REVIEWS
Labov, William (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
(1994). Principles of linguistic change, vol. I. Oxford: Blackwell.
LePage, R. B., & Tabouret-Keller, Andree. (1985). Acts of identity. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.
Milroy, Leslie (1987). Language and social networks. Oxford: Blackwell.
Pinker, Steven (1994). The language instinct. New York: Harper.
Thomason, Sarah Grey, & Kaufman, Terrence (1988). Language contact, creolization, and genetic
linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Trudgill, Peter (1974). The social differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weinreich, Uriel (1953). Languages in contact. The Hague: Mouton.
Zalewski, Daniel (1997). The gossip instinct: Review of Dunbar 1996. Lingua Franca 7:3.19-20.
(Received 13 June 1996)
BASIL BERNSTEIN, Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research,
critique. London (UK) & Bristol (PA): Taylor & Francis, 1996. Pp. xiv, 216.
Hb £40.00, pb £14.95.
Reviewed by JAMES V. WERTSCH
Dept. of Education, Washington University
St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
[email protected]
In his introduction to this volume, Bernstein reviews some comments that others
have made about reading his work, referring to the "complexity" and even "opacity" of his writing. I certainly agree with the assessment of complexity, and at
some points I can even see how charges of opacity might arise; but in my view
Bernstein is one of those scholars whose writings are worth wading through, even
if the effort is at times challenging or frustrating.
I don't make this dispensation for many authors, and at some points I have a
hard time making it for Bernstein - especially when it comes to some of his
figures, charts, and quasi-mathematical formulae. On balance, however, there is
little doubt that much can be gained by working through this volume. My first
reason for saying this is that Bernstein has brought a much more elaborated sociological imagination to bear on studies of language than is usually the case in
sociolinguistics. He is one of a very small number of scholars who can assert,
without self-recrimination, that "the 'socio' of sociolinguistics seems to be very
narrowly focused, selected more by the requirements of linguistics than developed by the requirements of sociology" (151).
In this connection, Bernstein states, "I think that my contributions, if any, to
the origins and development of a sociolinguistics is [sic] at best tangential or even
negative" (147). While this may be true for sociolinguistics as it is currently
constituted, it should not be the case; and it cannot continue to be the case if this
discipline hopes to address major social issues, such as how minds and identities
are socialized in complex institutional settings.
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JAMES V. WERTSCH
Over his long and productive career, Bernstein has worked tirelessly to introduce just such issues into our discussions, and he has sometimes paid dearly for
his efforts. Like many of his readers who have been concerned more with the
linguistic than the sociological side of sociolinguistics, I found his early accounts
of restricted and elaborated codes lacking or misguided. However, instead of
pouncing on these deficiencies, I think our time would be better spent looking
at the larger picture of how language and society are related in Bernstein's
account. Few other scholars to this day can offer the breadth of vision and power
of insight that he has provided over the years. Having thus betrayed my sympathies for Bernstein, I will go on to say that I think he spends entirely too much
time in this volume refuting and castigating his critics. Most readers would appreciate hearing more about the specifics of Bernstein's ideas, and where we
should go from here, than about the misinterpretations and shortcomings of his
critics.
In the ten chapters of this volume Bernstein touches on many of the issues that
he has addressed over the past few decades. Some of the chapters have appeared
elsewhere, and the volume generally comes off more as a reader sampling Bernstein's ideas, rather than a unified book in which each chapter builds on the
previous one. The result is that the reader can jump into the presentation at any of
several points.
Bernstein starts out by noting that his account of pedagogic practice takes it to
be "a fundamental social context through which cultural reproduction-production
takes place" (17). This is a perspective that may be somewhat familiar to many sociolinguists, but it is too seldom addressed in any concrete way in this discipline.
Conversely, sociologists interested in making claims about cultural reproductionproduction too often base their arguments on vague assumptions, with little concrete analysis of the linguistic mechanisms. As Bernstein notes:
Theories of cultural reproduction view education as a carrier of power relations external to education. From this point of view, pedagogic discourse becomes a carrier for something other than itself. It is a carrier of power relations
external to the school, a carrier of patterns of dominance with respect to class,
patriarchy, race. It is a matter of great interest that the actual structure which
enables power to be relayed, power to be carried, is itself not subject to analysis.
(18)
Given the obvious importance of understanding the role of symbolic practices
in cultural reproduction, it is striking that so few scholars of that topic have included such practices in their analyses. Bernstein's efforts to address these issues,
then, have constituted an important - and often lonely - struggle to fill in a gap in
our analyses that is begging to be addressed. Starting with a general concern for
how "power and control translate into principles of communication" and how these
principles "differentially regulate forms of consciousness" (18), he goes on to examine "pedagogic discourse" in some detail. I find his comments on this issue
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among the most interesting in the volume. From his perspective, pedagogic discourse is "a rule which embeds two discourses: a discourse of skills of various kinds
and their relations to each other, and a discourse of social order" (46).
The skills involved might be in physics, chemistry, or psychology, but these
"instructional discourses" are "recontextualized" by being embedded in "regulative discourse" to create the language of formal instruction:
Pedagogic discourse is constructed by a recontextualizing principle which selectively appropriates, relocates, refocuses, and relates other discourses to constitute its own order. In this sense, pedagogic discourse can never be identified
with any of the discourses it has recontextualized. (47)
This recontextualization involves a process in which "the original discourse passes
through ideological screens as it becomes its new form, pedagogic discourse"
(117).
By going through this formulation at various points and in various ways in this
volume, Bernstein sets a broad theoretical stage for addressing a host of pressing
issues involving symbolic control, pedagogic discourse, and identity. Some of the
problems are worked out in more detail than others, and none of them is (or could
be) formulated in complete detail in this volume; but the broad vision sets the
stage and is impressive indeed.
One point on which I would quarrel with Bernstein may reflect our different disciplinary perspectives, rather than an empirically resolvable question; but it is something that will need additional attention as these issues are pursued. It seems to me
that Bernstein, focusing on the power of institutionally organized discourse forms
to shape individuals' lives and identities, often does so to such a degree that there is
little room left to explore the impact of the active agent or subject. Bernstein offers
several caveats to the contrary, but time and again he returns to metaphors about
unidirectional transmission of influence from institution to individual. One of Bernstein's great strengths is that he has insisted, over the years, that institutional forces
must be taken into consideration; and I think he has been quite persuasive in many
of his efforts. However, it is possible to push this argument to such an extent that
the active agent is in danger of disappearing from the process altogether. For example, when he writes of "the translation of power and control into principles of
communication which become... their carriers or relays" (93-94), it sounds like
there is little room for anticipating the active agent's contributions to the process.
It is foolhardy to disagree with Bernstein's message that we should never
underestimate the power of institutions to shape discourse, and hence identity. In
the end, however, it will be essential to specify with more precision how active
agents shape this process. This concerns the ongoing search for balance in the
human sciences, in our understanding of how individual and society are related;
and it does little to undermine Bernstein's impressive contributions in this volume.
(Received 19 June 1997)
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