Report - European Science Foundation

enefits – impacting on all – of higher education. The
extension of access in this first – and most commonly
used – sense is important because of the part played
by educational credentials in determining personal life
chances in modern societies. Used in its second sense,
however, a broader set of issues are raised including
the proper balance between public and private sources
of funding, intellectual property rights, academic autonomy,
links between higher education institutions and
the communities they serve.
These two senses of ‘access’ will provide the
structure for the later sections of the paper where we
consider the research literature, first in terms of participation
– ‘Higher education and society: the social
construction of legitimate difference’ – then second in
the broader sense – ‘Higher education: who pays and
who benefits?’ Before that, we consider some of the
general theoretical and policy assumptions and frameworks
that underlie the theme of this paper.
3. Theoretical Assumptions
Classical sociology accorded two principal functions
to education: selection and socialisation. Selection
concerned the filling of positions within economic, political
and social elites. Socialisation concerned both
equipping the ‘selected’ with the necessary attributes
to occupy these positions and persuading the rest
that the selection was fair and ensuring that those not
selected were also equipped with the different set of
attributes necessary to play their own part in society.
Selection could take many forms – Turner’s distinction
between ‘sponsored’ and ‘contest’ mobility remains
useful in this respect – but the key function of justifying
inequality on principles of meritocracy is always central
(Turner, 1961). The details of the processes involved are
strongly affected by changes in social structure – providing
more or fewer elite positions and hence different
opportunities for upward social mobility at particular
periods of time (the ‘space at the top’ argument).
Accounts of these social processes can be divided
into the ‘liberal’ and the ‘elite reproduction’ theorists.
Moore has usefully summarised these with the liberal
theorists assigning functions of progressive social
change to education by
• “producing the ‘human capital’ required by an increasingly
high-skill, science-based economy;
• promoting the ‘civic’ values and behaviour appropriate
to advanced liberal democracy;
• developing a ‘meritocratic’ selection system
whereby people can achieve social status by
virtue of their actual abilities and contributions
rather than having it merely ‘ascribed’ by the accident
of birth;
• facilitating an ‘open’ society characterised by high
levels of social mobility reflecting the relationship
between ability and opportunity”.
Moore contrasts such accounts with those of the elite
reproduction theorists who see educational processes
in terms of how they
• “reproduce the privileges and dominance of the
ruling class (e.g. through access to educational
advantages leading to elite jobs and social positions);
• secure the legitimacy of capitalist social relations
through the inculcation of the dominant ideology;
• block the development of a counter-hegemonic
working-class consciousness that could effectively
challenge capitalism;
• systematically prepare pupils for their differentiated
future positions within the capitalist economy
and social structure.” (Moore, 2005, p38/9).
Although Moore is referring to all levels of education,
his distinctions seem to work well for higher education
specifically. As Moore points out, the two theoretical
positions are not necessarily contradictory: reproduction
may occur but does not have to be ‘perfect’. And
these are of course theoretical positions, not necessarily
supported by the results of empirical research.
There are a number of ‘elite reproduction’ theorists
who have made the above points in one way or another
– Bourdieu, 1996, Bowles and Gintis,1976, Brown and
Scase, 1994 etc. Their limitation as far as higher education
is concerned is that they have tended to focus
on the ‘elite’ – both educational and social – and have
rather neglected what is going on in perhaps 90% of
‘mass’ systems of higher education.
There are also other important limitations to the
reproduction theorists. First, their work cannot be easily
applied to contexts characterised by social confl ict
and change where a range of external and internal
socio-political and economic forces may be in play.
Second there is little focus on the internal content of
higher education, particularly on knowledge. Li Puma
(1993) in relation to Bourdieu has stated that he holds
an ‘absolute substantive theory of arbitrariness’ to the
extent that the content of a cultural product such as a
text or theoretical development is arbitrary and could
just as well have been replaced by an alternative product
to serve the same function. All that is necessary in
Bourdieu’s model is for the cultural product to produce
distinction as a means of expressing and reproducing
relations of class inequality. The content and internal
structuring of knowledge is therefore excluded from
analysis. Third, a question that needs to be posed is
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