ABSTRACT

Bernstein's Sociolinguistic Codes: A Logical Analysis

E. P. Brandon

This study focusses on Bernstein's notion of sociolinguistic codes, attempting to explicate them in terms of (i) the logical conception of ellipsis, and (ii) the conception of speech acts. Both these ideas are borrowed from contemporary philosophical logic. Bernstein's small rôle in Caribbean thought is recognized, but it is argued that with the fuller conception of his codes offered here there is a case for a more wide-ranging confrontation and testing of his ideas. The study concludes with some reflections on the methodological difficulties facing this interpretation of the codes.

PREFACE

This study has been gestating for a considerable time. I am grateful to my supervisor, Mr Herman McKenzie, for not hounding me away from less ambitious and more immediately pleasurable activities, though I am glad that the University's own threats have at last led to its conclusion. I am also grateful to my previous Head of Department, Dr Marlene Hamilton, whose persistence achieved the acquisition of a printer of sufficient quality to satisfy the UWI's archaic requirements.

I should also like to acknowledge the kindness of Professor Craig, Professor Ennis, Dr Harker and Dr Walford in making available to me various works, published and unpublished, that have been used in the preparation of this study.

The delay in finishing this study has allowed me to incorporate more recent developments in Bernstein's thinking. I was privileged to hear him lecture in 1984, and to obtain a copy of a then unpublished paper. This represents the most recent original Bernstein work I have examined, though since then I have seen Atkinson's 1985 book, to which reference is made in the study. But this study focusses on work that was central to Bernstein's earlier publications and which he now regards as settled, so there is not in fact much appeal to his more recent work.

This study is a non-empirical one. It embodies the results of several years of reflections on Bernstein from the perspective of an analytical philosopher who found himself immersed in the sociology of education. I believe such a perspective is still somewhat unusual; whether it yields any worthwhile insights the study should reveal. While it is almost a philosopher's profession to find what other people say mysterious, in Bernstein's case this finding is pretty widely shared. I hope that the resources of contemporary philosophical logic that I bring to bear on his views, and the explications and developments that I offer, will serve to make those views more plausible and lucid.

I have borrowed two main conceptions from philosophy: speech acts, and ellipsis. The former is a widely known and still developing area in modern English-speaking philosophy, and others have found it relevant to sociological concerns, as I note in the study. The latter is more original, and represents an area in which I have made some small contributions of a purely philosophical nature elsewhere. As will be seen, some parts of the study dealing with ellipsis overlap and borrow material from my publications on this topic.

Chapter 1 - Introduction

This study focusses on the nature of the sociolinguistic "codes" postulated in Basil Bernstein's sociology of education. While this might sound a particularly narrow concern, one of the aims of this study is to argue for the importance of considerably more interdisciplinary collaboration in this area of sociological enquiry. We shall, therefore, be ranging somewhat beyond the sociology of language, though this will bring with it the danger of venturing beyond the legitimate boundaries of sociology itself. But the argument is that if that appears to be so, the boundaries themselves need extending.

In this introductory chapter I intend to explain, briefly, what I propose to do and also to attempt to justify its being done, by me, under the aegis of the sociology department of the University of the West Indies. To explain what I shall be trying to achieve will require an outline of what Bernstein himself has set out to do, and here I shall sketch his contributions to the understanding of other aspects of social life, in particular educational systems and their place in the wider society. I shall conclude this chapter by noting some of the things I shall not be doing but which might well be expected in a non-empirical study of Bernstein's work.

Plan of this Study

After this introductory chapter, I shall begin by looking very briefly at the small part Bernstein has so far played in academic reflection on education or society in the Caribbean. Besides some interest as a very minor contribution to the sociology of Caribbean knowledge, this survey will also allow us to see some of the typical ways in which Bernstein's work has been appropriated in "education".

In the third chapter I shall set out a much fuller account of the sociolinguistic codes as Bernstein and his commentators have explained them at different times. Here I shall attempt to discuss the more important criticisms that have been levelled at the notion of such codes, but my main emphasis will be on some suggestions of my own for interpreting the codes. I shall be borrowing ideas here mainly from philosophical logic and will try to show that such explications allow for the codes to play the fairly central role in explaining educational failure that Bernstein originally introduced them to perform. But these suggestions also lead into other aspects of the reproduction of ideology that have independent interest for sociological theory.

Having set out these reinterpretations of the linguistic codes, I shall sketch in chapter 4 a programme of empirical research in a Jamaican context that would serve to test and refine the approach advocated in the previous chapter. This discussion will lead into the final chapter's more general review of some of the problems posed by this interpretation of the codes in the context of "main-stream" sociological research, and the place of stylistic concepts in that tradition.

A Justification

Before indicating a more general justification for undertaking this study, I think it would not be amiss to mention one of the more personal reasons for so doing - it might do something to justify its being done at all, if not here and in its present form. My interest in Bernstein's work dates from the time of my immersion, as an otherwise unemployable philosopher, in the training of teachers. Although I was responsible only for philosophical matters, I was a member of a team teaching an "Educational Foundations" course and it was in that academically somewhat disreputable environment that I found myself grappling with Bernstein's ideas. It was Bernstein, rather than the other sociologists of education to whom the trainee teachers were introduced, who captured my attention, partly because of an earlier interest in linguistics, but more, I think, because he alone seemed to have interesting hypotheses to explain the data that the others produced, and a set of categories that were at least unusual to confront the large-scale organization of education. No doubt also, for a philosopher with little interest in the practical preparation of teachers, Bernstein's notoriously opaque style afforded me the semblance of a relevant but academic interest, but I do not think I was alone in thinking that beneath the verbiage there were ideas that were worth revealing. In any case, greater familiarity with the sociology of education has not altered my belief that there is something, if not gold, in them there turbid paragraphs. I have wanted to settle accounts with Bernstein's ideas, after some years of tossing them around with the mainly philosophical flotsam and jetsam of my mind, and this study is the outcome of that wish.

As we shall soon see, Bernstein's best known work may emanate from a department of sociology of education, but one foot seems firmly set in some kind of linguistics and the other in what might be called "curriculum studies". And Bernstein's major audiences are certainly under the capacious umbrella of "education". But as I shall try to show, the inspiration of Bernstein's work has always been centrally sociological. His academic location in the London Institute of Education has obviously been decisive in creating his audience, and his different interests have helped to maintain a comparative isolation from the sociological establishment; but I shall also be arguing that the pressures to conform to standard methodological requirements of that establishment have played an important role in disguising the sociological concern behind a linguistic mask. (It must also be noted that linguistics itself is a comparatively recent and often changing inhabitant of English academe, a fact that has not helped Bernstein in the formulation of his ideas.)

Even if Bernstein's own sociological credentials can be defended, this study will be borrowing a great deal from traditionally non-sociological areas such as philosophical logic and this needs some further justification. I can, of course, say that I am not alone: several other students of society have found illumination in the notion of "speech acts" which I shall be using later (for example, Skinner, 1972, Dawson, 1977, Fauconnier, 1981), and more generally the field of theoretical sociology seems hospitable to ideas from virtually any quarter. To take but one authoritative statement along these lines, Tom Bottomore, surveying papers on the "state of the art" sponsored by the International Sociological Association in 1980, remarked that

it is quite evident ... that sociological research as a whole has been profoundly affected, over the past decade or so, by the increasingly pronounced multi-paradigmatic character of the discipline. Rival theoretical schemes and methodological orientations not only abound but seem to multiply. One consequence of this situation is that many sociologists have become increasingly preoccupied with metatheoretical questions - with problems of epistemology and philosophy of science (1982, p. 27).

Sociological reflection inspired by language can, however, be given a more impressive defence, and one that covers the logical tools that can contribute to our understanding of language. It should be said that some of the studies that focus on language have long occupied an ambivalent position with respect to other social or human sciences. For instance, Lévi-Strauss wrote glowingly of the scientific rigour of American descriptive linguistics not long before that approach was turned upside-down by Chomsky's revolution; and Chomsky's work itself has had much influence within cognitive psychology (which is where Chomsky himself thinks linguistics belongs). But for all the admiration or envy of the 'definitive' results of linguistic enquiry, the much messier social sciences have remained messy. A large part of the reason for this is that the successes of linguistics are based on the utterly non-purposive structures of language, the rules of the game, rather than on how those structures are used. It is for this reason that some thinkers have been inclined to exclude linguistics from the domain of social science (e.g., Watkins (1953) who invokes Hayek's distinction between the "natural sciences of society" and social science proper and allocates descriptive and historical linguistics to the former). But while linguistics might not in fact be of much direct use to sociology, language surely is; and some of the issues linguistics raises and can perhaps settle in its peculiar domain are issues for a much wider study of human behaviour.

The point has been made lucidly by Giddens:

Linguists commonly recognize three sorts of activities in which the speaker of a language engages: he is able to produce 'acceptable' sentences, to 'understand' sentences, and make judgements about 'potentially acceptable' sentences. This is a useful classification when applied to the activities of a social actor more generally: the study of speech and language provides us with important insights into the conduct of social life, not because the latter is like a language or can be represented as an 'information system', 'sign system', etc., but because language is such a central feature of social life that it exemplifies certain characteristics of all social activity.... what an actor 'knows' when he knows how to sustain social encounters with others within a specific community is how to produce 'acceptable' modes of action, to 'understand' both what he himself says and does and what others say and do, and to make judgements about 'potentially acceptable' forms of activity (1977, p. 129).

Besides invoking the weight of Giddens' authority, I have quoted his Chomskyan reflections at length because they also bring out an important aspect of the sort of work Bernstein has been concerned with and which perhaps sets him apart from a lot of ordinary sociological research. This feature of Bernstein's approach is the attempt to interpose a process of transmission between gross observable features of the society. Rather than simply correlate factors at different times or in different segments of social space, Bernstein wants to begin to specify the internalized regulative principles that produce the correlations. In Lacey's terms, he wants to get inside the "black-box" to reveal its inner workings (1976, pp. 56-7), or in his own "I am simply raising the question of how the 'outside' gets into the 'inside'" (1967, p. 38). That this focus of concern remains unusual can be seen from the way Swartz characterizes the similar work of Bourdieu for an English-speaking audience:

Bourdieu does not simply explain patterns of inequality by using mobility statistics or educational input-output data. Rather, his focus is on the processes through which cultural knowledge and style operate as carriers of social inequality (1977, p. 547).

Finally in this attempt to justify this study, one must face the fact that Bernstein's work is not a burning issue in the Caribbean. In the next chapter I shall review what little interest there has been in Bernstein's work among Caribbean scholars. It will be apparent in that discussion that there has been in fact very little confrontation with the actual detail of his work. For most people, Bernstein was a name to be conjured with as an authority for various claims; fashions in such appeals to authority change, and Bernstein is hardly mentioned nowadays in this manner. The one major study that did confront Bernstein viewed him in terms of the cognitive deficit ideology, which Bernstein had repudiated, and its author has not tried to adopt the later and more sympathetic views he attributes to Bernstein for his own ends. As I shall attempt to show in chapter 3, Bernstein's views about linguistic codes still have much to offer, and in ways that are directly relevant to education in the Caribbean, and I shall set out in chapter 4 a sketch of what might be attempted by way of empirical work inspired by these ideas. As will be apparent, the relevance I shall attempt to display will not focus on anything distinctively Caribbean, such as the creole language situation or the matrifocal family, though both will impact on any empirical work that might be suggested, but it is clearly much too narrow a view that would require attention only to what is idiosyncratic.

Much more tentatively I would also suggest that Bernstein's work might contribute to another Caribbean concern: identity. Much of what Bernstein has tried to deal with and bring into the arena for sociological investigation would normally be subsumed under the notion of style. Whether or not he has been successful, his work at least raises the question of how best to tackle such matters and make them amenable for sociological investigation at a more than anecdotal level. A preoccupation of liberally educated West Indians has been the search for, or attempt to create, an identity, as a member of the Caribbean nation (an entity invoked, for instance, in the dedication of Susan Craig's collection of sociological papers, 1982b), as a creole, as a Jamaican, or whatever. This has not been confined to more or less literary discussion but has been at the centre of the main theoretical contention within academic sociology in the English speaking Caribbean: the viability or otherwise of the "plural society" model.

Bernstein, of course, has nothing to say directly to these questions, but the link I am suggesting goes via the frequent invocations of style in attempts at self-definition in the discussions referred to above and, more explicitly, via Brathwaite's attempts to characterize West Indian options in terms of differing cultural orientations, as for instance in these remarks:

my own idea of creolization is based on the notion of an historically affected socio-cultural continuum, within which (as in the case of Jamaica) there are four inter-related and sometimes overlapping orientations. From their several cultural bases, people in the West Indies tend towards certain directions, positions, assumptions and ideals. But nothing is really fixed and monolithic .... the various elements of the process share and compete in/for a complexity of norm/ancestors (1974, p. 25 and p. 62).

In the light of these somewhat tentative claims that Bernstein's linguistically inspired theorizing can feed into the theoretical foundations of Caribbean social history and sociology, it is interesting to note Alleyne's recent attempt to make a similar case for creole linguistics. He notes the frequent reference to "twoness", "double consciousness", or "cultural duality and ambiguities of cultural reference" in Caribbean social life and goes on immediately to say that "it is interesting to observe that research on linguistic data is leading to a further refinement and reformulation of the notions of social duality rooted in linguistic variability." And he adds that "much more culturally significant than formal characteristics of Black speech may be the functions attributed to language in Afro-American communities" (1980, p. 8). It may then not be so bad to bring Bernstein back into Caribbean speculations.

An Outline of Bernstein's Views

In this section Bernstein's overall approach will be sketched. Historical developments will be largely avoided, as will many of the details. Since the sociolinguistic views will be examined at greater length in chapter 3, they will be left very undeveloped here, while his views about educational systems will be given more extensive treatment since they will not be figuring again in this study. Many of Bernstein's important papers have been reprinted in two volumes entitled Class, Codes and Control; I shall refer to such papers by giving both the date of original publication and the date of the reprint, but the page numbers will refer to the reprinted version.

Like Gaul, Bernstein's oeuvre can be divided into three parts. The first, in historical sequence, public influence, and academic discussion, will be labelled "sociolinguistic" and is the focus of this study. The second focus of concern, on the organization of educational transmissions, developed in Bernstein's teaching during the late 60's and flowered with his highly influential 1971a and will here be labelled "educational". The third part of his work is the most recent and represents an extension of the conceptual framework used in the educational theorizing to the encompassing society as a whole. When necessary I shall refer to this aspect of his endeavours as "macro-social". In his latest papers one can see a return to the educational focus but much more broadly conceived within the macro-social framework. In these papers he attempts to characterize the intrinsic character of educational transmission, of what he calls the "pedagogic device", and thereby to provide for the sociology of education "its necessary foundation and ... the fundamental theoretical object of the discipline" (1984, p. 19).

Bernstein's original intuition was that educational failure was intimately associated with the way people use language. His first published work suggested a distinction between two types of language use, public versus formal, originating in "a particular form of the structuring of feeling" (1958 = 1974, p. 26) and attitudes to social relations and objects to be found in different family types, and which influence subsequent perceptions and "the attendant structuring of receptivity" (ibid., p. 34) to experience in schools. This public/formal contrast was soon replaced by a contrast between restricted and elaborated codes, but perhaps the detailed empirical data reported in the papers that introduced the new terminology obscured Bernstein's intentions. As it was, what he did explicitly was to offer to "define" these codes "on a linguistic level, in terms of the probability of predicting for any one speaker which syntactic elements will be used to organize meaning" (1962a = 1974, p. 76). He went on to talk of distinguishing the codes on a psychological level but concluded by saying that "the codes themselves are functions of a particular form of social relationship or, more generally, qualities of social structure" (ibid., p. 77). Since this was then sheer assertion, while Bernstein counted noun phrases and the like, it is perhaps not surprising that many readers were unable to appreciate that the motivation was "to go behind the list of attributes given as indices of public and formal language, and to suggest the underlying regulative principle" (1971b = 1974, p. 8), as Bernstein claims in one of his short intellectual autobiographies.

The crudity of the operationalizing of his contrasts, the linguistically ignorant assumptions of the earliest papers (which were perhaps the most widely read), and the apparently ambivalent evaluations of the various kinds of language use (which were, after all, invoked to help explain academic failure) lead to a popular picture of Bernstein's position which was easily processed by the educational mills. The codes became two languages, or alternatively one language and a very sick relative, and educational failure could be cured by what amounted to second language learning. The dunces were not stupid after all, they just didn't speak the right language. Such a misreading, which omitted all the determining social background in family relationships (themselves the effects of class), did at least allow for some optimism about the possibility of successful and comparatively inexpensive educational interventions or changes of attitude in the school, and it fitted all too easily into the usual value assumptions of cultural imperialists.

Educational failure in English educational thought is virtually synonymous with working class educational failure, and it was in fact through trying to teach working class adolescents that Bernstein became aware of the role of language. His first papers contrasted the IQ scores obtained on verbal and non-verbal tests and attempted to explain why working class adolescents scored consistently much lower on the verbal than on the non-verbal tests. From the very beginning Bernstein assumed that everyone learnt his public language use, or later his restricted code; the heart of his explanation of educational failure lay in the further claim that only some individuals, typically middle class, were socialized into environments in which they would learn formal language or elaborated code, the code crucial to success in schooling. Given the fact that in London, as in many other places, working class speech exemplifies a different dialect from typical middle class speech, it was easy for people to believe that Bernstein's claims were really about different dialects, or about predominantly oral versus predominantly written languages; but he has always denied the accuracy of such beliefs. (This is not to rebut the suggestion of Karabel and Halsey (1977a, p. 63 ftn.) that Bernstein might have been aided by his socio-linguistic situation in formulating his hypotheses, but their remarks still seem to place more weight on the obviousness both of class and dialect differences than Bernstein's basic motivations would seem to warrant. Having doubted whether Bernstein's ideas would be applicable to the Soviet Union they go on to note that "Soviet sociologists point to 'cultural level' and 'family tradition' as determinants of scholastic achievement" [ibid., p. 66 ftn].)

What is true, as I have hinted already, is that the public version of Bernstein's sociolinguistic work concentrated on the children who used or failed to use the codes rather than attending to the suggestions about family structure, and its causes, that Bernstein had been making from his earliest papers.

As we shall see in more detail in chapter 3, Bernstein eventually freed his working conception of the codes from direct observational linkages by distinguishing restricted or elaborated "variants" from the codes in which they might be appearing, thus forcing a judgment of code away from isolated sentences to much larger contexts. This went some way to implement his underlying view that a code was a way of organizing meanings, not sentences or words. But we shall look at these developments in more detail in chapter 3.

Along with the work on sociolinguistic issues Bernstein developed an approach to the sociology of the curriculum and the organization of educational systems that also lead him to a conception of "code". The crucial paper here starts with three component parts of an "educational message system": curriculum, pedagogy, and evaluation. He tells us that

Curriculum defines what counts as valid knowledge, pedagogy defines what counts as a valid transmission of knowledge, and evaluation defines what counts as a valid realization of this knowledge on the part of the taught (1971a = 1977a, p. 85).

Bernstein notes that while one might look at various features of the contents of educational transmissions (their subject matter; length; availability to different members of the institution; etc.) he wishes to focus on the question of the strength of boundaries between contents. If the contents are well insulated, with sharp boundaries, they stand in a closed relation to one another; if the boundaries are blurred, they stand in an open relation. If contents are in closed relations to each other, we have a collection type of curriculum or "collection code":

here the learner has to collect a group of favoured contents in order to satisfy some criteria of evaluation. There may of course be some underlying concept to a collection: the gentleman, the educated man, the skilled man, the non-vocational man (1971a = 1977a, p. 87).

This distinction of educational codes has been based on strength of boundaries, and this general notion, applied in different areas, is the core to the two concepts of classification and framing that Bernstein introduced in this paper. To let him speak at length:

Where classification is strong, contents will be well insulated from each other by strong boundaries. Where classification is weak, there is reduced insulation between contents, for the boundaries between contents are weak or blurred. Classification thus refers to the degree of boundary maintenance between contents. Classification focuses our attention upon boundary strength as the critical distinguishing feature of the division of labour of educational knowledge. It gives us ... the basic structure of the message system, curriculum (ibid., p. 88).

Frame refers to the form of the context in which knowledge is transmitted and received. Frame refers to the specific pedagogical relationship of teacher and taught. In the same way as classification does not refer to contents, so frame does not refer to the contents of the pedagogy. Frame refers to the strength of the boundary between what may be transmitted and what may not be transmitted, in the pedagogical relationship. Where framing is strong, there is a sharp boundary, where framing is weak, a blurred boundary, between what may and may not be transmitted. Frame refers us to the range of options available to teacher and taught in the control of what is transmitted and received in the context of the pedagogical relationship.... Thus frame refers to the degree of control teacher and pupil possess over the selection, organization, pacing and timing of the knowledge transmitted and received in the pedagogical relationship (ibid., pp. 88-9).

In addition to all these varied and often conflicting respects, framing can also be applied in the context of the boundaries between the "non-school everyday community knowledge of the teacher or taught, and the educational knowledge transmitted in the pedagogical relationship" (ibid., p. 89). Since this aspect of framing seems to overlap with matters of classification, it is perhaps not surprising that Bernstein reports (1975 = 1977a, p. 7) that Mary Douglas could never understand what he was on about.¹

But leaving these matters aside, it is clear that framing can be looked at from different angles² and that classification and framing can vary independently. To substantiate this latter point, Bernstein suggests that some programmed learning might exemplify weak classification (blurring subject boundaries) but an exceptionally strong framing for the pupil (who only controls the pacing of his learning). Grimshaw suggests that the reverse might hold (very weak framing, strong classification) for residential foreign language courses (1976, p. 558). But while such possibilities exist, the major codes, collection and integrated, are defined, as we have seen, on the assumption of a reasonably high positive correlation between strength of classification and strength of framing, though of course within such codes there is room for some variation. (Bernstein develops a typology of sub-types of the codes and links them to variations in classification and framing in different exemplars - e.g. England shows very strong classification but somewhat weaker framing than Europe; the USA has the weakest classifications and frames of collection codes; etc. - but we do not need to enter into these details.)

Bernstein is concerned to spell out the implications of his analysis for power and identity. Strong social boundaries require strong boundary maintainers. Strong classification creates a strong sense of belonging to a particular group and thus a strong subject identity. Strong frames limit the pupil's power, but in other respects strong classification reduces the teacher's power over what he transmits and his power with respect to the boundary maintainers. (Though a persistent theme in Bernstein's writings is the way in which such strong classifications also serve to protect individual idiosyncrasies - since one's job is to profess a tightly bounded subject, one can be allowed unusual views and commitments outside of that area, at least if one belongs to the more privileged parts of the educational system. But as more becomes relevant to one's educational role, so more is at the mercy of the controllers.)

There are many such suggestions regarding the expected life experiences and sense of identity of people in collection or integrated codes. "The deep structure of the specialized type of collection code is strong boundary maintenance creating control from within through the formation of specific identities. An interesting aspect of the protestant spirit" (ibid., p. 96). Collection codes involve a hierarchical organization of knowledge "such that the ultimate mystery of the subject is revealed very late in the educational life" (p. 97); "knowledge under collection is private property with its own power structure and market situation" (p. 97); "the frames of the collection code ... make of educational knowledge something not ordinary or mundane, but something esoteric, ... I suggest that when this frame is relaxed to include everyday realities, it is often, and sometimes validly, not simply for the transmission of educational knowledge, but for purposes of social control of forms of deviancy. The weakening of this frame occurs usually with the less 'able' children whom we have given up educating" (p. 99); and so on. To explore these ideas would take us too far from my concern, but it is wryly amusing to contrast two reactions to these speculations. Grimshaw testifies that

Bernstein's classificatory heuristic makes explicit what had been, for me in any event, some vaguely sensed but important differences in the organization of knowledge and in modes of transmission of that knowledge ... several of Bernstein's notions generate the same reaction of "sensed knowledge" or "unarticulated familiarity" ... it may be that the ideas can be found, perhaps in fully articulated form, somewhere in the literature. I have seen them vaguely adumbrated ..., I have never seen them spelled out (1976, pp. 556-7, and p. 571).

Before closing this sketch of the educational codes with a reference to empirical results that pertain to it, one point of great importance must be made, which serves as one link between the sociolinguistic codes and education. Formal education is one of the main means whereby elaborated codes are selectively transmitted. We have seen already that in accounting for working class failure it is crucial that success requires the ability to manipulate elaborated code - that is the code in which the school traffics. But while that is the major relationship between formal education and the sociolinguistic codes, we have already seen in passing that Bernstein is not unaware of the greater complexity of the real world. As he notes, some parts of the educational system give up trying to inculcate elaborated code, so he is not to be seen as committed to the universality of that code in the day to day activities of all schooling. In fact, I shall suggest in a later chapter that when we look more widely than Bernstein's parochial English focus, we might wonder whether some parts of the formal school system ever try to put their pupils in touch with elaborated codes, or would be in a position to do so if they wanted to. But while these are important points for a general sociology of schooling, they are merely another reflection of the analytic point that schooling is not identical with education, and a reminder of the tremendous diversity covered by these terms.

Before moving on to note the even more abstract and general theorizing Bernstein has offered with respect to the total society, it is worth mentioning that in the years since its publication in 1971 the classification and framing framework has not generated much empirical research, unlike the sociolinguistic work. One of the few who have tried to test it is King who remarked that "the work on the school is conspicuous in its lack of reference to empirical studies, and as yet has not given rise to original research" (1976, p. 442), a judgment he does little to qualify in his 1983 (p. 36). Smith likewise contrasts the fertility of the sociolinguistic and family work with the difficulties of attacking the much more complex reality of schools:

The power of the model of familial situations used by Bernstein - its capacity to isolate and relate to each other a small number of crucial features - depends to a great extent on two aspects of the nuclear family in industrial societies: relative autonomy and relative structural simplicity. However, compared to the family with young children, educational institutions are internally differentiated to a much higher degree and stand at the centre of a much more complex network of relationships with other social structures whose constraints are relatively more penetrating (1976, p. 3).

The 1971 classification and framing paper began with a now well known claim:

How a society selects, classifies, distributes, transmits and evaluates the educational knowledge it considers to be public, reflects both the distribution of power and the principles of social control (ibid., p. 85).

Whereas in the earliest sociolinguistic papers an unanalyzed notion of class was used as the factor of last resort that underlay the family structures which in their turn underlay the kinds of communication children were socialized into in the home, in these most ambitious writings an attempt is made to specify the paths from class to its reproduction in the ongoing interaction of society. In his own words, he is trying to construct a model "for understanding the process whereby what is regarded as a basic classification (class relations) is transmitted and acquired by codes that differentially, invidiously, and oppositionally position subjects with respect to both discursive and physical resources" (1981, p. 354). My ambitions are not so encompassing, so I will not here try to sketch the details of this model. In our later discussions I shall, however, refer to what is said in these writings about the sociolinguistic codes that are my main concern and will try to suggest that some of my own suggestions are not so far removed from Bernstein's as his earlier work might have suggested.

Issues To Be Avoided in this Study

The focus of this study is deliberately on the sociolinguistic codes and some interpretations and extensions of them that seem to me worth exploring. It is also deliberately non-empirical. There are several matters with which a more comprehensive examination of Bernstein's work ought to deal. I mention a few of them here.

(a) Empirical Support

I have granted Bernstein's work the honorific title of theory, but a theory without evidence is a fatuous self-indulgence. I am, however, not concerned in this study with attempting to assess the evidential support for Bernstein's theories, nor with reporting any further work of my own directed at testing them empirically. This is not a matter for self-satisfaction, but perhaps even in the pre-paradigmatic state of sociology one might be forgiven for urging the advantages of a division of academic labour between the urgently necessary empirical testing of theory and its theoretical criticism and refinement. Where a possible appeal to the practice of physics breaks down is, however, also why I think my own concentration on the theoretical side of Bernstein's codes excusable, despite the need for empirical work and despite the ambivalent results of such work as has been done - it is by no means clear what is to count as a test of the theory. There are at least two reasons for this: it is not clear what the theory is saying (Gumperz, speaking from a sociolinguistic perspective, recently commented bluntly that "we don't know what elaborated or restricted codes are" [1979, p. 10]), and even when it is agreed what is being claimed it is by no means easy to find a way of bringing empirical evidence to bear upon it. One envies the theoretical physicists' apparent ability to spell out what incredibly expensive experiments need to be done to resolve some abstruse dispute about quarks or the decay of protons.

The evidential difficulties are compounded by two factors which no doubt exist in some form throughout the sciences but which are perhaps particularly damaging in the aspiring human sciences - the remains of a positivist conception of evidence, and the difficulty (particularly without benefit of hindsight) of distinguishing fruitful theoretical reformulation and qualification from sheer evasion of falsification. The first problem arises in our case in the intense reluctance to employ the vocabulary of meaning or cognitive style in observing stylistic features. The vocabulary of style has been developed by the literary and artistic disciplines, and they are anathema to any sociologist with pretensions to objectivity. So, for instance, one counts noun phrases or qualifying clauses or deictic expressions in the hope of measuring explicitness. I do not disdain the appeal to the quantitative, nor a certain empirical stubbornness; but when your interest is in questions of meaning it is perhaps unnecessarily stubborn to refuse to observe what is meant and instead simply count words. This is of course a drastic oversimplification of the issues, as I shall acknowledge in later chapters.

The second problem is of course well known, and it arises clearly in Bernstein's case since his work displays a move from fairly detailed empirical claims to more and more abstract and general levels. His commentators divide on the question whether this is simply a more and more desperate attempt to evade falsifying evidence or, as Bernstein himself would see it, a progress to a more adequate account of the deeper levels of structure in the explanation of surface phenomena. It could, of course, be partly both.

While these matters make life difficult throughout the sciences, Bernstein's work faces the peculiar complexity of social life which confronts sociological theory and which, too often, receives utterly inadequate recognition. One example may suffice. Connell reports an Australian experiment to look for Bernstein's codes among working class and middle class university students:

An ingenious study of university students by Poole, comparing utterances of students from working-class and middle-class backgrounds, is more relevant, and some of the predicted differences do show up, though they are not very marked and many of the tests show no difference (1977, p. 168).

empirical studies ... have not involved very large amounts of data, and have not been particularly sophisticated in either research methodology or interpretation of data

It is perhaps not surprising in such a context that expert opinion is divided also about the bearing of such evidence as there is on the codes - Robinson and Rackstraw (1978) claim that the only claim of the early Bernstein that is not yet supported is that working class children are less inquisitive than middle class children, while Edwards (1976) found only one significant difference between his social class groups and castigated the weakness of confident claims based on supposed linguistic differences. In the case of the educational codes and Bernstein's associated theorizing, Ronald King (1976, 1979) has gathered evidence that gives only limited support to Bernstein's detailed contentions, though again one could query the bearing of this evidence on the conceptual framework, and King himself moves on to attack the theoretical structure as misleading and to be rejected on non-empirical grounds as much as for his empirical reasons.

The empirical side of Bernstein's theorizing is then somewhat unsettled. I shall try in chapter 4 to outline a possible research programme to test my interpretations of the sociolinguistic codes, and we shall see there the serious obstacles in the way of easily arriving at a consensus on these matters.

(b) Deficit Models of Language

Another large and contentious area that I shall avoid concerns the evaluative implications, if any, of Bernstein's views. In reporting him I have already touched on the association of his views with notions of "cultural deprivation" and the inadequacy or even non-existence of the language of working class children (or of black children in the U.S.), and the educational recommendations that were in part based on similar readings of his work, but I wish to avoid the question of how far, despite his many disclaimers, he is really embroiled in such ethnocentric disdain (for which one may consult Karabel and Halsey, 1977a, pp. 65-7, or Demaine, 1981, pp. 35-40, among many others). On his own admission, his view is "not comfortable; neither is the reality" (1975 = 1977a, p. 28) - whatever he might wish to say on its behalf, if children fail because of the way they use language that use has something to be said against it, or perhaps better the alternative language use has something to be said for it. As Craig (1984) says of the analogous question of creole and standard international language, one obviously wants both.

(c) The Sociology of Bernstein's Theorizing

While its evidence and supposed implications would spring to mind as pertinent topics for a discussion of anyone's theorizing, the sociology of the theorizing itself might not. But in Bernstein's case it would certainly be of interest. Bernstein was for long a marginal person in academia, and in many ways he remains so. What has happened, however, was that he was adopted, canonized, by the teacher training establishment and made a staple part of the socialization of teachers in England. With a flowering of ethnographic work and Marxiste theorizing, Bernstein is perhaps no longer de rigueur, but he remains a central reference point, as revealed, for instance, in the space devoted to him in a recent "foundations" survey volume (Davies, 1983, pp. 121-3, 134-6). I shall avoid the sociology of Bernstein's theorizing in general, mainly because I am unable to tackle it adequately, but also because it has already attracted some attention elsewhere (Barrett, 1974, discussed by Hartnett and Naish, 1976, pp. 167-70). I shall, however, sketch in the next chapter what little there is to say about Bernstein's place in Caribbean intellectual life.

(d) Naming Names

In an important article (1981) and his subsequent book (1985), Atkinson seeks to place Bernstein in a context of structuralist thought and suggests that such a placing would be useful in coming to a clearer understanding of what Bernstein has been driving at. While it is undeniable that placing a theorist in a larger context of analogous theorizing can often shed light on his views, there are at least two reasons for avoiding this procedure here. One, that Atkinson acknowledges, is that Bernstein "has failed to develop links with structuralist writing" (1981, pp. 93-4) and in general has avoided invocations of other sociologists, apart from unspecific but admiring gestures towards Durkheim in particular as well as Mead, Parsons and Marx and some expressions of esteem for Bourdieu and his circle. Bernstein has apparently heeded Atkinson's reproach since his unpublished 1984 cites Atkinson and admits to the influence of Foucault in particular, as does the collaborative Bernstein and Diaz, 1984. But it remains true that the earlier work with which I am largely concerned was published, and probably produced, without reference to the French structuralists Atkinson mentions.

A second, somewhat less reputable reason is that the technique of contextualizing a theory so as to understand it better requires the context itself to be more intelligible than the theory in question. It is not clear to me that Atkinson's structuralists satisfy this criterion. In any case, clarifying Bernstein's obscurities is a large task; involving oneself in clarifying Derrida or Foucault as a means to that end does not seem a particularly efficient way of tackling it.

Footnotes

1. Mary Douglas has in a way made up for this lack of understanding. She asserts her indebtedness to Bernstein's notions in her work on 'grid/group' analysis (Douglas, 1970) which seems to be a growth area in social anthropology if the conference recorded in Douglas, 1982, is anything to go by.

2. This fact does not mean that framing is necessarily a contradictory notion, as Gibson (1977) supposes. Bernstein himself admits that what is strong framing for the pupil may be weak framing for the teacher and yet he wishes to judge a pedagogic situation as having one major framing value. What is needed, and what Bernstein only offers implicitly through his examples, is firstly a way of summing strengths of framing in different dimensions (pacing, timing, everyday knowledge, etc.), and secondly a way of aggregating framing strengths for different positions to arrive at the one major framing value (alternatively one might be offered a way of picking on whose framing values are to be considered while the rest are excluded). No doubt, in detailed applications, some of these requirements might be difficult to supply, but I do not see any reason a priori why they should be impossible to arrive at.