The term ‘social capital’ is a way of defining the intangible resources of community, shared values and trust upon which we draw in daily life. It has achieved considerable international currency across the social sciences through the very different work of Pierre Bourdieu in France and James Coleman and Robert Putnam in the United States, and has been widely taken up within politics and sociology as an explanation for the decline in social cohesion and community values in western societies. It (...) has also been adopted by policy makers, particularly in international governmental bodies such as the World Bank. (shrink)

A recent critique by Hughes and Tight argued that the 'Learning Society 'and related notions of productivity and change are 'myths'. In response, it is argued here that myth should not be confused with ideological distortion. The rhetorical dimension of current initiatives is a necessary feature of theoretical formulation, intended to influence public discussion and policy-making. The concepts of productivity and change are reconsidered in a wider historical dimension and the communitarian aspects of the project are shown to have a (...) more positive significance in the light of, for example, recent work by Beck and Giddens on 'reflexivity 'and 'risk'. It is acknowledged that faith in the application of technological solutions to societal learning challenges is frequently misplaced. But fear that the project's aims might be subverted by interests hostile to humane educational values is insufficient reason for such scepticism, which is too narrowly grounded and is misdirected. (shrink)

Scholarship in education beyond school has developed largely outside university departments of education, and has rarely engaged systematically with the study of education in schools. The paper concentrates on three areas: adult education, higher education, and further education. The development of the extra-mural tradition meant that adult education was less an object of scholarly study than a means of spreading scholarship to the wider population, with important exceptions such as historical studies. Since the 1970s, the volume of research and postgraduate (...) education in adult education in British universities has grown considerably. The study of higher education was marginal until the 1960s; its subsequent development was relatively slow until the 1990s, when the quality of university teaching came under wider external scrutiny. The study of further education and vocational training is characterised by disciplinary fragmentation, with much activity taking place in departments of psychology, economics, sociology and management, as well as in those former polytechnics that specialised in training further education teachers. The rise of integrative concepts such as lifelong learning suggest greater potential for cross-disciplinary scholarship that can engage the diverse body of those interested in teaching and research about this field. (shrink)

This exploratory paper considers the concept of generation in the context of learning across the life course. Although researchers have often found considerable inequalities in participation by age, as well as strongly articulated attitudinal differences, there have so far been only a handful of studies that have explored these patterns through the perspective of generational formations. The paper is primarily conceptual, exploratory and reflective, setting out a number of approaches to the concept of generations, most of which derive largely from (...) debates with the ghost of Karl Mannheim; it then considers how these concepts of generation have been applied to understandings of educational inequalities in recent research in Germany and the Nordic nations. It then examines the dynamics of inter-generational relations in learning, drawing on research undertaken as part of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme. The paper argues that although inter-generational dynamics are a relatively neglected dimension of Anglophone research on life chances and learning, there is a strong case for understanding their dual roles in both inequality and cohesion. It concludes by outlining some themes and areas for further investigation in the future. (shrink)