Critical Policy Studies: The Contribution of Basil Bernstein's Knowledge Code Theory

Critical policy studies adopts a discourse analytic approach to policy research, drawing specifically on the Foucauldian concepts of discourse, regimes of disciplinary power (bio-politics and panoptic surveillance principles), and subject positions; and the Bourdieuian concepts of field, capital and habitus. A core aim of critical policy studies is to analyse the ways in which supranational organisations, such as the OECD, increasingly regulate official national curriculums given their role in the development, administration and reportage of tests which are ‘closely linked with the debate about national standards’ expressed as comparative performance on basic mathematics, scientific and literacy skills (Tyler, 2010: 145).  However, missing from such theoretical work is a modelling of the production, recontextualisation, and acquisition of knowledge codes from the macro level of supranational organisations to the local level of school practices. This was the focus of Basil Bernstein’s sociological theory of education. This approach, Bernstein (1995: 392) proposed, distinguished his ‘particular corpus of work from that of Foucault or Bourdieu’. 

This paper undertakes three tasks. Firstly, it critically reviews the literature that has compared and contrasted the sociological approach of Bernstein to Bourdieu (Maton, 2008; Harker and May, 1993, Hasan, 1999) and Foucault (Diaz, 1984; Tyler, 1988). Specifically, the paper focuses on the theory of school knowledge, specifically the knowledge codes underpinning supranational, national and local school curriculum models, and the potential consequences of such knowledge codes on different groups of students.  Secondly, it explores Bernstein’s claim about his distinctive contribution to modelling knowledge codes (the structuring of curriculum). Thirdly, it tests the usefulness of Bernstein’s theory of knowledge codes to analysing policy enactment around standardised national testing drawing on examples from two contexts, namely Queensland, Australia and Newark, New Jersey, USA.