This article extends the authors' earlier work (Young & Muller 2013) exploring the concept of 'powerful knowledge'. It first examines some of the origins of the concept and goes on to a brief consideration of how sociology, political theory and economics have traditionally represented 'power' and 'knowledge'. Two key senses of power are…

The aim of this article is to reflect on and explore questions of truth and objectivity in the sociology of educational knowledge. It begins by reviewing the problems raised by the social constructivist approaches to knowledge associated with the "new sociology of education" of the I970s. It suggests that they have significant parallels…

The topic of this paper is the "new sociology of education" (NSOE) and its origins in the early 1970's. One aim of this paper is to argue that the regressive return to a rigid and ahistorical academic curriculum is not the only alternative. A second theme is the suggestion that the NSOE took a highly unreflective view of the role of…