Stephen Ball is Karl Mannheim Professor of Sociology of Education in the Department of Educational Foundations and Policy Studies at the Institute of Education, University of London. He did undergraduate sociology at the University of Essex, and an MA and DPhil in Sociological Studies at the University of Sussex working with Colin Lacey. His PhD was published in 1981 as Beachside Comprehensive. He worked at Sussex for ten years, and while there founded the Journal of Education Policy with Ivor Goodson, which he still edits. Stephen moved to King's College London in 1985 and then the Institute of Education in 2001. His involvement with Routledge goes back along way and includes a book series edited for Falmer Press and the publication of his prize-winning and much translated book The Micro-Politics of the School (Methuen). He has authored and edited many books, most recently Education Plc (2007) and The Education Debate (Policy Press), and has had 114 articles published in international journals and his work has been translated into 10 languages including 2 books in mandarin and 2 in Japanese.

Stephen Ball's research and writing has revolved around three issues social class, education policy and education reform (see Education Policy and Social Class) and has been driven by a series of research studies based on these topics. He is currently involved in 3 ESRC-funded projects, they are focused on: relationships between philanthropy and education policy (with Carolina Junemann); policy enactments in secondary schools (with Meg Maguire KCL and Annette Braun); and the educational strategies of the black middle class (with Carol Vincent, David Gillborn and Nicola Rollock). He is also working on an international study of the Global Middle Class with colleagues in Spain, Argentina, France, Australia and the US. Stephen is also the convener of the BERA Education and Social Theory SIG. In 2006 Stephen Ball was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Essex my tutor was Denis Marsden, who sadly died recently. He was author with Brian Jackson of the book Education and the Working Class. My career as a sociologist of education began as I read that book - it was about me! It made me understand clearly for the first time that sociology is about the relationships between, as Charles Wright-Mills put it, personal troubles and public issues. I had read The Sociological Imagination in the same year. I am still enthused by the attempt to understand the complex interplay between the personal and the political, between agency and structure, and between the empirical and the theoretical. Research and data constantly challenges and confounds the niceties of theory.

My early influences in terms of research practice and theory were Weber and the Chicago school, particular the work and methods of Anselm Strauss, and I sought to emulate the sort of engaged ethnography that denoted the work of the Chicago school. I still ‘do’ ethnographies of a kind but my main theoretical influences over the last 20 years have been Foucault and Bourdieu. The latter also saw himself working in the Weberian tradition. I find immediate relevance in the substance of their work but have also learned greatly from their orientations to scholarship and their modesty. In the simplest sense they make me think about what I do and how and do it.

One thing that I realized from reading Foucault was that I did not want to be a ‘something’, a Marxist, symbolic interactions or whatever. I am not interested in ‘languages of dedication’ as Basil Bernstein called them; I am interested in ‘problems and their vicissitudes’. I take the social world to be complex, messy and difficult - any theory that claims by to explain the world to us is inevitably wrong. Two theories are always better than one! I see theories as offering a toolbox of concepts and possibilities than can be used to interpret the world. It is their usefulness rather than their elegance that is important to me.

There are two main ‘problems’ that continue preoccupy me - social class and education policy, and their relationships. As regards the former I have in recent years been focused on researching and theorising the ‘advantages’ of the middle classes and the ways in which education policies ‘call-up’ unevenly distributed capitals and resources and thus enact and reproduce social inequalities. Education systems are invested with implicit assumptions modeled on the sensibilities and skills of middle class families, which work to exclude and blame, at the same time, poor and working class families. The other main theme in my recent work has been the privatisation of education, both in the reform of public sector institutions and the ‘selling-off’ or contracting-out of state education services to the private sector. I have undertaken an audit and mapping of education businesses in the UK (Education Plc 2007) and am now exploring the ways in which corporate philanthropies are participating in the funding and direction of educational programmes. And I have been trying to trace the flow of reform discourses internationally through business and advocacy networks and the ‘export’ of policy as a profit opportunity. There is now a global market in policy ‘solutions’ and educational institutions.

In all of this work I have researched alone and with a number of collaborators. The dynamics of solo and team research are interestingly different! I have had the wonderful opportunity to work on a number of projects with Carol Vincent (e.g. Childcare, Choice and Class Practices 2005) and Meg Maguire (e.g. Choice, Pathways and Transitions Post-16, 2000) and they have played an important part in my intellectual development and in the development of my research skills, for which I am very grateful. I have also benefitted from presenting my ideas in many different countries and Argentina and Brazil are particular places where interest in my work has led me to think more and more carefully about what I am trying to say.

Over the past year I have been involved in a collaboration, with Michael Apple and Luis-Armand Gandin, to edit an International Handbook of the Sociology of Education, which is published by Routledge this month. Working with Michael in particular is always enriching and challenging, and funny!

Michael Apple

One of the co authors of the new International Handbook of the Sociology of Education, and colleague of Stephen J Ball, Michael W. Apple is currently John Bascom Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and World Scholar and Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the Institute of Education, University of London. He also holds professorial appointments at Beijing Normal University and East China Normal University in China.

Michael has been a Visiting Distinguished Professor in many universities internationally. He has received the UCLA Medal for academic excellence as well as a number of honorary doctoral degrees from universities throughout the world. He continues to work with critical scholars, activist groups, unions, socially progressive governments, and dissidents in many nations to create more critically democratic research, policies, and practices in education.

Read more about Michael Apple.