and schooling
(Delamont 1999a and 1999b); and reflections on the sociology of education in Wales,
Scotland and Northern Ireland as opposed to England (Rees and Delamont 1999).
The large claims made in this paper are grounded in more detailed analyses in those
other works.
The first anomalous beast at the centre of this paper is the aggressively masculine
anti-school, anti-social young male. The tribe whose reaction to that beast is
explored is my own, the sociologists of education. Sociology of education has had a
consistently ambiguous response to the delinquent anti-school boy for a hundred
years: he has been lovingly studied and even eulogised, although he embodies much
that sociologists fear and dread. The emblematic figure, and his place in sociology of
education, will be chronicled, and then the paper explores what will replace it by
2025. This exploration allows us to reflect on the tensions between the mainstream
discipline of sociology and its own anomalous beast, sociology of education. For just
as the delinquent macho 'lad' is an anomalous beast for sociologists of education, so
too sociology of education is a 'fearsome scaly monster' (Douglas 1975:174) rejected
by sociology itself. Sociology as a whole has been as ambivalent about sociology of
education as it has been about the anti-school 'lad'.
Through the particular examples of the anti-school 'lad' and sociology of educa-
tion more general themes about class, gender, ethnicity, power, knowledge and
discourse are illuminated. Throughout the paper, the failure of sociology to square
up to the discourses of derision directed at feminist educational campaigns, English
state schools,1 sociologists of education and educational research will be critiqued.
The useful term 'discourse of derision' was originally coined by Stephen Ball (1990)
to epitomise the rhetoric used by right-wing commentators between 1976 and 1988 to
attack state education in England.2 That particular discourse of derision studied by
Ball continued until the 1997 general election in the United Kingdom, and for the
past twenty-five years has obscured the facts about British (as opposed to English)
education in general, and about gender issues in particular. Since the early 1990s
there have also been discourses of derision aimed at feminist educational cam-
paigners for damaging boys' life chances, and at educational researchers in general
and sociologists of education in particular.

Sociology of Education in Britain

Sociology of education in Britain has two grand narratives, both male.

Despite the work of feminists since Acker's (1981) classic paper, and in spite of
research on ethnicity, class is the central topic. One grand narrative is quantitative,
empirical and focused on social mobility: especially the upward mobility of
working-class boys. Halsey, Heath and Ridge (1980) epitomises this tradition: more
recently Brown and Scase (1994) addresses the same agenda. The other is qualitative,

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 The Anomalous Beasts 97

discursive and focused on anti-heroes: the portrayal of the rebellion or resistance of

the hooligan. Willis (1977) is the most famous example of this tradition.
The quantitative grand narrative is essentially a pro-education story: education
is a good thing, and a ladder for clever working-class boys to escape their class of
origin. Many leading sociologists of education used the ladder themselves (see, for
example, Halsey 1985) and the heroes of the narrative are the upwardly mobile males
reaching the middle class despite poverty, hostile teachers and alienating universities.
The theoretical perspectives used by the authors of this grand narrative are loosely
Fabian or Marxist (see Atkinson and Delamont 1997). Halsey (i997:vi) summarises it
well as 'political arithmetic in the service of the great values of a truly modern
democracy', and it predominates in Halsey, Lauder, Brown and Wells (1997). That
grand narrative is so well known, and its strengths and weaknesses so well
chronicled, that I am not going to deal any further with it in this paper. Instead, the
other tradition, that of the anti-hero, is my focus here.
Research on young men from the working class who refuse to conform to the
demands of schooling and reject the opportunities it purports to offer them is
currently topical. Since 1994 there has been a moral panic about the under-
achievement of working-class boys in English schools. Berliner and Biddle (1995:139)
state the 'bashing' of state schooling has 'long been a popular indoor sport' in the
United States.3 In England, too, this is a favourite pastime. The latest outbreak of the
indoor sport in England is the absurd claim that schools in the 1990s are failing boys,
letting down young men, and falling back helplessly in the face of 'laddishness'. This
message has been prominent since 1994 in the Times Educational Supplement ( TES),
and elsewhere in the press, and has received the ultimate indicator of a moral panic -
a Panorama programme.4 Simultaneously, commentators such as Harman (1993)
and Dench (1994, 1996) were claiming that Britain had developed in ways that left
young men rootless and uninvolved in society. Dench argued that men in Britain
were alienated, Harman that women had moved into the twenty-first century and
men had not. Their political and social views were diametrically opposed, especially
around feminism, but both thought and argued that there was a problem of young
men. The claim is absurd both because it is grounded in a misreading of the statistics
and because the problem is as old as mass education.5
The reality of school attainment is much more complex than the public
commentaries recognised and is explored elsewhere (Epstein et al. 1998; Weiner et al
1997; Skelton 1998; Delamont 1999a and b). The claims of the moral entrepreneurs
have received scrutiny and been challenged in those publications. Briefly, in 1994, the
media noticed that the achievements of English girls in public exams at 16 and 18 had
equalled, or even overtaken those of boys. This improvement in the school
performance of young women had actually been happening since 1978 (Newbould
1996) but had not been noticed by commentators. An analysis of the statistics on
exam performance from 1974 to 1994 shows the achievements of both sexes rising

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98 SARA DELAMONT

sharply, as the comprehensive schools began to succeed. The comparative under-

achievement of girls was wiped out, but boys' school performance also rose.
Grasping that fact demanded a better understanding of statistics than most media
pundits possess. Commentators seized on the women's performance, and launched a
classic discourse of derision. Instead of praising the girls, their teachers or their
schools, all three were castigated. The young women were derided as swots, and the
schools and teachers accused of betraying boys. Delamont (1999a and b) offers a
detailed analysis of the myth of the failing boy, and it is not the purpose of this paper
to recapitulate those arguments here. This paper has a different purpose, which is to
set the 1990s moral panic about anti-school lads into its context, and explore how
sociologists have been simultaneously repelled and attracted to them for a century.
This moral panic is, of course, the latest in a long series focused on the social
problems attributed to 'hooligans'.
Pearson's (1983) historical study of recurrent moral panics about hooliganism
should be a salutary reminder to sociologists. Pearson traced back from 1981 a myth
that: 'after centuries of domestic peace, the streets of Britain have suddenly been
plunged into an unnatural state of disorder' (i983:ix). In every generation back to the
1690s, commentators have lamented the disorderly behaviour of young working-
class men. Pearson worked backwards from 1981 to 1690, showing that each period
had a mythical belief that disorder did not exist twenty years earlier. Often the myth
stresses that immigrants have brought the disorder: the original hooligans (dan-
gerous Irish men in London in the 1890s), or Afro-Caribbeans in 1981. Blame is
heaped on bad parents, on inflammatory media (music halls, comics, videos) on a
'permissive' legal system, and, of course, on schools. 'Abuse is piled against mass
education from its beginnings in the Ragged Schools, via the Board (or as they were
called "Bored") Schools of the early 1900s, to the "permissive" jungle of the modern
comprehensive' (Pearson 1983:208). The lamentations from 1690, 1790, 1890 and 1990
are exactly the same in tone and content - only the vocabulary changes. Pearson
compares the rhetoric on 'law and order' at the Conservative party conferences of
1978 and 1958: each time speakers claimed the 'same' problem was new. Pearson's
book is a necessary correction to the moral panics of the 1990s about new lads and
the dangers of and from socially unattached young men. Marqusee (1993) makes
exactly the same point about cricket in England, working forwards from Francis
Thompson's famous poem 'The Run Stealers' of 1898, in which he claimed cricket
had declined since 1878. The discourse of derision about Alec Stewart fri 1999 is
exactly like that about 'New Lads'.

'Hooligans' and Sociologists of Education

The grand narrative in qualitative sociology of education (and in work on

deviance) is not only a British phenomenon. There is a robust tradition of such work

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 The Anomalous Beasts 99

in America. The analysis of sociologists of education and their ambivalence towards

working-class boys who reject education could start in Chicago, with Edith Abbott
and Sophonisba Breckenridge s research on delinquent children (1912) and school
truancy (1916). Subsequent landmarks include Thrasher (1927), Hollingshead (1947),
Stinchcombe (1964), Werthman (1977), the contributors to Buroway (1991), Wexler
(1992) and McLeod (1997) in the United States. Such work is not analysed in this
paper, which focuses on the studies in the United Kingdom. Here, the anti-school,
delinquent, rebellious young working-class urban males have been lovingly
chronicled and even celebrated as heroes, although they epitomise everything no
sociologist would actually want to live next door to in real life, and are the
embodiment of the opposite of the social mobility grand narrative which produced
the sociologists. Most of the male sociologists who have lovingly chronicled the
rebellion and resistance of the hooligans to schooling are themselves the heroic
products of the social mobility grand narrative of their subdiscipline. They worked
hard at school, did their homework, passed exams, took the advice of teachers, went
to university and became academics. They 'lived' the vision of the Fabians, embodied
the narrative of Halsey, Heath and Ridge (1980). However, once middle-class, they
have not only studied, but lionised, the very type of boys from whom they had to hide
in the playground.
I am concentrating upon the ethnographic work on adolescent working-class
and Afro -Caribbean boys in British schools, such as Hargreaves (1967), Patrick
(1973), Parker (1974), Willis (1977), Corrigan (1979), Abraham (1995) and Sewell
(1997). In 1967 David Hargreaves published the pioneering ethnography of a boys'
secondary modern school in Lancashire. A decade later Paul Willis's Learning to
Labour perpetuated the convention with his twelve lads from the Black Country
secondary modern school. Both these books were best sellers, both much cited.
Corrigan's (1979) Schooling the Smash Street Kids, which appeared close to Willis and
was overshadowed by it, took a similar celebratory view of the anti-school boy. In the
1980s John Abraham in Britain and J. C. Walker (1988) in Australia continued the
tradition (Abraham's monograph Divide and School though written in 1989, did not
appear till 1995). 6 Sewell's (1997) study of Afro-Caribbean boys prolongs the practice.
Sewell, himself black, revels in his ability to 'chill' with the boys at Township School.
In these books, and many others like them, the working-class boy who hates school,
truants, avoids his school work, copies and cheats when he does complete it, values
fighting and toughness, despises his teachers and boys who do work as effeminate
and weak, and gains status from boasting of sexual conquest, delinquent and
criminal activities, and from the peer group, is the hero. Such boys make life hard for
their teachers, reject the opportunities for credentials, and try to impose their
definition of masculinity on other males in their schools (Redman and Mac an Ghaill
1997; Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 1996).
The ethnographers who have described such young men have enjoyed an

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100 SARA DELAMONT

ambivalent relationship with them. On one hand, such groups

wonderful to describe: the best and most memorable prose is p
ising such young men. When Hargreaves portrayed Clint and D
them, and they are much more vivid in his text than Adam, the
soccer with his neat blazer, tie and short hair. Similarly, Willis v
'lads' as class heroes, and they will live for ever, mouthing the
platitudes. His pro-school boys, described by Willis only by th
'earholes', used by the lads about them, are marginalised, ignored
remembers them, they have not been given immortality. So too
even Abraham with his vivid depiction of the 'macho lads'.
The sociologist himself is a living rejection of that style of m
gone to university and entered the type of 'effeminate' life styl
despise. As a good researcher he has learnt the macho perspect
account of it which portrays that worldview for the reader. He t
on that insight and his skill in portraying it. It would be hard
young men, and indeed to avoid glamorising them. In the eve
emerge with a glamorous, anti-heroic immortality.
I am not arguing that those boys who reject schooling and
education without credentials should not be studied. Schools have
with them. But sociologists could work harder to capture their w
lauding it and endorsing it. Treating the world view of 'the lad
tionary heroes helps lock the young men into their Fordist pers
(1990) men in the former steel town in America, who longed f
Parsonian family of the 1950s. It is also bad sociology. Elevating
hero leaves the two grand narratives of the sociology of educatio
research on the processes of schooling shows that British schools
successful at polarising pupils, dividing the pupils into hostile ca
school pupil cultures. As long as the schools polarise pupils, the
educational participation held by the exponents of the quantita
grand narrative, will not be realised. The two traditions are in co

Sociology of Education and the Wider Discipline

In this section of the paper the focus widens to the relation

subspecialism of sociology of education and the wider disciplin
subdiscipline is our topic here, not just the work on anti-school b
problems, all the methods used and all the theories deployed, a
section. As well as the two grand narratives about class, the
lesser/minority traditions, as the Halsey et al. (1997) volume disp
one stigma, however. They are shunned by the mainstream disci
this part of the paper is the reverse of that in the previous sectio

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 The Anomalous Beasts i o i

about how a rebel is made into a hero, this is a narrative about how a hard-working
Cinderella is neglected, ignored and left in the kitchen among the ashes while her
family go to the Ball. This sad story opens with the 1997 general election in Britain,
which allowed sociology a voice in high places for the first time in over twenty years.7
The close relationship between Giddens and the centres of power, and the appoint-
ment of a series of sociologists as Vice-Chancellors are symbolic of this, as is the
appearance in the Honours Lists of sociologists. There is currently, a sociological
ball. However, sociology of education is a neglected stepchild, left at home. In
Implicit Meanings Mary Douglas reflected on Basil Bernstein's position in sociology,
arguing that he was 'neither fish, flesh nor fowP and commenting: 'In sociology
Bernstein is to some a fearsome scaly monster, cutting across all the tidy categories'
(Douglas 1975:174). In this section a brief discussion of Bernstein as an example of an
uncomfortable thorn in the flesh of sociology leads on to four other examples of
ways in which mainstream sociology has treated the subspecialism of education with
disdain.

Bernstein is emblematic of the whole of the sociology of education; for most of

the last fifty years - the BSA's history - sociology of education has been an uncom-
fortable subspecialism, regarded with considerable ambivalence. Bernstein is
anomalous in British sociology for a variety of reasons, including adopting a post-
Durkheimian structuralism in an era of Fabian fiinctionalism (Atkinson 1985,^995),
but his interest in education certainly contributed to his marginalisation in the
discipline. If he had focused his energies on writing about social class, and develop-
ing his ideas on the bifurcation of the middle classes, instead of focusing on
education, he would have been much more central to the discipline.8
In Bernstein's work on the 'new' middle class, grounded in the control and
manipulation of symbolic or cultural property, he prefigures the ideas of Lash and
Urry (1993) about the economy of signs and space. The childrearing and educational
strategies of this sector of the middle class, together with their extremely successful
manipulations to ensure their children obtain maximum credentials to succeed
them in their niche are, of course, those of sociologists themselves. (This may explain
why so many sociologists have ignored Bernstein's ideas.) Bernstein was one of the
first theorists to emphasise how different segments of the middle class were creating
totally different roles for women. He also recognised that the shared experiences of
women from different social class backgrounds employed together in clerical work
had implications for the interpntration of the systems of work and household in
Britain. Perhaps most obviously, Bernstein's explanation of how contrasting sectors
of the middle class were differently located in relation to the agencies of the welfare
state (schools, universities, hospitals, social work, services from professions such as
lawyers, dentists etc.) predicted the direction and focus of the Thatcher Govern-
ment's attacks on those agencies. In short, Bernstein's work contains a pioneering
deep understanding of Britain's changing class structure and response to reflexive

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102 SARA DELAMONT

modernity: yet he is ignored and neglected, because he

sociologist of education. As with Bernstein, so too with the
There are four types of disdain apparent in mainstream s
with the sociology of education: a failure to defend the s
failure to provide a platform for the sociology of education
subspecialism adequately; the paradox around culture. Th
Kingdom versus England problem, which is discussed fi
education is problematic for sociology in general becaus
separately for Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and Eng
separate system, and they are diverging. Sociologists based i
remiss. Abercrombie and Warde (1993), for example, using
that comprehensive schools failed to achieve their goals. The
better, Scottish research by McPherson and Willms (1987) th
results. Sociologists in England (as opposed to those
Northern Ireland) have been slow to recognise the 'break
steady re-emergence of Celtic separatist identities. In p
Britain's membership of the European Union, with its rec
regional languages, has been underestimated by English
subspecialisms, and in 'theory', this can be ignored, but ed
convenient 'memory lapse'. Mac an Ghaill (1994) highlighted
'English' identity, but, as this was in a contribution to soc
interpntrations of nationality, race, gender and identity
other commentators. This work on ethnicity and gender rel
deserves to be much better known. Mac an Ghaill's work is n
in sociology than it should be: it is also under attack and h
sociology as a whole.

Lack of Defence

The most recent example of the ambivalence in mainstream sociology about

the study of education is the total silence from the British Sociological Associatio
(BS A) in the face of the attacks on sociological research by Hargreaves, Woodhea
and Tooley. In the past eight or nine years there has been a series of virulent attack
on sociological research on education by David Hargreaves, Chris Woodhead (199
the Chief Inspector of English Schooling, and James Tooley (1998) a philosopher
commissioned by Woodhead. Chris Woodhead used the excuse of a review article
on the republication of 1,000 worth of classic volumes from the Routledge
International Library of Sociology (the blue tombstones) to praise Hargreaves'
(1967) study of Lumley extravagantly and launch a savage attack on subsequen
sociology of education for focusing on gender, race, sexuality and sociological
concepts such as symbolic violence. In the same year Tooley published an analysis of

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 The Anomalous Beasts 103

forty-seven journal articles claiming they showed that educational research in

Britain was politically biased, unscientific and jargon ridden. Both men took a short-
term and philistine position that any research project which did not help a teacher
solve an immediate classroom problem was a waste of money.
At first sight these were attacks on educational research, and the British
Education Research Association responded. However a closer look at the scholars
and texts attacked reveals that most of the targets are sociologists, criticised for using
ideas from Weber, Durkheim, Bourdieu or Habermas. The technical vocabulary of
the discipline, such as habitus and 'organic solidarity', is ridiculed in the writings of
Woodhead and Tooley. Many of the criticisms are defacto attacks on sociology itself.
However, the BSA executive has not made any statement, there has been no coverage
of the attacks in Network , and the sociologists of education have been left
undefended by the big names of the profession. Many of the papers attacked by
Tooley are from the British Journal of the Sociology of Education many of his attacks
are on their sociological nature, yet the BSA has been entirely silent. There has not
even been a statement defending the authors as contributors to sociology, as an
academic discipline.
This follows the total silence with which the BSA and leading sociologists greeted
the 1979-97 Conservative Government's removal of sociology of education from
teacher training curricula, abolition of the funding which had allowed practising
teachers to do post-qualifying work in sociology and refusal to accept degrees in
sociology as a qualification for primary school teaching. These changes destroyed the
main base of sociology of education in Britain. The survival of teacher training as a
university qualification owes nothing to its defence by sociologists.

Lack of a Platform

The failure to provide a platform has to be demonstrated by a series of

negatives and omissions. Each individually seems trivial, but looked at overall, they
add up to a wilful neglect. The key indicators are the lack of a conference since 1970,
the lack of a journal, the coverage in Stanley and Morgan (1993). The BSA conference
in Durham in 1970 was focused on education (Brown 1973). There has not been an
education conference since.9 There have been three on gender, two on medicine and
three on the family. The annual conference is a showcase, it leads to one or more
books, it gets national press coverage for sociology. No conference on education
means no books, no press coverage, no showcase.
The lack of a journal is another negative indicator. Britain has an excellent,
internationally recognised journal to showcase the sociology of education ( British
Journal of Sociology of Education), which is twenty-one years old. A newcomer to
British Sociology would never learn about it from any 'official' source: quite unlike
the American equivalent, Sociology of Education, which is a journal of the American

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104 SARA DELAMONT

Sociological Association (ASA). BJSEs editor has not been honoured by the BSA
advice is not sought, and BSA members are not even encouraged to subscribe to
membership discounts or reciprocal advertising in the BSA's journals. BJSE is
competitor with the BSA's own journals. Negotiating a special subscription fo
members, or arranging reciprocal advertising between the two BSA journals
BJSE , would cost the BSA nothing, but would be a membership benefit for
logists of education. However, the BSA has made no effort to collaborate with B
It is not treated and promoted as a sociology journal.
In 1993 Stanley and Morgan edited a celebration of twenty- five years of Sociolo
a volume that totally excluded education. In the 1988 Register of BSA memb
interests 115 people listed education, but the editors failed to comment on
decision to omit the topic from the collection. 10 These are three indicators o
failure of sociology as a whole to provide a platform for those who study educat
stand alongside other specialisms.

Failure to Address the Subspecialism

My third type of disdain is somewhat nebulous, though equally implicative.

It concerns the mismatch between the large amount of sociological work focused on
education and the attention paid to it by the elite sectors of the discipline. The
position of sociologists of education in 1999 is akin to the position of women in 1969:
useful as a labouring proletariat but not part of the governing class. A few individuals
whose field is education have been elected to high office, but the bulk of the
intellectual work produced by the majority is simply ignored. The topic is central to
the English W level syllabus, and to the undergraduate curriculum, and educational
research projects provide employment for many sociology graduates. But the elite
authors simply ignore the intellectual product of the subspecialism. Leading figures
in sociology too frequently ignore any analysis of education in their publications.
Three examples will illustrate this, from three analytic levels. First, there is the
programme of theorising around reflexive modernity and late modernity; the
second is the high status subspecialism of the sociology of science; the third is the
treatment of sociology of education by successive Research Assessment Exercises
(RAE) panels.
The works by Beck, Giddens and Lash (1994) and by Lash and Urry (1993) are
concerned with the changed world of late modernity, reflexive modernity or econo-
mies of signs and space. In these writings sociological work on education is
conspicuous by its absence. Lash (1994) mentions German apprenticeships and
technical education, and gives one citation to Willis (19 77). Otherwise the authors are
silent on education. They do not mention theorists such as Bernstein, relevant
empirical work, or bewail the lack of data on how reflexive modernity is or is not
embodied in schooling or in post-compulsory education. Leading theorists show, by

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 The Anomalous Beasts 105

their omissions, disdain for sociology of education. They are theorising about major
social changes in capitalist societies, yet they pay no attention at all to the ways in
which those societies reproduce their labour forces.
Sociology of education is a large but low-status specialism, sociology of science is
a small, but highly regarded, one. It is one of the few areas from which British
scholars get recognised for American awards. However, the definition of science used
by scholars in science and technology studies is one that, like other high-status
groups, spurns and ignores education. These researchers are notorious for totally
ignoring any research on socialisation into science. Their subject-matter is the
frontier science produced by elite men in top universities who engage in arcane
disputes and compete for prestigious peer recognition. Sociologists of science gain
status from their association with those elite male scientists, and the distance they
keep from the low-status routine science done by children, students, technicians and
women. They do not themselves study even doctoral students, far less undergraduate
or school-level education (see Ashmore, Myers and Potter 1995) and they ignore
those lesser mortals who do study such scientific contexts. By focusing on the tiny
elite minority of scientists they ensure the prestige of their own specialism and the
disenfranchising of sociologists of education.
These two examples of the ways in which the elite of sociology keep their distance
from those lesser sociologists who study education reflect a disciplinary culture
which permeates the criteria used to judge sociology by successive RAE panels since
1985. There have been three specialist RAE panels, in 1989, 1992 and 1996. Each time
the feedback from the panel to the discipline, and the gossip/hearsay/rumours have
been clear: high-status sociology departments are not active in the sociology of
education.11 Sociologists of education are not seen as important in sociology as
those who work on theory, science, culture, work, gender, the media and sexuality.

The Paradox of the 'Cultural Turn'

In the 1990s sociology has taken a 'cultural' turn. Theory ; Culture and Society
is a top journal, and studies of culture are published by the leading houses. Bourdieu
is in high fashion, the links to cultural studies are strong. It is a paradox that at the
time when sociology is engaged in a cultural turn, it shuns research on the social
structures and processes where culture is reproduced and interrupted. Schools,
universities, colleges of art, music and drama, the youth services, the myriad of
ballet, ballroom and folk dance classes, the music lessons, the choirs, the sports
coaching, are all sites where high and popular cultures are learnt, taught and
disseminated. Studying fans of The Prodigy is more likely to be seen as a valuable
contribution to sociology than research on the fate of school music since the
introduction of the English National Curriculum. This is a very peculiar value
system, worthy of investigation by Bourdieu himself.

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10 6 SARA DELAMONT

In part this may be explained by the anti-intellectual bias of the sociology

culture itself. Fans of The Prodigy are a more appropriate topic than fans of S
Simon Rattle or the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC); Manchester City sup-
porters more 'interesting' than lovers of Picasso's blue period or Rachel Whitere
The sociology of culture is actually the study of low-brow, anti-intellectual popula
culture: the equivalent of the hooligan in the school. Research on the audience
Wexford for the opera smacks of elitism in the way that a project on body-builde
does not. A project on real tennis or squash would be less acceptable than one o
greyhound racing. Studying culture in any educational setting would risk bein
doubly contaminating: of low status because it is part of the sociology of educatio
and elitist because educational settings are more likely to stress 'high' culture rath
than popular culture.
We have a paradox. Inside the sociology of education, we have a group of me
who have made successful careers writing about a life style that they have themsel
rejected in ways that make hooligans into memorable heroes, resisting schooli
Inside mainstream sociology one of the largest groups is treated as an underclas
despised and ignored. This is probably because it involves work with teachers an
children, but the exclusion deserves sociological research.

Hooligans and Sociologists in 2025

Sociologists do not have a good reputation as prophetesses or futurologists. I

am making my predictions for hooligans, for education, and for sociology with some
trepidation. First, will there still be hooligans in 2025? That is young men who are
relatively detached from the education system and the labour market, whose dress,
behaviour and attitudes are apparently anti-social, ungovernable and even illegal.
Pearson (1983) has shown there was a hooligan problem in the 1690s, so it would be
foolhardy to predict that there will not be any anti-school macho-lads in Britain in
2025. However, I am going to be optimistic and predict that because all the jour-
nalists, television pundits, broadcasters, MPs, clerics and moral entrepreneurs will
have done some sociology, and read work by analysts like Pearson, the phenomenon
will be recognised as transitory, structural in origin, and not exaggerated into a
moral panic, however colourful a life style the 'hooligans' adopt. That is, I am sure
there will be 'hooligans', but I hope that mainstream society will be less perturbed by
them, commentators write less apocalyptically about them, and media coverage be
more balanced. Even if that is not the case, sociological research on such young men
will be more careful about how it represents them.
On education, there are four predictions. First, schools in the United Kingdom
will not have managed to be inclusive, to get all classes, all races, all religions, both
sexes, gays and lesbians, and the disabled engaged with education so they achieve
their maximum potential and leave with a thirst for life-long learning. Schools in the

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 The Anomalous Beasts 107

United Kingdom are too deeply involved with dividing and excluding, and such
processes are so endemic in British society that I cannot see them changing.
Consequently, schools will still be producing cohorts of 'failing', rebellious, resistant
boys, who refuse to benefit from anything the schools offer them, and absorb the
stigma of being 'downstreamers'. Again, we can hope that the sociologists of educa-
tion studying them are working in a grand narrative that is less simplistically heroic
and better balanced.

There is a complication here, however. Mac an Ghaill (1994) found that the anti-
school boys he studied were suffering not only from being failures in school but also
from being English. They felt that other groups (Afro-Caribbean, Irish, Muslim, Sikh
and Hindu) had coherent cultural identities, while the English did not. Given the
resurgence of nationalism in Wales and Scotland, and its persistence in Northern
Ireland, it is likely that there will be considerable variations in the style of anti-school
male behaviour across the United Kingdom. These will be amplified by the
continuing divergence of the education systems.
The educational systems of Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England will
have diverged as Britain has become part of a Europe of the regions. The school
system and higher education will have continued to diverge as they have done since
1988 and 1992 (see Delamont 1999a; Rees and Istance 1997) accentuated by the
political devolution following the 1997 general election. Welsh education will have
celebrated its Celtic identity, and emphasising its linguistic separation from England
built links to that of Brittany, Catalonia and the Basque nation where minority
languages have been re- invigorated by bilingual school systems. Scotland will have
strengthened its separate system, perhaps moving closer to Scandinavian models.
Northern Ireland will, I hope, have abolished the eleven plus, the binary system,
single-sex schools and denominational schools. (In all these four nations, however,
there will be troublesome failing boys.) It would be wonderful to believe that
England will be free of the discourses of derision aimed at State schooling, but there
is no sign of any organised movement geared to the refutation of them, so I do not
predict their diminution. However, it would be nice to imagine that all sociologists
will know the facts about education, will be active in challenging the discourse of
derision, and will also defend their colleagues in sociology of education.
In an ideal world, the people who refused educational opportunities at school
would be able to return later, and would be found doing so. This is the vision of
Britain as a learning society. I would like to believe that lifelong learning would have
become normal by 2025, so that everyone constantly enjoys new knowledge. How-
ever, the findings from Cardiff do not lead me to be sanguine about this. They argue
that for most adults the main barrier to lifelong learning is the idea that learning is
only worth any commitment if it is compulsory or of immediate vocational, instru-
mental benefit. This value system is so deeply embedded in British culture I do not
think twenty- five years will change it.

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108 SARA DELAMONT

Predictions for sociology are hard, and it seems hubristic to make them.
However, I have made one for the sociology of education, and one for mainstream
sociology. In sociology of education I hope that the exponents of the quantitativ
grand narrative are well funded, so we will have regular social mobility studies done
for the whole of the United Kingdom, at intervals of not more than ten years, using
male and female samples, with care taken to get enough representatives of all th
ethnic minorities, to answer all the questions about the impact of educational
change on its objects. The lack of a proper study of men in England and Wales since
1972, and the paucity of data on women, hampers all educational debate. We still have
no decent data on the impact of comprehensive schooling in England and Wales, and
we need good data on the 1988 and the 1992 Acts, the abolition of student grants, an
the youth unemployment of the past twenty years.
Within sociology as a whole, the main influence will stem from the petrification
of a higher education hierarchy or stratification system. Universities will have been
solidified into a prestige hierarchy, with at least three broad categories and laborator
scientific research only funded in a small number of elite places. There will b
sociology in some of the top tier institutions, but, on current form, in England it wi
not include any sociology of education. If there is any sociology of education in the
top tier research universities it will be ghettoised in the education departments.

Conclusions

In the unlikely best-seller of 1997, Courtesans and Fishcakes , James Davidson

writes: tWhat is interesting about Foucauls work is the realization th
misrepresentations are just as interesting as representations, and even more usefu
when you can identify them, are outrageous lies' (Davidson i997:xxii). That is a
excellent epitaph for this paper. Hooligans misrepresent their life chances, soci
logists of education misrepresent the heroism of hooligans, and sociologists outwit
education ignore the subspecialism. My predictions will, in 2025, no doubt be
revealed to have been outrageous lies.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Rosemary Bartle Jones for wordprocessing this paper. An early

hooligan part of the argument was given to the National Union of Teachers
Cardiff in November 1998.

NOTES

1. These issues are specifically English, rather than British. There have not been
attacks on state education in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. (See Delam
and b; Rees and Delamont 1999).
2. Ball's account has parallels with the American book The Manufactured Crisis
Biddle 1995), a demolition of the USA's discourse of derision.

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 The Anomalous Beasts 109

3. Berliner and Biddle identify three interlocking groups, the Far Right, the Religious Right,
and the Neoconservatives (1995:133), who with the financial backing of some extremely
wealthy foundations, have publicised and developed the American discourse of derision.
They present a large amount of evidence, reveal how far the discourse of derision has been
based on half-truths, plain bias and distorted research findings, and conclude that
American education is not in crisis, but is in much better shape than the critics believe, and
where there are problems these have origins outside the schools and are imposed upon
educational institutions.

4. The contributors to Epstein et al (1998) detail these attacks on English schools, as do

Weiner et al. (1997). They are not listed here.
5. The analyses of right-wing discourse by Ball (1990) and Berliner and Biddle (1995) are
silent on issues of gender, but the wave of hysterical commentary from moral entrepreneurs
claiming white and Afro-Caribbean working-class boys are being betrayed by incompetent
schools is part of the phenomenon they analyse. The analyses collected in Epstein et al.
(1998) provide a sober corrective to the moral panic that arose when women's school
performance apparently overtook that of men. The mass media response to the public
announcement that the achievements (in terms of GCSE and 'A' level exam passes) of
English girls had overtaken those of boys was a classic discourse of derision. First, the fact
that male achievements have actually risen substantially is wilfully misunderstood or
ignored. Secondly, it allows commentators to argue that 'feminists' have taken over
schooling and derailed it, so boys are disadvantaged. Thirdly, it is 'bad' news, and in
England, like the United States, criticising state schooling is a very popular 'indoor sport'.
6. Walker's book is widely cited in British sociology of education as an exemplary
ethnography of boys in school along with the work of Connell (e.g. 1985).
7. The Callaghan Labour Government of the late 1970s was as hostile to sociology as the
successive Conservative Governments.

8. Bernstein retired in 1990. There were two Festschriften for him (Atkinson et al. 1995;
Sadovnik 1995), neither of which was reviewed in the three general sociology journals in
Britain. Both were published in the United States, where he is more honoured. The ASA and
AERA had symposia to launch the volumes: no such events took place at the BSA.
9. Every year from 1980 to 1990 I wrote to the BSA proposing education as a conference theme.
Sometimes a reply told me the committee thought the topic dull or unimportant,
sometimes no reply came. In 1991 1 decided to save my energy.
10. In the earliest years of the journal there were papers contributing to educational debate.
Given the large numbers of BSA members who are involved in educational research, its
absence was striking. A volume was drawn from the BSA's journal which failed to deal with
Bernstein, Halsey or Willis - three British sociologists known throughout the world. The
omission of education is not merely a British matter. Bourdieu was not discussed, nor any
of the American writers on sociology of education.
11. One referee suggested that the 'policy turn' in sociology of education (see Delamont and
Atkinson 1997; Ball 1990) during the 1980s helped marginalise it within sociology 'given the
general disdain within certain sections of the sociological community for anything
suggestive of an applied, policy-oriented focus'. I am very grateful for this insight which I
find entirely convincing.

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Biographical note. SARA DELAMONT is Reader in Sociology at Cardiff University. Her books
include Knowledgeable Womeny Fieldwork in Educational Settings , and Appetites and Identities .

Address: SOCSI, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff, CF10 3WT.

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