What is educationally worthwhile knowledge, and what are (and what should be) the significant differences between curriculum or school knowledge and the every day, commonsense knowledge that people acquire at home, in the community and in the workplace? Until the 1970s, answers to these questions were either taken for granted by both sociologists of education2 and curriculum researchers as being part of existing educational systems or seen as issues to be left to philosophy. Education was seen as a good thing; the only big issues for sociology were distributional?in particular, the persistence, in all forms of selective education, of social class inequal ities (Jencks, 1975). Why was progress to upper secondary and higher education lim ited to the few, and how could these persistent inequalities, found in all systems of mass education, be explained and reduced or overcome? The what of education, the knowledge that students did or did not acquire, was not questioned, at least by sociologists.3 It was taken for granted that school and nonschool knowledge were different; they had always been so. Only rarely in the past, and invariably around religious issues, did the content of the knowledge that was included in the curricu lum become part of educational debates, let alone those involving the wider public.

From Constructivism to Realism in the Sociology of the Curriculum.

textAlthough authoritative governance is ubiquitous in modern society, the nature of authority is one of the most neglected and understudied topics in economic, political and organizational theory today. This study aims to correct for this lacuna. Its main conclusion is that there is no such thing as an unambiguous concept of authority. Its is argued that both authority and responsibility in governance should be conceived in institutional rather than conceptual terms, and that the quest for legitimacy that is indissolubly tied up with any understanding of authority, ultimately involves a problem of institutional design.

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The Quest for Legitimacy: On Authority and Responsibility in Governance

With Obfuscation, Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum mean to start a revolution. They are calling us not to the barricades but to our computers, offering us ways to fight today's pervasive digital surveillance -- the collection of our data by governments, corporations, advertisers, and hackers. To the toolkit of privacy protecting techniques and projects, they propose adding obfuscation: the deliberate use of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection projects. Brunton and Nissenbaum provide tools and a rationale for evasion, noncompliance, refusal, even sabotage -- especially for average users, those of us not in a position to opt out or exert control over data about ourselves. Obfuscation will teach users to push back, software developers to keep their user data safe, and policy makers to gather data without misusing it. Brunton and Nissenbaum present a guide to the forms and formats that obfuscation has taken and explain how to craft its implementation to suit the goal and the adversary. They describe a series of historical and contemporary examples, including radar chaff deployed by World War II pilots, Twitter bots that hobbled the social media strategy of popular protest movements, and software that can camouflage users' search queries and stymie online advertising. They go on to consider obfuscation in more general terms, discussing why obfuscation is necessary, whether it is justified, how it works, and how it can be integrated with other privacy practices and technologies.

Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest

Nationalism is one of the most serious political problems in the world today. This volume is a collection of papers which address the topic of the ethics of nationalism. The contributors include some of the most eminent political philosophers and political scientists active today. The bulk of the literature on nationalism is in the social sciences and tends to focus on descriptive and prescriptive themes and issues of policy. This collection, however, focuses on the deeper moral issues that must be addressed if a policy prescription is to be well grounded.

The morality of nationalism

In this sequel to his double biography of John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, Steve Heims recounts another story in 20th-century intellectual history - a series of encounters that captured a moment of transformation in the human sciences. Focusing on the Macy Foundation conferences, which were designed to forge connections between wartime science and post-war social science, Heims's richly detailed account explores the dialogues that emerged among a remarkable group that included Wiener, von Neumann, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Warren McCulloch, Kurt Lewin, Molly Harrower, and Lawrence Kubie. Heims shows how those dialogues shaped ideas in psychology, sociology, anthropology and psychiatry.

Graeme Garrard

Papers

The crooked timber of humanity: Chapters in the history of ideas: Isaiah Berlin, ed. Henry Hardy (London: John Murray, 1990), 276 pp., £18.95